John Marvel, Assistant Part 16

She had tightened the rein on her horse and turned his head back.

"Everything. The mother and three children are all down; the father died a few days ago. Send the doctor and anything that you can find--food--clothing--medicine--some one to nurse them--if you can find her. It is the only chance."

"I will." She hesitated a moment and looked down at him, as if about to speak, but he waved her off. "Go, you must not stay longer."

He had moved around so that the wind, instead of blowing from him toward her, blew from the other side of her.

A moment later Eleanor Leigh was galloping for life down the steep bridle-path. It was a breakneck gait, and the path was rough enough to be perilous, but she did not heed it. It was the first time in all her life that she had been conscious that she could be of real use. She felt that she was galloping in a new world. From house to house she rode, but though all were sympathetic, there was no one to go. Those who might have gone, were elsewhere--or were dead. The doctor was away from home attending at other bedsides and, by the account given, had been working night and day until he could scarcely stand. Riding to the nearest telegraph station, the girl sent a despatch to a doctor whom she knew in the city where she lived, begging him to come or to send some one on the first train and saying that he would be met and that she would meet all his expenses. Then she sat down and wrote a note to her cousin. And two hours later, just as the dusk was falling, she rode up to the door of a country cabin back among the hills. As she softly pushed open the door, with her arm full of bundles, a form rose from the side of a bed and stood before her in the dusk of the room.

"My G.o.d! you must not come in here. Why have you come here?"

"To help you," said the girl.

"But you must not come in. Go out. You must," said John Marvel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "But you must not come in."]

"No, I have come to stay. I could not live if I did not stay now." She pushed her way in. "Here are some things I have brought. I have telegraphed for a doctor."

It was long before she could satisfy John Marvel, but she staid, and all that night she worked with him over the sick and the dying. All that night they two strove to hold Death at bay, across those wretched beds.

Once, indeed, he had struck past their guard and s.n.a.t.c.hed a life; but they had driven him back and saved the others. Ere morning came one of the children had pa.s.sed away; but the mother and the other children survived; and Eleanor Leigh knew that John Marvel, now on his knees, now leaning over the bed administering stimulants, had saved them.

As Eleanor Leigh stepped out into the morning light, she looked on a new earth, as fair as if it had just been created, and it was a new Eleanor Leigh who gazed upon it. The tinsel of frivolity had shrivelled and perished in the fire of that night. Sham had laid bare its shallow face and fled away. Life had taken on reality. She had seen a man, and thenceforth only a man could command her.

The physician came duly, sent up by the one she had telegraphed to; rode over to the Banyan house, and later to the village, where he p.r.o.nounced the disease diphtheria and the cause probably defective drainage and consequent impregnation of the water supply; wrote a prescription; commended the country doctor, returned home, and duly charged nearly half as much as the country doctor got in a year, which Miss Leigh duly paid with thoughts of John Marvel. This was what made the change in the girl which her father had noted.

No novelist can give all of a hero's or a heroine's life. He must take some especial phase and develop his characters along that line, otherwise he would soon overload his boat and swamp his reader's patience. He is happy who having selected his path of action does not wear out the reader in asking him to follow even this one line. Thus, it is possible to give only a part of Miss Eleanor Leigh's relation to life, and naturally the part selected is that which had also its relation to John Marvel.

If it be supposed by any one that Miss Eleanor Leigh devoted her entire time and thought to working among the poor he is greatly mistaken. John Marvel and Leo Wolffert did this: but Miss Leigh was far from living the consecrated life. She only made it a part of her life, that is all, and possibly this was the best for her to do. The glimpse which she got at the death-bed in the Banyan cottage that night when she went to help John Marvel fight death, tore the veil from her eyes and gave her a revelation of a life of which she had never dreamed till then, though it lay all about her in its tragic nakedness--but while it gave her pause and inspired her with a sincere wish to help the poor--or, possibly, to help John Marvel and Leo Wolffert, it did not change her nature or make her a missionary. An impulse, whatever its ultimate action, does not revolutionize. She still retained the love of pleasure natural to all young creatures. The young tree shoots up by nature into the sun. She still took part in the gay life about her, and, if possible, found a greater zest in it for the consciousness that she had widened her horizon and discovered more interests outside of the glittering little brazen circle in which her orbit had been hitherto confined. She had immediately on returning home interested herself to secure for John Marvel an invitation from Dr. Capon, her rector, to become one of his a.s.sistants and take charge of an outlying chapel which he had built in the poorest district of the town, moved thereto by a commendable feeling that the poor should have the gospel preached to them and that his church should not allow all the honors to go to other churches, particularly that of Rome. Dr. Capon prided himself and was highly esteemed by his fellows--that is, the upper officials, clergy, and laity alike--on his ability to obtain from his people the funds needed to extend what was known as "the work of the Parish," by which was signified mainly the construction of buildings, additions thereto, embellishments thereof, and stated services therein, and, incidentally, work among the poor for whom the buildings were supposed to have been planned. The buildings having all been erected and paid for and due report and laudation thereof having been made, it was found rather more difficult to fill them than had been previously antic.i.p.ated. And it was set down somewhat to the perversity of the poor that they refused the general invitation extended them to come and be labelled and patronized with words and smiles quite as unctuous as benignant.

Dr. Capon had not the reputation of getting on quite comfortably with his a.s.sistants. The exactions of his type of success had made him a business man. As his power of organization increased, spirituality dwindled. He dealt more with the rich and less with the poor. He had the reputation of being somewhat exacting in his demands on them, and of having a somewhat overweening sense of his own importance and authority.

Bright young men either declined altogether his suggestions of the whiteness of the harvest in the purlieus of the city, or, having been led into accepting positions under him, soon left him for some country parish or less imposing curacy--an exotic word which the Doctor himself had had something to do with importing from over seas. It thus happened that his chapel recently built for the poor with funds elicited from Dr.

Capon's wealthy paris.h.i.+oners was vacant when Miss Eleanor Leigh consulted the Reverend Doctor as to a good church for a peculiarly good young clergyman, and the Doctor being at that time in his second mourning and likewise in that state of receptivity incident to clerical widowers of a year and a half's standing, yielded readily to his fair paris.h.i.+oner's solicitations, and the position was tendered to John Marvel and after some hesitation was accepted--his chief motive being that his old friend Wolffert was there doing a work in which he had greatly interested him. If the fact that Miss Eleanor Leigh also lived in that city influenced him, it would simply prove that John Marvel, like the rest of Humanity was only mortal. The tender was made without the usual preliminary examination of the young man by the Doctor, so impressed had he been by the young girl's enthusiastic accounts of John Marvel's work and influence among the poor. Thus it was, that when John Marvel finally presented himself, the Doctor was more than surprised at his appearance--he was, indeed, almost shocked.

The Doctor was not only fond of his own appearance--which was certainly that of a gentleman and a very well-fed and clerical looking one as well--but he took especial pride in having his a.s.sistants also good-looking and clerical. He loved to march in processional and recessional at the end of a stately procession with two or three fine-looking young priests marching before him. It had a solemnizing effect--it made the church appear something important. It linked him with the historic and Apostolic Church of the ages. With the swelling organ pouring forth its strains to soar and die among the groined arches above him, he sometimes felt as he glanced along the surpliced line before him as if he were borne away, and had any one cried to him from the side he might almost have been able to heal with his blessing. But this short, broad, bow-legged, near-sighted man in his shabby, ill-fitting clothes! Why, it would never do to have him about him! He would mar the whole harmony of the scene. If it had not been too late and if the young man had not had such a potent influence behind him, the Doctor might have suggested some difficulties in the way of carrying through the arrangements he had proposed; but though Mrs. Argand and her brother-in-law were understood to have had some differences over certain business matters, she was very fond of her niece and she was the wealthiest woman who came to his church. The Doctor reflected, therefore, that he need not have the awkward young man about him much: and when a little later it appeared that this gawky young man was filling his chapel and neighborhood-house, poor-club and night-schools and was sending in reports which showed that real work was being done, the Doctor was well satisfied to let him remain--so well, indeed, that he never invited him to his house socially, but only held official relations with him. The report that among John Marvel's chief a.s.sistants in the work of organizing his poor-clubs and night-school was a Jew Socialist disturbed the Doctor slightly, but he reflected that when one showed such notable results it was in a way necessary to employ many curious agencies, and, after all, the a.s.sociation with Jews in secular affairs was a matter of taste.

XIII

MR. LEIGH.

Now, to recur to the period of my arrival in the West--the day after Miss Leigh's return home her father paid her the unusual honor of leaving his office to take lunch with her.

Her mind was full of the subject of the paper she had read in the press that morning, giving a lurid picture of the inconvenience and distress entailed on the pa.s.sengers and scoring the management of the company for permitting what was claimed to be "so gross a breach of the rights of the public."

Ordinarily, she would have pa.s.sed it over with indifference--a shrug of her white shoulders and a stamp of her little foot would have been all the tribute she would have paid to it. But of late she had begun to think.

It had never before been brought so clearly to the notice of the girl how her own pleasures--not the natural but the created pleasures--of which she was quite as fond as other healthy girls of her age and cla.s.s, were almost exclusively at the expense of the cla.s.s she had been accustomed to regard with a general sort of vague sympathy as "the Poor."

The attack on her father and herself enraged her; but, as she cooled down, a feeling deeper than mere anger at an injustice took possession of her mind.

To find that she herself had, in a way, been the occasion of the distress to women and children, startled her and left in her mind a feeling of uneasiness to which she had hitherto been a stranger.

"Father," she began, "did you see that dreadful article in the _Trumpet_ this morning?"

Mr. Leigh, without looking up, adopted the natural line of special pleading, although he knew perfectly well instantly the article to which she referred.

"What article?" he asked.

"That story about our having delayed the pa.s.senger train with women and children on it and then having side-tracked them without breakfast, in order to give our car the right-of-way."

"Oh! yes. I believe I saw that. I see so many ridiculous things in the newspapers, I pay no attention to them."

"But, father, that was a terrible arraignment," said the girl.

"Of whom?" asked Mr. Leigh, with a little twinkle in his eye.

"Why, of you; of Aunt Sophia, of----"

"Of me!"

"Yes, and of me--of everybody connected with the road."

"Not of you, my dear," said Mr. Leigh, with the light of affection warming up his rather cold face. "Surely no one, even the anarchistic writers of the anarchistic press, could imagine anything to say against you."

"Yes, of me, too, though not by name, perhaps; but I was there and I was in a way the cause of the trouble, because the car was sent after me and Aunt Sophia, and I feel terribly guilty about it."

"Guilty of what, my dear?" smiled her father. "Of simply using your own property in a way satisfactory to you?"

"That is just it, father; that is the point which the writer raises. Is it our own property?"

"It certainly is, my love. Property that I have paid for--my a.s.sociates and I--and which I control, or did control, in conjunction with the other owners, and propose to control to suit myself and them so long as we have the controlling interest, every socialistic writer, speaker and striker to the contrary notwithstanding."

"Well," said the girl, "that sounds all right. It looks as if you ought to be able to do what you like with your own; but, do you know, father, I am not sure that it is our own. That is just the point--he says----"

"Oh! nonsense!" said her father lightly. "Don't let this Jew go and fill your clear little head with such foolishness as that. Enjoy life while you can. Make your mind easy, and get all the use you can out of what I have ama.s.sed for you. I only hope you may have as much pleasure in using it as I have had in providing it."

The banker gazed over at his daughter half-quizzically, half-seriously, took out a cigar, and began to clip the end leisurely. The girl laughed.

She knew that he had something on his mind.

"Well, what is it?" she asked smiling.

He gave a laugh. "Don't go and imagine that because that Jew can write he is any the less a--don't go and confound him and his work. It is the easiest thing in the world to pick flaws--to find the defects in any system. The difficult thing is constructive work."

She nodded.