CHAPTER XLVI.
A PRISON MEMENTO
The political pot began to seethe. Many yet will remember how its smoke went up. The summer – summer of 1860 – grew fervent. Its breath became hot and dry. All observation – all thought – turned upon the fierce campaign. Discussion dropped as to whether Heenan would ever get that champion’s belt, which even the little rector believed he had fairly won in the international prize-ring. The news brought by each succeeding European steamer of Garibaldi’s splendid triumphs in the cause of a new Italy, the fierce rattle of partisan warfare in Mexico, that seemed almost within hearing, so nearly was New Orleans concerned in some of its movements, – all things became secondary and trivial beside the developments of a political canvass in which the long-foreseen, long-dreaded issues between two parts of the nation were at length to be made final. The conventions had met, the nominations were complete, and the clans of four parties and fractions of parties were “meeting,” and “rallying,” and “uprising,” and “outpouring.”
All life was strung to one high pitch. This contest was everything, – nay, everybody, – men, women, and children. They were all for the Constitution; they were all for the Union; and each, even Richling, for the enforcement of – his own ideas. On every bosom, “no matteh the sex,” and no matter the age, hung one of those little round, ribbanded medals, with a presidential candidate on one side and his vice-presidential man Friday on the other. Needless to say that Ristofalo’s Kate, instructed by her husband, imported the earliest and many a later invoice of them, and distributing her peddlers at choice thronging-places, “everlastin’ly,” as she laughingly and confidentially informed Dr. Sevier, “raked in the sponjewlicks.” They were exposed for sale on little stalls on populous sidewalks and places of much entry and exit.
The post-office in those days was still on Royal street, in the old Merchants’ Exchange. The small hand-holes of the box-delivery were in the wide tessellated passage that still runs through the building from Royal street to Exchange alley. A keeper of one of these little stalls established himself against a pillar just where men turned into and out of Royal street, out of or into this passage. One day, in this place, just as Richling turned from a delivery window to tear the envelope of a letter bearing the Milwaukee stamp, his attention was arrested by a man running by him toward Exchange alley, pale as death, and followed by a crowd that suddenly broke into a cry, a howl, a roar: “Hang him! Hang him!”
“Come!” said a small, strong man, seizing Richling’s arm and turning him in the common direction. If the word was lost on Richling’s defective hearing, not so the touch; for the speaker was Ristofalo. The two friends ran with all their speed through the passage and out into the alley. A few rods away the chased wretch had been overtaken, and was made to face his pursuers. When Richling and Ristofalo reached him there was already a rope about his neck.
The Italian’s leap, as he closed in upon the group around the victim, was like a tiger’s. The men he touched did not fall; they were rather hurled, driving backward those whom they were hurled against. A man levelled a revolver at him; Richling struck it a blow that sent it over twenty men’s heads. A long knife flashed in Ristofalo’s right hand. He stood holding the rope in his left, stooping slightly forward, and darting his eyes about as if selecting a victim for his weapon. A stranger touched Richling from behind, spoke a hurried word in Italian, and handed him a huge dirk. But in that same moment the affair was over. There stood Ristofalo, gentle, self-contained, with just a perceptible smile turned upon the crowd, no knife in his hand, and beside him the slender, sinewy, form, and keen gray eye of Smith Izard.
The detective was addressing the crowd. While he was speaking, half a score of police came from as many directions. When he had finished, he waved his slender hand at the mass of heads.
“Stand back. Go about your business.” And they began to go. He laid a hand upon the rescued stranger and addressed the police.
“Take this rope off. Take this man to the station and keep him until it’s safe to let him go.”
The explanation by which he had so quickly pacified the mob was a simple one. The rescued man was a seller of campaign medals. That morning, in opening a fresh supply of his little stock, he had failed to perceive that, among a lot of “Breckenridge and Lane” medals, there had crept in one of Lincoln. That was the sum of his offence. The mistake had occurred in the Northern factory. Of course, if he did not intend to sell Lincoln medals, there was no crime.
“Don’t I tell you?” said the Italian to Richling, as they were walking away together. “Bound to have war; is already begin-n.”
“It began with me the day I got married,” said Richling.
Ristofalo waited some time, and then asked: —
“How?”
“I shouldn’t have said so,” replied Richling; “I can’t explain.”
“Thass all right,” said the other. And, a little later: “Smith Izard call’ you by name. How he know yo’ name?”
“I can’t imagine!”
The Italian waved his hand.
“Thass all right, too; nothin’ to me.” Then, after another pause: “Think you saved my life to-day.”
“The honors are easy,” said Richling.
He went to bed again for two or three days. He liked it little when Dr. Sevier attributed the illness to a few moments’ violent exertion and excitement.
“It was bravely done, at any rate, Richling,” said the Doctor.
“That it was!” said Kate Ristofalo, who had happened to call to see the sick man at the same hour. “Doctor, ye’r mighty right! Ha!”
Mrs. Reisen expressed a like opinion, and the two kind women met the two men’s obvious wish by leaving the room.
“Doctor,” said Richling at once, “the last time you said it was love-sickness; this time you say it’s excitement; at the bottom it isn’t either. Will you please tell me what it really is? What is this thing that puts me here on my back this way?”
“Richling,” replied the Doctor, slowly, “if I tell you the honest truth, it began in that prison.”
The patient knit his hands under his head and lay motionless and silent.
“Yes,” he said, after a time. And by and by again: “Yes; I feared as much. And can it be that my physical manhood is going to fail me at such a time as this?” He drew a long breath and turned restively in the bed.
“We’ll try to keep it from doing that,” replied the physician. “I’ve told you this, Richling, old fellow to impress upon you the necessity of keeping out of all this hubbub, – this night-marching and mass-meeting and exciting nonsense.”
“And am I always – always to be blown back – blown back this way?” said Richling, half to himself, half to his friend.
“There, now,” responded the Doctor, “just stop talking entirely. No, no; not always blown back. A sick man always thinks the present moment is the whole boundless future. Get well. And to that end possess your soul in patience. No newspapers. Read your Bible. It will calm you. I’ve been trying it myself.” His tone was full of cheer, but it was also so motherly and the touch so gentle with which he put back the sick man’s locks – as if they had been a lad’s – that Richling turned away his face with chagrin.
“Come!” said the Doctor, more sturdily, laying his hand on the patient’s shoulder. “You’ll not lie here more than a day or two. Before you know it summer will be gone, and you’ll be sending for Mary.”
Richling turned again, put out a parting hand, and smiled with new courage.
CHAPTER XLVII.
NOW I LAY ME —
Time may drag slowly, but it never drags backward. So the summer wore on, Richling following his physician’s directions; keeping to his work only – out of public excitements and all overstrain; and to every day, as he bade it good-by, his eager heart, lightened each time by that much, said, “When you come around again, next year, Mary and I will meet you hand in hand.” This was his excitement, and he seemed to flourish on it.
But day by day, week by week, the excitements of the times rose. Dr. Sevier was deeply stirred, and ever on the alert, looking out upon every quarter of the political sky, listening to the rising thunder, watching the gathering storm. There could hardly have been any one more completely engrossed by it. If there was, it was his book-keeper. It wasn’t so much the Constitution that enlisted Narcisse’s concern; nor yet the Union, which seemed to him safe enough; much less did the desire to see the enforcement of the laws consume him. Nor was it altogether the “’oman candles” and the “’ockets”; but the rhetoric.
Ah, the “’eto’ic”! He bathed, he paddled, dove, splashed, in a surf of it.
“Doctah,” – shaking his finely turned shoulders into his coat and lifting his hat toward his head, – “I had the honah, and at the same time the pleasu’, to yeh you make a shawt speech lass evening. I was p’oud to yeh yo’ bunning eloquence, Doctah, – if you’ll allow. Yesseh. Eve’ybody said ’twas the moze bilious effo’t of the o’-casion.”
Dr. Sevier actually looked up and smiled, and thanked the happy young man for the compliment.
“Yesseh,” continued his admirer, “I nevveh flatteh. I give me’-it where the me’-it lies. Well, seh, we juz make the welkin ’ing faw joy when you finally stop’ at the en’. Pehchance you heard my voice among that sea of head’? But I doubt – in ’such a vas’ up’ising – so many imposing pageant’, in fact, – and those ’ocket’ exploding in the staw-y heaven’, as they say. I think I like that exp’ession I saw on the noozpapeh, wheh it says: ‘Long biffo the appointed owwa, thousan’ of flashing tawches and tas’eful t’anspa’encies with divuz devices whose blazing effulgence turn’ day into night.’ Thass a ve’y talented style, in fact. Well, au ’evoi’, Doctah. I’m going ad the – an’ thass anotheh thing I like – ’tis faw the ladies to ’ing bells that way on the balconies. Because Mr. Bell and Eve’et is name bell, and so is the bells name’ juz the same way, and so they ’ing the bells to signify. I had to elucidate that to my hant. Well, au ’evoi’, Doctah.”
The Doctor raised his eyes from his letter-writing. The young man had turned, and was actually going out without another word. What perversity moved the physician no one will ever know; but he sternly called: —
“Narcisse?”
The Creole wheeled about on the threshold.
“Yesseh?”
The Doctor held him with a firm, grave eye, and slowly said: —
“I suppose before you return you will go to the post office.” He said nothing more, – only that, just in his jocose way, – and dropped his eyes again upon his pen. Narcisse gave him one long black look, and silently went out.
But a sweet complacency could not stay long away from the young man’s breast. The world was too beautiful; the white, hot sky above was in such fine harmony with his puffed lawn shirt-bosom and his white linen pantaloons, bulging at the thighs and tapering at the ankles, and at the corner of Canal and Royal streets he met so many members of the Yancey Guards and Southern Guards and Chalmette Guards and Union Guards and Lane Dragoons and Breckenridge Guards and Douglas Rangers and Everett Knights, and had the pleasant trouble of stepping aside and yielding the pavement to the far-spreading crinoline. Oh, life was one scintillating cluster breast-pin of ecstasies! And there was another thing, – General William Walker’s filibusters! Royal street, St. Charles, the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel, were full of them.
It made Dr. Sevier both sad and fierce to see what hold their lawless enterprise took upon the youth of the city. Not that any great number were drawn into the movement, least of all Narcisse; but it captivated their interest and sympathy, and heightened the general unrest, when calmness was what every thoughtful man saw to be the country’s greatest need.
An incident to illustrate the Doctor’s state of mind.
It occurred one evening in the St. Charles rotunda. He saw some citizens of high standing preparing to drink at the bar with a group of broad-hatted men, whose bronzed foreheads and general out-of-door mien hinted rather ostentatiously of Honduras and Ruatan Island. As he passed close to them one of the citizens faced him blandly, and unexpectedly took his hand, but quickly let it go again. The rest only glanced at the Doctor, and drew nearer to the bar.
“I trust you’re not unwell, Doctor,” said the sociable one, with something of a smile, and something of a frown, at the tall physician’s gloomy brow.
“I am well, sir.”
“I – didn’t know,” said the man again, throwing an aggressive resentment into his tone; “you seemed preoccupied.”
“I was,” replied the Doctor, returning his glance with so keen an eye that the man smiled again, appeasingly. “I was thinking how barely skin-deep civilization is.”
The man ha-ha’d artificially, stepping backward as he said, “That’s so!” He looked after the departing Doctor an instant and then joined his companions.
Richling had a touch of this contagion. He looked from Garibaldi to Walker and back again, and could not see any enormous difference between them. He said as much to one of the bakery’s customers, a restaurateur with a well-oiled tongue, who had praised him for his intrepidity in the rescue of the medal-peddler, which, it seems, he had witnessed. With this praise still upon his lips the caterer walked with Richling to the restaurant door, and detained him there to enlarge upon the subject of Spanish-American misrule, and the golden rewards that must naturally fall to those who should supplant it with stable government. Richling listened and replied and replied again and listened; and presently the restaurateur startled him with an offer to secure him a captain’s commission under Walker. He laughed incredulously; but the restaurateur, very much in earnest, talked on; and by littles, but rapidly, Richling admitted the value of the various considerations urged. Two or three months of rapid adventure; complete physical renovation – of course – natural sequence; the plaudits of a grateful people; maybe fortune also, but at least a certainty of finding the road to it, – all this to meet Mary with next fall.
“I’m in a great hurry just now,” said Richling; “but I’ll talk about this thing with you again to-morrow or next day,” and so left.
The restaurateur turned to his head-waiter, stuck his tongue in his cheek, and pulled down the lower lid of an eye with his forefinger. He meant to say he had been lying for the pure fun of it.
When Dr. Sevier came that afternoon to see Reisen – of whom there was now but little left, and that little unable to leave the bed – Richling took occasion to raise the subject that had entangled his fancy. He was careful to say nothing of himself or the restaurateur, or anything, indeed, but a timid generality or two. But the Doctor responded with a clear, sudden energy that, when he was gone, left Richling feeling painfully blank, and yet unable to find anything to resent except the Doctor’s superfluous – as he thought, quite superfluous – mention of the island of Cozumel.
However, and after all, that which for the most part kept the public mind heated was, as we have said, the political campaign. Popular feeling grew tremulous with it as the landscape did under the burning sun. It was a very hot summer. Not a good one for feeble folk; and one early dawn poor Reisen suddenly felt all his reason come back to him, opened his eyes, and lo! he had crossed the river in the night, and was on the other side.
Dr. Sevier’s experienced horse halted of his own will to let a procession pass. In the carriage at its head the physician saw the little rector, sitting beside a man of German ecclesiastical appearance. Behind it followed a majestic hearse, drawn by black-plumed and caparisoned horses, – four of them. Then came a long line of red-shirted firemen; for he in the hearse had been an “exempt.” Then a further line of big-handed, white-gloved men in beavers and regalias; for he had been also a Freemason and an Odd-fellow. Then another column, of emotionless-visaged German women, all in bunchy black gowns, walking out of time to the solemn roll and pulse of the muffled drums, and the brazen peals of the funeral march. A few carriages closed the long line. In the first of them the waiting Doctor marked, with a sudden understanding of all, the pale face of John Richling, and by his side the widow who had been forty years a wife, – weary and red with weeping. The Doctor took off his hat.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
RISE UP, MY LOVE, MY FAIR ONE
The summer at length was past, and the burning heat was over and gone. The days were refreshed with the balm of a waning October. There had been no fever. True, the nights were still aglare with torches, and the street echoes kept awake by trumpet notes and huzzas, by the tramp of feet and the delicate hint of the bell-ringing; and men on the stump and off it; in the “wigwams;” along the sidewalks, as they came forth, wiping their mouths, from the free-lunch counters, and on the curb-stones and “flags” of Carondelet street, were saying things to make a patriot’s heart ache. But contrariwise, in that same Carondelet street, and hence in all the streets of the big, scattered town, the most prosperous commercial year – they measure from September to September – that had ever risen upon New Orleans had closed its distended record, and no one knew or dreamed that, for nearly a quarter of a century to come, the proud city would never see the equal of that golden year just gone. And so, away yonder among the great lakes on the northern border of the anxious but hopeful country, Mary was calling, calling, like an unseen bird piping across the fields for its mate, to know if she and the one little nestling might not come to hers.
And at length, after two or three unexpected contingencies had caused delays of one week after another, all in a silent tremor of joy, John wrote the word – “Come!”
He was on his way to put it into the post-office, in Royal street. At the newspaper offices, in Camp street, he had to go out into the middle of the way to get around the crowd that surrounded the bulletin-boards, and that scuffled for copies of the latest issue. The day of days was passing; the returns of election were coming in. In front of the “Picayune” office he ran square against a small man, who had just pulled himself and the most of his clothing out of the press with the last news crumpled in the hand that he still held above his head.
“Hello, Richling, this is pretty exciting, isn’t it?” It was the little clergyman. “Come on, I’ll go your way; let’s get out of this.”
He took Richling’s arm, and they went on down the street, the rector reading aloud as they walked, and shopkeepers and salesmen at their doors catching what they could of his words as the two passed.
“It’s dreadful! dreadful!” said the little man, thrusting the paper into his pocket in a wad.
“Hi! Mistoo Itchlin,” quoth Narcisse, passing them like an arrow, on his way to the paper offices.
“He’s happy,” said Richling.
“Well, then, he’s the only happy man I know of in New Orleans to-day,” said the little rector, jerking his head and drawing a sigh through his teeth.
“No,” said Richling, “I’m another. You see this letter.” He showed it with the direction turned down. “I’m going now to mail it. When my wife gets it she starts.”
The preacher glanced quickly into his face. Richling met his gaze with eyes that danced with suppressed joy. The two friends attracted no attention from those whom they passed or who passed them; the newsboys were scampering here and there, everybody buying from them, and the walls of Common street ringing with their shouted proffers of the “full account” of the election.
“Richling, don’t do it.”
“Why not?” Richling showed only amusement.
“For several reasons,” replied the other. “In the first place, look at your business!”
“Never so good as to-day.”
“True. And it entirely absorbs you. What time would you have at your fireside, or even at your family table? None. It’s – well you know what it is – it’s a bakery, you know. You couldn’t expect to lodge your wife and little girl in a bakery in Benjamin street; you know you couldn’t. Now, you– you don’t mind it – or, I mean, you can stand it. Those things never need damage a gentleman. But with your wife it would be different. You smile, but – why, you know she couldn’t go there. And if you put her anywhere where a lady ought to be, in New Orleans, she would be – well, don’t you see she would be about as far away as if she were in Milwaukee? Richling, I don’t know how it looks to you for me to be so meddlesome, and I believe you think I’m making a very poor argument; but you see this is only one point and the smallest. Now” —
Richling raised his thin hand, and said pleasantly: —
“It’s no use. You can’t understand; it wouldn’t be possible to explain; for you simply don’t know Mary.”
“But there are some things I do know. Just think; she’s with her mother where she is. Imagine her falling ill here, – as you’ve told me she used to do, – and you with that bakery on your hands.”
Richling looked grave.
“Oh no,” continued the little man. “You’ve been so brave and patient, you and your wife, both, – do be so a little bit longer! Live close; save your money; go on rising in value in your business; and after a little you’ll rise clear out of the sphere you’re now in. You’ll command your own time; you’ll build your own little home; and life and happiness and usefulness will be fairly and broadly open before you.” Richling gave heed with a troubled face, and let his companion draw him into the shadow of that “St. Charles” from the foot of whose stair-way he had once been dragged away as a vagrant.
“See, Richling! Every few weeks you may read in some paper of how a man on some ferry-boat jumps for the wharf before the boat has touched it, falls into the water, and – Make sure! Be brave a little longer – only a little longer! Wait till you’re sure!”
“I’m sure enough!”
“Oh, no, you’re not! Wait till this political broil is over. They say Lincoln is elected. If so, the South is not going to submit to it. Nobody can tell what the consequences are to be. Suppose we should have war? I don’t think we shall, but suppose we should? There would be a general upheaval, commercial stagnation, industrial collapse, shrinkage everywhere! Wait till it’s over. It may not be two weeks hence; it can hardly be more than ninety days at the outside. If it should the North would be ruined, and you may be sure they are not going to allow that. Then, when all starts fair again, bring your wife and baby. I’ll tell you what to do, Richling!”
“Will you?” responded the listener, with an amiable laugh that the little man tried to echo.
“Yes. Ask Dr. Sevier! He’s right here in the next street. He was on your side last time; maybe he’ll be so now.”
“Done!” said Richling. They went. The rector said he would do an errand in Canal street, while Richling should go up and see the physician.
Dr. Sevier was in.
“Why, Richling!” He rose to receive him. “How are you?” He cast his eye over his visitor with professional scrutiny. “What brings you here?”
“To tell you that I’ve written for Mary,” said Richling, sinking wearily into a chair.
“Have you mailed the letter?”
“I’m taking it to the post-office now.”
The Doctor threw one leg energetically over the other, and picked up the same paper-knife that he had handled when, two years and a half before, he had sat thus, talking to Mary and John on the eve of their separation.
“Richling, I’ll tell you. I’ve been thinking about this thing for some time, and I’ve decided to make you a proposal. I look at you and at Mary and at the times – the condition of the country – the probable future – everything. I know you, physically and mentally, better than anybody else does. I can say the same of Mary. So, of course, I don’t make this proposal impulsively, and I don’t want it rejected.
“Richling, I’ll lend you two thousand to twenty-five hundred dollars, payable at your convenience, if you will just go to your room, pack up, go home, and take from six to twelve months’ holiday with your wife and child.”
The listener opened his mouth in blank astonishment.
“Why, Doctor, you’re jesting! You can’t suppose” —
“I don’t suppose anything. I simply want you to do it.”
“Well, I simply can’t!”
“Did you ever regret taking my advice, Richling?”
“No, never. But this – why, it’s utterly impossible! Me leave the results of four years’ struggle to go holidaying? I can’t understand you, Doctor.”
“’Twould take weeks to explain.”
“It’s idle to think of it,” said Richling, half to himself.
“Go home and think of it twenty-four hours,” said the Doctor.
“It is useless, Doctor.”
“Very good, then; send for Mary. Mail your letter.”
“You don’t mean it!” said Richling.
“Yes, I do. Send for Mary; and tell her I advised it.” He turned quickly away to his desk, for Richling’s eyes had filled with tears; but turned again and rose as Richling rose. They joined hands.
“Yes, Richling, send for her. It’s the right thing to do – if you will not do the other. You know I want you to be happy.”
“Doctor, one word. In your opinion is there going to be war?”
“I don’t know. But if there is it’s time for husband and wife and child to draw close together. Good-day.”
And so the letter went.