The Minister's Charge Part 45

"I've only been here a few days. I'm drawing at the Museum. I've just got back. Have you been here all summer?"

"Yes--all summer. I hope you've been well--I suppose you've been away--"

"Yes, I've just got back," she repeated.

"Oh yes! I meant that!"

She smiled at his confusion, as kindly as the ideal of his day-dream.

"I've been spending the summer with Madeline, and I've spent most of it out-of-doors, sketching. Have you been well?"

"Yes--not very; oh yes, I'm well--" She had begun to move forward with the last question, and he found himself walking with her. "Did she--has Miss Swan come back with you?" he asked, looking her in the eyes with more question than he had put into his words.

"No, I don't think she'll come back this winter," said the girl. "You know," she went on, colouring a little, "that she's married now?"

"No," said Lemuel.

"Yes. To Mr. Berry. And I have a letter from him for you."

"Was he there with you, this summer?" asked Lemuel, ignoring alike Berry's marriage and the letter from him.

"Oh yes; of course! And I liked him better than I used to. He is very good, and if Madeline didn't have to go so far West to live! He will know how to appreciate her, and there are not many who can do that! Her father thinks he has a great deal of ability. Yes, if Madeline _had_ to get married!"

She talked as if convincing and consoling herself, and there was an accent of loneliness in it all that pierced Lemuel's preoccupation; he had hardly noted how almost pathetically glad she was to see him.

"You'll miss her here," he ventured.

"Oh, I don't dare to think of it," cried the girl. "I don't know what I shall do! When I first saw you, just now, it brought up Madeline and last winter so that it seemed too much to bear!"

They had walked out of the garden across Charles Street, and were climbing the slope of Beacon Street Mall, in the Common. "I suppose,"

she continued, "the only way will be to work harder, and try to forget it. They wanted me to go out and stay with them; but of course I couldn't. I shall work, and I shall read. I shall not find another Madeline Swan! You must have been reading a great deal this summer, Mr.

Barker," she said, in turning upon him from her bereavement. "Have you seen any of the old boarders? Or Mrs. Harmon? I shall never have another winter like that at the poor old St. Albans!"

Lemuel made what answer he could. There was happiness enough in merely being with her to have counterbalanced all the pain he was suffering; and when she made him partner of her interests and a.s.sociations, and appealed to their common memories in confidence of his sympathy, his heavy heart stirred with strange joy. He had supposed that Berry must have warned her against him; but she was treating him as if he had not.

Perhaps he had not, and perhaps he had done so, and this was her way of showing that she did not believe it. He tried to think so; he knew it was a subterfuge, but he lingered in it with a fleeting, fearful pleasure. They had crossed from the Common and were walking up under the lindens of Chestnut Street, and from time to time they stopped, in the earnestness of their parley, and stood talking, and then loitered on again in the summer security from oversight which they were too rapt to recognise. They reached the top of the hill, and came to a door where she stopped. He fell back a pace. "Good-bye--" It was eternal loss, but it was escape.

She smiled in timorous hesitation. "Won't you come in? And I will get Mr. Berry's letter."

She opened the door with a latch-key, and he followed her within; a servant-girl came half-way up the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs to see who it was, and then went down. She left him in the dim parlour a moment, while she went to get the letter. When she returned, "I have a little room for my work at the top of the house," she said, "but it will never be like the St.

Albans. There's no one else here yet, and it's pretty lonesome--without Madeline."

She sank into a chair, but he remained standing, and seemed not to heed her when she asked him to sit down. He put Berry's letter into his pocket without looking at it, and she rose again.

She must have thought he was going, and she said with a smile of gentle trust, "It's been like having last winter back again to see you. We thought you must have gone home right after the fire; we didn't see anything of you again. We went ourselves in about a week."

Then she did not know, and he must tell her himself.

"Did Mr. Berry say anything about me--at the fire--that last day?" he began bluntly.

"No!" she said, looking at him with surprise; there was a new sound in his voice. "He had no need to say anything! I wanted to tell you--to write and tell you--how much I honoured you for it--how ashamed I was for misunderstanding you just before, when--"

He knew that she meant when they all pitied him for a coward.

Her voice trembled; he could tell that the tears were in her eyes. He tried to put the sweetness of her praise from him. "Oh, it wasn't that that I meant," he groaned; and he wrenched the words out. "That fellow, who said he was a friend of mine, and got into the house that way, was a thief; and Mr. Berry caught him robbing his room the day of the fire, and treated me as if I knew it and was helping him on--"

"Oh!" cried the girl. "How cruel! How could he do that?"

Lemuel could not suffer himself to take refuge in her generous faith now.

"When I first came to Boston, I had my money stolen, and there were two days when I had nothing to eat; and then I was arrested by mistake for stealing a girl's satchel; and when I was acquitted, I slept the next night in the tramp's lodging-house, and that fellow was there, and when he came to the St. Albans I was ashamed to tell where I had known him, and so I let him pa.s.s himself off for my friend."

He kept his eyes fixed on hers, but he could not see them change from their pity of him, or light up with a sense of any squalor in his history.

"And I used to think that _my_ life had been hard!" she cried. "Oh, how much you have been through!"

"And after that," he pursued, "Mr. Sewell got me a place, a sort of servant's place, and when I lost that I came to be the man-of-all work at the St. Albans."

In her eyes the pity was changing to admiration; his confession which he had meant to be so abject had kindled her fancy like a boastful tale.

"How little we know about people and what they have suffered! But I thank you for telling me this--oh yes!--and I shall always think of myself with contempt. How easy and pleasant my life has been! And you--"

She stopped, and he stood helpless against her misconception. He told her about the poverty he had left at home, and the wretched circ.u.mstance of his life, but she could not see it as anything but honourable to his present endeavour. She listened with breathless interest to it all, and, "Well," she sighed at last, "it will always be something for you to look back to, and be proud of. And that girl--did she never say or do anything to show that she was sorry for that cruel mistake? Did you ever see her afterwards?"

"Yes," said Lemuel, sick at heart, and feeling how much more triumphantly he could have borne ignominy and rejection than this sweet sympathy.

She seemed to think he would say something more, but he turned away from her, and after a little silence of expectance she let him go, with promises to come again, which she seemed to win from him for his own sake.

In the street he took out Berry's letter and read it.

"DEAR OLD MAN,--I've been trying to get off a letter to you almost any time the last three months; but I've been round so much, and upside down so much since I saw you--out to W. T. and on my head in Western Ma.s.s.--that I've not been able to fetch it. I don't know as I could fetch it now, if it wasn't for the prospective Mrs. A. W. B., Jr., standing over me with a revolver, and waiting to see me do it. I've just been telling her about that little interview of ours with Williams, that day, and she thinks I ought to be man enough to write and say that I guess I was all wrong about you; I had a sneaking idea of the kind from the start almost, but if a fellow's proud at all, he's proud of his mistakes, and he hates to give them up. I'm pretty badly balled up now, and I can't seem to get the right words about remorse, and so forth; but you know how it is yourself. I am sorry, there's no two ways about that; but I've kept my suspicions as well as my regrets to myself, and now I do the best thing I can by way of reparation. I send this letter by Miss Carver. She hasn't read it, and she don't know what it's all about; but I guess you'd better tell her. Don't spare, yours truly, A. W. BERRY, JR."

The letter did not soften Lemuel at all towards Berry, and he was bitterly proud that he had spoken without this bidding, though he had seemed to speak to no end that he had expected. After a while he lost himself in his day-dreams again, and in the fantastic future which he built up this became a great source of comfort to him and to his ideal.

Now he parted with her in sublime renunciation, and now he triumphed over all the obstacles between them; but whatever turn he willed his fortunes to take, she still praised him, and he prided himself that he had shown himself at his worst to her of his own free impulse. Sewell praised him for it in his reverie; Mr. Corey and Mr. Bellingham both made him delicate compliments upon his n.o.ble behaviour, which he feigned had somehow become known to them.

XXIX.

At the usual hour he was at Mr. Corey's house, where he arrived footsore, and empty from supperless wanderings, but not hungry and not weary. The serving-man at the door met him with the message that Mr.

Corey had gone to dine at his club, and would not be at home till late.

He gave Lemuel a letter, which had all the greater effect from being presented to him on the little silver tray employed to bring up the cards and notes of the visitors and correspondents of the family.

The envelope was stamped in that ephemeral taste which configured the stationery of a few years ago, with the lines of alligator leather, and it exhaled a perfume so characteristic that it seemed to breathe Statira visibly before him. He knew this far better than the poor, scrawly, uncultivated handwriting which he had seen so little. He took the letter, and turning from the door read it by the light of the next street lamp.

"DEAR LEMUEL--Manda Grier has told me what she said to you and Ime about crazy about it dear Lem I want you should come and see mee O Lem you dont Suppose i could of let Manda Grier talk to you that way if I had of none it but of course you dident only do Say so I give her a real good goen over and she says shes sory she done it i dont want any body should care for mee without itse there free will but I shall alwayes care for you if you dont care for me dont come but if you do Care I want you should come as soon as ever you can I can explane everything Manda Grier dident mean anything but for the best but sometimes she dont know what she is sayin O Lem you mussent be mad But if you are and you dont want to come ennymore dont come But O i hope you wouldent let such a thing set you againste mee recollect that I never done or Said anything to set you against me,

"STATIRA."

A cruel disgust mingled with the remorse that this letter brought him.