“Ah! Well! I don’t think he’d
care for Latin. I think we’d better stick
to English for the present.”
Bellingham arranged for Lemuel to go with him that
afternoon to his cousin’s and make, as he phrased
it, a stagger at the job.
The stagger seemed to be sufficiently satisfactory.
Corey could not repress some twinges at certain characteristics
of Lemuel’s accent, but he seemed, in a critical
way, to take a fancy to him, and he was conditionally
installed for a week.
Corey was pleased from the beginning with Lemuel’s
good looks, and justified himself to his wife with
an Italian proverb: “Novanta su cento,
chi e bello difuori e buono di dentro.”
She had heard that proverb before, and she had always
considered it shocking; but he insisted that most
people married upon no better grounds, and that what
sufficed in the choice of a husband or wife was enough
for the choice of an intellectual nurse. He corrected
Lemuel’s pronunciation where he found it faulty,
and amused himself with Lemuel’s struggles to
conceal his hurt vanity, and his final good sense
in profiting by the correction. But Lemuel’s
reading was really very good; it was what, even more
than his writing, had given him a literary reputation
in Willoughby Pastures; and the old man made him exercise
it in widely different directions. Chiefly, however,
it was novels that he read, which, indeed, are the
chief reading of most people in our time; and as they
were necessarily the novels of our language, his elder
was not obliged to use that care in choosing them
which he must have exacted of himself in the fiction
of other tongues. He liked to hear Lemuel talk,
and he used the art of getting at the boy’s
life by being frank with his own experience.
But this was not always successful, and he was interested
to find Lemuel keeping doors that Sewell’s narrative
had opened carefully closed against him. He betrayed
no consciousness that they existed, and Lemuel maintained
intact the dignity and pride which come from the sense
of ignominy well hidden.
The week of probation had passed without interrupting
their relation, and Lemuel was regularly installed,
and began to lead a life which was so cut off from
his past in most things that it seemed to belie it.
He found himself dropped in the midst of luxury stranger
to him than the things they read of in those innumerable
novels. The dull, rich colours in the walls, and
the heavily rugged floors and dark-wooded leathern
seats of the library where he read to the old man;
the beautiful forms of the famous bronzes, and the
Italian saints and martyrs in their baroque or Gothic
frames of dim gold; the low shelves with their ranks
of luxurious bindings, and all the seriously elegant
keeping of the place, flattered him out of his strangeness;
and the footing on which he was received in this house,
the low-voiced respect with which the man-servant treated
