The stagger seemed to be sufficiently satisfactory. Corey could not
repress some twinges at certain characteristics of Lemuel's accent,
but he seemed, in a critical way, to take a fancy to him, and he was
conditionally installed for a week.
Corey was pleased from the beginning with Lemuel's good looks, and
justified himself to his wife with an Italian proverb: “_Novanta su
cento, chi è bello difuori ê buono di dentro_.” She had heard that
proverb before, and she had always considered it shocking; but he
insisted that most people married upon no better grounds, and that what
sufficed in the choice of a husband or wife was enough for the choice
of an intellectual nurse. He corrected Lemuel's pronunciation where he
found it faulty, and amused himself with Lemuel's struggles to
conceal his hurt vanity, and his final good sense in profiting by the
correction. But Lemuel's reading was really very good; it was what, even
more than his writing, had given him a literary reputation in Willoughby
Pastures; and the old man made him exercise it in widely different
directions. Chiefly, however, it was novels that he read, which, indeed,
are the chief reading of most people in our time; and as they were
necessarily the novels of our language, his elder was not obliged to use
that care in choosing them which he must have exacted of himself in the
fiction of other tongues. He liked to hear Lemuel talk, and he used the
art of getting at the boy's life by being frank with his own experience.
But this was not always successful, and he was interested to find
Lemuel keeping doors that Sewell's narrative had opened carefully closed
against him. He betrayed no consciousness that they existed, and Lemuel
maintained intact the dignity and pride which come from the sense of
ignominy well hidden.
The week of probation had passed without interrupting their relation,
and Lemuel was regularly installed, and began to lead a life which was
so cut off from his past in most things that it seemed to belie it. He
found himself dropped in the midst of luxury stranger to him than the
things they read of in those innumerable novels. The dull, rich colours
in the walls, and the heavily rugged floors and dark-wooded leathern
seats of the library where he read to the old man; the beautiful forms
of the famous bronzes, and the Italian saints and martyrs in their
baroque or Gothic frames of dim gold; the low shelves with their ranks
of luxurious bindings, and all the seriously elegant keeping of the
place, flattered him out of his strangeness; and the footing on which
he was received in this house, the low-voiced respect with which the
man-servant treated him, the master's light, cordial frankness,
the distant graciousness of the mistress, and the unembarrassed,
unembarrassing kindliness of the young ladies, both so much older than
himself, contributed to an effect that afterwards deepened more and
more, and became a vital part of the struggle which he was finally to
hold with himself. The first two or three days he saw no one but Mr.
Corey, and but for the women's voices in the other parts of the house,
he might have supposed himself in another bachelor's apartments, finer
and grander than Bellingham's. He was presented to Mrs. Corey when she
came into the library, but he did not see the daughters of the house
till he was installed in it. After that, his acquaintance with them
seemed to go no further. They were all polite and kind when they met
him, in the library or on the stairs, but they showed no curiosity about
him; and his never meeting them at table helped to keep him a
stranger to them under the same roof. He ate at a boarding-house in a
neighbouring street, but he slept at the Coreys' after he had read their
father asleep, and then, going out to his late breakfast, he did not
return till Mr. Corey had eaten his own, much later.
He wondered at first that neither of those young ladies read to their
father, not knowing the disability for mutual help that riches bring.
Later, he saw how much Miss Lily Corey was engrossed with charity and
art, and how constantly Miss Nannie Corey was occupied with social
cares, and was perpetually going and coming in their performance. Then
he saw that they could not have rendered nor their father have received
from his family the duty which he was paid to do, as they must have done
if they had been poorer. But they were all fond of one another, and the
father had a way of joking with his daughters, especially the youngest;
and they talked with a freedom of themselves which puzzled Lemuel. It
appeared from what they said at different times that they had not always
been so rich, or that they had once had money, and then less, and now
much more. It appeared also that their prosperity was due to a piece of
luck, and that the young Mr. Corey, whom they expected in the summer,
had brought it about. His father was very proud of him, and, getting
more and more used to Lemuel's companionship, he talked a great deal
about his Tom, as he called him, and about Tom's wife, and his wife's
family, who were somehow, Lemuel inferred, not all that his own family
could wish them, but very good people. Once when Mr. Corey was talking
of them, Mrs. Corey came in upon them, and seemed to be uneasy, as if
she thought he was saying too much. But the daughters did not seem to
care, especially the youngest.
He found out that Mr. Corey used to be a painter, and had lived a long
time in Italy when he was young, and he recalled with a voluptuous
thrill of secrecy that Williams had once been in Italy. Mr. Corey
seemed to think better of it than Williams; he liked to talk of Rome and
Florence, and of Venice, which Williams had said was a kind of hole. The
old man said this or that picture was of this or that school, and vague
lights of knowledge and senses of difference that flattered Lemuel's
intellectual vanity stole in upon him. He began to feel that the things
Mr. Corey had lived for were the great and high objects of life.
He now perceived how far from really fine or fashionable anything at
the St. Albans had been, and that the simplicity of Miss Vane's little
house, which the splendour of the hotel had eclipsed in his crude fancy,
was much more in harmony with the richness of Mr. Corey's. He oriented
himself anew, and got another view of the world which he had dropped
into. Occasionally he had glimpses of people who came to see the Coreys,
and it puzzled him that this family, which he knew so kind and good,
took with others the tone hard and even cynical which seemed the
prevailing tone of society; when their acquaintances went away they
dropped back, as if with relief, into their sincere and amiable fashions
of speech. Lemuel asked himself if every one in the world was playing a
part; it did not seem to him that Miss Carver had been; she was always
the same, and always herself. To be one's-self appeared to him the best
thing in the world, and he longed for it the more as he felt that he too
was insensibly beginning to play a part. Being so much in this beautiful
and luxurious house, where every one was so well dressed and well
mannered, and well kept in body and mind, and passing from his amazement
at all its appointments into the habit of its comfortable beauty, he
forgot more and more the humility and the humiliations of his past. He
did not forget its claims upon him; he sent home every week the greater
part of his earnings, and he wrote often to his mother; but now, when
he could have got the time to go home and see her, he did not go. In the
exquisite taste of his present environment, he could scarcely believe in
that figure, grizzled, leathern, and gaunt, and costumed in a grotesque
unlikeness to either sex. Sometimes he played with the fantastic
supposition of some other origin for himself, romantic and involved like
that of some of the heroes he was always reading of, which excluded her.
Another effect of this multifarious literature through which his duties
led him was the awakening of the ambition to write, stunned by his first
disastrous adventures in Boston, and dormant almost ever since, except
as it had stirred under the promptings of Evans's kindly interest. But
now it did not take the form of verse; he began to write moralistic
essays, never finished, but full of severe comment on the folly of the
world as he saw it. Sometimes they were examinations of himself, and
his ideas and principles, his doctrines and practice, penetrating quests
such as the theologians of an earlier day used to address to their
consciences.
Meantime, the deeply underlying mass of his rustic crudity and raw
youth took on a far higher polish than it had yet worn. Words dropped at
random in the talk he now heard supplied him with motives and shaped his
actions. Once Mr. Bellingham came in laughing about a sign which he saw
in a back street, of Misfit Parlours, and Lemuel spent the next week's
salary for a suit at a large clothing store, to replace the dress Sewell
had thought him so well in. He began insensibly to ape the manners of
those about him.
It drew near the time when the ladies of the Corey family were to leave
town, where they had lingered much longer than they meant, in the hope
that Mr. Corey might be so much better, or so much worse, that he would
consent to go to the shore with them. But his disabilities remained much
the same, and his inveterate habits indomitable. By this time that trust
in Lemuel, which never failed to grow up in those near him, reconciled
the ladies to the obstinate resolution of the master of the house to
stay in it as usual. They gave up the notion of a cottage, and they were
not going far away, nor for long at any one time; in fact, one or other
of them was always in the house. Mrs. Corey had grown into the habit of
confidence with Lemuel concerning her husband's whims and foibles; and
this motherly frankness from a lady so stately and distant at first was
a flattery more poisonous to his soul than any other circumstance of his
changed life.
It came July, and even Sewell went away then. He went with a mind at
rest concerning Lemuel's material prospects, and his unquestionable
usefulness and acceptability; but something, at the bottom of
his satisfaction, teased him still: a dumb fear that the boy was
extravagant, a sense that he was somehow different, and not wholly for
the better, from what he had been. He had seen, perhaps, nothing worse
in him than that growth of manner which amused Corey.
“He is putting us on,” he said to Bellingham one day, “and making us fit
as well as he can. I don't think we're altogether becoming, but that's
our fault, probably. I can't help thinking that if we were of better cut
and material we should show to better effect upon that granite soul. I
wish Tom were here. I've an idea that Tom would fit him like a glove.
Charles, why don't _you_ pose as a model for Barker?”
“I don't see why I'm not a very good model without posing,” said
Bellingham. “What do you want me to do for him? Take him to the club?
Barker's _not_ very conversational.”
“You don't take him on the right topics,” said Corey, not minding
that he had left the point. “I assure you that Barker, on any serious
question that comes up in our reading, has a clear head and an apt
tongue of his own. It isn't our manners alone that he emulates. I can't
find that any of us ever dropped an idea or suggestion of value that
Barker didn't pick it up, and turn it to much more account than the
owner. He's as true as a Tuscan peasant, as proud as an Indian, and as
quick as a Yankee.”
“Ah! I _hoped_ you wouldn't go abroad for that last,” said Bellingham.
“No; and it's delightful, seeing the great variety of human nature there
is in every human being here. Our life isn't stratified; perhaps it
never will be. At any rate, for the present, we're all in vertical
sections. But I always go back to my first notion of Barker: he's
ancestral, and he makes me feel like degenerate posterity. I've had the
same sensation with Tom; but Barker seems to go a little further back. I
suppose there's such a thing as getting too far back in these Origin
of Species days; but he isn't excessive in that or in anything. He's
confoundedly temperate, in fact; and he's reticent; he doesn't allow any
unseemly intimacy. He's always turning me out-of-doors.”
“Of course! But what can we old fellows hope to know of what's going
on in any young one? Talk of strangeness! I'd undertake to find more in
common with a florid old fellow of fifty from the red planet Mars than
with any young Bostonian of twenty.”
“Yes; but it's the youth of my sires that I find so strange in Barker.
Only, theoretically, there's no Puritanism. He's a thorough believer
in Sewell. I suspect he could formulate Sewell's theology a great deal
better than Sewell could.”