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SO_3HO = 3 is subscripted
[=u] = macron above "u"
* * * * *
GEORGE W. CABLE'S WRITINGS
BONAVENTURE. A Prose Pastoral of Arcadian Louisiana. 12mo, $1.25.
DR. SEVIER. 12mo, $1.25.
THE GRANDISSIMES. A Story of Creole Life. 12mo, $1.25.
OLD CREOLE DAYS. 12mo, $1.25.
STRANGE TRUE STORIES OF LOUISIANA. Illustrated. 12mo, $2.00.
*** _New Uniform Edition of the above five volumes, cloth, in a box,
$6.00._
* * *
JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER, 12mo, $1.50.
OLD CREOLE DAYS. Cameo Edition with Etching, $1.25.
OLD CREOLE DAYS. 2 vols. 16mo, paper, each 30 cts.
MADAME DELPHINE. 75 cts.
THE CREOLES OF LOUISIANA. Illus. Small 4to, $2.50.
THE SILENT SOUTH. 12mo, $1.00.
DR. SEVIER
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE
AUTHOR OF "OLD CREOLE DAYS," "THE GRANDISSIMES,"
"MADAME DELPHINE," ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1897
Copyright, 1883 and 1884
BY GEORGE W. CABLE
_All rights reserved_
TROW'S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
TO MY FRIEND
MARION A. BAKER
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I.--The Doctor 5
II.--A Young Stranger 10
III.--His Wife 17
IV.--Convalescence and Acquaintance 22
V.--Hard Questions 29
VI.--Nesting 34
VII.--Disappearance 45
VIII.--A Question of Book-keeping 52
IX.--When the Wind Blows 61
X.--Gentles and Commons 66
XI.--A Pantomime 73
XII.--"She's all the World" 81
XIII.--The Bough Breaks 87
XIV.--Hard Speeches and High Temper 94
XV.--The Cradle Falls 99
XVI.--Many Waters 107
XVII.--Raphael Ristofalo 118
XVIII.--How He Did It 127
XIX.--Another Patient 134
XX.--Alice 138
XXI.--The Sun at Midnight 142
XXII.--Borrower Turned Lender 160
XXIII.--Wear and Tear 169
XXIV.--Brought to Bay 177
XXV.--The Doctor Dines Out 184
XXVI.--The Trough of the Sea 194
XXVII.--Out of the Frying-Pan 207
XXVIII.--"Oh, where is my Love?" 215
XXIX.--Release.--Narcisse 224
XXX.--Lighting Ship 233
XXXI.--At Last 243
XXXII.--A Rising Star 248
XXXIII.--Bees, Wasps, and Butterflies 258
XXXIV.--Toward the Zenith 262
XXXV.--To Sigh, yet Feel no Pain 268
XXXVI.--What Name? 275
XXXVII.--Pestilence 280
XXXVIII.--"I must be Cruel only to be Kind" 286
XXXIX.--"Pettent Prate" 294
XL.--Sweet Bells Jangled 300
XLI.--Mirage 310
XLII.--Ristofalo and the Rector 317
XLIII.--Shall she Come or Stay? 324
XLIV.--What would you Do? 329
XLV.--Narcisse with News 335
XLVI.--A Prison Memento 340
XLVII.--Now I Lay Me-- 345
XLVIII.--Rise up, my Love, my Fair One! 351
XLIX.--A Bundle of Hopes 357
L.--Fall In! 366
LI.--Blue Bonnets over the Border 372
LII.--A Pass through the Lines 378
LIII.--Try Again 384
LIV.--"Who Goes There?" 394
LV.--Dixie 412
LVI.--Fire and Sword 425
LVII.--Almost in Sight 435
LVIII.--A Golden Sunset 445
LIX.--Afterglow 454
LX.--"Yet shall he live" 465
LXI.--Peace 470
DR. SEVIER.
CHAPTER I.
THE DOCTOR.
The main road to wealth in New Orleans has long been Carondelet
street. There you see the most alert faces; noses--it seems to
one--with more and sharper edge, and eyes smaller and brighter
and with less distance between them than one notices in other
streets. It is there that the stock and bond brokers hurry to and
fro and run together promiscuously--the cunning and the simple,
the headlong and the wary--at the four clanging strokes of the
Stock Exchange gong. There rises the tall facade of the Cotton
Exchange. Looking in from the sidewalk as you pass, you see its
main hall, thronged but decorous, the quiet engine-room of the
surrounding city's most far-reaching occupation, and at the hall's
farther end you descry the "Future Room," and hear the unearthly
ramping and bellowing of the bulls and bears. Up and down the
street, on either hand, are the ship-brokers and insurers, and in
the upper stories foreign consuls among a multitude of lawyers and
notaries.
In 1856 this street was just assuming its present character. The cotton
merchants were making it their favorite place of commercial domicile.
The open thoroughfare served in lieu of the present exchanges; men made
fortunes standing on the curb-stone, and during bank hours the sidewalks
were perpetually crowded with cotton factors, buyers, brokers, weighers,
reweighers, classers, pickers, pressers, and samplers, and the air was
laden with cotton quotations and prognostications.
Number 3-1/2, second floor, front, was the office of Dr. Sevier. This
office was convenient to everything. Immediately under its windows lay
the sidewalks where congregated the men who, of all in New Orleans,
could best afford to pay for being sick, and least desired to die. Canal
street, the city's leading artery, was just below, at the near left-hand
corner. Beyond it lay the older town, not yet impoverished in those
days,--the French quarter. A single square and a half off at the right,
and in plain view from the front windows, shone the dazzling white walls
of the St. Charles Hotel, where the nabobs of the river plantations
came and dwelt with their fair-handed wives in seasons of peculiar
anticipation, when it is well to be near the highest medical skill. In
the opposite direction a three minutes' quick drive around the upper
corner and down Common street carried the Doctor to his ward in the
great Charity Hospital, and to the school of medicine, where he filled
the chair set apart to the holy ailments of maternity. Thus, as it were,
he laid his left hand on the rich and his right on the poor; and he was
not left-handed.
Not that his usual attitude was one of benediction. He stood straight up
in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice,
keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly
untender everywhere, except--but always except--in the sick chamber.
His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of
mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of
his virtues. To demolish evil!--that seemed the finest of aims; and even
as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and
a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer
and better. He waged war--against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut
down; to uproot; to overwhelm;--these were his springs of action. That
their results were good proved that his sentiment of benevolence was
strong and high; but it was well-nigh shut out of sight by that
impatience of evil which is very fine and knightly in youngest manhood,
but which we like to see give way to kindlier moods as the earlier heat
of the blood begins to pass.
He changed in later years; this was in 1856. To "resist not evil" seemed
to him then only a rather feeble sort of knavery. To face it in its
nakedness, and to inveigh against it in high places and low, seemed the
consummation of all manliness; and manliness was the key-note of his
creed. There was no other necessity in this life.
"But a man must live," said one of his kindred, to whom, truth to tell,
he had refused assistance.
"No, sir; that is just what he can't do. A man must die! So, while he
lives, let him be a man!"
How inharmonious a setting, then, for Dr. Sevier, was 3-1/2 Carondelet
street! As he drove, each morning, down to that point, he had to pass
through long, irregular files of fellow-beings thronging either
sidewalk,--a sadly unchivalric grouping of men whose daily and yearly
life was subordinated only and entirely to the getting of wealth, and
whose every eager motion was a repetition of the sinister old maxim that
"Time is money."
"It's a great deal more, sir; it's life!" the Doctor always retorted.
Among these groups, moreover, were many who were all too well famed
for illegitimate fortune. Many occupations connected with the handling
of cotton yielded big harvests in perquisites. At every jog of the
Doctor's horse, men came to view whose riches were the outcome of
semi-respectable larceny. It was a day of reckless operation; much of
the commerce that came to New Orleans was simply, as one might say,
beached in Carondelet street. The sight used to keep the long, thin,
keen-eyed doctor in perpetual indignation.
"Look at the wreckers!" he would say.
It was breakfast at eight, indignation at nine, dyspepsia at ten.
So his setting was not merely inharmonious; it was damaging. He grew
sore on the whole matter of money-getting.
"Yes, I have money. But I don't go after it. It comes to me, because I
seek and render service for the service's sake. It will come to anybody
else the same way; and why should it come any other way?"
He not only had a low regard for the motives of most seekers of wealth;
he went further, and fell into much disbelief of poor men's needs. For
instance, he looked upon a man's inability to find employment, or upon
a poor fellow's run of bad luck, as upon the placarded woes of a
hurdy-gurdy beggar.
"If he wants work he will find it. As for begging, it ought to be easier
for any true man to starve than to beg."
The sentiment was ungentle, but it came from the bottom of his belief
concerning himself, and a longing for moral greatness in all men.
"However," he would add, thrusting his hand into his pocket and bringing
out his purse, "I'll help any man to make himself useful. And the
sick--well, the sick, as a matter of course. Only I must know what I'm
doing."
Have some of us known Want? To have known her--though to love her
was impossible--is "a liberal education." The Doctor was learned;
but this acquaintanceship, this education, he had never got. Hence his
untenderness. Shall we condemn the fault? Yes. And the man? We have not
the face. To be _just_, which he never knowingly failed to be, and at
the same time to feel tenderly for the unworthy, to deal kindly with the
erring,--it is a double grace that hangs not always in easy reach even
of the tallest. The Doctor attained to it--but in later years; meantime,
this story--which, I believe, had he ever been poor would never have
been written.