University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.
PERILOUS ACQUAINTANCES.

WHEN Imogen Eleonore returned home and was informed of the visit
which had been paid her, her vanity was so much gratified thereby
that she made an upright grand piano of herself and executed one of her most
thrilling solos.

“My soul is rejoiced to hear that he purposes to come here,” she discoursed
standing up loftily and elocutionizing in a way that was really dreadful.
“Walter Lehming is a dwarf in stature, but he is a towering giant in genius,
and a sweet cherub in heart. Only he of all the millions of earth have I
found gifted and empowered to soothe the keen blackness of my soul in its
hours of solitary sorrow, and to teach me the sublime lesson of improving my
mind and elevating my morale by practice in English composition. To him
I owe it that days which would otherwise have been dour and drear were
transformed into glowings of beatific sunshine. To him, much more than to my
own diffident merits, do I owe my station as an instructor. I rejoice that he
is to be of us.”

“Can I see him sometimes?” asked Nestoria with a timorous and piteous
wistfulness. “I thought he seemed very good, and I thought I should like to
hear him talk.”

“Intercourse with him would cheer, entrance, and elevate you,” affirmed
Imogen Eleonore, conscious that she herself had acquired eminence of feeling
and intellect. “My poor, lonely little Nettie, thou shalt know this noble man,
and he shall be thy friend.”

“Will it be safe?” queried Nestoria, pondering over her terrible secret.

“Walter Lehming may be trusted,” replied the schoolmistress. “If he
knew all, he would tell naught. The mysteries of angels and demons might
be confided to his great heart, and there they would eternally remain, wrapt
in pity and silence.”

From all this grandiose babble, the oddity and absurdity of which she did
not very plainly note, Nestoria gathered that it would be safe for her to meet
her friend's friend, and that she might find in him a comfortable companion.
It was very depressing to be so much alone as she was, and to have no more
uplifting converse than that of a “constant reader” of the “Spasmodie.”
While she did not scorn her fellow-lodger, and had begun to regard her with
the affection which in meek spirits springs from a sense of obligation, she did
find her somewhat limited in mind and vapid in discourse. They two stood to
each other in the relation of a superior and an inferior, the former unconscious
of her superiority, and the latter of her inferiority. Thus there was content,
but not the highest content; and Nestoria craved betterment, provided it could
be had without peril.

In a few days Lehming moved into the tenement-house, bringing with him
the transcendental John Bowlder. It must be understood that the Wetherel
estate was still far from being settled, and that Lehming had as yet positively
refused to receive any advances from it. The Dinneford ladies, oppressed

by the sombreness of the Judge's old house in Brooklyn, and incessantly
haunted there by its associations with their murdered kinsman, had abandoned
it and rented a modest dwelling in New York. Bowlder and Lehming had
not accompanied them: it did not seem best to them that two men should
abide with two women, though invited; and thus they had been led to establish
themselves in lodgings. They took three rooms on the same floor with
Imogen and Nestoria, thus completing the occupation of the passage. These
plain and even mean apartments they fitted up in plain fashion, as became
men of small incomes. One was Lehming's bedroom, another was devoted to
the transcendental dreamings of John Bowlder, and the third was a parlor and
study.

“This door must be always open,” said Lehming after he had put the
study in order, lined its dingy walls with his coarse book-shelves and strewn
the green baize of its centre-table with periodicals. “This must be the reading-room
of all our fellow-lodgers.”

“You are right, Walter,” agreed John Bowlder in his hearty, sonorous
way. “There must be no monopoly of culture. What store of knowledge
we have is not ours only, but our friends' also. I think little of books. Man is
a god; he is greater than his works; he is worthier of my study. But the
written volume ballasts and impels the mind which has not yet learned to
steer its own course. Your thought is an inspiration of beneficence.”

“The room is admirably fitted for the purpose,” continued Lehming, rising
on the toes of his pygmy shoes and looking about him with satisfaction.
“It could not have been better planned for it. If it opened into my bedroom,
it would have an air of privacy, and could hardly be made hospitable. But
its only entrance is from the public passage, by which all the world may
come. We will make all the world welcome.”

“I could wish you would accept of opulence, Walter,” said John Bowlder,
honestly admiring his deformed friend. “The world would profit by it.
Each man has his vocation, and the talent is the call to it. Yours is philanthropy,
as mine is insight.”

Lehming took no notice of the allusion to the fortune which awaited his
beck.

“I want the aid of your insight,” he smiled. “There are two young ladies
on this floor who must be tamed to enter this room and use whatever they find in
it. I want you to help me bait them with hospitality.”

“We will call on them and entreat them,” declared Bowlder. “We will
bring them in hither by the hand, as you lead homeless children into your
Sunday-school. Let us go to them at once. The man is no man who waits
to do anything, though it be no more than the boiling of an egg, a single minute
after it can be done. The punctual, prompt soul is the able soul—what
foolish people call the man of talent. But the wise know him merely as one
who dawdles not.”

Then he began to improvise, in a queer singing way that he had, not specially
wonderful for melody, chanting the following wondrous rune:

John Bowlder had made bales and bales of such verses, which in his moments
of presumption he tried to hope were equal to those of Emerson, or at

least conceived in their spirit. Like many men who long to be original, he
was instinctively and even to a certain extent consciously an imitator, and
was generally doing his whimsical best to reflect the peculiarities of some admired
model, with such fantastic and farcical results as you may behold in a
“crazy” looking-glass.

As his unbroken bass voice gambolled through his “rune,” so his clumsy
bulk rolled and rumbled along the passage. Ahead of it glided the little figure
of Lehming, like a stunted pony drawing a large wagon. It was very
much thus that they went through life: the dwarf guided, while the giant did
the bellowing.

It must be understood that Miss Jones had so arranged her own room as
to be able on a pinch to receive visitors in it. She had divided it into two
compartments by means of a lofty though fragile rampart of paper screen,
which completely environed her bed and washstand with its gaudy representation
of scarlet ships on a blue-vitriol ocean, so that nothing could well be
more seemly and genteel at the price. Thus she was in a state of decorous
preparation for the two gentlemen, and could admit them without going
through any preliminary housewifery. Indeed, she was waiting for them, and
opened at the first tap of Lehming's knuckles, so that John Bowlder, who was
just about applying his battering-ram of a fist to the door, missed his mark
and nearly gave the schoolma'am a facer, immediately stumbling into the room
in his usual headlong fashion. However, he lurched to before he had run
down the ships on the paper screen, and was tugged without accident into a
proper state of introduction to his hostess.

“Miss Jones, this is Mr. John Bowlder,” said Lehming in his simple, well-bred
way. “He is an old friend of mine, and wishes to be a friend of yours.”

“I welcome you, Mr. Bowlder, to my humble cot,” responded Imogen
Eleonore in her most unhuman, grand-piano manner. “In the inane wilderness
of brick and mortar which billows and throbs around us there are many,
many abodes far more palatial than this, but none, surely none, in which you
would be received with a simpler, more earnest, more heartfelt cordiality.”

The effect of this speech was somewhat like that of the opening of the
seventh seal; there was a silence of perplexity and amazement, though not
for the space of half an hour. Imogen Eleonore had keyed herself up to such
a lofty pitch, and had uttered her greeting in such an unnatural and absolutely
untenable tone, that for a moment she could not say a word further, and merely
stood panting. John Bowlder, reduced to stark plainness and lucidity by
an affectation which overtopped his own, simply mumbled, “Miss Jones, I
thank you.” He was much in the condition of a rooster who should find himself
outcrowed by a hen. He could not transcendentalize in the presence of
such a transcendent young woman. Meekly accepting a hard-bottomed chair,
he stared with the utmost circumference of his great blue eyes at Imogen,
postponing discourse until he could make up his mind how to take her. Never
before, since he became a philosopher, had he found so little good in “insight.”
For a short period it seemed to him as if neither he nor any one else
would ever speak again.

The sensible and kindly little Lehming came to the rescue of these two
great spirits. He saw the need of pouring the oil of mediocrity upon the billows
of sublimity, and reducing the conversation to a navigable level for human
possibilities. In his silvery, placid way he remarked, “What a cosy old
rocking-chair this is! It reminds me of my grandmother's.”

But Imogen Eleonore's surging nature was not to be calmed at once. She
was laboring under a sense of duty to herself, and to the sacred rites of hospitality.
It was necessary to present her young lady friend to the two gentlemen
in a manner suitable to the heroine of a mystery. Walking to the door
of Nestoria's room with a gait like that of a stage duchess retiring through an
“upper entrance,” she tapped, opened, and said in what she supposed to be a
thrilling murmur, “Nettie, my dear, come forth.”

The answer to this ridiculous summons was a piteous apparition. After
something like a burial, of weeks in duration, Nestoria came forth, unveiled
and pallid, to meet her fellow mortals. At sight of her Lehming and Bowlder
rose to their feet and bowed, with some such feeling as if they were saluting
an infant who did not belong to this world—an infant who had already become
a seraph. She was quite small, it will be remembered, and the stress of
grinding trouble and auxiety had worn her thin, so that she looked even more
tiny and childlike than her wont. Her bright natural color had faded under
the shadows of sorrow and confinement; and the terror of discovery which
crisped her heart at this moment gave her a whiteness like marble. In contrast
to this pallor her lucid blue eyes were startling, and her luxuriant golden
hair seemed twisted of living sunlight.

As for her expression, it was simply wonderful and indescribable. There
could not easily be a more touching sadness, a more plaintive demand for
sympathy, on the human countenance. In spite of struggles for resignation,
in spite of a present effort to put on a mask of unconcern, and perhaps all the
more because of the pinching constraint of that effort, she had a look which
rivalled the calm despair of the Cenci. To Lehming and Bowlder, both sensitive
and sincerely compassionate spirits, she appeared to advance under a
cross and wearing a crown of thorns.

Even Miss Jones was impressed by this spectacle of timidity and suffering.
For a few seconds she gazed at it in silence, forgetful of her mouthing elocution
and fustian rhetoric, and honestly fearful lest the girl should faint away.
But she had a difficult duty to perform: it was nothing less than to present in
fitting terms a young lady whose full name she did not know; and, making
one of those efforts under which both feelings and circumstances must bend,
she addressed herself to the unparalleled ceremony. With a prompt ingenuity
for which she ever after admired herself, she called to mind the spot where
she had first met her mysterious fellow-lodger, and evolved therefrom a patronymic
for her.

“Miss Nettie Fulton,” she bowed in her greatest manner. “Nettie, my
dear, let me introduce you to my old friend, Mr. Lehming, and my new friend,
Mr. Bowlder.”

For an instant she could say no more. The highest triumphs of genius are
not gained without an exhaustive struggle. Once more we behold Miss
Jones beaten by herself, and reduced to an agreeable silence.

There was such a din of shy, timorous blood in Nestoria's ears that she
did not notice the new name which had been given her, and so was not discomposed
by it. She heard only a jumble of words which she knew to be a
form of introduction, and in obedience to it she bowed mechanically, but without
speaking. She was in a strange confusion of spirit. So powerfully had
her late seclusion impressed her, that it seemed to her as if she were now for
the first time entering human society. Moreover, there was the terrible possibility
that these men might guess her identity and surrender her to justice.

Nevertheless, she could not help seeking their companionship, as a shipwrecked
pirate might draw toward navigators who should land upon his islet, though
fearful that they had come for his capture and punishment.

Lehming and Bowlder were also unusually bewildered. They were dazzled
by the girl's beauty, and touched by her plaintive expression of sorrow,
and attracted by her air of infantile helplessness. They had a longing to
gather her into protecting and comforting arms, as one picks up and pets an
unknown child who has fallen into trouble. Thus for a few seconds there
was silence, all three gazing at Nestoria.

This dumb inspection frightened the girl: of a sudden it seemed to her
that these men had seen her before; and she quivered with a mad impulse to
rush back into her room and lock the door.