EVERYBODY in Mercer knew Sara Wharton; in the first place, she was Edward Wharton’s daughter; the Edward Wharton of the Wharton & Blair Company, whose great Rolling and Smelting Mills darken Mercer’s sky with vast folds of black smoke, and give employment to two thirds of Mercer’s population. In the second place, she was a very charming young lady, who was too pretty to pass unnoticed when her victoria went rolling along the river road on fine afternoons. And in the third place, she was the president of two girls’ clubs, and the organizer of the Boys’ Alliance, and the Young Men’s Literary Association, and the founder of the Y. W. C. T. U., and the kindly autocrat of all Mercer’s rough, grimy, under-fed young people. She was a sweet-hearted, wholesome-minded, impulsive, dear child; the kind of girl who loved a party just as much, and planned her pretty dresses just as anxiously, and adored her father and mother just as unreasonably, as though she had never heard of a committee, and was indifferent to the Cause of Humanity. All Mercer knew her, and believed in her; and so when, one gray November afternoon, she was seen to go quietly up the steps of a certain house on Baker Street—a house which decent folk affected to ignore when they passed it by at midday, but at which they glanced curiously after nightfall—when Sara Wharton went into this house, those who chanced to see her said only, “Well! what won’t that girl do next?”

The woman who answered her ring opened the door scarcely more than a crack, and peered out at her sourly.

“I want to see Nellie Sherman,” said Miss Wharton.

“There’s no person by that name here,” the woman answered.

“Let me in, please,” Sara Wharton said. She put her hand against the door, which yielded a little and then stopped; the woman inside had braced her foot against it.

“She ain’t in.”

“I will wait until she comes, then,” returned the young lady pleasantly.

“I don’t know why you’re comin’ here lookin’ for a girl,” the woman cried out, in sudden, shrewish rage; “this is a respectable house; there’s no Sherman girl here!”

“Let me in at once,” said Sara Wharton, “or I shall get a policeman, and have a warrant served. I know Nellie Sherman lives here, and I want to see her. You had better let me in without further talk. I am Miss Wharton.”

“I don’t care if you are Queen Victoria,” the keeper of the house declared angrily; “well, you can come in, though there ain’t no Nellie Sherman here; there’s a Nettie Sherman,—if she’s the girl you’re looking for.”

“Tell her I want to see her, please.”

“She’s up in her room. You can go up.” Miss Wharton’s instant’s hesitation made her add, “There ain’t nobody there.”

The halls and stairs were nearly dark; one or two frowzy heads peered over the banisters, and drew back quickly; there was a loud guffaw of laughter from behind a closed door, and all the air was heavy with the reek of stale tobacco.

“Her room’s the third floor back,” the woman called up after the visitor, who went swiftly over the stairs, intent upon her errand, yet with a faint shudder, a sort of physical shrinking, that made her gather her cloak close about her, lest it might touch the wall or banisters.

“I’m glad I told Thomas to wait,” she said to herself, thinking of the brougham at the door, with the respectable, long-suffering Thomas on the box. At the third floor back she knocked, and waited for a reply; then she knocked again.

“What is it?” a muffled voice asked; “is that you, Mamie? Go ’way! I’m busy.”

“It is I; Miss Wharton; a friend of your aunt’s. Let me in, Nellie.” There was a breathless pause, and then a quick step, and a bolt was snapped back. A slight, startled-looking girl stood in the doorway. Sara entered with a certain fine, regal step that she had, that gave at once a sense of the uselessness of opposing her.

“Shut the door,” she commanded cheerfully, “and let me see you. Come, we will sit down and have a little talk. Oh, open that window first; there is some dreadful perfumery in the room. Ah, that’s nice; fresh air is the nicest sort of perfumery; don’t you think so?”

The girl stared at her without an answer. She was a delicate-looking creature, rather pretty, except that just now her face was stained with tears, and there was a sullen look about her little pale lips. But she had fair hair in a sort of aureole around her low forehead, and shading her really beautiful eyes; and she wore a crimson silk waist,—spotted, to be sure, and ripped on the shoulder, but bringing out the fairness of her skin, and the blue veins on her delicate temples.

“I’m sure I haven’t the pleasure of your acquaintance,” she said airily; but she was trembling.

“I know your aunt, Mrs. Sherman,” her visitor said; then there was a moment’s silence. Sara Wharton looked about the untidy room,—with its banjo hung with ribbons, its looking-glass rimmed with cards and tintypes stuck edgewise within the frame; its litter of cigarette ends, and its half-empty, uncorked bottle of beer on the marble-topped centre-table.

“Your aunt told me about you, my child,” she said, with a deep, kind look full into the girl’s face.

The color rushed into Nellie’s pale cheeks; but she only said, with vast indifference, “Is that so? Well, she’s very kind, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know that she has always been very kind,” Sara Wharton answered thoughtfully. “Now shut that window behind you; I don’t want you to sit in a draft; and the fresh air has driven out the perfumery. Why do you use perfumery, Nellie? Nice girls don’t.”

The girl looked at her blankly.

“Yes; your aunt told me about you. She told me how she had taken care of you ever since your mother died; and how she had sent you to school, and bought pretty dresses for you, and done the housework herself so that you shouldn’t spoil your hands; and how she took in washing so that you might go to dancing-school. She loved you very much, Nellie; but I am not sure that she was kind. Perhaps if you had had to work you wouldn’t have come to this dreadful house, and brought shame and disgrace to Mrs. Sherman. You’ve broken her heart, Nellie.”

The girl’s face paled and flushed; and then quivered suddenly into a storm of tears.

“I don’t like it here. But I can’t help it. I lost my place in the shop. I was late, and they discharged me. And I was afraid to go home and tell my aunt, she jaws at me so. That was four weeks ago. It was the third place I’d lost. So I—came here. I don’t like it. I was just crying when you came in!” She squeezed her handkerchief into a damp ball and pressed it against her eyes, sobbing. “The woman is so cross. And—and I owe her for board.”

Sara was silent.

“But there ain’t anything I can do; I’d die rather than go back to my aunt’s. She’d never forgive me. I don’t blame her. But I don’t like it here.”

“Perhaps your aunt will forgive you?” Sara said gently. Nellie rocked back and forth, sobbing.

“I’m too wicked,” she recited; her eyes roved over Sara’s dark dress, and inspected her pretty little bonnet, and dwelt on the glitter of an amethyst pin at her throat. “Oh, dear, I wish I hadn’t; I wish I was dead,” she said helplessly.

Sara Wharton’s face lit with a quick tenderness. She put her arm over the child’s bent shoulders, and drew the wet cheek down against her breast. “My dear, if you are sorry, if you know that it is wicked and dreadful, then the worst is over. Don’t wish to die—wish to live, so that you may be good. I know you can be good!” she ended, with a burst of courage in her voice, that struck some answering chord in the poor, half-developed little soul at her side. Nellie looked up.

“Oh, I will be good—if I can; just get out of here! I’m just about sick, anyway; I’ve got such a pain under my left shoulder; and I’m just tired of it—and Mrs. Smith is so cross. But I can’t go home. My aunt’ll jaw at me. Oh, I can’t ever go home!” She whimpered a little, and looked at her pretty finger nails critically.

“I’m sure your aunt will forgive you!” Sara said, impetuous and tender. “Let’s go and ask her to, now.”

“Mrs. Smith won’t let me go, I guess,” Nellie sighed; “I owe her two weeks board.”

“I will pay her.”

“I’ll come to-morrow,” the child demurred.

“Nellie, dear, I want you to come now! Oh, Nellie, won’t you begin this minute to be good?”

“I’m not so very bad,” Nellie protested, “and I can’t come now, truly. I haven’t any sack. I—sold it.” The tears welled up in her soft eyes at the remembrance of her poverty.

“You don’t need a sack. You’ll come in my carriage, and I’ll wrap a rug around you.”

“My!” said Nellie, “is your carriage here? One of the club girls told me it had satin cushions. Is that so, Miss Wharton?”

Sara bit her lip. “Never mind about the cushions. Oh, Nellie, dear, don’t think of things like that! Only just try with all your might to be good. Will you, Nellie?”

“Why, certainly,” said Nellie.

Sara Wharton drove home with a very serious look on her face. She had induced Nellie to leave that dreadful house; indeed, the girl had yielded with that fatally facile willingness to do what she was told which should have forbade any of the joy that may be felt over the one sinner that repenteth. But in the glow of “saving” the poor child, it was not easy for Sara Wharton to realize that Nellie’s first experience of sin had only reached the stage of the young smoker’s disgust with his first cigar. The young lady, with her carriage and her satin cushions, had come at the right moment—the moment when the expediency of morality had forced itself upon the girl’s little, flimsy common-sense, and she was willing to go shuddering back to comfortable decency; but as for any spiritual perception of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, it did not exist.

Nellie had received her aunt’s forgiveness as though she were conferring a favor. Indeed, she sighed with some impatience when Mrs. Sherman wept over her; and she said again, fretfully, in response to Miss Wharton’s assertions that now Nellie was going to be good,—“Why certainly, yes;” and looked about wearily, as if she wished the scene might come to an end.

“Nobody shan’t never know, my darling,” Mrs. Sherman told her, her voice breaking with tenderness; “I’ll say you’ve been away, visiting friends.”

“A’ right,” said Nellie. And neither the aunt nor the niece understood Miss Wharton’s quick protest against trying to hide one sin by another.

Sara, driving home, tired and saddened by the emotions of the afternoon, acknowledged to herself that the easy repentance was made of still less value by the easy forgiveness.

“But some day she will repent, really and truly,” she told herself; but she sighed, and dropped the window of the brougham, leaning forward to get the dash of wet, cold wind in her face. It seemed to her as though she still felt the lifeless air of those horrible halls and stairways, and the scent of musk, and tobacco smoke, and stale liquor.

“The only thing to do, the only way to save her is to love her,” Sara Wharton said to herself, “and I’m going to love her!”

When she reached home, and came in out of the cold dusk into the firelit hall, this divine intention of loving shone on her face with a beautiful solemnity. Her seriousness was so marked that her mother, who was just saying good evening to a departing caller, noticed it and said, with some anxiety:—

“My dear, there is nothing the matter, I hope?”

“No, mother darling,” the girl reassured her, with a glance at the tall fellow who stood with his hat and stick in his hand, waiting for Mrs. Wharton’s bow.

“Sara, my dear, this is Dr. Morse. My daughter, Dr. Morse.”

“I ventured to come and tell a sad story to your mother, Miss Wharton,” said the young man, “a dispensary story. I’ve just come on duty at the dispensary; but Mrs. Wharton’s kindness was so proverbial, that when I stumbled on a hard case, I came at once to tell her about it.”

“I’ve no doubt she was delighted to hear of it,” Sara said; “mother would really be dreadfully unhappy if everybody was prosperous; her occupation would be gone.”

“Why, Sara! Sara! you mustn’t say such things,” Mrs. Wharton reproved her, looking at her daughter over her gold spectacles, with the horrified protest of a simple and literal mind.

The other two laughed, feeling suddenly very well acquainted.

“So long as she lives in Mercer, Mrs. Wharton’s happiness is assured,” the doctor said; and went away, saying to himself, “What a girl! I don’t wonder people rave about her; she’s stunning! But I’m afraid she’s a professional philanthropist.”

“So that’s the new doctor?” Sara said, pulling off her gloves; “he has a nice face, rather. Did you like him, darling?”

“Yes,” her mother answered doubtfully, “only, Sara, my dear, he seems rather a stern young man. I wanted to give him a check for this poor woman he came to tell me about; but he said that I must let her clean windows, or something, to earn it. And you know, my dear child, that would interfere with James’s work. I’d much rather give the check than arrange for work.”

Sara kissed her, and cuddled her, for Mrs. Wharton was a little, roly-poly, comfortable sort of woman, and told her she was behind the times.

“Nowadays,” announced the young lady, “the ‘gave to him that asketh’ method is hopelessly unscientific; bless your dear old-fashioned heart!”

II

The saving of Nellie Sherman became an intense and passionate purpose in Sara Wharton’s life. Day by day, hour by hour, she watched and fought and prayed. She invented (according to the most approved charity methods) work for the vain and shiftless child; she had her taught to sew; she was careful to provide plenty of bright and wholesome amusement for her; by and by Nellie felt yearnings to be a bookkeeper, and Sara Wharton sent her to a commercial school. “You can pay me back when you get work,” she said, as cheerfully as though she believed that Nellie was capable of feeling a money obligation. She entered Nellie’s name at her Girls’ Club; she took her to concerts, and sent her books, and planned and thought and hoped; and always, always prayed. Furthermore, she loved the girl. That is to say, she called it love; and perhaps it was, in its way; at least it was that greater love that is content to give and not receive. Sara gave her very self—her power, her charm, her sweet and generous enthusiasms—fully and freely into the little, mean hands that were held out to take all they could get. “Because,” she said to herself, again, “the only way to reach her is to love her. Love is the greatest thing in the world! I’ve no doubt I would have been just as bad as Nellie if I hadn’t had so much love.” This thought made the girl rise, and go and push her mother’s sewing aside, and kiss her, with a little half laughing break in her voice, and her eyes suddenly wet with tears.

“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Wharton said breathlessly, adjusting her spectacles, which the impetuous embrace had disturbed; “is anything the matter, Sara?”

“No,” her daughter answered, with a laugh, winking away the tears, “I was just thinking how lucky I was to have you for a mother, you darling! If I’d had some cross old mother I should have been—I should have been a fiend! I haven’t a doubt of it. I’d have been just as wicked as poor Nellie Sherman.”

“Nothing of the sort!” retorted Mrs. Wharton, much ruffled; “please remember what kind of people your grand-parents on both sides were, and don’t say such unladylike things, Sara. Dear, dear, I don’t know what girls are coming to in these days. When I was young, young ladies didn’t know that such improper persons existed as your Nellie Sherman. I wish you would have nothing to do with her.”

Sara, on her knees beside the little, rosy, kindly lady, pulled her cap straight, and scolded her for making her forefinger rough with so much sewing.

“You are always making petticoats for poor people,” she said severely, “instead of talking to me about my winter clothes. I want a new dinner dress, ma’am, and you’ve got to buy it. I’ve used up all my allowance, and borrowed from father on the next quarter; so please help the deserving poor of your own household. Charity begins at home, let me tell you! Who is to have this petticoat?—while your own poor child is in want of a satin gown!”

“Well,” Mrs. Wharton said, with some confusion, “the fact is, Nellie looks so sickly I am afraid she is not warmly enough clad”—

Sara shrieked with laughter. “Consistency, thy name is Mother,” she cried; and began to pour out her plans for Nellie, which Mrs. Wharton amended several times, objecting to Sara’s assertion that Nellie should repay the money expended for her tuition at the commercial college.

“The poor thing will have so little money, anyhow,” she entreated. But Sara held to her theory.

“We’ll make it up in other ways,—petticoats, and things, but she must feel it a loan,” she said.

However, Miss Wharton’s theories were far too fine for the material with which she worked. When the three terms at the commercial college were over, Nellie was languidly grateful, but she doubted whether she should like bookkeeping; she was, however, willing to “give it a trial;” so Sara found a place in a shop for her, and, as the proprietor (another friend and dependent) could not pay the full wages, made up the sum herself. But it never occurred to Nellie to begin to pay her debt; and Sara, fearful of antagonizing the child, cast her theory to the winds, and did not suggest it.

So the first year passed. The anxious, courageous, artificial fight never flagged; and Nellie, for twelve months, was “straight.” There had been great expenditure of time and strength and money to save the little creature; and in a purely negative way the effort had been successful. Nellie was “straight.”

Yet Sara Wharton was sometimes dreadfully discouraged; she could not see a single large or noble trait in the girl, although it was her sweet and loving theory to believe in what she did not see.

“Goodness is there, somewhere!” she used to say to herself, with a beautiful and courageous belief which was part of her own character; and then she fell back on what she had called “the greatest thing in the world:” “Goodness is there, and I’ve got to love it out!” She took Nellie’s latent goodness for granted, especially in her effort to overcome the child’s enveloping selfishness. She was constantly trying to make her realize the happiness of sacrifice.

“Nellie,” she said once, “now that you’ve got your place as bookkeeper, and are earning some money, of course you want to pay me; but I think, even before that, you must want to pay for your board at your aunt’s. She has been so good to you, you know; and I’m sure you’ll be glad to help her along a little?”

“Oh, certainly!” Nellie replied, with a blank look.

“How much do you think you can pay?” Sara suggested cheerfully.

“Well, just now,” Nellie demurred, “I really have to have a new dress; perhaps, later, I can give her a little something.”

Sara looked at her wistfully. “Don’t you want to, Nellie? I should think your very first thought would be to do something for her. Just think what she has done for you!”

“Of course, I mean to,” Nellie said, tossing her head, “but I’ve got to have a dress—and things.”

“If only,” Sara reflected, “she could once understand how awfully nice it is to give!” and then she planned that every Saturday Nellie might come to the greenhouse and get some roses from the gardener,—“and take them to the hospital. It is delightful to do that!” she said. And Nellie smiled faintly, and said, “Oh, certainly;” but only came once for the flowers.

Nevertheless, Nellie Sherman had been “rescued.” Almost the same sort of rescue would have been achieved if Sara had fastened her into a strait-jacket and locked her into a room. But with Miss Wharton on one side, and her aunt on the other, day and night, the strange, boneless, unmoral little nature “kept straight;” and in a glimmering way the girl even began to see that there were certain views which were thought admirable, and once in a while she tried them on, as it were, and regarded herself in the mirror of Miss Wharton’s warm and joyous approbation.

“I was so sorry not to see you at the club last night, Nellie,” Sara said to her one day, dropping in to buy a pair of gloves at the shop where Nellie kept the books.

“My aunt wasn’t well,” said Nellie, “and I stayed at home to take care of her.” Such a light came into Sara Wharton’s sweet face, such tenderness and triumph and quick hope, that Nellie looked at her curiously.

“That was right, Nellie, dear,” she said; “I’m so glad you did it. I’m so glad,” she repeated, and went away, her eyes misty and her heart lifted up. She could not help going in to see Mrs. Sherman, making the excuse of bringing her some fruit because she was ill, but really to share her exultation.

“Sick?” said Mrs. Sherman, “why, no, ma’am, I’m not sick, no more than I always am with worry about that there Nellie. She didn’t come home from the club last night until after eleven, and I was scared to death for fear she’d gone off with them Caligan girls—they’re fast girls, that’s what they are; and she’s struck up a great friendship with ’em. My, she’ll worry me into my grave, Nellie will. But she said you’d kept her late to help you putting away the club books,—and of course that was all right.”

III

“You owe something to your family, my child,” Mrs. Wharton said one day; “you make us all very anxious and worried by overworking so; it’s your duty to take a little rest.”

“Mother, darling,” Sara began to protest, “I really can’t go away now; the Girls’ Club and”—

“You needn’t begin the list, my dear,” her mother interrupted—“I know them all. Dear, dear! Sara, when I was a girl, young women owed some duties to their parents, as well as to all the shiftless, worthless, improper people in the world.”

“I trust I’m not a Borrioboola-Gha person,” murmured Sara.

“Don’t be foolish, my child,” Mrs. Wharton said, “and use long words when your poor old mother don’t know what they mean”—

“You darling!” said Sara, and hugged her so tightly that Mrs. Wharton remonstrated.

“It would be a great deal more to the point if, instead of kissing me, you would be an obedient child. You worry me almost to death, working so hard. I want you to come to Florida. I asked Dr. Morse if he didn’t think you were doing too much, and he said you took a great deal of unnecessary trouble; so you see he agrees with me.”

“Mother, dear, how you adore doctors! Dr. Morse doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But you might tell me what else he said?”

“Oh, some nonsense about—about your being of so much value to Mercer,” Mrs. Wharton admitted, with evident fear that one statement might lessen the effect of the other.

But whether it was Dr. Morse’s understanding of the value of her work, or whether it was her mother’s entreaties, Sara at last agreed to go away for a little while, though it was hard work to get things in running order for a three months’ absence of their head. Nellie was her greatest anxiety; three months without oversight and guidance—who could tell what might happen! So Sara made many plans; the girl was to be guarded on this side and on that: she was to have steady work, and she was to have frequent amusement; pleasure and profit were all arranged. And before she went, Sara had a little talk with her. She had sent for the girl, who came up into her bedroom, where, just before dinner, Miss Wharton was sitting in the firelight. The pretty room was full of dusky shadows; its faint scent of roses, its deep, soft chairs, the shimmer of silver on the toilet-table, all its delicate luxury, was evident enough to Nellie. The sullen upper lip swelled out as she looked enviously about her. She liked the touch of the silk cushions, the feeling of the soft white rug under her feet; the color of Miss Wharton’s crimson tea-gown fed her eyes with delight. She hardly heard what the young lady was saying.

“Nellie, dear, I want you to try your very best to be good while I’m away.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Nellie, with a sigh.

Sara clasped her hands together over her knees, and held her lip between her teeth, drawing in her breath; Nellie watched her rings wink and flash in the firelight.

“Nellie” (Sara was saying to herself, “Oh, I hope I will say what is wise. I hope I can touch her!”), “Nellie, you know how I have always believed in you, and hoped for you, and loved you; and just because I have, and because I am truly, truly your friend, I want to ask you to do two things for me while I’m away: first, promise me not to tell another lie; oh, Nellie, you don’t know how unhappy you made me when you told me that lie about the club.”

Nellie dropped her head upon her breast, and made no answer.

“And then,” Sara went on, “I want you to try not to be so selfish. I am so grieved to have you indifferent to Mrs. Sherman’s kindness to you. She told me that you had only given her one dollar and seventy-five cents since you went to work. And don’t you see, you have been receiving everything she could give you, of love and care, and yet you have given her nothing! You haven’t even been kind to her, Nellie.”

“Oh!” said Nellie, “well, I wish I was dead. Everybody’s always finding fault. I’m sure there’s lots of girls worse than me. But I’m always being picked at. I wish I was dead.”

Sara was nervous and overstrained; besides, she was conscious of a sort of physical disgust at this poor, repulsive little being; her self-reproach brought the tears to her eyes. “I didn’t mean to be hard on you, Nellie,” she said, “only I want you to try.”

“I always try,” said Nellie.

“And,” Sara’s brave young voice went on, “I do want you to feel that—that Christ cares; that God cares, Nellie, that you shall be a good, true, dear girl. Will you just think of that, Nellie?”

“Why, of course,” Nellie answered resentfully, wiping her eyes. “I do always. My aunt makes me go to church every Sunday. Miss Sara, do you think you have any pieces of velvet in your rag-bag?”

Sara started. “Rag-bag?” she repeated vaguely, “velvet?”

“I thought I could trim my hat over,” Nellie explained. “You’ve got so many things,” she ended sullenly.

Sara was silent for a few minutes, reasoning with herself. After all, Nellie was young; it was natural for her to like pretty things.

“Yes, I can give you some velvet, I think,” she said cheerfully; “and, Nellie, I have a plan for you; what are you going to give your aunt for a Christmas gift?”

Nellie looked up blankly.

“I know you’ll want to give her something,” Sara went on, “and I was thinking of a nice chair. What do you think of that?”

“A chair!” repeated Nellie in astonishment. “Why, I wouldn’t buy a chair for myself!”

Sara sighed. “But you would like the fun of buying one for somebody else, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I ain’t got any money,” the girl said uneasily; and then Miss Wharton unfolded her plan, which was that she should give Nellie five dollars, and Nellie would add what she could, and a present should be purchased.

“Add something, if it’s only a dollar,” Sara said pleadingly; “a good, comfortable chair can be bought for six dollars.”

“A’ right; I don’t mind,” Nellie agreed, in a wearied way. She did not understand all this talk; she saw no reason in Miss Sara’s giving Mrs. Sherman a chair, and saying it was Nellie’s gift; still, she didn’t mind.

“You’ll like to do that, won’t you, Nellie?” Sara said anxiously.

“Oh, certainly,” said Nellie, and then she rose, for Miss Wharton was silent, and that seemed a sign of dismissal.

Sara rose, too, and stood looking at her visitor for a moment; then, suddenly she put her arm around the little thin shoulders, and drew the girl to her, and kissed her. “Oh, Nellie,” she said, her voice passionate and trembling,—“Oh, Nellie, dear! I—I wish I knew what to say, to show you—to make you feel”—her voice broke; Nellie was greatly embarrassed;—“but just believe I love you, won’t you? and be good!”

“Why,” said Nellie, with a sigh of fatigue and reproach, “certainly!” Then she added, “Well, good-by; hope you’ll have a delightful time, I’m sure,” and closed Miss Sara’s door, with a sense of relief that was like the lifting of some harassing weight. She came slowly downstairs, pulling on her soiled gloves, and walking with a mincing step. Escaped from Miss Wharton’s room, she felt as if all the luxury of this great house—the color, the lights, the soft carpet under her feet, the sparkle of the firelight in the hall below—was hers, and so she assumed the gait and the manner which she conceived to belong to an owner. The inside-man was just lighting a lamp under a big rose-colored shade, and Nellie threw up her head with a haughty look, and drew down the corners of her mouth, sweeping past him toward the door. James, however, smiled with great politeness.

“Oh, g’d evening, Miss Sherman,” he said. “My! it does seem to get dark early these days, doesn’t it?”

Nellie’s lofty coldness melted instantly. She simpered and said, “Is that so?”

“It’s quite late for a young lady to be out alone,” James remarked with grave solicitude.

“Oh, that’s a’ right,” Nellie protested.

She was smiling, and holding her head coquettishly, and looking up at him with great archness. She dropped her handkerchief as she reached the front door and James picked it up, and handed it to her with an elaborate bow. He caught her fingers in his own as he did so, and they both giggled, and Nellie said, “Now, you stop that!”

They lowered their voices with an apprehensive look towards the staircase; James opened the door and stepped out on the porch with her. “Well, you oughtn’t to be severe, Miss Sherman; it’s such a little hand, a gentleman can’t help it; Miss Sara’s is twice as big.”

“Is that so?” said Nellie; and then they both looked up at the sky, and James observed that the weather was threatening, and it certainly was too dark for a young lady, a beautiful young lady, to be out alone.

“Oh, that’s a’ right,” Nellie reassured him politely.

James in an absent-minded way put his arm round her, and said he thought ladies ought always to have gentlemen escorts.

“Is that so?” Nellie answered, simpering; and, with the same apparent absence of mind, sidling closer to him, which induced his easy caresses; “well, I must be going along,” she announced, giggling.

“Well, good-by, Miss Sherman,” said the chivalrous James, and gave her a hearty kiss, which made Nellie slap at him with one hand, and say, “Now you stop that!” and go off, still giggling, into the darkness.

Sara Wharton, upstairs by her fire, had dropped her face in her hands, and was saying to herself, “I must trust her more, and believe in her more! Oh, I am sure she tries—poor little Nellie.”

And certainly poor Nellie was not conscious of any lack of trying, so far as the episode with James was concerned. To her, as well as to him, it was very harmless, that kiss in the porch. And really to call such a thing “sin” is to lift it to a level where it does not belong.

But probably Sara Wharton was constitutionally unable to understand that.

The people who try to make silk purses out of inadequate materials rarely can understand it.

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!”

V

So Nellie’s summer outing was arranged: she was to have four months in a quiet place in the country; plenty of fresh air, and good milk, and wholesome food.

No wonder the little pale cheeks grew round and faintly pink; that her eyes seemed darker and brighter; her pinched, white lips fuller and redder. In a month it was evident that the quiet life which Sara had taken such pains to find was good for her; her whole miserable, sickly body began to thrive. It was a “quiet” life. From the girl’s point of view it was perfectly intolerable. She endured, in her way, the misery of the intellectual man or woman cut off absolutely from books or study of any kind, or of a clean person obliged to live in filth. The contrast was as great. The fact that it was in favor of righteousness did not make it any the less painful. Nellie’s sudden removal from the cheap and base excitements of her life caused absolute suffering. Such suffering, untempted reformers argue, is good for the soul.

But to Nellie the sweet drift of silent summer days was maddeningly dull; she brooded over what she felt was the hardship of her lot, and looked back upon her Mercer life as a time of freedom, and of a strange sort of importance,—which was as near self-respect as she could come. At least, in Mercer she was not “trod on,” as she now felt herself to be; she could go and walk the street on fine afternoons with the Caligan girls, three abreast, arm in arm, strutting and jostling each other, and looking into the shop windows; laughing loudly, or glancing haughtily at the passers-by, or giggling at “gentlemen friends.” It was all so harmless and so pleasant! Of course, Mrs. Smith’s on Baker Street, that was different; but just to meet lady and gentlemen friends, and talk and “carry on”—what was wrong in that? She did, to be sure, feel nervous about her health; but if it were necessary to go into the country, why couldn’t she have gone to a hotel, where she could have had some fun? It seemed a cruel life to Nellie! She came to feel toward Sara Wharton, instead of the uncomfortable resentment which in such natures takes the place of gratitude, a venomous hatred. Sara seemed to this poor, mean soul, a powerful enemy, one who interfered with every joy, and, not content with that, who “talked;” and Nellie hated talk. Like most of her class, except when in a rage, she had little to say beyond exclamations, and Miss Wharton’s impetuous flow of words, her entreaties, and rebukes, and suggestions, had only bewildered and irritated the girl; for Sara, like most of her class, had never taken Nellie’s mental deficiencies into account; she treated her always like a rational being. Like a “Soul,” Sara herself would have said.

So, up on the farm, as her fright about her health subsided, poor Nellie raged against her benefactor and her cruel fate. She fell into fits of weeping, or, what was worse to the quiet husband and wife in whose charge she was, into long silences, broken only by fitful flashes of black temper. Yet in spite of this, her bodily health increased. Very likely there would have been open rebellion, and a break for liberty by midsummer, if an unexpected interest had not come into her life. Two students, with their tutor, came to camp out near the farm; and after passing them once or twice in the road, and giggling with them over the posting of a letter in the office, poor Nellie grew better tempered. She frizzed her hair with keener enjoyment, and practiced airs and graces before her glass all the long hot forenoons; and in the afternoons walked in to the village on the remote chance of meeting the two boys. She did not see them often, but to know they were near gave her something to think about in the deadly monotony of farm life, and she was much happier. On the rare occasions of their meeting she would roll her eyes, and talk in her simpering, nasal voice of the weather, or the novel she had been reading, or how her “guardian” had sent her into the country for her health. The boys said to each other that she was pretty, and ripping good fun; and used to laugh over her silliness with their tutor. They were too busy and too wholesomely happy to give very much thought to her.

Thus the summer passed. The health which Sara Wharton so earnestly desired had returned, temporarily at least. When at last the first of September came, and Miss Wharton’s letter arrived to say she might come home,—such a gentle, friendly, sympathetic letter,—Nellie was wild with delight. She could hardly remember to say good-by to the kind people who had looked after her for the last few months; she almost forgot the boys; she was tremulous with joy.

“Oh, I’m so glad to go back—oh, I hate, hate, hate the country!” she kept saying; while the husband and wife looked at each other wonderingly.

So, strengthened and invigorated, panting for excitement, unchecked by any moral perceptions, by gratitude, by love, even by fear (now that she was well again),—she came back to Mercer.

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!”

The Riverside Press

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