Chapter 11

“O Lemuel!” cried Sibyl. “Do you think anyone in this house would intrude in your affairs? But if you need a friend--a sister----”

“I don't need any sister. I want you should let me alone.”

At these words, so little appreciative of her condescension, her romantic beneficence, her unselfish interest, Sibyl suddenly rebounded to her former level, which she was sensible was far above that of this unworthy object of her kindness. She rose from her chair, and pursued--

“If you need a friend--a sister--I'm sure that you can safely confide in--the cook.” She looked at him a moment, and broke into a malicious laugh very unlike that of a social reformer, which rang shriller at the bovine fury which mounted to Lemuel's eyes. The rattle of a night-latch made itself heard in the outer door. Sibyl's voice began to break, as it rose: “I never expected to be treated in my own aunt's house with such perfect ingratitude and impudence--yes, impudence!--by one of her servants!”

She swept out of the room, and her aunt, who entered it, after calling to her in vain, stood with Lemuel, and heard her mount the stairs, sobbing, to her own room, and lock herself in.

“What is the matter, Lemuel?” asked Miss Vane, breathing quickly. She looked at him with the air of a judge who would not condemn him unheard, but would certainly do so after hearing him. Whether it was Lemuel's perception of this that kept him silent, or his confusion of spirit from all the late rapidly successive events, or a wish not to inculpate the girl who had insulted him, he remained silent.

“Answer me!” said Miss Vane sharply.

Lemuel cleared his throat. “I don't know as I've got anything to say,” he answered finally.

“But I insist upon your saying something,” said Miss Vane. “What is this _impudence?_”

“There hasn't been any impudence,” replied Lemuel, hanging his head.

“Very well, then, you can tell me what Sibyl means,” persisted Miss Vane.

Lemuel seemed to reflect upon it. “No, I can't tell you,” he said at last, slowly and gently.

“You refuse to make any explanation whatever?”

“Yes.”

Miss Vane rose from the chair which she had mechanically sunk into while waiting for him to speak, and ceased to be the kindly, generous soul she was, in asserting herself as a gentlewoman who had a contumacious servant to treat with. “You will wait here a moment, please.”

“All right,” said Lemuel. She had asked him not to receive instructions from her with that particular answer, but he could not always remember.

She went upstairs, and returned with some banknotes that rustled in her trembling hand. “It is two months since you came, and I've paid you one month,” she said, and she set her lips, and tried to govern her head, which nevertheless shook with the vehemence she was struggling to repress. She laid two ten-dollar notes upon the table, and then added a five, a little apart. “This second month was to be twenty instead of ten. I shall not want you any longer, and should be glad to have you go now--at once--to-night! But I had intended to offer you a little present at Christmas, and I will give it you now.”

Lemuel took up the two ten-dollar notes without saying anything, and then after a moment laid one of them down. “It's only half a month,” he said. “I don't want to be paid for any more than I've done.”

“Lemuel!” cried Miss Vane. “I insist upon your taking it. I employed you by the month.”

“It don't make any difference about that; I've only been here a month and a half.”

He folded the notes, and turned to go out of the room. Miss Vane caught the five-dollar note from the table and intercepted him with it. “Well, then, you shall take it as a present.”

“I don't want any present,” said Lemuel, patiently waiting her pleasure to release him, but keeping his hands in his pockets.

“You would have taken it at Christmas,” said Miss Vane. “You shall take it now.”

“I shouldn't take a present any time,” returned Lemuel steadily.

“You are a foolish boy!” cried Miss Vane. “You need it, and I tell you to take it.”

He made no reply whatever.

“You are behaving very stubbornly--ungratefully,” said Miss Vane.

Lemuel lifted his head; his lip quivered a little. “I don't think you've got any right to say I'm ungrateful.”

“I don't mean ungrateful,” said Miss Vane. “I mean unkind--very silly, indeed. And I wish you to take this money. You are behaving resentfully--wickedly. I am much older than you, and I tell you that you are not behaving rightly. Why don't you do what I wish?”

“I don't want any money I haven't earned.”

“I don't mean the money. Why don't you tell me the meaning of what I heard? My niece said you had been impudent to her. Perhaps she didn't understand.”

She looked wistfully into the boy's face.

After a long time he said, “I don't know as I've got anything to say about it.”

“Very well, then, you may go,” said Miss Vane, with all her _hauteur_.

“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel passively, but the eyes that he looked at her with were moist, and conveyed a pathetic reproach. To her unmeasured astonishment, he offered her his hand; her amaze was even greater--_more_ infinite, as she afterwards told Sewell--when she found herself shaking it.

He went out of the room, and she heard him walking about his room in the L, putting together his few belongings. Then she heard him go down and open the furnace door, and she knew he was giving a final conscientious look at the fire. He closed it, and she heard him close the basement door behind him, and knew that he was gone.

She explored the L, and then she descended to the basement and mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal Lemuel hanging there.

Miss Vane went upstairs slowly, with a heavy heart. Under the hall light stood Sibyl, picturesque in the deep shadow it flung upon her face.

“Aunt Hope,” she began in a tragic voice.

“Don't _speak_ to me, you wicked girl!” cried her aunt, venting her self-reproach upon this victim. “It is _your_ doing.”

Sibyl turned with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of her own thoughts again.

XIII.

The sense of outrage with which Lemuel was boiling when Miss Vane came in upon Sibyl and himself had wholly passed away, and he now saw his dismissal, unjust as between that girl and him, unimpeachably righteous as between him and the moral frame of things. If he had been punished for being ready to take advantage of that fellow's necessity, and charge him fifty cents for changing ten dollars, he must now be no less obviously suffering for having abused that young lady's trust and defencelessness; only he was not suffering one-tenth as much. When he recurred to that wrong, in fact, and tried to feel sorry for it and ashamed, his heart thrilled in a curious way; he found himself smiling and exulting, and Miss Vane and her niece went out of his mind, and he could not think of anything but of being with that girl, of hearing her talk and laugh, of touching her. He sighed; he did not know what his mother would say if she knew; he did not know where he was going; it seemed a hundred years since the beginning of the afternoon.

A horse-car came by, and Lemuel stopped it. He set his bag down on the platform, and stood there near the conductor, without trying to go inside, for the bag was pretty large, and he did not believe the conductor would let him take it in.

The conductor said politely after a while, “See, 'd I get your fare?”

“No,” said Lemuel. He paid, and the conductor went inside and collected the other fares.

When he came back he took advantage of Lemuel's continued presence to have a little chat. He was a short, plump, stubby-moustached man, and he looked strong and well, but he said, with an introductory sigh, “Well, sir, I get sore all over at this business. There ain't a bone in me that hain't got an ache in it. Sometimes I can't tell but what it's the ache got a bone in it, ache seems the biggest.”

“Why, what makes it?” asked Lemuel absently.

“Oh, it's this standin'; it's the hours, and changin' the hours so much. You hain't got a chance to get used to one set o' hours before they get 'em all shifted round again. Last week I was on from eight to eight; this week it's from twelve to twelve. Lord knows what it's going to be next week. And this is one o' the best lines in town, too.”

“I presume they pay you pretty well,” said Lemuel, with awakening interest.

“Well, they pay a dollar 'n' half a day,” said the conductor.

“Why, it's more than forty dollars a month,” said Lemuel.

“Well, it is,” said the conductor scornfully, “if you work every day in the week. But I can't stand it more than six days out o' seven; and if you miss a day, or if you miss a trip, they dock you. No, sir. It's about the meanest business _I_ ever struck. If I wa'n't a married man, 'n' if I didn't like to be regular about my meals and get 'em at home 'th my wife, I wouldn't stand it a minute. But that's where it is. It's regular.”

A lady from within signalled the conductor. He stopped the car, and the lady, who had risen with her escort, remained chatting with a friend before she got out. The conductor snapped his bell for starting, with a look of patient sarcasm. “See that?” he asked Lemuel. “Some these women act as if the cars was their private carriage; and _you_ got to act so _too_, or the lady complains of you, and the company bounces you in a minute. Stock's owned along the line, and they think they own _you_ too. You can't get 'em to set more than ten on a side; they'll leave the car first. I'd like to catch 'em on some the South End or Cambridge cars. I'd show 'em how to pack live stock once, anyway. Yes, sir, these ladies that ride on this line think they can keep the car standin' while they talk about the opera. But you'd ought to see how they all look if a _poor_ woman tries their little game. Oh, I tell you, rich people are hard.”

Lemuel reflected upon the generalisation. He regarded Miss Vane as a rich person; but though she had blamed him unjustly, and had used him impatiently, even cruelly, in this last affair, he remembered other things, and he said--

“Well, I don't know as I should say all of them were hard.”

“Well, may be not,” admitted the conductor. “But I don't envy 'em. The way I look at it, and the way I tell my wife, I wouldn't want their money 'f I had to have the rest of it. Ain't any of 'em happy. I saw that when I lived out. No, sir; what me and my wife want to do is to find us a nice little place in the country.”

At the words a vision of Willoughby Pastures rose upon Lemuel, and a lump of home-sickness came into his throat. He saw the old wood-coloured house, crouching black within its walls under the cold November stars. If his mother had not gone to bed yet, she was sitting beside the cooking-stove in the kitchen, and perhaps his sister was brewing something on it, potion or lotion, for her husband's rheumatism. Miss Vane had talked to him about his mother; she had said he might have her down to visit him, if everything went on right; but of course he knew that Miss Vane did not understand that his mother wore bloomers, and he made up his mind that her invitation was never to be accepted. At the same time he had determined to ask Miss Vane to let him go up and see his mother some Sunday.

“'S fur's we go,” said the conductor. “'F you're goin' on, you want to take another car here.”

“I guess I'll go back with you a little ways,” said Lemuel. “I want to ask you--”

“Guess we'll have to take a back seat, then,” said the conductor, leading the way through the car to the other platform; “or a standee,” he added, snapping the bell. “What is it you want to ask?”

“Oh, nothing. How do you fellows learn to be conductors? How long does it take you?”

Till other passengers should come the conductor lounged against the guard of the platform in a conversational posture.

“Well, generally it takes you four or five days. You got to learn all the cross streets, and the principal places on all the lines.”

“Yes?”

“It didn't take me more'n two. Boston boy.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a fine discouragement. “I presume the conductors are mostly from Boston.”

“They're from everywhere. And some of 'em are pretty streaked, I can tell you; and then the rest of us has got to suffer; throws suspicion on all of us. One fellow gets to stealin' fares, and then everybody's got to wear a bell-punch. I never hear mine go without thinkin' it says, 'Stop thief!' Makes me sick, I can tell you.”

After a while Lemuel asked, “How do you get such a position?”

The conductor seemed to be thinking about some thing else. “It's a pretty queer kind of a world, anyway, the way everybody's mixed up with everybody else. What's the reason, if a man wants to steal, he can't steal and suffer for it himself, without throwin' the shame and the blame on a lot more people that never thought o' stealin'? I don't notice much when a fellow sets out to do right that folks think everybody else is on the square. No, sir, they don't seem to consider that kind of complaint so catching. Now, you take another thing: A woman goes round with the scarlet fever in her clothes, and a whole carful of people take it home to their children; but let a nice young girl get in, fresh as an apple, and a perfect daisy for wholesomeness every way, and she don't give it to a single soul on board. No, sir; it's a world I can't see through, nor begin to.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Lemuel, darkened by this black pessimism of the conductor. He had not, practically, found the world so unjust as the conductor implied, but he could not controvert his argument. He only said, “May be the right thing makes us feel good in some way we don't know of.”

“Well, I don't want to feel good in some way I don't know of, myself,” said the conductor very scornfully.

“No, that's so,” Lemuel admitted. He remained silent, with a vague wonder flitting through his mind whether Mr. Sewell could make anything better of the case, and then settled back to his thoughts of Statira, pierced and confused as they were now with his pain from that trouble with Miss Vane.

“What was that you asked me just now?” said the conductor.

“That I asked you?” Lemuel echoed. “Oh yes! I asked you how you got your place on the cars.”

“Well, sir, you have to have recommendations--they won't touch you without 'em; and then you have to have about seventy-five dollars capital to start with. You got to get your coat, and your cap, and your badge, and you got to have about twenty dollars of your own to make change with, first off; company don't start you with a cent.”

Lemuel made no reply. After a while he asked, “Do you know any good hotel, around here, where I could go for the night?”

“Well, there's the Brunswick, and there's the Van-dome,” said the conductor. “They're both pretty fair houses.” Lemuel looked round at the mention of the aristocratic hostelries to see if the conductor was joking. He owned to something of the kind by adding, “There's a little hotel, if you want something quieter, that ain't a great ways from here.” He gave the name of the hotel, and told Lemuel how to find it.

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. “I guess I'll get off here, then. Well, good evening.”

“Guess I'll have to get another nickel from you,” said the conductor, snapping his bell. “New trip,” he explained.

“Oh,” said Lemuel, paying. It seemed to him a short ride for five cents.

He got off, and as the conductor started up the car, he called forward through it to the driver, “Wanted to try for conductor, I guess. But I guess the seventy-five dollars capital settled that little point for him.”

Lemuel heard the voice but not the words. He felt his bag heavy in his hand as he walked away in the direction the conductor had given him, and he did not set it down when he stood hesitating in front of the hotel; it looked like too expensive a place for him, with its stained-glass door, and its bulk hoisted high into the air. He walked by the hotel, and then he came back to it, and mustered courage to go in. His bag, if not superb, looked a great deal more like baggage than the lank sack which he had come to Boston with; he had bought it only a few days before, in hopes of going home before long; he set it down with some confidence on the tesselated floor of cheap marble, and when a shirt-sleeved, drowsy-eyed, young man came out of a little room or booth near the door, where there was a desk, and a row of bells, and a board with keys, hanging from the wall above it, Lemuel said quite boldly that he would like a room. The man said, well, they did not much expect transients; it was more of a family-hotel, like; but he guessed they had a vacancy, and they could put him up. He brushed his shirt sleeves down with his hands, and looked apologetically at some ashes on his trousers, and said, well, it was not much use trying to put on style, anyway, when you were taking care of a furnace and had to run the elevator yourself, and look after the whole concern. He said his aunt mostly looked after letting the rooms, but she was at church, and he guessed he should have to see about it himself. He bade Lemuel just get right into the elevator, and he put his bag into a cage that hung in one corner of the hallway, and pulled at the wire rope, and they mounted together. On the way up he had time to explain that the clerk, who usually ran the elevator when they had no elevator-boy, had kicked, and they were just between hay and grass, as you might say. He showed Lemuel into a grandiose parlour or drawing-room, enormously draped and upholstered, and furnished in a composite application of yellow jute and red plush to the ashen easy-chairs and sofa. A folding-bed in the figure of a chiffonier attempted to occupy the whole side of the wall and failed.

“I'm afraid it's more than I can pay,” said Lemuel. “I guess I better see some other room.” But the man said the room belonged to a boarder that had just gone, and he guessed they would not charge him very much for it; he guessed Lemuel had better stay. He pulled the bed down, and showed him how it worked, and he lighted two bulbous gas-burners, contrived to burn the gas at such a low pressure that they were like two unsnuffed candles for brilliancy. He backed round over the spacious floor and looked about him with an unfamiliar, marauding air, which had a certain boldness, but failed to impart courage to Lemuel, who trembled for fear of the unknown expense. But he was ashamed to go away, and when the man left him he went to bed, after some suspicious investigation of the machine he was to sleep in. He found its comfort unmistakable. He was tired out with what had been happening, and the events of the day recurred in a turmoil that helped rather than hindered slumber; none evolved itself distinctly enough from the mass to pursue him; what he was mainly aware of was the daring question whether he could not get the place of that clerk who had kicked.

In the morning he saw the landlady, who was called Mrs. Harmon, and who took the pay for his lodging, and said he might leave his bag a while there in the office. She was a large, smooth, tranquil person, who seemed ready for any sort of consent; she entered into an easy conversation with Lemuel, and was so sympathetic in regard to the difficulties of getting along in the city, that he had proposed himself as clerk and been accepted almost before he believed the thing had happened. He was getting a little used to the rapidity of urban transactions, but his mind had still a rustic difficulty in keeping up with his experiences.

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Harmon, “it ain't very usual to take anybody without a reference; I never do it; but so long as you haven't been a great while in the city--You ever had a place in Boston before?”

“Well, not exactly what you may call a place,” said Lemuel, with a conscience against describing in that way his position at Miss Vane's. “It was only part work.” He added, “I wasn't there but a little while.”

“Know anybody in the city?”

“Yes,” said Lemuel reluctantly; “I know Rev. David L. Sewell, some.”

“Oh, all right,” said Mrs. Harmon, with eager satisfaction. “I have to be pretty particular who I have in the house. The boarders are all high-class, and I have to have all the departments accordingly. I'll see Mr. Sewell about you as soon as I get time, and I guess you can take right hold now, if you want to.”

Mrs. Harmon showed him in half a minute how to manage the elevator, and then left him with general instructions to tell everybody who came upon any errand he did not understand, that she would be back in a very short time. He found pen and paper in the office, and she said he might write the letter that he asked leave to send his mother; when he mentioned his mother, she said, yes, indeed, with a burst of maternal sympathy which was imagined in her case, for she had already told Lemuel that if she had ever had any children she would not have gone into the hotel business, which she believed unfriendly to their right nurture; she said she never liked to take ladies with children.

He enclosed some money to his mother which he had intended to send, but which, before the occurrence of the good fortune that now seemed opening upon him, he thought he must withhold. He made as little as he could of his parting with Miss Vane, whom he had celebrated in earlier letters to his mother; he did not wish to afflict her on his own account, or incense her against Miss Vane, who, he felt, could not help her part in it; but his heart burned anew against Miss Sibyl while he wrote. He dwelt upon his good luck in getting this new position at once, and he let his mother see that he considered it a rise in life. He said he was going to try to get Mrs. Harmon to let him go home for Thanksgiving, though he presumed he might have to come back the same night.

His letter was short, but he was several times interrupted by the lady boarders, many of whom stopped to ask Mrs. Harmon something on their way to their rooms from breakfast. They did not really want anything, in most cases; but they were strict with Lemuel in wanting to know just when they could see Mrs. Harmon; and they delayed somewhat to satisfy a natural curiosity in regard to him. They made talk with him as he took them up in the elevator, and did what they could to find out about him. Most of them had their door-keys in their hands, and dangled them by the triangular pieces of brass which the keys were chained to; they affected some sort of _negligée_ breakfast costume, and Lemuel thought them very fashionable. They nearly all snuffled and whined as they spoke; some had a soft, lazy nasal; others broke abruptly from silence to silence, in voices of nervous sharpness, like the cry or the bleat of an animal; one young girl, who was quite pretty, had a high, hoarse voice, like a gander.