CHAPTER XII

Mrs. Kenny, with prodigal hospitality, took Molly in for over Sunday.

Fairfax walked alongside of her to his boarding-house, carrying the imitation leather bag, talking to her, laughing with her, calling the colour back and making her eyes bright. He found himself, with his young lady, before the threshold of Kenny's hotel. "Gents only." Whether this was the rule or an idea only, Fairfax wondered, for Molly was not the first one of the gentler s.e.x who had been cordially entertained in the boarding-house! Mrs. Kenny's sister and her sister's child, her mother and aunts three, had successively come down on the hotel during Fairfax's pa.s.sing, and been lavishly entertained, anywhere and everywhere, even under Fairfax's feet, for he had come out one morning from his door to find two little girls sleeping on a mattress in the hall.

All his lifelong Fairfax retained an adoration for landladies. They had such tempting opportunities to display qualities that console and enn.o.ble, and the landladies with whom he had come in contact took advantage of their opportunities! It didn't seem enough to wait five weeks for a chap to pay up, when one's own rent was due, but the landlady must buy chicken at ruinous prices when a chap was ill, and make soup and put rice in it, and carry it steaming, flecked with rich golden grease, put pot-pie b.a.l.l.s in it and present it to a famishing fireman who could do no more than kiss the hand, the chapped hand, that brought the bowl.

"Now _wud_ ye, Misther Fairfax?"

He would, as if it had been his mother's!

Nut Street was moral, domestic and in proportion severe. Mary Kenny had not been born there; she had come with her husband from the happy-go-lucky, pig-harbouring shanties of County Cork. She was the most unprejudiced soul in the neighbourhood. Between boarders, a lazy husband, six children and bad debts, she had little time to gossip, but plenty of time in which to be generous.

"I _wull_ that!" she a.s.sured Molly. "Ye'll sleep in the kitchen on a shakedown, and the divil knows where it'll shake _from_ for I haven't a spare bed in the house!"

Molly would only stay till Monday.... Fairfax put her little bag on the kitchen table, where a coa.r.s.e cloth was spread, and the steam greeted them of a real Irish stew, and the odour of less genuine coffee tickled their appet.i.tes.

Molly Shannon considered Fairfax in his new Easter Sunday spring clothes. From his high collar, white as Nut Street could white it, to his polished boots--he was a pleasant thing to look upon. His cravat was as blue as his eyes. His moustache was brushed carefully from his young, well-made mouth, and he beamed with good humour on every one.

"Shure, dinner's dished, and the childer and Kenny are up to the cemetery pickin' vi'lets. Set right down, the rest will be along. Set down, Misther Fairfax and Molly Shannon."

After dinner, up in his room, the walls seemed to have contracted. The kitchen's smoky air rose even here, and he flung his window wide to the April sweetness. The atmosphere was too windless to come in and wrestle with the smell of frying, but he saw the day was golden as a draught waiting to be quaffed. The restricted schedule of Sunday cast a quiet over the yards, and from the distance Fairfax heard sounds that were not distinguishable in the weekday confusion, the striking of the hour from the Catholic Church bell, the voices of the children playing in the streets. There was a letter lying on his bureau from his mother: he had not had the heart to read it to-day. The gymnasium was shut for repairs, there was no ball game on for Easter Day, and, after a second's hesitation, he caught up his hat from where he had dropped it at his feet and rushed downstairs into the kitchen.

Molly, her sleeves rolled up, was washing dishes for Mrs. Kenny.

"Don't you want to come out with me for a walk?" Fairfax asked her.

"Go along," said Mrs. Kenny, giving her a shove with her bare elbow.

"I'll make out alone fine. The suds is elegant. If you meet Kenny and the children, tell them there's not a bit left but the lashins of the stew, and to hurry up."

CHAPTER XIII

There was a divine fragrance in the air. Fairfax stopped to gather a few anemones and handed them to his silent companion.

"Since you have grown so pale in the collar factory, Miss Molly, you look like these flowers."

He stretched out his, arms, bared his head, flung it up and looked toward the woodland up the slope and saw the snow-white stones on the hill, above the box borders and the cedar borders of the burial place: above, the sky was blue as a bird's wing.

"Let me help you." He put his hand under her arm and walked with her up the hill. They breathed together; the sweet air with its blossomy scent touched their lips, and the ancient message of spring spoke to them. He was on Molly's left side; beneath his arm he could feel her fluttering heart and his own went fast. At the hill top they paused at the entrance to a pretentious lot, with high white shafts and imposing columns, broken by the crude whiteness of a single marble cross. Brightly it stood out against the air and the dark green of cedar and box.

"This is the most perfect monument," he said aloud, "the most harmonious; indeed, it is the only relief to the eye."

On every grave were Easter garlands, crosses and wreaths; the air was heavy with lilac and with lily.

Except for a few monosyllables Molly said nothing, but now, as they paused side by side, she murmured--

"It's beautiful quiet after the racket of the shops; it's like heaven!"

Fairfax's glance wandered over the acres of monuments, marking the marble city, and came back to the living girl at his side.

"It's a strange place for two young people to stroll about in, Miss Molly."

Molly Shannon stood meekly, her work-stained hands clasped loosely before her and in her form were the beauties of youth, virginity, chast.i.ty, promise of life and fecundity, and, for Fairfax, of pa.s.sion.

"Ah, I don't know," she answered him slowly, "I think it's lovely and quiet here. Back in Troy next week when we work overtime and the boss gets mad, I'll think of it likely, I guess."

He talked to her as they strolled, realizing his need of companionship, and his pent-up heart poured itself forth as they walked between the graves, and he told the Irish girl of Bella and little Gardiner, and of his grief.

"I don't know what I did that day," he finished. "I was a brute to my aunt and to the little girl. I laid him down on his bed and rushed out like a crazy man; the house seemed to haunt me. I must have been ill then. I recall that my aunt called to me and that Bella hung on my arm and that I shook her off. I recall that my uncle followed me downstairs and stood by me while I got into my overcoat, but I was too savage and too miserably proud to answer him. I left him talking to me and the little girl crying on the stairs."

She asked him timidly, "What had they done to make you hate them so?"

She told herself in her humility that he was a gentleman and not for her.

He continued, carried away by the fact of a good listener, and, although she listened, she understood less than Benvenuto Cellini, less, even, than the children. He came up against so many things that were impossible to tell her that he stopped at length, laughing.

"You see how a chap runs on when he has a friend by him, Miss Molly. Why do you go back to the collar factory?"

He stopped short, remembering what Sanders had said, and that Nut Street had shut its doors against her. They had come down through the cemetery to the main avenue that stretched, s.p.a.cious and broad, between the dwellings of the dead. They sauntered slowly side by side, an incongruous, appealing couple. He saw her worn shoes, the poor skirt, the hands discoloured as were his, through toil, and his glance followed up the line of her form and his artistic sense told him that it was lovely. Under her coa.r.s.e bodice the breast gently swelled with her breath, her eyes were downcast, and there was an appealing charm about her that a young man in need of love could not gainsay. Pity for her had been growing long in Fairfax--since the first day he saw her in the coffee house, since the time when he had decided to go elsewhere for his meals.

She stopped at the foot of the avenue and said something was beautiful, and he looked up. The marble figure of an angel on a grey pedestal rose at the gate, a colossal figure in snowy marble, with folded wings and one uplifted hand. There was a solemn majesty in the creation, a fine, n.o.ble, holy majesty, and the sculptor halted before it so long, his face grave and his eyes absorbed, that when Molly sighed, he started. Along the base ran the words--

"_Why seek ye the living among the dead?_"

"Come," he said brusquely to his companion; "come. This is no place for us." And he hurried her out of the grounds.

On the way home his silence was not flattering to his companion, who was too meek to be offended. Already the pleasure of being by his side was well-nigh too much for her swelling heart to bear. The lengthening twilight filled Nut Street as they turned into it, and very nearly every member of the little working colony was out of doors, including the Sheedys and the new tenants of Sanders' old room. Walking alongside of Molly Shannon, Fairfax understood what his promenade would mean. He glanced at his companion and saw her colour, and she raised her head with a dignity that touched him, and as they pa.s.sed the Sheedys he said "Good-evening" in his pleasant Southern voice, lifting his hat as though they had been of his own kind. He drew the Irish girl's arm within his own.

For Molly, she walked a gamut of misery, and the sudden realization of the solemnity of the thing he was doing made the young man's heart beat heavily.

CHAPTER XIV

He had been gone from home more than a year, his mother wrote. "One cannot expect to carve a career in twelve months' time, Tony, and yet I am so impatient for you, my darling, I am certain you have gone far and have splendid things to show me. Are you sure that Albany is the place for you? Would it not have been better to have stayed on with Cedersholm? When will you run down to your old mother, dearest? I long for the sound of your footstep, the dear broken footstep, Tony...." Then she went on to say not to mind her foolishness, not to think of her as mourning, but to continue with his beautiful things. She had not been very well of late--a touch of fever, she reckoned: Emmeline took the best of care of her. She was better.

He let the pages fall, reading them hastily, eagerly, approaching in his thought of her everything he had longed to be, had yearned to be, might have been, and the letter with its elegant fine writing and the fluttering thin sheets rustled ghost-like in his hand. As he turned the pages a leaf of jasmine she had put between the sheets fell unseen to the floor.

He would go to New Orleans at once: he would throw himself at his mother's knees and tell her his failures, his temptations, his griefs: he would get a transfer to some Southern train, he would steal a ride, but he would go. His mother's pride would suffer when she saw what he had become, but he was not bringing her home a shameful story. She would ask to see his beautiful creations--alas! even his ideals were buried under grime and smoke, their voices drowned in whistles and bells! He folded his arms across his breast, the last sheet of the long letter in his hand, and again his room stifled him as it had done before when he had flown out to walk with the Irish girl. The walls closed in upon him.

The ceiling seemed to confine him like a coffin lid, and the flickering gas jet over his bureau burned pale like a burial candle....

He groaned, started forward to the door as though he would begin his journey home immediately, but like many a wanderer who starts on his voyage home and finds the old landmarks displaced, before Fairfax could take the first step forward, his course was for ever changed.... He had not heard Molly's knock at the door. The girl came in timidly, holding out a telegram; she brought it as she had brought the other, without comment, but with the Irish presentiment of ill, she remained waiting silently, knowing in her humble breast that she was all he had.