John Richling.
John Richling.
At the door of his own room, with one hand on the unturned knob and one holding the card, the Doctor stopped and reflected. The card gave no indication of urgency. Did it? It was hard to tell. He didn’t want to look foolish; morning would be time enough; he would go early next morning.
But at daybreak he was summoned post-haste to the bedside of a lady who had stayed all summer in New Orleans so as not to be out of this good doctor’s reach at this juncture. She counted him a dear friend, and in similar trials had always required close and continual attention. It was the same now.
Dr. Sevier scrawled and sent to the Richlings a line, saying that, if either of them was sick, he would come at their call. When the messenger returned with word from Mrs. Riley that both of them were out, the Doctor’s mind was much relieved. So a day and a night passed in which he did not close his eyes.
The next morning, as he stood in his office, hat in hand, and a finger pointing to a prescription on his desk, which he was directing Narcisse to give to some one who would call for it, there came a sudden hurried pounding of feminine feet on the stairs, a whiff of robes in the corridor, and Mary Richling rushed into his presence all tears and cries.
“O Doctor!—O Doctor! O God, my husband! my husband! O Doctor, my husband is in the Parish Prison!” She sank to the floor.
The Doctor raised her up. Narcisse hurried forward with his hands full of restoratives.
“Take away those things,” said the Doctor, resentfully. “Here!—Mrs. Richling, take Narcisse’s arm and go down and get into my carriage. I must write a short note, excusing myself from an appointment, and then I will join you.”
Mary stood alone, turned, and passed out of the office beside the young Creole, but without taking his proffered arm. Did she suspect him of having something to do with this dreadful affair?
“Missez Witchlin,” said he, as soon as they were out in the corridor, “I dunno if you goin’ to billiv me, but I boun’ to tell you that nodwithstanning that yo’ ’uzban’ is displease’ with me, an’ nodwithstanning ’e’s in that calaboose, I h’always fine ’im a puffic gen’leman—that Mistoo Itchlin,—an’ I’ll sweah ’eisa gen’leman!”
She lifted her anguished eyes and looked into his beautiful face. Could she trust him? His little forehead was as hard as a goat’s, but his eyes were brimming with tears, and his chin quivered. As they reached the head of the stairs he again offered his arm, and she took it, moaning softly, as they descended:—
“O John! O John! O my husband, my husband!”
THE TROUGH OF THE SEA.
Narcisse, on receiving his scolding from Richling, had gone to his home in Casa Calvo street, a much greater sufferer than he had appeared to be. While he was confronting his abaser there had been a momentary comfort in the contrast between Richling’s ill-behavior and his own self-control. It had stayed his spirit and turned the edge of Richling’s sharp denunciations. But, as he moved off the field, he found himself, at every step, more deeply wounded than even he had supposed. He began to suffocate with chagrin, and hurried his steps in sheer distress. He did not experience that dull, vacant acceptance of universal scorn which an unresentful coward feels. His pangs were all the more poignant because he knew his own courage.
In his home he went so straight up to the withered little old lady, in the dingiest of flimsy black, who was his aunt, and kissed her so passionately, that she asked at once what was the matter. He recounted the facts, shedding tears of mortification. Her feeling, by the time he had finished the account, was a more unmixed wrath than his, and, harmless as she was, and wrapped up in her dear, pretty nephew as she was, she yet demanded to know why such a man shouldn’t be called out upon the field of honor.
“Ah!” cried Narcisse, shrinkingly. She had touched the core of the tumor. One gets a public tongue-lashingfrom a man concerning money borrowed; well, how is one going to challenge him without first handing back the borrowed money? It was a scalding thought! The rotten joists beneath the bare scrubbed-to-death floor quaked under Narcisse’s to-and-fro stride.
“—And then, anyhow!”—he stopped and extended both hands, speaking, of course, in French,—“anyhow, he is the favored friend of Dr. Sevier. If I hurt him—I lose my situation! If he hurts me—I lose my situation!”
He dried his eyes. His aunt saw the insurmountability of the difficulty, and they drowned feeling in an affectionate glass of green-orangeade.
“But never mind!” Narcisse set his glass down and drew out his tobacco. He laughed spasmodically as he rolled his cigarette. “You shall see. The game is not finished yet.”
Yet Richling passed the next day and night without assassination, and on the second morning afterward, as on the first, went out in quest of employment. He and Mary had eaten bread, and it had gone into their life without a remainder either in larder or purse. Richling was all aimless.
“I do wish I had theartof finding work,” said he. He smiled. “I’ll get it,” he added, breaking their last crust in two. “I have the science already. Why, look you, Mary, the quiet, amiable, imperturbable, dignified, diurnal, inexorable haunting of men of influence will get you whatever you want.”
“Well, why don’t you do it, dear? Is there any harm in it? I don’t see any harm in it. Why don’t you do that very thing?”
“I’m telling you the truth,” answered he, ignoring her question. “Nothing else short of overtowering merit will get you what you want half so surely.”
“Well, why not do it? Why not?” A fresh, glad courage sparkled in the wife’s eyes.
“Why, Mary,” said John, “I never in my life tried so hard to do anything else as I’ve tried to do that! It sounds easy; but try it! You can’t conceive how hard it is till you try it. I can’tdoit! Ican’tdo it!”
“I’ddo it!” cried Mary. Her face shone. “I’ddo it! You’d see if I didn’t! Why, John”—
“All right!” exclaimed he; “you sha’n’t talk that way to me for nothing. I’ll try it again! I’ll begin to-day!”
“Good-by,” he said. He reached an arm over one of her shoulders and around under the other and drew her up on tiptoe. She threw both hers about his neck. A long kiss—then a short one.
“John, something tells me we’re near the end of our troubles.”
John laughed grimly. “Ristofalo was to get back to the city to-day: maybe he’s going to put us out of our misery. There are two ways for troubles to end.” He walked away as he spoke. As he passed under the window in the alley, its sash was thrown up and Mary leaned out on her elbows.
“John!”
“Well?”
They looked into each other’s eyes with the quiet pleasure of tried lovers, and were silent a moment. She leaned a little farther down, and said, softly:—
“You mustn’t mind what I said just now.”
“Why, what did you say?”
“That if it were I, I’d do it. I know you can do anything I can do, and a hundred better things besides.”
He lifted his hand to her cheek. “We’ll see,” he whispered. She drew in, and he moved on.
Morning passed. Noon came. From horizon to horizon the sky was one unbroken blue. The sun spread its bright, hot rays down upon the town and far beyond, ripening the distant, countless fields of the great delta, which by and by were to empty their abundance into the city’s lap for the employment, the nourishing, the clothing of thousands. But in the dusty streets, along the ill-kept fences and shadowless walls of the quiet districts, and on the glaring façades and heated pavements of the commercial quarters, it seemed only as though the slowly retreating summer struck with the fury of a wounded Amazon. Richling was soon dust-covered and weary. He had gone his round. There were not many men whom he could even propose to haunt. He had been to all of them. Dr. Sevier was not one. “Not to-day,” said Richling.
“It all depends on the way it’s done,” he said to himself; “it needn’t degrade a man if it’s done the right way.” It was only by such philosophy he had done it at all. Ristofalo he could have haunted without effort; but Ristofalo was not to be found. Richling tramped in vain. It may be that all plans were of equal merit just then. The summers of New Orleans in those times were, as to commerce, an utter torpor, and the autumn reawakening was very tardy. It was still too early for the stirrings of general mercantile life. The movement of the cotton crop was just beginning to be perceptible; but otherwise almost the only sounds were from the hammers of craftsmen making the town larger and preparing it for the activities of days to come.
The afternoon wore along. Not a cent yet to carry home! Men began to shut their idle shops and go to meet their wives and children about their comfortable dinner-tables. The sun dipped low. Hammers and sawswere dropped into tool-boxes, and painters pulled themselves out of their overalls. The mechanic’s rank, hot supper began to smoke on its bare board; but there was one board that was still altogether bare and to which no one hastened. Another day and another chance of life were gone.
Some men at a warehouse door, the only opening in the building left unclosed, were hurrying in a few bags of shelled corn. Night was falling. At an earlier hour Richling had offered the labor of his hands at this very door and had been rejected. Now, as they rolled in the last truck-load, they began to ask for rest with all the gladness he would have felt to be offered toil, singing,—
“To blow, to blow, some time for to blow.”
They swung the great leaves of the door together as they finished their chorus, stood grouped outside a moment while the warehouseman turned the resounding lock, and then went away. Richling, who had moved on, watched them over his shoulder, and as they left turned back. He was about to do what he had never done before. He went back to the door where the bags of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still and let him pass; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed, cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion. Richling dropped quickly on one knee and gathered hastily into his pocket a little pile of shelled corn that had leaked from one of the bags.
That was all. No harm to a living soul; no theft; no wrong; but ah! as he rose he felt a sudden inward lesion. Something broke. It was like a ship, in a dream, noiselessly striking a rock where no rock is. It seemed asthough the very next thing was to begin going to pieces. He walked off in the dark shadow of the warehouse, half lifted from his feet by a vague, wide dismay. And yet he felt no greatness of emotion, but rather a painful want of it, as if he were here and emotion were yonder, down-street, or up-street, or around the corner. The ground seemed slipping from under him. He appeared to have all at once melted away to nothing. He stopped. He even turned to go back. He felt that if he should go and put that corn down where he had found it he should feel himself once more a living thing of substance and emotions. Then it occurred to him—no, he would keep it, he would take it to Mary; but himself—he would not touch it; and so he went home.
Mary parched the corn, ground it fine in the coffee-mill and salted and served it close beside the candle. “It’s good white corn,” she said, laughing. “Many a time when I was a child I used to eat this in my playhouse and thought it delicious. Didn’t you? What! not going to eat?”
Richling had told her how he got the corn. Now he told his sensations. “You eat it, Mary,” he said at the end; “you needn’t feel so about it; but if I should eat it I should feel myself a vagabond. It may be foolish, but I wouldn’t touch it for a hundred dollars.” A hundred dollars had come to be his synonyme for infinity.
Mary gazed at him a moment tearfully, and rose, with the dish in her hand, saying, with a smile, “I’d look pretty, wouldn’t I!”
She set it aside, and came and kissed his forehead. By and by she asked:—
“And so you saw no work, anywhere?”
“Oh, yes!” he replied, in a tone almost free from dejection. “I saw any amount of work—preparations for abig season. I think I certainly shall pick up something to-morrow—enough, anyhow, to buy something to eat with. If we can only hold out a little longer—just a little—I am sure there’ll be plenty to do—for everybody.” Then he began to show distress again. “I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter, or if I’d been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer, or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn’t I try that, and was refused?”
“I’m glad of it,” said Mary.
“‘Show me your hands,’ said the man to me. I showed them. ‘You won’t do,’ said he.”
“I’m glad of it!” said Mary, again.
“No,” continued Richling; “or if I’d been a glazier, or a whitewasher, or a wood-sawyer, or”—he began to smile in a hard, unpleasant way,—“or if I’d been anything but an American gentleman. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t get the work!”
Mary sank into his lap, with her very best smile.
“John, if you hadn’t been an American gentleman”—
“We should never have met,” said John. “That’s true; that’s true.” They looked at each other, rejoicing in mutual ownership.
“But,” said John, “I needn’t have been the typical American gentleman,—completely unfitted for prosperity and totally unequipped for adversity.”
“That’s not your fault,” said Mary.
“No, not entirely; but it’s your calamity, Mary. O Mary! I little thought”—
She put her hand quickly upon his mouth. His eye flashed and he frowned.
“Don’t do so!” he exclaimed, putting the hand away; then blushed for shame, and kissed her.
They went to bed. Bread would have put them to sleep. But after a long time—
“John,” said one voice in the darkness, “do you remember what Dr. Sevier told us?”
“Yes, he said we had no right to commit suicide by starvation.”
“If you don’t get work to-morrow, are you going to see him?”
“I am.”
In the morning they rose early.
During these hard days Mary was now and then conscious of one feeling which she never expressed, and was always a little more ashamed of than probably she need have been, but which, stifle it as she would, kept recurring in moments of stress. Mrs. Riley—such was the thought—need not be quite so blind. It came to her as John once more took his good-by, the long kiss and the short one, and went breakfastless away. But was Mrs. Riley as blind as she seemed? She had vision enough to observe that the Richlings had bought no bread the day before, though she did overlook the fact that emptiness would set them astir before their usual hour of rising. She knocked at Mary’s inner door. As it opened a quick glance showed the little table that occupied the centre of the room standing clean and idle.
“Why, Mrs. Riley!” cried Mary; for on one of Mrs. Riley’s large hands there rested a blue-edged soup-plate, heaping full of the food that goes nearest to the Creole heart—jambolaya. There it was, steaming and smelling,—a delicious confusion of rice and red pepper, chicken legs, ham, and tomatoes. Mike, on her opposite arm, was struggling to lave his socks in it.
“Ah!” said Mrs. Riley, with a disappointed lift of thehead, “ye’re after eating breakfast already! And the plates all tleared off. Well, ye air smairt! I knowed Mr. Richlin’s taste for jumbalie”—
Mary smote her hands together. “And he’s just this instant gone! John! John! Why, he’s hardly”— She vanished through the door, glided down the alley, leaned out the gate, looking this way and that, tripped down to this corner and looked—“Oh! oh!”—no John there—back and up to the other corner—“Oh! which way did John go?” There was none to answer.
Hours passed; the shadows shortened and shrunk under their objects, crawled around stealthily behind them as the sun swung through the south, and presently began to steal away eastward, long and slender. This was the day that Dr. Sevier dined out, as hereinbefore set forth.
The sun set. Carondelet street was deserted. You could hear your own footstep on its flags. In St. Charles street the drinking-saloons and gamblers’ drawing-rooms, and the barber-shops, and the show-cases full of shirt-bosoms and walking-canes, were lighted up. The smell of lemons and mint grew finer than ever. Wide Canal street, out under the darkling crimson sky, was resplendent with countless many-colored lamps. From the river the air came softly, cool and sweet. The telescope man set up his skyward-pointing cylinder hard by the dark statue of Henry Clay; the confectioneries were ablaze and full of beautiful life, and every little while a great, empty cotton-dray or two went thundering homeward over the stony pavements until the earth shook, and speech for the moment was drowned. The St. Charles, such a glittering mass in winter nights, stood out high and dark under the summer stars, with no glow except just in its midst, in the rotunda; and even the rotunda was well-nigh desertedThe clerk at his counter saw a young man enter the great door opposite, and quietly marked him as he drew near.
Let us not draw the stranger’s portrait. If that were a pleasant task the clerk would not have watched him. What caught and kept that functionary’s eye was that, whatever else might be revealed by the stranger’s aspect,—weariness, sickness, hardship, pain,—the confession was written all over him, on his face, on his garb, from his hat’s crown to his shoe’s sole, Penniless! Penniless! Only when he had come quite up to the counter the clerk did not see him at all.
“Is Dr. Sevier in?”
“Gone out to dine,” said the clerk, looking over the inquirer’s head as if occupied with all the world’s affairs except the subject in hand.
“Do you know when he will be back?”
“Ten o’clock.”
The visitor repeated the hour murmurously and looked something dismayed. He tarried.
“Hem!—I will leave my card, if you please.”
The clerk shoved a little box of cards toward him, from which a pencil dangled by a string. The penniless wrote his name and handed it in. Then he moved away, went down the tortuous granite stair, and waited in the obscurity of the dimly lighted porch below. The card was to meet the contingency of the Doctor’s coming in by some other entrance. He would watch for him here.
By and by—he was very weary—he sat down on the stairs. But a porter, with a huge trunk on his back, told him very distinctly that he was in the way there, and he rose and stood aside. Soon he looked for another resting-place. He must get off of his feet somewhere, if only fora few moments. He moved back into the deep gloom of the stair-way shadow, and sank down upon the pavement. In a moment he was fast asleep.
He dreamed that he, too, was dining out. Laughter and merry-making were on every side. The dishes of steaming viands were grotesque in bulk. There were mountains of fruit and torrents of wine. Strange people of no identity spoke in senseless vaporings that passed for side-splitting wit, and friends whom he had not seen since childhood appeared in ludicrously altered forms and announced impossible events. Every one ate like a Cossack. One of the party, champing like a boar, pushed him angrily, and when he, eating like the rest, would have turned fiercely on the aggressor, he awoke.
A man standing over him struck him smartly with his foot.
“Get up out o’ this! Get up! get up!”
The sleeper bounded to his feet. The man who had waked him grasped him by the lapel of his coat.
“What do you mean?” exclaimed the awakened man, throwing the other off violently.
“I’ll show you!” replied the other, returning with a rush; but he was thrown off again, this time with a blow of the fist.
“You scoundrel!” cried the penniless man, in a rage; “if you touch me again I’ll kill you!”
They leaped together. The one who had proposed to show what he meant was knocked flat upon the stones. The crowd that had run into the porch made room for him to fall. A leather helmet rolled from his head, and the silver crescent of the police flashed on his breast. The police were not uniformed in those days.
But he is up in an instant and his adversary is down—backward, on his elbows. Then the penniless man is upagain; they close and struggle, the night-watchman’s club falls across his enemy’s head blow upon blow, while the sufferer grasps him desperately, with both hands, by the throat. They tug, they snuffle, they reel to and fro in the yielding crowd; the blows grow fainter, fainter; the grip is terrible; when suddenly there is a violent rupture of the crowd, it closes again, and then there are two against one, and up sparkling St. Charles street, the street of all streets for flagrant, unmolested, well-dressed crime, moves a sight so exhilarating that a score of street lads follow behind and a dozen trip along in front with frequent backward glances: two officers of justice walking in grim silence abreast, and between them a limp, torn, hatless, bloody figure, partly walking, partly lifted, partly dragged, past the theatres, past the lawyers’ rookeries of Commercial place, the tenpin alleys, the chop-houses, the bunko shows, and shooting-galleries, on, across Poydras street into the dim openness beyond, where glimmer the lamps of Lafayette square and the white marble of the municipal hall, and just on the farther side of this, with a sudden wheel to the right into Hevia street, a few strides there, a turn to the left, stumbling across a stone step and wooden sill into a narrow, lighted hall, and turning and entering an apartment here again at the right. The door is shut; the name is written down; the charge is made: Vagrancy, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest. An inner door is opened.
“What have you got in number nine?” asks the captain in charge.
“Chuck full,” replies the turnkey.
“Well, number seven?” These were the numbers of cells.
“The rats’ll eat him up in number seven.”
“How about number ten?”
“Two drunk-and-disorderlies, one petty larceny, and one embezzlement and breach of trust.”
“Put him in there.”
And this explains what the watchman in Marais street could not understand,—why Mary Richling’s window shone all night long.
OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN.
Round goes the wheel forever. Another sun rose up, not a moment hurried or belated by the myriads of life-and-death issues that cover the earth and wait in ecstasies of hope or dread the passage of time. Punctually at ten Justice-in-the-rough takes its seat in the Recorder’s Court, and a moment of silent preparation at the desks follows the loud announcement that its session has begun. The perky clerks and smirking pettifoggers move apart on tiptoe, those to their respective stations, these to their privileged seats facing the high dais. The lounging police slip down from their reclining attitudes on the heel-scraped and whittled window-sills. The hum of voices among the forlorn humanity that half fills the gradually rising, greasy benches behind, allotted to witnesses and prisoners’ friends, is hushed. In a little square, railed space, here at the left, the reporters tip their chairs against the hair-greased wall, and sharpen their pencils. A few tardy visitors, familiar with the place, tiptoe in through the grimy doors, ducking and winking, and softly lifting and placing their chairs, with a mock-timorous upward glance toward the long, ungainly personage who, under a faded and tattered crimson canopy, fills the august bench of magistracy with its high oaken back. On the right, behind a rude wooden paling that rises from the floor to the smoke-stained ceiling, are the peering, bloated faces of the night’s prisoners.
The recorder utters a name. The clerk down in front of him calls it aloud. A door in the palings opens, and one of the captives comes forth and stands before the rail. The arresting officer mounts to the witness-stand and confronts him. The oath is rattled and turned out like dice from a box, and the accusing testimony is heard. It may be that counsel rises and cross-examines, if there are witnesses for the defence. Strange and far-fetched questions, from beginners at the law or from old blunderers, provoke now laughter, and now the peremptory protestations of the court against the waste of time. Yet, in general, a few minutes suffices for the whole trial of a case.
“You are sure she picked the handsaw up by the handle, are you?” says the questioner, frowning with the importance of the point.
“Yes.”
“And that she coughed as she did so?”
“Well, you see, she kind o’”—
“Yes, or no!”
“No.”
“That’s all.” He waves the prisoner down with an air of mighty triumph, turns to the recorder, “trusts it is not necessary to,” etc., and the accused passes this way or that, according to the fate decreed,—discharged, sentenced to fine and imprisonment, or committed for trial before the courts of the State.
“Order in court!” There is too much talking. Another comes and stands before the rail, and goes his way. Another, and another; now a ragged boy, now a half-sobered crone, now a battered ruffian, and now a painted girl of the street, and at length one who starts when his name is called, as though something had exploded.
“John Richling!”
He came.
“Stand there!”
Some one is in the witness-stand, speaking. The prisoner partly hears, but does not see. He stands and holds the rail, with his eyes fixed vacantly on the clerk, who bends over his desk under the seat of justice, writing. The lawyers notice him. His dress has been laboriously genteel, but is torn and soiled. A detective, with small eyes set close together, and a nose like a yacht’s rudder, whisperingly calls the notice of one of these spectators who can see the prisoner’s face to the fact that, for all its thinness and bruises, it is not a bad one. All can see that the man’s hair is fine and waving where it is not matted with blood.
The testifying officer had moved as if to leave the witness-stand, when the recorder restrained him by a gesture, and, leaning forward and looking down upon the prisoner, asked:—
“Have you anything to say to this?”
The prisoner lifted his eyes, bowed affirmatively, and spoke in a low, timid tone. “May I say a few words to you privately?”
“No.”
He dropped his eyes, fumbled with the rail, and, looking up suddenly, said in a stronger voice, “I want somebody to go to my wife—in Prieur street. She is starving. This is the third day”—
“We’re not talking about that,” said the recorder. “Have you anything to say against this witness’s statement?”
The prisoner looked upon the floor and slowly shook his head. “I never meant to break the law. I never expected to stand here. It’s like an awful dream. Yesterday, at this time, I had no more idea of this—I didn’tthink I was so near it. It’s like getting caught in machinery.” He looked up at the recorder again. “I’m so confused”—he frowned and drew his hand slowly across his brow—“I can hardly—put my words together. I was hunting for work. There is no man in this city who wants to earn an honest living more than I do.”
“What’s your trade?”
“I have none.”
“I supposed not. But you profess to have some occupation, I dare say. What’s your occupation?”
“Accountant.”
“Hum! you’re all accountants. How long have you been out of employment?”
“Six months.”
“Why did you go to sleep under those steps?”
“I didn’t intend to go to sleep. I was waiting for a friend to come in who boards at the St. Charles.”
A sudden laugh ran through the room. “Silence in court!” cried a deputy.
“Who is your friend?” asked the recorder.
The prisoner was silent.
“What is your friend’s name?”
Still the prisoner did not reply. One of the group of pettifoggers sitting behind him leaned forward, touched him on the shoulder, and murmured: “You’d better tell his name. It won’t hurt him, and it may help you.” The prisoner looked back at the man and shook his head.
“Did you strike this officer?” asked the recorder, touching the witness, who was resting on both elbows in the light arm-chair on the right.
The prisoner made a low response.
“I don’t hear you,” said the recorder.
“I struck him,” replied the prisoner; “I knocked himdown.” The court officers below the dais smiled. “I woke and found him spurning me with his foot, and I resented it. I never expected to be a law-breaker. I”— He pressed his temples between his hands and was silent. The men of the law at his back exchanged glances of approval. The case was, to some extent, interesting.
“May it please the court,” said the man who had before addressed the prisoner over his shoulder, stepping out on the right and speaking very softly and graciously, “I ask that this man be discharged. His fault seems so much more to be accident than intention, and his suffering so much more than his fault”—
The recorder interrupted by a wave of the hand and a preconceived smile: “Why, according to the evidence, the prisoner was noisy and troublesome in his cell all night.”
“O sir,” exclaimed the prisoner, “I was thrown in with thieves and drunkards! It was unbearable in that hole. We were right on the damp and slimy bricks. The smell was dreadful. A woman in the cell opposite screamed the whole night. One of the men in the cell tried to take my coat from me, and I beat him!”
“It seems to me, your honor,” said the volunteer advocate, “the prisoner is still more sinned against than sinning. This is evidently his first offence, and”—
“Do you know even that?” asked the recorder.
“I do not believe his name can be found on any criminal record. I”—
The recorder interrupted once more. He leaned toward the prisoner.
“Did you ever go by any other name?”
The prisoner was dumb.
“Isn’t John Richling the only name you have ever gone by?” said his new friend: but the prisoner silentlyblushed to the roots of his hair and remained motionless.
“I think I shall have to send you to prison,” said the recorder, preparing to write. A low groan was the prisoner’s only response.
“May it please your honor,” began the lawyer, taking a step forward; but the recorder waved his pen impatiently.
“Why, the more is said the worse his case gets; he’s guilty of the offence charged, by his own confession.”
“I am guilty and not guilty,” said the prisoner slowly. “I never intended to be a criminal. I intended to be a good and useful member of society; but I’ve somehow got under its wheels. I’ve missed the whole secret of living.” He dropped his face into his hands. “O Mary, Mary! why are you my wife?” He beckoned to his counsel. “Come here; come here.” His manner was wild and nervous. “I want you—I want you to go to Prieur street, to my wife. You know—you know the place, don’t you? Prieur street. Ask for Mrs. Riley”—
“Richling,” said the lawyer.
“No, no! you ask for Mrs. Riley? Ask her—ask her—oh! where are my senses gone? Ask”—
“May it please the court,” said the lawyer, turning once more to the magistrate and drawing a limp handkerchief from the skirt of his dingy alpaca, with a reviving confidence, “I ask that the accused be discharged; he’s evidently insane.”
The prisoner looked rapidly from counsel to magistrate, and back again, saying, in a low voice, “Oh, no! not that! Oh, no! not that! not that!”
The recorder dropped his eyes upon a paper on the desk before him, and, beginning to write, said without looking up:—
“Parish Prison—to be examined for insanity.”
A cry of remonstrance broke so sharply from the prisoner that even the reporters in their corner checked their energetic streams of lead-pencil rhetoric and looked up.
“You cannot do that!” he exclaimed. “I am not insane! I’m not even confused now! It was only for a minute! I’m not even confused!”
An officer of the court laid his hand quickly and sternly upon his arm; but the recorder leaned forward and motioned him off. The prisoner darted a single flash of anger at the officer, and then met the eye of the justice.
“If I am a vagrant commit me for vagrancy! I expect no mercy here! I expect no justice! You punish me first, and try me afterward, and now you can punish me again; but you can’t do that!”
“Order in court! Sit down in those benches!” cried the deputies. The lawyers nodded darkly or blandly, each to each. The one who had volunteered his counsel wiped his bald Gothic brow. On the recorder’s lips an austere satire played as he said to the panting prisoner:—
“You are showing not only your sanity, but your contempt of court also.”
The prisoner’s eyes shot back a fierce light as he retorted:—
“I have no object in concealing either.”
The recorder answered with a quick, angry look; but, instantly restraining himself, dropped his glance upon his desk as before, began again to write, and said, with his eyes following his pen:—
“Parish Prison, for thirty days.”
The officer grasped the prisoner again and pointed him to the door in the palings whence he had come, andwhither he now returned, without a word or note of distress.
Half an hour later the dark omnibus without windows, that went by the facetious name of the “Black Maria” received the convicted ones from the same street door by which they had been brought in out of the world the night before. The waifs and vagabonds of the town gleefully formed a line across the sidewalk from the station-house to the van, and counted with zest the abundant number of passengers that were ushered into it one by one. Heigh ho! In they went: all ages and sorts; both sexes; tried and untried, drunk and sober, new faces and old acquaintances; a man who had been counterfeiting, his wife who had been helping him, and their little girl of twelve, who had done nothing. Ho, ho! Bridget Fury! Ha, ha! Howling Lou! In they go: the passive, the violent, all kinds; filling the two benches against the sides, and then the standing room; crowding and packing, until the officer can shut the door only by throwing his weight against it.
“Officer,” said one, whose volunteer counsel had persuaded the reporters not to mention him by name in their thrilling account,—“officer,” said this one, trying to pause an instant before the door of the vehicle, “is there no other possible way to”—
“Get in! get in!”
Two hands spread against his back did the rest; the door clapped to like the lid of a bursting trunk, the padlock rattled: away they went!
“OH, WHERE IS MY LOVE?”
At the prison the scene is repeated in reverse, and the Black Maria presently rumbles away empty. In that building, whose exterior Narcisse found so picturesque, the vagrant at length finds food. In that question of food, by the way, another question arose, not as to any degree of criminality past or present, nor as to age, or sex, or race, or station; but as to the having or lacking fifty cents. “Four bits” a day was the open sesame to a department where one could have bedstead and ragged bedding and dirty mosquito-bar, a cell whose window looked down into the front street, food in variety, and a seat at table with the officers of the prison. But those who could not pay were conducted past all these delights, along one of several dark galleries, the turnkeys of which were themselves convicts, who, by a process of reasoning best understood among the harvesters of perquisites, were assumed to be undergoing sentence.
The vagrant stood at length before a grated iron gate while its bolts were thrown back and it growled on its hinges. What he saw within needs no minute description; it may be seen there still, any day: a large, flagged court, surrounded on three sides by two stories of cells with heavy, black, square doors all a-row and mostly open; about a hundred men sitting, lying, or lounging about in scanty rags,—some gaunt and feeble, some burly and alert, some scarred and maimed, some sallow, some red,some grizzled, some mere lads, some old and bowed,—the sentenced, the untried, men there for the first time, men who were oftener in than out,—burglars, smugglers, house-burners, highwaymen, wife-beaters, wharf-rats, common “drunks,” pickpockets, shop-lifters, stealers of bread, garroters, murderers,—in common equality and fraternity. In this resting and refreshing place for vice, this caucus for the projection of future crime, this ghastly burlesque of justice and the protection of society, there was a man who had been convicted of a dreadful murder a year or two before, and sentenced to twenty-one years’ labor in the State penitentiary. He had got his sentence commuted to confinement in this prison for twenty-one years of idleness. The captain of the prison had made him “captain of the yard.” Strength, ferocity, and a terrific record were the qualifications for this honorary office.
The gate opened. A howl of welcome came from those within, and the new batch, the vagrant among them, entered the yard. He passed, in his turn, to a tank of muddy water in this yard, washed away the soil and blood of the night, and so to the cell assigned him. He was lying face downward on its pavement, when a man with a cudgel ordered him to rise. The vagrant sprang to his feet and confronted the captain of the yard, a giant in breadth and stature, with no clothing but a ragged undershirt and pantaloons.
“Get a bucket and rag and scrub out this cell!”
He flourished his cudgel. The vagrant cast a quick glance at him, and answered quietly, but with burning face:—
“I’ll die first.”
A blow with the cudgel, a cry of rage, a clash together, a push, a sledge-hammer fist in the side, another on thehead, a fall out into the yard, and the vagrant lay senseless on the flags.
When he opened his eyes again, and struggled to his feet, a gentle grasp was on his arm. Somebody was steadying him. He turned his eyes. Ah! who is this? A short, heavy, close-shaven man, with a woollen jacket thrown over one shoulder and its sleeves tied together in a knot under the other. He speaks in a low, kind tone:—
“Steady, Mr. Richling!”
Richling supported himself by a hand on the man’s arm, gazed in bewilderment at the gentle eyes that met his, and with a slow gesture of astonishment murmured, “Ristofalo!” and dropped his head.
The Italian had just entered the prison from another station-house. With his hand still on Richling’s shoulder, and Richling’s on his, he caught the eye of the captain of the yard, who was striding quietly up and down near by, and gave him a nod to indicate that he would soon adjust everything to that autocrat’s satisfaction. Richling, dazed and trembling, kept his eyes still on the ground, while Ristofalo moved with him slowly away from the squalid group that gazed after them. They went toward the Italian’s cell.
“Why are you in prison?” asked the vagrant, feebly.
“Oh, nothin’ much—witness in shootin’ scrape—talk ’bout aft’ while.”
“O Ristofalo,” groaned Richling, as they entered, “my wife! my wife! Send some bread to my wife!”
“Lie down,” said the Italian, pressing softly on his shoulders; but Richling as quietly resisted.
“She is near here, Ristofalo. You can send with the greatest ease! You can do anything, Ristofalo,—if you only choose!”
“Lay down,” said the Italian again, and pressed moreheavily. The vagrant sank limply to the pavement, his companion quickly untying the jacket sleeves from under his own arms and wadding the garment under Richling’s head.
“Do you know what I’m in here for, Ristofalo?” moaned Richling.
“Don’t know, don’t care. Yo’ wife know you here?” Richling shook his head on the jacket. The Italian asked her address, and Richling gave it.
“Goin’ tell her come and see you,” said the Italian. “Now, you lay still little while; I be back t’rectly.” He went out into the yard again, pushing the heavy door after him till it stood only slightly ajar, sauntered easily around till he caught sight of the captain of the yard, and was presently standing before him in the same immovable way in which he had stood before Richling in Tchoupitoulas street, on the day he had borrowed the dollar. Those who idly drew around could not hear his words, but the “captain’s” answers were intentionally audible. He shook his head in rejection of a proposal. “No, nobody but the prisoner himself should scrub out the cell. No, the Italian should not do it for him. The prisoner’s refusal and resistance had settled that question. No, the knocking down had not balanced accounts at all. There was more scrubbing to be done. It was scrubbing day. Others might scrub the yard and the galleries, but he should scrub out the tank. And there were other things, and worse,—menial services of the lowest kind. He should do them when the time came, and the Italian would have to help him too. Never mind about the law or the terms of his sentence. Those counted for nothing there.” Such was the sense of the decrees; the words were such as may be guessed or left unguessed. The scrubbing of the cell must commence at once. Thevagrant must make up his mind to suffer. “He had served on jury!” said the man in the undershirt, with a final flourish of his stick. “He’s got to pay dear for it.”
When Ristofalo returned to his cell, its inmate, after many upstartings from terrible dreams, that seemed to guard the threshold of slumber, had fallen asleep. The Italian touched him gently, but he roused with a wild start and stare.
“Ristofalo,” he said, and fell a-staring again.
“You had some sleep,” said the Italian.
“It’s worse than being awake,” said Richling. He passed his hands across his face. “Has my wife been here?”
“No. Haven’t sent yet. Must watch good chance. Git captain yard in good-humor first, or else do on sly.” The cunning Italian saw that anything looking like early extrication would bring new fury upon Richling. He knewallthe values of time. “Come,” he added, “must scrub out cell now.” He ignored the heat that kindled in Richling’s eyes, and added, smiling, “You don’t do it, I got to do it.”
With a little more of the like kindly guile, and some wise and simple reasoning, the Italian prevailed. Together, without objection from the captain of the yard, with many unavailing protests from Richling, who would now do it alone, and with Ristofalo smiling like a Chinaman at the obscene ribaldry of the spectators in the yard, they scrubbed the cell. Then came the tank. They had to stand in it with the water up to their knees, and rub its sides with brickbats. Richling fell down twice in the water, to the uproarious delight of the yard; but his companion helped him up, and they both agreed it was the sliminess of the tank’s bottom that was to blame.
“Soon we get through we goin’ to buy drink o’ whisky from jailer,” said Ristofalo; “he keep it for sale. Then, after that, kin hire somebody to go to your house; captain yard think we gittin’ mo’ whisky.”
“Hire?” said Richling. “I haven’t a cent in the world.”
“I got a little—few dimes,” rejoined the other.
“Then why are you here? Why are you in this part of the prison?”
“Oh, ’fraid to spend it. On’y got few dimes. Broke ag’in.”
Richling stopped still with astonishment, brickbat in hand. The Italian met his gaze with an illuminated smile. “Yes,” he said, “took all I had with me to bayou La Fourche. Coming back, slept with some men in boat. One git up in night-time and steal everything. Then was a big fight. Think that what fight was about—about dividing the money. Don’t know sure. One man git killed. Rest run into the swamp and prairie. Officer arrest me for witness. Couldn’t trust me to stay in the city.”
“Do you think the one who was killed was the thief?”
“Don’t know sure,” said the Italian, with the same sweet face, and falling to again with his brickbat,—“hope so!”
“Strange place to confine a witness!” said Richling, holding his hand to his bruised side and slowly straightening his back.
“Oh, yes, good place,” replied the other, scrubbing away; “git him, in short time, so he swear to anything.”
It was far on in the afternoon before the wary Ristofalo ventured to offer all he had in his pocket to a hanger-on of the prison office, to go first to Richling’s house, and then to an acquaintance of his own, withmessages looking to the procuring of their release. The messenger chose to go first to Ristofalo’s friend, and afterward to Mrs. Riley’s. It was growing dark when he reached the latter place. Mary was out in the city somewhere, wandering about, aimless and distracted, in search of Richling. The messenger left word with Mrs. Riley. Richling had all along hoped that that good friend, doubtless acquainted with the most approved methods of finding a missing man, would direct Mary to the police station at the earliest practicable hour. But time had shown that she had not done so. No, indeed! Mrs. Riley counted herself too benevolently shrewd for that. While she had made Mary’s suspense of the night less frightful than it might have been, by surmises that Mr. Richling had found some form of night-work,—watching some pile of freight or some unfinished building,—she had come, secretly, to a different conviction, predicated on her own married experiences; and if Mr. Richling had, in a moment of gloom, tipped the bowl a little too high, as her dear lost husband, the best man that ever walked, had often done, and had been locked up at night to be let out in the morning, why, give him a chance! Let him invent his own little fault-hiding romance and come home with it. Mary was frantic. She could not be kept in; but Mrs. Riley, by prolonged effort, convinced her it was best not to call upon Dr. Sevier until she could be sure some disaster had actually occurred, and sent her among the fruiterers and oystermen in vain search for Raphael Ristofalo. Thus it was that the Doctor’s morning messenger to the Richlings, bearing word that if any one were sick he would call without delay, was met by Mrs. Riley only, and by the reassuring statement that both of them were out. The later messenger, from the two men in prison, brought back word of Mary’s absence from thehouse, of her physical welfare, and Mrs. Riley’s promise that Mary should visit the prison at the earliest hour possible. This would not be till the next morning.
While Mrs. Riley was sending this message, Mary, a great distance away, was emerging from the darkening and silent streets of the river front and moving with timid haste across the broad levee toward the edge of the water at the steam-boat landing. In this season of depleted streams and idle waiting, only an occasional boat lifted its lofty, black, double funnels against the sky here and there, leaving wide stretches of unoccupied wharf-front between. Mary hurried on, clear out to the great wharf’s edge, and looked forth upon the broad, softly moving harbor. The low waters spread out and away, to and around the opposite point, in wide surfaces of glassy purples and wrinkled bronze. Beauty, that joy forever, is sometimes a terror. Was the end of her search somewhere underneath that fearful glory? She clasped her hands, bent down with dry, staring eyes, then turned again and fled homeward. She swerved once toward Dr. Sevier’s quarters, but soon decided to see first if there were any tidings with Mrs. Riley, and so resumed her course. Night overtook her in streets where every footstep before or behind her made her tremble; but at length she crossed the threshold of Mrs. Riley’s little parlor. Mrs. Riley was standing in the door, and retreated a step or two backward as Mary entered with a look of wild inquiry.
“Not come?” cried the wife.
“Mrs. Richlin’,” said the widow, hurriedly, “yer husband’s alive and found.”
Mary seized her frantically by the shoulders, crying with high-pitched voice:—
“Where is he?—where is he?”
“Ya can’t see um till marning, Mrs. Richlin’.”
“Where is he?” cried Mary, louder than before.
“Me dear,” said Mrs. Riley, “ye kin easy git him out in the marning.”
“Mrs. Riley,” said Mary, holding her with her eye, “is my husband in prison?—O Lord God! O God! my God!”
Mrs. Riley wept. She clasped the moaning, sobbing wife to her bosom, and with streaming eyes said:—
“Mrs. Richlin’, me dear, Mrs. Richlin’, me dear, what wad I give to have my husband this night where your husband is!”
RELEASE.—NARCISSE.
As some children were playing in the street before the Parish Prison next morning, they suddenly started and scampered toward the prison’s black entrance. A physician’s carriage had driven briskly up to it, ground its wheels against the curb-stone, and halted. If any fresh crumbs of horror were about to be dropped, the children must be there to feast on them. Dr. Sevier stepped out, gave Mary his hand and then his arm, and went in with her. A question or two in the prison office, a reference to the rolls, and a turnkey led the way through a dark gallery lighted with dimly burning gas. The stench was suffocating. They stopped at the inner gate.
“Why didn’t you bring him to us?” asked the Doctor, scowling resentfully at the facetious drawings and legends on the walls, where the dampness glistened in the sickly light.
The keeper made a low reply as he shot the bolts.
“What?” quickly asked Mary.
“He’s not well,” said Dr. Sevier.
The gate swung open. They stepped into the yard and across it. The prisoners paused in a game of ball. Others, who were playing cards, merely glanced up and went on. The jailer pointed with his bunch of keys to a cell before him. Mary glided away from the Doctor and darted in. There was a cry and a wail.
The Doctor followed quickly. Ristofalo passed out ashe entered. Richling lay on a rough gray blanket spread on the pavement with the Italian’s jacket under his head. Mary had thrown herself down beside him upon her knees, and their arms were around each other’s neck.
“Let me see, Mrs. Richling,” said the physician, touching her on the shoulder. She drew back. Richling lifted a hand in welcome. The Doctor pressed it.
“Mrs. Richling,” he said, as they faced each other, he on one knee, she on both. He gave her a few laconic directions for the sick man’s better comfort. “You must stay here, madam,” he said at length; “this man Ristofalo will be ample protection for you; and I will go at once and get your husband’s discharge.” He went out.
In the office he asked for a seat at a desk. As he finished using it he turned to the keeper and asked, with severe face:—
“What do you do with sick prisoners here, anyway?”
The keeper smiled.
“Why, if they gits right sick, the hospital wagon comes and takes ’em to the Charity Hospital.”
“Umhum!” replied the Doctor, unpleasantly,—“in the same wagon they use for a case of scarlet fever or small-pox, eh?”
The keeper, with a little resentment in his laugh, stated that he would be eternally lost if he knew.
“Iknow,” remarked the Doctor. “But when a man is only a little sick,—according to your judgment,—like that one in there now, he is treated here, eh?”
The keeper swelled with a little official pride. His tone was boastful.
“We has a complete dispenisary in the prison,” he said.
“Yes? Who’s your druggist?” Dr. Sevier was in his worst inquisitorial mood.
“One of the prisoners,” said the keeper.
The Doctor looked at him steadily. The man, in the blackness of his ignorance, was visibly proud of this bit of economy and convenience.
“How long has he held this position?” asked the physician.
“Oh, a right smart while. He was sentenced for murder, but he’s waiting for a new trial.”
“And he has full charge of all the drugs?” asked the Doctor, with a cheerful smile.
“Yes, sir.” The keeper was flattered.
“Poisons and all, I suppose, eh?” pursued the Doctor.
“Everything.”
The Doctor looked steadily and silently upon the officer, and tore and folded and tore again into small bits the prescription he had written. A moment later the door of his carriage shut with a smart clap and its wheels rattled away. There was a general laugh in the office, heavily spiced with maledictions.
“I say, Cap’, what d’you reckon he’d ’a’ said if he’d ’a’ seen the women’s department?”
In those days recorders had the power to release prisoners sentenced by them when in their judgment new information justified such action. Yet Dr. Sevier had a hard day’s work to procure Richling’s liberty. The sun was declining once more when a hack drove up to Mrs. Riley’s door with John and Mary in it, and Mrs. Riley was restrained from laughing and crying only by the presence of the great Dr. Sevier and a romantic Italian stranger by the captivating name of Ristofalo. Richling, with repeated avowals of his ability to walk alone, was helped into the house between these two illustrious visitors, Mary hurrying in ahead, and Mrs. Riley shuttingthe street door with some resentment of manner toward the staring children who gathered without. Was there anything surprising in the fact that eminent persons should call at her house?
When there was time for greetings she gave her hand to Dr. Sevier and asked him how he found himself. To Ristofalo she bowed majestically. She noticed that he was handsome and muscular.
At different hours the next day the same two visitors called. Also the second day after. And the third. And frequently afterward.
Ristofalo regained his financial feet almost, as one might say, at a single hand-spring. He amused Mary and John and Mrs. Riley almost beyond limit with his simple story of how he did it.
“Ye’d better hurry and be getting up out o’ that sick bed, Mr. Richlin’,” said the widow, in Ristofalo’s absence, “or that I-talian rascal’ll be making himself entirely too agree’ble to yer lady here. Ha! ha! It’sshethat he’s a-comin’ here to see.”
Mrs. Riley laughed again, and pointed at Mary and tossed her head, not knowing that Mary went through it all over again as soon as Mrs. Riley was out of the room, to the immense delight of John.
“And now, madam,” said Dr. Sevier to Mary, by and by, “let it be understood once more that even independence may be carried to a vicious extreme, and that”—he turned to Richling, by whose bed he stood—“you and your wife will not do it again. You’ve had a narrow escape. Is it understood?”
“We’ll try to be moderate,” replied the invalid, playfully.
“I don’t believe you,” said the Doctor.
And his scepticism was wise. He continued to watch them, and at length enjoyed the sight of John up and out again with color in his cheeks and the old courage—nay, a new and a better courage—in his eyes.
Said the Doctor on his last visit, “Take good care of your husband, my child.” He held the little wife’s hand a moment, and gazed out of Mrs. Riley’s front door upon the western sky. Then he transferred his gaze to John, who stood, with his knee in a chair, just behind her. He looked at the convalescent with solemn steadfastness. The husband smiled broadly.
“I know what you mean. I’ll try to deserve her.”
The Doctor looked again into the west.
“Good-by.”
Mary tried playfully to retort, but John restrained her, and when she contrived to utter something absurdly complimentary of her husband he was her only hearer.
They went back into the house, talking of other matters. Something turned the conversation upon Mrs. Riley, and from that subject it seemed to pass naturally to Ristofalo. Mary, laughing and talking softly as they entered their room, called to John’s recollection the Italian’s account of how he had once bought a tarpaulin hat and a cottonade shirt of the pattern called a “jumper,” and had worked as a deck-hand in loading and unloading steam-boats. It was so amusingly sensible to put on the proper badge for the kind of work sought. Richling mused. Many a dollar he might have earned the past summer, had he been as ingeniously wise, he thought.
“Ristofalo is coming here this evening,” said he, taking a seat in the alley window.
Mary looked at him with sidelong merriment. The Italian was coming to see Mrs. Riley.
“Why, John,” whispered Mary, standing beside him, “she’s nearly ten years older than he is!”
But John quoted the old saying about a man’s age being what he feels, and a woman’s what she looks.
“Why,—but—dear, it is scarcely a fortnight since she declared nothing could ever induce”—
“Let her alone,” said John, indulgently. “Hasn’t she said half-a-dozen times that it isn’t good for woman to be alone? A widow’s a woman—and you never disputed it.”
“O John,” laughed Mary, “for shame! You know I didn’t mean that. You know I never could mean that.”
And when John would have maintained his ground she besought him not to jest in that direction, with eyes so ready for tears that he desisted.
“I only meant to be generous to Mrs. Riley,” he said.
“I know it,” said Mary, caressingly; “you’re always on the generous side of everything.”
She rested her hand fondly on his arm, and he took it into his own.
One evening the pair were out for that sunset walk which their young blood so relished, and which often led them, as it did this time, across the wide, open commons behind the town, where the unsettled streets were turf-grown, and toppling wooden lamp-posts threatened to fall into the wide, cattle-trodden ditches.
“Fall is coming,” said Mary.
“Let it come!” exclaimed John; “it’s hung back long enough.”
He looked about with pleasure. On every hand the advancing season was giving promise of heightened activity. The dark, plumy foliage of the china trees was getting a golden edge. The burnished green of the great magnolias was spotted brilliantly with hundreds ofbursting cones, red with their pendent seeds. Here and there, as the sauntering pair came again into the region of brick sidewalks, a falling cone would now and then scatter its polished coral over the pavement, to be gathered by little girls for necklaces, or bruised under foot, staining the walk with its fragrant oil. The ligustrums bent low under the dragging weight of their small clustered berries. The oranges were turning. In the wet, choked ditches along the interruptions of pavement, where John followed Mary on narrow plank footways, bloomed thousands of little unrenowned asteroid flowers, blue and yellow, and the small, pink spikes of the water pepper. It wasn’t the fashionable habit in those days, but Mary had John gather big bunches of this pretty floral mob, and filled her room with them—not Mrs. Riley’s parlor—whoop, no! Weeds? Not if Mrs. Riley knew herself.
So ran time apace. The morning skies were gray monotones, and the evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing. Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The nervy, unmusical waking cry of the mocking-bird was often the first daybreak sound. At times a myriad downy seed floated everywhere, now softly upward, now gently downward, and the mellow rays of sunset turned it into a warm, golden snow-fall. By night a soft glow from distant burning prairies showed the hunters were afield; the call of unseen wild fowl was heard overhead, and—finer to the waiting poor man’s ear than all other sounds—came at regular intervals, now from this quarter and now from that, theheavy, rushing blast of the cotton compress, telling that the flood tide of commerce was setting in.
Narcisse surprised the Richlings one evening with a call. They tried very hard to be reserved, but they were too young for that task to be easy. The Creole had evidently come with his mind made up to take unresentfully and override all the unfriendliness they might choose to show. His conversation never ceased, but flitted from subject to subject with the swift waywardness of a humming-bird. It was remarked by Mary, leaning back in one end of Mrs. Riley’s little sofa, that “summer dresses were disappearing, but that the girls looked just as sweet in their darker colors as they had appeared in midsummer white. Had Narcisse noticed? Probably he didn’t care for”—
“Ho! I notiz them an’ they notiz me! An’ thass one thing I ’ave notiz about young ladies: they ah juz like those bird’; in summeh lookin’ cool, in winteh waum. I ’ave notiz that. An’ I’ve notiz anotheh thing which make them juz like those bird’. They halways know if a man is lookin’, an’ they halways make like they don’t see ’im! I would like to ’ite an i’ony about that—a lill i’ony—in the he’oic measuh. You like that he’oic measuh, Mizzez Witchlin’?”
As he rose to go he rolled a cigarette, and folded the end in with the long nail of his little finger.
“Mizzez Witchlin’, if you will allow me to light my ciga’ette fum yo’ lamp—I can’t use my sun-glass at night, because the sun is nod theh. But, the sun shining, I use it. I ’ave adop’ that method since lately.”
“You borrow the sun’s rays,” said Mary, with wicked sweetness.
“Yes; ’tis cheapeh than matches in the longue ’un.”
“You have discovered that, I suppose,” remarked John.
“Me? The sun-glass? No. I believe Ahchimides invend that, in fact. An’ yet, out of ten thousan’ who use the sun-glass only a few can account ’ow tis done. ’Ow did you think that that’s my invention, Mistoo Itchlin? Did you know that I am something of a chimist? I can tu’n litmus papeh ’ed by juz dipping it in SO3HO. Yesseh.”
“Yes,” said Richling, “that’s one thing that I have noticed, that you’re very fertile in devices.”
“Yes,” echoed Mary, “I noticed that, the first time you ever came to see us. I only wish Mr. Richling was half as much so.”