Dr. Sevier

“Can we get them at once?”

“Yes? At once? Yes? Oh, yes?”

No downward inflections from her.

“Well,” – the wife looked at the husband; he nodded, – “well, we’ll take it.”

“Yes?” responded the landlady; “well?” leaning against a bedpost and smiling with infantile diffidence, “you dunt want no ref’ence?”

“No,” said John, generously, “oh, no; we can trust each other that far, eh?”

“Oh, yes?” replied the sweet creature; then suddenly changing countenance, as though she remembered something. “But daz de troub’ – de room not goin’ be vacate for t’ree mont’.”

She stretched forth her open palms and smiled, with one arm still around the bedpost.

“Why,” exclaimed Mrs. Richling, the very statue of astonishment, “you said just now we could have it at once!”

“Dis room? Oh, no; nod dis room.”

“I don’t see how I could have misunderstood you.”

The landlady lifted her shoulders, smiled, and clasped her hands across each other under her throat. Then throwing them apart she said brightly: —

“No, I say at Madame La Rose. Me, my room is all fill’. At Madame La Rose, I say, I think you be pritty well. I’m shoe you be verrie well at Madame La Rose. I’m sorry. But you kin paz yondeh – ’tiz juz ad the cawneh? And I am shoe I think you be pritty well at Madame La Rose.”

She kept up the repetition, though Mrs. Richling, incensed, had turned her back, and Richling was saying good-day.

“She did say the room was vacant!” exclaimed the little wife, as they reached the sidewalk. But the next moment there came a quick twinkle from her eye, and, waving her husband to go on without her, she said, “You kin paz yondeh; at Madame La Rose I am shoe you be pritty sick.” Thereupon she took his arm, – making everybody stare and smile to see a lady and gentleman arm in arm by daylight, – and they went merrily on their way.

The last place they stopped at was in Royal street. The entrance was bad. It was narrow even for those two. The walls were stained by dampness, and the smell of a totally undrained soil came up through the floor. The stairs ascended a few steps, came too near a low ceiling, and shot forward into cavernous gloom to find a second rising place farther on. But the rooms, when reached, were a tolerably pleasant disappointment, and the proprietress a person of reassuring amiability.

She bestirred herself in an obliging way that was the most charming thing yet encountered. She gratified the young people every moment afresh with her readiness to understand or guess their English queries and remarks, hung her head archly when she had to explain away little objections, delivered her No sirs with gravity and her Yes sirs with bright eagerness, shook her head slowly with each negative announcement, and accompanied her affirmations with a gracious bow and a smile full of rice powder.

She rendered everything so agreeable, indeed, that it almost seemed impolite to inquire narrowly into matters, and when the question of price had to come up it was really difficult to bring it forward, and Richling quite lost sight of the economic rules to which he had silently acceded in the Rue Du Maine.

“And you will carpet the floor?” he asked, hovering off of the main issue.

“Put coppit? Ah! cettainlee!” she replied, with a lovely bow and a wave of the hand toward Mrs. Richling, whom she had already given the same assurance.

“Yes,” responded the little wife, with a captivated smile, and nodded to her husband.

“We want to get the decentest thing that is cheap,” he said, as the three stood close together in the middle of the room.

The landlady flushed.

“No, no, John,” said the wife, quickly, “don’t you know what we said?” Then, turning to the proprietress, she hurried to add, “We want the cheapest thing that is decent.”

But the landlady had not waited for the correction.

“Dissent! You want somesin dissent!” She moved a step backward on the floor, scoured and smeared with brick-dust, her ire rising visibly at every heart-throb, and pointing her outward-turned open hand energetically downward, added: —

“’Tis yeh!” She breathed hard. “Mais, no; you don’t want somesin dissent. No!” She leaned forward interrogatively: “You want somesin tchip?” She threw both elbows to the one side, cast her spread hands off in the same direction, drew the cheek on that side down into the collar-bone, raised her eyebrows, and pushed her upper lip with her lower, scornfully.

At that moment her ear caught the words of the wife’s apologetic amendment. They gave her fresh wrath and new opportunity. For her new foe was a woman, and a woman trying to speak in defence of the husband against whose arm she clung.

“Ah-h-h!” Her chin went up; her eyes shot lightning; she folded her arms fiercely, and drew herself to her best height; and, as Richling’s eyes shot back in rising indignation, cried: —

“Ziss pless? ’Tis not ze pless! Zis pless – is diss’nt pless! I am diss’nt woman, me! Fo w’at you come in yeh?”

“My dear madam! My husband” —

“Dass you’ uzban’?” pointing at him.

“Yes!” cried the two Richlings at once.

The woman folded her arms again, turned half-aside, and, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, simply remarked, with an ecstatic smile: —

“Humph!” and left the pair, red with exasperation, to find the street again through the darkening cave of the stair-way.

It was still early the next morning, when Richling entered his wife’s apartment with an air of brisk occupation. She was pinning her brooch at the bureau glass.

“Mary,” he exclaimed, “put something on and come see what I’ve found! The queerest, most romantic old thing in the city; the most comfortable – and the cheapest! Here, is this the wardrobe key? To save time I’ll get your bonnet.”

“No, no, no!” cried the laughing wife, confronting him with sparkling eyes, and throwing herself before the wardrobe; “I can’t let you touch my bonnet!”

There is a limit, it seems, even to a wife’s subserviency.

However, in a very short time afterward, by the feminine measure, they were out in the street, and people were again smiling at the pretty pair to see her arm in his, and she actually keeping step. ’Twas very funny.

As they went John described his discovery: A pair of huge, solid green gates immediately on the sidewalk, in the dull façade of a tall, red brick building with old carved vinework on its window and door frames. Hinges a yard long on the gates; over the gates a semi-circular grating of iron bars an inch in diameter; in one of these gates a wicket, and on the wicket a heavy, battered, highly burnished brass knocker. A short-legged, big-bodied, and very black slave to usher one through the wicket into a large, wide, paved corridor, where from the middle joist overhead hung a great iron lantern. Big double doors at the far end, standing open, flanked with diamond-paned side-lights of colored glass, and with an arch at the same, fan-shaped, above. Beyond these doors and showing through them, a flagged court, bordered all around by a narrow, raised parterre under pomegranate and fruit-laden orange, and over-towered by vine-covered and latticed walls, from whose ragged eaves vagabond weeds laughed down upon the flowers of the parterre below, robbed of late and early suns. Stairs old fashioned, broad; rooms, their choice of two; one looking down into the court, the other into the street; furniture faded, capacious; ceilings high; windows, each opening upon its own separate small balcony, where, instead of balustrades, was graceful iron scroll-work, centered by some long-dead owner’s monogram two feet in length; and on the balcony next the division wall, close to another on the adjoining property, a quarter circle of iron-work set like a blind-bridle, and armed with hideous prongs for house-breakers to get impaled on.

“Why, in there,” said Richling, softly, as they hurried in, “we’ll be hid from the whole world, and the whole world from us.”

The wife’s answer was only the upward glance of her blue eyes into his, and a faint smile.

The place was all it had been described to be, and more, – except in one particular.

“And my husband tells me” – The owner of said husband stood beside him, one foot a little in advance of the other, her folded parasol hanging down the front of her skirt from her gloved hands, her eyes just returning to the landlady’s from an excursion around the ceiling, and her whole appearance as fresh as the pink flowers that nestled between her brow and the rim of its precious covering. She smiled as she began her speech, but not enough to spoil what she honestly believed to be a very business-like air and manner. John had quietly dropped out of the negotiations, and she felt herself put upon her mettle as his agent. “And my husband tells me the price of this front room is ten dollars a month.”

“Munse?”

The respondent was a very white, corpulent woman, who constantly panted for breath, and was everywhere sinking down into chairs, with her limp, unfortified skirt dropping between her knees, and her hands pressed on them exhaustedly.

“Munse?” She turned from husband to wife, and back again, a glance of alarmed inquiry.

Mary tried her hand at French.

“Yes; oui, madame. Ten dollah the month —le mois.”

Intelligence suddenly returned. Madame made a beautiful, silent O with her mouth and two others with her eyes.

“Ah non! By munse? No, madame. Ah-h! impossybl’! By wick, yes; ten dollah de wick! Ah!”

She touched her bosom with the wide-spread fingers of one hand and threw them toward her hearers.

The room-hunters got away, yet not so quickly but they heard behind and above them her scornful laugh, addressed to the walls of the empty room.

A day or two later they secured an apartment, cheap, and – morally – decent; but otherwise – ah!

CHAPTER VII.

DISAPPEARANCE

It was the year of a presidential campaign. The party that afterward rose to overwhelming power was, for the first time, able to put its candidate fairly abreast of his competitors. The South was all afire. Rising up or sitting down, coming or going, week-day or Sabbath-day, eating or drinking, marrying or burying, the talk was all of slavery, abolition, and a disrupted country.

Dr. Sevier became totally absorbed in the issue. He was too unconventional a thinker ever to find himself in harmony with all the declarations of any party, and yet it was a necessity of his nature to be in the mêlée. He had his own array of facts, his own peculiar deductions; his own special charges of iniquity against this party and of criminal forbearance against that; his own startling political economy; his own theory of rights; his own interpretations of the Constitution; his own threats and warnings; his own exhortations, and his own prophecies, of which one cannot say all have come true. But he poured them forth from the mighty heart of one who loved his country, and sat down with a sense of duty fulfilled and wiped his pale forehead while the band played a polka.

It hardly need be added that he proposed to dispense with politicians, or that, when “the boys” presently counted him into their party team for campaign haranguing, he let them clap the harness upon him and splashed along in the mud with an intention as pure as snow.

“Hurrah for” —

Whom it is no matter now. It was not Fremont. Buchanan won the race. Out went the lights, down came the platforms, rockets ceased to burst; it was of no use longer to “Wait for the wagon”; “Old Dan Tucker” got “out of the way,” small boys were no longer fellow-citizens, dissolution was postponed, and men began to have an eye single to the getting of money.

A mercantile friend of Dr. Sevier had a vacant clerkship which it was necessary to fill. A bright recollection flashed across the Doctor’s memory.

“Narcisse!”

“Yesseh!”

“Go to Number 4 °Custom-house street and inquire for Mr. Fledgeling; or, if he isn’t in, for Mrs. Fledge – humph! Richling, I mean; I” —

Narcisse laughed aloud.

“Ha-ha-ha! daz de way, sometime’! My hant she got a honcl’ – he says, once ’pon a time” —

“Never mind! Go at once!”

“All a-ight, seh!”

“Give him this card” —

“Yesseh!”

“These people” —

“Yesseh!”

“Well, wait till you get your errand, can’t you? These” —

“Yesseh!”

“These people want to see him.”

“All a-ight, seh!”

Narcisse threw open and jerked off a worsted jacket, took his coat down from a peg, transferred a snowy handkerchief from the breast-pocket of the jacket to that of the coat, felt in his pantaloons to be sure that he had his match-case and cigarettes, changed his shoes, got his hat from a high nail by a little leap, and put it on a head as handsome as Apollo’s.

“Doctah Seveeah,” he said, “in fact, I fine that a ve’y gen’lemany young man, that Mistoo Itchlin, weely, Doctah.”

The Doctor murmured to himself from the letter he was writing.

“Well, au ’evoi’, Doctah; I’m goin’.”

Out in the corridor he turned and jerked his chin up and curled his lip, brought a match and cigarette together in the lee of his hollowed hand, took one first, fond draw, and went down the stairs as if they were on fire.

At Canal street he fell in with two noble fellows of his own circle, and the three went around by way of Exchange alley to get a glass of soda at McCloskey’s old down-town stand. His two friends were out of employment at the moment, – making him, consequently, the interesting figure in the trio as he inveighed against his master.

“Ah, phooh!” he said, indicating the end of his speech by dropping the stump of his cigarette into the sand on the floor and softly spitting upon it, – “le Shylock de la rue Carondelet!” – and then in English, not to lose the admiration of the Irish waiter: —

“He don’t want to haugment me! I din hass ’im, because the ’lection. But you juz wait till dat firce of Jannawerry!”

The waiter swathed the zinc counter, and inquired why Narcisse did not make his demands at the present moment.

“W’y I don’t hass ’im now? Because w’en I hass ’im he know’ he’s got to do it! You thing I’m goin’ to kill myseff workin’?”

Nobody said yes, and by and by he found himself alive in the house of Madame Zénobie. The furniture was being sold at auction, and the house was crowded with all sorts and colors of men and women. A huge sideboard was up for sale as he entered, and the crier was crying: —

“Faw-ty-fi’ dollah! faw-ty-fi’ dollah, ladies an’ gentymen! On’y faw-ty-fi’ dollah fo’ thad magniffyzan sidebode! Quarante-cinque piastres, seulement, messieurs! Les knobs vaut bien cette prix! Gentymen, de knobs is worse de money! Ladies, if you don’ stop dat talkin’, I will not sell one thing mo’! Et quarante cinque piastres– faw-ty-fi’ dollah” —

“Fifty!” cried Narcisse, who had not owned that much at one time since his father was a constable; realizing which fact, he slipped away upstairs and found Madame Zénobie half crazed at the slaughter of her assets.

She sat in a chair against the wall of the room the Richlings had occupied, a spectacle of agitated dejection. Here and there about the apartment, either motionless in chairs, or moving noiselessly about, and pulling and pushing softly this piece of furniture and that, were numerous vulture-like persons of either sex, waiting the up-coming of the auctioneer. Narcisse approached her briskly.

“Well, Madame Zénobie!” – he spoke in French – “is it you who lives here? Don’t you remember me? What! No? You don’t remember how I used to steal figs from you?”

The vultures slowly turned their heads. Madame Zénobie looked at him in a dazed way.

No, she did not remember. So many had robbed her – all her life.

“But you don’t look at me, Madame Zénobie. Don’t you remember, for example, once pulling a little boy – as little as that– out of your fig-tree, and taking the half of a shingle, split lengthwise, in your hand, and his head under your arm, – swearing you would do it if you died for it, – and bending him across your knee,” – he began a vigorous but graceful movement of the right arm, which few members of our fallen race could fail to recognize, – “and you don’t remember me, my old friend?”

She looked up into the handsome face with a faint smile of affirmation. He laughed with delight.

“The shingle was that wide. Ah! Madame Zénobie, you did it well!” He softly smote the memorable spot, first with one hand and then with the other, shrinking forward spasmodically with each contact, and throwing utter woe into his countenance. The general company smiled. He suddenly put on great seriousness.

“Madame Zénobie, I hope your furniture is selling well?” He still spoke in French.

She cast her eyes upward pleadingly, caught her breath, threw the back of her hand against her temple, and dashed it again to her lap, shaking her head.

Narcisse was sorry.

“I have been doing what I could for you, downstairs, – running up the prices of things. I wish I could stay to do more, for the sake of old times. I came to see Mr. Richling, Madame Zénobie; is he in? Dr. Sevier wants him.”

Richling? Why, the Richlings did not live there! The Doctor must know it. Why should she be made responsible for this mistake? It was his oversight. They had moved long ago. Dr. Sevier had seen them looking for apartments. Where did they live now? Ah, me! she could not tell. Did Mr. Richling owe the Doctor something?

“Owe? Certainly not. The Doctor – on the contrary” —

Ah! well, indeed, she didn’t know where they lived, it is true; but the fact was, Mr. Richling happened to be there just then! —à-ç’t’eure! He had come to get a few trifles left by his madame.

Narcisse made instant search. Richling was not on the upper floor. He stepped to the landing and looked down. There he went!

“Mistoo ’Itchlin!”

Richling failed to hear. Sharper ears might have served him better. He passed out by the street door. Narcisse stopped the auction by the noise he made coming downstairs after him. He had some trouble with the front door, – lost time there, but got out.

Richling was turning a corner. Narcisse ran there and looked; looked up – looked down – looked into every store and shop on either side of the way clear back to Canal street; crossed it, went back to the Doctor’s office, and reported. If he omitted such details as having seen and then lost sight of the man he sought, it may have been in part from the Doctor’s indisposition to give him speaking license. The conclusion was simple: the Richlings could not be found.

The months of winter passed. No sign of them.

“They’ve gone back home,” the Doctor often said to himself. How much better that was than to stay where they had made a mistake in venturing, and become the nurslings of patronizing strangers! He gave his admiration free play, now that they were quite gone. True courage that Richling had – courage to retreat when retreat is best! And his wife – ah! what a reminder of – hush, memory!

“Yes, they must have gone home!” The Doctor spoke very positively, because, after all, he was haunted by doubt.

One spring morning he uttered a soft exclamation as he glanced at his office-slate. The first notice on it read: —

Please call as soon as you can at number 292 St. Mary street, corner of Prytania. Lower corner – opposite the asylum.

John Richling.

The place was far up in the newer part of the American quarter. The signature had the appearance as if the writer had begun to write some other name, and had changed it to Richling.

CHAPTER VIII.

A QUESTION OF BOOK-KEEPING

A day or two after Narcisse had gone looking for Richling at the house of Madame Zénobie, he might have found him, had he known where to search, in Tchoupitoulas street.

Whoever remembers that thoroughfare as it was in those days, when the commodious “cotton-float” had not quite yet come into use, and Poydras and other streets did not so vie with Tchoupitoulas in importance as they do now, will recall a scene of commercial hurly-burly that inspired much pardonable vanity in the breast of the utilitarian citizen. Drays, drays, drays! Not the light New York things; but big, heavy, solid affairs, many of them drawn by two tall mules harnessed tandem. Drays by threes and by dozens, drays in opposing phalanxes, drays in long processions, drays with all imaginable kinds of burden; cotton in bales, piled as high as the omnibuses; leaf tobacco in huge hogsheads; cases of linens and silks; stacks of raw-hides; crates of cabbages; bales of prints and of hay; interlocked heaps of blue and red ploughs; bags of coffee, and spices, and corn; bales of bagging; barrels, casks, and tierces; whisky, pork, onions, oats, bacon, garlic, molasses, and other delicacies; rice, sugar, – what was there not? Wines of France and Spain in pipes, in baskets, in hampers, in octaves; queensware from England; cheeses, like cart-wheels, from Switzerland; almonds, lemons, raisins, olives, boxes of citron, casks of chains; specie from Vera Cruz; cries of drivers, cracking of whips, rumble of wheels, tremble of earth, frequent gorge and stoppage. It seemed an idle tale to say that any one could be lacking bread and raiment. “We are a great city,” said the patient foot-passengers, waiting long on street corners for opportunity to cross the way.

On one of these corners paused Richling. He had not found employment, but you could not read that in his face; as well as he knew himself, he had come forward into the world prepared amiably and patiently to be, to do, to suffer anything, provided it was not wrong or ignominious. He did not see that even this is not enough in this rough world; nothing had yet taught him that one must often gently suffer rudeness and wrong. As to what constitutes ignominy he had a very young man’s – and, shall we add? a very American – idea. He could not have believed, had he been told, how many establishments he had passed by, omitting to apply in them for employment. He little dreamed he had been too select. He had entered not into any house of the Samaritans, to use a figure; much less, to speak literally, had he gone to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Mary, hiding away in uncomfortable quarters a short stone’s throw from Madame Zénobie’s, little imagined that, in her broad irony about his not hunting for employment, there was really a tiny seed of truth. She felt sure that two or three persons who had seemed about to employ him had failed to do so because they detected the defect in his hearing, and in one or two cases she was right.

Other persons paused on the same corner where Richling stood, under the same momentary embarrassment. One man, especially busy-looking, drew very near him. And then and there occurred this simple accident, – that at last he came in contact with the man who had work to give him. This person good-humoredly offered an impatient comment on their enforced delay. Richling answered in sympathetic spirit, and the first speaker responded with a question: —

“Stranger in the city?”

“Yes.”

“Buying goods for up-country?”

It was a pleasant feature of New Orleans life that sociability to strangers on the street was not the exclusive prerogative of gamblers’ decoys.

“No; I’m looking for employment.”

“Aha!” said the man, and moved away a little. But in a moment Richling, becoming aware that his questioner was glancing all over him with critical scrutiny, turned, and the man spoke.

“D’you keep books?”

Just then a way opened among the vehicles; and the man, young and muscular, darted into it, and Richling followed.

“I can keep books,” he said, as they reached the farther curb-stone.

The man seized him by the arm.

“D’you see that pile of codfish and herring where that tall man is at work yonder with a marking-pot and brush? Well, just beyond there is a boarding-house, and then a hardware store; you can hear them throwing down sheets of iron. Here; you can see the sign. See? Well, the next is my store. Go in there – upstairs into the office – and wait till I come.”

Richling bowed and went. In the office he sat down and waited what seemed a very long time. Could he have misunderstood? For the man did not come. There was a person sitting at a desk on the farther side of the office, writing, who had not lifted his head from first to last, Richling said: —