Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Poor Mr. Sewell!” said Miss Vane, following him to the door. “May I run down and tell Mrs. Sewell?”

  “Not yet,” said the minister sadly. He was too insecure of Barker’s reception to be able to enjoy the joke.

  When he got back to the Wayfarer’s Lodge, whither he made himself walk in penance, he found Lemuel with a book in his hand, reading, while the cook stirred about the kitchen, and the broth, which he had well under way for the mid-day meal, lifted the lid of its boiler from time to time and sent out a joyous whiff of steam. The place had really a cosiness of its own, and Sewell began to fear that his victim had been so far corrupted by its comfort as to be unwilling to leave the Refuge. He had often seen the subtly disastrous effect of bounty, and it was one of the things he trembled for in considering the question of public aid to the poor. Before he addressed Barker, he saw him entered upon the dire life of idleness and dependence, partial or entire, which he had known so many Americans even willing to lead since the first great hard times began; and he spoke to him with the asperity of anticipative censure.

  “Barker!” he said, and Lemuel lifted his head from the book he was reading. “I have found something for you to do. I still prefer you should go home, and I advise you to do so. But,” he added, at the look that came into Lemuel’s face, “if you are determined to stay, this is the best I can do for you. It isn’t a full support, but it’s something, and you must look about for yourself, and not rest till you’ve found full work, and something better fitted for you. Do you think you can take care of a furnace?”

  “Hot air?” asked Lemuel.

  “Yes.”

  “I guess so. I took care of the church furnace, last winter.”

  “I didn’t know you had one,” said the minister, brightening in the ray of hope. “Would you be willing to take care of a domestic furnace — a furnace in a private house?”

  Lemuel pondered the proposal in silence. Whatever objections there were to it in its difference from the aims of his ambition in coming to the city of Boston, he kept to himself; and his ignorance of city prejudices and sophistications probably suggested nothing against the honest work to his pride. “I guess I should,” he said at last. “Well, then, come with me.”

  Sewell judged it best not to tell him whose furnace he was to take care of; he had an impression that Miss Vane was included in the resentment which Lemuel seemed to cherish toward him. But when he had him at her door, “It’s the lady whom you saw at my house the other day,” he explained. It was then too late for Lemuel to rebel if he had wished, and they went in.

  If there was any such unkindness in Lemuel’s breast toward her, it yielded promptly to her tact. She treated him at once, not like a servant, but like a young person, and yet she used a sort of respect for his independence which was soothing to his rustic pride. She put it on the money basis at once; she told him that she should give him ten dollars a month for taking care of the furnace, keeping the sidewalk clear of snow, shovelling the paths in the backyard for the women to get at their clothes-lines, carrying up and down coal and ashes for the grates, and doing errands. She said that this was what she had always paid, and asked him if he understood and were satisfied.

  Lemuel answered with one yes to both her questions, and then Miss Vane said that of course till the weather changed they should want no fire in the furnace, but that it might change, any day, and they should begin at once and count October as a full month. She thought he had better go down and look at the furnace and see if it was in order; she had had the pipes cleaned, but perhaps it needed blacking; the cook would show him how it worked. She went with him to the head of the basement stairs, and calling down, “Jane, here is Lemuel, come to look after the furnace,” left him and Jane to complete the acquaintance upon coming in sight of each other, and went back to the minister. He had risen to go, and she gave him her hand, while a smile rippled into laughter on her lips.

  “Do you think,” she asked, struggling with her mirth to keep unheard of those below, “that it is quite the work for a literary man?”

  “If he is a man,” said Sewell courageously, “the work won’t keep him from being literary.”

  Miss Vane laughed at his sudden recovery of spirit, as she had laughed at his dejection; but he did not care. He hurried home, with a sermon kindling in his mind so obviously, that his wife did not detain him beyond a few vital questions, and let him escape from having foisted his burden upon Miss Vane with the simple comment, “Well, we shall see how that will work.”

  As once before, Sewell tacitly took a hint from his own experience, and enlarging to more serious facts from it, preached effort in the erring. He denounced mere remorse. Better not feel that at all, he taught; and he declared that what is ordinarily distinguished from remorse as repentance, was equally a mere corrosion of the spirit unless some attempt at reparation went with it. He maintained that though some mischiefs — perhaps most mischiefs — were irreparable so far as restoring the original status was concerned, yet every mischief was reparable in the good-will and the good deed of its perpetrator. Do what you could to retrieve yourself from error, and then, not leave the rest to Providence, but keep doing. The good, however small, must grow if tended and nurtured like a useful plant, as the evil would certainly grow, like a wild and poisonous weed, if left to itself. Sin, he said, was a terrible mystery; one scarcely knew how to deal with it or to attempt to determine its nature; but perhaps — he threw out the thought while warning those who heard him of its danger in some aspects — sin was not wholly an evil. We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to another, — the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another, and knew not how to mitigate — possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this wrong, was good in disguise. But, returning to his original point, we were to beware how we rested in this despair. In the very extremity of our anguish, our fear, our shame, we were to gird ourselves up to reparation. Strive to do good, he preached; strive most of all to do good to those you have done harm to. His text was “Cease to do evil.”

  He finished his sermon during the afternoon, and in the evening his wife said they would run up to Miss Vane’s. Sewell shrank from this a little, with the obscure dread that Lemuel might have turned his back upon good fortune, and abandoned the place offered him, in which case Sewell would have to give a wholly different turn to his sermon; but he consented, as indeed he must. He was as curious as his wife to know how the experiment had resulted.

  Miss Vane did not wait to let them ask. “My dear,” she said, kissing Mrs. Sewell and giving her hand to the minister in one, “he is a pearl! And I’ve kept him from mixing his native lustre with Rising Sun Stove Polish by becoming his creditor in the price of a pair of overalls. I had no idea they were so cheap, and you can see that they will fade, with a few washings, to a perfect Millet blue. They were quite his own idea, when he found the furnace needed blacking, and he wanted to use the fifty cents he earned this morning toward the purchase, but I insisted upon advancing the entire dollar myself. Neatness, self-respect, awe-inspiring deference! — he is each and every one of them in person.”

  Sewell could not forbear a glance of triumph at his wife.

  “You leave us very little to ask,” said that injured woman.

  “But I’ve left myself a great deal to tell, my dear,” retorted Miss Vane, “and I propose to keep the floor; though I don’t really know where to begin.”

  “I thought you had got past the necessity of beginning,” said Sewell. “We know that the new pearl sweeps clean,” — Miss Vane applauded his mixed metaphor— “and now you might go on from that point.”

  “Well, you may think I’m rash,” said Miss Vane, “but I’ve thoroughly made up my mind to keep him.”

  “Dear, dear Miss Vane!” cried the minister. “Mrs. Sewell thinks you’re rash, but I don’t. What do you mean by keeping
him?”

  “Keeping him as a fixture — a permanency — a continuosity.”

  “Oh! A continuosity? I know what that is in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but I’m not sure that I follow your meaning exactly.”

  “Why, it’s simply this,” said Miss Vane. “I have long secretly wanted the protection of what Jane calls a man-body in the House, and when I saw how Lemuel had blacked the furnace, I knew I should feel as safe with him as with a whole body of troops.”

  “Well,” sighed the minister, “you have not been rash, perhaps, but you’ll allow that you’ve been rapid.”

  “No,” said Miss Vane, “I won’t allow that. I have simply been intuitive — nothing more. His functions are not decided yet, but it is decided that he is to stay; he’s to sleep in the little room over the L, and in my tranquillised consciousness he’s been there years already.”

  “And has Sibyl undertaken Barker’s reformation?” asked Sewell.

  “Don’t interrupt! Don’t anticipate! I admit nothing till I come to it. But after I had arranged with Lemuel I began to think of Sibyl.”

  “That was like some ladies I have known of,” said Sewell. “You women commit yourselves to a scheme, in order to show your skill in reconciling circumstances to the irretrievable. Well?”

  “Don’t interrupt, David!” cried his wife.

  “Oh, let him go on,” said Miss Vane. “It’s all very well, taking people into your house on the spur of the moment, and in obedience to a generous impulse, but when you reflect that the object of your good intentions slept in the Wayfarer’s Lodge the night before, and in the police-station the night before that, and enjoys a newspaper celebrity in connection with a case of assault and battery with intent to rob, — why, then you do reflect!”

  “Yes,” said Sewell, “that is just the point where I should begin.”

  “I thought,” continued Miss Vane, “I had better tell Sibyl all about it, so if by any chance the neighbours’ kitchens should have heard of the case — they read the police reports very carefully in the kitchens — —”

  “They do in some drawing-rooms,” interrupted Sewell.

  “It’s well for you they do, David,” said his wife. “Your prot�g� would have been in your Refuge still, if they didn’t.”

  “I see!” cried the minister. “I shall have to take the Sunrise another week.”

  Miss Vane looked from one to the other in sympathetic ignorance, but they did not explain, and she went on.

  “And if they should hear Lemuel’s name, and put two and two together, and the talk should get to Sibyl — well, I thought it all over, until the whole thing became perfectly lurid, and I wished Lemuel Barker was back in the depths of Willoughby Pastures — —”

  “I understand,” said Sewell. “Go on!”

  Miss Vane did so, after stopping to laugh. “It seemed to me I couldn’t wait for Sibyl to get home — she spent the night in Brookline, and didn’t come till five o’clock — to tell her. I began before she had got her hat or gloves off, and she sat down with them on, and listened like a three-years’ child to the Ancient Mariner, but she lost no time when she understood the facts. She went out immediately and stripped the nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it when you came in, there’s hardly a blossom left. She took the decorations of Lemuel’s room into her own hands at once; and if there is any saving power in nasturtiums, he will be a changed person. She says that now the great object is to keep him from feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him. I don’t know how she knows.”

  “Barker might feel that he was disgraced,” said the minister, “but I don’t believe that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect that he needed to be reclaimed.”

  “He makes me suspect that I need to be reclaimed,” said Miss Vane, “when he looks at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.”

  Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations yet?”

  “Not at all. They are to steal upon him when he comes in to-night. The gas is to be turned very low, and he is to notice everything gradually, so as not to get the impression that things have been done with a design upon him.” She laughed in reporting these ideas, which were plainly those of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered at the end.

  A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted in upon their group like an apparition. She had heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue eyes under them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour.

  “Aunty!” she said severely, “have you been telling?”

  “Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said Miss Vane. “Their knowing won’t hurt. He’ll never know it.”

  “If he hears you laughing, he’ll know it’s about him. He’s in the kitchen, now. He’s come in the back way. Do be quiet.” She had given her hand without other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the Sewells in turn, and now she passed out of the room.

  XI.

  “What makes Lemuel such a gift,” said Miss Vane, in a talk which she had with Sewell a month later, “is that he is so supplementary.”

  “Do you mean just in the supplementary sense of the term?”

  “Well, not in the fifth-wheel sense. I mean that he supplements us, all and singular — if you will excuse the legal exactness.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Sewell; “I should like even more exactness.”

  “Yes; but before I particularise I must express my general satisfaction in him as a man-body. I had no idea that man bodies in a house were so perfectly admirable.”

  “I’ve sometimes feared that we were not fully appreciated,” said Sewell. “Well?”

  “The house is another thing with a man-body in it. I’ve often gone without little things I wanted, simply because I hated to make Sarah bring them, and because I hated still worse to go after them, knowing we were both weakly and tired. Now I deny myself nothing. I make Lemuel fetch and carry without remorse, from morning till night. I never knew it before, but the man-body seems never to be tired, or ill, or sleepy.”

  “Yes,” said Sewell, “that is often the idea of the woman-body. I’m not sure that it’s correct.”

  “Oh, don’t attack it!” implored Miss Vane. “You don’t know what a blessing it is. Then, the man-body never complains, and I can’t see that he expects anything more in an order than the clear understanding of it. He doesn’t expect it to be accounted for in any way; the fact that you say you want a thing is enough. It is very strange. Then the moral support of the presence of a man-body is enormous. I now know that I have never slept soundly since I have kept house alone — that I have never passed a night without hearing burglars or smelling fire.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I shouldn’t mind a legion of burglars in the house; I shouldn’t mind being burned in my bed every night. I feel that Lemuel is in charge, and that nothing can happen.”

  “Is he really so satisfactory?” asked Sewell, exhaling a deep relief.

  “He is, indeed,” said Miss Vane. “I couldn’t, exaggerate it.”

  “Well, well! Don’t try. We are finite, after all, you know. Do you think it can last?”

  “I have thought of that,” answered Miss Vane. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t last. I have tried to believe that I did a foolish thing in coming to your rescue, but I can’t see that I did. I don’t see why it shouldn’t last as long as Lemuel chooses. And he seems perfectly contented with his lot. He doesn’t seem to regard it as domestic service, but as domestication, and he patronises our inefficiency while he spares it. His common-sense is extraordinary — it’s exemplary; it almost makes one wish to have common-sense one’s-self.” They had now got pretty far from the original proposition, and Sewell returned to it with the question, “Well, and how does he supplement you singularly?”

  “Oh! oh, yes!” said Miss Vane. “I could hardly tell you without going into too deep a study of character.”

  “I’m rather fond of that,” suggested
the minister.

  “Yes, and I’ve no doubt we should all work very nicely into a sermon as illustrations; but I can’t more than indicate the different cases. In the first place, Jane’s forgetfulness seems to be growing upon her, and since Lemuel came she’s abandoned herself to ecstasies of oblivion.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. She’s quite given over remembering anything, because she knows that he will remember everything.”

  “I see. And you?”

  “Well, you have sometimes thought I was a little rash.”

  “A little? Did I think it was a little?”

  “Well, a good deal. But it was all nothing to what I’ve been since Lemuel came. I used to keep some slight check upon myself for Sibyl’s sake; but I don’t now. I know that Lemuel is there to temper, to delay, to modify the effect of every impulse, and so I am all impulse now. And I’ve quite ceased to rule my temper. I know that Lemuel has self-control enough for all the tempers in the house, and so I feel perfectly calm in my wildest transports of fury.”

  “I understand,” said Sewell. “And does Sibyl permit herself a similar excess in her fancies and ambitions?”

  “Quite,” said Miss Vane. “I don’t know that she consciously relies upon Lemuel to supplement her, any more than Jane does; but she must be unconsciously aware that no extravagance of hers can be dangerous while Lemuel is in the house.”

  “Unconsciously aware is good. She hasn’t got tired of reforming him yet?”

  “I don’t know. I sometimes think she wishes he had gone a little farther in crime. Then his reformation would be more obvious.”

  “Yes; I can appreciate that. Does she still look after his art and literature?”

  “That phase has changed a little. She thinks now that he ought to be stimulated, if anything — that he ought to read George Eliot. She’s put Middlemarch and Romola on his shelf. She says that he looks like Tito Malemma.”