The Whartons did not get back until April, and the improvement in
Sara’s color, and the clear, glad look in her eyes, showed how
much she had needed the change. She was all ready for her brave,
happy work for other people. Her very first visit was to Nellie’s
aunt. When she climbed up to the top tenement, stopping to open a
window on a landing half way up, so that the sweet spring air might
turn out the odors of the hall-sink, and of the dirt in the corners
and on the stairs, she came into Mrs. Sherman’s room a little
breathless, but with a soft rose-color on her cheek.
“Well!” she called out cheerfully, “here I am again, Mrs. Sherman;
how are you; and how is Nellie?” and then she discovered Nellie
sitting close to the stove, on which was a tin boiler full of
steaming soapy linen, which Mrs. Sherman, bare armed and draggled,
pushed down once in a while with a broom-handle.
“There!” said Mrs. Sherman, “well! my sakes, Miss Wharton, it do do
me good to see you. Look at that there girl!”
Nellie sunk her head on her breast and began to cry. Sara was
instantly serious. “Is anything wrong?” she said gravely.
“Wrong!” cried Mrs. Sherman shrilly. “Well, I guess! I told her I’d
keep her till you come home, though she’s a shame to any decent
woman. My! what I’ve put up with for that there child!” She put her
apron over her head, sobbing and vociferating: “I told her I’d tell
you. I ain’t let her out of that door since. I’ll keep her straight
now, as long as _I_ live”--
Nellie, her face drawn and pale, sat plucking at the fringe of the
shawl about her shoulders, her sullen lips compressed, her eyes
cast resolutely down.
“Nellie?” Sara said. There was no answer.
“What has happened, Nellie?”
Silence.
“Tell me; I won’t be hard on you, Nellie. Have you--gone wrong
again?”
Nellie crossed her feet and made no reply.
In despair Sara turned again to Mrs. Sherman, who, with tears,
declaring first that Nellie should leave her house that night,
and then that she would never let her out of her sight, told the
shameful fact of another fall;--another reformation.
“She’s sick, that’s what’s the matter; that’s all her reformin’
amounts to,” the aunt said; “she was bleedin’ from her lungs, so
she come home. She was gone a week. It was two weeks last Thursday
she come back. Well, I thought she was dyin’. I was up with her
three nights. I sent for that there doctor at the dispensary. He
give her some stuff. That’s it in the bottle on the mantel. Well,
I didn’t let on to him how she’d been carryin’ on! Shame on her!
I’m done with her. She can go out to the gutter. That’s where she
belongs”--
“Oh, Mrs. Sherman,” Sara protested, her color coming and going.
“Nellie, how could you! oh, Nellie!” She looked over at the girl
with a sort of passionate disappointment and pity, yet with that
physical shrinking which the good woman feels in the presence of
the bad woman. With illness Nellie’s vanity had ebbed; she was
untidy, her hands were dirty; she had not frizzed her hair for
days, and it hung about her dull face in lifeless strands.
“Well,” Mrs. Sherman burst out, “there! She’s broke my heart.
Nellie, it’s time for your medicine. She ain’t got no appetite,
Miss Wharton. I don’t know what I _shall_ do!” The woman’s worn
face quivered with tears. Nellie got up and took her medicine; she
glanced at the hem of Miss Wharton’s skirt, but would not lift her
eyes any higher. The clothes on the stove boiled, and the suds
splashed over and sizzled on the hot iron. Mrs. Sherman, talking
and crying, rammed them down with the clothes-stick.
“I couldn’t believe it at first. She’d kep’ straight for more ’an
a year an’ a half. But she got to goin’ with a lot o’ them fast
girls, and she spent every cent she had on her back”--
Sara looked around suddenly. “Did she give you a present of a chair
at Christmas?”
“A chair? No; she never gave me nothing. Not a thing. You told
her she’d got to pay me board. I’d ’a’ been satisfied with that,
and not ’a’ wanted no presents of chairs. Well, I took her out of
her dyin’ mother’s arms, and I’ve lived to see the day I wished
she’d a-died then, with my poor, blessed sister. _She_ made a
misstep, I will say; and the man made off and left her. But she was
expectin’ to marry him. It was different from this one. _I’ve_ been
a respectable woman all my life, and I can’t stand the shame of
this,--the neighbors’ll know,” she rambled on, crying and jabbing
at the steaming clothes, and looking with furtive, dumb love at the
little, sick, mean face on the other side of the stove.
As for Sara Wharton, she went home heart-sick, but gathering up her
courage and her faith for further effort; this time to save the
body as well as the soul.
The first thing to be done was, plainly, to see the doctor at the
dispensary, who had already examined Nellie.
“I’ll have to tell him the truth about her,” Sara thought,
frowning. But it never occurred to her to shirk this.
“Yes, I remember the case, I think,” said Dr. Morse; “incipient
phthisis, I believe. Just let me look it up; yes, that was it;
anæmia, also; I gave her a tonic.”
“Phthisis?” Sara repeated, her color paling. “Oh, Dr. Morse,
doesn’t that mean--consumption?”
“Not yet,” he answered, with all the cheerfulness of scientific
indifference. “It will doubtless develop into consumption.”
“But that means she will _die_?” Sara said, her dark eyes full of
fear. “Oh, is it as bad as that?” Her lip trembled. The young man
looked at her with attention.
“I am sorry I told you so abruptly; I did not realize that the
young woman was anything to you, personally; and I assure you the
case is not hopeless.”
“Is there any hope? Oh, Dr. Morse, it is so awful to think of her
dying _now_! What must be done? How uneven things are! There was I,
a strong, well woman, down in Florida, and this poor girl”--
“There is perhaps some difference in the value of the two lives,”
the doctor objected, smiling. Sara brushed this aside as unworthy
of an answer.
“What can we do?”
“Well, I suppose if she could go away into the country, and live
a quiet, regular life, with plenty of milk to drink, and plenty
of fresh air and proper exercise, she would at least be greatly
benefited. Possibly cured. There are no marked lesions, I think, in
the lung.”
Sara listened with frowning intentness; then she drew a long breath
of relief. “I am so thankful that it is not hopeless. But I think
that--that in prescribing for her, I mean planning for her, you
ought to know--all there is to know, about her.”
“Yes, that is advisable,” the doctor agreed easily. The charming
color of her cheek, the bunch of violets on her shoulder, her
beautiful, troubled brown eyes, were not lost upon this young man.
“I thought her a vain little thing,” he went on, “and rather brutal
to the good woman who was taking care of her. But illness makes us
all selfish.”
“I am afraid she is vain, poor child,” Sara said, “and selfish,
too, rather. But the worst of it is, she has--she has not been
good, Dr. Morse.”
“Ah!” said the young man.
“I did hope she had reformed, but while I was away--it happened
again.”
“I see. I see.”
“Of course, in sending her away that has to be considered. She must
be among people who will do her good.”
“And to whom she will not do harm.”
Sara looked a little startled. “Of course; but I had not thought of
that.”
“It seems to me that is very important,” he said, smiling.
“Speaking of sending people away, I wish I might tell you of
another case which needs the country; or are your hands too full to
consider any one else?”
“Alas, it is my purse which is not full,” she said ruefully; “but
is it very bad?”
“It is a poor soul, a hard-working, honest little creature, who has
an old mother and an imbecile brother to support; and she’s nearly
at an end of her strength. She needs to be braced up.”
“I wish I could send her away too,” Sara said pitifully; “but I’ve
begged and begged for my cases until, positively, I haven’t the
face to ask for any more money. My friends fly when they see me
approaching, for fear I’m going to say ‘give, give!’” She laughed a
little, and the doctor looked at her with critical amusement.
“But of the two, you’d give the--you’d give Nellie Sherman the
chance for health?”
“Why, it’s only ‘bracing up’ that your poor woman needs,” Sara
said, with a surprised look, “and you say Nellie will die if she
doesn’t go away?”
“Perhaps that would be the best thing that could happen.”
“Dr. Morse! Would you have me let Nellie Sherman _die_, that three
people should be made comfortable?”
“I would, indeed,” he said, with a whimsical smile.
She looked at him in silent dismay, and he thought she shrank a
little.
“My dear Miss Wharton,” he said quickly, “just look at the
situation: your poor Nellie is a moral leper; she is a contagion;
she’s had her opportunity to get well (I speak spiritually);
she has had a year and a half of the most patient and earnest
effort expended upon her; but she hasn’t profited by it, and the
probability is she is incurable. On the other hand, here is a woman
who is a centre and source of moral health. Each needs physical
restoration: one for her life, the other for her usefulness,--and,
later, no doubt, her life, too. To which shall the chance be given?”
“To the one who might die!” Sara said impetuously.
She got up to go, a sparkle of indignation in her eyes; the young
man rose, too, and stood leaning back against his office table, his
hands in his pockets, and a good-natured smile on his lean, strong
face. “I don’t see,” his visitor went on, “how you dare to say any
soul is incurably bad”--
“I only said the _probability_ was that your Nellie was incurable;
and, after all, if you have only a certain amount of medicine, will
you give it to the moribund or the person who is just coming down
with an illness?”
“I don’t think the illustration is good,” Sara answered loftily;
“we are speaking of souls. And we have no right to say we know the
limit”--her voice fell a little--“of God’s power.”
Dr. Morse looked as though he were about to speak, but apparently
thought better of it.
“I’m very sorry for your poor woman,” Sara said, “and I’ll try to
see if I can’t arrange a little rest for her; but first of all,
life must be saved.”
Then she went away, her lip between her white teeth, and her breath
quick. “Horrible man!” she said to herself, “the idea of reasoning
about a thing like that--a human life! Dreadful person! I hope I
shall never see him again.”
Dr. Morse, in his office, thrust his hands down into his pockets,
and stretched his feet out, and reflected. “I suppose she
thinks I’m a brute. I might have known better than to talk to a
sentimental girl as though she were a rational being. She’ll keep
that creature alive long enough to bring two or three fellows
down to the gutter, and, possibly, even continue her physical and
moral characteristics in a child (though that’s not likely, thank
heaven), and then feel that she’s done _her_ duty! Good Lord, the
harm these philanthropists do!”
Nevertheless he softened a little when a short and formal note came
from Miss Wharton, with a small sum of money for “the case of which
he had spoken.”
“She’s got a good heart, that girl,” he told himself. “Her ten
dollars won’t do much, though; and to think of that little squalid
Nellie Sherman having a hundred spent to keep her worthless body
alive!”
V
So Nellie’s summer outing was arranged: she was to have four months
in a quiet place in the country; plenty of fresh air, and good
milk, and wholesome food.
No wonder the little pale cheeks grew round and faintly pink; that
her eyes seemed darker and brighter; her pinched, white lips
fuller and redder. In a month it was evident that the quiet life
which Sara had taken such pains to find was good for her; her whole
miserable, sickly body began to thrive. It was a “quiet” life.
From the girl’s point of view it was perfectly intolerable. She
endured, in her way, the misery of the intellectual man or woman
cut off absolutely from books or study of any kind, or of a clean
person obliged to live in filth. The contrast was as great. The
fact that it was in favor of righteousness did not make it any
the less painful. Nellie’s sudden removal from the cheap and base
excitements of her life caused absolute suffering. Such suffering,
untempted reformers argue, is good for the soul.
But to Nellie the sweet drift of silent summer days was maddeningly
dull; she brooded over what she felt was the hardship of her lot,
and looked back upon her Mercer life as a time of freedom, and
of a strange sort of importance,--which was as near self-respect
as she could come. At least, in Mercer she was not “trod on,” as
she now felt herself to be; she could go and walk the street on
fine afternoons with the Caligan girls, three abreast, arm in
arm, strutting and jostling each other, and looking into the shop
windows; laughing loudly, or glancing haughtily at the passers-by,
or giggling at “gentlemen friends.” It was all so harmless and
so pleasant! Of course, Mrs. Smith’s on Baker Street, that was
different; but just to meet lady and gentlemen friends, and talk
and “carry on”--what was wrong in that? She did, to be sure, feel
nervous about her health; but if it were necessary to go into the
country, why couldn’t she have gone to a hotel, where she could
have had some fun? It seemed a cruel life to Nellie! She came to
feel toward Sara Wharton, instead of the uncomfortable resentment
which in such natures takes the place of gratitude, a venomous
hatred. Sara seemed to this poor, mean soul, a powerful enemy,
one who interfered with every joy, and, not content with that,
who “talked;” and Nellie hated talk. Like most of her class,
except when in a rage, she had little to say beyond exclamations,
and Miss Wharton’s impetuous flow of words, her entreaties, and
rebukes, and suggestions, had only bewildered and irritated the
girl; for Sara, like most of her class, had never taken Nellie’s
mental deficiencies into account; she treated her always like a
rational being. Like a “Soul,” Sara herself would have said.
So, up on the farm, as her fright about her health subsided, poor
Nellie raged against her benefactor and her cruel fate. She fell
into fits of weeping, or, what was worse to the quiet husband and
wife in whose charge she was, into long silences, broken only by
fitful flashes of black temper. Yet in spite of this, her bodily
health increased. Very likely there would have been open rebellion,
and a break for liberty by midsummer, if an unexpected interest
had not come into her life. Two students, with their tutor, came
to camp out near the farm; and after passing them once or twice
in the road, and giggling with them over the posting of a letter
in the office, poor Nellie grew better tempered. She frizzed her
hair with keener enjoyment, and practiced airs and graces before
her glass all the long hot forenoons; and in the afternoons walked
in to the village on the remote chance of meeting the two boys.
She did not see them often, but to know they were near gave her
something to think about in the deadly monotony of farm life, and
she was much happier. On the rare occasions of their meeting she
would roll her eyes, and talk in her simpering, nasal voice of the
weather, or the novel she had been reading, or how her “guardian”
had sent her into the country for her health. The boys said to each
other that she was pretty, and ripping good fun; and used to laugh
over her silliness with their tutor. They were too busy and too
wholesomely happy to give very much thought to her.
Thus the summer passed. The health which Sara Wharton so earnestly
desired had returned, temporarily at least. When at last the
first of September came, and Miss Wharton’s letter arrived to
say she might come home,--such a gentle, friendly, sympathetic
letter,--Nellie was wild with delight. She could hardly remember
to say good-by to the kind people who had looked after her for the
last few months; she almost forgot the boys; she was tremulous with
joy.
“Oh, I’m so _glad_ to go back--oh, I hate, hate, _hate_ the
country!” she kept saying; while the husband and wife looked at
each other wonderingly.
So, strengthened and invigorated, panting for excitement, unchecked
by any moral perceptions, by gratitude, by love, even by fear (now
that she was well again),--she came back to Mercer.