Part 10

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.

VI

One night in December, Sara Wharton, coming home from a dinner, was told that Dr. Morse was waiting for her in the library. She went in at once, pulling off her long gloves, and with her white cloak falling back from her pretty shoulders. She had not seen the doctor since that talk about Nellie, and she had forgotten her indignation with him. She had heard too much of his goodness among the poor people to harbor resentment.

“Oh, I am so sorry to be so late,” she said. “Have you been waiting very long? Oh, this room is cold! Why haven’t they kept the fire up?” She turned, with a pretty, hospitable impulse to summon a servant, but Dr. Morse stopped her with a gesture.

“I am quite warm. I will only detain you for a few moments. I want you to help me.”

“Indeed, I will; has anything gone wrong?”

“Yes,” he said, with a hard look.

“One of your poor people?” she asked. She sat down by the fire, one silken foot on the fender; her cloak had slipped down behind her, and she was pulling out her gloves, and smoothing them on her knee. She looked up at him with a charming smile.

“Yes,” he said, “one of my poor people--and yours. Miss Wharton, can you tell me anything about Nellie Sherman?”

“Nellie?” Sara Wharton’s face began to change. “Oh, Dr. Morse, I wish I could tell you anything encouraging about her. She quarreled with her aunt, and went to work at a factory in North Mercer. She hardly ever comes home, I’m sorry to say; she is boarding with a respectable family, I believe, and I think she does not depend on Mrs. Sherman for any money. But I’ve lost my hold on her--if I ever had any! She has only been to see me once since she came home in September. You know I sent her away in the summer? And she got well, Dr. Morse!” she ended triumphantly.

“Yes; she did,” he said with stern significance.

“What is the matter? Is she sick again? is she--_dead_?”

“Dead? I wish she were.”

“Dr. Morse!”

“Miss Wharton, that miserable creature has lived long enough to corrupt and seduce an innocent boy. Young Jack Hayes has--I beg your pardon, this is plain talk--but I am a physician and you are--a philanthropist, so we need not mince words,--Jack has gone off with her. I have come to-night from his mother’s bedside. Mrs. Hayes has just heard what he has done--her innocent boy.”

Sara rose, shrinking and wincing as though he had struck her.

“I thought it possible,” he went on, “that you might know where she was living, and perhaps I could get on her track. She met Jack up in the country; he was there with a tutor; of course, she had no difficulty in finding him when he came back to town. He went off with her on Sunday, we think--at least, one of the Clay boys saw him with her Sunday night, and he hasn’t been at home since.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Sara said brokenly.

“I went to see Mrs. Sherman before I came here, and do you know what she said to me? She sat, poor woman, with the tears streaming down her cheeks: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘if I could only know she was dead! If she was just safe in her grave!’”

Sara shivered.

“I thought to myself, ‘She would be, you poor soul, if some of us wise people had not interfered.’ I reproach myself,” he went on savagely, “that I did not try to dissuade you when you told me you meant to keep the girl alive. We ought to stamp such vermin out--or let it die out, at least. Instead, you philanthropists and we doctors do all we can to keep them alive,--that they may propagate their kind! Fortunately, nature generally prevents that,--but Nellie’s mother was a fallen woman, you may remember? Poor Jack--poor Mrs. Hayes! Miss Wharton, our hands are not innocent of that boy’s blood.”

Sara was very white; she still trembled, but she lifted her head and looked full at him. “Dr. Morse, are you God, to kill?”

“Or you, to make alive?” he interrupted. “I did not ask you to kill--I asked you not to interfere--to allow God to work in his own way. I asked you to use that judgment which, in ordinary affairs, is so excellent--to consider _probabilities_; you do as much as that in refusing to leave a lighted candle in a powder magazine. What would you think of me, if I turned a smallpox patient loose in a crowd? Nellie is far more dangerous than smallpox. Don’t you see--surely you must see! that it would have been better for the community if she had died last summer?”

“Better for the community,” Sara said passionately; “but what about Nellie? Would it have been better for Nellie?”

“It could hardly be worse, could it?” he answered dryly; “but if it were worse, better one lost soul than two or three.”

“God doesn’t lose souls so easily,” she cried; but he pressed the logic of her hope home.

“Then why not have trusted Him, and let her die? Death isn’t the worst thing in the world! And may I remind you”--they had both risen; and from a cruel sort of justice on his part, and a horrified dismay on hers, anger was arising in their eyes--“may I remind you of a poor woman of whom I spoke that day you came to see me about Nellie? She is in the hospital, broken down absolutely; her brother is in the almshouse, and her mother living on charity. But Nellie Sherman, a thief, a liar, a prostitute, a moral imbecile, is in good health!”

“You have no right to say such things,” Sara said, in a low voice. “I had to give that poor creature a chance to save her soul; and to do that I had to save her body”--

“And ruin Jack--body and soul”--

“That was not my business,” she flung back at him.

“It was your business!” he said. “It was your business to weigh probabilities. Oh!” he ended, impetuously, “the trouble with us is, nowadays, that we make too much of _life_, and too little of _living_. It is living that is important, not existing! I tell you, Miss Wharton, there is only a limited amount of power in the world; only a limited amount of opportunity, or of money, for that matter; and we are bound to put power and opportunity and money where they will do the most good! Did you put them where they would do the most good?”

Sara flinched, then rallied all her faith. “Dr. Morse, I did the duty which came to my hands; I had no choice.”

“No choice?” he repeated. “There is always choice! that’s where responsibility comes in. The good woman and the bad woman may not come and stand hand in hand before you, each asking aid. But the good woman, abstractly, is always dying (or--being tempted to turn into a bad woman, for that matter!), so there is always choice. We’ve got to consider moral economics; we’ve no business to gratify our selfish sentimentalism at the expense of society!” He was so much in earnest that he did not see how tensely she was holding herself, or what a look of terror had come into her young face.

“The Gospel of Love is all I can plead,” she said, in the voice of one insisting to herself; “but it is the salvation of the world!”

All the stern anxiety of his face melted into an exaltation as intense as her own. “Law is the salvation of the world! And law means that the good of the whole, not the comfort of the individual, shall be considered; it means a love so sane as to permit the mercy of death.”

Sara put her hands over her face to hide a burst of tears. Her accuser ground his teeth in helpless discomfort.

“I’m right,” he said doggedly, “but I’m a brute; I wish you would forgive me.”

She turned from him, unable to speak. He wanted to follow her, to comfort her; to say, as one does to a child or a woman, “Never mind,”--but he dared not.

“I’m sorry I’ve wounded you,” he said again miserably; “I hope you will forgive me?”

“Forgive you?” she turned and faced him, the tears on her face; “I haven’t anything to forgive. Do you suppose I care how you talk to _me_?--if I am right? oh, _if_ I am right!”

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