“Oh, but you must not!” cried Sewell. “That is wrong, cruelly wrong. I’m sure that’s out of your novel-reading, my dear, and not out of your heart. Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that.”
“Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it—how much character she has got!—and I suppose she’ll see somebody else.”
Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession. As a matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen anyone, and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same spirit.
Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay, kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying dividends again—he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the present prevented this—he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas. He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the matter.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to catch up and stop ’em from going, but they all tumbled, one after another. It wa’n’t in the nature of things that they could be stopped till the last brick went. I don’t talk much with my wife, any more about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you.”
“We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world,” replied the minister, “but I’m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever. And in your own case, as I understand, you don’t admit—you don’t feel sure—that you ever actually did wrong this man—”
“Well, no; I don’t. That is to say—”
He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle kindness of his, “I should be inclined to think—nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can’t be that our sins only weaken us—that your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater”—he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham’s pride, and said—“emergency.”
“Do you think so?”
“I think that there may be truth in what I suggest.”
“Well, I don’t know what it was,” said Lapham; “all I know is that when it came to the point, although I could see that I’d got to go under unless I did it—that I couldn’t sell out to those Englishmen, and I couldn’t let that man put his money into my business without I told him just how things stood.”
As Sewell afterwards told his wife, he could see that the loss of his fortune had been a terrible trial to Lapham, just because his prosperity had been so gross and palpable; and he had now a burning desire to know exactly how, at the bottom of
