"I"m sure you are, Mary. You"re fitted by character and outward disposition, and by experience. You"re full of cheer"--
She tearfully shook her head. But he insisted.
"You will be--for _his_ sake, as you once said to me. Don"t you remember?"
She remembered. She recalled all he wished her to: the prayer she had made that, whenever death should part her husband and her, he might not be the one left behind. Yes, she remembered; and the Doctor spoke again:--
"Now, I invite you to make this your princ.i.p.al business. I"ll pay you for it, regularly and well, what I think it"s worth; and it"s worth no trifle. There"s not one in a thousand that I"d trust to do it, woman or man; but I know you will do it all, and do it well, without any nonsense. And if you want to look at it so, Mary, you can just consider that it"s John doing it, all the time; for, in fact, that"s just what it is. It beats sewing, Mary, or teaching school, or making preserves, I think."
"Yes," said Mary, looking down on Alice, and stroking her head.
"You can stay right here where you are, with Madame Zen.o.bie, as you had planned; but you"ll give yourself to this better work. I"ll give you a _carte blanche_. Only one mistake I charge you not to make; don"t go and come from day to day on the a.s.sumption that only the poor are poor, and need counsel and attention."
"I know that would be a mistake," said Mary.
"But I mean more than that," continued the Doctor. "You must keep a hold on the rich and comfortable and happy. You want to be a medium between the two, identified with both as completely as possible. It"s a hard task, Mary. It will take all your cunning."
"And more, too," replied she, half-musing.
"You know," said the Doctor, "I"m not to appear in the matter, of course; I"m not to be mentioned: that must be one of the conditions."
Mary smiled at him through her welling eyes.
"I"m not fit to do it," she said, folding the wet spots of her handkerchief under. "But still, I"d rather not refuse. If I might try it, I"d like to do so. If I could do it well, it would be a finer monument--to _him_"--
"Than bra.s.s or marble," said Dr. Sevier. "Yes, more to his liking."
"Well," said Mary again, "if you think I can do it I"ll try it."
"Very well. There"s one place you can go to, to begin with, to-morrow morning, if you choose. I"ll give you the number. It"s just across here in Casa Calvo street."
"Narcisse"s aunt?" asked Mary, with a soft gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Yes. Have you been there already?"
She had; but she only said:--
"There"s one thing that I"m afraid will go against me, Doctor, almost everywhere." She lifted a timid look.
The Doctor looked at her inquiringly, and in his private thought said that it was certainly not her face or voice.
"Ah!" he said, as he suddenly recollected. "Yes; I had forgotten. You mean your being a Union woman."
"Yes. It seems to me they"ll be sure to find it out. Don"t you think it will interfere?"
The Doctor mused.
"I forgot that," he repeated and mused again. "You can"t blame us, Mary; we"re at white heat"--
"Indeed I don"t!" said Mary, with eager earnestness.
He reflected yet again.
"But--I don"t know, either. It may be not as great a drawback as you think. Here"s Madame Zen.o.bie, for instance"--
Madame Zen.o.bie was just coming up the front steps from the garden, pulling herself up upon the veranda wearily by the bal.u.s.trade. She came forward, and, with graceful acknowledgment, accepted the physician"s outstretched hand and courtesied.
"Here"s Madame Zen.o.bie, I say; you seem to get along with her."
Mary smiled again, looked up at the standing quadroon, and replied in a low voice:--
"Madame Zen.o.bie is for the Union herself."
"Ah! no-o-o!" exclaimed the good woman, with an alarmed face. She lifted her shoulders and extended what Narcisse would have called the han" of rep-u-diation; then turned away her face, lifted up her underlip with disrelish, and asked the surrounding atmosphere,--"What I got to do wid Union? Nuttin" do wid Union--nuttin" do wid Confederacie!" She moved away, addressing the garden and the house by turns. "Ah! no!" She went in by the front door, talking Creole French, until she was beyond hearing.
Dr. Sevier reached out toward the child at Mary"s knee. Here was one who was neither for nor against, nor yet a fear-constrained neutral. Mary pushed her persuasively toward the Doctor, and Alice let herself be lifted to his lap.
"I used to be for it myself," he said, little dreaming he would one day be for it again. As the child sank back into his arm, he noticed a miniature of her father hanging from her neck. He took it into his fingers, and all were silent while he looked long upon the face.
By and by he asked Mary for an account of her wanderings. She gave it.
Many of the experiences, that had been hard and dangerous enough when she was pa.s.sing through them, were full of drollery when they came to be told, and there was much quiet amus.e.m.e.nt over them. The sunlight faded out, the cicadas hushed their long-drawn, ear-splitting strains, and the moon had begun to shine in the shadowy garden when Dr. Sevier at length let Alice down and rose to take his lonely homeward way, leaving Mary to Alice"s prattle, and, when that was hushed in slumber, to gentle tears and whispered thanksgivings above the little head.
CHAPTER LX.
"YET SHALL HE LIVE."
We need not follow Mary through her ministrations. Her office was no sinecure. It took not only much labor, but, as the Doctor had expected, it took all her cunning. True, nature and experience had equipped her for such work; but for all that there was an art to be learned, and time and again there were cases of mental and moral decrepitude or deformity that baffled all her skill until her skill grew up to them, which in some cases it never did. The greatest tax of all was to seem, and to be, unprofessional; to avoid regarding her work in quant.i.ty, and to be simply, merely, in every case, a personal friend; not to become known as a benevolent itinerary, but only a kind and thoughtful neighbor. Blessed word! not benefactor--neighbor!
She had no schemes for helping the unfortunate by mult.i.tude. Possibly on that account her usefulness was less than it might have been. But I am not sure; for they say her actual words and deeds were but the seed of ultimate harvests; and that others, moreover, seeing her light shine so brightly along this seemingly narrow path, and moved to imitate her, took that other and broader way, and so both fields were reaped.
But, I say, we need not follow her steps. They would lead deviously through ill-smelling military hospitals, and into buildings that had once been the counting-rooms of Carondelet-street cotton merchants, but were now become the prisons of soldiers in gray. One of these places, restored after the war as a cotton factor"s counting-room again, had, until a few years ago, a queer, clumsy patch in the plastering of one wall, near the base-board. Some one had made a rough inscription on it with a cotton sampler"s marking-brush. It commemorates an incident. Mary by some means became aware beforehand that this incident was going to occur; and one of the most trying struggles of conscience she ever had in her life was that in which she debated with herself one whole night whether she ought to give her knowledge to others or keep it to herself.
She kept it. In fact, she said nothing until the war was all over and done, and she never was quite sure whether her silence was right or wrong. And when she asked Dr. Sevier if he thought she had done wrong, he asked:--
"You knew it was going to take place, and kept silence?"
"Yes," said Mary.
"And you want to know whether you did right?"
"Yes. I"d like to know what you think."
He sat very straight, and said not a word, nor changed a line of his face. She got no answer at all.
The inscription was as follows; I used to see it every work-day of the week for years--it may be there yet--190 Common street, first flight, back office: