Mrs. Sewell, who did not always go to her husband's sermons, was at church that day, and joined him when some ladies who had lingered to thank him for the excellent lesson he had given them at last left him to her.
“Really, David,” she said, “I wondered your congregation could keep their countenances while you were going on. Did you think of that poor boy up at Willoughby Pastures when you were writing that sermon?”
“Yes, my dear,” replied Sewell gravely; “he was in my mind the whole time.”
“Well, you were rather hard upon yourself; and I think I was rather too hard upon you, that time, though I was so vexed with you. But nothing has come of it, and I suppose there are cases where people are so lost to common sense that you can't do anything for them by telling them the truth.”
“But you'd better tell it, all the same,” said Sewell, still in a glow of righteous warmth from his atonement; and now a sudden temptation to play with fire seized him. “You wouldn't have excused me if any trouble had come of it.”
“No, I certainly shouldn't,” said his wife. “But I don't regret it altogether if it's made you see what danger you run from that tendency of yours. What in the world made you think of it?”
“Oh, it came into my mind.” said Sewell.
He did not find time to write to Barker the next day, and on recurring to his letter he saw that there was no danger of his taking another step without his advice, and he began to postpone it; when he had time he was not in the mood; he waited for the time and the mood to come together, and he also waited for the most favourable moment to tell his wife that he had got that letter from Barker and to ask her advice about answering it. If it had been really a serious matter, he would have told her at once; but being the thing it was, he did not know just how to approach it, after his first concealment. He knew that, to begin with, he would have to account for his mistake in attempting to keep it from her, and would have to bear some just upbraiding for this unmanly course, and would then be miserably led to the distasteful contemplation of the folly by which he had brought this trouble upon himself. Sewell smiled to think how much easier it was to make one's peace with one's God than with one's wife; and before he had brought himself to the point of answering Barker's letter, there came a busy season in which he forgot him altogether.
II.
One day in the midst of this Sewell was called from his study to see some one who was waiting for him in the reception-room, but who sent in no name by the housemaid.
“I don't know as you remember me,” the visitor said, rising awkwardly, as Sewell came forward with a smile of inquiry. “My name's Barker.”
“Barker?” said the minister, with a cold thrill of instant recognition, but playing with a factitious uncertainty till he could catch his breath in the presence of the calamity. “Oh yes! How do you do?” he said; and then planting himself adventurously upon the commandment to love one's neighbour as one's-self, he added: “I'm very glad to see you!”
In token of his content, he gave Barker his hand and asked him to be seated.
The young man complied, and while Sewell waited for him to present himself in some shape that he could grapple with morally, he made an involuntary study of his personal appearance. That morning, before starting from home by the milk-train that left Willoughby Pastures at 4.5, Barker had given his Sunday boots a coat of blacking, which he had eked out with stove-polish, and he had put on his best pantaloons, which he had outgrown, and which, having been made very tight a season after tight pantaloons had gone out of fashion in Boston, caught on the tops of his boots and stuck there in spite of his efforts to kick them loose as he stood up, and his secret attempts to smooth them down when he had reseated himself. He wore a single-breasted coat of cheap broadcloth, fastened across his chest with a carnelian clasp-button of his father's, such as country youth wore thirty years ago, and a belated summer scarf of gingham, tied in a breadth of knot long since abandoned by polite society.
Sewell had never thought his wife's reception-room very splendidly appointed, but Barker must have been oppressed by it, for he sat in absolute silence after resuming his chair, and made no sign of intending to open the matter upon which he came. In the kindness of his heart Sewell could not refrain from helping him on.
“When did you come to Boston?” he asked with a cheeriness which he was far from feeling.
“This morning,” said Barker briefly, but without the tremor in his voice which Sewell expected.
“You've never been here before, I suppose,” suggested Sewell, with the vague intention of generalising or particularising the conversation, as the case might be.
Barker abruptly rejected the overture, whatever it was. “I don't know as you got a letter from me a spell back,” he said.
“Yes, I did,” confessed Sewell. “I did receive that letter,” he repeated, “and I ought to have answered it long ago. But the fact is—” He corrected himself when it came to his saying this, and said, “I mean that I put it by, intending to answer it when I could do so in the proper way, until, I'm very sorry to say, I forgot it altogether. Yes, I forgot it, and I certainly ask your pardon for my neglect. But I can't say that as it's turned out I altogether regret it. I can talk with you a great deal better than I could write to you in regard to your”—Sewell hesitated between the words poems and verses, and finally said—“work. I have blamed myself a great deal,” he continued, wincing under the hurt which he felt that he must be inflicting on the young man as well as himself, “for not being more frank with you when I saw you at home in September. I hope your mother is well?”
“She's middling,” said Barker, “but my married sister that came to live with us since you was there has had a good deal of sickness in her family. Her husband's laid up with the rheumatism most of the time.”
“Oh!” murmured Sewell sympathetically. “Well! I ought to have told you at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing acceptable work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you ever expected to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious purpose,—for anything but your own pleasure and entertainment,—I should certainly have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens of the long poem you have sent me give me even less reason to encourage you than the things you read me at home.”
Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker's air-castles to break the silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words; but nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see, Barker remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled Sewell a little to see him apparently so besotted in his own conceit, and he added: “But I think I had better not ask you to rely altogether upon my opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to a publisher, and you can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a moment.”
He left the room and went slowly upstairs to his wife. It appeared to him a very short journey to the third story, where he knew she was decking the guest-chamber for the visit of a friend whom they