I
EVERYBODY in Mercer knew Sara Wharton; in the first
place, she was Edward Wharton’s daughter; the Edward Wharton of
the Wharton & Blair Company, whose great Rolling and Smelting
Mills darken Mercer’s sky with vast folds of black smoke, and give
employment to two thirds of Mercer’s population. In the second
place, she was a very charming young lady, who was too pretty to
pass unnoticed when her victoria went rolling along the river road
on fine afternoons. And in the third place, she was the president
of two girls’ clubs, and the organizer of the Boys’ Alliance, and
the Young Men’s Literary Association, and the founder of the Y. W.
C. T. U., and the kindly autocrat of all Mercer’s rough, grimy,
under-fed young people. She was a sweet-hearted, wholesome-minded,
impulsive, dear child; the kind of girl who loved a party just as
much, and planned her pretty dresses just as anxiously, and adored
her father and mother just as unreasonably, as though she had never
heard of a committee, and was indifferent to the Cause of Humanity.
All Mercer knew her, and believed in her; and so when, one gray
November afternoon, she was seen to go quietly up the steps of a
certain house on Baker Street--a house which decent folk affected
to ignore when they passed it by at midday, but at which they
glanced curiously after nightfall--when Sara Wharton went into this
house, those who chanced to see her said only, “Well! what won’t
that girl do next?”
The woman who answered her ring opened the door scarcely more than
a crack, and peered out at her sourly.
“I want to see Nellie Sherman,” said Miss Wharton.
“There’s no person by that name here,” the woman answered.
“Let me in, please,” Sara Wharton said. She put her hand against
the door, which yielded a little and then stopped; the woman inside
had braced her foot against it.
“She ain’t in.”
“I will wait until she comes, then,” returned the young lady
pleasantly.
“I don’t know why you’re comin’ here lookin’ for a girl,” the woman
cried out, in sudden, shrewish rage; “this is a respectable house;
there’s no Sherman girl here!”
“Let me in at once,” said Sara Wharton, “or I shall get a
policeman, and have a warrant served. I know Nellie Sherman lives
here, and I want to see her. You had better let me in without
further talk. I am Miss Wharton.”
“I don’t care if you are Queen Victoria,” the keeper of the house
declared angrily; “well, you can come in, though there ain’t no
Nellie Sherman here; there’s a Nettie Sherman,--if she’s the girl
you’re looking for.”
“Tell her I want to see her, please.”
“She’s up in her room. You can go up.” Miss Wharton’s instant’s
hesitation made her add, “There ain’t nobody there.”
The halls and stairs were nearly dark; one or two frowzy heads
peered over the banisters, and drew back quickly; there was a loud
guffaw of laughter from behind a closed door, and all the air was
heavy with the reek of stale tobacco.
“Her room’s the third floor back,” the woman called up after the
visitor, who went swiftly over the stairs, intent upon her errand,
yet with a faint shudder, a sort of physical shrinking, that made
her gather her cloak close about her, lest it might touch the wall
or banisters.
“I’m glad I told Thomas to wait,” she said to herself, thinking
of the brougham at the door, with the respectable, long-suffering
Thomas on the box. At the third floor back she knocked, and waited
for a reply; then she knocked again.
“What is it?” a muffled voice asked; “is that you, Mamie? Go ’way!
I’m busy.”
“It is I; Miss Wharton; a friend of your aunt’s. Let me in,
Nellie.” There was a breathless pause, and then a quick step, and
a bolt was snapped back. A slight, startled-looking girl stood in
the doorway. Sara entered with a certain fine, regal step that she
had, that gave at once a sense of the uselessness of opposing her.
“Shut the door,” she commanded cheerfully, “and let me see you.
Come, we will sit down and have a little talk. Oh, open that window
first; there is some dreadful perfumery in the room. Ah, that’s
nice; fresh air is the nicest sort of perfumery; don’t you think
so?”
The girl stared at her without an answer. She was a
delicate-looking creature, rather pretty, except that just now her
face was stained with tears, and there was a sullen look about her
little pale lips. But she had fair hair in a sort of aureole around
her low forehead, and shading her really beautiful eyes; and she
wore a crimson silk waist,--spotted, to be sure, and ripped on the
shoulder, but bringing out the fairness of her skin, and the blue
veins on her delicate temples.
“I’m sure I haven’t the pleasure of your acquaintance,” she said
airily; but she was trembling.
“I know your aunt, Mrs. Sherman,” her visitor said; then there
was a moment’s silence. Sara Wharton looked about the untidy
room,--with its banjo hung with ribbons, its looking-glass rimmed
with cards and tintypes stuck edgewise within the frame; its litter
of cigarette ends, and its half-empty, uncorked bottle of beer on
the marble-topped centre-table.
“Your aunt told me about you, my child,” she said, with a deep,
kind look full into the girl’s face.
The color rushed into Nellie’s pale cheeks; but she only said, with
vast indifference, “Is that so? Well, she’s very kind, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know that she has always been very kind,” Sara Wharton
answered thoughtfully. “Now shut that window behind you; I don’t
want you to sit in a draft; and the fresh air has driven out the
perfumery. Why do you use perfumery, Nellie? Nice girls don’t.”
The girl looked at her blankly.
“Yes; your aunt told me about you. She told me how she had taken
care of you ever since your mother died; and how she had sent
you to school, and bought pretty dresses for you, and done the
housework herself so that you shouldn’t spoil your hands; and how
she took in washing so that you might go to dancing-school. She
loved you very much, Nellie; but I am not sure that she was kind.
Perhaps if you had had to work you wouldn’t have come to this
dreadful house, and brought shame and disgrace to Mrs. Sherman.
You’ve broken her heart, Nellie.”
The girl’s face paled and flushed; and then quivered suddenly into
a storm of tears.
“_I_ don’t like it here. But I can’t help it. I lost my place in
the shop. I was late, and they discharged me. And I was afraid to
go home and tell my aunt, she jaws at me so. That was four weeks
ago. It was the third place I’d lost. So I--came here. I don’t
like it. I was just crying when you came in!” She squeezed her
handkerchief into a damp ball and pressed it against her eyes,
sobbing. “The woman is so cross. And--and I owe her for board.”
Sara was silent.
“But there ain’t anything I can do; I’d die rather than go back to
my aunt’s. She’d never forgive me. I don’t blame her. But _I_ don’t
like it here.”
“Perhaps your aunt will forgive you?” Sara said gently. Nellie
rocked back and forth, sobbing.
“I’m too wicked,” she recited; her eyes roved over Sara’s dark
dress, and inspected her pretty little bonnet, and dwelt on the
glitter of an amethyst pin at her throat. “Oh, dear, I wish I
hadn’t; I wish I was dead,” she said helplessly.
Sara Wharton’s face lit with a quick tenderness. She put her arm
over the child’s bent shoulders, and drew the wet cheek down
against her breast. “My dear, if you are sorry, if you know that
it is wicked and dreadful, then the worst is over. Don’t wish to
die--wish to live, so that you may be good. I know you _can_ be
good!” she ended, with a burst of courage in her voice, that
struck some answering chord in the poor, half-developed little soul
at her side. Nellie looked up.
“Oh, I will be good--if I can; just get out of here! I’m just about
sick, anyway; I’ve got such a pain under my left shoulder; and I’m
just tired of it--and Mrs. Smith is so cross. But I can’t go home.
My aunt’ll jaw at me. Oh, I can’t ever go home!” She whimpered a
little, and looked at her pretty finger nails critically.
“I’m _sure_ your aunt will forgive you!” Sara said, impetuous and
tender. “Let’s go and ask her to, now.”
“Mrs. Smith won’t let me go, I guess,” Nellie sighed; “I owe her
two weeks board.”
“I will pay her.”
“I’ll come to-morrow,” the child demurred.
“Nellie, dear, I want you to come now! Oh, Nellie, won’t you begin
this minute to be good?”
“I’m not so very bad,” Nellie protested, “and I can’t come now,
truly. I haven’t any sack. I--sold it.” The tears welled up in her
soft eyes at the remembrance of her poverty.
“You don’t need a sack. You’ll come in my carriage, and I’ll wrap a
rug around you.”
“My!” said Nellie, “is your carriage here? One of the club girls
told me it had satin cushions. Is that so, Miss Wharton?”
Sara bit her lip. “Never mind about the cushions. Oh, Nellie, dear,
don’t think of things like that! Only just try with all your might
to be good. Will you, Nellie?”
“Why, certainly,” said Nellie.
* * * * *
Sara Wharton drove home with a very serious look on her face. She
had induced Nellie to leave that dreadful house; indeed, the girl
had yielded with that fatally facile willingness to do what she was
told which should have forbade any of the joy that may be felt over
the one sinner that repenteth. But in the glow of “saving” the poor
child, it was not easy for Sara Wharton to realize that Nellie’s
first experience of sin had only reached the stage of the young
smoker’s disgust with his first cigar. The young lady, with her
carriage and her satin cushions, had come at the right moment--the
moment when the expediency of morality had forced itself upon the
girl’s little, flimsy common-sense, and she was willing to go
shuddering back to comfortable decency; but as for any spiritual
perception of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, it did not
exist.
Nellie had received her aunt’s forgiveness as though she were
conferring a favor. Indeed, she sighed with some impatience when
Mrs. Sherman wept over her; and she said again, fretfully, in
response to Miss Wharton’s assertions that _now_ Nellie was going
to be good,--“Why certainly, yes;” and looked about wearily, as if
she wished the scene might come to an end.
“Nobody shan’t never know, my darling,” Mrs. Sherman told her,
her voice breaking with tenderness; “I’ll say you’ve been away,
visiting friends.”
“A’ right,” said Nellie. And neither the aunt nor the niece
understood Miss Wharton’s quick protest against trying to hide one
sin by another.
Sara, driving home, tired and saddened by the emotions of the
afternoon, acknowledged to herself that the easy repentance was
made of still less value by the easy forgiveness.
“But some day she will repent, really and truly,” she told herself;
but she sighed, and dropped the window of the brougham, leaning
forward to get the dash of wet, cold wind in her face. It seemed
to her as though she still felt the lifeless air of those horrible
halls and stairways, and the scent of musk, and tobacco smoke, and
stale liquor.
“The only thing to do, the only way to save her is to love her,”
Sara Wharton said to herself, “and I’m going to love her!”
When she reached home, and came in out of the cold dusk into the
firelit hall, this divine intention of loving shone on her face
with a beautiful solemnity. Her seriousness was so marked that her
mother, who was just saying good evening to a departing caller,
noticed it and said, with some anxiety:--
“My dear, there is nothing the matter, I hope?”
“No, mother darling,” the girl reassured her, with a glance at the
tall fellow who stood with his hat and stick in his hand, waiting
for Mrs. Wharton’s bow.
“Sara, my dear, this is Dr. Morse. My daughter, Dr. Morse.”
“I ventured to come and tell a sad story to your mother, Miss
Wharton,” said the young man, “a dispensary story. I’ve just come
on duty at the dispensary; but Mrs. Wharton’s kindness was so
proverbial, that when I stumbled on a hard case, I came at once to
tell her about it.”
“I’ve no doubt she was delighted to hear of it,” Sara said; “mother
would really be dreadfully unhappy if everybody was prosperous; her
occupation would be gone.”
“Why, Sara! Sara! you mustn’t say such things,” Mrs. Wharton
reproved her, looking at her daughter over her gold spectacles,
with the horrified protest of a simple and literal mind.
The other two laughed, feeling suddenly very well acquainted.
“So long as she lives in Mercer, Mrs. Wharton’s happiness is
assured,” the doctor said; and went away, saying to himself, “What
a girl! I don’t wonder people rave about her; she’s stunning! But
I’m afraid she’s a professional philanthropist.”
“So that’s the new doctor?” Sara said, pulling off her gloves; “he
has a nice face, rather. Did you like him, darling?”
“Yes,” her mother answered doubtfully, “only, Sara, my dear, he
seems rather a stern young man. I wanted to give him a check for
this poor woman he came to tell me about; but he said that I must
let her clean windows, or something, to earn it. And you know, my
dear child, that would interfere with James’s work. I’d much rather
give the check than arrange for work.”
Sara kissed her, and cuddled her, for Mrs. Wharton was a little,
roly-poly, comfortable sort of woman, and told her she was behind
the times.
“Nowadays,” announced the young lady, “the ‘gave to him that
asketh’ method is hopelessly unscientific; bless your dear
old-fashioned heart!”