_ CHAPTER XXV. THE DOCTOR DINES OUT
On the third day after these incidents, again at the sunset hour, but in a very different part of the town, Dr. Sevier sat down, a guest, at dinner. There were flowers; there was painted and monogrammed china; there was Bohemian glass; there was silver of cunning work with linings of gold, and damasked linen, and oak of fantastic carving. There were ladies in summer silks and elaborate coiffures; the hostess, small, slender, gentle, alert; another, dark, flashing, Roman, tall; another, ripe but not drooping, who had been beautiful, now, for thirty years; and one or two others. There were jewels; there were sweet odors. And there were, also, some good masculine heads: Dr. Sevier's, for instance; and the chief guest's,--an iron-gray, with hard lines in the face, and a scar on the near cheek,--a colonel of the regular army passing through from Florida; and one crown, bald, pink, and shining, encircled by a silken fringe of very white hair: it was the banker who lived in St. Mary street. His wife was opposite. And there was much high-bred grace. There were tall windows thrown wide to make the blaze of gas bearable, and two tall mulattoes in the middle distance bringing in and bearing out viands too sumptuous for any but a French nomenclature.
It was what you would call a quiet affair; quite out of season, and difficult to furnish with even this little handful of guests; but it was a proper and necessary attention to the colonel; conversation not too dull, nor yet too bright for ease, but passing gracefully from one agreeable topic to another without earnestness, a restless virtue, or frivolity, which also goes against serenity. Now it touched upon the prospects of young A. B. in the demise of his uncle; now upon the probable seriousness of C. D. in his attentions to E. F.; now upon G.'s amusing mishaps during a late tour in Switzerland, which had--"how unfortunately!"--got into the papers. Now it was concerning the admirable pulpit manners and easily pardoned vocal defects of a certain new rector. Now it turned upon Stephen A. Douglas's last speech; passed to the questionable merits of a new-fangled punch; and now, assuming a slightly explanatory form from the gentlemen to the ladies, showed why there was no need whatever to fear a financial crisis--which came soon afterward.
The colonel inquired after an old gentleman whom he had known in earlier days in Kentucky.
"It's many a year since I met him," he said. "The proudest man I ever saw. I understand he was down here last season."
"He was," replied the host, in a voice of native kindness, and with a smile on his high-fed face. "He was; but only for a short time. He went back to his estate. That is his world. He's there now."
"It used to be considered one of the finest places in the State," said the colonel.
"It is still," rejoined the host. "Doctor, you know him?"
"I think not," said Dr. Sevier; but somehow he recalled the old gentleman in button gaiters, who had called on him one evening to consult him about his sick wife.
"A good man," said the colonel, looking amused; "and a superb gentleman. Is he as great a partisan of the church as he used to be?"
"Greater! Favors an established church of America."
The ladies were much amused. The host's son, a young fellow with sprouting side-whiskers, said he thought he could be quite happy with one of the finest plantations in Kentucky, and let the church go its own gait.
"Humph!" said the father; "I doubt if there's ever a happy breath drawn on the place."
"Why, how is that?" asked the colonel, in a cautious tone.
"Hadn't he heard?" The host was surprised, but spoke low. "Hadn't he heard about the trouble with their only son? Why, he went abroad and never came back!"
Every one listened.
"It's a terrible thing," said the hostess to the ladies nearest her; "no one ever dares ask the family what the trouble is,--they have such odd, exclusive ideas about their matters being nobody's business. All that can be known is that they look upon him as worse than dead and gone forever."
"And who will get the estate?" asked the banker.
"The two girls. They're both married."
"They're very much like their father," said the hostess, smiling with gentle significance.
"Very much," echoed the host, with less delicacy. "Their mother is one of those women who stand in terror of their husband's will. Now, if he were to die and leave her with a will of her own she would hardly know what to do with it--I mean with her will--or the property either."
The hostess protested softly against so harsh a speech, and the son, after one or two failures, got in his remark:--
"Maybe the prodigal would come back and be taken in."
But nobody gave this conjecture much attention. The host was still talking of the lady without a will.
"Isn't she an invalid?" Dr. Sevier had asked.
"Yes; the trip down here last season was on her account,--for change of scene. Her health is wretched."
"I'm distressed that I didn't call on her," said the hostess; "but they went away suddenly. My dear, I wonder if they really did encounter the young man here?"
"Pshaw!" said the husband, softly, smiling and shaking his head, and turned the conversation.
In time it settled down with something like earnestness for a few minutes upon a subject which the rich find it easy to discuss without the least risk of undue warmth. It was about the time when one of the graciously murmuring mulattoes was replenishing the glasses, that remark in some way found utterance to this effect,--that the company present could congratulate themselves on living in a community where there was no poor class.
"Poverty, of course, we see; but there is no misery, or nearly none," said the ambitious son of the host.
Dr. Sevier differed with him. That was one of the Doctor's blemishes as a table guest: he would differ with people.
"There is misery," he said; "maybe not the gaunt squalor and starvation of London or Paris or New York; the climate does not tolerate that,--stamps it out before it can assume dimensions; but there is at least misery of that sort that needs recognition and aid from the well-fed."
The lady who had been beautiful so many years had somewhat to say; the physician gave attention, and she spoke:--
"If sister Jane were here, she would be perfectly triumphant to hear you speak so, Doctor." She turned to the hostess, and continued: "Jane is quite an enthusiast, you know; a sort of Dorcas, as husband says, modified and readapted. Yes, she is for helping everybody."
"Whether help is good for them or not," said the lady's husband, a very straight and wiry man with a garrote collar.
"It's all one," laughed the lady. "Our new rector told her plainly, the other day, that she was making a great mistake; that she ought to consider whether assistance assists. It was really amusing. Out of the pulpit and off his guard, you know, he lisps a little; and he said she ought to consider whether 'aththithtanth aththithtth.'"
There was a gay laugh at this, and the lady was called a perfect and cruel mimic.
"'Aththithtanth aththithtth!'" said two or three to their neighbors, and laughed again.
"What did your sister say to that?" asked the banker, bending forward his white, tonsured head, and smiling down the board.
"She said she didn't care; that it kept her own heart tender, anyhow. 'My dear madam,' said he, 'your heart wants strengthening more than softening.' He told her a pound of inner resource was more true help to any poor person than a ton of assistance."
The banker commended the rector. The hostess, very sweetly, offered her guarantee that Jane took the rebuke in good part.
"She did," replied the time-honored beauty; "she tried to profit by it. But husband, here, has offered her a wager of a bonnet against a hat that the rector will upset her new schemes. Her idea now is to make work for those whom nobody will employ."
"Jane," said the kind-faced host, "really wants to do good for its own sake."
"I think she's even a little Romish in her notions," said Jane's wiry brother-in-law. "I talked to her as plainly as the rector. I told her, 'Jane, my dear, all this making of work for the helpless poor is not worth one-fiftieth part of the same amount of effort spent in teaching and training those same poor to make their labor intrinsically marketable.'"
"Yes," said the hostess; "but while we are philosophizing and offering advice so wisely, Jane is at work--doing the best she knows how. We can't claim the honor even of making her mistakes."
"'Tisn't a question of honors to us, madam," said Dr. Sevier; "it's a question of results to the poor."
The brother-in-law had not finished. He turned to the Doctor.
"Poverty, Doctor, is an inner condition"--
"Sometimes," interposed the Doctor.
"Yes, generally," continued the brother-in-law, with some emphasis. "And to give help you must, first of all, 'inquire within'--within your beneficiary."
"Not always, sir," replied the Doctor; "not if they're sick, for instance." The ladies bowed briskly and applauded with their eyes. "And not always if they're well," he added. His last words softened off almost into soliloquy.
The banker spoke forcibly:--
"Yes, there are two quite distinct kinds of poverty. One is an accident of the moment; the other is an inner condition of the individual"--
"Of course it is," said sister Jane's brother-in-law, who felt it a little to have been contradicted on the side of kindness by the hard-spoken Doctor. "Certainly! it's a deficiency of inner resources or character, and what to do with it is no simple question."
"That's what I was about to say," resumed the banker; "at least, when the poverty is of that sort. And what discourages kind people is that that's the sort we commonly see. It's a relief to meet the other, Doctor, just as it's a relief to a physician to encounter a case of simple surgery."
"And--and," said the brother-in-law, "what is your rule about plain almsgiving to the difficult sort?"
"My rule," replied the banker, "is, don't do it. Debt is slavery, and there is an ugly kink in human nature that disposes it to be content with slavery. No, sir; gift-making and gift-taking are twins of a bad blood." The speaker turned to Dr. Sevier for approval; but, though the Doctor could not gainsay the fraction of a point, he was silent. A lady near the hostess stirred softly both under and above the board. In her private chamber she would have yawned. Yet the banker spoke again:--
"Help the old, I say. You are pretty safe there. Help the sick. But as for the young and strong,--now, no man could be any poorer than I was at twenty-one,--I say be cautious how you smooth that hard road which is the finest discipline the young can possibly get."
"If it isn't _too_ hard," chirped the son of the host.
"Too hard? Well, yes, if it isn't too hard. Still I say, hands off; you needn't turn your back, however." Here the speaker again singled out Dr. Sevier. "Watch the young man out of one corner of your eye; but make him swim!"
"Ah-h!" said the ladies.
"No, no," continued the banker; "I don't say let him drown; but I take it, Doctor, that your alms, for instance, are no alms if they put the poor fellow into your debt and at your back."
"To whom do you refer?" asked Dr. Sevier. Whereat there was a burst of laughter, which was renewed when the banker charged the physician with helping so many persons, "on the sly," that he couldn't tell which one was alluded to unless the name were given.
"Doctor," said the hostess, seeing it was high time the conversation should take a new direction, "they tell me you have closed your house and taken rooms at the St. Charles."
"For the summer," said the physician.
As, later, he walked toward that hotel, he went resolving to look up the Richlings again without delay. The banker's words rang in his ears like an overdose of quinine: "Watch the young man out of one corner of your eye. Make him swim. I don't say let him drown."
"Well, I do watch him," thought the Doctor. "I've only lost sight of him once in a while." But the thought seemed to find an echo against his conscience, and when it floated back it was: "I've only _caught_ sight of him once in a while." The banker's words came up again: "Don't put the poor fellow into your debt and at your back." "Just what you've done," said conscience. "How do you know he isn't drowned?" He would see to it.
While he was still on his way to the hotel he fell in with an acquaintance, a Judge Somebody or other, lately from Washington City. He, also, lodged at the St. Charles. They went together. As they approached the majestic porch of the edifice they noticed some confusion at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the rotunda; cabmen and boys were running to a common point, where, in the midst of a small, compact crowd, two or three pairs of arms were being alternately thrown aloft and brought down. Presently the mass took a rapid movement up St. Charles street.
The judge gave his conjecture: "Some poor devil resisting arrest."
Before he and the Doctor parted for the night they went to the clerk's counter.
"No letters for you, Judge; mail failed. Here is a card for you, Doctor."
The Doctor received it. It had been furnished, blank, by the clerk to its writer.
[Illustration: JOHN RICHLING.]
At the door of his own room, with one hand on the unturned knob and one holding the card, the Doctor stopped and reflected. The card gave no indication of urgency. Did it? It was hard to tell. He didn't want to look foolish; morning would be time enough; he would go early next morning.
But at daybreak he was summoned post-haste to the bedside of a lady who had stayed all summer in New Orleans so as not to be out of this good doctor's reach at this juncture. She counted him a dear friend, and in similar trials had always required close and continual attention. It was the same now.
Dr. Sevier scrawled and sent to the Richlings a line, saying that, if either of them was sick, he would come at their call. When the messenger returned with word from Mrs. Riley that both of them were out, the Doctor's mind was much relieved. So a day and a night passed in which he did not close his eyes.
The next morning, as he stood in his office, hat in hand, and a finger pointing to a prescription on his desk, which he was directing Narcisse to give to some one who would call for it, there came a sudden hurried pounding of feminine feet on the stairs, a whiff of robes in the corridor, and Mary Richling rushed into his presence all tears and cries.
"O Doctor!--O Doctor! O God, my husband! my husband! O Doctor, my husband is in the Parish Prison!" She sank to the floor.
The Doctor raised her up. Narcisse hurried forward with his hands full of restoratives.
"Take away those things," said the Doctor, resentfully. "Here!--Mrs. Richling, take Narcisse's arm and go down and get into my carriage. I must write a short note, excusing myself from an appointment, and then I will join you."
Mary stood alone, turned, and passed out of the office beside the young Creole, but without taking his proffered arm. Did she suspect him of having something to do with this dreadful affair?
"Missez Witchlin," said he, as soon as they were out in the corridor, "I dunno if you goin' to billiv me, but I boun' to tell you that nodwithstanning that yo' 'uzban' is displease' with me, an' nodwithstanning 'e's in that calaboose, I h'always fine 'im a puffic gen'leman--that Mistoo Itchlin,--an' I'll sweah 'e _is_ a gen'leman!"
She lifted her anguished eyes and looked into his beautiful face. Could she trust him? His little forehead was as hard as a goat's, but his eyes were brimming with tears, and his chin quivered. As they reached the head of the stairs he again offered his arm, and she took it, moaning softly, as they descended:--
"O John! O John! O my husband, my husband!" _