“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.
