Dr. Sevier

It began to rain, but Richling sought no shelter. The men he was in search of were not to be found. But the victorious ships, with bare black arms stretched wide, boarding nettings up, and the dark muzzles of their guns bristling from their sides, came, silently as a nightmare, slowly around the bend at Slaughterhouse Point and moved up the middle of the harbor. At the French market he found himself, without forewarning, witness of a sudden skirmish between some Gascon and Sicilian market-men, who had waved a welcome to the fleet, and some Texan soldiers who resented the treason. The report of a musket rang out, a second and third reëchoed it, a pistol cracked, and another, and another; there was a rush for cover; another shot, and another, resounded in the market-house, and presently in the street beyond. Then, in a moment, all was silence and emptiness, into which there ventured but a single stooping, peeping Sicilian, glancing this way and that, with his finger on trigger, eager to kill, gliding from cover to cover, and presently gone again from view, leaving no human life visible nearer than the swarming mob that Richling, by mounting a pile of ship’s ballast, could see still on the steam-boat landing, pillaging in the drenching rain, and the long fleet casting anchor before the town in line of battle.

Late that afternoon Richling, still wet to the skin, amid pushing and yelling and the piping calls of distracted women and children, and scuffling and cramming in, got Kate Ristofalo, trunks, baskets, and babes, safely off on the cars. And when, one week from that day, the sound of drums, that had been hushed for a while, fell upon his ear again, – no longer the jaunty rataplan of Dixie’s drums, but the heavy, monotonous roar of the conqueror’s at the head of his dark-blue columns, – Richling could not leave his bed.

Dr. Sevier sat by him and bore the sound in silence. As it died away and ceased, Richling said: —

“May I write to Mary?”

Then the Doctor had a hard task.

“I wrote for her yesterday,” he said. “But, Richling, I – don’t think she’ll get the letter.”

“Do you think she has already started?” asked the sick man, with glad eagerness.

“Richling, I did the best I knew how” —

“Whatever you did was all right, Doctor.”

“I wrote to her months ago, by the hand of Ristofalo. He knows she got the letter. I’m afraid she’s somewhere in the Confederacy, trying to get through. I meant it for the best, my dear boy.”

“It’s all right, Doctor,” said the invalid; but the physician could see the cruel fact slowly grind him.

“Doctor, may I ask one favor?”

“One or a hundred, Richling.”

“I want you to let Madame Zénobie come and nurse me.”

“Why, Richling, can’t I nurse you well enough?”

The Doctor was jealous.

“Yes,” answered the sick man. “But I’ll need a good deal of attention. She wants to do it. She was here yesterday, you knew. She wanted to ask you, but was afraid.”

His wish was granted.

CHAPTER LVII.

ALMOST IN SIGHT

In St. Tammany Parish, on the northern border of Lake Ponchartrain, about thirty miles from New Orleans, in a straight line across the waters of the lake, stood in time of the war, and may stand yet, an old house, of the Creole colonial fashion, all of cypress from sills to shingles, standing on brick pillars ten feet from the ground, a wide veranda in front, and a double flight of front steps running up to it sidewise and meeting in a balustraded landing at its edge. Scarcely anything short of a steamer’s roof or a light-house window could have offered a finer stand-point from which to sweep a glass round the southern semi-circle of water and sky than did this stair-landing; and here, a long ship’s-glass in her hands, and the accustomed look of care on her face, faintly frowning against the glare of noonday, stood Mary Richling. She still had on the pine-straw hat, and the skirt – stirring softly in a breeze that had to come around from the north side of the house before it reached her – was the brown and olive homespun.

“No use,” said an old, fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east to west.

The house was near the edge of a slightly rising ground, close to the margin of a bayou that glided around toward the left from the woods at its back, and ran, deep and silent, under the shadows of a few huge, wide-spreading, moss-hung live-oaks that stood along its hither shore, laving their roots in its waters, and throwing their vast green images upon its glassy surface. As the dark stream slipped away from these it flashed a little while in the bright open space of a marsh, and, just entering the shade of a spectral cypress wood, turned as if to avoid it, swung more than half about, and shone sky-blue, silver, and green as it swept out into the unbroken sunshine of the prairie.

It was over this flowery savanna, broadening out on either hand, and spreading far away until its bright green margin joined, with the perfection of a mosaic, the distant blue of the lake, that Mary, dallying a moment with hope, passed her long glass. She spoke with it still raised and her gaze bent through it: —

“There’s a big alligator crossing the bayou down in the bend.”

“Yes,” said the aged man, moving his flat, carpet-slippered feet a laborious inch; “alligator. Alligator not goin’ take you ’cross lake. No use lookin’. ’Ow Peter goin’ come when win’ dead ahead? Can’t do it.”

Yet Mary lifted the glass a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the glass, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east.

“You see sail yondeh?” came the slow inquiry from behind.

“No,” said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the balustrade.

“Humph! No! Dawn’t I tell you is no use look?”

“He was to have got here three days ago,” said Mary, shutting the glass and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie.

The Spanish Creole grunted.

“When win’ change, he goin’ start. He dawn’t start till win’ change. Win’ keep ligue dat, he dawn’t start ’t all.” He moved his orange-wood staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came and laid the glass on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear.

In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers, lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?

The morning after that on which she had missed the cars at Canton she had taken a south-bound train for Camp Moore, the camp of the forces that had evacuated New Orleans, situated near the railway station of Tangipahoa, some eighty miles north of the captured city. Thence, after a day or two of unavoidable delay, and of careful effort to know the wisest step, she had taken stage, – a crazy ambulance, – with some others, two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and sands below and murmuring pines above, – vast colonnades of towering, branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall and pretty to look upon, like suddenly grown girls, and the sun was beginning to shine hot. Now she passed over rustic bridges, under posted warnings to drive slow or pay a fine, or through sandy fords across purling streams, hearing the monotone of some unseen mill-dam, or scaring the tall gray crane from his fishing, or the otter from his pranks. Again she went up into leagues of clear pine forest, with stems as straight as lances; meeting now a farmer, and now a school-girl or two, and once a squad of scouts, ill-mounted, worse clad, and yet more sorrily armed; bivouacking with the jolly, tattered fellows, Mary and one of the other women singing for them, and the “boys” singing for Mary, and each applauding each about the pine-knot fire, and the women and children by and by lying down to slumber, in soldier fashion, with their feet to the brands, under the pines and the stars, while the gray-coats stood guard in the wavering fire-light; but Mary lying broad awake staring at the great constellation of the Scorpion, and thinking now of him she sought, and now remorsefully of that other scout, that poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so on into beds of white sand and oyster-shells, and then into one of the villages on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we give a few lines to one matter.

Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey’s end; she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. – ’s “hotel,” at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a man on horseback met them, and, in passing, raised his hat to Mary. The act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled, disconcerted, and had to ask the unobservant, loquacious driver to repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look brightened his face.

“It’s all fixed,” he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” she replied.

The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance full of humor.

“Hold on. It’s still my deal. This is the last time, and then I’m done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to do a thing, do it. Them’s the words that’s inscribed on my banner, as the felleh says; only I, Sam, aint got much banner. And if I sort o’ use about this low country a little while for my health, as it were, and nibble around sort o’ pro bono pūblico takin’ notes, why you aint a-carin’, is you? For wherefore shouldest thou?” He put on a yet more ludicrous look, and spread his hand off at one side, working his outstretched fingers.

“Yes,” responded Mary, with severe gravity; “I must care. You did finish at Holly Springs. I was to find the rest of the way as best I could. That was the understanding. Go away!” She made a commanding gesture, though she wore a pleading look. He looked grave; but his habitual grimace stole through his gravity and invited her smile. But she remained fixed. He gathered the rein and straightened up in the saddle.

“Yes,” she insisted, answering his inquiring attitude; “go! I shall be grateful to you as long as I live. It wasn’t because I mistrusted you that I refused your aid at Camp Moore or at – that other place on this side. I don’t mistrust you. But don’t you see – you must see – it’s your duty to see – that this staying and – and – foll – following – is – is – wrong.” She stood, holding her skirt in one hand, and Alice’s hand in the other, not upright, but in a slightly shrinking attitude, and as she added once more, “Go! I implore you – go!” her eyes filled.

“I will; I’ll go,” said the man, with a soft chuckle intended for self-abasement. “I go, thou goest, he goes. ‘I’ll skedaddle,’ as the felleh says. And yit it do seem to me sorter like, – if my moral sense is worthy of any consideration, which is doubtful, may be, – seems to me like it’s sort o’ jumpin’ the bounty for you to go and go back on an arrangement that’s been all fixed up nice and tight, and when it’s on’y jess to sort o’ ’jump into the wagon’ that’s to call for you to-morrow, sun-up, drove by a nigger boy, and ride a few mile’ to a house on the bayou, and wait there till a man comes with a nice little schooner, and take you on bode and sail off, and ‘good-by, Sally,’ and me never in sight from fust to last, ‘and no questions axed.’”

“I don’t reject the arrangement,” replied Mary, with tearful pleasantness. “If you’ll do as I say, I’ll do as you say; and that will be final proof to you that I believe you’re” – she fell back a step, laughingly – “‘the clean sand!’” She thought the man would have perpetrated some small antic; but he did not. He did not even smile, but lifted the rein a little till the horse stepped forward, and, putting out his hand, said: —

“Good-by. You don’t need no directions. Jess tell the lady where you’ boardin’ that you’ve sort o’ consented to spend a day or two with old Adrien Sanchez, and get into the wagon when it comes for you.” He let go her hand. “Good-by, Alice.” The child looked up in silence and pressed herself against her mother. “Good-by,” said he once more.

“Good-by,” replied Mary.

His eyes lingered as she dropped her own.

“Come, Alice,” she said, resisting the little one’s effort to stoop and pick a wild-pea blossom, and the mother and child started slowly back the way they had come. The spy turned his horse, and moved still more slowly in the opposite direction. But before he had gone many rods he turned the animal’s head again, rode as slowly back, and, beside the spot where Mary had stood, got down, and from the small imprint of her shoe in the damp sand took the pea-blossom, which, in turning to depart, she had unawares trodden under foot. He looked at the small, crushed thing for a moment, and then thrust it into his bosom; but in a moment, as if by a counter impulse, drew it forth again, let it flutter to the ground, following it with his eyes, shook his head with an amused air, half of defiance and half of discomfiture, turned, drew himself into the saddle, and with one hand laid upon another on the saddle-bow and his eyes resting on them in meditation, passed finally out of sight.

Here, then, in this lone old Creole cottage, Mary was tarrying, prisoner of hope, coming out all hours of the day, and scanning the wide view, first, only her hand to shade her brow, and then with the old ship’s-glass, Alice often standing by and looking up at this extraordinary toy with unspoken wonder. All that Mary could tell her of things seeable through it could never persuade the child to risk her own eye at either end of it. So Mary would look again and see, out in the prairie, in the morning, the reed birds, the marsh hen, the blackbirds, the sparrows, the starlings, with their red and yellow epaulets, rising and fluttering and sinking again among the lilies and mallows, and the white crane, paler than a ghost, wading in the grassy shallows. She saw the ravening garfish leap from the bayou, and the mullet in shining hundreds spatter away to left and right; and the fisherman and the shrimp-catcher in their canoes come gliding up the glassy stream, riding down the water-lilies, that rose again behind and shook the drops from their crowns, like water-sprites. Here and there, farther out, she saw the little cat-boats of the neighboring village crawling along the edge of the lake, taking their timid morning cruises. And far away she saw the titanic clouds; but on the horizon, no sail.

In the evening she would see mocking-birds coming out of the savanna and flying into the live-oaks. A summer duck might dart from the cypresses, speed across the wide green level, and become a swerving, vanishing speck on the sky. The heron might come round the bayou’s bend, and suddenly take fright and fly back again. The rattling kingfisher might come up the stream, and the blue crane sail silently through the purple haze that hung between the swamp and the bayou. She would see the gulls, gray and white, on the margin of the lake, the sun setting beyond its western end, and the sky and water turning all beautiful tints; and every now and then, low down along the cool, wrinkling waters, passed across the round eye of the glass the broad, downward-curved wing of the pelican. But when she ventured to lift the glass to the horizon, she swept it from east to west in vain. No sail.

“Dawn’t I tell you no use look? Peter dawn’t comin’ in day-time, nohow.”

But on the fifth morning Mary had hardly made her appearance on the veranda, and had not ventured near the spy-glass yet, when the old man said: —

“She rain back in swamp las’ night; can smell.”

“How do you feel this morning?” asked Mary, facing around from her first glance across the waters. He did not heed.

“See dat win’?” he asked, lifting one hand a little from the top of his staff.

“Yes,” responded Mary, eagerly; “why, it’s – hasn’t it – changed?”

“Yes, change’ las’ night ’fo’ went to bed.”

The old man’s manner betrayed his contempt for one who could be interested in such a change, and yet not know when it took place.

“Why, then,” began Mary, and started as if to take down the glass.

“What you doin’?” demanded its owner. “Better let glass ’lone; fool’ wid him enough.”

Mary flushed, and, with a smile of resentful apology, was about to reply, when he continued: —

“What you want glass for? Dare Peter’ schooner – right dare in bayou. What want glass for? Can’t see schooner hundred yard’ off ’dout glass?” And he turned away his poor wabbling head in disgust.

Mary looked an instant at two bare, rakish, yellow poles showing out against the clump of cypresses, and the trim little white hull and apple-green deck from which they sprang, then clasped her hands and ran into the house.

CHAPTER LVIII.

A GOLDEN SUNSET

Dr. Sevier came to Richling’s room one afternoon, and handed him a sealed letter. The postmark was blurred, but it was easy still to read the abbreviation of the State’s name, – Kentucky. It had come by way of New York and the sea. The sick man reached out for it with avidity from the large bed in which he sat bolstered up. He tore it open with unsteady fingers, and sought the signature.

“It’s from a lawyer.”

“An old acquaintance?” asked the doctor.

“Yes,” responded Richling, his eyes glancing eagerly along the lines. “Mary’s in the Confederate lines! – Mary and Alice!” The hand that held the letter dropped to his lap. “It doesn’t say a word about how she got through!”

“But where did she get through?” asked the physician. “Whereabouts is she now?”

“She got through away up to the eastward of Corinth, Mississippi. Doctor, she may be within fifty miles of us this very minute! Do you think they’ll give her a pass to come in?”

“They may, Richling; I hope they will.”

“I think I’d get well if she’d come,” said the invalid. But his friend made no answer.

A day or two afterward – it was drawing to the close of a beautiful afternoon in early May – Dr. Sevier came into the room and stood at a window looking out. Madame Zénobie sat by the bedside softly fanning the patient. Richling, with his eyes, motioned her to retire. She smiled and nodded approvingly, as if to say that that was just what she was about to propose, and went out, shutting the door with just sound enough to announce her departure to Dr. Sevier.

He came from the window to the bedside and sat down. The sick man looked at him, with a feeble eye, and said, in little more than a whisper: —

“Mary and Alice” —

“Yes,” said the Doctor.

“If they don’t come to-night they’ll be too late.”

“God knows, my dear boy!”

“Doctor” —

“What, Richling?”

“Did you ever try to guess” —

“Guess what, Richling?”

“His use of my life.”

“Why, yes, my poor boy, I have tried. But I only make out its use to me.”

The sick man’s eye brightened.

“Has it been?”

The Doctor nodded. He reached out and took the wasted hand in his. It tried to answer his pressure. The invalid spoke.

“I’m glad you told me that before – before it was too late.”

“Are you, my dear boy? Shall I tell you more?”

“Yes,” the sick man huskily replied; “oh, yes.”

“Well, Richling, – you know we’re great cowards about saying such things; it’s a part of our poor human weakness and distrust of each other, and the emptiness of words, – but – lately – only just here, very lately, I’ve learned to call the meekest, lovingest One that ever trod our earth, Master; and it’s been your life, my dear fellow, that has taught me.” He pressed the sick man’s hand slowly and tremulously, then let it go, but continued to caress it in a tender, absent way, looking on the floor as he spoke on.

“Richling, Nature herself appoints some men to poverty and some to riches. God throws the poor upon our charge – in mercy to us. Couldn’t he take care of them without us if he wished? Are they not his? It’s easy for the poor to feel, when they are helped by us, that the rich are a godsend to them; but they don’t see, and many of their helpers don’t see, that the poor are a godsend to the rich. They’re set over against each other to keep pity and mercy and charity in the human heart. If every one were entirely able to take care of himself we’d turn to stone.” The speaker ceased.

“Go on,” whispered the listener.

“That will never be,” continued the Doctor. “God Almighty will never let us find a way to quite abolish poverty. Riches don’t always bless the man they come to, but they bless the world. And so with poverty; and it’s no contemptible commission, Richling, to be appointed by God to bear that blessing to mankind which keeps its brotherhood universal. See, now,” – he looked up with a gentle smile, – “from what a distance he brought our two hearts together. Why, Richling, the man that can make the rich and poor love each other will make the world happier than it has ever been since man fell!”

“Go on,” whispered Richling.

“No,” said the Doctor.

“Well, now, Doctor —I want to say – something.” The invalid spoke with a weak and broken utterance, with many breaks and starts that we may set aside.

“For a long time,” he said, beginning as if half in soliloquy, “I couldn’t believe I was coming to this early end, simply because I didn’t see why I should. I know that was foolish. I thought my hardships” – He ceased entirely, and, when his strength would allow, resumed: —

“I thought they were sent in order that when I should come to fortune I might take part in correcting some evils that are strangely overlooked.”

The Doctor nodded, and, after a moment of rest, Richling said again: —

“But now I see – that is not my work. May be it is Mary’s. May be it’s my little girl’s.”

“Or mine,” murmured the Doctor.

“Yes, Doctor, I’ve been lying here to-day thinking of something I never thought of before, though I dare say you have, often. There could be no art of healing till the earth was full of graves. It is by shipwreck that we learn to build ships. All our safety – all our betterment – is secured by our knowledge of others’ disasters that need not have happened had they only known. Will you – finish my mission?” The sick man’s hand softly grasped the hand that lay upon it. And the Doctor responded: —