CHAPTER XXXIII.
BEES, WASPS, AND BUTTERFLIES
The merry day went by. The new year, 1858, set in. Everything gathered momentum. There was a panic and a crash. The brother-in-law of sister Jane – he whom Dr. Sevier met at that quiet dinner-party – struck an impediment, stumbled, staggered, fell under the feet of the racers, and crawled away minus not money and credit only, but all his philosophy about helping the poor, maimed in spirit, his pride swollen with bruises, his heart and his speech soured beyond all sweetening.
Many were the wrecks. But over their débris, Mercury and Venus – the busy season and the gay season – ran lightly, hand in hand. Men getting money and women squandering it. Whole nights in the ball-room. Gold pouring in at the hopper and out at the spout, – Carondelet street emptying like a yellow river into Canal street. Thousands for vanity; thousands for pride; thousands for influence and for station; thousands for hidden sins; a slender fraction for the wants of the body; a slenderer for the cravings of the soul. Lazarus paid to stay away from the gate. John the Baptist, in raiment of broadcloth, a circlet of white linen about his neck, and his meat strawberries and ice-cream. The lower classes mentioned mincingly; awkward silences or visible wincings at allusions to death, and converse on eternal things banished as if it were the smell of cabbage. So looked the gay world, at least, to Dr. Sevier.
He saw more of it than had been his wont for many seasons. The two young-lady cousins whom he had brought and installed in his home thirsted for that gorgeous, nocturnal moth life in which no thirst is truly slaked, and dragged him with them into the iridescent, gas-lighted spider-web of society.
“Now, you know you like it!” they said.
“A little of it, yes. But I don’t see how you can like it, who virtually live in it and upon it. Why, I would as soon try to live upon cake and candy!”
“Well, we can live very nicely upon cake and candy,” retorted they.
“Why, girls, it’s no more life than spice is food. What lofty motive – what earnest, worthy object” —
But they drowned his homily in a carol, and ran away arm in arm to dress for another ball. One of them stopped in the door with an air of mock bravado: —
“What do we care for lofty motives or worthy objects?”
A smile escaped from him as she vanished. His condemnation was flavored with charity. “It’s their mating season,” he silently thought, and, not knowing he did it, sighed.
“There come Dr. Sevier and his two pretty cousins,” was the ball-room whisper. “Beautiful girls – rich widower without children – great catch! Passé, how? Well, maybe so; not as much as he makes himself out, though.” “Passé, yes,” said a merciless belle to a blade of her own years; “a man of strong sense is passé at any age.” Sister Jane’s name was mentioned in the same connection, but that illusion quickly passed. The cousins denied indignantly that he had any matrimonial intention. Somebody dissipated the rumor by a syllogism: “A man hunting a second wife always looks like a fool; the Doctor doesn’t look a bit like a fool, ergo” —
He grew very weary of the giddy rout, standing in it like a rock in a whirlpool. He did rejoice in the Carnival, but only because it was the end.
“Pretty? yes, as pretty as a bonfire,” he said. “I can’t enjoy much fiddling while Rome is burning.”
“But Rome isn’t always burning,” said the cousins.
“Yes, it is! Yes, it is!”
The wickeder of the two cousins breathed a penitential sigh, dropped her bare, jewelled arms out of her cloak, and said: —
“Now tell us once more about Mary Richling.” He had bored them to death with Mary.
Lent was a relief to all three. One day, as the Doctor was walking along the street, a large hand grasped his elbow and gently arrested his steps. He turned.
“Well, Reisen, is that you?”
The baker answered with his wide smile. “Yes, Toctor, tat iss me, sure. You titn’t tink udt iss Mr. Richlun, tit you?”
“No. How is Richling?”
“Vell, Mr. Richlun kitten along so-o-o-so-o-o. He iss not ferra shtrong; ovver he vurks like a shteam-inchyine.”
“I haven’t seen him for many a day,” said Dr. Sevier.
The baker distended his eyes, bent his enormous digestive apparatus forward, raised his eyebrows, and hung his arms free from his sides. “He toandt kit a minudt to shpare in teh tswendy-four hourss. Sumptimes he sayss, ‘Mr. Reisen, I can’t shtop to talk mit you.’ Sindts Mr. Richlun pin py my etsteplitchmendt, I tell you teh troot, Toctor Tseweer, I am yoost meckin’ monneh haynd ofer fist!” He swung his chest forward again, drew in his lower regions, revolved his fists around each other for a moment, and then let them fall open at his sides, with the added assurance, “Now you kott teh ectsectly troot.”
The Doctor started away, but the baker detained him by a touch: —
“You toandt kott enna verte to sendt to Mr. Richlun, Toctor!”
“Yes. Tell him to come and pass an hour with me some evening in my library.”
The German lifted his hand in delight.
“Vy, tot’s yoost teh dting! Mr. Richlun alvayss pin sayin’, ‘I vish he aysk me come undt see um;’ undt I sayss, ‘You holdt shtill, yet, Mr. Richlun; teh next time I see um I make um aysk you.’ Vell, now, titn’t I tunned udt?” He was happy.
“Well, ask him,” said the Doctor, and got away.
“No fool is an utter fool,” pondered the Doctor, as he went. Two friends had been kept long apart by the fear of each, lest he should seem to be setting up claims based on the past. It required a simpleton to bring them together.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
TOWARD THE ZENITH
“Richling, I am glad to see you!”
Dr. Sevier had risen from his luxurious chair beside a table, the soft downward beams of whose lamp partly showed, and partly hid, the rich appointments of his library. He grasped Richling’s hand, and with an extensive stride drew forward another chair on its smooth-running casters.
Then inquiries were exchanged as to the health of one and the other. The Doctor, with his professional eye, noticed, as the light fell full upon his visitor’s buoyant face, how thin and pale he had grown. He rose again, and stepping beyond Richling with a remark, in part complimentary and in part critical, upon the balmy April evening, let down the sash of a window where the smell of honeysuckles was floating in.
“Have you heard from your wife lately?” he asked, as he resumed his seat.
“Yesterday,” said Richling. “Yes, she’s very well, been well ever since she left us. She always sends love to you.”
“Hum,” responded the physician. He fixed his eyes on the mantel and asked abstractedly, “How do you bear the separation?”
“Oh!” Richling laughed, “not very heroically. It’s a great strain on a man’s philosophy.”
“Work is the only antidote,” said the Doctor, not moving his eyes.
“Yes, so I find it,” answered the other. “It’s bearable enough while one is working like mad; but sooner or later one must sit down to meals, or lie down to rest, you know” —
“Then it hurts,” said the Doctor.
“It’s a lively discipline,” mused Richling.
“Do you think you learn anything by it?” asked the other, turning his eyes slowly upon him. “That’s what it means, you notice.”
“Yes, I do,” replied Richling, smiling; “I learn the very thing I suppose you’re thinking of, – that separation isn’t disruption, and that no pair of true lovers are quite fitted out for marriage until they can bear separation if they must.”
“Yes,” responded the physician; “if they can muster the good sense to see that they’ll not be so apt to marry prematurely. I needn’t tell you I believe in marrying for love; but these needs-must marriages are so ineffably silly. You ‘must’ and you ‘will’ marry, and ‘nobody shall hinder you!’ And you do it! And in three or four or six months” – he drew in his long legs energetically from the hearth-pan – “death separates you! – death, sometimes, resulting directly from the turn your haste has given to events! Now, where is your ‘must’ and ‘will’?” He stretched his legs out again, and laid his head on his cushioned chair-back.
“I have made a narrow escape,” said Richling.
“I wasn’t so fortunate,” responded the Doctor, turning solemnly toward his young friend. “Richling, just seven months after I married Alice I buried her. I’m not going into particulars – of course; but the sickness that carried her off was distinctly connected with the haste of our marriage. Your Bible, Richling, that you lay such store by, is right; we should want things as if we didn’t want them. That isn’t the quotation, exactly, but it’s the idea. I swore I couldn’t and wouldn’t live without her; but, you see, this is the fifteenth year that I have had to do it.”
“I should think it would have unmanned you for life,” said Richling.
“It made a man of me! I’ve never felt young a day since, and yet I’ve never seemed to grow a day older. It brought me all at once to my full manhood. I have never consciously disputed God’s arrangements since. The man who does is only a wayward child.”
“It’s true,” said Richling, with an air of confession, “it’s true;” and they fell into silence.
Presently Richling looked around the room. His eyes brightened rapidly as he beheld the ranks and tiers of good books. He breathed an audible delight. The multitude of volumes rose in the old-fashioned way, in ornate cases of dark wood from floor to ceiling, on this hand, on that, before him, behind; some in gay covers, – green, blue, crimson, – with gilding and embossing; some in the sumptuous leathers of France, Russia, Morocco, Turkey; others in worn attire, battered and venerable, dingy but precious, – the gray heads of the council.
The two men rose and moved about among those silent wits and philosophers, and, from the very embarrassment of the inner riches, fell to talking of letter-press and bindings, with maybe some effort on the part of each to seem the better acquainted with Caxton, the Elzevirs, and other like immortals. They easily passed to a competitive enumeration of the rare books they had seen or not seen here and there in other towns and countries. Richling admitted he had travelled, and the conversation turned upon noted buildings and famous old nooks in distant cities where both had been. So they moved slowly back to their chairs, and stood by them, still contemplating the books. But as they sank again into their seats the one thought which had fastened itself in the minds of both found fresh expression.
Richling began, smilingly, as if the subject had not been dropped at all, – “I oughtn’t to speak as if I didn’t realize my good fortune, for I do.”
“I believe you do,” said the Doctor, reaching toward the fire-irons.
“Yes. Still, I lose patience with myself to find myself taking Mary’s absence so hard.”
“All hardships are comparative,” said the Doctor.
“Certainly they are,” replied Richling. “I lie sometimes and think of men who have been political prisoners, shut away from wife and children, with war raging outside and no news coming in.”
“Think of the common poor,” exclaimed Dr. Sevier, – “the thousands of sailors’ wives and soldiers’ wives. Where does that thought carry you?”
“It carries me,” responded the other, with a low laugh, “to where I’m always a little ashamed of myself.”
“I didn’t mean it to do that,” said the Doctor; “I can imagine how you miss your wife. I miss her myself.”
“Oh! but she’s here on this earth. She’s alive and well. Any burden is light when I think of that – pardon me, Doctor!”
“Go on, go on. Anything you please about her, Richling.” The Doctor half sat, half lay in his chair, his eyes partly closed. “Go on,” he repeated.
“I was only going to say that long before Mary went away, many a time when she and I were fighting starvation at close quarters, I have looked at her and said to myself, ‘What if I were in Dr. Sevier’s place?’ and it gave me strength to rise up and go on.”
“You were right.”
“I know I was. I often wake now at night and turn and find the place by my side empty, and I can hardly keep from calling her aloud. It wrenches me, but before long I think she’s no such great distance away, since we’re both on the same earth together, and by and by she’ll be here at my side; and so it becomes easy to me once more.” Richling, in the self-occupation of a lover, forgot what pains he might be inflicting. But the Doctor did not wince.
“Yes,” said the physician, “of course you wouldn’t want the separation to be painless; and it promises a reward, you know.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Richling, with an exultant smile and motion of the head, and then dropped his eyes in meditation. The Doctor looked at him steadily.
“Richling, you’ve gathered some terribly hard experiences. But hard experiences are often the foundation-stones of a successful life. You can make them all profitable. You can make them draw you along, so to speak. But you must hold them well in hand, as you would a dangerous team, you know, – coolly and alertly, firmly and patiently, – and never let the reins slack till you’ve driven through the last gate.”
Richling replied, with a pleasant nod, “I believe I shall do it. Did you notice what I wrote you in my letter? I have got the notion strongly that the troubles we have gone through – Mary and I – were only our necessary preparation – not so necessary for her as for me” —
“No,” said Dr. Sevier, and Richling continued, with a smile: —
“To fit us for a long and useful life, and especially a life that will be full of kind and valuable services to the poor. If that isn’t what they were sent for” – he dropped into a tone of reflection – “then I don’t understand them.”
“And suppose you don’t understand,” said the Doctor, with his cold, grim look.
“Oh!” rejoined Richling, in amiable protest; “but a man would like to understand.”
“Like to – yes,” replied the Doctor; “but be careful. The spirit that must understand is the spirit that can’t trust.” He paused. Presently he said, “Richling!”
Richling answered by an inquiring glance.
“Take better care of your health,” said the physician.
Richling smiled – a young man’s answer – and rose to say good-night.
CHAPTER XXXV.
TO SIGH, YET FEEL NO PAIN
Mrs. Riley missed the Richlings, she said, more than tongue could tell. She had easily rented the rooms they left vacant; that was not the trouble. The new tenant was a sallow, gaunt, wind-dried seamstress of sixty, who paid her rent punctually, but who was —
“Mighty poor comp’ny to thim as’s been used to the upper tin, Mr. Ristofalo.”
Still she was a protection. Mrs. Riley had not regarded this as a necessity in former days, but now, somehow, matters seemed different. This seamstress had, moreover, a son of eighteen years, principally skin and bone, who was hoping to be appointed assistant hostler at the fire-engine house of “Volunteer One,” and who meantime hung about Mrs. Riley’s dwelling and loved to relieve her of the care of little Mike. This also was something to be appreciated. Still there was a void.
“Well, Mr. Richlin’!” cried Mrs. Riley, as she opened her parlor door in response to a knock. “Well, I’ll be switched! ha! ha! I didn’t think it was you at all. Take a seat and sit down!”
It was good to see how she enjoyed the visit. Whenever she listened to Richling’s words she rocked in her rocking-chair vigorously, and when she spoke stopped its motion and rested her elbows on its arms.
“And how is Mrs. Richlin’? And so she sent her love to me, did she, now? The blessed angel! Now, ye’re not just a-makin’ that up? No, I know ye wouldn’t do sich a thing as that, Mr. Richlin’. Well, you must give her mine back again. I’ve nobody else on e’rth to give ud to, and never will have.” She lifted her nose with amiable stateliness, as if to imply that Richling might not believe this, but that it was true, nevertheless.
“You may change your mind, Mrs. Riley, some day,” returned Richling, a little archly.
“Ha! ha!” She tossed her head and laughed with good-natured scorn. “Nivver a fear o’ that, Mr. Richlin’!” Her brogue was apt to broaden when pleasure pulled down her dignity. “And, if I did, it wuddent be for the likes of no I-talian Dago, if id’s him ye’re a-dthrivin’ at, – not intinding anny disrespect to your friend, Mr. Richlin’, and indeed I don’t deny he’s a perfect gintleman, – but, indeed, Mr. Richlin’, I’m just after thinkin’ that you and yer lady wouldn’t have no self-respect for Kate Riley if she should be changing her name.”
“Still you were thinking about it,” said Richling, with a twinkle.
“Ah! ha! ha! Indeed I wasn’, an’ ye needn’ be t’rowin’ anny o’ yer slyness on me. Ye know ye’d have no self-respect fur me. No; now ye know ye wuddent, – wud ye?”
“Why, Mrs. Riley, of course we would. Why – why not?” He stood in the door-way, about to take his leave. “You may be sure we’ll always be glad of anything that will make you the happier.” Mrs. Riley looked so grave that he checked his humor.
“But in the nixt life, Mr. Richlin’, how about that?”
“There? I suppose we shall simply each love all in absolute perfection. We’ll” —
“We’ll never know the differ,” interposed Mrs. Riley.
“That’s it,” said Richling, smiling again. “And so I say, – and I’ve always said, – if a person feels like marrying again, let him do it.”
“Have ye, now? Well, ye’re just that good, Mr. Richlin’.”
“Yes,” he responded, trying to be grave, “that’s about my measure.”
“Would you do ut?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. But I should like – in good earnest, Mrs. Riley, I should like, now, the comfort of knowing that you were not to pass all the rest of your days in widowhood.”
“Ah! ged out, Mr. Richlin’!” She failed in her effort to laugh. “Ah! ye’re sly!” She changed her attitude and drew a breath.
“No,” said Richling, “no, honestly. I should feel that you deserved better at this world’s hands than that, and that the world deserved better of you. I find two people don’t make a world, Mrs. Riley, though often they think they do. They certainly don’t when one is gone.”
“Mr. Richlin’,” exclaimed Mrs. Riley, drawing back and waving her hand sweetly, “stop yer flattery! Stop ud! Ah! ye’re a-feeling yer oats, Mr. Richlin’. An’ ye’re a-showin’ em too, ye air. Why, I hered ye was lookin’ terrible, and here ye’re lookin’ just splendud!”
“Who told you that?” asked Richling.
“Never mind! Never mind who he was – ha, ha, ha!” She checked herself suddenly. “Ah, me! It’s a shame for the likes o’ me to be behavin’ that foolish!” She put on additional dignity. “I will always be the Widow Riley.” Then relaxing again into sweetness: “Marridge is a lottery, Mr. Richlin’; indeed an’ it is; and ye know mighty well that he ye’re after joking me about is no more nor a fri’nd.” She looked sweet enough for somebody to kiss.
“I don’t know so certainly about that,” said her visitor, stepping down upon the sidewalk and putting on his hat. “If I may judge by” – He paused and glanced at the window.
“Ah, now, Mr. Richlin’, na-na-now, Mr. Richlin’, ye daurn’t say ud! Ye daurn’t!” She smiled and blushed and arched her neck and rose and sank upon herself with sweet delight.
“I say if I may judge by what he has said to me,” insisted Richling.
Mrs. Riley glided down across the door-step, and, with all the insinuation of her sex and nation, demanded: —
“What’d he tell ye? Ah! he didn’t tell ye nawthing! Ha, ha! there wasn’ nawthing to tell!” But Richling slipped away.
Mrs. Riley shook her finger: “Ah, ye’re a wicket joker, Mr. Richlin’. I didn’t think that o’ the likes of a gintleman like you, anyhow!” She shook her finger again as she withdrew into the house, smiling broadly all the way in to the cradle, where she kissed and kissed again her ruddy, chubby, sleeping boy.
Ristofalo came often. He was a man of simple words, and of few thoughts of the kind that were available in conversation; but his personal adventures had begun almost with infancy, and followed one another in close and strange succession over lands and seas ever since. He could therefore talk best about himself, though he talked modestly. “These things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,” and there came times when even a tear was not wanting to gem the poetry of the situation.
“And ye might have saved yerself from all that,” was sometimes her note of sympathy. But when he asked how she silently dried her eyes.
Sometimes his experiences had been intensely ludicrous, and Mrs. Riley would laugh until in pure self-oblivion she smote her thigh with her palm, or laid her hand so smartly against his shoulder as to tip him half off his seat.
“Ye didn’t!”
“Yes.”
“Ah! Get out wid ye, Raphael Ristofalo, – to be telling me that for the trooth!”
At one such time she was about to give him a second push, but he took the hand in his, and quietly kept it to the end of his story.
He lingered late that evening, but at length took his hat from under his chair, rose, and extended his hand.
“Man alive!” she cried, “that’s my hand, sur, I’d have ye to know. Begahn wid ye! Lookut heere! What’s the reason ye make it so long atween yer visits, eh? Tell me that. Ah – ah – ye’ve no need fur to tell me, Mr. Ristofalo! Ah – now don’t tell a lie!”
“Too busy. Come all time – wasn’t too busy.”
“Ha, ha! Yes, yes; ye’re too busy. Of coorse ye’re too busy. Oh, yes! ye air too busy – a-courtin’ thim I-talian froot gerls around the Frinch Mairket. Ah! I’ll bet two bits ye’re a bouncer! Ah, don’t tell me. I know ye, ye villain! Some o’ thim’s a-waitin’ fur ye now, ha, ha! Go! And don’t ye nivver come back heere anny more. D’ye mind?”
“Aw righ’.” The Italian took her hand for the third time and held it, standing in his simple square way before her and wearing his gentle smile as he looked her in the eye. “Good-by, Kate.”
Her eye quailed. Her hand pulled a little helplessly and in a meek voice she said: —
“That’s not right for you to do me that a-way, Mr. Ristofalo. I’ve got a handle to my name, sur.”
She threw some gentle rebuke into her glance, and turned it upon him. He met it with that same amiable absence of emotion that was always in his look.
“Kate too short by itself?” he asked. “Aw righ’; make it Kate Ristofalo.”
“No,” said Mrs. Riley, averting and drooping her face.
“Take good care of you,” said the Italian; “you and Mike. Always be kind. Good care.”
Mrs. Riley turned with sudden fervor.
“Good cayre! – Mr. Ristofalo,” she exclaimed, lifting her free hand and touching her bosom with the points of her fingers, “ye don’t know the hairt of a woman, surr! No-o-o, surr! It’s love we wants! ‘The hairt as has trooly loved nivver furgits, but as trooly loves ahn to the tlose!’”
“Yes,” said the Italian; “yes,” nodding and ever smiling, “dass aw righ’.”
But she: —
“Ah! it’s no use fur you to be a-talkin’ an’ a-pallaverin’ to Kate Riley when ye don’t be lovin’ her, Mr. Ristofalo, an’ ye know ye don’t.”
A tear glistened in her eye.
“Yes, love you,” said the Italian; “course, love you.”
He did not move a foot or change the expression of a feature.
“H-yes!” said the widow. “H-yes!” she panted. “H-yes, a little! A little, Mr. Ristofalo! But I want” – she pressed her hand hard upon her bosom, and raised her eyes aloft – “I want to be – h – h – h-adaured above all the e’rth!”
“Aw righ’,” said Ristofalo; “das aw righ’; yes – door above all you worth.”
“Raphael Ristofalo,” she said, “ye’re a-deceivin’ me! Ye came heere whin nobody axed ye, – an’ that ye know is a fact, surr, – an’ made yerself agree’ble to a poor, unsuspectin’ widdah, an’ [tears] rabbed me o’ mie hairt, ye did; whin I nivver intinded to git married ag’in.”
“Don’t cry, Kate – Kate Ristofalo,” quietly observed the Italian, getting an arm around her waist, and laying a hand on the farther cheek. “Kate Ristofalo.”
“Shut!” she exclaimed, turning with playful fierceness, and proudly drawing back her head; “shut! Hah! It’s Kate Ristofalo, is it? Ah, ye think so? Hah-h! It’ll be ad least two weeks yet before the priest will be after giving you the right to call me that!”
And, in fact, an entire fortnight did pass before they were married.