Dr. Sevier

He called himself an accountant, gulping down his secret pride with an amiable glow that commanded, instantly, an amused esteem. And, to judge by his evident familiarity with Tonti’s beautiful scheme of mercantile records, he certainly – those guessed whose books he had extricated from confusion – had handled money and money values in days before his unexplained coming to New Orleans. Yet a close observer would have noticed that he grasped these tasks only as problems, treated them in their mathematical and enigmatical aspect, and solved them without any appreciation of their concrete values. When they were done he felt less personal interest in them than in the architectural beauty of the store-front, whose window-shutters he had never helped to close without a little heart-leap of pleasure.

But, standing thus, and looking in at the machinery, a man touched him on the shoulder.

“Good-morning,” said the man. He wore a pleasant air. It seemed to say, “I’m nothing much, but you’ll recognize me in a moment; I’ll wait.” He was short, square, solid, beardless; in years, twenty-five or six. His skin was dark, his hair almost black, his eyebrows strong. In his mild black eyes you could see the whole Mediterranean. His dress was coarse, but clean; his linen soft and badly laundered. But under all the rough garb and careless, laughing manner was visibly written again and again the name of the race that once held the world under its feet.

“You don’t remember me?” he added, after a moment.

“No,” said Richling, pleasantly, but with embarrassment. The man waited another moment, and suddenly Richling recalled their earlier meeting. The man, representing a wholesale confectioner in one of the smaller cities up the river, had bought some cordials and syrups of the house whose books Richling had last put in order.

“Why, yes I do, too!” said Richling. “You left your pocket-book in my care for two or three days; your own private money, you said.”

“Yes.” The man laughed softly. “Lost that money. Sent it to the boss. Boss died – store seized – everything gone.” His English was well pronounced, but did not escape a pretty Italian accent, too delicate for the printer’s art.

“Oh! that was too bad!” Richling laid his hand upon an awning-post and twined an arm and leg around it as though he were a vine. “I – I forget your name.”

“Ristofalo. Raphael Ristofalo. Yours is Richling. Yes, knocked me flat. Not got cent in world.” The Italian’s low, mellow laugh claimed Richling’s admiration.

“Why, when did that happen?” he asked.

“Yes’day,” replied the other, still laughing.

“And how are you going to provide for the future?” Richling asked, smiling down into the face of the shorter man. The Italian tossed the future away with the back of his hand.

“I got nothin’ do with that.” His words were low, but very distinct.

Thereupon Richling laughed, leaning his cheek against the post.

“Must provide for the present,” said Raphael Ristofalo. Richling dropped his eyes in thought. The present! He had never been able to see that it was the present which must be provided against, until, while he was training his guns upon the future, the most primitive wants of the present burst upon him right and left like whooping savages.

“Can you lend me dollar?” asked the Italian. “Give you back dollar an’ quarter to-morrow.”

Richling gave a start and let go the post. “Why, Mr. Risto – falo, I – I – , the fact is, I” – he shook his head – “I haven’t much money.”

“Dollar will start me,” said the Italian, whose feet had not moved an inch since he touched Richling’s shoulder. “Be aw righ’ to-morrow.”

“You can’t invest one dollar by itself,” said the incredulous Richling.

“Yes. Return her to-morrow.”

Richling swung his head from side to side as an expression of disrelish. “I haven’t been employed for some time.”

“I goin’ t’employ myself,” said Ristofalo.

Richling laughed again. There was a faint betrayal of distress in his voice as it fell upon the cunning ear of the Italian; but he laughed too, very gently and innocently, and stood in his tracks.

“I wouldn’t like to refuse a dollar to a man who needs it,” said Richling. He took his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve seen the time when it was much easier to lend than it is just now.” He thrust his hand down into his pocket and stood gazing at the sidewalk.

The Italian glanced at Richling askance, and with one sweep of the eye from the softened crown of his hat to the slender, white bursted slit in the outer side of either well-polished shoe, took in the beauty of his face and a full understanding of his condition. His hair, somewhat dry, had fallen upon his forehead. His fine, smooth skin was darkened by the exposure of his daily wanderings. His cheek-bones, a trifle high, asserted their place above the softly concave cheeks. His mouth was closed and the lips were slightly compressed; the chin small, gracefully turned, not weak, – not strong. His eyes were abstracted, deep, pensive. His dress told much. The fine plaits of his shirt had sprung apart and been neatly sewed together again. His coat was a little faulty in the set of the collar, as if the person who had taken the garment apart and turned the goods had not put it together again with practised skill. It was without spot and the buttons were new. The edges of his shirt-cuffs had been trimmed with the scissors. Face and vesture alike revealed to the sharp eye of the Italian the woe underneath. “He has a wife,” thought Ristofalo.

Richling looked up with a smile. “How can you be so sure you will make, and not lose?”

“I never fail.” There was not the least shade of boasting in the man’s manner. Richling handed out his dollar. It was given without patronage and taken with simple thanks.

“Where goin’ to meet to-morrow morning?” asked Ristofalo. “Here?”

“Oh! I forgot,” said Richling. “Yes, I suppose so; and then you’ll tell me how you invested it, will you?”

“Yes, but you couldn’t do it.”

“Why not?”

Raphael Ristofalo laughed. “Oh! fifty reason’.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

HOW HE DID IT

Ristofalo and Richling had hardly separated, when it occurred to the latter that the Italian had first touched him from behind. Had Ristofalo recognized him with his back turned, or had he seen him earlier and followed him? The facts were these: about an hour before the time when Richling omitted to apply for employment in the ill-smelling store in Tchoupitoulas street, Mr. Raphael Ristofalo halted in front of the same place, – which appeared small and slovenly among its more pretentious neighbors, – and stepped just inside the door to where stood a single barrel of apples, – a fruit only the earliest varieties of which were beginning to appear in market. These were very small, round, and smooth, and with a rather wan blush confessed to more than one of the senses that they had seen better days. He began to pick them up and throw them down – one, two, three, four, seven, ten; about half of them were entirely sound.

“How many barrel’ like this?”

“No got-a no more; dass all,” said the dealer. He was a Sicilian. “Lame duck,” he added. “Oäl de rest gone.”

“How much?” asked Ristofalo, still handling the fruit.

The Sicilian came to the barrel, looked in, and said, with a gesture of indifference: —

“’M – doll’ an’ ’alf.”

Ristofalo offered to take them at a dollar if he might wash and sort them under the dealer’s hydrant, which could be heard running in the back yard. The offer would have been rejected with rude scorn but for one thing: it was spoken in Italian. The man looked at him with pleased surprise, and made the concession. The porter of the store, in a red worsted cap, had drawn near. Ristofalo bade him roll the barrel on its chine to the rear and stand it by the hydrant.

“I will come back pretty soon,” he said, in Italian, and went away.

By and by he returned, bringing with him two swarthy, heavy-set, little Sicilian lads, each with his inevitable basket and some clean rags. A smile and gesture to the store-keeper, a word to the boys, and in a moment the barrel was upturned, and the pair were washing, wiping, and sorting the sound and unsound apples at the hydrant.

Ristofalo stood a moment in the entrance of the store. The question now was where to get a dollar. Richling passed, looked in, seemed to hesitate, went on, turned, and passed again, the other way. Ristofalo saw him all the time and recognized him at once, but appeared not to observe him.

“He will do,” thought the Italian. “Be back few minute’,” he said, glancing behind him.

“Or-r righ’,” said the store-keeper, with a hand-wave of good-natured confidence. He recognized Mr. Raphael Ristofalo’s species.

The Italian walked up across Poydras street, saw Richling stop and look at the machinery, approached, and touched him on the shoulder.

On parting with him he did not return to the store where he had left the apples. He walked up Tchoupitoulas street about a mile, and where St. Thomas street branches acutely from it, in a squalid district full of the poorest Irish, stopped at a dirty fruit-stand and spoke in Spanish to its Catalan proprietor. Half an hour later twenty-five cents had changed hands, the Catalan’s fruit shelves were bright with small pyramids – sound side foremost – of Ristofalo’s second grade of apples, the Sicilian had Richling’s dollar, and the Italian was gone with his boys and his better grade of fruit. Also, a grocer had sold some sugar, and a druggist a little paper of some harmless confectioner’s dye.

Down behind the French market, in a short, obscure street that runs from Ursulines to Barracks street, and is named in honor of Albert Gallatin, are some old buildings of three or four stories’ height, rented, in John Richling’s day, to a class of persons who got their livelihood by sub-letting the rooms, and parts of rooms, to the wretchedest poor of New Orleans, – organ-grinders, chimney-sweeps, professional beggars, street musicians, lemon-peddlers, rag-pickers, with all the yet dirtier herd that live by hook and crook in the streets or under the wharves; a room with a bed and stove, a room without, a half-room with or without ditto, a quarter-room with or without a blanket or quilt, and with only a chalk-mark on the floor instead of a partition. Into one of these went Mr. Raphael Ristofalo, the two boys, and the apples. Whose assistance or indulgence, if any, he secured in there is not recorded; but when, late in the afternoon, the Italian issued thence – the boys, meanwhile, had been coming and going – an unusual luxury had been offered the roustabouts and idlers of the steam-boat landings, and many had bought and eaten freely of the very small, round, shiny, sugary, and artificially crimson roasted apples, with neatly whittled white-pine stems to poise them on as they were lifted to the consumer’s watering teeth. When, the next morning Richling laughed at the story, the Italian drew out two dollars and a half, and began to take from it a dollar.

“But you have last night’s lodging and so forth yet to pay for.”

“No. Made friends with Sicilian luggerman. Slept in his lugger.” He showed his brow and cheeks speckled with mosquito-bites. “Ate little hard-tack and coffee with him this morning. Don’t want much.” He offered the dollar with a quarter added. Richling declined the bonus.

“But why not?”

“Oh, I just couldn’t do it,” laughed Richling; “that’s all.”

“Well,” said the Italian, “lend me that dollar one day more, I return you dollar and half in its place to-morrow.”

The lender had to laugh again. “You can’t find an odd barrel of damaged apples every day.”

“No. No apples to-day. But there’s regiment soldiers at lower landing; whole steam-boat load; going to sail this evenin’ to Florida. They’ll eat whole barrel hard-boil’ eggs.” – And they did. When they sailed, the Italian’s pocket was stuffed with small silver.

Richling received his dollar and fifty cents. As he did so, “I would give, if I had it, a hundred dollars for half your art,” he said, laughing unevenly. He was beaten, surpassed, humbled. Still he said, “Come, don’t you want this again? You needn’t pay me for the use of it.”

But the Italian refused. He had outgrown his patron. A week afterward Richling saw him at the Picayune Tier, superintending the unloading of a small schooner-load of bananas. He had bought the cargo, and was reselling to small fruiterers.

“Make fifty dolla’ to-day,” said the Italian, marking his tally-board with a piece of chalk.

Richling clapped him joyfully on the shoulder, but turned around with inward distress and hurried away. He had not found work.

Events followed of which we have already taken knowledge. Mary, we have seen, fell sick and was taken to the hospital.

“I shall go mad!” Richling would moan, with his dishevelled brows between his hands, and then start to his feet, exclaiming, “I must not! I must not! I must keep my senses!” And so to the commercial regions or to the hospital.

Dr. Sevier, as we know, left word that Richling should call and see him; but when he called, a servant – very curtly, it seemed to him – said the Doctor was not well and didn’t want to see anybody. This was enough for a young man who hadn’t his senses. The more he needed a helping hand the more unreasonably shy he became of those who might help him.

“Will nobody come and find us?” Yet he would not cry “Whoop!” and how, then, was anybody to come?

Mary returned to the house again (ah! what joys there are in the vale of tribulation!), and grew strong, – stronger, she averred, than ever she had been.

“And now you’ll not be cast down, will you?” she said, sliding into her husband’s lap. She was in an uncommonly playful mood.

“Not a bit of it,” said John. “Every dog has his day. I’ll come to the top. You’ll see.”

“Don’t I know that?” she responded, “Look here, now,” she exclaimed, starting to her feet and facing him, “I’ll recommend you to anybody. I’ve got confidence in you!” Richling thought she had never looked quite so pretty as at that moment. He leaped from his chair with a laughing ejaculation, caught and swung her an instant from her feet, and landed her again before she could cry out. If, in retort, she smote him so sturdily that she had to retreat backward to rearrange her shaken coil of hair, it need not go down on the record; such things will happen. The scuffle and suppressed laughter were detected even in Mrs. Riley’s room.

“Ah!” sighed the widow to herself, “wasn’t it Kate Riley that used to get the sweet, haird knocks!” Her grief was mellowing.

Richling went out on the old search, which the advancing summer made more nearly futile each day than the day before.

Stop. What sound was that?

“Richling! Richling!”

Richling, walking in a commercial street, turned. A member of the firm that had last employed him beckoned him to halt.

“What are you doing now, Richling? Still acting deputy assistant city surveyor pro tem.?”

“Yes.”

“Well, see here! Why haven’t you been in the store to see us lately? Did I seem a little preoccupied the last time you called?”

“I” – Richling dropped his eyes with an embarrassed smile – “I was afraid I was in the way – or should be.”

“Well and suppose you were? A man that’s looking for work must put himself in the way. But come with me. I think I may be able to give you a lift.”

“How’s that?” asked Richling, as they started off abreast.

“There’s a house around the corner here that will give you some work, – temporary anyhow, and may be permanent.”

So Richling was at work again, hidden away from Dr. Sevier between journal and ledger. His employers asked for references. Richling looked dismayed for a moment, then said, “I’ll bring somebody to recommend me,” went away, and came back with Mary.

“All the recommendation I’ve got,” said he, with timid elation. There was a laugh all round.

“Well, madam, if you say he’s all right, we don’t doubt he is!”

CHAPTER XIX.

ANOTHER PATIENT

“Doctah Seveeah,” said Narcisse, suddenly, as he finished sticking with great fervor the postage-stamps on some letters the Doctor had written, and having studied with much care the phraseology of what he had to say, and screwed up his courage to the pitch of utterance, “I saw yo’ notiz on the noozpapeh this mornin’.”

The unresponding Doctor closed his eyes in unutterable weariness of the innocent young gentleman’s prepared speeches.

“Yesseh. ’Tis a beaucheouz notiz. I fine that w’itten with the gweatez accu’acy of diction, in fact. I made a twanslation of that faw my hant. Thaz a thing I am fon’ of, twanslation. I dunno ’ow ’tis, Doctah,” he continued, preparing to go out, – “I dunno ’ow ’tis, but I thing, you goin’ to fine that Mistoo Itchlin ad the en’. I dunno ’ow ’tis. Well, I’m goin’ ad the” —

The Doctor looked up fiercely.

“Bank,” said Narcisse, getting near the door.

“All right!” grumbled the Doctor, more politely.

“Yesseh – befo’ I go ad the poss-office.”

A great many other persons had seen the advertisement. There were many among them who wondered if Mr. John Richling could be such a fool as to fall into that trap. There were others – some of them women, alas! – who wondered how it was that nobody advertised for information concerning them, and who wished, yes, “wished to God,” that such a one, or such a one, who had had his money-bags locked up long enough, would die, and then you’d see who’d be advertised for. Some idlers looked in vain into the city directory to see if Mr. John Richling were mentioned there. But Richling himself did not see the paper. His employers, or some fellow-clerk, might have pointed it out to him, but – we shall see in a moment.

Time passed. It always does. At length, one morning, as Dr. Sevier lay on his office lounge, fatigued after his attentions to callers, and much enervated by the prolonged summer heat, there entered a small female form, closely veiled. He rose to a sitting posture.

“Good-morning, Doctor,” said a voice, hurriedly, behind the veil. “Doctor,” it continued, choking, – “Doctor” —

“Why, Mrs. Richling!”

He sprang and gave her a chair. She sank into it.

“Doctor, – O Doctor! John is in the Charity Hospital!”

She buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed aloud. The Doctor was silent a moment, and then asked: —

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Chills.”

It seemed as though she must break down again, but the Doctor stopped her savagely.

“Well, my dear madam, don’t cry! Come, now, you’re making too much of a small matter. Why, what are chills? We’ll break them in forty-eight hours. He’ll have the best of care. You needn’t cry! Certainly this isn’t as bad as when you were there.”

She was still, but shook her head. She couldn’t agree to that.

“Doctor, will you attend him?”

“Mine is a female ward.”

“I know; but” —

“Oh – if you wish it – certainly; of course I will. But now, where have you moved, Mrs. Richling? I sent” – He looked up over his desk toward that of Narcisse.

The Creole had been neither deaf nor idle. Hospital? Then those children in Prieur street had told him right. He softly changed his coat and shoes. As the physician looked over the top of the desk Narcisse’s silent form, just here at the left, but out of the range of vision, passed through the door and went downstairs with the noiselessness of a moonbeam.

Mary explained the location and arrangement of her residence.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s the way your clerk must have overlooked us. We live behind – down the alleyway.”

“Well, at any rate, madam,” said the Doctor, “you are here now, and before you go I want to” – He drew out his pocket-book.

There was a quick gesture of remonstrance and a look of pleading.

“No, no, Doctor, please don’t! please don’t! Give my poor husband one more chance; don’t make me take that. I don’t refuse it for pride’s sake!”

“I don’t know about that,” he replied; “why do you do it?”

“For his sake, Doctor. I know just as well what he’d say – we’ve no right to take it anyhow. We don’t know when we could pay it back.” Her head sank. She wiped a tear from her hand.

“Why, I don’t care if you never pay it back!” The Doctor reddened angrily.

Mary raised her veil.

“Doctor,” – a smile played on her lips, – “I want to say one thing.” She was a little care-worn and grief-worn; and yet, Narcisse, you should have seen her; you would not have slipped out.

“Say on, madam,” responded the Doctor.

“If we have to ask anybody, Doctor, it will be you. John had another situation, but lost it by his chills. He’ll get another. I’m sure he will.” A long, broken sigh caught her unawares. Dr. Sevier thrust his pocket-book back into its place, compressing his lips and giving his head an unpersuaded jerk. And yet, was she not right, according to all his preaching? He asked himself that. “Why didn’t your husband come to see me, as I requested him to do, Mrs. Richling?”

She explained John’s being turned away from the door during the Doctor’s illness. “But anyhow, Doctor, John has always been a little afraid of you.”

The Doctor’s face did not respond to her smile.

“Why, you are not,” he said.

“No.” Her eyes sparkled, but their softer light quickly returned. She smiled and said: —

“I will ask a favor of you now, Doctor.”

They had risen, and she stood leaning sidewise against his low desk and looking up into his face.

“Can you get me some sewing? John says I may take some.”

The Doctor was about to order two dozen shirts instanter, but common sense checked him, and he only said: —

“I will. I will find you some. And I shall see your husband within an hour. Good-by.” She reached the door. “God bless you!” he added.

“What, sir?” she asked, looking back.

But the Doctor was reading.

CHAPTER XX.

ALICE

A little medicine skilfully prescribed, the proper nourishment, two or three days’ confinement in bed, and the Doctor said, as he sat on the edge of Richling’s couch: —

“No, you’d better stay where you are to-day; but to-morrow, if the weather is good, you may sit up.”

Then Richling, with the unreasonableness of a convalescent, wanted to know why he couldn’t just as well go home. But the Doctor said again, no.

“Don’t be impatient; you’ll have to go anyhow before I would prefer to send you. It would be invaluable to you to pass your entire convalescence here, and go home only when you are completely recovered. But I can’t arrange it very well. The Charity Hospital is for sick people.”

“And where is the place for convalescents?”

“There is none,” replied the physician.

“I shouldn’t want to go to it, myself,” said Richling, lolling pleasantly on his pillow; “all I should ask is strength to get home, and I’d be off.”

The Doctor looked another way.

“The sick are not the wise,” he said, abstractedly. “However, in your case, I should let you go to your wife as soon as you safely could.” At that he fell into so long a reverie that Richling studied every line of his face again and again.

A very pleasant thought was in the convalescent’s mind the while. The last three days had made it plain to him that the Doctor was not only his friend, but was willing that Richling should be his.

At length the physician spoke: —

“Mary is wonderfully like Alice, Richling.”

“Yes?” responded Richling, rather timidly. And the Doctor continued: —

“The same age, the same stature, the same features. Alice was a shade paler in her style of beauty, just a shade. Her hair was darker; but otherwise her whole effect was a trifle quieter, even, than Mary’s. She was beautiful, – outside and in. Like Mary, she had a certain richness of character – but of a different sort. I suppose I would not notice the difference if they were not so much alike. She didn’t stay with me long.”

“Did you lose her – here?” asked Richling, hardly knowing how to break the silence that fell, and yet lead the speaker on.

“No. In Virginia.” The Doctor was quiet a moment, and then resumed: —

“I looked at your wife when she was last in my office, Richling; she had a little timid, beseeching light in her eyes that is not usual with her – and a moisture, too; and – it seemed to me as though Alice had come back. For my wife lived by my moods. Her spirits rose or fell just as my whim, conscious or unconscious, gave out light or took on shadow.” The Doctor was still again, and Richling only indicated his wish to hear more by shifting himself on his elbow.