An Imperative Duty. William Dean Howells
him, and that will vex him, but we can't of an Irishman. You treat him with the greatest rudeness and he doesn't mind it; then you propose to be particularly kind and nice, and he takes fire with the most bewildering offence."
"I know it," said Miss Aldgate. "That was the way with all our cooks in New York. Don't you remember, aunty?"
Mrs. Meredith made no answer.
"We can't call them stupid," Olney went on. "I think that as a general thing the Irish are quicker-witted than we are. They're sympathetic and poetic far beyond us. But they can't understand the simplest thing from us. Perhaps they set the high constructive faculties of the imagination at work, when they ought to use a little attention and mere common- sense. At any rate they seem more foreign to our intelligence, our way of thinking, than the Jews--or the negroes even."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that about the negroes," said Miss Aldgate. "We were having a dispute this afternoon," she explained, "about the white waiters here and the colored waiters at the Hotel Vendome. I was calling on some friends we have there," and Miss Aldgate flushed a little as she said this: " or rather, they came here to see us, and then I drove back with them a moment; and it made me quite homesick to come away and leave those black waiters. Don't you think they're charming? With those soft voices and gentle manners? My aunt has no patience with me; she can't bear to have me look at them; but I never see one of them without loving them. I suppose it's because they're about the first thing I can remember. I was born in the South, you know. Perhaps I got to having a sort of fellow- feeling with them from my old black nurse. You know the Italians say you do."
She turned vividly toward Olney, as if to refer the scientific point to him, but he put it by with a laugh.
"I'm afraid I feel about them as Miss Aldgate does, Mrs. Meredith; and I hadn't an old nurse, either. I've been finding them wherever I've seen them, since I got back." Miss Aldgate clapped her hands. "To be sure, I haven't been here long enough to get tired of them."
"Oh, I should never tire of them! " said the girl. "But so far, certainly, they seem to me the most agreeable, the most interesting feature of the social spectacle."
"There, Aunt Caroline!"
"I must confess," Olney went on, "that it's given me a distinct pleasure whenever I've met one of them. They seem to be the only people left who have any heart for life here; they all look hopeful and happy, even in the rejection from their fellow- men, which strikes me as one of the most preposterous, the most monstrous things in the world, now I've got back to it here."
Mrs. Meredith lay with her hand shading her eyes and half her face. She asked, without taking her hand away, "Would you like to meet them on terms of social equality--intermarry with them?"
"Oh, now, Aunt Caroline! " Miss Aldgate broke in. Who's talking of anything like that?"
"I certainly am not," said Olney, as far as the intermarrying is concerned. But short of that I don't see why one shouldn't associate with them. There are terms a good deal short of the affection we lavish on dogs and horses that I fancy they might be very glad of. We might recognize them as fellow-beings in public, if we don't in private; but we ignore, if we don't repulse them at every point-from our business as well as our bosoms. Yes, it strikes one as very odd on getting home--very funny, very painful. You would think we might meet on common ground before our common God--but we don't. They have their own churches, and I suppose it would be as surprising to find one of them at a white communion-table as it would to find one at a white dinner-party."
Olney said this without the least feeling about the matter, except a sense of its grotesqueness. He was himself an agnostic, but he could be as censorious of the Christians who denied Christ in the sacrament, as if he had himself been a better sort. He added:
"Possibly the negroes would be welcome in a Catholic church; the Catholics seem to have kept the ideal of Christian equality in their churches. If ever they turn their attention to the negroes--"
"Oh, I can't imagine a colored Catholic," said Miss Aldgate. "There seems something unnatural in the very idea."
"All the same, there are a good many of them."
"In Boston?"
"No, not in Boston, I fancy." Mrs. Meredith had taken no farther part in the con- versation; she lay rigidly quiet on her sofa, with her hand shading her eyes.
There was a knock at the door, and Miss Aldgate sprang to open it, with the effect of being glad to work off her exuberant activity in that or any other way: with Mrs. Meredith so passive, and Olney so acquiescent, the discussion of the race problem was not half enough for her.
The man was there, with the bottle from the apothecary's, and he and Miss Aldgate had a beaming little interview. He exulted in getting back with the medicine all right, and she gratefully accepted his high sense of his offices, and repaid him his outlay, running about the room, and opening several trunks and bags to find her purse, and then added something for his trouble.
"Dear me! " she said, when she got rid of him, "I wish they wouldn't make it quite so clear that they expected to be I remembered." They've kept my memory on the qui vive every moment I've been in the hotel."
Olney smiled in sympathy as he took the bottle from her. "I've found it impossible to forget the least thing they've done for me, and I never boasted of my memory."
She stood watching his examination of the label of the bottle, and his test of its contents from a touch of the inner tip of the cork on his tongue. "A spoon? I've got one here in aunty's medicine chest. It would have cost its weight in silver to get one from the din- ing-room. And there happens to be ice-water, if you have to give it in water. Don't say water without ice!"
"Ice-water will do," said Olney. He began to drop the medicine from the bottle into the spoon, which he then poured into the glass of water she brought him. "I believe," he said, stirring it, "that if the negroes ever have their turn--and if the meek are to inherit the earth they must come to it -- we shall have a civilization of such sweetness and good-will as the world has never known yet. Perhaps we shall have to wait their turn for any real Christian civilization."
"You remember the black Madonna at Florence, that used to be so popular? What Madonna was it? I suppose they will revere her, when they get to be all Catholics. Were you in any of their churches to-day? You were saying--" Miss Aldgate put out her hand for the glass.
"No; I never was in a colored church in my life," said Olney. "I'm critical, not constructive, in my humanity. It's easier."
He went himself with the glass to Mrs. Meredith. She seemed not to have been paying any attention to his talk with her niece. She lifted herself up at his approach, and took the glass from him.
"Shall I drink it all?"
"Yes--you can take all of it."
She quaffed it at one nervous gulp, and flung her head heavily down again. "I don't believe it will make me sleep," she said.
Olney smiled. "Well, fortunately, this kind doesn't require the co-operation of the patient. It will make you sleep, I think. You may try keeping awake, if you like."
She opened her eyes with a flash. "Is it chloral?"
"No, it isn't chloral."
"Tell me the truth!" She laid a convulsive clutch upon his wrist, as he sat fronting her and curiously watching her. "I will not let you justify yourself by that code of yours which lets the doctor cheat his patient! If you have been giving me some form of chloral - "
"I haven't been giving you any form of chloral," said Olney, beginning to smile.
"Then you are trying to hypnotize me!"
Olney burst into a laugh. "You certainly need sleep, Mrs. Meredith! I'll look in during the fore-noon, about the time you ought to wake, and de-hypnotize you." He moved toward the door; but before he reached it he stopped and said, seriously: "I don't know of any code that would allow me to cheat you, against your will. I don't believe any doctor