THE PHARISEE AND THE BARBER.
Sheafe lane, in Boston, is an almost unmentionable
and plebeian thoroughfare, between two very
mentionable and patrician streets. It is mainly used
by bakers, butchers, urchins going to school, and
clerks carrying home parcels—in short, by those who
care less for the beauty of the road than for economy
of time and shoe-leather. If you please, it is a shabby
hole. Children are born there, however, and people
die and marry there, and are happy and sad there, and
the great events of life, more important than our
liking or disliking of Sheafe lane, take place in it
continually. It used not to be a very savory place.
Yet it has an indirect share of such glory as attaches
to the birth-places of men above the common. The
(present) great light of the Unitarian church was born
at one end of Sheafe lane, and one of the most accomplished
merchant gentlemen in the gay world of New
York was born at the other. And in the old Haymarket
(a kind of cul-de-sac, buried in the side of
Sheaf lane), stood the dusty lists of chivalric old
Roulstone, a gallant horseman, who in other days
would have been a knight of noble devoir, though in
the degeneracy of a Yankee lustrum, he devoted his
soldierly abilities to the teaching of young ladies how
to ride.
Are you in Sheafe lane? (as the magnetisers inquire).
Please to step back twenty-odd years, and
take the hand of a lad with a rosy face (ourself—for
we lived in Sheafe lane twenty-odd years ago), and
come to a small house, dingy yellow, with a white
gate. The yard is below the level of the street.
Mind the step.
The family are at breakfast in the small parlor
fronting on the street. But come up this dark staircase,
to the bedroom over the parlor—a very neat
room, plainly furnished; and the windows are curtained,
and there is one large easy chair, and a stand
with a bible open upon it. In the bed lies an old man
of seventy, deaf, nearly blind, and bed-ridden.
We have now shown you what comes out of the
shadows to us, when we remember the circumstances
we are about to body forth in a sketch, for it can
scarcely be called a story.
It wanted an hour to noon. The Boylston clock
struck eleven, and close on the heel of the last stroke
followed the tap of the barber's knuckle on the door
of the yellow house in Sheafe lane. Before answering
to the rap, the maid-of-all-work filled a tin can from
the simmering kettle, and surveying herself in a three-cornered
bit of looking-glass, fastened on a pane of the
kitchen window; then, with a very soft and sweet
“good morning,” to Rosier, the barber, she led the
way to the old man's room.
“He looks worse to-day,” said the barber, as the
skinny hand of the old man crept up tremblingly to
his face, conscious of the daily office about to be performed
for him.
“They think so below stairs,” said Harriet, “and
one of the church is coming to pray with him to-night.
Shall I raise him up now?”
The barber nodded, and the girl seated herself near
the pillow, and lifting the old man, drew him upon her
breast, and as the operation went rather lingeringly on,
the two chatted together very earnestly.
Rosier was a youth of about twenty-one, talkative
and caressing, as all barbers are; and what with his
curly hair and ready smile, and the smell of soap that
seemed to be one of his natural properties, he was a
man to be thought of over a kitchen fire. Besides, he
was thriving in his trade, and not a bad match. All of
which was duly considered by the family with which
Harriet lived, for they loved the poor girl.
Poor girl, I say. But she was not poor, at least if
it be true that as a woman thinketh so is she. Most
people would have described her as a romantic girl.
And so she was, but without deserving a breath of the
ridicule commonly attached to the word. She was
uneducated, too, if any child of New England can be
called uneducated. Beyond school-books and the
Bible, she had read nothing but the Scottish Chiefs,
and this novel was to her what the works of God are
to others. It could never become familiar. It must
be the gate of dream-land; what the moon is to a
poet, what a grove is to a man of revery, what sunshine
is to all the world. And she mentioned it as
seldom as people praise sunshine, and lived in it as
unconsciously.
Harriet had never before been out to service. She
was a farmer's daughter, new from the country. If
she was not ignorant of the degradation of her condition
in life, she forgot it habitually. A cheerful and
thoughtful smile was perpetually on her lips, and the
hardships of her daily routine were encountered as
things of course, as clouds in the sky, as pebbles in
the inevitable path. He attention seemed to belong
to her body, but her consciousness only to her
imagination. In her voice and eyes there was no
touch or taint of her laborious servitude, and if
she had suddenly been “made a lady,” there would
have been nothing but her hard hands to redeem from
her low condition. Then, hard-working creature as
she was, she was touchingly beautiful. A coarse eye
would have passed her without notice, perhaps, but a
painter would not. She was of a fragile shape, and had
a slight stoop, but her head was small and exquisitely
moulded, and her slender neck, round, graceful, and
polished, was set upon her shoulders with the fluent
grace of a bird's. Her hair was profuse, and of a
tinge almost yellow in the sun, but her eyes were of a
blue, deep almost to blackness, and her heavy eye-lashes
darkened them still more deeply. She had the
least possible color in her cheeks. Her features were
soft and unmarked, and expressed delicacy and repose,
though her nostrils were capable of dilating with an
energy of expression that seemed wholly foreign to
her character.
Rosier had first seen Harriet when called in to the
old man, six months before, and they were now supposed
by the family to be engaged lovers, waiting only
for a little more sunshine on the barber's fortune.
Meantime, they saw each other at least half an hour
every morning, and commonly passed their evenings
together, and the girl seemed very tranquilly happy in
her prospect of marriage.
At four o'clock on the afternoon of the day before
mentioned, Mr. Flint was to make a spiritual visit to
the old man. Let us first introduce him to the reader.
Mr. Asa Flint was a bachelor of about forty-five,
and an “active member” of a church famed for its
zeal. He was a tall man, with a little bend in his
back, and commonly walked with his eyes upon the
ground, like one intent on meditation. His complexion
was sallow, and his eyes dark and deeply set; but
by dint of good teeth, and a little “wintry redness in
his cheek,” he was good-looking enough for all his
ends. He dressed in black, as all religious men must
(in Boston), and wore shoes with black stockings the
year round. In his worldly condition, Mr. Flint had
always been prospered. He spent five hundred dollars
a year in his personal expenses, and made five thousand
in his business, and subscribed, say two hundred
dollars a year to such societies as printed the name of
the donors. Mr. Flint had no worldly acquaintances.
He lived in a pious boarding-house, and sold all his
goods to the members of the country churches in
communion with his own. He “loved the brethren,”
for he wished to converse with no one who did not see
heaven and the church at his back—himself in the
foreground, and the other two accessories in the perspective.
Piety apart, he had found out at twenty-five,
that, as a sinner he would pass through the world
simply Asa Flint—as a saint, he would be Asa Flint
plus eternity and the respect of a large congregation.
He was a shrewd man, and chose the better part.
Also, he remembered, sin is more expensive than
sanctity.
At four o'clock Mr. Flint knocked at the door. At
the same hour there was a maternal prayer-meeting at
the vestry, and of course it was to be numbered
among his petty trials that he must find the mistress
of the house absent from home. He walked up
stairs, and after a look into the room of the sick man,
despatched the lad who had opened the door for him,
to request the “help” of the family to be present at
the devotions.
Harriet had a rather pleasing recollection of Mr.
Flint. He had offered her his arm, a week before, in
coming out from a conference meeting, and had “presumed
that she was a young lady on a visit” to the
mistress! She arranged her 'kerchief and took the
kettle off the fire.
Mr. Flint was standing by the bedside with folded
hands. The old man lay looking at him with a kind
of uneasy terror in his face, which changed, as Harriet
entered, to a smile of relief. She retired modestly to
the foot of the bed, and, hidden by the curtain, open
only at the side, she waited the commencement of the
prayer.
“Kneel there, little boy!” said Mr. Flint, pointing
to a chair on the other side of the light-stand, “and
you, my dear, kneel here by me! Let us pray!”
Harriet had dropped upon her knees near the corner
of the bed, and Mr. Flint dropped upon his, on
the other side of the post, so that after raising his
hands in the first adjuration, they descended gradually,
and quite naturally, upon the folded hands of the
neighbor—and there they remained. She dared not
withdraw them, but as his body rocked to and fro in
his devout exercise, she drew back her head to avoid
coming into farther contact, and escaped with only his
breath upon her temples.
It was a very eloquent prayer. Mr. Flint's voice,
in a worldly man, would have been called insinuating,
but its kind of covert sweetness, low and soft, seemed,
in a prayer, only the subdued monotony of reverence
and devotion. But it won upon the ear all the same.
He began, with a repetition of all the most sublime
ascriptions of the psalmist, filling the room, it appeared
to Harriet, with a superhuman presence. She trembled
to be so near him with his words of awe. Gradually
he took up the more affecting and tender passages
of scripture, and drew the tears into her eyes
with the pathos of his tone and the touching images
he wove together. His hand grew moist upon hers,
and he leaned closer to her. He began, after a short
pause, to pray for her especially—that her remarkable
beauty might not be a snare to her—that her dove-like
eyes might beam only on the saddened faces of
the saints—that she might be enabled to shun the
company of the worldly, and consort only with God's
people—and that the tones of prayer now in her ears
might sink deep into her heart as the voice of one
who would never cease to feel an interest in her temporal
and eternal welfare. His hand tightened its
grasp upon hers, and his face turned more toward
her; and as Harriet, blushing, spite of the awe
weighing on her heart, stole a look at the devout
man, she met the full gaze of his coal-black eyes
fixed unwinkingly upon her. She was entranced.
She dared not stir, and she dared not take her
eyes from his. And when he came to his amen, she
sank back upon the ground, and covered her face with
her hands. And presently she remembered, with
some wonder, that the old man, for whom Mr. Flint
had come to pray, had not been even mentioned in
the prayer.
The lad left the room after the amen, and Mr. Flint
raised Harriet from the floor and seated her upon a
chair out of the old man's sight, and pulled a hymnbook
from his pocket, and sat down beside her. She
was a very enthusiastic singer, to say the least, and he
commonly led the singing at the conferences, and so,
holding her hand that she might beat the time with
him, he passed an hour in what he would call very
sweet communion. And by this time the mistress of
the family came home, and Mr. Flint took his leave.
From that evening, Mr. Flint fairly undertook the
“eternal welfare” of the beautiful girl. From her
kind mistress he easily procured for her the indulgence
due to an awakened sinner, and she had permission
to frequent the nightly conference, Mr. Flint
always charging himself with the duty of seeing her
safely home. He called sometimes in the afternoon,
and had a private interview to ascertain the “state of
her mind,” and under a strong “conviction” of something
or other, the excited girl lived now in a constant
revery, and required as much looking after as a child.
She was spoiled as a servant, but Mr. Flint had only
done his duty by her.
This seemed all wrong to Rosier, the barber, however.
The bright, sweet face of the girl he thought
to marry, had grown sad, and her work went all amiss
—he could see that. She had no smile, and almost
no word, for him. He liked little her going out at
dusk when he could not accompany her, and coming
home late with the same man always, though a very
good man, no doubt. Then, once lately, when he
had spoken of the future, she had murmured something
which Mr. Flint had said about “marrying with
unbelievers,” and it stuck in Rosier's mind and troubled
him. Harriet grew thin and haggard besides,
though she paid more attention to her dress, and
dressed more ambitiously than she used to do.
We are reaching back over a score or more of
years for the scenes we are describing, and memory
drops here and there a circumstance by the way. The
reader can perhaps restore the lost fragments, if we
give what we remember of the outline.
The old man died, and Rosier performed the last
of his offices to fit him for the grave, and that, if we
remember rightly, was the last of his visits, but one,
to the white house in Sheafe lane. The bed was
scarce vacated by the dead, ere it was required again
for another object of pity. Harriet was put into it
with a brain fever. She was ill for many weeks, and
called constantly on Mr. Flint's name in her delirium;
and when the fever left her, she seemed to have but
one desire on earth—that he should come and see
her. Message after message was secretly carried to
him by the lad, whom she had attached to her with
her uniform kindness and sweet temper, but he never
came.. She relapsed after a while into a state of stupor,
like idiocy, and when day after day passed without
amendment, it was thought necessary to send for
her father to take her home.
A venerable looking old farmer, with white hairs,
drove his rough wagon into Sheafe lane one evening,
we well remember. Slowly, with the aid of his long
staff, he crept up the narrow staircase to his daughter's
room, and stood a long time, looking at her in
silence. She did not speak to him.
He slept upon a bed made up at the side of hers,
upon the floor, and the next morning he went out
early for his horse, and she was taken up and dressed
for the journey. She spoke to no one, and when the
old man had breakfasted, she quietly submitted to be
carried toward the door. The sight of the street first
seemed to awaken some recollection, and suddenly in
a whisper she called to Mr. Flint.
“Who is Mr. Flint?” asked the old man.
Rosier was at the gate, standing there with his hat
off to bid her farewell. She stopped upon the side-walk,
and looked around hurriedly.
“He is not here—I'll wait for him!” cried Harriet,
in a troubled voice, and she let go her father's arm
and stepped back.
They took hold of her and drew her toward the
wagon, but she struggled to get free, and moaned like
a child in grief. Rosier took her by the hand and
tried to speak to her, but he choked, and the tears
came to his eyes. Apparently she did not know him.
A few passers-by gathered around now, and it was
necessary to lift her into the wagon by force, for the
distressed father was confused and embarrassed with
her struggles, and the novel scene around him. At
the suggestion of the mistress of the family, Rosier
lifted her in his arms and seated her in the chair intended
for her, but her screams began to draw a crowd
around, and her struggles to free herself were so violent,
that it was evident the old man could never take
her home alone. Rosier kindly offered to accompany
him, and as he held her in her seat and tried to sooth her,
the unhappy father got in beside her and drove away.
She reached home, Rosier informed us, in a state
of dreadful exhaustion, still calling on the name that
haunted her; and we heard soon after, that she relapsed
into a brain fever, and death soon came to her
with a timely deliverance from her trouble.
