"Tony," she replied, "I'd rather be wretched with you--if I were, and I'm not, dear. I'd rather be unhappy along of you than the happiest queen."

He kissed her hand with a gallantry new to her and which made her crimson, and half laugh and half cry.

She went early to bed, and Antony, alone in the kitchen, raked down the coals, covered the fire in the stove, heard the clock tick and the whistles of the boat on the river. In the silence of the winter night, as it fell around him, he thought: "I reckon I'll have to try to make her happy, even if I cut out my miserable talent and kill it." And as he straightened himself he felt the Presence there. The solemn Presence that had come with her to his workshop and kept him company, and it was so impressive that he pa.s.sed his hand across his forehead as though dazed, and opened the door of his bedroom to see her and be a.s.sured. She was already asleep; by her side, the little basket prepared, waited for the life to come. He stepped in softly, and his heart melted. He knelt down and buried his face in the pillow by her side, and without waking she turned her face toward him in her sleep.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

He did not go to the studio for a month, but though he remained with her the poor girl profited little by his company. He smoked countless cigarettes, in spite of the fact that he had doctor's bills to look forward to. In the long winter evenings he read books that he fetched from the library while the blizzards and storms swept round the window, and the next day his duties stared him in the face. He dreamed before the stove, his cigarette between his fingers, and Molly watched him; but Rainsford, when he came, did not find her any more alone.

Finally, in the last Sunday of January, after the noon dinner, she fetched him his coat and m.u.f.fler.

"I can't let you stay home any more like this, Tony," she told him.

"Take your things and go to the studio; I'm sure you're dying to, and don't hurry back. I'm feeling fine."

He caught her suggestion with an eagerness that made her bite her lip; she kept her face from him lest he should see her disappointment. He exclaimed joyously--

"Why, I reckon you're right, Molly. I _will_ go for awhile. I'll work all the better for the holiday."

He might have said "sacrifice."

As he got into his things he asked her: "You're sure you'll not need anything, Molly? You think it's all right for me to go?"

She a.s.sured him she would rest and sleep, and that the woman "below stairs" would come up if she wanted anything. He mustn't hurry.

He took the studio key. He was gone, his uneven step echoed on the narrow stairs. She listened till it died away.

Fairfax before his panel during the afternoon worked as though Fate were at his heels. When he came in the room was bitter cold, and it took the big fire he built long to make the shed inhabitable; but no sooner had the chill left the air, and he unwrapped his plaster, than a score of ideas came beating upon him like emanc.i.p.ated ghosts and shades, and he saw the forms, though the faces were still veiled. He sang and whistled, he declaimed aloud as the clay he mixed softened and rolled under his fingers.... It let him shape it, its magic was under his thumb, its plasticity, its response fascinated the sculptor. He tried now with the intensity of his being to fix his conception for the gate of Death and Eternal Life. He had already made his drawing for the new scaffolding, and it would take him two Sundays to build it up. Falutini would help him.

It seemed strange to work without Molly sitting in her corner. He wondered how long the daylight would last; he had three months still until spring; that meant twelve Sundays. He thought of Molly's approaching illness, and a shadow crossed his face. Why had he come back only to tempt and tantalize himself with freedom and the joy of creation?

Sunday-Albany outside was as tranquil as the tomb, and scarcely a footstep pa.s.sed under his window. The snow lay light upon the window-ledge and the roof, and as the room grew warmer the cordial light fell upon him as he worked, and a sense of the right to labour, the right to be free, made him take heart and inspired his hand. He began the sketch of his group on a large scale.

As he bent over his board the snow without shifted rustling from the roof, and the slipping, feathery shower fell gleaming before his window; the sound made him glance up and back towards the door. As he did so he recalled, with the artist's vivid vision, the form of his wife, as she had stood in the opened door, her arm along the panel, in the att.i.tude of waiting and parting.

"By Jove!" he murmured, gazing as though it were reality. Half wondering, but with a.s.surance, he indicated what he recalled, and was drawing in rapidly, absorbed in his idea, when some one struck the door harshly from without, and Rainsford called him.

Fairfax started, threw down his pencil, and seized his hat and m.u.f.fler--he worked in his overcoat because he was cold--to follow the man who had come to fetch him in haste.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

Over and over again that night in his watch that lasted until dawn, as he walked the floor of his little parlour-kitchen and listened, as he stood in the window before the soundless winter night and listened, Fairfax said the word he had said to her when she had paused in the doorway--

"Wait...!"

For what should she wait?

Did he want her to wait until he had caught the image of her on his mind and brain that he might call upon it for his inspiration?

He called her to "wait!"

Until he should become a great master and need her with her simplicity and her humble mind less than ever? Until he should be honoured by his kind and crowned successful and come at last into his own, and she be the only shadow on his glory? Not for that!

Until Fairfax one day should need the warmth of a perfectly unselfish woman's heart, a self-effacing tenderness, a breast to lean upon? She had given him all this.

He smelled the ether and strange drugs. The doctor came and went. The nurse he had engaged from the hospital, "the woman from below stairs" as well, came and went, spoke to him and shut him out.

He was conscious that in a chair in a corner, in a desperate position, his head in his hands, Rainsford was sitting. Of these things he was conscious afterward, but he felt now that he only listened, his every emotion concentrated in the sense of hearing. What was it he was so intent to hear? The pa.s.sing of the Irrevocable or the advent of a new life? He stood at length close to her door, and it was nearly morning. A clock somewhere struck four presently, and the whistle of the Limited blew; but those were not the sounds he waited to hear.

At five o'clock, whilst it was still dark in the winter morning, he started, his heart thumping against his breast, a sob in his throat. Out of the stillness which to him had been unbroken, came a cry, then another, terribly sweet and heart-touching--the cry of life. He opened the door of his wife's room and entered softly in his stocking feet.

There seemed to be a mult.i.tude between him and his wife and child. He did not dare to approach, but stood leaning against the wall, cold with apprehension and stirred to his depths. He seemed to stand there for a lifetime, and his knees nearly gave way beneath him. His hand pressed against his cheek. He leaned forward.

"_Wait!_"

He almost murmured the word that came to his lips.

For what should Molly Fairfax wait? Life had given her a state too high.

She had brought much grace to it and much love. She had given a great deal. To wait for return, for such gifts, was to wait for the unattainable.

She went through the open door that she saw open, perhaps not all unwillingly; and she was not alone, for the child went with her, and they came to Fairfax and told him that she had gone through gently murmuring his name.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

As Nut Street, with the destruction of his little statue, had been wiped out of his history, so the two rooms overlooking the river and steamboats knew Antony Fairfax no more. He turned the key in the door the day they carried away the body of his wife, and when he came back from the snowy earth and the snowy white city where he left her with his hour-old child, he went to the Delavan House as he had done before, and buried his head in his arms on his lowly bed in a hotel room and wept.

The following day he sent word to Rainsford to look out for another engineer in his place. He had driven his last trip.

t.i.to Falutini wrung his friend's hand, and told Fairfax, in his broken Italian-English, that he knew a fellow would take the rooms as they stood. "Would Tony give the job to him?" Save for his clothes and Molly's things, and they were few, he took nothing, not even the drawings decorating the wall on which other Irish eyes should look with admiration.

He interviewed the jewellers again. They gave him four hundred dollars and took his mother's ring. He paid his doctor's bills and funeral expenses, and had fifty dollars left until he should finish his bas-relief. He went to live at the Ca.n.a.l Street studio and shut himself up with his visions, his freedom, his strange reproach and his sense of untrammelled wings.

He worked with impa.s.sioned fervour, for now he _knew_. He modelled with a.s.surance, for now he _saw_. His hands were so eager to create the idea of his brain that he sighed as he worked, fairly panted at his task as though he ran a race with inspiration. Half-fed, sometimes quite sleepless, he lost weight and flesh. He missed the open-air life of the engine and the air at his ears. But now at his ears were the audible voices of his conceptions. February and March pa.s.sed. His models were, a mannequin, his studies of Molly Fairfax, and once the daughter of the man who rented him the workshop stood before him draped in the long garment; but he sent her away: she was too _living_ for his use. He ate in little cheap restaurants down by the riverside, or cooked himself coffee and eggs over his lamp, and wondered who would be the first to break the silence and isolation, for it was six weeks before he saw a single human being save those he pa.s.sed in the street.

"Rainsford," he said to the agent, who on the last day of March came slowly in at noon, walking like a man just out of a long illness, "I reckoned you'd be along when you were ready. I've waited for you here."

Fairfax's hand was listlessly touched by his friend's, then Rainsford went over and took Molly's place by the lamp. Fairfax checked the words, "Not _there_, for G.o.d's sake, Rainsford!" He thought, "Let the living come. Nothing can brush away the image of her sitting there in the lamplight, no matter how many fill the place."

Rainsford's eyes were hollow, and his tone as pale as his face, whose sunken cheeks and hollows, to Fairfax, marked the progress of a fatal disease. His voice sounded hoa.r.s.e and strained; he spoke with effort.