Dr. Sevier

“I? Yes; yes, I must.”

He started.

“I’m ’appy to yeh it!” said Narcisse.

His innocent kindness was a rebuke. Richling began to offer a cordial parting salutation, but Narcisse said: —

“You goin’ that way? Well, I kin go that way.”

They went.

“I was goin’ ad the poss-office, but” – he waved his hand and curled his lip. “Mistoo Itchlin, in fact, if you yeh of something suitable to me I would like to yeh it. I am not satisfied with that pless yondeh with Doctah Seveeah. I was compel this mawnin’, biffo you came in, to ’epoove ’im faw ’is ’oodness. He called me a jackass, in fact. I woon allow that. I ’ad to ’epoove ’im. ‘Doctah Seveeah,’ says I, ‘don’t you call me a jackass ag’in!’ An’ ’e din call it me ag’in. No, seh. But ’e din like to ’ush up. Thass the rizz’n ’e was a lil miscutteous to you. Me, I am always polite. As they say, ‘A nod is juz as good as a kick f’om a bline hoss.’ You are fon’ of maxim, Mistoo Itchlin? Me, I’m ve’y fon’ of them. But they’s got one maxim what you may ’ave ’eard – I do not fine that maxim always come t’ue. ’Ave you evva yeah that maxim, ‘A fool faw luck’? That don’t always come t’ue. I ’ave discove’d that.”

“No,” responded Richling, with a parting smile, “that doesn’t always come true.”

Dr. Sevier denounced the world at large, and the American nation in particular, for two days. Within himself, for twenty-four hours, he grumly blamed Richling for their rupture; then for twenty-four hours reproached himself, and, on the morning of the third day knocked at the door, corner of St. Mary and Prytania.

No one answered. He knocked again. A woman in bare feet showed herself at the corresponding door-way in the farther half of the house.

“Nobody don’t live there no more, sir,” she said.

“Where have they gone?”

“Well, reely, I couldn’t tell you, sir. Because, reely, I don’t know nothing about it. I haint but jest lately moved in here myself, and I don’t know nothing about nobody around here scarcely at all.”

The Doctor shut himself again in his carriage and let himself be whisked away, in great vacuity of mind.

“They can’t blame anybody but themselves,” was, by-and-by, his rallying thought. “Still” – he said to himself after another vacant interval, and said no more. The thought that whether they could blame others or not did not cover all the ground, rested heavily on him.

CHAPTER XV.

THE CRADLE FALLS

In the rear of the great commercial centre of New Orleans, on that part of Common street where it suddenly widens out, broad, unpaved, and dusty, rises the huge dull-brown structure of brick, famed, well-nigh as far as the city is known, as the Charity Hospital.

Twenty-five years ago, when the emigrant ships used to unload their swarms of homeless and friendless strangers into the streets of New Orleans to fall a prey to yellow-fever or cholera, that solemn pile sheltered thousands on thousands of desolate and plague-stricken Irish and Germans, receiving them unquestioned, until at times the very floors were covered with the sick and dying, and the sawing and hammering in the coffin-shop across the inner court ceased not day or night. Sombre monument at once of charity and sin! For, while its comfort and succor cost the houseless wanderer nothing, it lived and grew, and lives and grows still, upon the licensed vices of the people, – drinking, harlotry, and gambling.

The Charity Hospital of St. Charles – such is its true name – is, however, no mere plague-house. Whether it ought to be, let doctors decide. How good or necessary such modern innovations as “ridge ventilation,” “movable bases,” the “pavilion plan,” “trained nurses,” etc., may be, let the Auxiliary Sanitary Association say. There it stands as of old, innocent of all sins that may be involved in any of these changes, rising story over story, up and up: here a ward for poisonous fevers, and there a ward for acute surgical cases; here a story full of simple ailments, and there a ward specially set aside for women.

In 1857 this last was Dr. Sevier’s ward. Here, at his stated hour one summer morning in that year, he tarried a moment, yonder by that window, just where you enter the ward and before you come to the beds. He had fallen into discourse with some of the more inquiring minds among the train of students that accompanied him, and waited there to finish and cool down to a physician’s proper temperature. The question was public sanitation.

He was telling a tall Arkansan, with high-combed hair, self-conscious gloves, and very broad, clean-shaven lower jaw, how the peculiar formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, “the common dumping-ground and cesspool of the city, sir!”

Some of the students nodded convincedly to the speaker; some looked askance at the Arkansan, who put one forearm meditatively under his coat-tail; some looked through the window over the regions alluded to, and some only changed their pose and looked around for a mirror.

The Doctor spoke on. Several of his hearers were really interested in the then unusual subject, and listened intelligently as he pointed across the low plain at hundreds of acres of land that were nothing but a morass, partly filled in with the foulest refuse of a semi-tropical city, and beyond it where still lay the swamp, half cleared of its forest and festering in the sun – “every drop of its waters, and every inch of its mire,” said the Doctor, “saturated with the poisonous drainage of the town!”

“I happen,” interjected a young city student; but the others bent their ear to the Doctor, who continued: —

“Why, sir, were these regions compactly built on, like similar areas in cities confined to narrow sites, the mortality, with the climate we have, would be frightful.”

“I happen to know,” essayed the city student; but the Arkansan had made an interrogatory answer to the Doctor, that led him to add: —

“Why, yes; you see the houses here on these lands are little, flimsy, single ground-story affairs, loosely thrown together, and freely exposed to sun and air.”

“I hap – ,” said the city student.

“And yet,” exclaimed the Doctor, “Malaria is king!”

He paused an instant for his hearers to take in the figure.

“Doctor, I happen to” —

Some one’s fist from behind caused the speaker to turn angrily, and the Doctor resumed: —

“Go into any of those streets off yonder, – Trémé, Prieur, Marais. Why, there are often ponds under the houses! The floors of bedrooms are within a foot or two of these ponds! The bricks of the surrounding pavements are often covered with a fine, dark moss! Water seeps up through the sidewalks! That’s his realm, sir! Here and there among the residents – every here and there – you’ll see his sallow, quaking subjects dragging about their work or into and out of their beds, until a fear of a fatal ending drives them in here. Congestion? Yes, sometimes congestion pulls them under suddenly, and they’re gone before they know it. Sometimes their vitality wanes slowly, until Malaria beckons in Consumption.”

“Why, Doctor,” said the city student, ruffling with pride of his town, “there are plenty of cities as bad as this. I happen to know, for instance” —

Dr. Sevier turned away in quiet contempt.

“It will not improve our town to dirty others, or to clean them, either.”

He moved down the ward, while two or three members among the moving train, who never happened to know anything, nudged each other joyfully.

The group stretched out and came along, the Doctor first and the young men after, some of one sort, some of another, – the dull, the frivolous, the earnest, the kind, the cold, – following slowly, pausing, questioning, discoursing, advancing, moving from each clean, slender bed to the next, on this side and on that, down and up the long sanded aisles, among the poor, sick women.

Among these, too, there was variety. Some were stupid and ungracious, hardened and dulled with long penury as some in this world are hardened and dulled with long riches. Some were as fat as beggars; some were old and shrivelled; some were shrivelled and young; some were bold; some were frightened; and here and there was one almost fair.

Down at the far end of one aisle was a bed whose occupant lay watching the distant, slowly approaching group with eyes of unspeakable dread. There was not a word or motion, only the steadfast gaze. Gradually the throng drew near. The faces of the students could be distinguished. This one was coarse; that one was gentle; another was sleepy; another trivial and silly; another heavy and sour; another tender and gracious. Presently the tones of the Doctor’s voice could be heard, soft, clear, and without that trumpet quality that it had beyond the sick-room. How slowly, yet how surely, they came! The patient’s eyes turned away toward the ceiling; they could not bear the slowness of the encounter. They closed; the lips moved in prayer. The group came to the bed that was only the fourth away; then to the third; then to the second. There they pause some minutes. Now the Doctor approaches the very next bed. Suddenly he notices this patient. She is a small woman, young, fair to see, and, with closed eyes and motionless form, is suffering an agony of consternation. One startled look, a suppressed exclamation, two steps forward, – the patient’s eyes slowly open. Ah, me! It is Mary Richling.

“Good-morning, madam,” said the physician, with a cold and distant bow; and to the students, “We’ll pass right along to the other side,” and they moved into the next aisle.

“I am a little pressed for time this morning,” he presently remarked, as the students showed some unwillingness to be hurried. As soon as he could he parted with them and returned to the ward alone.

As he moved again down among the sick, straight along this time, turning neither to right nor left, one of the Sisters of Charity – the hospital and its so-called nurses are under their oversight – touched his arm. He stopped impatiently.

“Well, Sister” – (bowing his ear).

“I – I – the – the” – His frown had scared away her power of speech.

“Well, what is it, Sister?”

“The – the last patient down on this side” —

He was further displeased. “I’ll attend to the patients, Sister,” he said; and then, more kindly, “I’m going there now. No, you stay here, if you please.” And he left her behind.

He came and stood by the bed. The patient gazed on him.