The evening after the fire Mrs. Sewell sat talking it over with her
husband, in the light of the newspaper reports, which made very much
more of Lemuel's part in it than she liked. The reporters had flattered
the popular love of the heroic in using Mrs. Harmon's version of his
exploits, and represented him as having been most efficient and daring
throughout, and especially so in regard to the Evanses.
“Well, that doesn't differ materially from what they told us
themselves,” said Sewell.
“You know very well, David,” retorted his wife, “that there couldn't
have been the least danger at any time; and when he helped her to get
Mr. Evans downstairs, the fire was nearly all out.”
“Very well, then; he would have saved their lives if it had been
necessary. It was a case of potential heroism, that contained all the
elements of self-sacrifice.”
Mrs. Sewell could not deny this, but she was not satisfied. She was
silent a moment before she asked, “What do you suppose that wretched
creature will do now?”
“I think very likely he will come to me,” answered Sewell.
“I dare say.” The bell rang. “And I suppose that's he now!”
They listened and heard Miss Vane's voice at the door, asking for them.
Mrs. Sewell ran down the stairs and kissed her. “Oh, I'm _so_ glad you
came. Isn't it wonderful? I've just come from them, and she's taking the
whole care of him, as if he had always been the sick one, and she strong
and well.”
“What do you mean, Lucy? He isn't ill!”
“Who isn't?”
“What are you talking about?”
“About Mr. Evans--”
“Oh!” said Miss Vane, with cold toleration. She arrived at the study
door and gave Sewell her hand. “I scarcely knew him, you know; I only
met him casually here. I've come to see,” she added nervously, “if you
know where Lemuel is, Mr. Sewell. Have you seen anything of him since
the fire? How nobly he behaved! But I never saw anything he wasn't equal
to!”
“Mrs. Sewell objects to his saving human life,” said Sewell, not able to
deny himself.
“I don't see how you can take the slightest interest in him,” began Mrs.
Sewell, saying a little more than she meant.
“You would, my dear,” returned Miss Vane, “if you had wronged him as I
have.”
“Or as I,” said Sewell.
“I'm thankful I haven't, then,” said his wife. “It seems to me that
there's nothing else of him. As to his noble behaviour, it isn't
possible you believe those newspaper accounts? He didn't save any one's
life; there was no danger!”
Miss Vane, preoccupied with her own ideal of the facts, stared at her
without replying, and then turned to Sewell.
“I want to find him and ask him to stay with me till he can
get something else to do.” Sewell's eyebrows arched themselves
involuntarily. “Sibyl has gone to New York for a fortnight; I shall be
quite alone in the house, and I shall be very glad of his company,”
she explained to the eyebrows, while ignoring them. Her chin quivered a
little, as she added, “I shall be _proud_ of his company. I wish him to
understand that he is my _guest._”
“I suppose I shall see him soon,” said Sewell, “and I will give him your
message.”
“Will you tell him,” persisted Miss Vane, a little hysterically,
“that if he is in any way embarrassed, I insist upon his coming to me
immediately--at _once?_”
Sewell smiled, “Yes.”
“I know that I'm rather ridiculous,” said Miss Vane, smiling in
sympathy, “and I don't blame Mrs. Sewell for not entering into my
feelings. Nobody could, who hadn't felt the peculiar Lemuel glamour.”
“I don't imagine he's embarrassed in any way,” said Sewell. “He seems to
have the gift of lighting on his feet. But I'll tell him how peremptory
you are, Miss Vane.”
“Well, upon my word,” cried Mrs. Sewell, when Miss Vane had taken leave
of them in an exaltation precluding every recurrent attempt to enlighten
her as to the true proportions of Lemuel's part in the fire, “I really
believe people like to be made fools of. Why didn't _you_ tell her,
David, that he had done nothing?”
“What would have been the use? She has her own theory of the affair.
Besides, he did do something; he did his duty, and my experience is that
it's no small thing to do. It wasn't his fault that he didn't do more.”
He waited some days for Lemuel to come to him, and he inquired each time
he went to see the Evanses if they knew where he was. But they had not
heard of him since the night of the fire.
“It's his shyness,” said Evans; “I can understand how if he thought he
had put me under an obligation he wouldn't come near me--and couldn't.”
Evans was to go out of town for a little while; the proprietors of the
_Saturday Afternoon_ insisted upon his taking a rest, and they behaved
handsomely about his salary. He did not want to go, but his wife got him
away finally, after he had failed in two or three attempts at writing.
Lemuel did not appear to Sewell till the evening of the day when the
Evanses left town. It seemed as if he had waited till they were gone, so
that he could not be urged to visit them. At first the minister scolded
him a little for his neglect; but Lemuel said he had heard about them,
and knew they were getting along all right. He looked as if he had not
been getting along very well himself; his face was thin, and had an air
at once dogged and apprehensive. He abruptly left talking of Evans, and
said, “I don't know as you heard what happened that night before the
fire just after I got back from your house?”
“No, I hadn't.”
Lemuel stopped. Then he related briefly and cleanly the whole affair,
Sewell interrupting him from time to time with murmurs of sympathy, and
“Tchk, tchk, tchk!” and “Shocking, shocking!” At the end he said, “I had
hoped somehow that the general calamity had swallowed up your particular
trouble in it. Though I don't know that general calamities ever do that
with particular troubles,” he added, more to himself than to Lemuel; and
he put the idea away for some future sermon.
“Mr. Evans stopped and said something to me that night. He said we had
to live things down, and not die them down; he wanted I should wait till
Saturday before I was sure that I couldn't get through Tuesday. He said,
How did we know that death was the end of trouble?”
“Yes,” said the minister, with a smile of fondness for his friend; “that
was like Evans all over.”
“I sha'n't forget those things,” said Lemuel. “They've been in my head
ever since. If it hadn't been for them, I don't know what I should have
done.”
He stopped, and after a moment's inattention Sewell perceived that he
wished to be asked something more. “I hope,” he said, “that nothing more
has been going wrong with you?” and as he asked this he laid his hand
affectionately on the young man's shoulder, just as Evans had done.
Lemuel's eyes dimmed and his breath thickened. “What has become of the
person--the discharged convict?”
“I guess I had better tell you,” he said; and he told him of the
adventure with Berry and Williams.
Sewell listened in silence, and then seemed quite at a loss what to say;
but Lemuel saw that he was deeply afflicted. At last he asked, lifting
his eyes anxiously to Sewell's, “Do you think I did wrong to say the
thief was a friend of mine, and get him off that way?”
“That's a very difficult question,” sighed Sewell. “You had a duty to
society.”
“Yes, I've thought of that since!”
“If I had been in your place, I'm afraid I should be glad not to have
thought of it in time; and I'm afraid I'm glad that, as it is, it's too
late. But doesn't it involve you with him in the eyes of the other young
man?” “Yes, I presume it does,” said Lemuel. “I shall have to go away.”
“Back to Willoughby Pastures?” asked Sewell, with not so much faith in
that panacea for Lemuel's troubles as he had once had.
“No, to some other town. Do you know of anything I could get to do in
New York?”
“Oh, no, no!” said the minister. “You needn't let this banish you. We
must seek this young Mr.--”
“Berry.”
“--Mr. Berry out, and explain the matter to him.”
“Then you'll have to tell him all about me?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Lemuel was silent, and looked down.
“In the meantime,” pursued the minister, “I have a message for you from
Miss Vane. She has heard, as we all have, of your behaviour during the
fire--”
“It wasn't anything,” Lemuel interrupted. “There wasn't the least
danger; and Mrs. Evans did it all herself, anyway. It made me sick to
see how the papers had it. It's a shame!”
Sewell smiled. “I'm afraid you couldn't make Miss Vane think so; but I
can understand what you mean. She has never felt quite easy about the
way--the terms--on which she parted with you. She has spoken to me
several times of it, and--ah--expressed her regret; and now, knowing
that you have been--interrupted in your life, she is anxious to have you
come to her--”
An angry flash lighted up Lemuel's face.
“I couldn't go back there! I wouldn't do any such work again.”
“I don't mean that,” Sewell hastened to say “Miss Vane wished me to ask
you to come as her guest until you could find something--Miss Sibyl Vane
has gone to New York--”
“I'm very much obliged to her,” said Lemuel, “but I shouldn't want to
give her so much trouble, or any one. I--I liked her very much, and I
shouldn't want she should think I didn't appreciate her invitation.”
“I will tell her,” said the minister. “I had no great hope you would see
your way to accepting it. But she will be glad to know that you received
it.” He added, rather interrogatively than affirmatively, “In the right
spirit.”
“Oh yes,” said Lemuel. “Please to tell her I did.”
“Thank you,” said Sewell, with bland vagueness. “I don't know that I've
asked yet where you are staying at present?”
“I'm at Mrs. Nash's, 13 Canary Place. Mrs. Harmon went there first.”
“Oh! And are you looking forward to rejoining her in a new place?”
“I don't know as I am. I don't know as I should want to go into an hotel
again.”
Sewell manifested a little embarrassment. “Well, you won't forget your
promise to let me be of use to you--pecuniarily, if you should be in
need of a small advance at any time.”
“Oh no! But I've got enough money for a while yet--till I can get
something to do.” He rose, and after a moment's hesitation he said, “I
don't know as I want you should say anything to that fellow about me. To
Mr. Berry, I mean.”
“Oh! certainly not,” said Sewell, “if you don't wish it.”
Whatever it was in that reticent and elusive soul which prompted his
request, the minister now felt that he could not know; but perhaps the
pang that Lemuel inflicted on himself had as much transport as anguish
in it. He believed that he had for ever cut himself off from the
companionship that seemed highest and holiest on earth to him; he should
never see that girl again; Berry must have told Miss Swan, and long
before this Miss Carver had shuddered at the thought of him as the
accomplice of a thief. But he proudly said to himself that he must let
it all go; for if he had not been a thief, he had been a beggar and a
menial, he had come out of a hovel at home, and his mother went
about like a scarecrow, and it mattered little what kind of shame she
remembered him in.
He thought of her perpetually now, and, in those dialogues which we hold
in reverie with the people we think much about, he talked with her
all day long. At first, when he began to do this, it seemed a wrong to
Statira; but now, since the other was lost to him beyond other approach,
he gave himself freely up to the mystical colloquies he held with her,
as the devotee abandons himself to imagined converse with a saint.
Besides, if he was in love with Statira, he was not in love with Jessie;
that he had made clear to himself; for his feeling toward her was wholly
different.
Most of the time, in these communings, he was with her in her own home,
down at Corbitant, where he fancied she had gone, after the catastrophe
at the St. Albans, and he sat there with her on a porch at the front
door, which she had once described to him, and looked out under the
silver poplars at the vessels in the bay. He formed himself some image
of it all from pictures of the seaside which he had seen; and there were
times when he tried to go back with her into the life she had led there
as a child. Perhaps his ardent guesses at this were as near reality
as anything that could be made to appear, for, after her mother and
brothers and sisters had died out of the wide old house, her existence
there was as lonely as if she had been a little ghost haunting it. She
had inherited her mother's temperament with her father's constitution;
she was the child born to his last long absence at sea and her mother's
last solitude at home. When he returned, he found his wife dead and his
maiden sister caring for the child in the desolate house.
This sister of Captain Carver's had been disappointed, as the phrase
is, when a young girl; another girl had won her lover from her. Her
disappointment had hardened her to the perception of the neighbours;
and, by a strange perversion of the sympathies and faculties, she had
turned from gossip and censure, from religion, and from all the sources
of comfort that the bruised heart of Corbitant naturally turned to, and
found such consolation as came to her in books, that is to say romances,
and especially the romances that celebrated and deified such sorrow
as her own. She had been a pretty little thing when young, and Jessie
remembered her as pretty in her early old age. At heart she must still
have been young when her hair was grey, for she made a friend and
companion of the child, and they fed upon her romances together. When
the aunt died, the child, who had known no mother but her, was stricken
with a grief so deep and wild that at first her life and then her mind
was feared for. To get her away from the associations and influences
of the place, her father sent her to school in the western part of the
State, where she met Madeline Swan, and formed one of those friendships
which are like passions between young girls. During her long absence,
her father married again; and she was called home to his deathbed. He
was dead when she arrived; he had left a will that made her dependent on
her stepmother. When Madeline Swan wrote to announce that she was coming
to Boston to study art, Jessie Carver had no trouble in arranging with
her stepmother, by the sacrifice of her final claim on her father's
estate, to join her friend there, with a little sum of money on which
she was to live till she should begin to earn something.
Her life had been a series of romantic episodes; Madeline said that if
it could be written out it would be fascinating; but she went to work
very practically, and worked hard. She had not much feeling for colour;
but she drew better than her friend, and what she hoped to do was to
learn to illustrate books.
One evening, after a day of bitter-sweet reveries of Jessie, Lemuel went
to see Statira. She and 'Manda Grier were both very gay, and made him
very welcome. They had tea for him; Statira tried all her little arts,
and 'Manda Grier told some things that had happened in the box-factory.
He could not help laughing at them; they were really very funny; but he
felt somehow that it was all a preparation for something else. At last
the two girls made a set at him, as 'Manda Grier called it, and tried to
talk him into their old scheme of going to wait on table at some of the
country hotels, or the seaside. They urged that now, while he was out of
a place, it was just the time to look up a chance.
He refused, at first kindly, and at last angrily; and he would have
gone away in this mood if Statira had not said that she would never say
another word to him about it, and hung upon his neck, while 'Manda Grier
looked on in sullen resentment. He came away sick and heavy at heart.
He said to himself that they would be willing to drag him into the mire;
they had no pride; they had no sense; they did not know anything and
they could not learn. He tried to get away from them to Miss Carver in
his thoughts; but the place where he had left her was vacant, and he
could not conjure her back. Out of the void, he was haunted by a look of
grieving reproach and wonder from her eyes.