University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
FRIENDS AND COMFORTERS.

SCARCELY had Edward left the Dinnefords when there arrived two other
visitors, the relatives who had been for some time expected as guests—
Mr. John Bowlder and Mr. Walter Lehming.

Mr. Bowlder was a man of headlong demeanor and plunging gait. He entered
the room crown foremost, and with great vehemence, somewhat as if he
were a ram or he-goat who had butted down the door, and was about to inflict
the same violence upon the window sash, and go flying into the garden. He
was big and heavily moulded, and a loose suit of ready-made clothing made
him appear even larger than he was, so that he had the roly-poly look of a fat
Newfoundland puppy. His head was monstrous, or at least it seemed to be
monstrous, it was so magnified by a vast shock of hair and a bushy beard, both
as white as if he were eighty years old, although he could not have been above
fifty. His face was so pink and fresh that it put one in mind of a healthy infant;
and his large blue eyes had a benevolent, dreamy tenderness which was
very beautiful. He made a stamping, jolting rush at the ladies, shook them
both at once by the hand with exhilarating energy, and gushed a stream of
friendly incoherence.

“I have just seen Edward,” he opened abruptly, without any prelude of
salutations. “Cheer up about your little friend who has vanished into the unknown.
He has found a suggestion of her. Delicate omens traced in air.
There is a boat gone, and she must have taken it. Edward is off in search of
her. Thought will dissolve the universe and find her at the bottom of it. As
for the Judge, dear me, dear me! What can I say to comfort you? The red
slayer has been here. But then when he thinks he slays he errs. Our noble
old friend lives on in the heaven of the good. Well, here is Lehming. Lehming,
I got in your way, my good fellow. Come forward and speak your divine
consolations. The voice of the heart is the voice of the gods.”

Walter Lehming was at least as peculiar in appearance as John Bowlder.
In age he might have been twenty-eight, but he looked nearer forty. He was
very short, hardly more than five feet in height, and by many persons would
have been called a dwarf. Nor was this insignificant figure well proportioned,
for his brevity of stature lay mainly in his legs, his body being of nearly the
natural size. His chest, indeed, was of unusual girth, and there was a more
than ordinary fulness between the shoulders, so that at first glance he gave
one an impression of rickets. As with most men of inferior height, his head
was disproportionately large; and it seemed all the larger because of its luxuriant
covering of straight, matted brown hair. His face was long, marked
by prominent cheek-bones and a heavy chin, and of a reddened, sallow complexion,
not unlike the tint of a Madeira nut. This plain countenance, at first
view so unprepossessing and almost repulsive, was lighted up by a cheerful
and amiable expression, which in the end rendered it agreeable. The large
gray eyes were patient, meditative, intelligent, and kind; the coarsely modelled
mouth had a smile of little less than divine sweetness. When he spoke, moreover,

his low voice at once charmed the ear and touched the soul, so musical
was it, so cultured, and so sympathetic.

“My dear aunt!” he said, gently taking Mrs. Dinneford's hand and looking
her in the face with a composed pity which told of a heart that had learned to
be tranquil under sorrows. “I wish that I could have been here to support you
under the first burst of this calamity. How much you must have suffered!”

Tears sprang into the impulsive, soft-hearted woman's eyes, and bending
down toward Lehming, as one bends to a child, she kissed his withered cheek.
It was affecting to see the humble gratitude which lighted up the young man's
old face in response to this salutation. Since the death of his mother very few
tokens of affection had come his way, and even the embrace of an elderly relative
was to him a great and unexpected compliment.

We must explain, in passing, that neither of these two men pertained in
any manner to the Wetherel stock. John Bowlder was a cousin of the deceased
Mr. Dinneford, and Walter Lehming was the son of that gentleman's
sister, so that he was only a nephew to Mrs. Dinneford by marriage.

“And here is Alice,” said the shaken woman, fighting with sobs for her
voice, but smiling cordially at the same time, so irrepressible was her kindness
and cheerfulness. “You must kiss her too, Walter. We must cling together
now, like brethren in one tent. Alice and I will want all the friendship you
can give, for our oldest and best friend is gone from us, and has left us very
solitary. It seems to me sometimes as if the angel of mercy stoppeth not to
comfort, but passeth by on the other side. These bereavements and tragedies
do shake one's faith. We have had an awful revelation of the wickedness that
can exist in the world. To think that any human being should want to kill
our dear, good, beneficent old friend, whose life was one long labor of love for
his fellow ereatures! He thought so much of you, Walter! He was set upon
leaving a portion of his property to you because, he said, you were his relative
in the Lord if not in the flesh, and he knew you would be guided to dispense
it for good. But, oh dear, what am I talking about! I ought not, perhaps,
to have told you of that, for crime has spread its awful mystery and entanglements
over this whole matter, and we don't yet rightly know what shall
be. It almost seems as if Providence had taken counsel this time to bring the
plans of the godly to naught. The will has disappeared, and of course if it
isn't found you will have nothing, Walter.”

“Don't speak of it,” replied Lehming with perfect composure and the
smile of a seraph. “But is the will really gone?” he quickly added, as if a
new thought had occurred to him which made the subject important. “And
you, then?”

“Oh, never mind that now,” sighed Mrs. Dinneford. “Alice and I have
enough to make us comfortable. We will talk of that by and by, and I shall
want your advice about investments at a proper time. I didn't mean to mention
the will, but my mind does run on so when it gets started, and seeing you
quite upset me for a minute. Cousin Wetherel thought so much of you. And
now Edward will have the whole of it, and go no one knows whither. But
perhaps he will mend, now or later. You know Tupper says, `Let a spendthrift
grow to be old, he will set his heart on saving.' And if he had nothing
he might be tempted to more and greater follies, for poverty shall make a man
desperate and hurry him ruthless into crime. I don't mean to prophesy hard
things of Edward, nor to bring him to the bar of my poor judgment. He came
to see us just now, and behaved most beautifully.”

“It is a pleasure and a duty to hope for the best,” said Lehming. “The
weight of great responsibility often makes young men suddenly wise. He is
intelligent, you know, and good-hearted.”

“He has just rushed off after that missing girl in the noblest manner,” put
in John Bowlder, his great blue eyes twice as large as life with excitement.
“He went on his mission like a spiritual activity. I ought to have borne him
company. That girl must be found.”

“Why! did you know her?” asked Alice.

“Never saw her in my life,” declared John Bowlder. “Never heard of
her till ten minutes ago. But what does that matter? The divine soul is
promptly receptive to misfortune. Unhappiness always dazzles me. All men
and women who are clothed in it take to me a nobler form. Don't understand
me as getting on the housetops to boast. But, as Emerson says, why should
we make it a point to disparage with our false modesty that man we are? If
I am not helpful, I am heartful.”

“Cousin John, you run over with Emerson as I do with Tupper,” said Mrs.
Dinneford, laughing out of the midst of her sorrows, for her humors were wonderfully
variable, chasing each other to and fro like kittens.

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to explain that ruddy, headlong John Bowlder
sought to be a philosopher, and that his favorite tap in philosophy was the
one commonly called transcendental. He worshipped Emerson, admired Thoreau,
and read much in Walt Whitman. Years before this, carried away by
the story of “Walden,” as many a boy has been by that of “Robinson Crusoe,”
he rushed into the forests of Maine, built a hermitage there, and communed
obstinately with unsympathizing nature, until a party of surveyors
found him bedridden with rheumatism and starving, and sent him back to the
degrading comforts of civilization.

“What is the next thing to be done?” gently inquired the unassuming Lehming.
“I am ready to take all your labors off your hands as far as possible.”

“The next thing!” groaned Mrs. Dinneford. “It seems as if everything
came next. The whole future is such a struggling medley, or at least my poor
mind is! But here is a matter that needs counsel immediately. Here is a letter
to Nestoria; it came this noon, and it must be from her father; just see the
foreign postmarks. What shall be done with it? Shall I open it?”

“Under the circumstances we are justified in opening it,” decided Lehming
after brief reflection. “There may be something in it which will indicate
whither she would be likely to go. My supposition of course is that she witnessed
the tragedy, and was frightened away by it. This letter may mention
friends of hers with whom she might be led to take refuge. Yes, it is our duty
to open it.”

Mrs. Dinneford broke the seal, skimmed hastily through the epistle, and
uttered a cry of poignant distress.

“Her father is dead,” she cried. “This is from one of his brother missionaries.
The poor thing hasn't a home in the whole world. Oh, why doesn't
she come back to us?”

“This is terrible,” sighed Lehming, his sallow face beautiful with compassion;
while John Bowlder suddenly thrust his hands into his white beard and
did violence to it.

“We must labor now by day and night to find her,” sobbed Mrs. Dinneford.

“At once!” answered John Bowlder vehemently. “We must rush into

this calamity like firemen into a burning house. But cheer up, my human
friends. Labor done with a will is sure to conquer. The will is in itself a
guide. As Emerson says, `A breath of will blows eternally through the universe
in the direction of the right and necessary.' I shall take a boat and go
over this whole harbor.”

“Cousin John, you may go under it,” observed Mrs. Dinneford. “Can you
row?”

“I can learn,” declared John Bowlder.

“But the wind was strong last night, and if she got into a boat it must have
blown her out into the Sound, and the Sound here is twenty miles wide.”

“I shall remember that,” said John Bowlder.

And take a boat he did; and upset himself three rods from high-water mark,
wading ashore through the shallows with undiminished spirit, but finding himself
obliged to go to bed until his clothes could be dried; for as usual he had
lost his valise in his late journeyings, and neither the Judge's garments nor
Lehming's were big enough for him. Getting tired presently of retirement,
he wrapped a coverlet about him and sat by his window, discoursing to the curious
idlers who wandered about the grounds, and exhorting them in mystical.
proverbial sentences to be helpful.

“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none,” he lectured to
a knot of boys who gathered to stare at him. “Go out and do your bidden
work, if you do it alone. Shun father and brother, if your good genius calls
you, and they hear it not. But be sure you know how to row before you leap
into your shallop. Columbus himself needed a planet to shape his course upon.
The brightest of all pole stars in our heaven is experience. At the same time
we must not follow the old wife's rule of refusing to go into the water until
we can swim. Indeed, courage is the especial duty of youth. The young are
apostles. To them the superhuman voice incessantly commands, Go ye forth.
I am not speaking now of stealing apples nor of robbing birds' nests, but of
conferring benefits and straining the higher activities. The soul walks with
bended neck in cellars, but loftily and usefully above ground.”

“Benny, come here,” yelled one urchin to another, more distant, with
whom he was in friendly relations. “Here's a bully old crazy man, an' he's a
goin' it like everything. I guess he's the murderer. Come an' look at him.”

Somewhat disconcerted by this misconception, Mr. Bowlder returned to his
bed until his flannel suit should be dried, leaving the disentanglement of the
Wetherel mystery to others, at least for the present.