RELEASE.—NARCISSE.

As some children were playing in the street before the Parish Prison next morning, they suddenly started and scampered toward the prison’s black entrance. A physician’s carriage had driven briskly up to it, ground its wheels against the curb-stone, and halted. If any fresh crumbs of horror were about to be dropped, the children must be there to feast on them. Dr. Sevier stepped out, gave Mary his hand and then his arm, and went in with her. A question or two in the prison office, a reference to the rolls, and a turnkey led the way through a dark gallery lighted with dimly burning gas. The stench was suffocating. They stopped at the inner gate.

“Why didn’t you bring him to us?” asked the Doctor, scowling resentfully at the facetious drawings and legends on the walls, where the dampness glistened in the sickly light.

The keeper made a low reply as he shot the bolts.

“What?” quickly asked Mary.

“He’s not well,” said Dr. Sevier.

The gate swung open. They stepped into the yard and across it. The prisoners paused in a game of ball. Others, who were playing cards, merely glanced up and went on. The jailer pointed with his bunch of keys to a cell before him. Mary glided away from the Doctor and darted in. There was a cry and a wail.

The Doctor followed quickly. Ristofalo passed out as he entered. Richling lay on a rough gray blanket spread on the pavement with the Italian’s jacket under his head. Mary had thrown herself down beside him upon her knees, and their arms were around each other’s neck.

“Let me see, Mrs. Richling,” said the physician, touching her on the shoulder. She drew back. Richling lifted a hand in welcome. The Doctor pressed it.

“Mrs. Richling,” he said, as they faced each other, he on one knee, she on both. He gave her a few laconic directions for the sick man’s better comfort. “You must stay here, madam,” he said at length; “this man Ristofalo will be ample protection for you; and I will go at once and get your husband’s discharge.” He went out.

In the office he asked for a seat at a desk. As he finished using it he turned to the keeper and asked, with severe face:—

“What do you do with sick prisoners here, anyway?”

The keeper smiled.

“Why, if they gits right sick, the hospital wagon comes and takes ’em to the Charity Hospital.”

“Umhum!” replied the Doctor, unpleasantly,—“in the same wagon they use for a case of scarlet fever or small-pox, eh?”

The keeper, with a little resentment in his laugh, stated that he would be eternally lost if he knew.

“I know,” remarked the Doctor. “But when a man is only a little sick,—according to your judgment,—like that one in there now, he is treated here, eh?”

The keeper swelled with a little official pride. His tone was boastful.

“We has a complete dispenisary in the prison,” he said.

“Yes? Who’s your druggist?” Dr. Sevier was in his worst inquisitorial mood. “One of the prisoners,” said the keeper.

The Doctor looked at him steadily. The man, in the blackness of his ignorance, was visibly proud of this bit of economy and convenience.

“How long has he held this position?” asked the physician.

“Oh, a right smart while. He was sentenced for murder, but he’s waiting for a new trial.”

“And he has full charge of all the drugs?” asked the Doctor, with a cheerful smile.

“Yes, sir.” The keeper was flattered.

“Poisons and all, I suppose, eh?” pursued the Doctor.

“Everything.”

The Doctor looked steadily and silently upon the officer, and tore and folded and tore again into small bits the prescription he had written. A moment later the door of his carriage shut with a smart clap and its wheels rattled away. There was a general laugh in the office, heavily spiced with maledictions.

“I say, Cap’, what d’you reckon he’d ’a’ said if he’d ’a’ seen the women’s department?”

In those days recorders had the power to release prisoners sentenced by them when in their judgment new information justified such action. Yet Dr. Sevier had a hard day’s work to procure Richling’s liberty. The sun was declining once more when a hack drove up to Mrs. Riley’s door with John and Mary in it, and Mrs. Riley was restrained from laughing and crying only by the presence of the great Dr. Sevier and a romantic Italian stranger by the captivating name of Ristofalo. Richling, with repeated avowals of his ability to walk alone, was helped into the house between these two illustrious visitors, Mary hurrying in ahead, and Mrs. Riley shutting the street door with some resentment of manner toward the staring children who gathered without. Was there anything surprising in the fact that eminent persons should call at her house?

When there was time for greetings she gave her hand to Dr. Sevier and asked him how he found himself. To Ristofalo she bowed majestically. She noticed that he was handsome and muscular.

At different hours the next day the same two visitors called. Also the second day after. And the third. And frequently afterward.

Ristofalo regained his financial feet almost, as one might say, at a single hand-spring. He amused Mary and John and Mrs. Riley almost beyond limit with his simple story of how he did it.

“Ye’d better hurry and be getting up out o’ that sick bed, Mr. Richlin’,” said the widow, in Ristofalo’s absence, “or that I-talian rascal’ll be making himself entirely too agree’ble to yer lady here. Ha! ha! It’s she that he’s a-comin’ here to see.”

Mrs. Riley laughed again, and pointed at Mary and tossed her head, not knowing that Mary went through it all over again as soon as Mrs. Riley was out of the room, to the immense delight of John.

“And now, madam,” said Dr. Sevier to Mary, by and by, “let it be understood once more that even independence may be carried to a vicious extreme, and that”—he turned to Richling, by whose bed he stood—“you and your wife will not do it again. You’ve had a narrow escape. Is it understood?”

“We’ll try to be moderate,” replied the invalid, playfully.

“I don’t believe you,” said the Doctor. And his scepticism was wise. He continued to watch them, and at length enjoyed the sight of John up and out again with color in his cheeks and the old courage—nay, a new and a better courage—in his eyes.

Said the Doctor on his last visit, “Take good care of your husband, my child.” He held the little wife’s hand a moment, and gazed out of Mrs. Riley’s front door upon the western sky. Then he transferred his gaze to John, who stood, with his knee in a chair, just behind her. He looked at the convalescent with solemn steadfastness. The husband smiled broadly.

“I know what you mean. I’ll try to deserve her.”

The Doctor looked again into the west.

“Good-by.”

Mary tried playfully to retort, but John restrained her, and when she contrived to utter something absurdly complimentary of her husband he was her only hearer.

They went back into the house, talking of other matters. Something turned the conversation upon Mrs. Riley, and from that subject it seemed to pass naturally to Ristofalo. Mary, laughing and talking softly as they entered their room, called to John’s recollection the Italian’s account of how he had once bought a tarpaulin hat and a cottonade shirt of the pattern called a “jumper,” and had worked as a deck-hand in loading and unloading steam-boats. It was so amusingly sensible to put on the proper badge for the kind of work sought. Richling mused. Many a dollar he might have earned the past summer, had he been as ingeniously wise, he thought.

“Ristofalo is coming here this evening,” said he, taking a seat in the alley window.

Mary looked at him with sidelong merriment. The Italian was coming to see Mrs. Riley. “Why, John,” whispered Mary, standing beside him, “she’s nearly ten years older than he is!”

But John quoted the old saying about a man’s age being what he feels, and a woman’s what she looks.

“Why,—but—dear, it is scarcely a fortnight since she declared nothing could ever induce”—

“Let her alone,” said John, indulgently. “Hasn’t she said half-a-dozen times that it isn’t good for woman to be alone? A widow’s a woman—and you never disputed it.”

“O John,” laughed Mary, “for shame! You know I didn’t mean that. You know I never could mean that.”

And when John would have maintained his ground she besought him not to jest in that direction, with eyes so ready for tears that he desisted.

“I only meant to be generous to Mrs. Riley,” he said.

“I know it,” said Mary, caressingly; “you’re always on the generous side of everything.”

She rested her hand fondly on his arm, and he took it into his own.

One evening the pair were out for that sunset walk which their young blood so relished, and which often led them, as it did this time, across the wide, open commons behind the town, where the unsettled streets were turf-grown, and toppling wooden lamp-posts threatened to fall into the wide, cattle-trodden ditches.

“Fall is coming,” said Mary.

“Let it come!” exclaimed John; “it’s hung back long enough.”

He looked about with pleasure. On every hand the advancing season was giving promise of heightened activity. The dark, plumy foliage of the china trees was getting a golden edge. The burnished green of the great magnolias was spotted brilliantly with hundreds of bursting cones, red with their pendent seeds. Here and there, as the sauntering pair came again into the region of brick sidewalks, a falling cone would now and then scatter its polished coral over the pavement, to be gathered by little girls for necklaces, or bruised under foot, staining the walk with its fragrant oil. The ligustrums bent low under the dragging weight of their small clustered berries. The oranges were turning. In the wet, choked ditches along the interruptions of pavement, where John followed Mary on narrow plank footways, bloomed thousands of little unrenowned asteroid flowers, blue and yellow, and the small, pink spikes of the water pepper. It wasn’t the fashionable habit in those days, but Mary had John gather big bunches of this pretty floral mob, and filled her room with them—not Mrs. Riley’s parlor—whoop, no! Weeds? Not if Mrs. Riley knew herself.

So ran time apace. The morning skies were gray monotones, and the evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing. Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The nervy, unmusical waking cry of the mocking-bird was often the first daybreak sound. At times a myriad downy seed floated everywhere, now softly upward, now gently downward, and the mellow rays of sunset turned it into a warm, golden snow-fall. By night a soft glow from distant burning prairies showed the hunters were afield; the call of unseen wild fowl was heard overhead, and—finer to the waiting poor man’s ear than all other sounds—came at regular intervals, now from this quarter and now from that, the heavy, rushing blast of the cotton compress, telling that the flood tide of commerce was setting in.

Narcisse surprised the Richlings one evening with a call. They tried very hard to be reserved, but they were too young for that task to be easy. The Creole had evidently come with his mind made up to take unresentfully and override all the unfriendliness they might choose to show. His conversation never ceased, but flitted from subject to subject with the swift waywardness of a humming-bird. It was remarked by Mary, leaning back in one end of Mrs. Riley’s little sofa, that “summer dresses were disappearing, but that the girls looked just as sweet in their darker colors as they had appeared in midsummer white. Had Narcisse noticed? Probably he didn’t care for”—

“Ho! I notiz them an’ they notiz me! An’ thass one thing I ’ave notiz about young ladies: they ah juz like those bird’; in summeh lookin’ cool, in winteh waum. I ’ave notiz that. An’ I’ve notiz anotheh thing which make them juz like those bird’. They halways know if a man is lookin’, an’ they halways make like they don’t see ’im! I would like to ’ite an i’ony about that—a lill i’ony—in the he’oic measuh. You like that he’oic measuh, Mizzez Witchlin’?”

As he rose to go he rolled a cigarette, and folded the end in with the long nail of his little finger.

“Mizzez Witchlin’, if you will allow me to light my ciga’ette fum yo’ lamp—I can’t use my sun-glass at night, because the sun is nod theh. But, the sun shining, I use it. I ’ave adop’ that method since lately.”

“You borrow the sun’s rays,” said Mary, with wicked sweetness.

“Yes; ’tis cheapeh than matches in the longue ’un.” “You have discovered that, I suppose,” remarked John.

“Me? The sun-glass? No. I believe Ahchimides invend that, in fact. An’ yet, out of ten thousan’ who use the sun-glass only a few can account ’ow tis done. ’Ow did you think that that’s my invention, Mistoo Itchlin? Did you know that I am something of a chimist? I can tu’n litmus papeh ’ed by juz dipping it in SO₃HO. Yesseh.”

“Yes,” said Richling, “that’s one thing that I have noticed, that you’re very fertile in devices.”

“Yes,” echoed Mary, “I noticed that, the first time you ever came to see us. I only wish Mr. Richling was half as much so.”

She beamed upon her husband. Narcisse laughed with pure pleasure.

“Well, I am compel’ to say you ah co’ect. I am continually makin’ some discove’ies. ‘Necessity’s the motheh of inventions.’ Now thass anotheh thing I ’ave notiz—about that month of Octobeh: it always come befo’ you think it’s comin’. I ’ave notiz that about eve’y month. Now, to-day we ah the twennieth Octobeh! Is it not so?” He lighted his cigarette. “You ah compel’ to co’obo’ate me.”