Lemuel got a conductor's overcoat and cap at half-price from a man who
had been discharged, and put by the money saved to return to Sewell when
he should come. He entered upon his duties the next morning, under the
instruction of an old conductor, who said, “Hain't I seen you som'ere's
before?” and he worked all day, taking money and tickets, registering
fares, helping ladies on and off the car, and monotonously journeying
back and forth over his route. He went on duty at six o'clock in the
morning, after an early breakfast that 'Manda Grier and his mother got
him, for Statira was not strong enough yet to do much, and he was to be
relieved at eight. At nightfall, after two half-hour respites for dinner
and tea, he was so tired that he could scarcely stand.
“Well, how do you like it, as fur's you've gone?” asked the instructing
conductor, in whom Lemuel had recognised an old acquaintance. “Sweet
life, ain't it? There! That switch hain't worked again! Jump off, young
man, and put your shoulder to the wheel!”
The car had failed to take the right-hand turn where the line divided;
it had to be pushed back, and while the driver tugged and swore under
his breath at his horses, Lemuel set himself to push the car.
“'S no use!” said the driver finally. “I got to hitch 'em on at the
other end, and pull her back.”
He uncoupled the team from the front of the car, and swung round with
it. Lemuel felt something strike him, on the leg, and he fell down. He
scrambled to his feet again, but his left leg doubled under him; it went
through his mind that one of the horses must have lashed out and broken
it; then everything seemed to stop.
The world began again for him in the apothecary's shop where he had been
carried, and from which he was put into an ambulance, by a policeman.
It stopped again, as he whirled away; it renewed itself in anguish, and
ceased in bliss as he fainted from the pain or came to.
They lifted him up some steps, at last, and carried him into a high,
bright room, where there were two or three cots, and a long glass case
full of surgical instruments. They laid him on a cot, and some one
swiftly and skilfully undressed him. A surgeon had come in, and now he
examined Lemuel's leg. He looked once or twice at his face.
“This is a pretty bad job, I can't tell how bad till you have had the
ether. Will you leave it with me?”
“Yes. But do the best you can for me.”
“You may be sure I will.”
Lemuel believed that they meant to cut off his leg. He knew that he had
a right to refuse and to take the consequences, but he would not; he had
no right to choose death, when he had others to live for.
He woke deathly sick at first, and found himself lying in bed, one of
the two rows in a long room, where there were some quiet women in neat
caps and seersucker dresses going about, with bowls of food and bottles
of medicine.
Lemuel still felt his leg, and the pain in it, but he had heard how
mutilated men felt their lost limbs all their lives, and he was afraid
to make sure by the touch of his hand.
A nurse who saw his eyes open came to him. He turned them upon her, but
he could not speak. She must have understood. “The doctor thinks he can
save your leg for you; but it's a bad fracture. You must be careful to
keep very still.”
He fell asleep; and life began again for him, in the midst of suffering
and death. He saw every day broken and mangled men, drunk with ether,
brought up as he had been, and laid in beds; he saw the priest of the
religion to which most of the poor and lowly still belong, go and come
among the cots, and stand by the pillows where the sick feebly followed
him in the mystical gestures which he made on his brow and breast; he
learned to know the use of the white linen screen which was drawn
about a bed to hide the passing of a soul; he became familiar with the
helpless sympathy, the despair of the friends who came to visit the sick
and dying.
He had not lacked for more attention and interest from his own than the
rules of the hospital allowed. His mother and 'Manda Grier came first,
and then Statira when they would let her. She thought it hard that she
was not suffered to do the least thing for him; she wished to take him
away to their own rooms, where she could nurse him twice as well. At
first she cried whenever she saw him, and lamented over him, so that
the head nurse was obliged to explain to her that she disturbed the
patients, and could not come any more unless she controlled herself. She
promised, and kept her word; she sat quietly by his pillow and held his
hand, when she came, except when she put up her own to hide the cough
which she could not always restrain. The nurse told her that, of course,
she was not accountable for the cough, but she had better try to check
it. Statira brought troches with her, and held them in her mouth for
this purpose.
Lemuel's family was taken care of in this time of disaster. The
newspapers had made his accident promptly known; and not only Sewell,
but Miss Vane and Mrs. Corey had come to see if they could be of any
use.
One day a young girl brought a bouquet of flowers and set it by Lemuel's
bed, when he seemed asleep. He suddenly opened his eyes, and saw Sybil
Vane for the first time since their quarrel.
She put her finger to her lip, and smiled with the air of a lady
benefactress; then, with a few words of official sympathy, she
encouraged him to get well, and flitted to the next bed, where she
bestowed a jacqueminot rosebud on a Chinaman dying of cancer.
Sewell came often to see him, at first in the teeth of his mother's
obvious hostility, but with her greater and greater relenting. Nothing
seemed gloomier than the outlook for Lemuel, but Sewell had lived too
long not to know that the gloom of an outlook has nothing to do with a
man's real future. It was impossible, of course, for Lemuel to go back
to Mr. Corey's now with a sick wife, who would need so much of his care.
Besides, he did not think it desirable on other accounts. He recurred to
what Lemuel had said about getting work that should not take him too far
away from the kind of people his betrothed was used to, and he felt a
pity and respect for the boy whom life had already taught this wisdom,
this resignation. He could see that before his last calamity had come
upon him, Barker was trying to adjust his ambition to his next duty,
or rather to subordinate it; and the conviction that he was right gave
Sewell courage to think that he would yet somehow succeed. It also gave
him courage to resist, on Barker's behalf, the generous importunities
of some who would have befriended him. Mr. Corey and Charles Bellingham
drove up to the hospital one day, to see Lemuel; and when Sewell met
them the same evening, they were full of enthusiasm. Corey said that
the effect of the hospital, with its wards branching from the classistic
building in the centre, was delightfully Italian; it was like St.
Peter's on a small scale, and he had no idea how interesting the South
End was; it was quite a bit of foreign travel to go up there. Bellingham
had explored the hospital throughout; he said he had found it the thing
to do--it was a thing for everybody to do; he was astonished that he
had never done it before. They united in praising Barker, and they asked
what could be done for him. Corey was strenuous for his coming back to
him; at any rate they must find something for him. Bellingham favoured
the notion of doing something for his education; a fellow like that
could come to almost anything.
Sewell shook his head. “All that's impossible, now. With that girl----”
“Oh, confound her!” cried Bellingham.
“I was rather disappointed at not seeing his mother,” said Corey. “I had
counted a good deal, I find, upon Mrs. Barker's bloomers.”
“With a girl like that for his wife,” pursued Sewell, “the conditions
are all changed. He must cleave to her in mind as well as body, and he
must seek the kind of life that will unite them more and more, not less
and less. In fact, he was instinctively doing so when this accident
happened. That's what marriage means.”
“Oh, not always,” suggested Corey.
“He must go back to Willoughby Pastures,” Sewell concluded, “to his
farm.”
“Oh, come now!” said Bellingham, with disgust.
“If that sort of thing is to go on,” said Corey, “what is to become of
the ancestry of the future _élite_ of Boston? I counted upon Barker to
found one of our first families. Besides, any Irishman could take his
farm and do better with it. The farm would be meat to the Irishman, and
poison to Barker, now that he's once tasted town.”
“Yes, I know all that,” said Sewell sadly. “I once thought the greatest
possible good I could do Barker, after getting him to Boston, was to get
him back to Willoughby Pastures; but if that was ever true, the time is
past. Now, it merely seems the only thing possible. When he gets well,
he will still have an invalid wife on his hands; he must provide her a
home; she could have helped him once, and would have done so, I've no
doubt; but now she must be taken care of.”
“Look here!” said Bellingham. “What's the reason these things can't be
managed as they are in the novels? In any well-regulated romance that
cough of hers would run into quick consumption and carry Barker's
fiancee off in six weeks; and then he could resume his career of
usefulness and prosperity here, don't you know. He could marry some one
else, and found that family that Corey wants.”
They all laughed, Sewell ruefully.
“As it is,” said Corey, “I suppose she'll go on having hemorrhages to a
good old age, and outlive him, after being a clog and burden to him all
his life. Poor devil! What in the world possesses him to want to marry
her? But I suppose the usual thing.”
This gave Sewell greater discomfort than the question of Lemuel's
material future. He said listlessly, “Oh, I suppose so,” but he was
far from thinking precisely that. He had seen Lemuel and the young girl
together a great deal, and a painful misgiving had grown up in his mind.
It seemed to him that while he had seen no want of patience and kindness
towards her in Lemuel, he had not seen the return of her fondness,
which, silly as it was in some of its manifestations, he thought he
should be glad of in him. Yet he was not sure. Barker was always so
self-contained that he might very well feel more love for her than he
showed; and, after all, Sewell rather weakly asked himself, was the love
so absolutely necessary?
When he repeated this question in his wife's presence, she told him she
was astonished at him.
“You know that it is _vitally_ necessary! It's all the more necessary,
if he's so superior to her, as you say. I can't think what's become of
your principles, my dear!”
“I do, you've got them,” said Sewell.
“I really believe I have,” said his wife, with that full conviction of
righteousness which her sex alone can feel. “I have always heard you
say that marriage without love was not only sinful in itself, but the
beginning of sorrow. Why do you think now that it makes no difference?”
“I suppose I was trying to adapt myself to circumstances,” answered
Sewell, frankly at least. “Let's hope that my facts are as wrong as my
conclusions. I'm not sure of either. I suppose, if I saw him idolising
so slight and light a person as she seems to be, I should be more
disheartened about his future than I am now. If he overvalued her, it
would only drag him lower down.”
“Oh, his future! Drag him down! Why don't you think of her, going up
there to that dismal wilderness, to spend her days in toil and poverty,
with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother-in-law, in
such a looking hovel?” Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages
conventionally, but they were effective. “You have allowed your feelings
about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why
should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is that so
very bright?”
“I don't think that either is dazzling,” sighed the minister. Yet
Barker's grew a little lighter as he familiarised himself with it, or
rather with Barker. He found that he had a plan for getting a teacher's
place in the Academy, if they reopened it at Willoughby Pastures, as
they talked of doing, under the impulse of such a course in one of the
neighbouring towns, and that he was going home, in fancy at least, with
purposes of enlightenment and elevation which would go far to console
him under such measure of disappointment as they must bring. Sewell
hinted to Barker that he must not be too confident of remodelling
Willoughby Pastures upon the pattern of Boston.
“Oh no; I don't expect that,” said Lemuel. “What I mean is that I shall
always try to remember myself what I've learnt here--from the kind of
men I've seen, and the things that I know people are all the time doing
for others. I told you once that they haven't got any idea of that in
the country. I don't expect to preach it into them; they wouldn't like
it if I did; and they'd make fun of it; but if I could try to _live_
it?”
“Yes,” said Sewell, touched by this young enthusiasm.
“I don't know as I can all the time,” said Lemuel. “But it seems to me
that that's what I've learnt here, if I've learnt anything. I think the
world's a good deal better than I used to.”
“Do you indeed, my dear boy?” asked Sewell, greatly interested. “It's a
pretty well-meaning world--I hope it is.”
“Yes, that's what I mean,” said Lemuel. “I presume it ain't
perfect--isn't, I should say,” and Sewell smiled. “Mr. Corey was always
correcting me on that. But if I were to do nothing but pass along the
good that's been done me since I came here, I should be kept busy the
rest of my life.”
Sewell knew that this emotion was largely the physical optimism of
convalescence; but he could not refuse the comfort it gave him to find
Barker in such a mood, and he did not conceive it his duty to discourage
it. Lofty ideals, if not indulged at the expense of lowly realities, he
had never found hurtful to any; and it was certainly better for Barker
to think too well than too ill of Boston, if it furnished him incentives
to unselfish living. He could think of enough things in the city to
warrant a different judgment, but if Barker's lesson from his experience
there was this, Sewell was not the person to weaken its force with him.
He said, with a smile of reserved comment, “Well, perhaps you'll be
coming back to us, some day.”
“I don't look forward to that,” said Lemuel soberly; and then his face
took a sterner cast, as if from the force of his resolution. “The first
thing I've got to do after I've made a home for her is to get Statira
away from the town where she can have some better air, and see if she
can't get her health back. It'll be time enough to talk of Boston again
when she's fit to live here.”
The minister's sympathetic spirit sank again. But his final parting with
Barker was not unhopeful. Lemuel consented to accept from him a small
loan, to the compass of which he reduced the eager bounty of Miss Vane
and Mr. Corey, representing that more would be a burden and an offence
to Barker. Statira and his mother came with him to take leave of the
Sewells.
They dismounted from the horse-car at the minister's door; and he saw,
with sensibility, the two women helping Lemuel off; he walked with a
cane, and they went carefully on either side of him. Sewell hastened
to meet them at the door himself, and he was so much interested in the
spectacle of this mutual affection that he failed at first to observe
that Mrs. Barker wore the skirts of occidental civilisation instead of
the bloomers which he had identified her with.
“She _says_ she's goin' to put 'em on again as soon as she gets back
to Willoughby,” the younger woman explained to Mrs. Sewell in an aside,
while the minister was engaged with Lemuel and his mother. “But I
tell her as long as it ain't the fashion in Boston, I guess she hadn't
better, he-e-e-re.” Statira had got on her genteel prolongation of her
last syllables again. “I guess I shall get along with her. She's kind
of queer when you first get acquainted; but she's _real_
good-_heart_-e-e-d.” She was herself very prettily dressed, and though
she looked thin, and at times gave a deep, dismal cough, she was so
bright and gay that it was impossible not to feel hopeful about her. She
became very confidential with Mrs. Sewell, whom she apparently brevetted
Lemuel's best friend, and obliged to a greater show of interest in
him than she had ever felt. She told her the whole history of her love
affair, and of how much 'Manda Grier had done to help it on at first,
and then how she had wanted her to break off with Lemuel. “But,” she
concluded, “I think we're goin' to get along real nice together. I don't
know as we shall live all in the same _hou_-ou-se; I guess it'll be the
best thing for Lem and I if we can board till we get some little of our
health back; I'm more scared for him than what I am for my-_se_-e-lf. I
don't presume but what we shall both miss the city some; but he might be
out of a job all winter in town; I shouldn't want he should go back on
them _ca_-a-rs. Most I hate is leavin' 'Manda Grier, she is the one
that I've roomed with ever since I first came to Boston; but Lem and her
don't get on very well; they hain't really either of 'em _got_ anything
against each other now, but they don't _like_ very _we_-e-ll; and, of
course, I got to have the friends that he wants me to have, and that's
what 'Manda Grier says, _to_-o-o; and so it's just as well we're goin'
to be where they won't _cla_-a-sh.”
She talked to Mrs. Sewell in a low voice; but she kept her eyes upon
Lemuel all the time; and when Sewell took him and his mother the length
of the front drawing-room away, she was quite distraught, and answered
at random till he came back.
Sewell did not know what to think. Would this dependence warm her
betrothed to greater tenderness than he now showed, or would its excess
disgust him? He was not afraid that Lemuel would ever be unkind to
her; but he knew that in marriage kindness was not enough. He looked
at Lemuel, serious, thoughtful, refined in his beauty by suffering; and
then his eye wandered to Statira's delicate prettiness, so sweet,
so full of amiable cheerfulness, so undeniably light and silly. What
chiefly comforted him was the fact of an ally whom the young thing
had apparently found in Lemuel's mother. Whether that grim personage's
ignorant pride in her son had been satisfied with a girl of Statira's
style and fashion, and proven capableness in housekeeping, or whether
some fancy for butterfly prettiness lurking in the fastnesses of the old
woman's rugged nature had been snared by the gay face and dancing eyes,
it was apparent that she at least was in love with Statira. She allowed
herself to be poked about and rearranged as to her shawl and the
narrow-brimmed youthful hat which she wore on the peak of her skull, and
she softened to something like a smile at the touch of Statira's quick
hands.
They had all come rather early to make their parting visit at the
Sewells, for the Barkers were going to take the two o'clock train for
Willoughby Pastures, while Statira was to remain in Boston till he could
make a home for her. Lemuel promised to write, as soon as he should be
settled, and tell Sewell about his life and his work; and Sewell, beyond
earshot of his wife, told him he might certainly count upon seeing them
at Willoughby in the course of the next summer. They all shook hands
several times. Lemuel's mother gave her hand from under the fringe of
her shawl, standing bolt upright at arm's-length off, and Sewell said it
felt like a collection of corn-cobs.