IV
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!”