The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker. William Dean Howells
without letting her know anything of his presence.
“Well?” said Mrs. Sewell, meeting his face of perplexity with a penetrating glance. “What is it, David?”
“Nothing. That is—everything! Lemuel Barker is here!”
“Lemuel Barker? Who is Lemuel Barker?” She stood with the pillow-sham in her hand which she was just about to fasten on the pillow, and Sewell involuntarily took note of the fashion in which it was ironed.
“Why, surely you remember! That simpleton at Willoughby Pastures.” If his wife had dropped the pillow-sham, and sunk into a chair beside the bed, fixing him with eyes of speechless reproach; if she had done anything dramatic, or said anything tragic, no matter how unjust or exaggerated, Sewell could have borne it; but she only went on tying the sham on the pillow, without a word. “The fact is, he wrote to me some weeks ago, and sent me some specimens of a long poem.”
“Just before you preached that sermon on the tender mercies of the wicked?”
“Yes,” faltered Sewell. “I had been waiting to show you the letter.”
“You waited a good while, David.”
“I know—I know,” said Sewell miserably. “I was waiting—waiting—” He stopped, and then added with a burst, “I was waiting till I could put it to you in some favourable light.”
“I'm glad you're honest about it at last, my dear!”
“Yes. And while I was waiting I forgot Barker's letter altogether. I put it away somewhere—I can't recollect just where, at the moment. But that makes no difference; he's here with the whole poem in his pocket, now.” Sewell gained a little courage from his wife's forbearance; she knew that she could trust him in all great matters, and perhaps she thought that for this little sin she would not add to his punishment. “And what I propose to do is to make a complete thing of it, this time. Of course,” he went on convicting himself, “I see that I shall inflict twice the pain that I should have done if I had spoken frankly to him at first; and of course there will be the added disappointment, and the expense of his coming to Boston. But,” he added brightly, “we can save him any expense while he's here, and perhaps I can contrive to get him to go home this afternoon.”
“He wouldn't let you pay for his dinner out of the house anywhere,” said Mrs. Sewell. “You must ask him to dinner here.”
“Well,” said Sewell, with resignation; and suspecting that his wife was too much piqued or hurt by his former concealment to ask what he now meant to do about Barker, he added: “I'm going to take him round to a publisher and let him convince himself that there's no hope for him in a literary way.”
“David!” cried his wife; and now she left off adjusting the shams, and erecting herself looked at him across the bed, “You don't intend to do anything so cruel.”
“Cruel?”
“Yes! Why should you go and waste any publisher's time by getting him to look at such rubbish? Why should you expose the poor fellow to the mortification of a perfectly needless refusal? Do you want to shirk the responsibility—to put it on some one else?”
“No; you know I don't.”
“Well, then, tell him yourself that it won't do.”
“I have told him.”
“What does he say?”
“He doesn't say anything. I can't make out whether he believes me or not.”
“Very well, then; you've done your duty, at any rate.” Mrs. Sewell could not forbear saying also, “If you'd done it at first, David, there wouldn't have been any of this trouble.”
“That's true,” owned her husband, so very humbly that her heart smote her.
“Well, go down and tell him he must stay to dinner, and then try to get rid of him the best way you can. Your time is really too precious, David, to be wasted in this way. You must get rid of him, somehow.”
Sewell went back to his guest in the reception-room, who seemed to have remained as immovably in his chair as if he had been a sitting statue of himself. He did not move when Sewell entered.
“On second thoughts,” said the minister, “I believe I will not ask you to go to a publisher with me, as I had intended; it would expose you to unnecessary mortification, and it would be, from my point of view, an unjustifiable intrusion upon very busy people. I must ask you to take my word for it that no publisher would bring out your poem, and it never would pay you a cent if he did.” The boy remained silent as before, and Sewell had no means of knowing whether it was from silent conviction or from mulish obstinacy. “Mrs. Sewell will be down presently. She wished me to ask you to stay to dinner. We have an early dinner, and there will be time enough after that for you to look about the city.”
“I shouldn't like to put you out,” said Barker.
“Oh, not at all,” returned Sewell, grateful for this sign of animation, and not exigent of a more formal acceptance of his invitation. “You know,” he said, “that literature is a trade, like every other vocation, and that you must serve an apprenticeship if you expect to excel. But first of all you must have some natural aptitude for the business you undertake. You understand?” asked Sewell; for he had begun to doubt whether Barker understood anything. He seemed so much more stupid than he had at home; his faculties were apparently sealed up, and he had lost all the personal picturesqueness which he had when he came in out of the barn, at his mother's call, to receive Sewell.
“Yes,” said the boy.
“I don't mean,” continued Sewell, “that I wouldn't have you continue to make verses whenever you have the leisure for it. I think, on the contrary, that it will give a grace to your life which it might otherwise lack. We are all in daily danger of being barbarised by the sordid details of life; the constantly recurring little duties which must be done, but which we must not allow to become the whole of life.” Sewell was so much pleased with this thought, when it had taken form in words, that he made a mental note of it for future use. “We must put a border of pinks around the potato-patch, as Emerson would say, or else the potato-patch is no better than a field of thistles.” Perhaps because the logic of this figure rang a little false, Sewell hastened to add: “But there are many ways in which we can prevent the encroachment of those little duties without being tempted to neglect them, which would be still worse. I have thought a good deal about the condition of our young men in the country, and I have sympathised with them in what seems their want of opportunity, their lack of room for expansion. I have often wished that I could do something for them—help them in their doubts and misgivings, and perhaps find some way out of the trouble for them. I regret this tendency to the cities of the young men from the country. I am sure that if we could give them some sort of social and intellectual life at home, they would not be so restless and dissatisfied.”
Sewell felt as if he had been preaching to a dead wall; but now the wall opened, and a voice came out of it, saying: “You mean something to occupy their minds?”
“Exactly so!” cried Sewell. “Something to occupy their minds. Now,” he continued, with a hope of getting into some sort of human relations with his guest which he had not felt before, “why shouldn't a young man on a farm take up some scientific study, like geology, for instance, which makes every inch of earth vocal, every rock historic, and the waste places social?” Barker looked so blankly at him that he asked again, “You understand?”
“Yes,” said Barker; but having answered Sewell's personal question, he seemed to feel himself in no wise concerned with the general inquiry which Sewell had made, and he let it lie where Sewell had let it drop. But the minister was so well pleased with the fact that Barker had understood anything of what he had said, that he was content to let the notion he had thrown out take its chance of future effect, and rising, said briskly: “Come upstairs with me into my study, and I will show you a picture of Agassiz. It's a very good photograph.”
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