The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe\'s law-office readily enough, but its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.
Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than Harvey—the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.
“Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?” he asked, as he seated himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.
Harvey was busy at a big box—a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked in the fading light to be half-dried plants.
“Well, I don\'t know—I rather guess not,” he made answer, as he pursued his task. “So far as I can make out, this wouldn\'t be the place to start in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to leaders, but I don\'t see much law laying around loose. Anyway,” he went on, “I couldn\'t afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have to earn money, you know.”
Theron felt that he liked the boy. “Yes,” he said, with a kindly tone; “I\'ve heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr. Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages too.”
“Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,” the boy explained, stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in his hand, “but that\'s no good unless there\'s regular practice coming into the office all the while. THAT\'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But Gorringe don\'t have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he does it all himself.”
The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was a money-lender—what was colloquially called a “note-shaver.” To his rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the boy.
“What are you doing there?” he inquired, to change the subject.
“Sorting out some plants,” replied Harvey. “I don\'t know what\'s got into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he\'s had since I\'ve been here—that is, in six weeks—besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don\'t know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I\'ve had kind of half a notion that he\'s figurin\' on getting married. I can\'t think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water—just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they\'ve got marriage on the brain.”
Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister\'s attention.
“But as I understand it,” he remarked hesitatingly, “Brother Gorringe—or rather Mr. Gorringe—gets all the plants he wants, everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don\'t know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that effect.”
The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the window, shook his head. “These don\'t come from no garden outside,” he declared. “They come from the dealers\', and he pays solid cash for \'em. The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents. There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.”
Mr. Ware did not offer to look. “Very likely these are for the garden I was speaking of,” he said. “Of course you can\'t go on taking plants out of a garden indefinitely without putting others in.”
“I don\'t know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,” answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the street below. Then he turned to the minister. “Your wife\'s doing a good deal of gardening this spring, I notice,” he said casually. “You\'d hardly think it was the same place, she\'s fixed it up so. If she wants any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.”
“I will remember,” said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself came in.
The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and said almost peremptorily to the boy, “You can go now!” Then he turned again to Theron.
“Well, Mr. Ware, I\'m glad to see you,” he repeated, and drew up a chair by the window. “Things are going all right with you, I hope.”
Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer\'s face a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes, cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.
“I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you,” he said, getting better under way as he went on. “Quarterly Conference is only a fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to happen.”
“I\'m not a church member, you know,” interposed Gorringe. “That shuts me out of the Quarterly Conference.”
“Alas, yes!” said Theron. “I wish it didn\'t. I\'m afraid I\'m not going to have any friends to spare there.”
“What are you afraid of?” asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at his ease again “They can\'t eat you.”
“No, they keep me too lean for that,” responded Theron, with a pensive smile. “I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an extra allowance. I don\'t see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn\'t fair, and it isn\'t right. But so far from its looking as if I could get an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my moving expenses, as you know, and—and, frankly, I don\'t know which way to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while.”
“That\'s where you\'re wrong,” said Mr. Gorringe. “If you let things like that worry you, you\'ll keep a sore skin all your life. You take my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real difficulties, why, I guess—” the lawyer paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way—“I guess some road out can be found all right. The main thing is, don\'t fret, and don\'t allow your wife to—to fret either.”
He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone, and the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him pass the house.
“Yes,” he said; “I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively, we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be ............