Dr. Sevier

“Still you were thinking about it,” said Richling, with a twinkle.

“Ah! ha! ha! Indeed I wasn’, an’ ye needn’ be t’rowin’ anny o’ yer slyness on me. Ye know ye’d have no self-respect fur me. No; now ye know ye wuddent, – wud ye?”

“Why, Mrs. Riley, of course we would. Why – why not?” He stood in the door-way, about to take his leave. “You may be sure we’ll always be glad of anything that will make you the happier.” Mrs. Riley looked so grave that he checked his humor.

“But in the nixt life, Mr. Richlin’, how about that?”

“There? I suppose we shall simply each love all in absolute perfection. We’ll” —

“We’ll never know the differ,” interposed Mrs. Riley.

“That’s it,” said Richling, smiling again. “And so I say, – and I’ve always said, – if a person feels like marrying again, let him do it.”

“Have ye, now? Well, ye’re just that good, Mr. Richlin’.”

“Yes,” he responded, trying to be grave, “that’s about my measure.”

“Would you do ut?”

“No, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. But I should like – in good earnest, Mrs. Riley, I should like, now, the comfort of knowing that you were not to pass all the rest of your days in widowhood.”

“Ah! ged out, Mr. Richlin’!” She failed in her effort to laugh. “Ah! ye’re sly!” She changed her attitude and drew a breath.

“No,” said Richling, “no, honestly. I should feel that you deserved better at this world’s hands than that, and that the world deserved better of you. I find two people don’t make a world, Mrs. Riley, though often they think they do. They certainly don’t when one is gone.”

“Mr. Richlin’,” exclaimed Mrs. Riley, drawing back and waving her hand sweetly, “stop yer flattery! Stop ud! Ah! ye’re a-feeling yer oats, Mr. Richlin’. An’ ye’re a-showin’ em too, ye air. Why, I hered ye was lookin’ terrible, and here ye’re lookin’ just splendud!”

“Who told you that?” asked Richling.

“Never mind! Never mind who he was – ha, ha, ha!” She checked herself suddenly. “Ah, me! It’s a shame for the likes o’ me to be behavin’ that foolish!” She put on additional dignity. “I will always be the Widow Riley.” Then relaxing again into sweetness: “Marridge is a lottery, Mr. Richlin’; indeed an’ it is; and ye know mighty well that he ye’re after joking me about is no more nor a fri’nd.” She looked sweet enough for somebody to kiss.

“I don’t know so certainly about that,” said her visitor, stepping down upon the sidewalk and putting on his hat. “If I may judge by” – He paused and glanced at the window.

“Ah, now, Mr. Richlin’, na-na-now, Mr. Richlin’, ye daurn’t say ud! Ye daurn’t!” She smiled and blushed and arched her neck and rose and sank upon herself with sweet delight.

“I say if I may judge by what he has said to me,” insisted Richling.

Mrs. Riley glided down across the door-step, and, with all the insinuation of her sex and nation, demanded: —

“What’d he tell ye? Ah! he didn’t tell ye nawthing! Ha, ha! there wasn’ nawthing to tell!” But Richling slipped away.

Mrs. Riley shook her finger: “Ah, ye’re a wicket joker, Mr. Richlin’. I didn’t think that o’ the likes of a gintleman like you, anyhow!” She shook her finger again as she withdrew into the house, smiling broadly all the way in to the cradle, where she kissed and kissed again her ruddy, chubby, sleeping boy.

Ristofalo came often. He was a man of simple words, and of few thoughts of the kind that were available in conversation; but his personal adventures had begun almost with infancy, and followed one another in close and strange succession over lands and seas ever since. He could therefore talk best about himself, though he talked modestly. “These things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,” and there came times when even a tear was not wanting to gem the poetry of the situation.

“And ye might have saved yerself from all that,” was sometimes her note of sympathy. But when he asked how she silently dried her eyes.

Sometimes his experiences had been intensely ludicrous, and Mrs. Riley would laugh until in pure self-oblivion she smote her thigh with her palm, or laid her hand so smartly against his shoulder as to tip him half off his seat.

“Ye didn’t!”

“Yes.”

“Ah! Get out wid ye, Raphael Ristofalo, – to be telling me that for the trooth!”

At one such time she was about to give him a second push, but he took the hand in his, and quietly kept it to the end of his story.

He lingered late that evening, but at length took his hat from under his chair, rose, and extended his hand.

“Man alive!” she cried, “that’s my hand, sur, I’d have ye to know. Begahn wid ye! Lookut heere! What’s the reason ye make it so long atween yer visits, eh? Tell me that. Ah – ah – ye’ve no need fur to tell me, Mr. Ristofalo! Ah – now don’t tell a lie!”

“Too busy. Come all time – wasn’t too busy.”

“Ha, ha! Yes, yes; ye’re too busy. Of coorse ye’re too busy. Oh, yes! ye air too busy – a-courtin’ thim I-talian froot gerls around the Frinch Mairket. Ah! I’ll bet two bits ye’re a bouncer! Ah, don’t tell me. I know ye, ye villain! Some o’ thim’s a-waitin’ fur ye now, ha, ha! Go! And don’t ye nivver come back heere anny more. D’ye mind?”

“Aw righ’.” The Italian took her hand for the third time and held it, standing in his simple square way before her and wearing his gentle smile as he looked her in the eye. “Good-by, Kate.”

Her eye quailed. Her hand pulled a little helplessly and in a meek voice she said: —

“That’s not right for you to do me that a-way, Mr. Ristofalo. I’ve got a handle to my name, sur.”

She threw some gentle rebuke into her glance, and turned it upon him. He met it with that same amiable absence of emotion that was always in his look.

“Kate too short by itself?” he asked. “Aw righ’; make it Kate Ristofalo.”

“No,” said Mrs. Riley, averting and drooping her face.

“Take good care of you,” said the Italian; “you and Mike. Always be kind. Good care.”

Mrs. Riley turned with sudden fervor.

“Good cayre! – Mr. Ristofalo,” she exclaimed, lifting her free hand and touching her bosom with the points of her fingers, “ye don’t know the hairt of a woman, surr! No-o-o, surr! It’s love we wants! ‘The hairt as has trooly loved nivver furgits, but as trooly loves ahn to the tlose!’”

“Yes,” said the Italian; “yes,” nodding and ever smiling, “dass aw righ’.”

But she: —

“Ah! it’s no use fur you to be a-talkin’ an’ a-pallaverin’ to Kate Riley when ye don’t be lovin’ her, Mr. Ristofalo, an’ ye know ye don’t.”

A tear glistened in her eye.

“Yes, love you,” said the Italian; “course, love you.”

He did not move a foot or change the expression of a feature.

“H-yes!” said the widow. “H-yes!” she panted. “H-yes, a little! A little, Mr. Ristofalo! But I want” – she pressed her hand hard upon her bosom, and raised her eyes aloft – “I want to be – h – h – h-adaured above all the e’rth!”

“Aw righ’,” said Ristofalo; “das aw righ’; yes – door above all you worth.”

“Raphael Ristofalo,” she said, “ye’re a-deceivin’ me! Ye came heere whin nobody axed ye, – an’ that ye know is a fact, surr, – an’ made yerself agree’ble to a poor, unsuspectin’ widdah, an’ [tears] rabbed me o’ mie hairt, ye did; whin I nivver intinded to git married ag’in.”

“Don’t cry, Kate – Kate Ristofalo,” quietly observed the Italian, getting an arm around her waist, and laying a hand on the farther cheek. “Kate Ristofalo.”

“Shut!” she exclaimed, turning with playful fierceness, and proudly drawing back her head; “shut! Hah! It’s Kate Ristofalo, is it? Ah, ye think so? Hah-h! It’ll be ad least two weeks yet before the priest will be after giving you the right to call me that!”

And, in fact, an entire fortnight did pass before they were married.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

WHAT NAME?

Richling in Dr. Sevier’s library, one evening in early May, gave him great amusement by an account of the Ristofalo-Riley wedding. He had attended it only the night before. The Doctor had received an invitation, but had pleaded previous engagements.

“But I am glad you went,” he said to Richling; “however, go on with your account.”

“Oh! I was glad to go. And I’m certainly glad I went.”

Richling proceeded with the recital. The Doctor smiled. It was very droll, – the description of persons and costumes. Richling was quite another than his usual restrained self this evening. Oddly enough, too, for this was but his second visit; the confinement of his work was almost like an imprisonment, it was so constant. The Doctor had never seen him in just such a glow. He even mimicked the brogue of two or three Irish gentlemen, and the soft, outlandish swing in the English of one or two Sicilians. He did it all so well that, when he gave an instance of some of the broad Hibernian repartee he had heard, the Doctor actually laughed audibly. One of his young-lady cousins on some pretext opened a door, and stole a glance within to see what could have produced a thing so extraordinary.

“Come in, Laura; come in! Tell Bess to come in.”

The Doctor introduced Richling with due ceremony Richling could not, of course, after this accession of numbers, go on being funny. The mistake was trivial, but all saw it. Still the meeting was pleasant. The girls were very intelligent and vivacious. Richling found a certain refreshment in their graceful manners, like what we sometimes feel in catching the scent of some long-forgotten perfume. They had not been told all his history, but had heard enough to make them curious to see and speak to him. They were evidently pleased with him, and Dr. Sevier, observing this, betrayed an air that was much like triumph. But after a while they went as they had come.

“Doctor,” said Richling, smiling until Dr. Sevier wondered silently what possessed the fellow, “excuse me for bringing this here. But I find it so impossible to get to your office” – He moved nearer the Doctor’s table and put his hand into his bosom.

“What’s that?” asked the Doctor, frowning heavily. Richling smiled still broader than before.

“This is a statement,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of the various loans you have made me, with interest to date.”

“Yes?” said the Doctor, frigidly.

“And here,” persisted the happy man, straightening out a leg as he had done the first time they ever met, and drawing a roll of notes from his pocket, “is the total amount.”

“Yes?” The Doctor regarded them with cold contempt. “That’s all very pleasant for you, I suppose, Richling, – shows you’re the right kind of man, I suppose, and so on. I know that already, however. Now just put all that back into your pocket; the sight of it isn’t pleasant. You certainly don’t imagine I’m going to take it, do you?”

“You promised to take it when you lent it.”

“Humph! Well, I didn’t say when.”

“As soon as I could pay it,” said Richling.

“I don’t remember,” replied the Doctor, picking up a newspaper. “I release myself from that promise.”

“I don’t release you,” persisted Richling; “neither does Mary.”

The Doctor was quiet awhile before he answered. He crossed his knees, a moment after folded his arms, and presently said: —

“Foolish pride, Richling.”

“We know that,” replied Richling; “we don’t deny that that feeling creeps in. But we’d never do anything that’s right if we waited for an unmixed motive, would we?”

“Then you think my motive – in refusing it – is mixed, probably.”

“Ho-o-oh!” laughed Richling. The gladness within him would break through. “Why, Doctor, nothing could be more different. It doesn’t seem to me as though you ever had a mixed motive.”

The Doctor did not answer. He seemed to think the same thing.

“We know very well, Doctor, that if we should accept this kindness we might do it in a spirit of proper and commendable – a – humble-mindedness. But it isn’t mere pride that makes us insist.”

“No?” asked the Doctor, cruelly. “What is it else?”

“Why, I hardly know what to call it, except that it’s a conviction that – well, that to pay is best; that it’s the nearest to justice we can get, and that” – he spoke faster – “that it’s simply duty to choose justice when we can and mercy when we must. There, I’ve hit it out!” He laughed again. “Don’t you see, Doctor? Justice when we may – mercy when we must! It’s your own principles!”

The Doctor looked straight at the mantel-piece as he asked: —

“Where did you get that idea?”

“I don’t know; partly from nowhere, and” —

“Partly from Mary,” interrupted the Doctor. He put out his long white palm. “It’s all right. Give me the money.” Richling counted it into his hand. He rolled it up and stuffed it into his portemonnaie.

“You like to part with your hard earnings, do you, Richling?”

“Earnings can’t be hard,” was the reply; “it’s borrowings that are hard.”

The Doctor assented.

“And, of course,” said Richling, “I enjoy paying old debts.” He stood and leaned his head in his hand with his elbow on the mantel. “But, even aside from that, I’m happy.”

“I see you are!” remarked the physician, emphatically, catching the arms of his chair and drawing his feet closer in. “You’ve been smiling worse than a boy with a love-letter.”

“I’ve been hoping you’d ask me what’s the matter.”

“Well, then, Richling, what is the matter?”

“Mary has a daughter.”

“What!” cried the Doctor, springing up with a radiant face, and grasping Richling’s hand in both his own.

Richling laughed aloud, nodded, laughed again, and gave either eye a quick, energetic wipe with all his fingers.

“Doctor,” he said, as the physician sank back into his chair, “we want to name” – he hesitated, stood on one foot and leaned again against the shelf – “we want to call her by the name of – if we may” —

The Doctor looked up as if with alarm, and John said, timidly, – “Alice!”

Dr. Sevier’s eyes – what was the matter? His mouth quivered. He nodded and whispered huskily: —

“All right.”

After a long pause Richling expressed the opinion that he had better be going, and the Doctor did not indicate any difference of conviction. At the door the Doctor asked: —

“If the fever should break out this summer, Richling, will you go away?”

“No.”

CHAPTER XXXVII.

PESTILENCE

On the twentieth of June, 1858, an incident occurred in New Orleans which challenged special attention from the medical profession. Before the month closed there was a second, similar to the first. The press did not give such matters to the public in those days; it would only make the public – the advertising public – angry. Times have changed since – faced clear about: but at that period Dr. Sevier, who hated a secret only less than a falsehood, was right in speaking as he did.

“Now you’ll see,” he said, pointing downward aslant, “the whole community stick its head in the sand!” He sent for Richling.

“I give you fair warning,” he said. “It’s coming.”

“Don’t cases occur sometimes in an isolated way without – anything further?” asked Richling, with a promptness which showed he had already been considering the matter.

“Yes.”

“And might not this” —

“Richling, I give you fair warning.”

“Have you sent your cousins away, Doctor?”

“They go to-morrow.” After a silence the Doctor added: “I tell you now, because this is the time to decide what you will do. If you are not prepared to take all the risks and stay them through, you had better go at once.”

“What proportion of those who are taken sick of it die?” asked Richling.

“The proportion varies in different seasons; say about one in seven or eight. But your chances would be hardly so good, for you’re not strong, Richling, nor well either.”

Richling stood and swung his hat against his knee.

“I really don’t see, Doctor, that I have any choice at all. I couldn’t go to Mary – when she has but just come through a mother’s pains and dangers – and say, ‘I’ve thrown away seven good chances of life to run away from one bad one.’ Why, to say nothing else, Reisen can’t spare me.” He smiled with boyish vanity.

“O Richling, that’s silly!”

“I – I know it,” exclaimed the other, quickly; “I see it is. If he could spare me, of course he wouldn’t be paying me a salary.” But the Doctor silenced him by a gesture.

“The question is not whether he can spare you, at all. It’s simply, can you spare him?”

“Without violating any pledge, you mean,” added Richling.

“Of course,” assented the physician.

“Well, I can’t spare him, Doctor. He has given me a hold on life, and no one chance in seven, or six, or five is going to shake me loose. Why, I tell you I couldn’t look Mary in the face!”

“Have your own way,” responded the Doctor. “There are some things in your favor. You frail fellows often pull through easier than the big, full-blooded ones.”

“Oh, it’s Mary’s way too, I feel certain!” retorted Richling, gayly, “and I venture to say” – he coughed and smiled again – “it’s yours.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” replied the unsmiling Doctor, reaching for a pen and writing a prescription. “Here; get that and take it according to direction. It’s for that cold.”

“If I should take the fever,” said Richling, coming out of a revery, “Mary will want to come to me.”

“Well, she mustn’t come a step!” exclaimed the Doctor.

“You’ll forbid it, will you not, Doctor? Pledge me!”

“I do better, sir; I pledge myself.”

So the July suns rose up and moved across the beautiful blue sky; the moon went through all her majestic changes; on thirty-one successive midnights the Star Bakery sent abroad its grateful odors of bread, and as the last night passed into the first twinkling hour of morning the month chronicled one hundred and thirty-one deaths from yellow fever. The city shuddered because it knew, and because it did not know, what was in store. People began to fly by hundreds, and then by thousands. Many were overtaken and stricken down as they fled. Still men plied their vocations, children played in the streets, and the days came and went, fair, blue tremulous with sunshine, or cool and gray and sweet with summer rain. How strange it was for nature to be so beautiful and so unmoved! By and by one could not look down a street, on this hand or on that, but he saw a funeral. Doctors’ gigs began to be hailed on the streets and to refuse to stop, and houses were pointed out that had just become the scenes of strange and harrowing episodes.

“Do you see that bakery, – the ‘Star Bakery’? Five funerals from that place – and another goes this afternoon.”

Before this was said August had completed its record of eleven hundred deaths, and September had begun the long list that was to add twenty-two hundred more. Reisen had been the first one ill in the establishment. He had been losing friends, – one every few days; and he thought it only plain duty, let fear or prudence say what they might, to visit them at their bedsides and follow them to their tombs. It was not only the outer man of Reisen, but the heart as well, that was elephantine. He had at length come home from one of these funerals with pains in his back and limbs, and the various familiar accompaniments.

“I feel right clumsy,” he said, as he lifted his great feet and lowered them into the mustard foot-bath.

“Doctor Sevier,” said Richling, as he and the physician paused half way between the sick-chambers of Reisen and his wife, “I hope you’ll not think it foolhardy for me to expose myself by nursing these people” —

“No,” replied the veteran, in a tone of indifference, and passed on; the tincture of self-approval that had “mixed” with Richling’s motives went away to nothing.

Both Reisen and his wife recovered. But an apple-cheeked brother of the baker, still in a green cap and coat that he had come in from Germany, was struck from the first with that mortal terror which is so often an evil symptom of the disease, and died, on the fifth day after his attack, in raging delirium. Ten of the workmen, bakers and others, followed him. Richling alone, of all in the establishment, while the sick lay scattered through the town on uncounted thousands of beds, and the month of October passed by, bringing death to eleven hundred more, escaped untouched of the scourge.

“I can’t understand it,” he said.

“Demand an immediate explanation,” said Dr. Sevier, with sombre irony.

How did others fare? Ristofalo had, time and again, sailed with the fever, nursed it, slept with it. It passed him by again. Little Mike took it, lay two or three days very still in his mother’s strong arms, and recovered. Madame Ristofalo had had it in “fifty-three.” She became a heroic nurse to many, and saved life after life among the poor.

The trials of those days enriched John Richling in the acquaintanceship and esteem of Sister Jane’s little lisping rector. And, by the way, none of those with whom Dr. Sevier dined on that darkest night of Richling’s life became victims. The rector had never encountered the disease before, but when Sister Jane and the banker, and the banker’s family and friends, and thousands of others, fled, he ran toward it, David-like, swordless and armorless. He and Richling were nearly of equal age. Three times, four times, and again, they met at dying-beds. They became fond of each other.

Another brave nurse was Narcisse. Dr. Sevier, it is true, could not get rid of the conviction for years afterward that one victim would have lived had not Narcisse talked him to death. But in general, where there was some one near to prevent his telling all his discoveries and inventions, he did good service, and accompanied it with very chivalric emotions.

“Yesseh,” he said, with a strutting attitude that somehow retained a sort of modesty, “I ’ad the gweatess success. Hah! a nuss is a nuss those time’. Only some time’ ’e’s not. ’Tis accawding to the povvub, – what is that povvub, now, ag’in?” The proverb did not answer his call, and he waved it away. “Yesseh, eve’ybody wanting me at once – couldn’ supply the deman’.”

Richling listened to him with new pleasure and rising esteem.

“You make me envy you,” he exclaimed, honestly.

“Well, I s’pose you may say so, Mistoo Itchlin, faw I nevva nuss a sing-le one w’at din paid me ten dollahs a night. Of co’se! ‘Consistency, thou awt a jew’l.’ It’s juz as the povvub says, ‘All work an’ no pay keep Jack a small boy.’ An’ yet,” he hurriedly added, remembering his indebtedness to his auditor, “’tis aztonizhin’ ’ow ’tis expensive to live. I haven’ got a picayune of that money pwesently! I’m aztonizh’ myseff!”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

“I MUST BE CRUEL ONLY TO BE KIND.”

The plague grew sated and feeble. One morning frost sent a flight of icy arrows into the town, and it vanished. The swarthy girls and lads that sauntered homeward behind their mothers’ cows across the wide suburban stretches of marshy commons heard again the deep, unbroken, cataract roar of the reawakened city.

We call the sea cruel, seeing its waters dimple and smile where yesterday they dashed in pieces the ship that was black with men, women, and children. But what shall we say of those billows of human life, of which we are ourselves a part, that surge over the graves of its own dead with dances and laughter and many a coquetry, with panting chase for gain and preference, and pious regrets and tender condolences for the thousands that died yesterday – and need not have died?

Such were the questions Dr. Sevier asked himself as he laid down the newspaper full of congratulations upon the return of trade’s and fashion’s boisterous flow, and praises of the deeds of benevolence and mercy that had abounded throughout the days of anguish.

Certain currents in these human rapids had driven Richling and the Doctor wide apart. But at last, one day, Richling entered the office with a cheerfulness of countenance something overdone, and indicative to the Doctor’s eye of inward trepidation.

“Doctor,” he said hurriedly, “preparing to leave the office? It was the only moment I could command” —

“Good-morning, Richling.”

“I’ve been trying every day for a week to get down here,” said Richling, drawing out a paper. “Doctor” – with his eyes on the paper, which he had begun to unfold.

“Richling” – It was the Doctor’s hardest voice. Richling looked up at him as a child looks at a thundercloud. The Doctor pointed to the document: —

“Is that a subscription paper?”

“Yes.”

“You needn’t unfold it, Richling.” The Doctor made a little pushing motion at it with his open hand. “From whom does it come?”