Lemuel let himself into Miss Vane's house with his key to the back gate,
and sat down, still throbbing, in his room over the L, and tried to get
the nature of his deed, or misdeed, before his mind. He had grown up to
manhood in an austere reverence for himself as regarded the other sex,
and in a secret fear, as exacting for them as it was worshipful of
women. His mother had held all show of love-sickness between young
people in scorn; she said they were silly things, when she saw them
soft upon one another; and Lemuel had imbibed from her a sense of
unlawfulness, of shame, in the love-making he had seen around him all
his life. These things are very open in the country. Even in large
villages they have kissing-games at the children's parties, in the
church vestries and refectories; and as a little boy Lemuel had taken
part in such games. But as he grew older, his reverence and his fear
would not let him touch a girl. Once a big girl, much older than he,
came up behind him in the play-ground and kissed him; he rubbed the
kiss off with his hand, and scoured the place with sand and gravel. One
winter all the big boys and girls at school began courting whenever the
teacher was out of sight a moment; at the noon-spell some of them sat
with their arms round one another. Lemuel wandered off by himself in the
snows of the deep woods; the sight of such things, the thought of them
put him to shame for those fools, as he tacitly called them; and now
what had he done himself? He could not tell. At times he was even proud
and glad of it; and then he did not know what would become of him. But
mostly it seemed to him that he had been guilty of an enormity that
nothing could ever excuse. He must have been crazy to do such a thing to
a young lady like that; her tear-stained face looked her wonder at him
still.
By this time she had told 'Manda Grier all about it; and he dared not
think what their thoughts of him must be. It seemed to him that he ought
to put such a monster as he was out of the world. But all the time there
was a sweetness, a joy in his heart, that made him half frantic with
fear of himself.
“Lemuel!”
He started up at the sound of Sibyl Vane's voice calling to him from the
dining-room which opened into the L.
“Yes, ma'am,” he answered tremulously, going to his door. Miss Vane had
been obliged to instruct him to say ma'am to her niece, whom he had at
first spoken of by her Christian name.
“Was that you came in a little while ago?”
“Yes, ma'am, I came in.”
“Oh! And have you had your supper?”
“I--I guess I don't want any supper.”
“Don't want any supper? You will be ill. Why don't you?”
“I don't know as I feel just like eating anything.”
“Well, it won't do. Will you see, please, if Jane is in the kitchen?”
Lemuel came forward, full of his unfitness for the sight of men, but
gathering a little courage when he found the dining-room so dark. He
descended to the basement and opened the door of the kitchen, looked in,
and shut it again. “Yes, ma'am, she's there.”
“Oh!” Sibyl seemed to hesitate. Then she said: “Light the gas down
there, hadn't you better?”
“I don't know but I had,” Lemuel assented.
But before he could obey, “And Lemuel!” she called down again, “come and
light it up here too, please.”
“I will as soon as I've lit it here,” said Lemuel.
An imperious order came back. “You will light it here _now,_ please.”
“All right,” assented Lemuel. When he appeared in the upper entry and
flashed the gas up, he saw Sibyl standing at the reception-room door,
with her finger closed into a book which she had been reading.
“You're not to say that you will do one thing when you're told to do
another.”
Lemuel whitened a little round the lips. “I'm not to do two things at
once, either, I suppose.”
Sibyl ignored this reply. “Please go and get your supper, and when
you've had it come up here again. I've some things for you to do.”
“I'll do them now,” said Lemuel fiercely. “I don't want any supper, and
I sha'n't eat any.”
“Why, Lemuel, what is the matter with you?” asked the girl, in the
sudden effect of motherly solicitude. “You look very strange, you seem
so excited.”
“I'm not hungry, that's all,” said the boy doggedly. “What is it you
want done?”
“Won't you please go up to the third floor,” said Sibyl, in a phase of
timorous dependence, “and see if everything is right there? I thought I
heard a noise. See if the windows are fast, won't you?”
Lemuel turned and she followed with her finger in her book, and her book
pressed to her heart, talking. “It seemed to me that I heard steps and
voices. It's very mysterious. I suppose any one could plant a ladder
on the roof of the L part, and get into the windows if they were not
fastened.”
“Have to be a pretty long ladder,” grumbled Lemuel.
“Yes,” Sibyl assented, “it would. And it didn't sound exactly like
burglars.”
She followed him half-way up the second flight of stairs, and stood
there while he explored the third story throughout.
“There ain't anything there,” he reported without looking at her, and
was about to pass her on the stairs in going down.
“Oh, thank you very much, Lemuel,” she said, with fervent gratitude
in her voice. She fetched a tremulous sigh. “I suppose it was nothing.
Yes,” she added hoarsely, “it must have been nothing. Oh, let _me_ go
down first!” she cried, putting out her hand to stop him from passing
her. She resumed when they reached the ground floor again. “Aunty has
gone out, and Jane was in the kitchen, and it began to grow dark while
I sat reading in the drawing-room, and all at once I heard the strangest
_noise_.” Her voice dropped deeply on the last word. “Yes, it was very
strange indeed! Thank you, Lemuel,” she concluded.
“Quite welcome,” said Lemuel dryly, pushing on towards the basement
stairs.
“Oh! And Lemuel! will you let Jane give you your supper in the
dining-room, so that you could be here if I heard anything else?”
“I don't want any supper,” said Lemuel.
The girl scrutinised him with an expression of misgiving. Then, with
a little sigh, as of one who will not explore a painful mystery, she
asked: “Would you mind sitting in the dining-room, then, till aunty gets
back?”
“I'd just as lives sit there,” said Lemuel, walking into the dark
dining-room and sitting down.
“Oh, thank you very much. Aunty will be back very soon, I suppose. She's
just gone to the Sewells' to tea.”
She followed him to the threshold. “You must--I must--light the gas in
here for you.”
“Guess I can light the gas,” said Lemuel, getting up to intercept her in
this service. She had run into the reception-room for a match, and she
would not suffer him to prevent her.
“No, no! I insist! And Lemuel,” she said, turning upon him, “I must ask
you to excuse my speaking harshly to you. I was--agitated.”
“Perfectly excusable,” said Lemuel.
“I am afraid,” said the girl, fixing him with her eyes, “that you are
not well.”
“Oh yes, I'm well. I'm--pretty tired; that's all.”
“Have you been walking far?”
“Yes--not very.”
“The walking ought to do you good,” said Sibyl, with serious
thoughtfulness. “I think,” she continued, “you had better have some
bryonia. Don't you think you had?”
“No, no! I don't want anything,” protested Lemuel.
She looked at him with a feeling of baffled anxiety painted on her face;
and as she turned away, she beamed with a fresh inspiration. “I will get
you a book.” She flew into the reception-room and back again, but she
only had the book that she had herself been reading.
“Perhaps you would like to read this? I've finished it. I was just
looking back through it.”
“Thank you; I guess I don't want to read any, just now.”
She leaned against the side of the dining-table, beyond which Lemuel
sat, and searched his fallen countenance with a glance contrived to
be at once piercing and reproachful. “I see,” she said, “you have not
forgiven me.”
“Forgiven you?” repeated Lemuel blankly.
“Yes--for giving way to my agitation in speaking to you.”
“I don't know,” said Lemuel, with a sigh of deep inward trouble, “as I
noticed anything.”
“I told you to light the gas in the basement,” suggested Sibyl, “and
then I told you to light it up here, and then--I scolded you.”
“Oh yes,” admitted Lemuel: “that.” He dropped his head again.
Sibyl sank upon the edge of a chair. “Lemuel! you have something on your
mind?”
The boy looked up with a startled face.
“Yes! I can see that you have,” pursued Sibyl. “What have you been
doing?” she demanded sternly.
Lemuel was so full of the truth that it came first to his lips in
all cases. He could scarcely force it aside now with the evasion that
availed him nothing. “I don't know as I've been doing anything in
particular.”
“I see that you don't wish to tell me!” cried the girl. “But you might
have trusted me. I would have defended you, no matter what you had
done--the worse the better.”
Lemuel hung his head without answering.
After a while she continued: “If I had been that girl who had you
arrested, and I had been the cause of so much suffering to an innocent
person, I should never have forgiven myself. I should have devoted
my life to expiation. I should have spent my life in going about the
prisons, and finding out persons who were unjustly accused. I should
have done it as a penance. Yes! even if he had been guilty!”
Lemuel remained insensible to this extreme of self-sacrifice, and she
went on: “This book--it is a story--is all one picture of such a nature.
There is a girl who's been brought up as the ward of a young man. He
educates her, and she expects to be his wife, and he turns out to be
perfectly false and unworthy in every way; but she marries him all the
same, although she likes some one else, because she feels that she ought
to punish herself for thinking of another, and because she hopes that
she will die soon, and when her guardian finds out what she's done for
him, it will reform him. It's perfectly sublime. It's--ennobling! If
every one could read this book, they would be very different.”
“I don't see much sense in it,” said Lemuel, goaded to this comment.
“You would if you read it. When she dies--she is killed by a fall from
her horse in hunting, and has just time to join the hands of her husband
and the man she liked first, and tell them everything--it is wrought up
so that you hold your breath. I suppose it was reading that that made
me think there were burglars getting in. But perhaps you're right not
to read it now, if you're excited already. I'll get you something
cheerful.” She whirled out of the room and back in a series of those
swift, nervous movements peculiar to her. “There! that will amuse you,
I know.” She put the book down on the table before Lemuel, who silently
submitted to have it left there. “It will distract your thoughts,
if anything will. And I shall ask you to let me sit just here in the
reception-room, so that I can call you if I feel alarmed.”
“All right,” said Lemuel, lapsing absently to his own troubled thoughts.
“Thank you very much,” said Sibyl. She went away, and came back
directly. “Don't you think,” she asked, “that it's very strange you
should never have seen or heard anything of her?”
“Heard of who?” he asked, dragging himself painfully up from the depths
of his thoughts.
“That heartless girl who had you arrested.”
“She _wasn't_ heartless!” retorted Lemuel indignantly.
“You think so because you are generous, and can't imagine such
heartlessness. Perhaps,” added Sibyl, with the air of being illumined
by a happy thought, “she is dead. That would account for everything. She
may have died of remorse. It probably preyed upon her till she couldn't
bear it any longer, and then she killed herself.”
Lemuel began to grow red at the first apprehension of her meaning. As
she went on, he changed colour more and more.
“She is alive!” cried Sibyl. “She's alive, and you have seen her!
You needn't deny it! You've seen her to-day!” Lemuel rose in clumsy
indignation. “I don't know as anybody's got any right to say what I've
done, or haven't done.”
“O Lemuel!” cried Sibyl. “Do you think anyone in this house would
intrude in your affairs? But if you need a friend--a sister----”
“I don't need any sister. I want you should let me alone.”
At these words, so little appreciative of her condescension, her
romantic beneficence, her unselfish interest, Sibyl suddenly rebounded
to her former level, which she was sensible was far above that of this
unworthy object of her kindness. She rose from her chair, and pursued--
“If you need a friend--a sister--I'm sure that you can safely confide
in--the cook.” She looked at him a moment, and broke into a malicious
laugh very unlike that of a social reformer, which rang shriller at the
bovine fury which mounted to Lemuel's eyes. The rattle of a night-latch
made itself heard in the outer door. Sibyl's voice began to break, as it
rose: “I never expected to be treated in my own aunt's house with
such perfect ingratitude and impudence--yes, impudence!--by one of her
servants!”
She swept out of the room, and her aunt, who entered it, after calling
to her in vain, stood with Lemuel, and heard her mount the stairs,
sobbing, to her own room, and lock herself in.
“What is the matter, Lemuel?” asked Miss Vane, breathing quickly. She
looked at him with the air of a judge who would not condemn him unheard,
but would certainly do so after hearing him. Whether it was Lemuel's
perception of this that kept him silent, or his confusion of spirit from
all the late rapidly successive events, or a wish not to inculpate the
girl who had insulted him, he remained silent.
“Answer me!” said Miss Vane sharply.
Lemuel cleared his throat. “I don't know as I've got anything to say,”
he answered finally.
“But I insist upon your saying something,” said Miss Vane. “What is this
_impudence?_”
“There hasn't been any impudence,” replied Lemuel, hanging his head.
“Very well, then, you can tell me what Sibyl means,” persisted Miss
Vane.
Lemuel seemed to reflect upon it. “No, I can't tell you,” he said at
last, slowly and gently.
“You refuse to make any explanation whatever?”
“Yes.”
Miss Vane rose from the chair which she had mechanically sunk into while
waiting for him to speak, and ceased to be the kindly, generous soul
she was, in asserting herself as a gentlewoman who had a contumacious
servant to treat with. “You will wait here a moment, please.”
“All right,” said Lemuel. She had asked him not to receive instructions
from her with that particular answer, but he could not always remember.
She went upstairs, and returned with some banknotes that rustled in her
trembling hand. “It is two months since you came, and I've paid you one
month,” she said, and she set her lips, and tried to govern her head,
which nevertheless shook with the vehemence she was struggling to
repress. She laid two ten-dollar notes upon the table, and then added
a five, a little apart. “This second month was to be twenty instead of
ten. I shall not want you any longer, and should be glad to have you go
now--at once--to-night! But I had intended to offer you a little present
at Christmas, and I will give it you now.”
Lemuel took up the two ten-dollar notes without saying anything, and
then after a moment laid one of them down. “It's only half a month,” he
said. “I don't want to be paid for any more than I've done.”
“Lemuel!” cried Miss Vane. “I insist upon your taking it. I employed you
by the month.”
“It don't make any difference about that; I've only been here a month
and a half.”
He folded the notes, and turned to go out of the room. Miss Vane caught
the five-dollar note from the table and intercepted him with it. “Well,
then, you shall take it as a present.”
“I don't want any present,” said Lemuel, patiently waiting her pleasure
to release him, but keeping his hands in his pockets.
“You would have taken it at Christmas,” said Miss Vane. “You shall take
it now.”
“I shouldn't take a present any time,” returned Lemuel steadily.
“You are a foolish boy!” cried Miss Vane. “You need it, and I tell you
to take it.”
He made no reply whatever.
“You are behaving very stubbornly--ungratefully,” said Miss Vane.
Lemuel lifted his head; his lip quivered a little. “I don't think you've
got any right to say I'm ungrateful.”
“I don't mean ungrateful,” said Miss Vane. “I mean unkind--very
silly, indeed. And I wish you to take this money. You are behaving
resentfully--wickedly. I am much older than you, and I tell you that you
are not behaving rightly. Why don't you do what I wish?”
“I don't want any money I haven't earned.”
“I don't mean the money. Why don't you tell me the meaning of what I
heard? My niece said you had been impudent to her. Perhaps she didn't
understand.”
She looked wistfully into the boy's face.
After a long time he said, “I don't know as I've got anything to say
about it.”
“Very well, then, you may go,” said Miss Vane, with all her _hauteur_.
“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel passively, but the eyes that he
looked at her with were moist, and conveyed a pathetic reproach. To her
unmeasured astonishment, he offered her his hand; her amaze was even
greater--_more_ infinite, as she afterwards told Sewell--when she found
herself shaking it.
He went out of the room, and she heard him walking about his room in the
L, putting together his few belongings. Then she heard him go down and
open the furnace door, and she knew he was giving a final conscientious
look at the fire. He closed it, and she heard him close the basement
door behind him, and knew that he was gone.
She explored the L, and then she descended to the basement and
mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by
the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the
utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room,
hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal Lemuel hanging
there.
Miss Vane went upstairs slowly, with a heavy heart. Under the hall light
stood Sibyl, picturesque in the deep shadow it flung upon her face.
“Aunt Hope,” she began in a tragic voice.
“Don't _speak_ to me, you wicked girl!” cried her aunt, venting her
self-reproach upon this victim. “It is _your_ doing.”
Sibyl turned with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly
bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of
her own thoughts again.