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The Minister\'s Charge

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THE MINISTER'S CHARGE

OR

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER

BY

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM," "A MODERN INSTANCE," "INDIAN
SUMMER," ETC.





THE MINISTER'S CHARGE;

OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER.




I.


On their way back to the farm-house where they were boarding, Sewell's
wife reproached him for what she called his recklessness. "You had no
right," she said, "to give the poor boy false hopes. You ought to have
discouraged him--that would have been the most merciful way--if you
knew the poetry was bad. Now, he will go on building all sorts of
castles in the air on your praise, and sooner or later they will come
tumbling about his ears--just to gratify your passion for saying
pleasant things to people."

"I wish you had a passion for saying pleasant things to me, my dear,"
suggested her husband evasively.

"Oh, a nice time I should have!"

"I don't know about _your_ nice time, but I feel pretty certain
of my own. How do you know--Oh, _do_ get up, you implacable
cripple!" he broke off to the lame mare he was driving, and pulled
at the reins.

"Don't saw her mouth!" cried Mrs. Sewell.

"Well, let her get up, then, and I won't. I don't like to saw her
mouth; but I have to do something when you come down on me with your
interminable consequences. I dare say the boy will never think of my
praise again. And besides, as I was saying when this animal
interrupted me with her ill-timed attempts at grazing, how do you
know that I knew the poetry was bad?"

"How? By the sound of your voice. I could tell you were dishonest in
the dark, David."

"Perhaps the boy knew that I was dishonest too," suggested Sewell.

"Oh no, he didn't. I could see that he pinned his faith to every
syllable."

"He used a quantity of pins, then; for I was particularly profuse of
syllables. I find that it requires no end of them to make the worse
appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you.
But come, now, Lucy, let me off a syllable or two. I--I have a
conscience, you know well enough, and if I thought--But pshaw! I've
merely cheered a lonely hour for the boy, and he'll go back to
hoeing potatoes to-morrow, and that will be the end of it."

"I _hope_ that will be the end of it," said Mrs. Sewell, with
the darkling reserve of ladies intimate with the designs of
Providence.

"Well," argued her husband, who was trying to keep the matter from
being serious, "perhaps he may turn out a poet yet. You never can
tell where the lightning is going to strike. He has some idea of
rhyme, and some perception of reason, and--yes, some of the lines
_were_ musical. His general attitude reminded me of Piers
Plowman. Didn't he recall Piers Plowman to you?"

"I'm glad you can console yourself in that way, David," said his
wife relentlessly.

The mare stopped again, and Sewell looked over his shoulder at the
house, now black in the twilight, on the crest of the low hill
across the hollow behind them. "I declare," he said, "the loneliness
of that place almost broke my heart. There!" he added, as the faint
sickle gleamed in the sky above the roof, "I've got the new moon
right over my left shoulder for my pains. That's what comes of
having a sympathetic nature."

* * * * *

The boy was looking at the new moon, across the broken gate which
stopped the largest gap in the tumbled stone wall. He still gripped
in his hand the manuscript which he had been reading to the
minister.

"There, Lem," called his mother's voice from the house, "I guess
you've seen the last of 'em for one while. I'm 'fraid you'll take
cold out there 'n the dew. Come in, child."

The boy obeyed. "I was looking at the new moon, mother. I saw it
over my right shoulder. Did you hear--hear him," he asked, in a
broken and husky voice,--"hear how he praised my poetry, mother?"

* * * * *

"Oh, _do_ make her get up, David!" cried Mrs. Sewell. "These
mosquitoes are eating me alive!"

"I will saw her mouth all to the finest sort of kindling-wood, if
she doesn't get up this very instant," said Sewell, jerking the
reins so wildly that the mare leaped into a galvanic canter, and
continued without further urging for twenty paces. "Of course,
Lucy," he resumed, profiting by the opportunity for conversation
which the mare's temporary activity afforded, "I should feel myself
greatly to blame if I thought I had gone beyond mere kindness in my
treatment of the poor fellow. But at first I couldn't realise that
the stuff was so bad. Their saying that he read all the books he
could get, and was writing every spare moment, gave me the idea that
he _must_ be some sort of literary genius in the germ, and I
listened on and on, expecting every moment that he was coming to
some passage with a little lift or life in it; and when he got to
the end, and hadn't come to it, I couldn't quite pull myself
together to say so. I had gone there so full of the wish to
recognise and encourage, that I couldn't turn about for the other
thing. Well! I shall know another time how to value a rural
neighbourhood report of the existence of a local poet. Usually there
is some hardheaded cynic in the community with native perception
enough to enlighten the rest as to the true value of the phenomenon;
but there seems to have been none here. I ought to have come sooner
to see him, and then I could have had a chance to go again and talk
soberly and kindly with him, and show him gently how much he had
mistaken himself. Oh, _get_ up!" By this time the mare had
lapsed again into her habitual absent-mindedness, and was limping
along the dark road with a tendency to come to a full stop, from
step to step. The remorse in the minister's soul was so keen that he
could not use her with the cruelty necessary to rouse her flagging
energies; as he held the reins he flapped his elbows up toward his
face, as if they were wings, and contrived to beat away a few of the
mosquitoes with them; Mrs. Sewell, in silent exasperation, fought
them from her with the bough which she had torn from an overhanging
birch-tree.

In the morning they returned to Boston, and Sewell's parish duties
began again; he was rather faithfuller and busier in these than he
might have been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all
sorts, and so little upon beliefs. He declared that he envied the
ministers of the good old times who had only to teach their people
that they would be lost if they did not do right; it was much
simpler than to make them understand that they were often to be good
for reasons not immediately connected with their present or future
comfort, and that they could not confidently expect to be lost for
any given transgression, or even to be lost at all. He found it
necessary to do his work largely in a personal way, by meeting and
talking with people, and this took up a great deal of his time,
especially after the summer vacation, when he had to get into
relations with them anew, and to help them recover themselves from
the moral lassitude into which people fall during that season of
physical recuperation.

He was occupied with these matters one morning late in October when
a letter came addressed in a handwriting of copybook carefulness,
but showing in every painstaking stroke the writer's want of
training, which, when he read it, filled Sewell with dismay. It was
a letter from Lemuel Barker, whom Sewell remembered, with a pang of
self-upbraiding, as the poor fellow he had visited with his wife the
evening before they left Willoughby Pastures; and it enclosed
passages of a long poem which Barker said he had written since he
got the fall work done. The passages were not submitted for Sewell's
criticism, but were offered as examples of the character of the
whole poem, for which the author wished to find a publisher. They
were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they
seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of
versification, that Sewell wondered how the writer should have
mastered the notion of anything so literary as publication, till he
came to that part of the letter in which Barker spoke of their
having had so much sickness in the family that he thought he would
try to do something to help along. The avowal of this meritorious
ambition inflicted another wound upon Sewell's guilty consciousness;
but what made his blood run cold was Barker's proposal to come down
to Boston, if Sewell advised, and find a publisher with Sewell's
assistance.

This would never do, and the minister went to his desk with the
intention of despatching a note of prompt and total discouragement.
But in crossing the room from the chair into which he had sunk, with
a cheerful curiosity, to read the letter, he could not help some
natural rebellion against the punishment visited upon him. He could
not deny that he deserved punishment, but he thought that this, to
say the least, was very ill-timed. He had often warned other sinners
who came to him in like resentment that it was this very quality of
inopportuneness that was perhaps the most sanative and divine
property of retribution; the eternal justice fell upon us, he said,
at the very moment when we were least able to bear it, or thought
ourselves so; but now in his own case the clear-sighted prophet
cried out and revolted in his heart. It was Saturday morning, when
every minute was precious to him for his sermon, and it would take
him fully an hour to write that letter; it must be done with the
greatest sympathy; he had seen that this poor foolish boy was very
sensitive, and yet it must be done with such thoroughness as to cut
off all hope of anything like literary achievement for him.

At the moment Sewell reached his desk, with a spirit disciplined to
the sacrifice required of it, he heard his wife's step outside his
study door, and he had just time to pull open a drawer, throw the
letter into it, and shut it again before she entered. He did not
mean finally to conceal it from her, but he was willing to give
himself breath before he faced her with the fact that he had
received such a letter. Nothing in its way was more terrible to this
good man than the righteousness of that good woman. In their case,
as in that of most other couples who cherish an ideal of dutiful
living, she was the custodian of their potential virtue, and he was
the instrument, often faltering and imperfect, of its application to
circumstances; and without wishing to spare himself too much, he was
sometimes aware that she did not spare him enough. She worked his
moral forces as mercilessly as a woman uses the physical strength of
a man when it is placed at her direction.

"What is the matter, David?" she asked, with a keen glance at the
face he turned upon her over his shoulder.

"Nothing that I wish to talk of at present, my dear," answered
Sewell, with a boldness that he knew would not avail him if she
persisted in knowing.

"Well, there would be no time if you did," said his wife. "I'm
dreadfully sorry for you, David, but it's really a case you can't
refuse. Their own minister is taken sick, and it's appointed for
this afternoon at two o'clock, and the poor thing has set her heart
upon having you, and you must go. In fact, I promised you would.
I'll see that you're not disturbed this morning, so that you'll have
the whole forenoon to yourself. But I thought I'd better tell you at
once. It's only a child--a little boy. You won't have to say much."

"Oh, of course I must go," answered Sewell, with impatient
resignation; and when his wife left the room, which she did after
praising him and pitying him in a way that was always very sweet to
him, he saw that he must begin his sermon at once, if he meant to
get through with it in time, and must put off all hope of replying
to Lemuel Barker till Monday at least. But he chose quite a
different theme from that on which he had intended to preach. By an
immediate inspiration he wrote a sermon on the text, "The tender
mercies of the wicked are cruel," in which he taught how great harm
could be done by the habit of saying what are called kind things. He
showed that this habit arose not from goodness of heart, or from the
desire to make others happy, but from the wish to spare one's-self
the troublesome duty of formulating the truth so that it would
perform its heavenly office without wounding those whom it was
intended to heal. He warned his hearers that the kind things spoken
from this motive were so many sins committed against the soul of the
flatterer and the soul of him they were intended to flatter; they
were deceits, lies; and he besought all within the sound of his
voice to try to practise with one another an affectionate sincerity,
which was compatible not only with the brotherliness of
Christianity, but the politeness of the world. He enforced his
points with many apt illustrations, and he treated the whole subject
with so much fulness and fervour, that he fell into the error of the
literary temperament, and almost felt that he had atoned for his
wrongdoing by the force with which he had portrayed it.

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
expected that evening. He imagined himself saying to her when his
trial was well over that he did not see why she complained of those
stairs; that he thought they were nothing at all. But this sense of
the absurdity of the situation which played upon the surface of his
distress flickered and fled at sight of his wife bustling cheerfully
about, and he was tempted to go down and get Barker out of the
house, and out of Boston if possible, 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."

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