“I wish they would go home.”
“I have sent them.”
“You have? Home to Milwaukee?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God!”
He soon began to mend. Yet it was weeks before he could leave the house. When one day he reëntered the hospital, still pale and faint, he was prompt to express to the Mother-Superior the comfort he had felt in his sickness to know that his brother physician had sent those Richlings to their kindred.
The Sister shook her head. He saw the deception in an instant. As best his strength would allow, he hurried to the keeper of the rolls. There was the truth. Home? Yes,—to Prieur street,—discharged only one week before. He drove quickly to his office.
“Narcisse, you will find that young Mr. Richling living in Prieur street, somewhere between Conti and St. Louis. I don’t know the house; you’ll have to find it. Tell him I’m in my office again, and to come and see me.”
Narcisse was no such fool as to say he knew the house. He would get the praise of finding it quickly.
“I’ll do my mose awduous, seh,” he said, took down his coat, hung up his jacket, put on his hat, and went straight to the house and knocked. Got no answer. Knocked again, and a third time; but in vain. Went next door and inquired of a pretty girl, who fell in love with him at a glance.
“Yes, but they had moved. She wasn’tjess ezac’lysure where theyhadmoved to,unless-nit was in that little house yondeh between St. Louis and Toulouse; and if they wasn’t there she didn’t knowwherethey was. People ought to leave words where they’s movin’ at, but they don’t. You’re very welcome,” she added, as he expressed his thanks; and he would have been welcome had he questioned her for an hour. His parting bow and smile stuck in her heart a six-months.
He went to the spot pointed out. As a Creole he was used to seeing very respectable people living in very small and plain houses. This one was not too plain even for his ideas of Richling, though it was but a little one-street-door-and-window affair, with an alley on the left running back into the small yard behind. He knocked. Again no one answered. He looked down the alley and saw, moving about the yard, a large woman, who, he felt certain, could not be Mrs. Richling.
Two little short-skirted, bare-legged girls were playing near him. He spoke to them in French. Did they know where Monsieu’ Itchlin lived? The two children repeated the name, looking inquiringly at each other.
“Non, miché.”—“No, sir, they didn’t know.”
“Qui reste ici?” he asked. “Who lives here?”
“Ici? Madame qui reste là c’est Mizziz Ri-i-i-ly!” said one.
“Yass,” said the other, breaking into English and rubbing a musquito off of her well-tanned shank with the sole of her foot, “tis Mizziz Ri-i-i-ly what live there. She jess move een. She’s got a lill baby.—Oh! you means dat lady what was in de Chatty Hawspill!”
“No, no! A real, nicelady. She nevva saw that Cha’ity Hospi’l.”
The little girls shook their heads. They couldn’t imagine a person who had never seen the Charity Hospital.
“Was there nobody else who had moved into any of these houses about here lately?” He spoke again in French. They shook their heads. Two boys came forward and verified the testimony. Narcisse went back with his report: “Moved,—not found.”
“I fine that ve’y d’oll, Doctah Seveeah,” concluded the unaugmented, hanging up his hat; “some peop’ always ’ard to fine. I h-even notiz that sem thing w’en I go to colic’ some bill. I dunno ’ow’ tis, Doctah, but I assu’ you I kin tell that by a man’s physio’nomie. Nobody teach me that. ’Tis my own ingeenu’ty ’as made me to discoveh that, in fact.”
The Doctor was silent. Presently he drew a piece of paper toward him and, dipping his pen into the ink, began to write:—
“Information wanted of the whereabouts of John Richling”—
“Narcisse,” he called, still writing, “I want you to take an advertisement to the ‘Picayune’ office.”
“With the gweatez of pleazheh, seh.” The clerk began his usual shifting of costume. “Yesseh! I assu’ you, Doctah, that is a p’oposition moze enti’ly to my satizfagtion; faw I am suffe’ing faw a smoke, and deztitute of a ciga’ette! I am aztonizh’ ’ow I did that, to egshauz them unconsciouzly, in fact.” He received the advertisement in an envelope, whipped his shoes a little with his handkerchief, and went out. One would think to hear him thundering down the stairs, that it was twenty-five cents’ worth of ice.
“Hold o—” The Doctor started from his seat, then turned and paced feebly up and down. Who, besides Richling, might see that notice? What might be its unexpected results? Who was John Richling? A man with a secret at the best; and a secret, in Dr. Sevier’seyes, was detestable. Might not Richling be a man who had fled from something? “No! no!” The Doctor spoke aloud. He had promised to think nothing ill of him. Let the poor children have their silly secret. He spoke again: “They’ll find out the folly of it by and by.” He let the advertisement go; and it went.
RAPHAEL RISTOFALO.
Richling had a dollar in his pocket. A man touched him on the shoulder.
But let us see. On the day that John and Mary had sold their only bedstead, Mrs. Riley, watching them, had proposed the joint home. The offer had been accepted with an eagerness that showed itself in nervous laughter. Mrs. Riley then took quarters in Prieur street, where John and Mary, for a due consideration, were given a single neatly furnished back room. The bedstead had brought seven dollars. Richling, on the day after the removal, was in the commercial quarter, looking, as usual, for employment.
The young man whom Dr. Sevier had first seen, in the previous October, moving with a springing step and alert, inquiring glances from number to number in Carondelet street was slightly changed. His step was firm, but something less elastic, and not quite so hurried. His face was more thoughtful, and his glance wanting in a certain dancing freshness that had been extremely pleasant. He was walking in Poydras street toward the river.
As he came near to a certain man who sat in the entrance of a store with the freshly whittled corner of a chair between his knees, his look and bow were grave, but amiable, quietly hearty, deferential, and also self-respectful—and uncommercial: so palpably uncommercial that the sitter did not rise or even shut his knife.
He slightly stared. Richling, in a low, private tone, was asking him for employment.
“What?” turning his ear up and frowning downward.
The application was repeated, the first words with a slightly resentful ring, but the rest more quietly.
The store-keeper stared again, and shook his head slowly.
“No, sir,” he said, in a barely audible tone. Richling moved on, not stopping at the next place, or the next, or the next; for he felt the man’s stare all over his back until he turned the corner and found himself in Tchoupitoulas street. Nor did he stop at the first place around the corner. It smelt of deteriorating potatoes and up-river cabbages, and there were open barrels of onions set ornamentally aslant at the entrance. He had a fatal conviction that his services would not be wanted in malodorous places.
“Now, isn’t that a shame?” asked the chair-whittler, as Richling passed out of sight. “Such a gentleman as that, to be beggin’ for work from door to door!”
“He’s not beggin’ f’om do’ to do’,” said a second, with a Creole accent on his tongue, and a match stuck behind his ear like a pen. “Beside, he’s toomuchof a gennlemun.”
“That’s where you and him differs,” said the first. He frowned upon the victim of his delicate repartee with make-believe defiance. Number Two drew from an outside coat-pocket a wad of common brown wrapping-paper, tore from it a small, neat parallelogram, dove into an opposite pocket for some loose smoking-tobacco, laid a pinch of it in the paper, and, with a single dexterous turn of the fingers, thumbs above, the rest beneath,—it looks simple, but ’tis an amazing art,—made a cigarette. Then he took down his match, struck it under his short coat-skirt,lighted his cigarette, drew an inhalation through it that consumed a third of its length, and sat there, with his eyes half-closed, and all that smoke somewhere inside of him.
“That young man,” remarked a third, wiping a toothpick on his thigh and putting it in his vest-pocket, as he stepped to the front, “don’t know how tolookfur work. There’s one way fur a day-laborer to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a gentleman to look fur work, and there’s another way fur a—a—a man with money to look fur somethin’ to put his money into.It’s just like fishing!” He threw both hands outward and downward, and made way for a porter’s truck with a load of green meat. The smoke began to fall from Number Two’s nostrils in two slender blue streams. Number Three continued:—
“You’ve got to know what kind o’ hooks you want, and what kind o’ bait you want, and then, afterthat, you’ve”—
Numbers One and Two did not let him finish.
“—Got to know how to fish,” they said; “that’s so!” The smoke continued to leak slowly from Number Two’s nostrils and teeth, though he had not lifted his cigarette the second time.
“Yes, you’ve got to know how to fish,” reaffirmed the third. “If you don’t know how to fish, it’s as like as not that nobody can tell you what’s the matter; an’ yet, all the same, you aint goin’ to ketch no fish.”
“Well, now,” said the first man, with an unconvinced swing of his chin, “spunk’ll sometimes pull a man through; and you can’t say he aint spunky.” Number Three admitted the corollary. Number Two looked up: his chance had come.
“He’d a w’ipped you faw a dime,” said he to NumberOne, took a comforting draw from his cigarette, and felt a great peace.
“I take notice he’s a little deaf,” said Number Three, still alluding to Richling.
“That’d spoil him for me,” said Number One.
Number Three asked why.
“Oh, I just wouldn’t have him about me. Didn’t you ever notice that a deaf man always seems like a sort o’ stranger? I can’t bear ’em.”
Richling meanwhile moved on. His critics were right. He was not wanting in courage; but no man from the moon could have been more an alien on those sidewalks. He was naturally diligent, active, quick-witted, and of good, though maybe a little too scholarly address; quick of temper, it is true, and uniting his quickness of temper with a certain bashfulness,—an unlucky combination, since, as a consequence, nobody had to get out of its way; but he was generous in fact and in speech, and never held malice a moment. But, besides the heavy odds which his small secret seemed to be against him, stopping him from accepting such valuable friendships as might otherwise have come to him, and besides his slight deafness, he was by nature a recluse, or, at least, a dreamer. Every day that he set foot on Tchoupitoulas, or Carondelet, or Magazine, or Fulton, or Poydras street he came from a realm of thought, seeking service in an empire of matter.
There is a street in New Orleans called TritonWalk. That is what all the ways of commerce and finance and daily bread-getting were to Richling. He was a merman—ashore. It was the feeling rather than the knowledge of this that prompted him to this daily, aimless trudging after mere employment. He had a proper pride; once in a while a little too much; nor did he clearly see hisdeficiencies; and yet the unrecognized consciousness that he had not the commercial instinct made him willing—as Number Three would have said—to “cut bait” for any fisherman who would let him do it.
He turned without any distinct motive and, retracing his steps to the corner, passed up across Poydras street. A little way above it he paused to look at some machinery in motion. He liked machinery,—for itself rather than for its results. He would have gone in and examined the workings of this apparatus had it not been for the sign above his head, “No Admittance.” Those words always seemed painted for him. A slight modification in Richling’s character might have made him an inventor. Some other faint difference, and he might have been a writer, a historian, an essayist, or even—there is no telling—a well-fed poet. With the question of food, raiment, and shelter permanently settled, he might have become one of those resplendent flash lights that at intervals dart their beams across the dark waters of the world’s ignorance, hardly from new continents, but from the observatory, the study, the laboratory. But he was none of these. There had been a crime committed somewhere in his bringing up, and as a result he stood in the thick of life’s battle, weaponless. He gazed upon machinery with childlike wonder; but when he looked around and saw on every hand men,—good fellows who ate in their shirt-sleeves at restaurants, told broad jokes, spread their mouths and smote their sides when they laughed, and whose best wit was to bombard one another with bread-crusts and hide behind the sugar-bowl; men whom he could have taught in every kind of knowledge that they were capable of grasping, except the knowledge of how to get money,—when he saw these men, as it seemed to him, grow rich daily bysimply flipping beans into each other’s faces, or slapping each other on the back, the wonder of machinery was eclipsed. Do as they did? He? He could no more reach a conviction as to what the price of corn would be to-morrow than he could remember what the price of sugar was yesterday.
He called himself an accountant, gulping down his secret pride with an amiable glow that commanded, instantly, an amused esteem. And, to judge by his evident familiarity with Tonti’s beautiful scheme of mercantile records, he certainly—those guessed whose books he had extricated from confusion—had handled money and money values in days before his unexplained coming to New Orleans. Yet a close observer would have noticed that he grasped these tasks only as problems, treated them in their mathematical and enigmatical aspect, and solved them without any appreciation of their concrete values. When they were done he felt less personal interest in them than in the architectural beauty of the store-front, whose window-shutters he had never helped to close without a little heart-leap of pleasure.
But, standing thus, and looking in at the machinery, a man touched him on the shoulder.
“Good-morning,” said the man. He wore a pleasant air. It seemed to say, “I’m nothing much, but you’ll recognize me in a moment; I’ll wait.” He was short, square, solid, beardless; in years, twenty-five or six. His skin was dark, his hair almost black, his eyebrows strong. In his mild black eyes you could see the whole Mediterranean. His dress was coarse, but clean; his linen soft and badly laundered. But under all the rough garb and careless, laughing manner was visibly written again and again the name of the race that once held the world under its feet.
“You don’t remember me?” he added, after a moment.
“No,” said Richling, pleasantly, but with embarrassment. The man waited another moment, and suddenly Richling recalled their earlier meeting. The man, representing a wholesale confectioner in one of the smaller cities up the river, had bought some cordials and syrups of the house whose books Richling had last put in order.
“Why, yes I do, too!” said Richling. “You left your pocket-book in my care for two or three days; your own private money, you said.”
“Yes.” The man laughed softly. “Lost that money. Sent it to the boss. Boss died—store seized—everything gone.” His English was well pronounced, but did not escape a pretty Italian accent, too delicate for the printer’s art.
“Oh! that was too bad!” Richling laid his hand upon an awning-post and twined an arm and leg around it as though he were a vine. “I—I forget your name.”
“Ristofalo. Raphael Ristofalo. Yours is Richling. Yes, knocked me flat. Not got cent in world.” The Italian’s low, mellow laugh claimed Richling’s admiration.
“Why, when did that happen?” he asked.
“Yes’day,” replied the other, still laughing.
“And how are you going to provide for the future?” Richling asked, smiling down into the face of the shorter man. The Italian tossed the future away with the back of his hand.
“I got nothin’ do with that.” His words were low, but very distinct.
Thereupon Richling laughed, leaning his cheek against the post.
“Must provide for the present,” said Raphael Ristofalo. Richling dropped his eyes in thought. The present! He had never been able to see that it was the present whichmust be provided against, until, while he was training his guns upon the future, the most primitive wants of the present burst upon him right and left like whooping savages.
“Can you lend me dollar?” asked the Italian. “Give you back dollar an’ quarter to-morrow.”
Richling gave a start and let go the post. “Why, Mr. Risto—falo, I—I—, the fact is, I”—he shook his head—“I haven’t much money.”
“Dollar will start me,” said the Italian, whose feet had not moved an inch since he touched Richling’s shoulder. “Be aw righ’ to-morrow.”
“You can’t invest one dollar by itself,” said the incredulous Richling.
“Yes. Return her to-morrow.”
Richling swung his head from side to side as an expression of disrelish. “I haven’t been employed for some time.”
“I goin’ t’employ myself,” said Ristofalo.
Richling laughed again. There was a faint betrayal of distress in his voice as it fell upon the cunning ear of the Italian; but he laughed too, very gently and innocently, and stood in his tracks.
“I wouldn’t like to refuse a dollar to a man who needs it,” said Richling. He took his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve seen the time when it was much easier to lend than it is just now.” He thrust his hand down into his pocket and stood gazing at the sidewalk.
The Italian glanced at Richling askance, and with one sweep of the eye from the softened crown of his hat to the slender, white bursted slit in the outer side of either well-polished shoe, took in the beauty of his face and a full understanding of his condition. His hair, somewhat dry, had fallen upon his forehead. His fine, smoothskin was darkened by the exposure of his daily wanderings. His cheek-bones, a trifle high, asserted their place above the softly concave cheeks. His mouth was closed and the lips were slightly compressed; the chin small, gracefully turned, not weak,—not strong. His eyes were abstracted, deep, pensive. His dress told much. The fine plaits of his shirt had sprung apart and been neatly sewed together again. His coat was a little faulty in the set of the collar, as if the person who had taken the garment apart and turned the goods had not put it together again with practised skill. It was without spot and the buttons were new. The edges of his shirt-cuffs had been trimmed with the scissors. Face and vesture alike revealed to the sharp eye of the Italian the woe underneath. “He has a wife,” thought Ristofalo.
Richling looked up with a smile. “How can you be so sure you will make, and not lose?”
“I never fail.” There was not the least shade of boasting in the man’s manner. Richling handed out his dollar. It was given without patronage and taken with simple thanks.
“Where goin’ to meet to-morrow morning?” asked Ristofalo. “Here?”
“Oh! I forgot,” said Richling. “Yes, I suppose so; and then you’ll tell me how you invested it, will you?”
“Yes, but you couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
Raphael Ristofalo laughed. “Oh! fifty reason’.”
HOW HE DID IT.
Ristofalo and Richling had hardly separated, when it occurred to the latter that the Italian had first touched him from behind. Had Ristofalo recognized him with his back turned, or had he seen him earlier and followed him? The facts were these: about an hour before the time when Richling omitted to apply for employment in the ill-smelling store in Tchoupitoulas street, Mr. Raphael Ristofalo halted in front of the same place,—which appeared small and slovenly among its more pretentious neighbors,—and stepped just inside the door to where stood a single barrel of apples,—a fruit only the earliest varieties of which were beginning to appear in market. These were very small, round, and smooth, and with a rather wan blush confessed to more than one of the senses that they had seen better days. He began to pick them up and throw them down—one, two, three, four, seven, ten; about half of them were entirely sound.
“How many barrel’ like this?”
“No got-a no more; dass all,” said the dealer. He was a Sicilian. “Lame duck,” he added. “Oäl de rest gone.”
“How much?” asked Ristofalo, still handling the fruit.
The Sicilian came to the barrel, looked in, and said, with a gesture of indifference:—
“’M—doll’ an’ ’alf.”
Ristofalo offered to take them at a dollar if he might wash and sort them under the dealer’s hydrant, which could be heard running in the back yard. The offer would have been rejected with rude scorn but for one thing: it was spoken in Italian. The man looked at him with pleased surprise, and made the concession. The porter of the store, in a red worsted cap, had drawn near. Ristofalo bade him roll the barrel on its chine to the rear and stand it by the hydrant.
“I will come back pretty soon,” he said, in Italian, and went away.
By and by he returned, bringing with him two swarthy, heavy-set, little Sicilian lads, each with his inevitable basket and some clean rags. A smile and gesture to the store-keeper, a word to the boys, and in a moment the barrel was upturned, and the pair were washing, wiping, and sorting the sound and unsound apples at the hydrant.
Ristofalo stood a moment in the entrance of the store. The question now was where to get a dollar. Richling passed, looked in, seemed to hesitate, went on, turned, and passed again, the other way. Ristofalo saw him all the time and recognized him at once, but appeared not to observe him.
“He will do,” thought the Italian. “Be back few minute’,” he said, glancing behind him.
“Or-r righ’,” said the store-keeper, with a hand-wave of good-natured confidence. He recognized Mr. Raphael Ristofalo’s species.
The Italian walked up across Poydras street, saw Richling stop and look at the machinery, approached, and touched him on the shoulder.
On parting with him he did not return to the store where he had left the apples. He walked up Tchoupitoulas street about a mile, and where St. Thomas streetbranches acutely from it, in a squalid district full of the poorest Irish, stopped at a dirty fruit-stand and spoke in Spanish to its Catalan proprietor. Half an hour later twenty-five cents had changed hands, the Catalan’s fruit shelves were bright with small pyramids—sound side foremost—of Ristofalo’s second grade of apples, the Sicilian had Richling’s dollar, and the Italian was gone with his boys and his better grade of fruit. Also, a grocer had sold some sugar, and a druggist a little paper of some harmless confectioner’s dye.
Down behind the French market, in a short, obscure street that runs from Ursulines to Barracks street, and is named in honor of Albert Gallatin, are some old buildings of three or four stories’ height, rented, in John Richling’s day, to a class of persons who got their livelihood by sub-letting the rooms, and parts of rooms, to the wretchedest poor of New Orleans,—organ-grinders, chimney-sweeps, professional beggars, street musicians, lemon-peddlers, rag-pickers, with all the yet dirtier herd that live by hook and crook in the streets or under the wharves; a room with a bed and stove, a room without, a half-room with or without ditto, a quarter-room with or without a blanket or quilt, and with only a chalk-mark on the floor instead of a partition. Into one of these went Mr. Raphael Ristofalo, the two boys, and the apples. Whose assistance or indulgence, if any, he secured in there is not recorded; but when, late in the afternoon, the Italian issued thence—the boys, meanwhile, had been coming and going—an unusual luxury had been offered the roustabouts and idlers of the steam-boat landings, and many had bought and eaten freely of the very small, round, shiny, sugary, and artificially crimson roasted apples, with neatly whittled white-pine stems to poise them on as they were lifted to theconsumer’s watering teeth. When, the next morning Richling laughed at the story, the Italian drew out two dollars and a half, and began to take from it a dollar.
“But you have last night’s lodging and so forth yet to pay for.”
“No. Made friends with Sicilian luggerman. Slept in his lugger.” He showed his brow and cheeks speckled with mosquito-bites. “Ate little hard-tack and coffee with him this morning. Don’t want much.” He offered the dollar with a quarter added. Richling declined the bonus.
“But why not?”
“Oh, I just couldn’t do it,” laughed Richling; “that’s all.”
“Well,” said the Italian, “lend me that dollar one day more, I return you dollar and half in its place to-morrow.”
The lender had to laugh again. “You can’t find an odd barrel of damaged apples every day.”
“No. No apples to-day. But there’s regiment soldiers at lower landing; whole steam-boat load; going to sail this evenin’ to Florida. They’ll eat whole barrel hard-boil’ eggs.”—And they did. When they sailed, the Italian’s pocket was stuffed with small silver.
Richling received his dollar and fifty cents. As he did so, “I would give, if I had it, a hundred dollars for half your art,” he said, laughing unevenly. He was beaten, surpassed, humbled. Still he said, “Come, don’t you want this again? You needn’t pay me for the use of it.”
But the Italian refused. He had outgrown his patron. A week afterward Richling saw him at the Picayune Tier, superintending the unloading of a small schooner-load ofbananas. He had bought the cargo, and was reselling to small fruiterers.
“Make fifty dolla’ to-day,” said the Italian, marking his tally-board with a piece of chalk.
Richling clapped him joyfully on the shoulder, but turned around with inward distress and hurried away. He had not found work.
Events followed of which we have already taken knowledge. Mary, we have seen, fell sick and was taken to the hospital.
“I shall go mad!” Richling would moan, with his dishevelled brows between his hands, and then start to his feet, exclaiming, “I must not! I must not! I must keep my senses!” And so to the commercial regions or to the hospital.
Dr. Sevier, as we know, left word that Richling should call and see him; but when he called, a servant—very curtly, it seemed to him—said the Doctor was not well and didn’t want to see anybody. This was enough for a young man whohadn’this senses. The more he needed a helping hand the more unreasonably shy he became of those who might help him.
“Will nobody come and find us?” Yet he would not cry “Whoop!” and how, then, was anybody to come?
Mary returned to the house again (ah! what joys there are in the vale of tribulation!), and grew strong,—stronger, she averred, than ever she had been.
“And now you’llnotbe cast down,willyou?” she said, sliding into her husband’s lap. She was in an uncommonly playful mood.
“Not a bit of it,” said John. “Every dog has his day. I’ll come to the top. You’ll see.”
“Don’t I know that?” she responded, “Look here, now,” she exclaimed, starting to her feet and facing him,“I’llrecommend you to anybody.I’vegot confidence in you!” Richling thought she had never looked quite so pretty as at that moment. He leaped from his chair with a laughing ejaculation, caught and swung her an instant from her feet, and landed her again before she could cry out. If, in retort, she smote him so sturdily that she had to retreat backward to rearrange her shaken coil of hair, it need not go down on the record; such things will happen. The scuffle and suppressed laughter were detected even in Mrs. Riley’s room.
“Ah!” sighed the widow to herself, “wasn’t it Kate Riley that used to get the sweet, haird knocks!” Her grief was mellowing.
Richling went out on the old search, which the advancing summer made more nearly futile each day than the day before.
Stop. What sound was that?
“Richling! Richling!”
Richling, walking in a commercial street, turned. A member of the firm that had last employed him beckoned him to halt.
“What are you doing now, Richling? Still acting deputy assistant city surveyorpro tem.?”
“Yes.”
“Well, see here! Why haven’t you been in the store to see us lately? Did I seem a little preoccupied the last time you called?”
“I”—Richling dropped his eyes with an embarrassed smile—“I wasafraid I was in the way—or should be.”
“Well and suppose you were? A man that’s looking for work must put himself in the way. But come with me. I think I may be able to give you a lift.”
“How’s that?” asked Richling, as they started off abreast.
“There’s a house around the corner here that will give you some work,—temporary anyhow, and may be permanent.”
So Richling was at work again, hidden away from Dr. Sevier between journal and ledger. His employers asked for references. Richling looked dismayed for a moment, then said, “I’ll bring somebody to recommend me,” went away, and came back with Mary.
“All the recommendation I’ve got,” said he, with timid elation. There was a laugh all round.
“Well, madam, if you say he’s all right, we don’t doubt he is!”
ANOTHER PATIENT.
“Doctah Seveeah,” said Narcisse, suddenly, as he finished sticking with great fervor the postage-stamps on some letters the Doctor had written, and having studied with much care the phraseology of what he had to say, and screwed up his courage to the pitch of utterance, “I saw yo’ notiz on the noozpapeh this mornin’.”
The unresponding Doctor closed his eyes in unutterable weariness of the innocent young gentleman’s prepared speeches.
“Yesseh. ’Tis a beaucheouz notiz. I fine that w’itten with the gweatez accu’acy of diction, in fact. I made a twanslation of that faw my hant. Thaz a thing I am fon’ of, twanslation. I dunno ’ow ’tis, Doctah,” he continued, preparing to go out,—“I dunno ’ow ’tis, but I thing, you goin’ to fine that Mistoo Itchlin ad the en’. I dunno ’ow ’tis. Well, I’m goin’ ad the”—
The Doctor looked up fiercely.
“Bank,” said Narcisse, getting near the door.
“All right!” grumbled the Doctor, more politely.
“Yesseh—befo’ I go ad the poss-office.”
A great many other persons had seen the advertisement. There were many among them who wondered if Mr. John Richling could be such a fool as to fall into that trap. There were others—some of them women, alas!—who wondered how it was that nobody advertised for informationconcerning them, and who wished, yes, “wished to God,” that such a one, or such a one, who had had his money-bags locked up long enough, would die, and then you’d see who’d be advertised for. Some idlers looked in vain into the city directory to see if Mr. John Richling were mentioned there. But Richling himself did not see the paper. His employers, or some fellow-clerk, might have pointed it out to him, but—we shall see in a moment.
Time passed. It always does. At length, one morning, as Dr. Sevier lay on his office lounge, fatigued after his attentions to callers, and much enervated by the prolonged summer heat, there entered a small female form, closely veiled. He rose to a sitting posture.
“Good-morning, Doctor,” said a voice, hurriedly, behind the veil. “Doctor,” it continued, choking,—“Doctor”—
“Why, Mrs. Richling!”
He sprang and gave her a chair. She sank into it.
“Doctor,—O Doctor! John is in the Charity Hospital!”
She buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed aloud. The Doctor was silent a moment, and then asked:—
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Chills.”
It seemed as though she must break down again, but the Doctor stopped her savagely.
“Well, my dear madam, don’t cry! Come, now, you’re making too much of a small matter. Why, what are chills? We’ll break them in forty-eight hours. He’ll have the best of care. You needn’t cry! Certainly this isn’t as bad as when you were there.”
She was still, but shook her head. She couldn’t agree to that.
“Doctor, will you attend him?”
“Mine is a female ward.”
“I know; but”—
“Oh—if you wish it—certainly; of course I will. But now, where have you moved, Mrs. Richling? I sent”— He looked up over his desk toward that of Narcisse.
The Creole had been neither deaf nor idle. Hospital? Then those children in Prieur street had told him right. He softly changed his coat and shoes. As the physician looked over the top of the desk Narcisse’s silent form, just here at the left, but out of the range of vision, passed through the door and went downstairs with the noiselessness of a moonbeam.
Mary explained the location and arrangement of her residence.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s the way your clerk must have overlooked us. We live behind—down the alleyway.”
“Well, at any rate, madam,” said the Doctor, “you are here now, and before you go I want to”— He drew out his pocket-book.
There was a quick gesture of remonstrance and a look of pleading.
“No, no, Doctor, please don’t! please don’t! Give my poor husband one more chance; don’t make me take that. I don’t refuse it for pride’s sake!”
“I don’t know about that,” he replied; “why do you do it?”
“For his sake, Doctor. I know just as well what he’d say—we’ve no right to take it anyhow. We don’t know when we could pay it back.” Her head sank. She wiped a tear from her hand.
“Why, I don’t care if you never pay it back!” The Doctor reddened angrily.
Mary raised her veil.
“Doctor,”—a smile played on her lips,—“I want to say one thing.” She was a little care-worn and grief-worn; and yet, Narcisse, you should have seen her; you would not have slipped out.
“Say on, madam,” responded the Doctor.
“If we have to ask anybody, Doctor, it will be you. John had another situation, but lost it by his chills. He’ll get another. I’m sure he will.” A long, broken sigh caught her unawares. Dr. Sevier thrust his pocket-book back into its place, compressing his lips and giving his head an unpersuaded jerk. And yet, was she not right, according to all his preaching? He asked himself that. “Why didn’t your husband come to see me, as I requested him to do, Mrs. Richling?”
She explained John’s being turned away from the door during the Doctor’s illness. “But anyhow, Doctor, John has always been a little afraid of you.”
The Doctor’s face did not respond to her smile.
“Why, you are not,” he said.
“No.” Her eyes sparkled, but their softer light quickly returned. She smiled and said:—
“I will ask a favor of you now, Doctor.”
They had risen, and she stood leaning sidewise against his low desk and looking up into his face.
“Can you get me some sewing? John says I may take some.”
The Doctor was about to order two dozen shirts instanter, but common sense checked him, and he only said:—
“I will. I will find you some. And I shall see your husband within an hour. Good-by.” She reached the door. “God bless you!” he added.
“What, sir?” she asked, looking back.
But the Doctor was reading.
ALICE.
A little medicine skilfully prescribed, the proper nourishment, two or three days’ confinement in bed, and the Doctor said, as he sat on the edge of Richling’s couch:—
“No, you’d better stay where you are to-day; but to-morrow, if the weather is good, you may sit up.”
Then Richling, with the unreasonableness of a convalescent, wanted to know why he couldn’t just as well go home. But the Doctor said again, no.
“Don’t be impatient; you’ll have to go anyhow before I would prefer to send you. It would be invaluable to you to pass your entire convalescence here, and go home only when you are completely recovered. But I can’t arrange it very well. The Charity Hospital is for sick people.”
“And where is the place for convalescents?”
“There is none,” replied the physician.
“I shouldn’t want to go to it, myself,” said Richling, lolling pleasantly on his pillow; “all I should ask is strength to get home, and I’d be off.”
The Doctor looked another way.
“The sick are not the wise,” he said, abstractedly. “However, in your case, I should let you go to your wife as soon as you safely could.” At that he fell into so long a reverie that Richling studied every line of his face again and again.
A very pleasant thought was in the convalescent’s mind the while. The last three days had made it plain to him that the Doctor was not only his friend, but was willing that Richling should be his.
At length the physician spoke:—
“Mary is wonderfully like Alice, Richling.”
“Yes?” responded Richling, rather timidly. And the Doctor continued:—
“The same age, the same stature, the same features. Alice was a shade paler in her style of beauty, just a shade. Her hair was darker; but otherwise her whole effect was a trifle quieter, even, than Mary’s. She was beautiful,—outside and in. Like Mary, she had a certain richness of character—but of a different sort. I suppose I would not notice the difference if they were not so much alike. She didn’t stay with me long.”
“Did you lose her—here?” asked Richling, hardly knowing how to break the silence that fell, and yet lead the speaker on.
“No. In Virginia.” The Doctor was quiet a moment, and then resumed:—
“I looked at your wife when she was last in my office, Richling; she had a little timid, beseeching light in her eyes that is not usual with her—and a moisture, too; and—it seemed to me as though Alice had come back. For my wife lived by my moods. Her spirits rose or fell just as my whim, conscious or unconscious, gave out light or took on shadow.” The Doctor was still again, and Richling only indicated his wish to hear more by shifting himself on his elbow.
“Do you remember, Richling, when the girl you had been bowing down to and worshipping, all at once, in a single wedding day, was transformed into your adorer?”
“Yes, indeed,” responded the convalescent, withbeaming face. “Wasn’t it wonderful? I couldn’t credit my senses. But how did you—was it the same”—
“It’s the same, Richling, with every man who has really secured a woman’s heart with her hand. It was very strange and sweet to me. Alice would have been a spoiled child if her parents could have spoiled her; and when I was courting her she was the veriest little empress that ever walked over a man.”
“I can hardly imagine,” said Richling, with subdued amusement, looking at the long, slender form before him. The Doctor smiled very sweetly.
“Yes.” Then, after another meditative pause: “But from the moment I became her husband she lived in continual trepidation. She so magnified me in her timid fancy that she was always looking tremulously to me to see what should be her feeling. She even couldn’t help being afraid of me. I hate for any one to be afraid of me.”
“Do you, Doctor?” said Richling, with surprise and evident introspection.
“Yes.”
Richling felt his own fear changing to love.
“When I married,” continued Dr. Sevier, “I had thought Alice was one that would go with me hand in hand through life, dividing its cares and doubling its joys, as they say; I guiding her and she guiding me. But if I had let her, she would have fallen into me as a planet might fall into the sun. I didn’t want to be the sun to her. I didn’t want her to shine only when I shone on her, and be dark when I was dark. No man ought to want such a thing. Yet she made life a delight to me; only she wanted that development which a better training, or even a harder training, might have given her; that subserving of the emotions to the”—he waved his hand—“Ican’t philosophize about her. We loved one another with our might, and she’s in heaven.”
Richling felt an inward start. The Doctor interrupted his intended speech.
“Our short experience together, Richling, is the one great light place in my life; and to me, to-day, sere as I am, the sweet—the sweetest sound—on God’s green earth”—the corners of his mouth quivered—“is the name of Alice. Take care of Mary, Richling; she’s a priceless treasure. Don’t leave the making and sustaining of the home sunshine all to her, any more than you’d like her to leave it all to you.”
“I’ll not, Doctor; I’ll not.” Richling pressed the Doctor’s hand fervently; but the Doctor drew it away with a certain energy, and rose, saying:—
“Yes, you can sit up to-morrow.”
The day that Richling went back to his malarious home in Prieur street Dr. Sevier happened to meet him just beyond the hospital gate. Richling waved his hand. He looked weak and tremulous. “Homeward bound,” he said, gayly.
The physician reached forward in his carriage and bade his driver stop. “Well, be careful of yourself; I’m coming to see you in a day or two.”
THE SUN AT MIDNIGHT.
Dr. Sevier was daily overtasked. His campaigns against the evils of our disordered flesh had even kept him from what his fellow-citizens thought was only his share of attention to public affairs.
“Why,” he cried to a committee that came soliciting his coöperation, “here’s one little unprofessional call that I’ve been trying every day for two weeks to make—and ought to have made—and must make; and I haven’t got a step toward it yet. Oh, no, gentlemen!” He waved their request away.
He was very tired. The afternoon was growing late. He dismissed his jaded horse toward home, walked down to Canal street, and took that yellow Bayou-Road omnibus whose big blue star painted on its corpulent side showed that quadroons, etc., were allowed a share of its accommodation, and went rumbling and tumbling over the cobble-stones of the French quarter.
By and by he got out, walked a little way southward in the hot, luminous shade of low-roofed tenement cottages that closed their window-shutters noiselessly, in sensitive-plant fashion, at his slow, meditative approach, and slightly and as noiselessly reopened them behind him, showing a pair of wary eyes within. Presently he recognized just ahead of him, standing out on the sidewalk, the little house that had been described to him by Mary.
In a door-way that opened upon two low woodensidewalk steps stood Mrs. Riley, clad in a crisp black and white calico, a heavy, fat babe poised easily in one arm. The Doctor turned directly toward the narrow alley, merely touching his hat to her as he pushed its small green door inward, and disappeared, while she lifted her chin at the silent liberty and dropped her eyelids.
Dr. Sevier went down the cramped, ill-paved passage very slowly and softly. Regarding himself objectively, he would have said the deep shade of his thoughts was due partly, at least, to his fatigue. But that would hardly have accounted for a certain faint glow of indignation that came into them. In truth, he began distinctly to resent this state of affairs in the life of John and Mary Richling. An ill-defined anger beat about in his brain in search of some tangible shortcoming of theirs upon which to thrust the blame of their helplessness. “Criminal helplessness,” he called it, mutteringly. He tried to define the idea—or the idea tried to define itself—that they had somehow been recreant to their social caste, by getting down into the condition and estate of what one may call the alien poor. Carondelet street had in some way specially vexed him to-day, and now here was this. It was bad enough, he thought, for men to slip into riches through dark back windows; but here was a brace of youngsters who had glided into poverty, and taken a place to which they had no right to stoop. Treachery,—that was the name for it. And now he must be expected,—the Doctor quite forgot that nobody had asked him to do it,—he must be expected to come fishing them out of their hole, like a rag-picker at a trash barrel.
—“Bringing me into this wretched alley!” he silently thought. His foot slipped on a mossy brick. Oh, no doubt they thought they were punishing some negligent friend or friends by letting themselves down into this sortof thing. Never mind! He recalled the tender, confiding, friendly way in which he had talked to John, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. He wished, now, he had every word back he had uttered. They might hide away to the full content of their poverty-pride. Poverty-pride: he had invented the term; it was the opposite pole to purse-pride—and just as mean,—no, meaner. There! Must he yet slip down? He muttered an angry word. Well, well, this was making himself a little the cheapest he had ever let himself be made. And probably this was what they wanted! Misery’s revenge. Umhum! They sit down in sour darkness, eh! and make relief seek them. It wouldn’t be the first time he had caught the poor taking savage comfort in the blush which their poverty was supposed to bring to the cheek of better-kept kinsfolk. True, he didn’t know this was the case with the Richlings. But wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? And have they a dog, that will presently hurl himself down this alley at one’s legs? He hopes so. He would so like to kick him clean over the twelve-foot close plank fence that crowded his right shoulder. Never mind! His anger became solemn.
The alley opened into a small, narrow yard, paved with ashes from the gas-works. At the bottom of the yard a rough shed spanned its breadth, and a woman was there, busily bending over a row of wash-tubs.
The Doctor knocked on a door near at hand, then waited a moment, and, getting no response, turned away toward the shed and the deep, wet, burring sound of a wash-board. The woman bending over it did not hear his footfall. Presently he stopped. She had just straightened up, lifting a piece of the washing to the height of her head, and letting it down with a swash and slap upon the board. It was a woman’s garment, butcertainly not hers. For she was small and slight. Her hair was hidden under a towel. Her skirts were shortened to a pair of dainty ankles by an extra under-fold at the neat, round waist. Her feet were thrust into a pair of sabots. She paused a moment in her work, and, lifting with both smoothly rounded arms, bared nearly to the shoulder, a large apron from her waist, wiped the perspiration from her forehead. It was Mary.
The red blood came up into the Doctor’s pale, thin face. This was too outrageous. This was insult! He stirred as if to move forward. He would confront her. Yes, just as she was. He would speak. He would speak bluntly. He would chide sternly. He had the right. The only friend in the world from whom she had not escaped beyond reach,—he would speak the friendly, angry word that would stop this shocking—
But, truly, deeply incensed as he was, and felt it his right to be, hurt, wrung, exasperated, he did not advance. She had reached down and taken from the wash-bench the lump of yellow soap that lay there, and was soaping the garment on the board before her, turning it this way and that. As she did this she began, all to herself and for her own ear, softly, with unconscious richness and tenderness of voice, to sing. And what was her song?
“Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?”
Down drooped the listener’s head. Remember? Ah, memory!—The old, heart-rending memory! Sweet Alice!
“Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown?”
Yes, yes; so brown!—so brown!
“She wept with delight when you gave her a smile,And trembled with fear at your frown.”
Ah! but the frown is gone! There is a look of supplication now. Sing no more! Oh, sing no more! Yes, surely, she will stop there!
No. The voice rises gently—just a little—into the higher key, soft and clear as the note of a distant bird, and all unaware of a listener. Oh! in mercy’s name—
“In the old church-yard in the valley, Ben Bolt,In a corner obscure and alone,They have fitted a slab of granite so gray,And sweet Alice lies under the stone.”
The little toiling figure bent once more across the wash-board and began to rub. He turned, the first dew of many a long year welling from each eye, and stole away, out of the little yard and down the dark, slippery alley, to the street.
Mrs. Riley still stood on the door-sill, holding the child.
“Good-evening, madam!”
“Sur, to you.” She bowed with dignity.
“Is Mrs. Richling in?”
There was a shadow of triumph in her faint smile.
“She is.”
“I should like to see her.”
Mrs. Riley hoisted her chin. “I dunno if she’s a-seein’ comp’ny to-day.” The voice was amiably important. “Wont ye walk in? Take a seat and sit down, sur, and I’ll go and infarm the laydie.”
“Thank you,” said the Doctor, but continued to stand.
Mrs. Riley started and stopped again.
“Ye forgot to give me yer kyaird, sur.” She drew her chin in again austerely.
“Just say Dr. Sevier.”
“Certainly, sur; yes, that’ll be sufficiend. And dispinse with the kyaird.” She went majestically.
The Doctor, left alone, cast his uninterested glance around the smart little bare-floored parlor, upon its new, jig-sawed, gray hair-cloth furniture, and up upon a picture of the Pope. When Mrs. Riley, in a moment, returned he stood looking out the door.
“Mrs. Richling consints to see ye, sur. She’ll be in turreckly. Take a seat and sit down.” She readjusted the infant on her arm and lifted and swung a hair-cloth arm-chair toward him without visible exertion. “There’s no use o’ having chayers if ye don’t sit on um,” she added affably.
The Doctor sat down, and Mrs. Riley occupied the exact centre of the small, wide-eared, brittle-looking sofa, where she filled in the silent moments that followed by pulling down the skirts of the infant’s apparel, oppressed with the necessity of keeping up a conversation and with the want of subject-matter. The child stared at the Doctor, and suddenly plunged toward him with a loud and very watery coo.
“Ah-h!” said Mrs. Riley, in ostentatious rebuke. “Mike!” she cried, laughingly, as the action was repeated. “Ye rowdy, air ye go-un to fight the gintleman?”
She laughed sincerely, and the Doctor could but notice how neat and good-looking she was. He condescended to crook his finger at the babe. This seemed to exasperate the so-called rowdy. He planted his pink feet on his mother’s thigh and gave a mighty lunge and whoop.
“He’s go-un to be a wicked bruiser,” said proud Mrs. Riley. “He”—the pronoun stood, this time, for her husband—“he never sah the child. He was kilt with an explosion before the child was barn.”
She held the infant on her strong arm as he struggled to throw himself, with wide-stretched jaws, upon her bosom; and might have been devoured by the wickedbruiser had not his attention been diverted by the entrance of Mary, who came in at last, all in fragrant white, with apologies for keeping the Doctor waiting.
He looked down into her uplifted eyes. What a riddle is woman! Had he not just seen this one in sabots? Did she not certainly know, through Mrs. Riley, that he must have seen her so? Were not her skirts but just now hitched up with an under-tuck, and fastened with a string? Had she not just laid off, in hot haste, a suds-bespattered apron and the garments of toil beneath it? Had not a towel been but now unbound from the hair shining here under his glance in luxuriant brown coils? This brightness of eye, that seemed all exhilaration, was it not trepidation instead? And this rosiness, so like redundant vigor, was it not the flush of her hot task? He fancied he saw—in truth he may have seen—a defiance in the eyes as he glanced upon, and tardily dropped, the little water-soaked hand with a bow.
Mary turned to present Mrs. Riley, who bowed and said, trying to hold herself with majesty while Mike drew her head into his mouth: “Sur,” then turned with great ceremony to Mary, and adding, “I’ll withdrah,” withdrew with the head and step of a duchess.
“How is your husband, madam?”
“John?—is not well at all, Doctor; though he would say he was if he were here. He doesn’t shake off his chills. He is out, though, looking for work. He’d go as long as he could stand.”
She smiled; she almost laughed; but half an eye could see it was only to avoid the other thing.
“Where does he go?”
“Everywhere!” She laughed this time audibly.
“If he went everywhere I should see him,” said Dr. Sevier.
“Ah! naturally,” responded Mary, playfully. “But he does go wherever he thinks there’s work to be found. He doesn’t wander clear out among the plantations, of course, where everybody has slaves, and there’s no work but slaves’ work. And he says it’s useless to think of a clerkship this time of year. It must be, isn’t it?”
The Doctor made no answer.
There was a footstep in the alley.
“He’s coming now,” said Mary,—“that’s he. He must have got work to-day. He has an acquaintance, an Italian, who promised to have something for him to do very soon. Doctor,”—she began to put together the split fractions of a palm-leaf fan, smiling diffidently at it the while,—“I can’t see how it is any discredit to a man not to have aknackfor making money?”
She lifted her peculiar look of radiant inquiry.
“It is not, madam.”
Mary laughed for joy. The light of her face seemed to spread clear into her locks.
“Well, I knew you’d say so! John blames himself; he can make money, you know, Doctor, but he blames himself because he hasn’t that natural gift for it that Mr. Ristofalo has. Why, Mr. Ristofalo is simply wonderful!” She smiled upon her fan in amused reminiscence. “John is always wishing he had his gift.”
“My dear madam, don’t covet it! At least don’t exchange it for anything else.”
The Doctor was still in this mood of disapprobation when John entered. The radiancy of the young husband’s greeting hid for a moment, but only so long, the marks of illness and adversity. Mary followed him with her smiling eyes as the two men shook hands, and John drew a chair near to her and sat down with a sigh of mingled pleasure and fatigue.
She told him of whom she and their visitor had just been speaking.
“Raphael Ristofalo!” said John, kindling afresh. “Yes; I’ve been with him all day. It humiliates me to think of him.”
Dr. Sevier responded quietly:—
“You’ve no right to let it humiliate you, sir.”
Mary turned to John with dancing eyes, but he passed the utterance as a mere compliment, and said, through his smiles:—
“Just see how it is to-day. I have been overseeing the unloading of a little schooner from Ruatan island loaded with bananas, cocoanuts, and pine-apples. I’ve made two dollars; he has made a hundred.”
Richling went on eagerly to tell about the plain, lustreless man whose one homely gift had fascinated him. The Doctor was entertained. The narrator sparkled and glowed as he told of Ristofalo’s appearance, and reproduced his speeches and manner.
“Tell about the apples and eggs,” said the delighted Mary.
He did so, sitting on the front edge of his chair-seat, and sprawling his legs now in front and now behind him as he swung now around to his wife and now to the Doctor. Mary laughed softly at every period, and watched the Doctor, to see his slight smile at each detail of the story. Richling enjoyed telling it; he had worked; his earnings were in his pocket; gladness was easy.
“Why, I’m learning more from Raphael Ristofalo than I ever learned from my school-masters: I’m learning the art of livelihood.”
He ran on from Ristofalo to the men among whom he had been mingling all day. He mimicked the strange, long swing of their Sicilian speech; told of their swarthyfaces and black beards, their rich instinct for color in costume; their fierce conversation and violent gestures; the energy of their movements when they worked, and the profoundness of their repose when they rested; the picturesqueness and grotesqueness of the negroes, too; the huge, flat, round baskets of fruit which the black men carried on their heads, and which the Sicilians bore on their shoulders or the nape of the neck. The “captain” of the schooner was a central figure.
“Doctor,” asked Richling, suddenly, “do you know anything about the island of Cozumel?”
“Aha!” thought Mary. So there was something besides the day’s earning that elated him.
She had suspected it. She looked at her husband with an expression of the most alert pleasure. The Doctor noticed it.
“No,” he said, in reply to Richling’s question.
“It stands out in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Yucatan,” began Richling.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Well, Mary, I’ve almost promised the schooner captain that we’ll go there. He wants to get up a colony.”
Mary started.
“Why, John!” She betrayed a look of dismay, glanced at their visitor, tried to say “Have you?” approvingly, and blushed.
The Doctor made no kind of response.
“Now, don’t conclude,” said John to Mary, coloring too, but smiling. He turned to the physician. “It’s a wonderful spot, Doctor.”
But the Doctor was still silent, and Richling turned.
“Just to think, Mary, of a place where you can raise all the products of two zones; where health is almostperfect; where the yellow fever has never been; and where there is such beauty as can be only in the tropics and a tropical sea. Why, Doctor, I can’t understand why Europeans or Americans haven’t settled it long ago.”
“I suppose we can find out before we go, can’t we?” said Mary, looking timorously back and forth between John and the Doctor.
“The reason is,” replied John, “it’s so little known. Just one island away out by itself. Three crops of fruit a year. One acre planted in bananas feeds fifty men. All the capital a man need have is an axe to cut down the finest cabinet and dye-woods in the world. The thermometer never goes above ninety nor below forty. You can hire all the labor you want at a few cents a day.”
Mary’s diligent eye detected a cloud on the Doctor’s face. But John, though nettled, pushed on the more rapidly.
“A man can make—easily!—a thousand dollars the first year, and live on two hundred and fifty. It’s the place for a poor man.”
He looked a little defiant.
“Of course,” said Mary, “I know you wouldn’t come to an opinion”—she smiled with the same restless glance—“until you had made all the inquiries necessary. It mu—must—be a delightful place. Doctor?”
Her eyes shone blue as the sky.
“I wouldn’t send a convict to such a place,” said Dr. Sevier.
Richling flamed up.
“Don’t you think,” he began to say with visible restraint and a faint, ugly twist of the head,—“don’t you think it’s a better place for a poor man than a great, heartless town?”
“This isn’t a heartless town,” said the Doctor.
“He doesn’t mean it as you do, Doctor,” interposed Mary, with alarm. “John, you ought to explain.”
“Than a great town,” said Richling, “where a man of honest intentions and real desire to live and be useful and independent; who wants to earn his daily bread at any honorable cost, and who can’t do it because the town doesn’t want his services, and will not have them—can go”— He ceased, with his sentence all tangled.
“No!” the Doctor was saying meanwhile. “No! No! No!”
“Here I go, day after day,” persisted Richling, extending his arm and pointing indefinitely through the window.
“No, no, you don’t, John,” cried Mary, with an effort at gayety; “you don’t go by the window, John; you go by the door.” She pulled his arm down tenderly.
“I go by the alley,” said John. Silence followed. The young pair contrived to force a little laugh, and John made an apologetic move.
“Doctor,” he exclaimed, with an air of pleasantry, “the whole town’s asleep!—sound asleep, like a negro in the sunshine! There isn’t work for one man in fifty!” He ended tremulously. Mary looked at him with dropped face but lifted eyes, handling the fan, whose rent she had made worse.
“Richling, my friend,”—the Doctor had never used that term before,—“what does your Italian money-maker say to the idea?”
Richling gave an Italian shrug and his own pained laugh.
“Exactly! Why, Mr. Richling, you’re on an island now,—an island in mid-ocean. Both of you!” He waved his hands toward the two without lifting his head from the back of the easy-chair, where he had dropped it.
“What do you mean, Doctor?”
“Mean? Isn’t my meaning plain enough? I mean you’re too independent. You know very well, Richling, that you’ve started out in life with some fanciful feud against the ‘world.’ What it is I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s not the sort that religion requires. You’ve told this world—you remember you said it to me once—that if it will go one road you’ll go another. You’ve forgotten that, mean and stupid and bad as your fellow-creatures are, they’re your brothers and sisters, and that they have claims on you as such, and that you have claims on them as such.—Cozumel! You’re there now! Has a friend no rights? I don’t know your immediate relatives, and I say nothing about them”—