Dr. Sevier Part 35

"I'm telling you the truth," answered he, ignoring her question.

"Nothing else short of overtowering merit will get you what you want half so surely."

"Well, why not do it? Why not?" A fresh, glad courage sparkled in the wife's eyes.

"Why, Mary," said John, "I never in my life tried so hard to do anything else as I've tried to do that! It sounds easy; but try it! You can't conceive how hard it is till you try it. I can't _do_ it! I _can't_ do it!"

"_I'd_ do it!" cried Mary. Her face shone. "_I'd_ do it! You'd see if I didn't! Why, John"--

"All right!" exclaimed he; "you sha'n't talk that way to me for nothing.

I'll try it again! I'll begin to-day!"

"Good-by," he said. He reached an arm over one of her shoulders and around under the other and drew her up on tiptoe. She threw both hers about his neck. A long kiss--then a short one.

"John, something tells me we're near the end of our troubles."

John laughed grimly. "Ristofalo was to get back to the city to-day: maybe he's going to put us out of our misery. There are two ways for troubles to end." He walked away as he spoke. As he pa.s.sed under the window in the alley, its sash was thrown up and Mary leaned out on her elbows.

"John!"

"Well?"

They looked into each other's eyes with the quiet pleasure of tried lovers, and were silent a moment. She leaned a little farther down, and said, softly:--

"You mustn't mind what I said just now."

"Why, what did you say?"

"That if it were I, I'd do it. I know you can do anything I can do, and a hundred better things besides."

He lifted his hand to her cheek. "We'll see," he whispered. She drew in, and he moved on.

Morning pa.s.sed. Noon came. From horizon to horizon the sky was one unbroken blue. The sun spread its bright, hot rays down upon the town and far beyond, ripening the distant, countless fields of the great delta, which by and by were to empty their abundance into the city's lap for the employment, the nourishing, the clothing of thousands. But in the dusty streets, along the ill-kept fences and shadowless walls of the quiet districts, and on the glaring facades and heated pavements of the commercial quarters, it seemed only as though the slowly retreating summer struck with the fury of a wounded Amazon. Richling was soon dust-covered and weary. He had gone his round. There were not many men whom he could even propose to haunt. He had been to all of them. Dr.

Sevier was not one. "Not to-day," said Richling.

"It all depends on the way it's done," he said to himself; "it needn't degrade a man if it's done the right way." It was only by such philosophy he had done it at all. Ristofalo he could have haunted without effort; but Ristofalo was not to be found. Richling tramped in vain. It may be that all plans were of equal merit just then. The summers of New Orleans in those times were, as to commerce, an utter torpor, and the autumn reawakening was very tardy. It was still too early for the stirrings of general mercantile life. The movement of the cotton crop was just beginning to be perceptible; but otherwise almost the only sounds were from the hammers of craftsmen making the town larger and preparing it for the activities of days to come.

The afternoon wore along. Not a cent yet to carry home! Men began to shut their idle shops and go to meet their wives and children about their comfortable dinner-tables. The sun dipped low. Hammers and saws were dropped into tool-boxes, and painters pulled themselves out of their overalls. The mechanic's rank, hot supper began to smoke on its bare board; but there was one board that was still altogether bare and to which no one hastened. Another day and another chance of life were gone.

Some men at a warehouse door, the only opening in the building left unclosed, were hurrying in a few bags of sh.e.l.led corn. Night was falling. At an earlier hour Richling had offered the labor of his hands at this very door and had been rejected. Now, as they rolled in the last truck-load, they began to ask for rest with all the gladness he would have felt to be offered toil, singing,--

"To blow, to blow, some time for to blow."

They swung the great leaves of the door together as they finished their chorus, stood grouped outside a moment while the warehouseman turned the resounding lock, and then went away. Richling, who had moved on, watched them over his shoulder, and as they left turned back. He was about to do what he had never done before. He went back to the door where the bags of grain had stood. A drunken sailor came swinging along. He stood still and let him pa.s.s; there must be no witnesses. The sailor turned the next corner. Neither up nor down nor across the street, nor at dust-begrimed, cobwebbed window, was there any sound or motion. Richling dropped quickly on one knee and gathered hastily into his pocket a little pile of sh.e.l.led corn that had leaked from one of the bags.

That was all. No harm to a living soul; no theft; no wrong; but ah! as he rose he felt a sudden inward lesion. Something broke. It was like a ship, in a dream, noiselessly striking a rock where no rock is. It seemed as though the very next thing was to begin going to pieces. He walked off in the dark shadow of the warehouse, half lifted from his feet by a vague, wide dismay. And yet he felt no greatness of emotion, but rather a painful want of it, as if he were here and emotion were yonder, down-street, or up-street, or around the corner. The ground seemed slipping from under him. He appeared to have all at once melted away to nothing. He stopped. He even turned to go back. He felt that if he should go and put that corn down where he had found it he should feel himself once more a living thing of substance and emotions. Then it occurred to him--no, he would keep it, he would take it to Mary; but himself--he would not touch it; and so he went home.

Mary parched the corn, ground it fine in the coffee-mill and salted and served it close beside the candle. "It's good white corn," she said, laughing. "Many a time when I was a child I used to eat this in my playhouse and thought it delicious. Didn't you? What! not going to eat?"

Richling had told her how he got the corn. Now he told his sensations.

"You eat it, Mary," he said at the end; "you needn't feel so about it; but if I should eat it I should feel myself a vagabond. It may be foolish, but I wouldn't touch it for a hundred dollars." A hundred dollars had come to be his synonyme for infinity.

Mary gazed at him a moment tearfully, and rose, with the dish in her hand, saying, with a smile, "I'd look pretty, wouldn't I!"

She set it aside, and came and kissed his forehead. By and by she asked:--

"And so you saw no work, anywhere?"

"Oh, yes!" he replied, in a tone almost free from dejection. "I saw any amount of work--preparations for a big season. I think I certainly shall pick up something to-morrow--enough, anyhow, to buy something to eat with. If we can only hold out a little longer--just a little--I am sure there'll be plenty to do--for everybody." Then he began to show distress again. "I could have got work to-day if I had been a carpenter, or if I'd been a joiner, or a slater, or a bricklayer, or a plasterer, or a painter, or a hod-carrier. Didn't I try that, and was refused?"

"I'm glad of it," said Mary.

"'Show me your hands,' said the man to me. I showed them. 'You won't do,' said he."

"I'm glad of it!" said Mary, again.

"No," continued Richling; "or if I'd been a glazier, or a whitewasher, or a wood-sawyer, or"--he began to smile in a hard, unpleasant way,--"or if I'd been anything but an American gentleman. But I wasn't, and I didn't get the work!"

Mary sank into his lap, with her very best smile.

"John, if you hadn't been an American gentleman"--

"We should never have met," said John. "That's true; that's true." They looked at each other, rejoicing in mutual ownership.

"But," said John, "I needn't have been the typical American gentleman,--completely unfitted for prosperity and totally unequipped for adversity."

"That's not your fault," said Mary.

"No, not entirely; but it's your calamity, Mary. O Mary! I little thought"--

She put her hand quickly upon his mouth. His eye flashed and he frowned.

"Don't do so!" he exclaimed, putting the hand away; then blushed for shame, and kissed her.

They went to bed. Bread would have put them to sleep. But after a long time--

"John," said one voice in the darkness, "do you remember what Dr. Sevier told us?"

"Yes, he said we had no right to commit suicide by starvation."

"If you don't get work to-morrow, are you going to see him?"

"I am."

In the morning they rose early.

During these hard days Mary was now and then conscious of one feeling which she never expressed, and was always a little more ashamed of than probably she need have been, but which, stifle it as she would, kept recurring in moments of stress. Mrs. Riley--such was the thought--need not be quite so blind. It came to her as John once more took his good-by, the long kiss and the short one, and went breakfastless away.

But was Mrs. Riley as blind as she seemed? She had vision enough to observe that the Richlings had bought no bread the day before, though she did overlook the fact that emptiness would set them astir before their usual hour of rising. She knocked at Mary's inner door. As it opened a quick glance showed the little table that occupied the centre of the room standing clean and idle.

"Why, Mrs. Riley!" cried Mary; for on one of Mrs. Riley's large hands there rested a blue-edged soup-plate, heaping full of the food that goes nearest to the Creole heart--_jambolaya_. There it was, steaming and smelling,--a delicious confusion of rice and red pepper, chicken legs, ham, and tomatoes. Mike, on her opposite arm, was struggling to lave his socks in it.