_ CHAPTER LX. "YET SHALL HE LIVE"
We need not follow Mary through her ministrations. Her office was no sinecure. It took not only much labor, but, as the Doctor had expected, it took all her cunning. True, nature and experience had equipped her for such work; but for all that there was an art to be learned, and time and again there were cases of mental and moral decrepitude or deformity that baffled all her skill until her skill grew up to them, which in some cases it never did. The greatest tax of all was to seem, and to be, unprofessional; to avoid regarding her work in quantity, and to be simply, merely, in every case, a personal friend; not to become known as a benevolent itinerary, but only a kind and thoughtful neighbor. Blessed word! not benefactor--neighbor!
She had no schemes for helping the unfortunate by multitude. Possibly on that account her usefulness was less than it might have been. But I am not sure; for they say her actual words and deeds were but the seed of ultimate harvests; and that others, moreover, seeing her light shine so brightly along this seemingly narrow path, and moved to imitate her, took that other and broader way, and so both fields were reaped.
But, I say, we need not follow her steps. They would lead deviously through ill-smelling military hospitals, and into buildings that had once been the counting-rooms of Carondelet-street cotton merchants, but were now become the prisons of soldiers in gray. One of these places, restored after the war as a cotton factor's counting-room again, had, until a few years ago, a queer, clumsy patch in the plastering of one wall, near the base-board. Some one had made a rough inscription on it with a cotton sampler's marking-brush. It commemorates an incident. Mary by some means became aware beforehand that this incident was going to occur; and one of the most trying struggles of conscience she ever had in her life was that in which she debated with herself one whole night whether she ought to give her knowledge to others or keep it to herself. She kept it. In fact, she said nothing until the war was all over and done, and she never was quite sure whether her silence was right or wrong. And when she asked Dr. Sevier if he thought she had done wrong, he asked:--
"You knew it was going to take place, and kept silence?"
"Yes," said Mary.
"And you want to know whether you did right?"
"Yes. I'd like to know what you think."
He sat very straight, and said not a word, nor changed a line of his face. She got no answer at all.
The inscription was as follows; I used to see it every work-day of the week for years--it may be there yet--190 Common street, first flight, back office:
[Illustration:
Oct 14 1864
17 Confederate
Prisoners escaped
Through this hole]
But we move too fast. Let us go back into the war for a moment longer. Mary pursued her calling. The most of it she succeeded in doing in a very sunshiny way. She carried with her, and left behind her, cheer, courage, hope. Yet she had a widow's heart, and whenever she took a widow's hand in hers, and oftentimes, alone or against her sleeping child's bedside, she had a widow's tears. But this work, or these works,--she made each particular ministration seem as if it were the only one,--these works, that she might never have had the opportunity to perform had her nest-mate never been taken from her, seemed to keep John near. Almost, sometimes, he seemed to walk at her side in her errands of mercy, or to spread above her the arms of benediction. And so even the bitter was sweet, and she came to believe that never before had widow such blessed commutation.
One day, a short, slight Confederate prisoner, newly brought in, and hobbling about the place where he was confined, with a vile bullet-hole in his foot, came up to her and said:--
"Allow me, madam,--did that man call you by your right name, just now?"
Mary looked at him. She had never seen him before.
"Yes, sir," she said.
She could see the gentleman, under much rags and dirt.
"Are you Mrs. John Richling?"
A look of dismay came into his face as he asked the grave question.
"Yes, sir," replied Mary.
His voice dropped, and he asked, with subdued haste:--
"Ith it pothible you're in mourning for him?"
She nodded.
It was the little rector. He had somehow got it into his head that preachers ought to fight, and this was one of the results. Mary went away quickly, and told Dr. Sevier. The Doctor went to the commanding general. It was a great humiliation to do so, he thought. There was none worse, those days, in the eyes of the people. He craved and got the little man's release on parole. A fortnight later, as Dr. Sevier was sitting at the breakfast table, with the little rector at its opposite end, he all at once rose to his full attenuated height, with a frown and then a smile, and, tumbling the chair backward behind him, exclaimed:--
"Why, Laura!"--for it was that one of his two gay young nieces who stood in the door-way. The banker's wife followed in just behind, and was presently saying, with the prettiest heartiness, that Dr. Sevier looked no older than the day they met the Florida general at dinner years before. She had just come in from the Confederacy, smuggling her son of eighteen back to the city, to save him from the conscript officers, and Laura had come with her. And when the clergyman got his crutches into his armpits and stood on one foot, and he and Laura both blushed as they shook hands, the Doctor knew that she had come to nurse her wounded lover. That she might do this without embarrassment, they got married, and were thereupon as vexed with themselves as they could be under the circumstances that they had not done it four or five years before. Of course there was no parade; but Dr. Sevier gave a neat little dinner. Mary and Laura were its designers; Madame Zenobie was the master-builder and made the gumbo. One word about the war, whose smoke was over all the land, would have spoiled the broth. But no such word was spoken.
It happened that the company was almost the same as that which had sat down in brighter days to that other dinner, which the banker's wife recalled with so much pleasure. She and her husband and son were guests; also that Sister Jane, of whom they had talked, a woman of real goodness and rather unrelieved sweetness; also her sister and bankrupted brother-in-law. The brother-in-law mentioned several persons who, he said, once used to be very cordial to him and his wife, but now did not remember them; and his wife chid him, with the air of a fellow-martyr; but they could not spoil the tender gladness of the occasion.
"Well, Doctor," said the banker's wife, looking quite the old lady now, "I suppose your lonely days are over, now that Laura and her husband are to keep house for you."
"Yes," said the Doctor.
But the very thought of it made him more lonely than ever.
"It's a very pleasant and sensible arrangement," said the lady, looking very practical and confidential; "Laura has told me all about it. It's just the thing for them and for you."
"I think so, ma'am," replied Dr. Sevier, and tried to make his statement good.
"I'm sure of it," said the lady, very sweetly and gayly, and made a faint time-to-go beckon with a fan to her husband, to whom, in the farther drawing-room, Laura and Mary stood talking, each with an arm about the other's waist. _