University of Virginia Library

39. CHAPTER XXXIX.
A RATIONAL AND A WHIMSICAL COMFORTER.

Nestoria had now more peace of mind than had been hers since her flight
from the scene of the murder.

She had, as it seemed to her, made a confidant of Lehming; and every infant
knows the comfort that there is in telling one's trouble. In actual fact she
had barely hinted to him the solution of this horrible Wetherel problem, so
that a soul less sympathetic and clever than his might have altogether misapprehended
her. But so clear and obvious to her mind was the whole labyrinth
of crime, that it appeared to her as if her few vague words had pointed out
every bloody footstep which tracked its obscure intersections. At times, indeed,
she said to herself that she had divulged far too much, and was angry at
her weakness and terrified at her imprudence. But, on the whole, her overflow
of confidence, and the sense of sympathy obtained, soothed her. Her eyes
began to beam their natural sunshine, and there was less plaintiveness and beseeching
for pity in her smile, while her conversation sparkled now and then
with the intrinsic lightsomeness of youth.

“How strangely we get used to things!” she one evening said to Lehming
“Once I would not have thought it possible that I should see the weeks which
I have seen, and yet preserve sanity and life. But here I am; I still have my
reason and draw my breath; indeed, it sometimes appears to me that I am not
even changed. I have just been reading a description of the siege of Port
Hudson, telling how accustomed the artillerymen became to the bombardment,

and how they slept alongside of the roaring guns. The noise and the
danger were ordinary circumstances to them. It is just so with me. I am usually
as calm as I was in the days of innocence and safety. It seems like a stupor;
and yet I am not stupefied; I am merely tranquil. It is a terrible mystery.
One feels like saying that the human soul is capable of too much. It is
capable of living quietly in sin and sorrow, as well as in holiness and prosperity.
Are we right in pitying the poor and ignorant on the ground that they
are wretched? Perhaps they are as contented as the rich and wise. We
should pity them mainly for being thus contented with curses instead of longing
and striving after blessings. I understand now the lives of criminals. I
used to suppose that they were constantly tormented by remorse and terror.
The sad knowledge has come to me that it is not so. They are generally easy
in their minds. They are like me. Perhaps I have suffered more with remorse
than any brutal murderer now living. And yet I bear it; my hand does
not tremble when I paint; I hit the right colors without effort; I paint better
every day—better and more easily. One might suppose that there was no
curse upon me for duty unfulfilled.”

“Few can endure like you,” sighed Lehming, who was often impatient of
the physical feebleness which he found in himself. “You are a marvel of
health. Under your load I should be crushed. Even the trifle of it which you
have given me to carry, seems at times nearly too much for me.”

“I am sorry for it,” she said humbly. “I ought to have gone away without
a word. I have been weak and selfish.”

Lehming looked at her with wonder and almost with reverence. He said
to himself that he had never known in one so young such elevation of sentiment
and keenness of reflection. Had he seen her while she was at Sea Lodge,
and so been able to estimate the great advance which she had made since that
time in both moral and intellectual force, he would have been still more astonished.
The bearing of constant peril and vast sorrow had developed this lately
girlish spirit surprisingly and with surprising rapidity.

“Don't mind about having laden me,” said the deformed young man. “If
I cannot live a little for others, I count myself nothing worth. I only regret
that you cannot see your way clear to do your instant duty, however painful it
may be.”

“Ah! don't talk of that!” implored Nestoria, drooping her sunny head.
“Not yet! Wait!”

“Do you know that Edward Wetherel proved an alibi?” he continued,
venturing boldly upon the subject which he believed to be her torment. “He
proved that he was in New Haven on the night of the murder.”

“Did he?” exclaimed Nestoria, her face turning crimson. “Oh, did he?”

“I heard the testimony,” replied Lehming, trembling with the eagerness
of hope. “The witnesses were wild fellows, but at the time I did not doubt
them.”

For a minute or so the girl remained silent. She was studying over and
over the picture which her memory presented of the assassination, and striving
to eliminate from it the form and features of Edward Wetherel. The task was
impossible; the figure reappeared as fast as she rubbed it out; it had a cruel, a
ghoulish tenacity of existence. The flush of joy in her cheeks faded under its
battenings to a plaintive pallor. Lehming's sensitive spirit divined from this
change in her countenance that she knew of something which would not let
her give lasting credit to his cheering tale. The subject became hateful to
him, and he wrenched himself away from it.

“I wish we had some enlivening amusement for you,” he said. “I should
like—if it were not too mad a wish—to take you to see a comedy.”

She glanced at him with surprise, and replied, “I thought the theatre was
very wicked.”

“It is a matter of regret that so many good people have thought so,” observed
Lehming. “The Church lost a strong grip on humanity when it denounced
the drama and gave it over into the hands of the irreligious. Men
need relaxation, and will have it. Devout minds should have recognized the
fact, and should have provided pure public amusements, theatrical and others.
A Christianized theatre would be a means of teaching, capable of reaching ears
that will not hearken to the pulpit.”

“I can understand that it might be so,” nodded Nestoria, after due reflection,
such as she habitually gave to a new idea before accepting it. “I should
like to see something amusing. I should like,” she added, the corners of her
mouth trembling piteously, “to laugh once more.”

At this moment they heard a singular sound in the hall. It was a shuffling
and thumping, as of some one dancing, and dancing, too, with all his might,
like King David in his linen ephod. Then the door opened, and the bushy,
grizzled hair and beard, and the rosy face of John Bowlder appeared, accompanied
of course by that philosopher's bulky and cumbrous figure. He looked
bigger than ever, for he was clad in a flowered calico dressing-gown, which
was voluminous enough to wrap up a middle-sized steeple comfortably, and
which bagged and swung in all directions to get away from its wearer. He
was dancing; there could be no doubt of the capering fact; he was performing
some kind of an untaught, unteachable, unexampled jig; such a jig as was
never produced to human eyes before, and without supernatural assistance
never will be again. A colt let loose in a meadow, or a calf welcoming its
mother home from pasture, never accomplished such unbroken plungings and
kickings and buttings. Meantime—a philosopher through it all—he had the
rapt air of a whirling Dervish. His haystack of a head was thrown back in
a kind of ecstasy, and a childlike, simple smile played about the corners of his
wide mouth. Take his expression and his action together, and he was the
maddest human spectacle imaginable. If Lehming and Nestoria had not been
familiar with his oddities, they would have judged him stark crazy, and set
about tying him.

“I am frisky to-night,” he gasped breathlessly, as he curveted around the
room. “We must obey our whims, as well as our solemn intuitions, if we
would be real men. Great and beautiful, and partakers of the divine essence,
are the untrammelled children of nature. It is our rational duty to do what we
want to do, like Robert Burns and George Gordon Byron—like kittens and infants.
If you desire to hop on one leg, let your desire have instant and unpremeditated
outcome, defying the promenaders and the police. Skip, hop, and
jump in Broadway, if Broadway seems your arena. Only do not hop through
taking thought thereto, out of bravado or vain pomp. Let your hopping be
the fruit of simplicity and honesty, or it is no acceptable hopping, but rather
dishonoring.”

Here he came in conflict with a chair, upsetting it and falling across it.
Nestoria burst into a hearty, natural laugh, the first laugh that Lehming had
ever heard from her, her only laugh since the night of the murder.

Unabashed by his calamity, John Bowlder picked himself up, briskly set
the chair on its clattering, noisy legs, placed himself astraddle of it, and commenced
singing some of his own verses:

“Do you call it a tune, Mr. Bowlder?” asked Nestoria, as soon as she could
speak. “It seems as though it must be something else.”

Her face had a gleam of that shrewd, infantile humor which those who
knew her months before had sometimes seen upon it. Lehming, to whom the
expression was a revelation, gazed upon it with wonder and pleasure. He beheld
in it the renewed hope and exhilaration of a soul which, after long wandering
in utterly blinding darkness, finds its way into a more supportable
gloom, and walks on with reviving confidence and cheerfulness.

“Yes, I venture to call that yawp a tune, Miss Nettie,” gayly replied the
philosopher. “It is the tune the old cow died of. It is Bowlder's tune, the
only one he knows, and known to no other cosmos. The man who feels that
he is called to sing cannot wait to learn music. If he is a true man, he will
sing what he can, though the jackass keep him company. Suppose Robert
Burns had refused to write poetry until he could write it in pure English or in
Latin. We should not have had his great, boyish, demigod glee. There
would have been no `Tam o' Shanter' for us, now nor forevermore. No Burns
am I; no Tam o' Shanter have I to cheer the world with; so much I know of
myself. But what I have that give I freely, like a bird, or a running spring,
or a pumpkin pie.”

This last figure struck him as a particularly good one. It was natural, it
was drawn from common life, like the similes of Socrates and Emerson. It
inspired him to improvise some more of his extraordinary poetry, singing it to
his invariable melody, which went equally well with all meters:

“The old cow that died of the tune may now die again of the verses,” he
commented with exterior modesty, while yet he could not help glancing about
him in some faint hope of a compliment.

Nestoria smiled. The first burst of resuscitated gayety was spent, and had
not strength enough left to uplift her to a laugh. It seemed to her, nevertheless,
that she was wildly merry.

“I shall grow fat again if I go on laughing at this rate,” she said.

“Let me urge you to laugh whenever you can,” counselled Lehming.
“Some of us have too few chances for light-heartedness. We must let none
slip.'

“He means himself as well as me,” thought Nestoria, glancing compassionately
at his deformed figure and plaintive face. “I must give him what
sympathy and comfort I can.”