The Minister’s Charge by William D. HowellsOr, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker (page 5)

with her kindly, and he went to see her the night before he started home, though it was not Sunday, but he had found her door locked, and this made him angry with her, he could not have said just why. If he told his mother about Statira now, what should he tell her? He compromised by telling her about the two girls that had painted his likeness.

His mother seemed not to care a great deal about the pictures. She said, “I don’t want you should let any girl make a fool of you, Lem.”

“Oh no,” he answered, and went and looked out of the window.

“I don’t say but what they’re nice girls enough, but in your place you no need to throw yourself away.”

Lemuel thought of the awe of Miss Carver in which he lived, and the difference between them; and he could have laughed at his mother’s ignorant pride. What would she say if she knew that he was engaged to a girl that worked in a box-factory? But probably she would not think that studying art and teaching it was any better. She evidently believed that his position in the St. Albans was superior to that of Miss Carver.

His sister and her husband came home before they had finished dinner. His sister had her face all tied up to keep from taking cold after having her tooth drawn, and Lemuel had to go out and help his rheumatic brother-in-law put up the horse. When they came in, his brother-in-law did not wash his hands before going to the table, and Lemuel could not keep his eyes off his black and broken fingernails; his mother’s and sister’s nails were black too. It must have been so when he lived at home.

His sister could not eat; she took some tea, and went to bed. His brother-in-law pulled off his boots after dinner, and put up his stocking-feet on the stove-hearth to warm them.

There was no longer any chance to talk with his mother indoors, and he asked her if she would not like to come out; it was very mild. She put on her bonnet, and they strolled down the road. All the time Lemuel had to keep from looking at her bloomers. When they met any one driving, he had to keep himself from trying to look as if he were not with her, but was just out walking alone.

The day wore heavily away. His brother-in-law’s rheumatism came on toward evening, and his sister’s face had swollen, so that it would not do for her to go out. Lemuel put on some old clothes he found in his room, and milked the cows himself.

“Like old times, Lem,” said his mother, when he came in.

“Yes,” he assented quietly.

He and his mother had tea together, but pretty soon afterwards she seemed to get sleepy; and Lemuel said he had been up early and he guessed he would go to bed. His mother said she guessed she would go too.

After he had blown out his light, she came in to see if he were comfortable. “I presume it seems a pretty poor place to you, Lem,” she said, holding her lamp up and looking round.

“I guess if it’s good enough for you it is for me,” he answered evasively.

“No, it ain’t,” she said. “I always b’en used to it, and I can see from your talk that you’ve got used to something different already. Well, it’s right, Lem. You’re a good boy, and I want you should get the good of Boston, all you can. We don’t any of us begrutch it to ye; and what I came up to say now was, don’t you scrimp yourself down there to send home to us. We got a roof over our heads, and we can keep soul and body together somehow; we always have, and we don’t need a great deal. But I want you should keep yourself nicely dressed down to Boston, so ‘t you can go with the best; I don’t want you should feel anyways meechin’ on account of your clothes. You got a good figure, Lem; you take after your father. Sometimes I wish you was a little bigger; but _he_ wa’n’t; and he had a big spirit. He wa’n’t afraid of anything; and they said if he’d come out o’ that battle where he was killed, he’d ‘a’ b’en a captain. He was a good man.”

She had hardly ever spoken so much of his father before; he knew now by the sound of her voice in the dim room that the tears must be in her eyes; but she governed herself and went on.

“What I wanted to say was, don’t you keep sendin’ so much o’ your money home, child. It’s yours, and I want you should have it; most of it goes for patent medicines, anyway, when it gets here; we can’t keep Reuben from buying ’em, and he’s always changin’ doctors. And I want you should hold yourself high, Lem. You’re as good as anybody. And don’t you go with any girls, especially, that ain’t of the best. You’re gettin’ to that time o’ life when you’ll begin to think about ’em; but don’t you go and fall in love with the first little poppet you see, because she’s got pretty eyes and curly hair.”

It seemed to Lemuel as if she must know about Statira, but of course she did not. He lay still, and she went on.

“Don’t you go and get engaged, or any such foolishness in a hurry, Lem. Them art-student girls you was tellin’ about, I presume they’re all right enough; but you wait a while. Young men think it’s a kind of miracle if a girl likes ’em, and they’re ready to go crazy over it; but it’s the most natural thing she can do. You just wait a while. When you get along a little further, you can pick and choose for yourself. I don’t know as I should want you should marry for money; but don’t you go and take up with the first thing comes along, because you’re afraid to look higher. What’s become o’ that nasty thing that talked so to you at that Miss Vane’s?”

Lemuel said that he had never seen Sibyl or Miss Vane since; but he did not make any direct response to the anxieties his mother had hinted at. Her pride in him, so ignorant of all the reality of his life in the city, crushed him more than the sight and renewed sense of the mean conditions from which he had sprung. What if he should tell her that Miss Carver, whom she did not want him to marry in a hurry, regarded him as a servant, and treated him as she would treat a black man? What if she knew that he was as good as engaged to marry a girl that could no more meet Miss Carver on the same level than she could fly? He could only tell his mother not to feel troubled about him; that he was not going to get married in any great hurry; and pretend to be sleepy and turn his head away.

She pulled the covering up round his neck and tucked it in with her strong, rough old hand, whose very tenderness hurt.

He had expected to stay the greater part of the next day, but he took an earlier train. His sister was still laid up; she thought she must have taken cold in her jaw; her husband, rumpled, unshaven, with a shawl over his shoulders, cowered about the cook-stove for the heat. He began to hate this poverty and suffering, to long for escape from it to the life which at that distance seemed so rich and easy and pleasant; he trembled lest something might have happened in his absence to have thrown him out of his place.

All the way to Boston he was under the misery of the home that he was leaving; his mother’s pride added to the burden of it. But when the train drew in sight of the city, and he saw the steeples and chimneys, and the thin masts of the ships printed together against the horizon, his heart rose. He felt equal to it, to anything in it.

He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and he saw no one at the hotel except the Harmons till toward dinner-time. Then the ladies coming in from shopping had a word of welcome for him; some of them stopped and shook hands at the office, and when they began to come down to dinner they spoke to him, and there again some of them offered their hands; they said it seemed an age since he had gone.

The art-students came down with Berry, who shook hands so cordially with him that perhaps they could not help it. Miss Carver seemed to hesitate, but she gave him her hand too, and she asked, as the others had done, whether he had found his family well.

He did not know what to think. Sometimes he felt as if people were trying to make a fool of him almost. He remained blushing and smiling to himself after the last of them had gone in to dinner. He did not know what Miss Carver meant, but her eyes seemed to have lost that cold distance, and to have come nearer to him.

Late at night Berry came to him where he sat at his desk. “Well, Barker, I’m glad you’re back again, old man. Feels as if you’d been gone a month of Sundays. Didn’t know whether we should have you with us this _first_ evening.”

Lemuel grew hot with consciousness, and did not make it better for himself by saying, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I should in your _place_,” returned Berry. “It’s human nature. It’s all right. What did the ladies think of the ‘Roman Youth’ the other night? The distinguished artists weren’t sure exactly, and I thought I could make capital with one of ’em if I could find out. Yes, that’s my little game, Barker; that’s what I dropped in for; Bismarck style of diplomacy. I’ll tell you why they want to know, if you won’t give me away: Miss Swan wanted to give her ‘bit of colour’–that’s what she calls it–to one of the young ladies; but she’s afraid she didn’t like it.”

“I guess they liked it well enough,” said Lemuel, thinking with shame that Statira had not had the grace to say a word of either of the pictures; he attributed this to ‘Manda Grier’s influence.

“Well that’s good, so far as it goes,” said Berry. “But now, to come down to particulars, what did they _say_? That’s what Miss Swan will ask _me_.”

“I don’t remember just what they said,” faltered Lemuel.

“Well, they must have said something,” insisted Berry jocosely. “Give a fellow some little clue, and I can piece it out for myself. What did _she_ say? I don’t ask which she _was_? but I have my suspicions. All I want to know is what she _said_. Anything like beautiful middle distance, or splendid chiaroscuro, or fine perspective, or exquisite modelling? Come now! Try to think, Barker.” He gave Lemuel time, but to no purpose. “Well,” he resumed, with affected dejection, “I’ll have to try to imagine it; I guess I can; I haven’t worked my imagination much since I took up the law. But look here, Barker,” he continued more briskly, “now you open up a little. Here I’ve been giving you my confidence ever since I saw you–forcing it on you; and you know just how far I’m gone on Miss Swan, to a hundredth part of an inch; but I don’t know enough of your affections to swear that you’ve got any. Now, which one is it? Don’t be mean about it. I won’t give you away. Honest Injun!”

Lemuel was goaded to desperation. His face burned, and the perspiration began to break out on his forehead. He did not know how to escape from this pursuit.

“Which is it, Barker?” repeated his tormentor. “I know it’s human nature to deny it; though I never could understand why; if I was engaged, the Sunday papers should have it about as quick!”

“I’m _not_ engaged!” cried Lemuel.

“You ain’t?” yelled Berry.

“No!”

“Give me your hand! Neither am I!”

He shook Lemuel’s helpless hand with mock heroic fervour. “We are brothers from this time forth, Barker! You can’t imagine how closely this tie binds you to me, Barker. Barker, we are one; with no particular prospect, as far as I am concerned, of ever being more.”

He offered to dramatise a burst of tears on Lemuel’s shoulder; but Lemuel escaped from him.

“Stop! Quit your fooling! What if somebody should come in?”

“They won’t,” said Berry, desisting, and stretching himself at ease in the only chair besides Lemuel’s with which the office was equipped. “It’s too late for ’em. Now o’er the one-half world nature seems dead-ah, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep-ah. We are safe here from all intrusion, and I can lay bare my inmost thoughts to you, Barker, if I happen to have any. Barker, I’m awfully glad you’re not engaged to either of those girls,–or both. And it’s not altogether because I enjoy the boon companionship of another unengaged man, but it’s partly because I don’t think–shall I say it?”

“Say what?” asked Lemuel, not without some prescience.

“Well, you can forgive the brotherly frankness, if you don’t like it. I don’t think they’re quite up to you.”

Lemuel gave a sort of start, which Berry interpreted in his own way.

“Now, hold on! I know just how you feel. Been there myself. I have seen the time too when I thought any sort of girl was too good for Alonzo W., Jr. But I don’t now. I think A. W., Jr., is good enough for the best. I may be mistaken; I was the other time. But we all begin that way; and the great object is not to keep on that way. See? Now, I suppose you’re in love–puppy love–with that little thing. Probably the first girl you got acquainted with after you came to Boston, or may be a sweet survival of the Willoughby Pastures period. All right. Perfectly natural, in either case. But don’t you let it go any further, my dear boy; old man, don’t you let it go any further. Pause! Reflect! Consider! Love wisely, but not too well! Take the unsolicited advice of a sufferer.”

Pride, joy, shame, remorse, mixed in Lemuel’s heart, which eased itself in an involuntary laugh at Berry’s nonsense.

“Now, what I want you to do–dear boy, or old man, as the case may be–is to regard yourself in a new light. Regard yourself, for the sake of the experiment, as too good for any girl in Boston. No? Can’t fetch it? Try again!”

Lemuel could only laugh foolishly.

“Well, now, that’s singular,” pursued Berry. “I supposed you could have done it without the least trouble. Well, let’s try something a little less difficult. Look me in the eye, and regard yourself as too good, for example, for Miss Carver. Ha!”

An angry flush spread over Lemuel’s embarrassed face. “I wish you’d behave yourself,” he stammered.

“In any other cause I would,” said Berry solemnly. “But I must be cruel to be kind. Seriously, old man, if you can’t think yourself too good for Miss Carver, I wish you’d think yourself good enough. Now, I’m not saying anything against the Willoughby episode, mind. That has its place in the wise economy of nature, just like anything else. But there ain’t any outcome in it for you. You’ve got a future before you, Barker, and you don’t want to go and load up with a love affair that you’ll keep trying to unload as long as you live. No, sir! Look at me! I know I’m not an example in some things, but in this little business of correctly placed affections I could give points to Solomon. Why am I in love with M. Swan? Because I can’t help it for one thing, and because for another thing she can do more to develop the hidden worth and unsuspected powers of A. W., Jr., than any other woman in the world. She may never feel that it’s her mission, but she can’t shake my conviction that way; and I shall stay undeveloped to prove that I was right. Well, now, what you want, my friend, is development, and you can’t get it where you’ve been going. She hain’t got it on hand. And what you want to do is not to take something else in its place–tender heart, steadfast affections, loyalty; they’ve got ’em at every shop in town; they’re a drug in the market. You’ve got to say ‘No development, heigh? Well, I’ll just look round a while, and if I can’t find it at some of the other stores I’ll come back and take some of that steadfast affection. You say it won’t come off? Or run in washing?’ See?”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Lemuel, trying to summon an indignant feeling, and laughing with a strange pleasure at heart. “You’ve got no right to talk to me that way. I want you should leave me alone!”

“Well, since you’re so pressing, I will go,” said Berry easily. “But if I find you at our next interview sitting under the shade of the mustard-tree whose little seed I have just dropped, I shall feel that I have not laboured in vain. ‘She’s a darling, she’s a daisy, she’s a dumpling, she’s a lamb!’ I refer to Miss Swan, of course; but on other lips the terms are equally applicable to Miss Carver; and don’t you forget it!”

He swung out of the office with a mazurka step. His silk hat, gaily tilted on the side of his head, struck against the door-jamb, and fell rolling across the entry floor. Lemuel laughed wildly. At twenty these things are droll.

XXI.

A week passed, and Lemuel had not tried to see Statira again. He said to himself that even when he had tried to do what was right, and to show those young ladies how much he thought of her by bringing her to see their pictures, she had acted very ungratefully, and had as good as tried to quarrel with him. Then, when he went to see her before his visit home, she was out; she had never been out before when he called.

Now, he had told Berry that they were not engaged. At first, this shocked him as if it were a lie. Then he said to himself that he had a right to make that answer because Berry had no right to ask the questions that led to it. Then he asked himself if he really were engaged to Statira. He had told her that he liked her better than any one else in the world, and she had said as much to him. But he pretended that he did not know whether it could be called an engagement.

There was no one who could solve the question for him, and it kept asking itself that whole week, and especially when he was with Miss Carver, as happened two or three times through Berry’s connivance. Once he had spent the greater part of an evening in the studio, where he talked nearly all the time with Miss Carver, and he found out that she was the daughter of an old ship’s captain at Corbitant; her mother was dead, and her aunt had kept house for her father. It was an old square house that her grandfather built, in the days when Corbitant had direct trade with France. She described it minutely, and told how a French gentleman had died there in exile at the time of the French revolution and who was said to haunt the house; but Miss Carver had never seen any ghosts in it. They all began to talk of ghosts and weird experiences; even Berry had had some strange things happen to him in the West. Then the talk broke in two again, and Lemuel sat apart with Miss Carver, who told at length the plot of a story she had been reading; it was a story called _Romola_; and she said she would lend it to Lemuel; she said she did not see how any one could bear to be the least selfish or untrue after reading it. That made Lemuel feel cold; but he could not break away from her charm. She sat where the shaded lamp threw its soft light on one side of her face; it looked almost like the face of a spirit, and her eyes were full of a heavenly gentleness.

Lemuel asked himself how he could ever have thought them proud eyes. He asked himself at the same time and perpetually, whether he was really engaged to Statira or not. He thought how different this evening was from those he spent with her. She could not talk about anything but him and her dress; and ‘Manda Grier could not do anything but say saucy things which she thought were smart. Miss Swan was really witty; it was as good as the theatre to hear her and Berry going on together. Berry was pretty bright; there was no denying it. He sang to his banjo that night; one of the songs was Spanish; he had learned it in New Mexico.

Lemuel began to understand better how such nice young ladies could go with Berry. At first, after Berry talked so to him that night in the office against Statira, he determined that he would keep away from him. But Berry was so sociable and good-natured that he could not. The first thing he knew, Lemuel was laughing at something Berry said, and then he could not help himself.

Berry was coming now, every chance he had, to talk about the art- students. He seemed to take it for granted that Lemuel was as much interested in Miss Carver as he was himself in Miss Swan; and Lemuel did begin to speak of her in a shy way. Berry asked him if he had noticed that she looked like that Spanish picture of the Virgin that Miss Swan had pinned up next to the door; and Lemuel admitted that there was some resemblance.

“Notice those eyes of hers, so deep, and sorry for everybody in general? If it was anybody in particular, _that_ fellow would be in luck. Oh. she’s a dumpling, there’s no mistake about it! ‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered!’ That’s Miss Carver’s style. She looks as if she just _wanted_ to forgive somebody something. I’m afraid you ain’t wicked enough, Barker. Look here! What’s the reason we can’t make up a little party for the Easter service at the Catholic cathedral Sunday night? The girls would like to go, I know.”

“No, no, I can’t! I mustn’t!” said Lemuel, and he remained steadfast in his refusal. It would be the second Sunday night that he had not seen Statira, and he felt that he must not let it pass so. Berry went off to the cathedral with the art-students; and he kept out of the way till they were gone.

He said to himself that he would go a little later than usual to see Statira, to let her know that he was not so very anxious; but when he found her alone, and she cried on his neck, and owned that she had not behaved as she should that night when she went to see the pictures, and that she had been afraid he hated her, and was not coming any more, he had stayed away so long, his heart was melted, and he did everything to soothe and comfort her, and they were more loving together than they had been since the first time. ‘Manda Grier came in, and said through her nose, like an old country-woman, “‘The falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love!'” and Statira exclaimed in the old way, “‘_Manda_!” that he had once thought so cunning, and rested there in his arms with her cheek tight pressed against his.

She did not talk; except when she was greatly excited about something, she rarely had anything to say. She had certain little tricks, poutings, bridlings, starts, outcries, which had seemed the most bewitching things in the world to Lemuel. She tried all these now, unaffectedly enough, in listening to his account of his visit home, and so far as she could she vividly sympathised with him.

He came away heavy and unhappy. Somehow, these things no longer sufficed for him. He compared this evening with the last he had spent with the art-students, which had left his brain in a glow, and kept him awake for hours with luminous thoughts. But he had got over that unkindness to Statira, and he was glad of that. He pitied her now, and he said to himself that if he could get her away from ‘Manda Grier, and under the influence of such girls as Miss Swan and Miss Carver, it would be much better for her. He did not relent toward ‘Manda Grier; he disliked her more than ever, and in the friendship which he dramatised between Statira and Miss Carver, he saw her cast adrift without remorse.

Sewell had told him that he was always at leisure Monday night, and the next evening Lemuel went to pay his first visit to the minister since his first day in Boston. It was early, and Evans, who usually came that evening, had not arrived yet, but Sewell had him in his thought when he hurried forward to meet his visitor.

“Oh, is it you, Mr. Barker?” he asked in a note of surprise. “I am glad to see you. I had been intending to come and look you up again. Will you sit down? Mr. Evans was here the other night, and we were talking of you. I hope you are all well?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Lemuel, taking the hand the minister offered, and then taking the chair he indicated. Sewell did not know exactly whether to like the greater ease which Lemuel showed in his presence; but there was nothing presumptuous in it, and he could not help seeing the increased refinement of the young man’s beauty. The knot between his eyes gave him interest, while it inflicted a vague pang upon the minister. “I have been at home since I saw you.” Lemuel looked down at his neat shoes to see if they were in fit state for the minister’s study-carpet, and Sewell’s eye sympathetically following, wandered to the various details of Lemuel’s simple and becoming dress,–the light spring suit which he had indulged himself in at the Misfit Parlours since his mother had bidden him keep his money for himself and not send so much of it home.

“Ah, have you?” cried the minister. “I hope you found your people all well? How is the place looking? I suppose the season isn’t quite so advanced as it is with us.”

“There’s some snow in the woods yet,” said Lemuel, laying the stick he carried across the hat-brim on his knees. “Mother was well; but my sister and her husband have had a good deal of sickness.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that,” said Sewell, with the general sympathy which Evans accused him of keeping on tap professionally. “Well, how did you like the looks of Willoughby Pastures compared with Boston? Rather quieter, I suppose.”

“Yes, it was quieter,” answered Lemuel.

“But the first touch of spring must be very lovely there! I find myself very impatient with these sweet, early days in town. I envy you your escape to such a place.”

Lemuel opposed a cold silence to the lurking didacticism of these sentences, and Sewell hastened to add, “And I wish I could have had your experience in contrasting the country and the town, after your long sojourn here, on your first return home. Such a chance can come but once in a lifetime, and to very few.”

“There are some pleasant things about the country,” Lemuel began.

“Oh, I am sure of it!” cried Sewell, with cheerful aimlessness.

“The stillness was a kind of rest, after the noise here; I think any one might be glad to get back to such a place—-“

“I was sure you would,” interrupted Sewell.

“If he was discouraged or broken down any way,” Lemuel calmly added.

“Oh!” said Sewell. “You mean that you found more sympathy among your old friends and neighbours than you do here?”

“No,” said Lemuel bluntly. “That’s what city people think. But it’s all a mistake. There isn’t half the sympathy in the country that there is in the city. Folks pry into each other’s business more, but they don’t really care so much. What I mean is that you could live cheaper, and the fight isn’t so hard. You might have to use your hands more, but you wouldn’t have to use your head hardly at all. There isn’t so much opposition–competition.”

“Oh,” said Sewell a second time. “But this competition–this struggle–in which one or the other must go to the wall, isn’t that painful?”

“I don’t know as it is,” answered Lemuel, “as long as you’re young and strong. And it don’t always follow that one must go to the wall. I’ve seen some things where both got on better.”

Sewell succumbed to this worldly wisdom. He was frequently at the disadvantage men of cloistered lives must be, in having his theories in advance of his facts. He now left this point, and covertly touched another that had come up in his last talk with Evans about Barker. “But you find in the country, don’t you, a greater equality of social condition? People are more on a level, and have fewer artificial distinctions.”

“Yes, there’s that,” admitted Lemuel. “I’ve worried a good deal about that, for I’ve had to take a servant’s place in a good many things, and I’ve thought folks looked down on me for it, even when they didn’t seem to intend to do it. But I guess it isn’t so bad as I thought when I first began to notice it. Do you suppose it is?” His voice was suddenly tense with personal interest in the question which had ceased to be abstract.

“Oh, certainly not,” said the minister, with an ease which he did not feel.

“I presume I had what you may call a servant’s place at Miss Vane’s,” pursued Lemuel unflinchingly, “and I’ve been what you may call head waiter at the St. Albans, since I’ve been there. If a person heard afterwards, when I had made out something, if I ever did, that I had been a servant, would they–they–despise me for it?”

“Not unless they were very silly people,” said Sewell cordially, “I can assure you.”

“But if they had ever seen me doing a servant’s work, wouldn’t they always remember it, no matter what I was afterwards?” Sewell hesitated, and Lemuel hurried to add, “I ask because I’ve made up my mind not to be anything but clerk after this.”

Sewell pitied the simple shame, the simple pride. “That isn’t the question for you to ask, my dear boy,” he answered gently, and with an affection which he had never felt for his charge before. “There’s another question, more important, and one which you must ask yourself: ‘_Should I care if they did?_’ After all, the matter’s in your own hands. Your soul’s always your own till you do something wrong.”

“Yes, I understand that.” Lemuel sat silently thoughtful, fingering his hat-band. It seemed to Sewell that he wished to ask something else, and was mustering his courage; but if this was so, it exhaled in a sigh, and he remained silent.

“I should be sorry,” pursued the minister, “to have you dwell upon such things. There are certain ignoble facts in life which we can best combat by ignoring them. A slight of almost any sort ceases to be when you cease to consider it.” This did not strike Sewell as wholly true when he had said it, and he was formulating some modification of it in his mind, when Lemuel said–

“I presume a person can help himself some by being ashamed of caring for such things, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant—-“

“I guess I’ve exaggerated the whole thing some. But if a thing is so, thinking it ain’t won’t unmake it.”

“No,” admitted Sewell reluctantly. “But I should be sorry, all the same, if you let it annoy–grieve you. What has pleased me in what I’ve been able to observe in you, has been your willingness to take hold of any kind of honest work. I liked finding you with your coat off washing dishes, that morning, at the Wayfarer’s Lodge, and I liked your going at once to Miss Vane’s in a–as you did—-“

“Of course,” Lemuel interrupted, “I could do it before I knew how it was looked at here.”

“And couldn’t you do it now?”

“Not if there was anything else.”

“Ah, that’s the great curse of it; that’s what I deplore,” Sewell broke out, “in our young people coming from the country to the city. They must all have some genteel occupation! I don’t blame them; but I would gladly have saved you this experience–this knowledge–if I could. I felt that I had done you a kind of wrong in being the means, however indirectly and innocently, of your coming to Boston, and I would willingly have done anything to have you go back to the country. But you seemed to distrust me–to find something hostile in me–and I did not know how to influence you.”

“Yes, I understand that,” said Lemuel. “I couldn’t help it, at first. But I’ve got to see it all in a different light since then. I know that you meant the best by me. I know now that what I wrote wasn’t worth anything, and just how you must have looked at it. I didn’t know some things then that I do now; and since I have got to know a little more I have understood better what you meant by all you said.”

“I am very glad,” said Sewell, with sincere humility, “that you have kept no hard feeling against me.”

“Oh, not at all. It’s all right now. I couldn’t explain very well that I hadn’t come to the city just to be in the city, but because I had to do something to help along at home. You didn’t seem to understand that there wa’n’t anything there for me to take hold of.”

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t, or wouldn’t quite understand that; I was talking and acting, I’m afraid, from a preconceived notion.” Lemuel made no reply, not having learned yet to utter the pleasant generalities with which city people left a subject; and after a while Sewell added, “I am glad to have seen your face so often at church. You have been a great deal in my mind, and I have wished to do something to make your life happy, and useful to you in the best way, here, but I haven’t quite known how.” At this point Sewell realised that it was nearly eight months since Lemuel had come to Boston, and he said contritely, “I have not made the proper effort, I’m afraid; but I did not know exactly how to approach you. You were rather a difficult subject,” he continued, with a smile in which Lemuel consented to join, “but now that we’ve come to a clearer understanding–” He broke off and asked, “Have you many acquaintances in Boston?”

Lemuel hesitated, and cleared his throat, “Not many.”

Something in his manner prompted the minister to say, “That is such a very important thing for young men in a strange place. I wish you would come oftener to see us, hereafter. Young men, in the want of companionship, often form disadvantageous acquaintances, which they can’t shake off afterwards, when they might wish to do so. I don’t mean evil acquaintance; I certainly couldn’t mean that in your case; but frivolous ones, from which nothing high or noble can come– nothing of improvement or development.”

Lemuel started at the word and blushed. It was Berry’s word. Sewell put his own construction on the start and the blush.

“Especially,” he went on, “I should wish any young man whom I was interested in to know refined and noble woman.” He felt that this was perhaps in Lemuel’s case too much like prescribing port wine and carriage exercise to an indigent patient, and he added, “If you cannot know such women, it is better to know none at all. It is not what women say or do, so much as the art they have of inspiring a man to make the best of himself. The accidental acquaintances that young people are so apt to form are in most cases very detrimental. There is no harm in them of themselves, perhaps, but all irregularity in the life of the young is to be deplored.”

“Do you mean,” asked Lemuel, with that concreteness which had alarmed Sewell before, “that they ought to be regularly introduced?”

“I mean that a young girl who allowed a young man to make her acquaintance outside of the–the–social sanctions–would be apt to be a silly or romantic person, at the best. Of course, there are exceptions. But I should be very sorry if any young man I knew–no; why shouldn’t I say _you_, at once?–should involve himself in any such way. One thing leads to another, especially with the young; and the very fact of irregularity, of romance, of strangeness in an acquaintance, throws a false glamour over the relation, and appeals to the sentiments in an unwarranted degree.”

“Yes, that is so,” said Lemuel.

The admission stimulated Sewell in the belief that he had a clue in his hand which it was his duty to follow up. “The whole affair loses proportion and balance. The fancy becomes excited, and some of the most important interests–the very most important interests of life–are committed to impulse.” Lemuel remained silent, and it seemed the silence of conviction. “A young man is better for knowing women older than himself, more cultivated, devoted to higher things. Of course, young people must see each other, must fall in love and get married; but there need be no haste about such things. If there is haste–if there is rashness, thoughtlessness–there is sure to be unhappiness. Men are apt to outgrow their wives intellectually, if their wives’ minds are set on home and children, as they should be, and allowance for this ought to be made, if possible. I would rather that in the beginning the wife should be the mental superior. I hope it will be several years yet before you think seriously of such things, but when the time comes, I hope you will have seen some young girl–there are such for every one of us–whom it is civilisation and enlightenment, refinement, and elevation, simply to know. On the other hand, a silly girl’s influence is degrading and ruinous. She either drags those attached to her down to her own level; or she remains a weight and a clog upon the life of a man who loves her.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a sigh which Sewell interpreted as that of relief from danger recognised in time.

He pursued eagerly. “I could not warn any one too earnestly against such an entanglement.”

Lemuel rose and looked about with a troubled glance. Sewell continued: “Any such marriage–a marriage upon any such conditions– is sure to be calamitous; and if the conditions are recognised beforehand, it is sure to be iniquitous. So far from urging the fulfilment of even a promise, in such a case, I would have every such engagement broken, in the interest of humanity–of morality—-“

Mrs. Sewell came into the room, and gave a little start of surprise, apparently not mixed with pleasure, at seeing Lemuel. She had never been able to share her husband’s interest in him, while insisting upon his responsibility; she disliked him not logically, but naturally, for the wrong and folly which he had been the means of her husband’s involving himself in; Miss Vane’s kindliness toward Lemuel, which still survived, and which expressed itself in questions about him whenever she met the minister, was something that Mrs. Sewell could not understand. She now said, “Oh! Mr. Barker!” and coldly gave him her hand. “Have you been well? Must you go?”

“Yes, thank you. I have got to be getting back. Well, good evening.” He bowed to the Sewells.

“You must come again to see me,” said the minister, and looked at his wife.

“Yes, it has been a very long time since you were here,” Mrs. Sewell added.

“I haven’t had a great deal of time to myself,” said Lemuel, and he contrived to get himself out of the room.

Sewell followed him down to the door, in the endeavour to say something more on the subject his wife had interrupted, but he only contrived to utter some feeble repetitions. He came back in vexation, which he visited upon Lemuel. “Silly fellow!” he exclaimed.

“What has he been doing now?” asked Mrs. Sewell, with reproachful discouragement.

“Oh, _I_ don’t know! I suspect that he’s been involving himself in some ridiculous love affair!” Mrs. Sewell looked a silent inculpation. “It’s largely conjecture on my part, of course,–he’s about as confiding as an oyster!–but I fancy I have said some things in a conditional way that will give him pause. I suspect from his manner that he has entangled himself with some other young simpleton, and that he’s ashamed of it, or tired of it, already. If that’s the case, I have hit the nail on the head. I told him that a foolish, rash engagement was better broken than kept. The foolish marriages that people rush into are the greatest bane of life!”

“And would you really have advised him, David,” asked his wife, “to break off an engagement if he had made one?”

“Of course I should! I—-“

“Then I am glad I came in in time to prevent your doing anything so wicked.”

“Wicked?” Sewell turned from his desk, where he was about to sit down, in astonishment.

“Yes! Do you think that nobody else is to be considered in such a thing? What about the poor, silly girl if he breaks off with her? Oh, you men are all alike! Even the best! You think it is a dreadful thing for a young man to be burdened with a foolish love affair at the beginning of his career; but you never think of the girl whose whole career is spoiled, perhaps, if the affair is broken off! Hasn’t she any right to be considered?”

“I should think,” said Sewell, distinctly daunted, “that they were equally fortunate, if it were broken off.”

“O my dear, you know you don’t think anything of the kind! If he has more mind than she has, and is capable of doing something in the world, he goes on and forgets her; but she remembers him. Perhaps it’s her one chance in life to get married–to have a home. You know very well that in a case of that kind–a rash engagement, as you call it–both are to blame; and shall one do all the suffering? Very probably his fancy was taken first, and he followed her up, and flattered her into liking him; and now shall he leave her because he’s tired of her?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, recovering from the first confusion which his wife’s unexpected difference of opinion had thrown him into, “I should think that was the very best reason in the world why he should leave her. Would his marrying make matters worse or better if he were tired of her? As for wickedness, I should feel myself guilty if I did not do my utmost to prevent marriages between people when one or other wished to break their engagement, and had not the moral courage to do so. There is no more pernicious delusion than that one’s word ought to be kept in such an affair, after the heart has gone out of it, simply because it’s been given.”

“David!”

But Sewell was not to be restrained. “I am right about this, Lucy, and you know it. Half the miserable marriages in the world could be prevented, if there were only some frank and fearless adviser at hand to say to the foolish things that if they no longer fully and freely love each other they can commit no treason so deadly as being true to their word. I wish,” he now added, “that I could be the means of breaking off every marriage that the slightest element of doubt enters into beforehand. I should leave much less work for the divorce courts. The trouble comes from that crazy and mischievous principle of false self-sacrifice that I’m always crying out against. If a man has ceased to love the woman he has promised to marry–or _vice versa_–the best possible thing they can do, the only righteous thing, is not to marry.”

Mrs. Sewell could not deny this. She directed an oblique attack from another quarter, as women do, while affecting not to have changed her ground at all. “Very well, then, David, I wish you would have nothing to do with that crazy and mischievous principle yourself. I wish you would let this ridiculous Barker of yours alone from this time forth. He has found a good place, where he is of use, and where he is doing very well. Now I think your responsibility is fairly ended. I hope you won’t meddle with his love affairs, if he has any; for if you do, you will probably have your hands full. He is very good looking, and all sorts of silly little geese will be falling in love with him.”

“Well, so far his love troubles are purely conjectural,” said Sewell with a laugh. “I’m bound to say that Barker himself didn’t say a word to justify the conjecture that he was either in love or wished to be out of it. However, I’ve given him some wholesome advice which he’ll be all the better for taking, merely as a prophylactic, if nothing else.”

“I am tired of him,” sighed Mrs. Sewell. “Is he going to keep perpetually turning up, in this way? I hope you were not very pressing with him in your invitations to him to call again?”

Sewell smiled. “You were not, my dear.”

“You let him take too much of your time. I was so provoked, when I heard you going on with him, that I came down to put an end to it.”

“Well, you succeeded,” said Sewell easily. “Don’t you think he’s greatly improved in the short time he’s been in the city?”

“He’s very well dressed. I hope he isn’t extravagant.”

“He’s not only well dressed, but he’s beginning to be well spoken. I believe he’s beginning to observe that there is such a thing as not talking through the nose. He still says, ‘I don’t know as,’ but most of the men they turn out of Harvard say that; I’ve heard some of the professors say it.”

Mrs. Sewell was not apparently interested in this.

XXII.

That night Lemuel told Mrs. Harmon that she must not expect him to do anything thenceforward but look after the accounts and the general management; she must get a head-waiter, and a boy to run the elevator. She consented to this, as she would have consented to almost anything else that he proposed.

He had become necessary to the management of the St. Albans in every department; and if the lady boarders felt that they could not now get on without him, Mrs. Harmon was even more dependent.

With her still nominally at the head of affairs, and controlling the expenses as a whole, no radical reform could be effected. But there were details of the outlay in which Lemuel was of use, and he had brought greater comfort into the house for less money. He rejected her old and simple device of postponing the payment of debt as an economical measure, and substituted cash dealings with new purveyors. He gradually but inevitably took charge of the store- room, and stopped the waste there; early in his administration he had observed the gross and foolish prodigality with which the portions were sent from the carving-room, and after replacing Mrs. Harmon’s nephew there, he established a standard portion that gave all the needed variety, and still kept the quantity within bounds. It came to his taking charge of this department entirely, and as steward he carved the meats, and saw that nothing was in a way to become cold before he opened the dining-room doors as head-waiter.

His activities promoted the leisure which Mrs. Harmon had always enjoyed, and which her increasing bulk fitted her to adorn. Her nephew willingly relinquished the dignity of steward. He said that his furnaces were as much as he wanted to take care of; especially as in former years, when it had begun to come spring, he had experienced a stress of mind in keeping the heat just right, when the ladies were all calling down the tubes for more of it or less of it, which he should now be very glad not to have complicated with other cares. He said that now he could look forward to the month of May with some pleasure.

The guests, sensibly or insensibly, according to their several temperaments, shared the increased ease that came from Lemuel’s management. The service was better in every way; their beds were promptly made, their rooms were periodically swept; every night when they came up from dinner they found their pitchers of ice-water at their doors. This change was not accomplished without much of that rebellion and renunciation which was known at the St. Albans as kicking. Chambermaids and table-girls kicked, but they were replaced by Lemuel, who went himself to the intelligence office, and pledged the new ones to his rule beforehand. There was even some kicking among the guests, who objected to the new portions, and to having a second bill sent them if the first remained unpaid for a week; but the general sense of the hotel was in Lemuel’s favour.

He had no great pleasure in the reform he had effected. His heart was not in it, except as waste and disorder and carelessness were painful to him. He suffered to promote a better state of things, as many a woman whose love is for books or pictures or society suffers for the perfection of her housekeeping, and sacrifices her taste to achieve it. He would have liked better to read, to go to lectures, to hear sermons; with the knowledge of Mr. Evans’s life as an editor and the incentive of a writer near him, he would have liked to try again if he could not write something, though the shame of his failure in Mr. Sewell’s eyes had burned so deep. Above all, since he had begun to see how city people regarded the kind of work he had been doing, he would have liked to get out of the hotel business altogether, if he could have been sure of any other.

As the spring advanced his cares grew lighter. Most of the regular boarders went away to country hotels and became regular boarders there. Their places were only partially filled by transients from the South and West, who came and went, and left Lemuel large spaces of leisure, in which he read, or deputed Mrs. Harmon’s nephew to the care of the office and pursued his studies of Boston, sometimes with Mr. Evans,–whose newspaper kept him in town, and who liked to prowl about with him, and to frequent the odd summer entertainments,–but mostly alone. They became friends after a fashion, and were in each other’s confidence as regarded their opinions and ideas, rather than their history; now and then Evans dropped a word about the boy he had lost, or his wife’s health, but Lemuel kept his past locked fast in his breast.

The art-students had gone early in the summer, and Berry had left Boston for Wyoming at the end of the spring term of the law-school. He had not been able to make up his mind to pop before Miss Swan departed, but he thought he should fetch it by another winter; and he had got leave to write to her, on condition, he said, that he should conduct the whole correspondence himself.

Miss Carver had left Lemuel dreaming of her as an ideal, yet true, with a slow, rustic constancy, to Statira. For all that had been said and done, he had not swerved explicitly from her. There was no talk of marriage between them, and could not be; but they were lovers still, and when Miss Carver was gone, and the finer charm of her society was unfelt, he went back to much of the old pleasure he had felt in Statira’s love. The resentment of her narrow-mindedness, the shame for her ignorance passed; the sense of her devotion remained.

‘Manda Grier wanted her to go home with her for part of the summer, but she would not have consented if Lemuel had not insisted. She wrote him back ill-spelt, scrawly little letters, in one of which she told him that her cough was all gone, and she was as well as ever. She took a little more cold when she returned to town in the first harsh September weather, and her cough returned, but she said she did not call it anything now.

The hotel began to fill up again for the winter. Berry preceded the art-students by some nervous weeks, in which he speculated upon what he should do if they did not come at all. Then they came, and the winter passed, with repetitions of the last winter’s events, and a store of common memories that enriched the present, and insensibly deepened the intimacy in which Lemuel found himself. He could not tell whither the present was carrying him; he only knew that he had drifted so far from the squalor of his past, that it seemed like the shadow of a shameful dream.

He did not go to see Statira so often as he used; and she was patient with his absences, and defended him against ‘Manda Grier, who did not scruple to tell her that she believed the fellow was fooling with her, and who could not always keep down a mounting dislike of Lemuel in his presence. One night towards spring, when he returned early from Statira’s, he found Berry in the office at the St. Albans. “That you, old man?” he asked. “Well, I’m glad you’ve come. Just going to leave a little Billy Ducks for you here, but now I needn’t. The young ladies sent me down to ask if you had a copy of Whittier’s poems; they want to find something in it. I told ’em Longfellow would do just as well, but I couldn’t seem to convince ’em. They say he didn’t write the particular poem they want.”

“Yes, I’ve got Whittier’s poems here,” said Lemuel, unlocking his desk. “It belongs to Mr. Evans; I guess he won’t care if I lend it.”

“Well, now, I tell you what,” said Berry; “don’t you let a borrowed book like that go out of your hands. Heigh? You just bring it up yourself. See?” He winked the eye next Lemuel with exaggerated insinuation. “They’ll respect you all the more for being so scrupulous, and I guess they won’t be very much disappointed on general principles if you come along. There’s lots of human nature in girls–the best of ’em. I’ll tell ’em I left you lookin’ for it. I don’t mind a lie or two in a good cause. But you hurry along up, now.”

He was gone before Lemuel could stop him; he could not do anything but follow.

It appeared that it was Miss Swan who wished to see the poem; she could not remember the name of it, but she was sure she should know it if she saw it in the index. She mingled these statements with her greetings to Lemuel, and Miss Carver seemed as glad to see him. She had a little more colour than usual, and they were all smiling, so that he knew Berry had been getting off some of his jokes. But he did not care.

Miss Swan found the poem as she had predicted, and, “Now all keep still,” she said, “and I’ll read it.” But she suddenly added, “Or no; you read it, Mr. Barker, won’t you?”

“If Barker ain’t just in voice to-night, I’ll read it,” suggested Berry.

But she would not let him make this diversion. She ignored his offer, and insisted upon Lemuel’s reading. “Jessie says you read beautifully. That passage in _Romola_,” she reminded him; but Lemuel said it was only a few lines, and tried to excuse himself. At heart he was proud of his reading, and he ended by taking the book.

When he had finished the two girls sighed.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Jessie?” said Miss Swan.

“Beautiful!” answered her friend.

Berry yawned.

“Well, I don’t see much difference between that and a poem of Longfellow’s. Why wouldn’t Longfellow have done just as well? Honestly, now! Why isn’t one poem just as good as another, for all practical purposes?”

“It is, for some people,” said Miss Swan.

Berry figured an extreme anguish by writhing in his chair. Miss Swan laughed in spite of herself, and they began to talk in their usual banter, which Miss Carver never took part in, and which Lemuel was quite incapable of sharing. If it had come to savage sarcasm or a logical encounter, he could have held his own, but he had a natural weight and slowness that disabled him from keeping up with Berry’s light talk; he envied it, because it seemed to make everybody like him, and Lemuel would willingly have been liked.

Miss Carver began to talk to him about the book, and then about Mr. Evans. She asked him if he went much to his rooms, and Lemuel said no, not at all, since the first time Mr. Evans had asked him up. He said, after a pause, that he did not know whether he wanted him to come.

“I should think he would,” said Miss Carver. “It must be very gloomy for him, with his wife such an invalid. He seems naturally such a gay person.”

“Yes, that’s what I think,” said Lemuel.

“I wonder,” said the girl, “if it seems to you harder for a naturally cheerful person to bear things, than for one who has always been rather melancholy?”

“Yes, it does!” he answered with the pleasure and surprise young people have in discovering any community of feeling; they have thought themselves so utterly unlike each other. “I wonder why it should?”

“I don’t know; perhaps it isn’t so. But I always pity the cheerful person the most.”

They recognised an amusing unreason in this, and laughed. Miss Swan across the room had caught the name.

“Are you talking of Mrs. Evans?”

Berry got his banjo down from the wall, where Miss Swan allowed him to keep it as bric-a-brac, and began to tune it.

“I don’t believe it agrees with this banjoseph being an object of virtue,” he said. “What shall it be, ladies? Something light and gay, adapted to disperse gloomy reflections?” He played a fandango. “How do you like that? It has a tinge of melancholy in it, and yet it’s lively too, as a friend of mine used to say about the Dead March.”

“Was his name Berry?” asked Miss Swan.

“Not Alonzo W., Jr.,” returned Berry tranquilly, and he and Miss Swan began to joke together.

“I know a friend of Mr. Evans’s,” said Lemuel to Miss Carver. “Mr. Sewell. Have you ever heard him preach?”

“Oh yes, indeed. We go nearly every Sunday morning.”

“I nearly always go in the evening now,” said Lemuel. “Don’t you like him?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “There’s something about him–I don’t know what–that doesn’t leave you feeling how bad you are, but makes you want to be better. He helps you so; and he’s so clear. And he shows that he’s had all the mean and silly thoughts that you have. I don’t know–it’s as if he were talking for each person alone.”

“Yes, that is exactly the way I feel!” Lemuel was proud of the coincidence. He said, to commend himself further to Miss Carver, “I have just been round to see him.”

“I should think you would value his acquaintance beyond anything,” said the girl. “Is he just as earnest and simple as he is in the pulpit?”

“He’s just the same, every way.” Lemuel went a little further; “I knew him before I came to Boston. He boarded one summer where we lived.” As he spoke he thought of the grey, old, unpainted house, and of his brother-in-law with his stocking-feet on the stove- hearth, and his mother’s bloomers; he thought of his arrest, and his night in the police-station, his trial, and the Wayfarer’s Lodge; and he wondered that he could think of such things and still look such a girl in the face. But he was not without that strange joy in their being unknown to her which reserved and latent natures feel in mere reticence, and which we all experience in some degree when we talk with people and think of our undiscovered lives.

They went on a long time, matching their opinions and feelings about many things, as young people do, and fancying that much of what they said was new with them. When he came away after ten o’clock, he thought of one of the things that Sewell had said about the society of refined and noble women: it was not so much what they said or did that helped; it was something in them that made men say and do their best, and help themselves to be refined and noble men, to make the most of themselves in their presence. He believed that this was what Miss Carver had done, and he thought how different it was with him when he came away from an evening with Statira. Again he experienced that compassion for her, in the midst of his pride and exultation; he asked himself what he could do to help her; he did not see how she could be changed.

Berry followed him downstairs, and wanted to talk the evening over.

“I don’t see how I’m going to stand it much longer, Barker,” he said. “I shall have to pop pretty soon or die, one of the two; and I’m afraid either one ‘ll kill me. Wasn’t she lovely to-night? Honey in the comb, sugar in the gourd, _I_ say! I wonder what it is about popping, anyway, that makes it so hard, Barker? It’s simply a matter of business, if you come to boil it down. You offer a fellow so many cattle, and let him take ’em or leave ’em. But if the fellow happens to have on a long, slim, olive-green dress of some colour, and holds her head like a whole floral tribute on a stem, and _you_ happen to be the cattle you’re offering, you can’t feel so independent about it, somehow. Well, what’s the use? She’s a daisy, if ever there was one. Ever notice what a peculiar blue her eyes are?”

“Blue?” said Lemuel. “They’re brown.”

“Look here, old man,” said Berry compassionately, “do you think I’ve come down here to fool away my time talking about Miss Carver? We’ll take some Saturday afternoon for that, when we haven’t got anything else to do; but it’s Miss Swan that has the floor at present. What were you two talking about over there, so long? I can’t get along with Miss Carver worth a cent.”

“I hardly know what we did talk about,” said Lemuel dreamily.

“Well, I’ve got the same complaint, I couldn’t tell you ten words that Madeline said–in thine absence let me call thee Madeline, sweet!–but I knew it was making an immortal spirit of me, right straight along, every time. The worst thing about an evening like this is, it don’t seem to last any time at all. Why, when those girls began to put up their hands to hide their yawns, I felt like I was just starting in for a short call. I wish I could have had a good phonograph around. I’d put it on my sleepless pillow, and unwind its precious record all through the watches of the night.” He imitated the thin phantasmal squeak of the instrument in repeating a number of Miss Swan’s characteristic phrases. “Yes, sir, a pocket phonograph is the thing I’m after.”

“I don’t see how you can talk the way you do,” said Lemuel, shuddering inwardly at Berry’s audacious freedom, and yet finding a certain comfort in it.

“That’s just the way I felt myself at first. But you’ll get over it as you go along. The nicest thing about their style of angel is that they’re perfectly human, after all. You don’t believe it now, of course, but you will.”

It only heightened Lemuel’s conception of Miss Carver’s character to have Berry talk so lightly and daringly of her, in her relation to him. He lay long awake after he went to bed, and in the turmoil of his thoughts one thing was clear: so pure and high a being must never know anything of his shameful past, which seemed to dishonour her through his mere vicinity. He must go far from her, and she must not know why; but long afterwards Mr. Sewell would tell her, and then she would understand. He owed her this all the more because he could see now that she was not one of the silly persons, as Mr. Sewell called them, who would think meanly of him for having in his ignorance and inexperience, done a servant’s work. His mind had changed about that, and he wondered that he could ever have suspected her of such a thing.

About noon the next day the street door was opened hesitatingly, as if by some one not used to the place; and when Lemuel looked up from the menus he was writing, he saw the figure of one of those tramps who from time to time presented themselves and pretended to want work. He scanned the vagabond sharply, as he stood moulding a soft hat on his hands, and trying to superinduce an air of piteous appeal upon the natural gaiety of his swarthy face. “Well! what’s wanted?”

A dawning conjecture that had flickered up in the tramp’s eyes flashed into full recognition.

“Why, mate!”

Lemuel’s heart stood still. “What–what do you want here?”

“Why, don’t you know me, mate?”

All his calamity confronted Lemuel.

“No,” he said, but nothing in him supported the lie he had uttered.

“Wayfarer’s Lodge?” suggested the other cheerfully. “Don’t you remember?”

“No—-“

“I guess you do,” said the mate easily. “Anyway, I remember you.”

Lemuel’s feeble defence gave way. “Come in here,” he said, and he shut the door upon the intruder and himself, and submitted to his fate. “What is it?” he asked huskily.

“Why, mate! what’s the matter? Nobody’s goin’ to hurt you,” said the other encouragingly. “What’s your lay here?”

“Lay?”

“Yes. Got a job here?”

“I’m the clerk,” said Lemuel, with the ghost of his former pride of office.

“Clerk?” said the tramp with good-humoured incredulity. “Where’s your diamond pin? Where’s your rings?” He seemed willing to prolong the playful inquiry. “Where’s your patent leather boots?”

“It’s not a common hotel. It’s a sort of a family hotel, and I’m the clerk. What do you want?”

The young fellow lounged back easily in his chair. “Why, I did drop in to beat the house out of a quarter if I could, or may be ten cents. Thank you, sir. God bless you, sir.” He interrupted himself to burlesque a professional gratitude. “That style of thing, you know. But I don’t know about it now. Look here, mate! what’s the reason you couldn’t get me a job here too? I been off on a six months’ cruise since I saw you, and I’d like a job on shore first rate. Couldn’t you kind of ring me in for something? I ain’t afraid of work, although I never did pretend to love it. But I should like to reform now, and get into something steady. Heigh?”

“There isn’t anything to do–there’s no place for you,” Lemuel began.

“Oh, pshaw, now, mate, you think!” pleaded the other. “I’ll take any sort of a job; I don’t care what it is. I ain’t got any o’ that false modesty about me. Been round too much. And I don’t want to go back to the Wayfarer’s Lodge. It’s a good place, and I know my welcome’s warm and waitin’ for me, between two hot plates; but the thing of it is, it’s demoralisin’. That’s what the chaplain said just afore I left the–ship, ‘n’ I promised him I’d give work a try, anyway. Now you just think up something! I ain’t in any hurry.” In proof he threw his soft hat on the desk, and took up one of the _menus_. “This your bill of fare? Well, it ain’t bad! Vurmiselly soup, boiled holibut, roast beef, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, roast pork with apple sauce, chicken corquettes, ditto patties, three kinds of pie; bread puddin’, both kinds of sauce; ice cream, nuts, and coffee. Why, mate!”

Lemuel sat dumb and motionless. He could see no way out of the net that had entangled him. He began feebly to repeat. “There isn’t anything,” when some one tried the door.

“Mr. Barker!” called Mrs. Harmon. “You in there?”

He made it worse by waiting a moment before he rose and opened the door. “I didn’t know I’d locked it.” The lie came unbidden; he groaned inwardly to think how he was telling nothing but lies. Mrs. Harmon did not come in. She glanced with a little question at the young fellow, who had gathered his hat from the table, and risen with gay politeness.

It was a crisis of the old sort; the elevator boy had kicked, and Mrs. Harmon said, “I just stopped to say that I was going out and I could stop at the intelligence office myself to get an elevator boy–“

The mate took the word with a joyous laugh at the coincidence. “It’s just what me and Mr. Barker was talking about! I’m from up his way, and I’ve just come down to Boston to see if I couldn’t look up a job; and he was tellin’ me, in here, about your wantin’ a telegraph–I mean a elevator-boy, but he didn’t think it would suit me. But I should like to give it a try, anyway. It’s pretty dull up our way, and I got to do something. Mr. Barker ‘ll tell you who I am.”

He winked at Lemuel with the eye not exposed to Mrs. Harmon, and gave her a broad, frank, prepossessing smile.

“Well, of course,” said Mrs. Harmon smoothly, “any friend of Mr. Barker’s—-“

“We just been talkin’ over old times in here,” interrupted the mate. “I guess it was me shoved that bolt in. I didn’t want to have anybody see me talkin’ with him till I’d got some clothes that would be a little more of a credit to him.”

“Well, that’s right,” said Mrs. Harmon appreciatively. “I always like to have everybody around my house looking neat and respectable. I keep a first-class house, and I don’t have any but first-class help, and I expect them to dress accordingly, from the highest to the lowest.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the mate, “that’s the way I felt about it myself, me and Mr. Barker both; and he was just tellin’ me that if I was a mind to give the elevator a try, he’d lend me a suit of his clothes.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Harmon; “if Mr. Barker and you are a mind to fix it up between you—-“

“Oh, we are!” said the mate. “There won’t be any trouble about that.”

“I don’t suppose I need to stop at the intelligence office. I presume Mr. Barker will show you how to work the elevator. He helped us out with it himself at first.”

“Yes, that’s what he said,” the other chimed in. “But I guess I’d better go and change my clothes first. Well, mate,” he added to Lemuel, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”

Lemuel rose trembling from the chair where he had been chained, as it seemed to him, while the mate and Mrs. Harmon arranged their affair with his tacit connivance. He had not spoken a word; he feared so much to open his lips lest another lie should come out of them, that his sense of that danger was hardly less than his terror at the captivity in which he found himself.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Harmon, “I’ll look after the office till you get back. Mr. Barker ‘ll show you where you can sleep.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said the mate, with gratitude that won upon her.

“And I’m glad,” she added, “that it’s a friend of Mr. Barker’s that’s going to have the place. We think everything of Mr. Barker here.”

“Well, you can’t think more of him than what we do up home,” rejoined the other with generous enthusiasm.

In Lemuel’s room he was not less appreciative. “Why, mate, it does me good to see how you’ve got along. I got to write a letter home at once, and tell the folks what friends you’ve got in Boston. I don’t believe they half understand it.” He smiled joyously upon Lemuel, who stood stock still, with such despair in his face that probably the wretch pitied him.

“Look here, mate, don’t you be afraid now! I’m on the reform lay with all my might, and I mean business. I ain’t a-goin’ to do you any harm, you bet your life. These your things?” he asked, taking Lemuel’s winter suit from the hooks where they hung, and beginning to pull off his coat. He talked on while he changed his dress. “I was led away, and I got my come-uppings, or the other fellow’s come- uppings, for _I_ wa’n’t to blame any, and I always said so, and I guess the judge would say so too, if it was to do over again.”

A frightful thought stung Lemuel to life. “The judge? Was it a passenger-ship?”

The other stopped buttoning Lemuel’s trousers round him to slap himself on the thigh. “Why, mate! don’t you know enough to know what a _sea voyage_ is? Why, I’ve been down to the _Island_ for the last six months! Hain’t you never heard it called a sea voyage? Why, we _always_ come off from a cruise when we git back! You don’t mean to say you never _been_ one?”

“Oh, my goodness!” groaned Lemuel. “Have–have you been in prison?”

“Why, of course.”

“Oh, what am I going to do?” whispered the miserable creature to himself.

The other heard him. “Why, you hain’t got to do anything! I’m on the reform, and you might leave everything layin’ around loose, and I shouldn’t touch it. Fact! You ask the ship’s chaplain.”

He laughed in the midst of his assertions of good resolutions, but sobered to the full extent, probably, of his face and nature, and tying Lemuel’s cravat on at the glass, he said solemnly, “Mate, it’s all right. I’m on the reform.”

XXIII.

Lemuel’s friend entered upon his duties with what may also be called artistic zeal. He showed a masterly touch in managing the elevator from the first trip. He was ready, cheerful, and obliging; he lacked nothing but a little more reluctance and a Seaside Library novel to be a perfect elevator-boy.

The ladies liked him at once; he was so pleasant and talkative, and so full of pride in Lemuel that they could not help liking him; and several of them promptly reached that stage of confidence where they told him, as an old friend of Lemuel’s, they thought Lemuel read too much, and was going to kill himself if he kept on a great deal longer. The mate said he thought so too, and had noticed how bad Lemuel looked the minute he set eyes on him. But he asked what was the use? He had said everything he could to him about it. He was always just so, up at home. As he found opportunity he did what he could to console Lemuel with furtive winks and nods.

Lemuel dragged absently and haggardly through the day. In the evening he told Mrs. Harmon that he had to go round and see Mr. Sewell a moment.

It was then nine o’clock, and she readily assented; she guessed Mr. Williams–he had told her his name was Williams–could look after the office while he was gone. Mr. Williams was generously glad to do so. Behind Mrs. Harmon’s smooth large form, he playfully threatened her with his hand levelled at his shoulder; but even this failed to gladden Lemuel.

It was half-past nine when he reached the minister’s house, and the maid had a visible reluctance at the door in owning that Mr. Sewell was at home. Mrs. Sewell had instructed her not to be too eagerly candid with people who came so late; but he was admitted, and Sewell came down from his study to see him in the reception-room.

“What is the matter?” he asked at once, when he caught sight of Lemuel’s face; “has anything gone wrong with you, Mr. Barker?” He could not help being moved by the boy’s looks; he had a fleeting wish that Mrs. Sewell were there to see him, and be moved too; and he prepared himself as he might to treat the trouble which he now expected to be poured out.

“Yes,” said Lemuel, “I want to tell you; I want you to tell me what to do.”

When he had put the case fully before the minister, his listener was aware of wishing that it had been a love-trouble, such as he foreboded at first.

He drew a long and deep breath, and before he began to speak he searched himself for some comfort or encouragement, while Lemuel anxiously scanned his face.

“Yes–yes! I see your–difficulty,” he began, making the futile attempt to disown any share in it. “But perhaps–perhaps it isn’t so bad as it seems. Perhaps no harm will come. Perhaps he really means to do well; and if you are vigilant in–in keeping him out of temptation—-” Sewell stopped, sensible that he was not coming to anything, and rubbed his forehead.

“Do you think,” asked Lemuel, dry mouthed with misery, “that I ought to have told Mrs. Harmon at once?”

“Why, it is always best to be truthful and above-board–as a principle,” said the minister, feeling himself somehow dragged from his moorings.

“Then I had better do it yet!”

“Yes,” said Sewell, and he paused. “Yes. That is to say–As the mischief is done–Perhaps–perhaps there is no haste. If you exercise vigilance–But if he has been in prison–Do you know what he was in for?”

“No. I didn’t know he had been in at all till we got to my room. And then I couldn’t ask him–I was afraid to.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, kindly if helplessly.

“I was afraid, if I sent him off–or tried to–that he would tell about my being in the Wayfarer’s Lodge that night, and they would think I had been a tramp. I could have done it, but I thought he might tell some lie about me; and they might get to know about the trial—-“

“I see,” said Sewell.

“I hated to lie,” said Lemuel piteously, “but I seemed to have to.”

There was another yes on the minister’s tongue; he kept it back; but he was aware of an instant’s relief in the speculation–the question presented itself abstractly–as to whether it was ever justifiable or excusable to lie. Were the Jesuitical casuists possibly right in some slight, shadowy sort? He came back to Lemuel groaning in spirit. “No–no–no!” he sighed; “we mustn’t admit that you _had_ to lie. We must never admit that.” A truth flashed so vividly upon him that it seemed almost escape. “What worse thing could have come from telling the truth than has come from withholding it? And that would have been some sort of end, and this–this is only the miserable beginning.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with all desirable humility. “But I couldn’t see it at once.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you; I don’t blame _you_,” said Sewell. “It was a sore temptation. I blame _myself_!” he exclaimed, with more comprehensiveness than Lemuel knew; but he limited his self- accusal by adding, “I ought to have told Mrs. Harmon myself what I knew of your history; but I refrained because I knew you had never done any harm, and I thought it cruel that you should be dishonoured by your misfortunes in a relation where you were usefully and prosperously placed; and so–and so I didn’t. But perhaps I was wrong. Yes, I was wrong. I have only allowed the burden to fall more heavily upon you at last.”

It was respite for Lemuel to have some one else accusing himself, and he did not refuse to enjoy it. He left the minister to wring all the bitterness he could for himself out of his final responsibility. The drowning man strangles his rescuer.

Sewell looked up, and loosened his collar as if really stifling. “Well, well. We must find some way out of it. I will see–see what can be done for you to-morrow.”

Lemuel recognised his dismissal. “If you say so, Mr. Sewell, I will go straight back and tell Mrs. Harmon all about it.”

Sewell rose too. “No–no. There is no such haste. You had better leave it to me now. I will see to it–in the morning.”

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. “I hate to give you so much trouble.”

“Oh,” said Sewell, letting him out at the street-door, and putting probably less thought and meaning into the polite words than they had ever contained before, “it’s no trouble.”

He went upstairs to his study, and found Mrs. Sewell waiting there. “Well, _now_–what, David?”

“Now what?” he feebly echoed.

“Yes. What has that wretched creature come for now?”

“You may well call him a wretched creature,” sighed Sewell.

“Is he really engaged? Has he come to get you to marry him?”

“I think he’d rather have me bury him at present.” Sewell sat down, and, bracing his elbow on his desk, rested his head heavily on his hand.

“Well,” said his wife, with a touch of compassion tempering her curiosity.

He began to tell her what had happened, and he did not spare himself in the statement of the case. “There you have the whole affair now. And a very pretty affair it is. But, I declare,” he concluded, “I can’t see that any one is to blame for it.”

“No one, David?”

“Well, Adam, finally, of course. Or Eve. Or the Serpent,” replied the desperate man.

Seeing him at this reckless pass, his wife forebore reproach, and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I am going around there in the morning to tell Mrs. Harmon all about Barker.”

“She will send him away instantly.”

“I dare say.”

“And what will the poor thing do?”

“Goodness knows.”

“I’m afraid Badness knows. It will drive him to despair.”

“Well, perhaps not–perhaps not,” sighed the minister. “At any rate, we must not _let_ him be driven to despair. You must help me, Lucy.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Sewell was a good woman, and she liked to make her husband feel it keenly.

“I knew that it must come to that,” she said.

“Of course, we must not let him be ruined. If Mrs. Harmon insists upon his going at once–as I’ve no doubt she will–you must bring him here, and we must keep him till he can find some other home.” She waited, and added, for a final stroke of merciless beneficence, “He can have Alfred’s room, and Alf can take the front attic.”

Sewell only sighed again. He knew she did not mean this.

Barker went back to the St. Albans, and shrunk into as small space in the office as he could. He pulled a book before him and pretended to read, hiding the side of his face toward the door with the hand that supported his head. His hand was cold as ice, and it seemed to him as if his head were in a flame. Williams came and looked in at him once, and then went back to the stool which he occupied just outside the elevator-shaft when not running it. He whistled softly between his teeth, with intervals of respectful silence, and then went on whistling in absence of any whom it might offend.

Suddenly a muffled clamour made itself heard from the depths of the dining-room, like that noise of voices which is heard behind the scenes at the theatre when an armed mob is about to burst upon the stage. Irish tones, high, windy, and angry, yells, and oaths defined themselves, and Mrs. Harmon came obesely hurrying from the dining- room toward the office, closely followed by Jerry, the porter. When upon duty, or, as some of the boarders contended, when in the right humour, he blacked the boots, and made the hard-coal fires, and carried the trunks up and down stairs. When in the wrong humour, he had sometimes been heard to swear at Mrs. Harmon, but she had excused him in this eccentricity because, she said, he had been with her so long. Those who excused it with her on these grounds conjectured arrears of wages as another reason for her patience. His outbreaks of bad temper had the Celtic uncertainty; the most innocent touch excited them, as sometimes the broadest snub failed to do so; and no one could foretell what direction his zigzag fury would take. He had disliked Lemuel from the first, and had chafed at the subordination into which he had necessarily fallen. He was now yelling after Mrs. Harmon, to know if she was not satisfied with _wan_ gutther-snoipe, that she must nades go and pick up another, and whether the new wan was going to be too good to take prisints of money for his worruk from the boarthers, and put all the rest of the help under the caumpliment of refusin’ ut, or else demanin’ themselves by takin’ ut? If this was the case, he’d have her to know that she couldn’t kape anny other help; and the quicker she found it out the betther. Mrs. Harmon was trying to appease him by promising to see Lemuel at once, and ask him about it.

The porter raised his voice an octave. “D’ ye think I’m a loyar, domn ye? Don’t ye think I’m tellin’ the thruth?”

He followed her to the little office, whither she had retreated on a purely mechanical fulfilment of her promise to speak to Lemuel, and crowded in upon them there.

“Here he is now!” he roared in his frenzy. “He’s too good to take the money that’s offered to ‘um! He’s too good to be waither! He wannts to play the gintleman! He thinks ‘umself too good to do what the other servants do, that’s been tin times as lahng in the house!”

At the noise some of the ladies came hurrying out of the public parlour to see what the trouble was. The street-door opened, and Berry entered with the two art-students. They involuntarily joined the group of terrified ladies.

“What’s the row?” demanded Berry. “Is Jerry on the kick?”

No one answered. Lemuel stood pale and silent, fronting the porter, who was shaking his fist in his face. He had not heard anything definite in the outrage that assailed him. He only conjectured that it was exposure of Williams’s character, and the story of his own career in Boston.

“Why don’t you fire him out of there, Barker?” called the law- student. “Don’t be afraid of him!”

Lemuel remained motionless; but his glance sought the pitying eyes of the assembled women, and then dropped before the amaze that looked at him from those of Miss Carver. The porter kept roaring out his infamies.

Berry spoke again.

“Mrs. Harmon, do you want that fellow in there?”

“No, goodness knows I don’t, Mr. Berry.”

“All right.” Berry swung the street-door open with his left hand, and seemed with the same gesture to lay his clutch upon the porter’s collar. “Fire him out myself!” he exclaimed, and with a few swiftly successive jerks and bumps the burly shape of the porter was shot into the night. “I want you to get me an officer, Jerry,” he said, putting his head out after him. “There’s been a blackguard makin’ a row here. Never mind your hat! Go!”

“Oh, my good gracious, Mr. Berry!” gasped Mrs. Harmon, “what have you done?” “If it’s back pay, Mrs. Harmon, we’ll pass round the hat. Don’t you be troubled. That fellow wasn’t fit to be in a decent house.”

Berry stopped a moment and looked at Lemuel. The art-students did not look at him at all; they passed on upstairs with Berry.

The other ladies remained to question and to comment. Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, to whom the uproar seemed to have penetrated in his basement, came up and heard the story from them. He was quite decided. He said that Mr. Berry had done right. He said that he was tired of having folks damn his aunt up hill and down dale; and that if Jerry had kept on a great deal longer, he would have said something to him himself about it.

The ladies justified him in the stand he took; they returned to the parlour to talk it all over, and he went back to his basement. Mrs. Harmon, in tears, retired to her room, and Lemuel was left standing alone in his office. The mate stole softly to him from the background of the elevator, where he had kept himself in safety during the outbreak.

“Look here, mate. This thing been about your ringin’ me in here?”

“Oh, go away, go away!” Lemuel huskily entreated.

“Well, that’s what I intend to do. I don’t want to stay here and git you into no more trouble, and I know that’s what’s been done. You never done me no harm, and I don’t want to do you none. I’m goin’ right up to your room to git my clo’es, and then I’ll skip.”

“It won’t do any good now. It’ll only make it worse. You’d better stay now. You must.”

“Well, if you say so, mate.”

He went back to his elevator, and Lemuel sat down at his desk, and dropped his face upon his arms there. Toward eleven o’clock Evans came in and looked at him, but without speaking; he must have concluded that he was asleep; he went upstairs, but after a while he came down again and stopped again at the office door, and looked in on the haggard boy, hesitating as if for the best words. “Barker, Mr. Berry has been telling me about your difficulty here. I know all about you–from Mr. Sewell.” Lemuel stared at him. “And I will stand your friend, whatever people think. And I don’t blame you for not wanting to be beaten by that ruffian; you could have stood no chance against him; and if you had thrashed him it wouldn’t have been a great triumph.”

“I wish he had killed me,” said Lemuel from his dust-dry throat.

“Oh no; that’s foolish,” said the elder, with patient, sad kindness. “Who knows whether death is the end of trouble? We must live things down, not die them down.” He put his arm caressingly across the boy’s shoulder.

“I can never live this down,” said Lemuel. He added passionately, “I wish I could die!”

“No,” said Evans. “You must cheer up. Think of next Saturday. It will soon be here, and then you’ll be astonished that you felt so bad on Tuesday.”

He gave Lemuel a parting pressure with his arm, and turned to go upstairs.

At the same moment the figure of Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, distracted, violent, burst up through the door leading to the basement.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed the editor, “is Mr. Harmon going to kick?”

“The house is on fire!” yelled the apparition.

A thick cloud of smoke gushed out of the elevator-shaft, and poured into the hall, which it seemed to fill instantly. It grew denser, and in another instant a wild hubbub began. The people appeared from every quarter and ran into the street, where some of the ladies began calling up at the windows to those who were still in their rooms. A stout little old lady came to an open window, and paid out hand over hand a small cable on which she meant to descend to the pavement; she had carried this rope about with her many years against the exigency to which she was now applying it. Within, the halls and the stairway became the scene of frantic encounter between wives and husbands rushing down to save themselves, and then rushing back to save their forgotten friends. Many appeared in the simple white in which they had left their beds, with the addition of such shawls or rugs as chance suggested. A house was opened to the fugitives on the other side of the street, and the crowd that had collected could not repress its applause when one of them escaped from the hotel-door and shot across. It applauded impartially men, women, and children, and, absorbed in the spectacle, no one sounded the fire-alarm; the department began to be severely condemned among the bystanders before the engines appeared.

Most of the ladies, in their escape or their purpose of rescue, tried each to possess herself of Lemuel, and keep him solely in her interest. “Mr. Barker! Mr. Barker! Mr. Barker!” was called for in various sopranos and contraltos, till an outsider took up the cry and shouted, “Barker! Barker! Speech! Speech!” This made him very popular with the crowd, who in their enjoyment of the fugitives were unable to regard the fire seriously. A momentary diversion was caused by an elderly gentleman who came to the hotel-door, completely dressed except that he was in his stockings, and demanded Jerry. The humourist who had called for a speech from Lemuel volunteered the statement that Jerry had just gone round the corner to see a man. “I want him,” said the old gentleman savagely. “I want my boots; I can’t go about in my stockings.”

Cries for Jerry followed; but in fact the porter had forgotten all his grudges and enmities; he had reappeared, in perfect temper, and had joined Lemuel and Berry in helping to get the women and children out of the burning house.

The police had set a guard at the door, in whom Lemuel recognised the friendly old officer who had arrested him. “All out?” asked the policeman.

The smoke, which had reddened and reddened, was now a thin veil drawn over the volume of flame that burned strongly and steadily up the well of the elevator, and darted its tongues out to lick the framework without. The heat was intense. Mrs. Harmon came panting and weeping from the dining-room with some unimportant pieces of silver, driven forward by Jerry and her nephew.

They met the firemen, come at last, and pulling in their hose, who began to play upon the flames; the steam filled the place with a dense mist.

Lemuel heard Berry ask him through the fog, “Barker, where’s old Evans?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” he lamented back.

“He must have gone up to get Mrs. Evans.”

He made a dash towards the stairs. A fireman caught him and pulled him back. “You can’t go up; smoke’s thick as hell up there.” But Lemuel pulled away, and shot up the stairs. He heard the firemen stop Berry.

“You can’t go, I tell you! Who’s runnin’ this fire anyway, I’d like to know?”

He ran along the corridor which Evans’s apartment opened upon. There was not much smoke there; it had drawn up the elevator-well, as if in a chimney.

He burst into the apartment and ran to the inner room, where he had once caught a glimpse of Mrs. Evans sitting by the window.

Evans stood leaning against the wall, with his hand at his breast. He panted, “Help her–help–“

“Where _is_ she? Where _is_ she?” demanded Lemuel.

She came from an alcove in the room, holding a handkerchief drenched with cologne in her hand, which she passed to her husband’s face. “Are you better now? Can you come, dear? Rest on me!”

“I’m–I’m all right! Go–go! I can get along–“

“I’ll go when _you_ go,” said Mrs. Evans. She turned to Lemuel. “Mr. Evans fainted; but he is better now.” She took his hand with a tender tranquillity that ignored all danger or even excitement, and gently chafed it.

“But come–come!” cried Lemuel. “Don’t you know the house is on fire?”

“Yes, I know it,” she replied. “We must get Mr. Evans down. You must help me.” Lemuel had seldom seen her before; but he had so long heard and talked of her hopeless invalidism that she was like one risen from the dead, in her sudden strength and courage, and he stared at the miracle of her restoration. It was she who claimed and bore the greater share of the burden in getting her husband away. He was helpless; but in the open air he caught his breath more fully, and at last could tremulously find his way out of the sympathetic crowd. “Get a carriage,” she said to Lemuel; and then she added, as it drove up and she gave an address, “I can manage him now.”

Evans weakly pressed Lemuel’s hand from the seat to which he had helped him, and the hack drove away. Lemuel looked crazily after it a moment, and then returned to the burning house.

Berry called to him from the top of the outside steps, “Barker, have you seen that partner of yours?”

Lemuel ran up to him. “No!”

“Well, come in here. The elevator’s dropped, and they’re afraid he went down with it.”

“I know he didn’t! He wouldn’t be such a fool!”

“Well, we’ll know when they get the fire under.”

“I thought I saw something in the elevator, and as long as you don’t know where he is–” said a fireman.

“Well,” said Berry, “if you’ve got the upper hands of this thing, I’m going to my room a minute.”

Lemuel followed him upstairs, to see if he could find Williams. The steam had ascended and filled the upper halls; little cascades of water poured down the stairs, falling from step to step; the long strips of carpeting in the corridors swam in the deluge which the hose had poured into the building, and a rain of heavy drops burst through the ceilings.

Most of the room-doors stood open, as the people had flung them wide in their rush for life. At the door of Berry’s room a figure appeared which he promptly seized by the throat.

“Don’t be in a hurry!” he said, as he pushed it into the room. “I want to see you.”

It was Williams.

“I want to see what you’ve got in your pockets. Hold on to him, Barker.”

Lemuel had no choice. He held Williams by the arms while Berry went through him, as he called the search. He found upon him whatever small articles of value there had been in his room.

The thief submitted without a struggle, without a murmur.

Berry turned scornfully to Lemuel. “This a friend of yours, Mr. Barker?”

Still the thief did not speak, but he looked at Lemuel.

“Yes,” he dryly gasped.

“Well!” said Berry, staring fiercely at him for a moment. “If it wasn’t for something old Evans said to me about you, a little while ago, I’d hand you both over to the police.”

Williams seemed to bear the threat with philosophic resignation, but Lemuel shrank back in terror. Berry laughed.

“Why, you are his pal. Go along! I’ll get Jerry to attend to you.”

Lemuel slunk downstairs with Williams. “Look here, mate,” said the rogue; “I guess I ha’n’t used you just right.”

Lemuel expected himself to cast the thief off with bitter rejection. But he heard himself saying hopelessly, “Go away, and try to behave yourself,” and then he saw the thief make the most of the favour of heaven and vanish through the crowd.

He would have liked to steal away too; but he remained, and began mechanically helping again wherever he saw help needed. By and by Berry came out; Lemuel thought that he would tell some policeman to arrest him; but he went away without speaking to any one.

In an hour the firemen had finished their share of the havoc, and had saved the building. They had kept the fire to the elevator-shaft and the adjoining wood-work, and but for the water they had poured into the place the ladies might have returned to their rooms, which were quite untouched by the flames. As it was, Lemuel joined with Jerry in fetching such things to them as their needs or fancies suggested; the refugees across the way were finally clothed by their efforts, and were able to quit their covert indistinguishable in dress from any of the other boarders.

The crowd began to go about its business. The engines had disappeared from the little street with exultant shrieks; in the morning the insurance companies would send their workmen to sweep out the extinct volcano, and mop up the shrunken deluge, preparatory to ascertaining the extent of the damage done; in the meantime the police kept the boys and loafers out of the building, and the order that begins to establish itself as soon as chaos is confessed took possession of the ruin.

But it was all the same a ruin and a calamitous conclusion for the time being. The place that had been in its grotesque and insufficient fashion a home for so many homeless people was uninhabitable; even the Harmons could not go back to it. The boarders had all scattered, but Mrs. Harmon lingered, dwelling volubly upon the scene of disaster. She did not do much else; she was not without a just pride in it, but she was not puffed up by all the sympathy and consolation that had been offered her. She thought of others in the midst of her own troubles, and she said to Lemuel, who had remained working with Jerry under her direction in putting together such things as she felt she must take away with her–

“Well, I don’t know as I feel much worse about myself than I do about poor Mr. Evans. Why, I’ve got the ticket in my pocket now that he gave me for the Wednesday matinee! I do wonder how he’s gettin’ along! I guess they’ve got you to thank, if they’re alive to tell the tale. What _did_ you do to get that woman out alive?” Lemuel looked blankly at her, and did not answer. “And Mr. Evans too! You must have had your hands full, and that’s what I told the reporters; but I told ’em I guessed you’d be equal to it if any one would. Why, I don’t suppose Mrs. Evans has been out of her room for a month, or hardly stepped her foot to the floor. Well, I don’t want to see many people look as he did when you first got him out of the house.”

“Well, I don’t know as I want to see many more fires where I live,”