_ 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!" _