He could not forbear a laugh at her criticism of the spruce knickerbockers; but with the thought of the varying standards of a different status of life the realization of his exile came to him anew, and imbittered the decoction called coffee which Mrs. Sims handed to him, and although his eyes were dry, as he gulped it down, he tasted tears.
It was difficult for him to resent any admiration of himself as too redundant, but she could not quit the subject, and pointed out to Tubal Cain Sims, when he entered, the excellence of the fit of the shirt about the shoulders and its flatness in the back; apparently arguing that if this shirt fitted the juggler, it was only Tubal Cain Sims’s rugged temper and finical fancy that his shirt did not fit. The old man’s prominent shoulder-blades were not long destined to be concealed by the worn cloth drawn taut across their recurved arches as he leaned slouchingly forward, and the loose amplitudes over his narrow bent chest might well have been economized for a supplement across the shoulders. It never seemed to occur to either of them that the cloth should be cut to suit the figure, or at all events the bearing, of the wearer. She only tortured her helpless partner with her adherence to a pattern at least fifty years old, and which had fitted him well enough twenty-five years ago; but as seam, gusset, and band burst under the stress of his crookedness and increasing slouch, he considered that the hand of Jane Ann Sims had utterly forgotten its cunning, and talked as if his clothes were a trap requiring a certain diligence of investigation to get into, and from which there was no escape.
The juggler grew restive lest Euphemia should enter while he was a bone of contention between the two, for Mrs. Sims was still disposed to call on all who might behold to note the beauty of the fit of his shirt, and Tubal Cain Sims as resolutely refused to admire. Royce was ready to laugh at himself that he should thus desire to shirk these personalities in Euphemia’s presence, and that he should assume for her a delicacy in the discussion which he was very sure Mrs. Sims would not appreciate. Yet he was not so coxcombical as to preëmpt for her Mrs. Sims’s standpoint; he realized that she might be as stolidly unadmiring as Tubal Cain himself. He finished his breakfast with a hasty swallow or two, and was about to take himself off with his fishing-rod down to the river, hearing Mrs. Sims remarking after him, “Ye oughter thank the Lord on your bended knees, young man, fur the fit o’ them clothes,” and Tubal Cain Sims’s growl of objurgation that “folks oughter have better manners an’ sense ’n ter be thankin’ the Lord for the set o’ thar clothes on the blessed Sabbath day.”
“Is this Sunday?” asked the juggler, and stood stock-still.
“It air the blessed Sabbath,” said Tubal Cain, his eyes still full of the misfit rancor and his mouth full of corn dodger.
Ah, how Lucien Royce heard across the silent Cove the bells ringing from the church towers of St. Louis, hundreds of miles away! He distinguished even the melody that the chimes were rippling out,—he would have sworn to it amongst a thousand,—and the booming of heavier metal sounding from neighboring steeples. He knew just how a certain dissonance impinged upon the melodious tumult,—the bell of an old church below Seventeenth Street that had a crack in it and rang false. The raucous voices of newsboys were calling the Sunday papers, much further up town than on week-days. The clanging of the cable cars sounded here, there, everywhere; the sunlit streets were full of people. And then, as his heart was throbbing near to breaking for this his world, his home, of which he was bereft, he realized how his imagination had cheated him. Across the Cove the slanting sun-rays had not yet reached the levels of the basin; the red hue of the dawning still tinged them. The mists of the night clung yet in purple shadowy ravines. The dew was in the air. Away—away—the far city of the mirage lay sluggard and asleep. No bell rang there save the Angelus. Now and again a figure slipped along to early mass. The rumbling wheels of a baker’s wagon or the tinkle of a milkman’s bell might sound,—a phase of the town, an hour of the day he did not know and for which he did not care. And so he was admonished to beware of fancies. This—this was his home, and here he was to spend his life.
He hardly knew how he might contrive to spend the day, he said, as he flung himself down on a ledge of the rock overlooking the river. He appreciated how he would value the rest, had a week of hard work preceded it. He was no Sabbatarian on religious principles, but adhered to the theory as physically economical. As he lay smoking, he argued that much of his tendency to revert to the troubles that had whelmed him, to pine for even the minutiæ of his old life,—aught that suggested it was dear!—to forget that it had gone forever and could never be conjured back, and that a far different fate awaited him in his familiar world, was only an indication of the morbid influence of idleness and mental solitude. The persistence of the activities of the human mind is but scantily realized. Given adequate subjects to work upon, to engross it,—a stent, so to speak,—and its powers seem rarely greater than its task; but remove the objective point of occupation, and the complications of the engine, its normal strength yet its perilous fragility, its inherent tendencies to dislocation, its perpetual uncontrollable subjection to any idea, evolved at haphazard, clutched with a tenacity as of the muscles of a galvanized grasp, result in a chaos of disaster, the mere contemplation of which is wonderfully conducive to energy and the embellishment of toil.
Blessed are the hard workers, for their minds and their hearts shall be sound. This truth was most deeply felt by the young exile from the business world as well as the world of pleasure.
“I must get at something,” he said to himself. “I must realize that I am here to stay. This juggling money”—he rattled in his pocket the silver that he had earned the evening of his ill-starred entertainment—“won’t last forever, even at the rates of board and lodging in Etowah Cove. It would be the part of wisdom to ingratiate myself with the miller,—cross-grained old donkey,—help him with the mill, marry the miller’s daughter, and succeed to the throne.”
He laughed, with a mocking relish of the incongruity of the idea. Then, as he thought of the miller’s daughter, a vague perception came to him that he had never before encountered a woman apparently so indifferent to him; for indifference was not the sentiment which he was wont to excite. He remembered, too, his hasty retreat from the table, lest her delicacy be offended if his garments were descanted upon in her presence. “Am I going to persuade myself that I am in love with this rural Napoleon in petticoats?” he asked himself scornfully. Then he argued that it was merely because he was not used to such critical scrutiny of his vestments except by his tailor. “All the same, I got out of there before the lady Euphemia appeared.” He thus took as dispassionate note of the fact as if he were discussing the state of mind of another person. “I might meet a worse fate. She could be trusted to keep me extremely straight from now till the Judgment Day. She is so pretty—that—if she were a trifle softer—a trifle different, it wouldn’t be such hard lines to make love to her.”