Dr. Sevier

CHAPTER XLI.
MIRAGE

“This spoils some of your arrangements, doesn’t it?” asked Dr. Sevier of Richling, stepping again into his carriage. He had already said the kind things, concerning Reisen, that physicians commonly say when they have little hope. “Were you not counting on an early visit to Milwaukee?”

Richling laughed.

“That illusion has been just a little beyond reach for months.” He helped the Doctor shut his carriage-door.

“But now, of course – ” said the physician.

“Of course it’s out of the question,” replied Richling; and the Doctor drove away, with the young man’s face in his mind bearing an expression of simple emphasis that pleased him much.

Late at night Richling, in his dingy little office, unlocked a drawer, drew out a plump package of letters, and began to read their pages, – transcripts of his wife’s heart, pages upon pages, hundreds of precious lines, dates crowding closely one upon another. Often he smiled as his eyes ran to and fro, or drew a soft sigh as he turned the page, and looked behind to see if any one had stolen in and was reading over his shoulder. Sometimes his smile broadened; he lifted his glance from the sheet and fixed it in pleasant revery on the blank wall before him. Often the lines were entirely taken up with mere utterances of affection. Now and then they were all about little Alice, who had fretted all the night before, her gums being swollen and tender on the upper left side near the front; or who had fallen violently in love with the house-dog, by whom, in turn, the sentiment was reciprocated; or whose eyes were really getting bluer and bluer, and her cheeks fatter and fatter, and who seemed to fear nothing that had existence. And the reader of the lines would rest one elbow on the desk, shut his eyes in one hand, and see the fair young head of the mother drooping tenderly over that smaller head in her bosom. Sometimes the tone of the lines was hopefully grave, discussing in the old tentative, interrogative key the future and its possibilities. Some pages were given to reminiscences, – recollections of all the droll things and all the good and glad things of the rugged past. Every here and there, but especially where the lines drew toward the signature, the words of longing multiplied, but always full of sunshine; and just at the end of each letter love spurned its restraints, and rose and overflowed with sweet confessions.

Sometimes these re-read letters did Richling good; not always. Maybe he read them too often. It was only the very next time that the Doctor’s carriage stood before the bakery that the departing physician turned before he reëntered the vehicle, and – whatever Richling had been saying to him – said abruptly: —

“Richling, are you falling out of love with your work?”

“Why do you ask me that?” asked the young man, coloring.

“Because I no longer see that joy of deliverance with which you entered upon this humble calling. It seems to have passed like a lost perfume, Richling. Have you let your toil become a task once more?”

Richling dropped his eyes and pushed the ground with the toe of his boot.

“I didn’t want you to find that out, Doctor.”

“I was afraid, from the first, it would be so,” said the physician.

“I don’t see why you were.”

“Well, I saw that the zeal with which you first laid hold of your work was not entirely natural. It was good, but it was partly artificial, – the more credit to you on that account. But I saw that by and by you would have to keep it up mainly by your sense of necessity and duty. ‘That’ll be the pinch,’ I said; and now I see it’s come. For a long time you idealized the work; but at last its real dulness has begun to overcome you, and you’re discontented – and with a discontentment that you can’t justify, can you?”

“But I feel myself growing smaller again.”

“No wonder. Why, Richling, it’s the discontent makes that.”

“Oh, no! The discontent makes me long to expand. I never had so much ambition before. But what can I do here? Why, Doctor, I ought to be – I might be” —

The physician laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“Stop, Richling. Drop those phrases and give us a healthy ‘I am,’ and ‘I must,’ and ‘I will.’ Don’t —don’t be like so many! You’re not of the many. Richling, in the first illness in which I ever attended your wife, she watched her chance and asked me privately – implored me – not to let her die, for your sake. I don’t suppose that tortures could have wrung from her, even if she realized it, – which I doubt, – the true reason. But don’t you feel it? It was because your moral nature needs her so badly. Stop – let me finish. You need Mary back here now to hold you square to your course by the tremendous power of her timid little ‘Don’t you think?’ and ‘Doesn’t it seem?’”

“Doctor,” replied Richling, with a smile of expostulation, “you touch one’s pride.”

“Certainly I do. You’re willing enough to say that you love her and long for her, but not that your moral manhood needs her. And yet isn’t it true?”

“It sha’n’t be true,” said Richling, swinging a playful fist. “‘Forewarned is forearmed;’ I’ll not allow it. I’m man enough for that.” He laughed, with a touch of pique.

“Richling,” – the Doctor laid a finger against his companion’s shoulder, preparing at the same time to leave him, – “don’t be misled. A man who doesn’t need a wife isn’t fit to have one.”

“Why, Doctor,” replied Richling, with sincere amiability, “you’re the man of all men I should have picked out to prove the contrary.”

“No, Richling, no. I wasn’t fit, and God took her.”

In accordance with Dr. Sevier’s request Richling essayed to lift the mind of the baker’s wife, in the matter of her husband’s affliction, to that plane of conviction where facts, and not feelings, should become her motive; and when he had talked until his head reeled, as though he had been blowing a fire, and she would not blaze for all his blowing – would be governed only by a stupid sentimentality; and when at length she suddenly flashed up in silly anger and accused him of interested motives; and when he had demanded instant retraction or release from her employment; and when she humbly and affectionately apologized, and was still as deep as ever in hopeless, clinging sentimentalisms, repeating the dictums of her simple and ignorant German neighbors and intimates, and calling them in to argue with him, the feeling that the Doctor’s exhortation had for the moment driven away came back with more force than ever, and he could only turn again to his ovens and account-books with a feeling of annihilation.

“Where am I? What am I?” Silence was the only answer. The separation that had once been so sharp a pain had ceased to cut, and was bearing down upon him now with that dull, grinding weight that does the damage in us.

Presently came another development: the lack of money, that did no harm while it was merely kept in the mind, settled down upon the heart.

“It may be a bad thing to love, but it’s a good thing to have,” he said, one day, to the little rector, as this friend stood by him at a corner of the high desk where Richling was posting his ledger.

“But not to seek,” said the rector.

Richling posted an item and shook his head doubtingly.

“That depends, I should say, on how much one seeks it, and how much of it he seeks.”

“No,” insisted the clergyman. Richling bent a look of inquiry upon him, and he added: —

“The principle is bad, and you know it, Richling. ‘Seek ye first’ – you know the text, and the assurance that follows with it – ‘all these things shall be added’” —

“Oh, yes; but still” —

“‘But still!’” exclaimed the little preacher; “why must everybody say ‘but still’? Don’t you see that that ‘but still’ is the refusal of Christians to practise Christianity?”

Richling looked, but said nothing; and his friend hoped the word had taken effect. But Richling was too deeply bitten to be cured by one or two good sayings. After a moment he said: —

“I used to wonder to see nearly everybody struggling to be rich, but I don’t now. I don’t justify it, but I understand it. It’s flight from oblivion. It’s the natural longing to be seen and felt.”

“Why isn’t it enough to be felt?” asked the other. “Here, you make bread and sell it. A thousand people eat it from your hand every day. Isn’t that something?”

“Yes; but it’s all the bread. The bread’s everything; I’m nothing. I’m not asked to do or to be. I may exist or not; there will be bread all the same. I see my remark pains you, but I can’t help it. You’ve never tried the thing. You’ve never encountered the mild contempt that people in ease pay to those who pursue the ‘industries.’ You’ve never suffered the condescension of rank to the ranks. You don’t know the smart of being only an arithmetical quantity in a world of achievements and possessions.”

“No,” said the preacher, “maybe I haven’t. But I should say you are just the sort of man that ought to come through all that unsoured and unhurt. Richling,” – he put on a lighter mood, – “you’ve got a moral indigestion. You’ve accustomed yourself to the highest motives, and now these new notions are not the highest, and you know and feel it. They don’t nourish you. They don’t make you happy. Where are your old sentiments? What’s become of them?”

“Ah!” said Richling, “I got them from my wife. And the supply’s nearly run out.”

“Get it renewed!” said the little man, quickly, putting on his hat and extending a farewell hand. “Excuse me for saying so. I didn’t intend it; I dropped in to ask you again the name of that Italian whom you visit at the prison, – the man I promised you I’d go and talk to. Yes – Ristofalo; that’s it. Good-by.”

That night Richling wrote to his wife. What he wrote goes not down here; but he felt as he wrote that his mood was not the right one, and when Mary got the letter she answered by first mail: —

“Will you not let me come to you? Is it not surely best? Say but the word, and I’ll come. It will be the steamer to Chicago, railroad to Cairo, and a St. Louis boat to New Orleans. Alice will be both company and protection, and no burden at all. O my beloved husband! I am just ungracious enough to think, some days, that these times of separation are the hardest of all. When we were suffering sickness and hunger together – well, we were together. Darling, if you’ll just say come, I’ll come in an instant. Oh, how gladly! Surely, with what you tell me you’ve saved, and with your place so secure to you, can’t we venture to begin again? Alice and I can live with you in the bakery. O my husband! if you but say the word, a little time – a few days will bring us into your arms. And yet, do not yield to my impatience; I trust your wisdom, and know that what you decide will be best. Mother has been very feeble lately, as I have told you; but she seems to be improving, and now I see what I’ve half suspected for a long time, and ought to have seen sooner, that my husband – my dear, dear husband – needs me most; and I’m coming – I’m coming, John, if you’ll only say come.

Your loving

Mary.”

CHAPTER XLII.
RISTOFALO AND THE RECTOR

Be Richling’s feelings what they might, the Star Bakery shone in the retail firmament of the commercial heavens with new and growing brilliancy. There was scarcely time to talk even with the tough little rector who hovers on the borders of this history, and he might have become quite an alien had not Richling’s earnest request made him one day a visitor, as we have seen him express his intention of being, in the foul corridors of the parish prison, and presently the occupant of a broken chair in the apartment apportioned to Raphael Ristofalo and two other prisoners. “Easy little tasks you cut out for your friends,” said the rector to Richling when next they met. “I got preached to– not to say edified. I’ll share my edification with you!” He told his experience.

It was a sinister place, the prison apartment. The hand of Kate Ristofalo had removed some of its unsightly conditions and disguised others; but the bounds of the room, walls, ceiling, windows, floor, still displayed, with official unconcern, the grime and decay that is commonly thought good enough for men charged, rightly or wrongly, with crime.

The clergyman’s chair was in the centre of the floor. Ristofalo sat facing him a little way off on the right. A youth of nineteen sat tipped against the wall on the left, and a long-limbed, big-boned, red-shirted young Irishman occupied a poplar table, hanging one of his legs across a corner of it and letting the other down to the floor. Ristofalo remarked, in the form of polite acknowledgment, that the rector had preached to the assembled inmates of the prison on the Sunday previous.

“Did I say anything that you thought was true?” asked the minister.

The Italian smiled in the gentle manner that never failed him.

“Didn’t listen much,” he said. He drew from a pocket of his black velveteen pantaloons a small crumpled tract. It may have been a favorite one with the clergyman, for the youth against the wall produced its counterpart, and the man on the edge of the table lay back on his elbow, and, with an indolent stretch of the opposite arm and both legs, drew a third one from a tin cup that rested on a greasy shelf behind him. The Irishman held his between his fingers and smirked a little toward the floor. Ristofalo extended his toward the visitor, and touched the caption with one finger: “Mercy offered.”

“Well,” asked the rector, pleasantly, “what’s the matter with that?”

“Is no use yeh. Wrong place – this prison.”

“Um-hm,” said the tract-distributor, glancing down at the leaf and smoothing it on his knee while he took time to think. “Well, why shouldn’t mercy be offered here?”

“No,” replied Ristofalo, still smiling; “ought offer justice first.”

“Mr. Preacher,” asked the young Irishman, bringing both legs to the front, and swinging them under the table, “d’ye vote?”

“Yes; I vote.”

“D’ye call yerself a cidizen – with a cidizen’s rights an’ djuties?”

“I do.”

“That’s right.” There was a deep sea of insolence in the smooth-faced, red-eyed smile that accompanied the commendation. “And how manny times have ye bean in this prison?”

“I don’t know; eight or ten times. That rather beats you, doesn’t it?”

Ristofalo smiled, the youth uttered a high rasping cackle, and the Irishman laughed the heartiest of all.

“A little,” he said; “a little. But nivver mind. Ye say ye’ve bin here eight or tin times; yes. Well, now, will I tell ye what I’d do afore and iver I’d kim back here ag’in, – if I was you now? Will I tell ye?”

“Well, yes,” replied the visitor, amiably; “I’d like to know.”

“Well, surr, I’d go to the mair of this city and to the judge of the criminal coort, and to the gov’ner of the Sta-ate, and to the ligislatur, if needs be, and I’d say, ‘Gintlemin, I can’t go back to that prison! There is more crimes a-being committed by the people outside ag’in the fellies in theyre than – than – than the – the fellies in theyre has committed ag’in the people! I’m ashamed to preach theyre! I’m afeered to do ud!’” The speaker slipped off the table, upon his feet. “‘There’s murrder a-goun’ on in theyre! There’s more murrder a-bein’ done in theyre nor there is outside! Justice is a-bein’ murdered theyre ivery hour of day and night!’”

He brandished his fist with the last words, but dropped it at a glance from Ristofalo, and began to pace the floor along his side of the room, looking with a heavy-browed smile back and forth from one fellow-captive to the other. He waited till the visitor was about to speak, and then interrupted, pointing at him suddenly: —

“Ye’re a Prodez’n preacher! I’ll bet ye fifty dollars ye have a rich cherch! Full of leadin’ cidizens!”

“You’re correct.”

“Well, I’d go an’ – an’ – an’ I’d say, ‘Dawn’t ye nivver ax me to go into that place ag’in a-pallaverin’ about mercy, until ye gid ud chaynged from the hell on earth it is to a house of justice, wheyre min gits the sintences that the coorts decrees!’ I don’t complain in here. He don’t complain,” pointing to Ristofalo; “ye’ll nivver hear a complaint from him. But go look in that yaird!” He threw up both hands with a grimace of disgust – “Aw!” – and ceased again, but continued his walk, looked at his fellows, and resumed: —

“I listened to yer sermon. I heerd ye talkin’ about the souls of uz. Do ye think ye kin make anny of thim min believe ye cayre for the souls of us whin ye do nahthing for the bodies that’s before yer eyes tlothed in rrags and stairved, and made to sleep on beds of brick and stone, and to receive a hundred abuses a day that was nivver intended to be a pairt of annybody’s sintince – and manny of’m not tried yit, an’ nivver a-goun’ to have annythin’ proved ag’in ’m? How can ye come offerin’ uz merrcy? For ye don’t come out o’ the tloister, like a poor Cat’lic priest or Sister. Ye come rright out o’ the hairt o’ the community that’s a-committin’ more crimes ag’in uz in here than all of us together has iver committed outside. Aw! – Bring us a better airticle of yer own justice ferst – I doan’t cayre how crool it is, so ut’s justice– an’ thin preach about God’s mercy. I’ll listen to ye.”

Ristofalo had kept his eyes for the most of the time on the floor, smiling sometimes more and sometimes less. Now, however, he raised them and nodded to the clergyman. He approved all that had been said. The Irishman went and sat again on the table and swung his legs. The visitor was not allowed to answer before, and must answer now. He would have been more comfortable at the rectory.

“My friend,” he began, “suppose, now, I should say that you are pretty nearly correct in everything you’ve said?”

The prisoner, who, with hands grasping the table’s edge on either side of him, was looking down at his swinging brogans, simply lifted his lurid eyes without raising his head, and nodded. “It would be right,” he seemed to intimate, “but nothing great.”

“And suppose I should say that I’m glad I’ve heard it, and that I even intend to make good use of it?”

His hearer lifted his head, better pleased, but not without some betrayal of the distrust which a lower nature feels toward the condescensions of a higher. The preacher went on: —

“Would you try to believe what I have to add to that?”

“Yes, I’d try,” replied the Irishman, looking facetiously from the youth to Ristofalo. But this time the Italian was grave, and turned his glance expectantly upon the minister, who presently replied: —

“Well, neither my church nor the community has sent me here at all.”

The Irishman broke into a laugh.

“Did God send ye?” He looked again to his comrades, with an expanded grin. The youth giggled. The clergyman met the attack with serenity, waited a moment and then responded: —

“Well, in one sense, I don’t mind saying – yes.”

“Well,” said the Irishman, still full of mirth, and swinging his legs with fresh vigor, “he’d aht to ’a’ sint ye to the ligislatur.”

“I’m in hopes he will,” said the little rector; “but” – checking the Irishman’s renewed laughter – “tell me why should other men’s injustice in here stop me from preaching God’s mercy?”

“Because it’s pairt your injustice! Ye do come from yer cherch, an’ ye do come from the community, an’ ye can’t deny ud, an’ ye’d ahtn’t to be comin’ in here with yer sweet tahk and yer eyes tight shut to the crimes that’s bein’ committed ag’in uz for want of an outcry against ’em by you preachers an’ prayers an’ thract-disthributors.” The speaker ceased and nodded fiercely. Then a new thought occurred to him, and he began again abruptly: —

“Look ut here! Ye said in yer serrmon that as to Him” – he pointed through the broken ceiling – “we’re all criminals alike, didn’t ye?”

“I did,” responded the preacher, in a low tone.

“Yes,” said Ristofalo; and the boy echoed the same word.

“Well, thin, what rights has some to be out an’ some to be in?”

“Only one right that I know of,” responded the little man; “still that is a good one.”

“And that is – ?” prompted the Irishman.

“Society’s right to protect itself.”

“Yes,” said the prisoner, “to protect itself. Thin what right has it to keep a prison like this, where every man an’ woman as goes out of ud goes out a blacker devil, and cunninger devil, and a more dangerous devil, nor when he came in? Is that anny protection? Why shouldn’t such a prison tumble down upon the heads of thim as built it? Say.”

“I expect you’ll have to ask somebody else,” said the rector. He rose.

“Ye’re not a-goun’!” exclaimed the Irishman, in broad affectation of surprise.

“Yes.”

“Ah! come, now! Ye’re not goun’ to be beat that a-way by a wild Mick o’ the woods?” He held himself ready for a laugh.

“No, I’m coming back,” said the smiling clergyman, and the laugh came.

“That’s right! But” – as if the thought was a sudden one – “I’ll be dead by thin, willn’t I? Of coorse I will.”

“Yes?” rejoined the clergyman. “How’s that?”

The Irishman turned to the Italian.

“Mr. Ristofalo, we’re a-goin to the pinitintiary, aint we?”

Ristofalo nodded.

“Of coorse we air! Ah! Mr. Preechur, that’s the place!”

“Worse than this?”

“Worse? Oh, no! It’s better. This is slow death, but that’s quick and short – and sure. If it don’t git ye in five year’, ye’re an allygatur. This place? It’s heaven to ud!”