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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