A Philanthropist

“I suspected him from the first,” said Miss Gould, with some irritation, to her lodger. She spoke with irritation because of the amused smile of the lodger. He bowed with the grace that characterized all his lazy movements.

“He looked very much like that Tom Waters that I had at the Reformed Drunkards' League last year. I even thought he was Tom--”

“I do not know Tom?” hazarded the lodger.

“No. I don't know whether I ever mentioned him to you. He came twice to the League, and we were really quite hopeful about him, and the third time he asked to have the meeting at his house. We thought it a great sign--the best of signs, in fact. So as a great favor we went there instead of meeting at the Rooms. I was a little late--I lost the way--and when I got there I heard a great noise as if they were singing different songs at the same time. I hurried in to lead them--they get so mixed in the singing--and--it makes me blush now to think of it!--the wretch had invited them all early, and--and they were all intoxicated!

“I am sorry I told you,” she added with dignity; for the lodger, in an endeavor to smile sympathetically, had lost his way and was convulsed with a mirth entirely unregretful.

“Not at all, not at all,” he murmured politely. “It is a delightful story. I would not have missed it--a choir of reformed drunkards! But do you not, my dear Miss Gould, perceive in these little setbacks a warning against further attempts? Do you still attend the League? It is not possible!”

“Possible?” echoed his visitor; for owing to certain recent and untoward circumstances, Miss Gould was half reclining in her lodger's great Indian chair, sipping a glass of his '49 port. “Indeed I do! They had every one of them to be reformed all over again! It was most disgraceful!”

Her lodger checked a rising smile, and leaned solicitously toward her, regarding her firm, fine-featured face with flattering attention.

“Are you growing stronger? Can I bring you anything?” he inquired.

Miss Gould's color rose, half with anger at her weakness of body, half with a vexed consciousness of his amusement.

“Thank you, no,” she returned coldly, “I am ashamed to have been so weak-minded. I must go now and tell Henry to pile the wood again in the east corner. There will probably come another tramp very soon--they are very prevalent this month, I hear.”

Her lodger left his low wicker seat--a proof of enormous excitement--and frowned at her.

“Do you seriously mean, Miss Gould, that you are going to run the risk of another such--such catastrophe? It is absurd. I cannot believe it of you! Is there no other way--”

But he had been standing a long while, it occurred to him, and he retired to the chair again. A splinter of wood on his immaculate white flannel coat caught his eye, and a slow smile spread over his handsome, lazy face. It grew and grew until at last a distinct chuckle penetrated to the dusky corner where the Indian chair leaned back against dull Oriental draperies. Its occupant attempted to rise, her face stern, her mouth unrelenting. He was at her side instantly.

“Take my arm--and pardon me!” he said with an irresistible grace. “It is only my fear for your comfort, you know, Miss Gould. I cannot bear that you should be at the mercy of every drunken fellow that wishes to impose on you!”

As she crossed the hall that separated her territory from his, her fine, full figure erect, her dark head high in the air, a whimsical regret came over him that they were not younger and more foolish.

“I should certainly marry her to reform her,” he said to the birch log that spluttered on his inimitable colonial fire-dogs. And then, as the remembrance of the events of the morning came to him, he laughed again.

He had been disturbed at his leisurely coffee and roll by a rapid and ceaseless pounding, followed by a violent rattling, and varied by stifled cries apparently from the woodshed. The din seemed to come from the lower part of the house, and after one or two futile appeals to the man who served as valet, cook, and butler in his bachelor establishment, he decided that he was alone in his half of the house, and that the noise came from Miss Gould's side. He strolled down the beautiful winding staircase, and dragged his crimson dressing-gown to the top of the cellar stairs, the uproar growing momentarily more terrific. Half-way down the whitewashed steps he paused, viewing the remarkable scene below him with interest and amazement. The cemented floor was literally covered with neatly chopped kindling-wood, which rose as in a tide under the efforts of a large red-faced man who, with the regularity of a machine, stooped, grasped a billet in either hand, shook them in the face of Miss Gould, who cowered upon a soap-box at his side, and flung them on the floor. From the woodhouse near the cellar muffled shouts were heard through a storm of blows on the door. From the rattling of this door, and the fact that the red-faced man aimed every third stick at it, the observer might readily conclude that some one desirous of leaving the woodhouse was locked within it.

For a moment the spectator on the stairs stood stunned. The noise was deafening; the appearance of the man, whose expression was one of settled rage but whose actions were of the coldest regularity, was most bewildering, partially obscured as it was by the flying billets of wood; the mechanical attempts of Miss Gould to rise from the soap-box, invariably checked by a fierce brandishing of the stick just taken from the lessening pile, were at once startling and fascinating, inasmuch as she was methodically waved back just as her knees had unbent for the trial, and as methodically essayed her escape again, alternately rising with dignity and sinking back in terror.

The red dressing-gown advanced a step, and met her gaze. Dignity and terror shifted to relief.

“Oh, Mr. Welles!” she gasped. Her lodger girded up his robe de chambre with its red silk cord and advanced with decision through the chaos of birch and hickory. A struggle, sharp but brief, and he turned to find Miss Gould offering a coil of clothes-rope with which to bind the conquered, whom conflict had sobered, for he made no resistance.

“What do you mean by such idiotic actions?” the squire of dames demanded, as he freed the maddened Henry from his durance vile in the woodhouse and confronted the red-faced man, who had not uttered a word.

He cast a baffled glance at Miss Gould and a triumphant smile at Henry before replying. Then, disdaining the lady's righteous indignation and the hired man's threatening gestures, he faced the gentleman in the scarlet robe and spoke as man to man.

“Gov'nor,” he said with somewhat thickened speech, “I come here an' I asked for a meal. An' she tol' me would I work fer it? An' I said yes. An' she come into this ol' vault of a suller, an' she pointed to that ol' heap o' wood, an' she tol' me ter move it over ter that corner. An' I done so fer half an hour. An' I says to that blitherin' fool over there, who was workin' in that ol' wood-house, what the devil did she care w'ich corner the darned stuff was in? An' he says that she didn't care a hang, but that she'd tell the next man that come along to move it back to where I got it from; he said 'twas a matter er principle with her not to give a man a bite fer nothin'! So I shut him in his ol' house, an' w'en she come down I gave her a piece of my mind. I don't mind a little work, mister, but when it come to shufflin' kind-lin's round in this ol' tomb fer half an hour an' makin' a fool o' myself fer nothin', I got my back up. My time ain't so vallyble to me as 'tis to some, gov'nor, but it's worth a damn sight more'n that!”

Miss Gould's lodger shuddered as he remembered the quarter he had surreptitiously bestowed upon the man, and the withering scorn that would be his portion were the weakness known. He smiled as he recalled the scene in the cellar when he had helped Miss Gould up the stairs and returned to soothe Henry, who regretted that he had left one timber of the woodhouse upon another.

“Though I'm bound to say, Mr. Welles, that I see how he felt. I've often felt like a fool explainin' how they was to move that wood back an' forth. It does seem strange that Miss Gould has to do it that way. Give 'em some-thin' an' let 'em go, I say!”

It was precisely his own view--but how fundamentally immoral the position was he knew so well! He recalled Miss Gould's lectures on the subject, miracles of eloquence and irrefutably correct in deductions that interested him not nearly so much as the lecturer.

“So firm, so positive, so wholesome!” he would murmur to himself in tacit apology for the instructive hours spent before their common ground, the great fireplace in the central hall. He never sat there without remembering their first interview: her resentment at an absolutely inexcusable intrusion slowly melting before his exquisite appreciation of every line and corner of the old colonial homestead; her reserve waning at every touch of his irresistible courtesy, till, to her own open amazement, she rose to conduct this connoisseur in antiquities through the rooms whose delights he had perfectly foreseen, he assured her, from the modelling of the front porch; her utter and instantaneous refusal to consider for a second his proposal to lodge a stranger in half of her father's house; and the naïve and conscientious struggle with her principles when, with a logic none the less forcible because it was so gracefully developed, he convinced her that her plain duty lay along the lines of his choice.

For as a philanthropist what could she do? Here were placed in her hands means she could not in conscience overlook. Rapidly translating his dollars into converts, he juggled them before her dazzled eyes; he even hinted delicately at Duty, with that exact conception of the requirements of the stern daughter felt by none so keenly as those who systematically avoid her.

His good genius prompted him to refer casually to soup-kitchens. Now soup-kitchens were the delight of Miss Gould's heart; toward the establishment of a soup-kitchen she had looked since the day when her father's death had left her the double legacy of his worldly goods and his unworldly philanthropy.

Visions of dozens of Bacchic revellers, riotous no more, but seated temperately each before his steaming bowl, rose to her delighted eyes; she saw in fancy the daughters and nieces of the reformed in smiles and white aprons ladling the nutritious and attractive compound, earning thus an honest wage; she saw a neatly balanced account-book and a triumphant report; she saw herself the respected and deprecatory idol of a millennial village. She wavered, hesitated, and was lost.

That very evening saw the establishment of a second ménage in the north side of the house, and though a swift regret chilled her manner for weeks, she found herself little by little growing interested in her lodger, and conscious of an increasing desire to benefit him, an irritated longing to influence him for good, to turn him from the butterfly whims of a pretended invalid to an appreciation of the responsibilities of life.