And still another thing: I have been taught to know what the poor suffer. I know their feelings, their temptations, their hardships, their sad mistakes, and the frightful mistakes and oversights the rich make concerning them, and the ways to give them true and helpful help. And now, if God ever gives me competency, whether he gives me abundance or not, I know what he intends me to do. I was once, in fact and in sentiment, a brother to the rich; but I know that now he has trained me to be a brother to the poor. Don’t think I am going to be foolish. I remember that I’m brother to the rich too; but I’ll be the other as well. How wisely has God—what am I saying? Poor fools that we humans are! We can hardly venture to praise God’s wisdom to-day when we think we see it, lest it turn out to be only our own folly to-morrow.
But I find I’m only writing to myself, Doctor, not to you; so I stop. Mary is well, and sends you much love.
Yours faithfully,
John Richling.
“Very little about Mary,” murmured Dr. Sevier. Yet he was rather pleased than otherwise with the letter. He thrust it into his breast-pocket. In the evening, at his fireside, he drew it out again and re-read it.
“Talks as if he had got into an impregnable castle,” thought the Doctor, as he gazed into the fire. “Book-keeper to a baker,” he muttered, slowly folding the sheet again. It somehow vexed him to see Richling so happy in so low a station. But—“It’s the joy of what he has escaped from, not to,” he presently remembered.
A fortnight or more elapsed. A distant relative of Dr. Sevier, a man of his own years and profession, was his guest for two nights and a day as he passed through the city, eastward, from an all-summer’s study of fevers in Mexico. They were sitting at evening on opposite sides of the library fire, conversing in the leisurely ease of those to whom life is not a novelty.
“And so you think of having Laura and Bess come out from Charleston, and keep house for you this winter? Their mother wrote me to that effect.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Sevier. “Society here will be a great delight to them. They will shine. And time will be less monotonous for me. It may suit me, or it may not.”
“I dare say it may,” responded the kinsman, whereas in truth he was very doubtful about it.
He added something, a moment later, about retiring for the night, and his host had just said, “Eh?” when a slave, in a five-year-old dress-coat, brought in the card of a person whose name was as well known in New Orleans in those days as St. Patrick’s steeple or the statue of Jackson in the old Place d’Armes. Dr. Sevier turned it over and looked for a moment ponderingly upon the domestic.
The relative rose.