The Rise of Silas Lapham

“Parents poor, of course,” suggested the journalist. “Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know,” said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good camradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then with quiet self-respect, “I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won’t interest you.”

“Oh, yes, it will,” returned Bartley, unabashed. “You’ll see; it’ll come out all right.” And in fact it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.

“Mr. Lapham,” he wrote, “passed rapidly over the story of his early life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother [...]”

“I don’t want to see any more men killed in my time.”

“But it wasn’t self-sacrifice—or not self-sacrifice alone. She was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn’t appreciate him half as much as she could. I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book—for I did cry. It’s silly—it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?”

“If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn’t mine to give.” She added in a burst of despair, “He isn’t mine to keep!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she has got to bear it. I don’t know what’s to come of it all. But she’s got to bear her share of it.”

“One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?” suggested Sewell. “That’s sense, and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality.”

“Oh! Never! Never for an instant! How could you think such a thing? It was impossible! I never thought of her. But I see—I see! I can explain—no, there’s nothing to explain! I have never knowingly done or said a thing from first to last to make you think that. I see how terrible it is!” he said; but he still smiled, as if he could not take it seriously. “I admired her beauty—who could help doing that?—and I thought her very good and sensible.”

“What’s he done? Well, now, I’ll tell you what he’s done, Persis, since you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used him so badly in getting him out of the business. He’s been dabbling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to,—wild-cat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims,—till he’s run through about everything.”

“Then I know he’ll move heaven and earth to bring it about. I know you won’t be allowed to suffer for doing him a kindness, Silas. He can’t be so ungrateful! Why, why should he pretend to have any such parties in view when he hasn’t? Don’t you be down-hearted, Si. You’ll see that he’ll be round with them to-morrow.”

“About what I done? Well, it don’t always seem as if I done it,” replied Lapham. “Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it. I don’t know,” he added thoughtfully, biting the corner of his stiff moustache. “I don’t know as I should always say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.”