“TREMENDOUS FACTS!” HE SAID.
It is well that Mrs. Marion Dennis felt entirely safe in her friend
Flossy's hands, for her affairs were very thoroughly talked over that
evening, and sundry conclusions arrived at.
One question Mrs. Roberts asked her husband, at the close of the
conference, which apparently had nothing to do with Marion Dennis'
affairs:--
“Evan, do you know Dr. Everett?”
“Everett? Let me think--yes, I know of him; a young physician,
comparatively, who had not been here long, and has made his mark.”
“In what direction?”
“Several, perhaps; but I have heard of him chiefly in the line of his
profession. He was accidentally called to attend a young lady belonging
to a very wealthy family out in Brookline. I say accidentally--that is
a reverent way we have of speaking, you know; of course, I mean
providentially. The nursery governess in the family was sick, and this
Dr. Everett, who had fallen in with her somewhere, volunteered to cure
her. He was calling on her one morning when the sick daughter, who,
by the way, had been given up by her physician, was taken suddenly and
alarmingly worse; in the emergency Dr. Everett was summoned, and while
they waited for the regular physician he succeeded in doing such good
service that he inspired the mother with confidence; she became anxious
to put the case entirely into his hands, which was done, and the young
lady recovered, and Dr. Everett's position, professionally, was assured.
Isn't that an interesting little item for you? He is said to have marked
success; and, of course, since the Brookline occurrence his practice is
largely among the wealthy. How has your attention been called to him?”
“My protector this morning said he was a 'swell' doctor, who was
attending that Calkins boy. I wondered if he did it because he loved
Christ. He might be a helper. I want to call on that sick boy to-morrow
if I can arrange it. I think I must take some one with me.”
“You may take me with you,” her husband said, emphatically.
However much trips through alleys with Nimble Dick might be conducive to
that young man's moral development, Mr. Roberts felt that his wife had
experimented sufficiently.
Thus it transpired that, dressed in the plainest, quietest garb which
her wardrobe would furnish, Mrs. Roberts went to the alley the next
morning accompanied by her husband.
In one sense it was a mistake that the first call in the alley should
have been made on the Calkins family. It was calculated to give Mrs.
Roberts mistaken ideas as to the manner in which poor people lived. A
bare enough room, certainly, not even a bit of carpet laid before the
bed, but it was a clean room. Floor and window and cupboard-door were as
clean as water could make them; and the bed, while it looked hopelessly
hard and dreadful to Mrs. Roberts, was really a pattern of neatness and
purity to every dweller in that attic. There was a straw tick, covered
with a dark calico spread, which did duty as a sheet, and the boy who
lay on it was covered by a patched quilt that had been mended, and was
clean. Wonderful things these to say of such a locality! Mr. Roberts
suspected it, and Dr. Everett knew it. That gentleman was bending over
his patient when the two guests arrived, and vouchsafed them not even a
glance, while the dark-haired, dark-eyed, homely, decently-dressed girl
gave Mrs. Roberts a seat on the one chair which the room contained, and
set a stool for her husband that had been made of four old chair legs
and a square board.
Sallie Calkins was somewhat flurried by this unexpected call. She had no
idea who the people were, nor for what they had come. A vague fear that
they might be in some way connected with her brother's “place” at the
printing-office, which he was in such fear of losing that his night had
been a restless one, made her hasten to say, in a tremulous voice:--
“The doctor thinks he will be well in a little while. It isn't a bad
break, he says, and Mark wants to keep his place. He thinks, maybe, some
of the alley boys would keep it for him, if you would be so kind.”
She was evidently addressing Mr. Roberts, but she looked at Flossy. The
fair, sweet face, that gave her such sympathetic glances, seemed the one
to appeal to. Mr. Roberts, however, discerned that he was mistaken for
the employer, and immediately dispelled the idea by asking where the boy
worked, and how the accident had happened.
“It was the elevator, sir,” she said, eagerly. “The chain broke, and it
went down with a bang, and Mark was on it, and he rolled off somehow, he
doesn't know how; and he has been that bad that he couldn't tell me
if he had. He was kind of wild, sir, all night, and talking about his
place.”
“Was there no one but you to be with him during the night?” Mrs. Roberts
asked. “Where is the mother?”
“We've got no mother, ma'am; there is only Mark and me--and father,” she
added, after a doubtful pause. “But father was not at home last night.
Oh, I didn't need no one to take care of Mark. I wouldn't have left
him.”
“And he likes to have you take care of him, I am sure. What do you give
him to eat? He will need nourishing food, I think; beef teas and broths,
and nice little tempting dishes, made with milk, perhaps. Are you his
cook, too? I wonder if you wouldn't like to have me show you how to make
good things for him? I've learned how to make some nice dishes that sick
people like.”
Before the bewildered girl could answer, the doctor turned abruptly
from his long examination of his patient, and gave the guests the first
attention he had vouchsafed them. The truth was this man had had some
unfortunate experiences with district visitors, and had perhaps an
unreasonable prejudice against them as a class. “I can't help it,
ma'am,” he said to Mrs. Saunders, when she was taking him to task one
day. “There are exceptions, of course, at least we will hope there are;
but if you had seen some of my specimens, you would be the first to wish
an infusion of common sense could be introduced among them. As a rule,
they offer a tract where they should give a loaf of bread or a bowl
of broth; and wedge their advice and reproofs in with every helpful
movement. It is like so many doses of medicine to the patient; to be
endured because he is at their mercy, and can't help himself. They mean
well, the most of them; but the trouble is, we have a way of making
district visitors out of people who have nothing to do, and who have
never learned that 'all the nations of the earth were made of one
blood.'”
Something in Mrs. Roberts' tones or words seemed to interest him, and he
turned toward her.
“Does this alley belong to you?” he asked, abruptly, his mind still full
of the district visitor.
She regarded him with a puzzled air for a moment, then answered
naïvely:--
“I don't think it does; if it did I would have some things ever so
different.”
Dr. Everett laughed; and Mr. Roberts came forward and introduced
himself.
“My wife has hardly answered you fully,” he said. “I am under the
impression that she desires to adopt a certain portion of this alley; at
least I have heard of little else since last Sabbath afternoon. She is
in search of some stray sheep who have been put under her care.”
“Ah,” the doctor said, turning quickly to her, “a Sabbath-school
teacher? Is this young man one of your scholars?”
“No,” she explained; “but she had heard of him while inquiring where one
of her boys lived, and she had called to see if she could help in any
way. Dirk Colson was the boy who, they told her, lived near this place.”
The eyes of the trim sister brightened.
“He lives on the next square,” she said. “Oh, ma'am, are you his
teacher, and do you care for him? I'm so glad.”
“He is a favorite of yours, is he?” the doctor asked, looking from
one speaking face to another, and seeming immensely interested in the
matter.
“No, indeed!” the girl said, quickly. “He's horrid! But I'm sorry for
his sister; and she wants Dirk to get on, and he never does get on; but
I thought maybe such a kind of a teacher could help him.”
There was such intense and genuine admiration in the girl's voice for
the vision of loveliness before her that Dr. Everett could not help
smiling.
“It doesn't seem unlikely,” said he, with significance; and added: “Who
is this Dirk Colson, who seems to be an object of interest?”
“He is one of the worst boys in the alley, sir; sometimes I think he
is the very worst, because he is cross as well as hateful; but Mark is
always kind of sorry for him, and says he has such a bad father he can't
help it. And Mart--that's his sister--she is a friend of mine, and she
feels bad about Dirk, but she can't do nothing; he ain't a bit like Mark
there.”
The last words were spoken tenderly, and the sisterly eyes turned toward
the boy on the bed, and obeying a sign from his eyes she went over to
him. The doctor plied his questions:--
“Have you recently taken a class, madam? and is their general reputation
as encouraging as this special scamp of whom we are hearing?”
His words almost jarred on Mrs. Roberts; she had already prayed enough
for her boys to have a sort of tender feeling for them--a half desire
to cover their faults from the gaze of the indifferent world. Did Dr.
Everett represent the indifferent world, or did he love her Master? She
wished she knew.
“There is nothing encouraging about them,” she said, with grave
earnestness, “save the facts that they are made in the image of God, and
that he wants them to 'turn from the power of Satan unto God, that they
may receive forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among them which are
sanctified.'”
A rare flash of intelligence and appreciation greeted her now from those
fine eyes bent so scrutinizingly on her.
“Tremendous facts!” he said. “Glorious possibilities! 'Himself hath said
it.' I claim kinship with you; I am an heir of the same inheritance.”
He held a hand to each, and they were cordially grasped. Then Dr.
Everett proceeded to business.
“There is enough to do,” he said; “everything is lacking here; there is
severe poverty, united to the most scrupulous tenderness and the most
tender love on the part of this brother and sister. I stumbled on the
case, and will do professionally all that is needed. And I have a friend
who would undoubtedly come to the rescue, but she is crowded just now.
I shall be rejoiced to report to her a helper. Do you know Joy Saunders?
Well, I wish you did; she is one whom you could appreciate. She is
young, though, and without a husband to guard her, and there are some
places to which she cannot come.”
“Has she learned that important fact?” asked Mr. Roberts, with a
significant smile. Then some explanation seemed necessary. “This lady,”
he said, “tried the alley alone yesterday, and lost her way, and went
lower down,--quite near to Burk Street, I imagine.”
“And what happened?” The quick question and the doctor's tone suggested
possibilities not pleasant.
“Oh, she met one of her new recruits,--as hard a boy, so one of the
policemen on this beat tells me, as there is in the row,--and pressed
him into service to escort her back to civilization; and strange to say,
the fellow did it without placing any tricks.”
The doctor turned on the small lady a curious glance.
“I think you may be able to do something, even for Dirk Colson,” he
said.
“Do you know him?”
He laughed over the eagerness of the question.
“Never heard of him before. I was only thinking of our friend's
description of his awfulness. Ah, whom have we here?”
For the door had opened abruptly, and a pair of great blue eyes, set
in a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The
vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed
on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to
which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger.
She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the
unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and
silently as she had come.
“That is Dirk's sister,” Sallie Calkins said, coming forward, her homely
face aglow with shame. “She isn't a bad girl, ma'am, she doesn't mean to
be, but she has a dreadful time. Her mother is sickly, and has to go out
washing, times when she isn't able to sit up; and there'll be days when
she can't hold up her head; and the father is bad, ma'am, and drinks,
and swears, and sells things for drink till there ain't nothing left to
sell; and Mart hasn't anything to mend her clothes with, and she doesn't
know how, anyway; and she hasn't even got a comb to comb her hair with,
her father he took it to sell; and everything there is horrid, and Dirk,
he's awful.”
It was strange, she could not herself account for it; but with every
added word of misery that set poor Dirk Colson lower and lower in the
scale of humanity, there seemed to come into this woman's heart, and
shine in her face, an assurance that he was to be a “chosen vessel unto
God.”
The doctor was watching her again, curious, apparently, to see how this
pitiful appeal for forbearance in judging of poor Mart affected her, and
something in his face made her say, speaking low, “an inheritance among
them which are sanctified.”
“Amen!” he said. And there came to Mrs. Roberts a feeling that this
earnest prayer, for the second time repeated by two men who prayed, was
a sort of seal from the Master.
She turned away from both gentlemen then; the tears were very near the
surface. She must do something to tone down the beating of her heart.
Sallie was at hand, and she went with her to another corner of the room,
and a low-toned conversation was carried on, scraps of which floated
back to the gentlemen in the form of “sheets,” “grape jelly,” “mutton
broth,” “a soft pillow,” and the like.
“I feel my patient growing better,” the doctor said, with satisfaction.
“Is there no father here?” Mr. Roberts asked.
The doctor shook his head, but answered:--
“There is the most pitiful apology for a father that I ever saw,--a mere
wreck of a man! Spends his time in a sort of weak drinking, if I may
coin a phrase to describe him; he actually uses no energy even in that
business. Just staggers around and bemoans his lot; a most unfortunate
man, in his own estimation, with whom the world, through no fault of
his, has gone wrong. He is never downright intoxicated, and never free
from the effects of liquor. He is much like a wilted leaf in the hands
of this boy and girl. They could pitch him out of the window without
much difficulty, and if the fall did not kill him he would shed tears
and say it was a hard world. But now, what do we see, when the name of
father is so dishonored,--made a wreck, as it were? Why, the order of
nature is reversed, and these children take on the protective. They are
father and mother, and he is the weak, sinning child. The way that that
boy and girl have worked to keep their miserable father from starving or
freezing is something to astonish the very angels. They shield him,
too; nobody who wants to reach their hearts must blame him. They are a
study!--as different from the other inhabitants of the alley as the
sky is different from that mud-hole down there. It isn't a good simile,
either. There is no religion in their efforts. They are the veriest
heathen.”
“How do you account for the development?”
The doctor shook his head:--
“I don't account for it; it is abnormal. There must have been a mother
who left her impress. I can't learn anything about the mother--she died
when the girl was an infant; but I would like to know her history. I
venture to assert that she belonged to Christ, and that a gleam of the
divine pity that she saw in him, and loved, left its impress on her
children. That is somewhat mystical,” he added, smiling. “I rarely talk
in this way; it must have been your wife who set me off.”
“But she is the most practical and energetic of beings!”
“Ay, so are the angels, I fancy; and make us think of heaven directly we
hear the rustle of their wings. Has your wife been a Christian long?”
“Barely two years since she began to think of these things.”
“I thought as much. She impresses me as one who is being led; who
does not choose to go alone; has not learned how, indeed. A very few
Christians never learn how, and with them the Lord does his special
work. Well, sir; I must go. I'm glad to have met you, and glad to leave
you here. Good morning!”