"A--_what_?"

"A Sin-eater. I'm sure they're still being worn in Ireland. A Sin-eater is a man who has had a great sorrow or committed a great crime----"

"Miss _Vail_!"

"--and lives in a damp and dismal cave across a slimy moor and whenever any one dies unshriven, he is sent for, and he comes after dark, his face shrouded, and prays and moans all night beside the corpse, eating all he possibly can of the food which has been placed about it, and what he can't consume on the spot he takes away before dawn, in a sack, and that is his larder, you see, until the next sudden death! And, of course, the idea is that he has taken the sins of the departed upon his own soul, and that when he has done it long enough and meekly enough he will be permitted to die, himself, and other people's sins will have miraculously cleansed him of his own!"

"I never heard anything so--so revolting," said the Superintendent in her most smothered voice.

"Oh, do you find it so? To me it seems very quaint and charming." She was ashamed of her small-boy impishness but for sheer high spirits she could not seem to stop. "But perhaps," she allowed it grudgingly, "he didn't commit a crime; perhaps he was merely crossed in love, or--likeliest of all--a.s.sumed the burden of another's misdeed! A wild young brother, or The Heir! That's it,--The Heir! And Michael, with proper younger-son humility, realized that he didn't count, and took the blame and fled to the States, and now The Heir has died, first doing the decent thing in the way of death-bed remorse and confession. And, of course, there's a girl in it somewhere, and I'm sure she has waited for Michael all these years instead of marrying The Heir, aren't you?"

But for the most part her mood was one of amazing gentleness and serenity, with that insistent desire for being good enough and worthy enough for the glory about to descend upon her. She made little pilgrimages to all the people they had helped together,--to Ethel and Jerry and Billiken in Rochester, snugly prosperous and happy, with a little Jerry, now, whose ears f.l.a.n.g.ed exactly as his father's did; to Chicago, to confer with little Miss Marjorie and the Roderick Frosts about the making of the old house where Roderick IV was born into a Maternity Home, and to gladden the good little Stranger's Friend with a fat check for her work, and to puncture Mrs. Mussel's gloom with substantial gifts and the bright and bonny refurnishing of the Christian room for girls such as Edna Miles pretended to be; to catch up with the girl who had taken her "CROWDED HOUR" to success, always on tour now, in one of her playlets, and married to the brother of "BROTHER" ("BROTHER"

himself having given up and gone to make the long fight on the desert).

She went, fur-bundled and red-cheeked, to spend a week-end with Deacon Gillespie and "Angerleek" at Three Meadows, and found one of the daughters at home, and the old man told her that two of the sons were coming for their summer vacations. Angelique was animated with timid cheer; _he'd_ been different, gentler, since Danny....

Jane went back to New York with June in her heart. Was not this a part of her life with Michael since he had sent her to that lean, clean island to snare back her soul? This was part of the harvest they had sown together, for everything she had done since coming to know him had been shared with him. There came a moment, of course, when her sense of sanctification broke like a bubble. "I feel like the Elsie Books," she said, grinning her boy's grin at herself. "I'd better go home and let Mrs. Wetherby put me in my place!"

But even in her Vermont village she found balm. They might hold, with Mrs. Hills, that "Praise to the face is open disgrace," and be chary of effusions, but Jane Vail was the brightest jewel in their crown, and it was only the deafest and dimmest old ladies who asked her if she was still going on with her literary work.

Mrs. Wetherby, although she would never forgive Jane to her dying day, was clearly thankful to have Martin all to herself. She fed him to repletion and washed and ironed his silk shirts with her own hands, and she loved to say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club, "Well, Marty says his mother's _his_ girl!" Martin himself was heavily cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down.

It would not be very long, now, before there was no "a.s.st." in front of the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.

The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be, without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered, and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping them....

Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy which was coming as certainly as the morning.

Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was there--Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and welcome home the wanderer--and at once the old life, the old routine, the old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.

Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been filled with meaning; that it was inevitable that he should take Emma Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had waited an hour in her sitting room--Michael Daragh had often dropped in for a chat before she went to Mexico--but when at last she heard his feet upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own floor.

And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the theater that evening (where she must go to pa.s.s upon the performance of a new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her mind--no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all--but to settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old man-she-met-on-the-boat....

Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell subst.i.tuted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost--shy, and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.

"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"

"I--I'm wondering, too," said Jane.

"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back I've been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up my courage--but 'tis the boldest and brazenest thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the doubt! I'll be there inside the hour, or a half-hour itself, and let you be merciful, Jane Vail!"

"I will be waiting," she said, "and I will be merciful."

"G.o.d love you!" he cried and hung up abruptly.

She rose from her chair and stood in the middle of her clever orange and black room, icy hands clamped tightly to her burning cheeks. So!

Journeys' end! She flew into the other room and with unsteady fingers divested herself of her severely smart business dress and flung a creamy cloud over her head. She justified this costume vigorously to herself. It was five o'clock--almost evening--and she wanted him to see her thus, he who had hardly ever seen her in other than the bread-and-b.u.t.ter garb of every day, but when she looked in the gla.s.s she shook her head. If he had at last dared to ask her to leave her sunny fields for his shadowed paths, was this the vision to rea.s.sure him?

She put on a mellow velvet of deepest brown, cunningly cut, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it made her look like a young queen in an old frieze, but not, it was to be admitted, like a durable help-meet for a Settlement worker.

Her windows were wide to the tentative advances of spring and now she heard a ringing tread upon the pavement below, and with breathless haste she pulled off her regal raiment and flung herself into the primmest and plainest of her work frocks--a stern little brown serge with Puritan collar and cuffs, and this time she nodded approval at her reflection.

Here was, indeed, a creature for human nature's daily food!

She heard his feet upon the stairs, his knuckles on the door of her sitting room, but she waited for a last long look. When she looked into that mirror again, she would see the glorified, glad face of Michael Daragh's love.

CHAPTER XVIII

The big Irishman was pulling burdened breaths and haste had flushed his lean cheeks, and they faced each other for an instant in silence before he caught her hands in a hard clutch. "I will be swift," he said, "the way the courage won't be oozing out of me!"

"Yes, Michael Daragh!" She stood up straight and proud before him, waiting for his word. She had waited long for it, turning her back alike on prosperous, opulent love and busy and purposeful spinsterhood, knowing that happiness for her was the grave, young saint whose chief concern would be always for the world's woe. Richly dowered though she was in body and brain, fit for a man's whole devotion, she would be content to share him with the submerged, with the besmirched and befouled of the earth. And at last he was speaking.

"Many's the bold boon I've begged, but never the like of this," he said, his gray eyes holding hers, "but _never_ the like of this! Would you--_could_ you--be dining with a dope fiend?"

It seemed a long time to Jane before she worked her hands free of his clasp and heard her voice, "I--don't believe I understand----"

"Why would you, indeed?" he cried, penitently. "Let you sit down till I'm telling you."

She seated herself in her straight desk chair, and--"Dining with a dope fiend," she heard herself saying. "It sounds rather like a line from a comic song, doesn't it?"

"A lad he is, just," said Daragh, earnestly. "It got hold of him after a sickness in the smooth devil's way it has. Six months, now, I'm toiling with him. Times I have him on his feet, times he's destroyed again. 'Twas a terrible pity I had to be leaving him the while I was home in Ireland.

Well, I found him doing rare and fine, G.o.d love him, back at his drawing again in the sc.r.a.p of a studio I found for him, but a pitiful tangle of nerves and fancies. What he needs now is a friend--his own sort--some one that speaks his own tongue. He thinks the decent world will have none of him,--a weak, pitiful thing isn't worth the saving. Fair perished with the lonesomeness, he is. 'I used to know women,' he was telling me, 'pretty women, clever ones; I miss them--the sound of their voices and the look of their white hands and their making tea, and the light, gay talk we'd be having!' Then he sat, limp, with the grit gone out of him.

'Not one of them would come near me, now,' he said. 'Holding their skirts away from me, pa.s.sing by on the other side.' And then--may the devil fly away with my tongue, Jane Vail--I heard myself saying, 'There's one won't be doing that, lad! There's one, the best and fairest and cleverest of them all, the wonder-worker of the world,' I said, 'will be putting on her gayest gear and be coming here to make tea-talk with you, the way you'll think the month of June itself is happened in your studio!'" He stopped, looking down at her with anxious eyes.

Jane took her own time about looking at him, and when she did it was almost as if she had never seen him before. He was still wearing his winter suit, this soft spring weather, and it wanted pressing and his boots were far from new. He stooped a little as he stood there, waiting for her verdict, as if even the broadest shoulders wearied finally of other people's loads, and the line of his zealot's jaw was sharper than ever. She felt nothing but scorn for him. He had birth, breeding, abilities; why must he wrap himself in monkish sackcloth, in monkish celibacy? Rage rose in her, rage and ridicule for herself. So, this was the man for whom she had dressed herself three times, cunningly and provocatively? This was the man to whom she had come running with her heart held out in her hands,--her sane, sound, hitherto una.s.sailable heart, twenty-eight years old,--when he required of her merely a service such as he might ask of any of his Settlement workers,--money from this one, work from that one, charm and cheer from her, Jane Vail.

Worry throve in his eyes. "I'm doubting I had the right to ask you. Is it too much, indeed?"

Jane rose, lifting her shoulders ever so slightly. "The right? Why, surely. You're asking me for an hour or so of my time just as you would ask me for a check. I am to lift up the light of my countenance on this young gentleman, then, and convince him that he is still socially desirable?"

"I'll be praising you all the long days of my life if you will," he said humbly, continuing to stand.

"Sit down, then, while I put on my hat," she said carelessly, quite as she would have spoken to a messenger, and moved toward her bedroom door.

"Please"--he took one step after her--"it's riot but your little brown gown would charm the birds off the bush,--and it's not that I'd be mentioning it or asking it for myself, but----"

"No," said Jane, and her voice was as bright and dry as her eyes, "one could hardly fancy you asking anything for yourself."

"I would not, indeed," he said, grateful for the exoneration, "but I'm wondering ... wouldn't you seem grander to the lad in a--a gayer frock, perhaps?"

"Very possibly I would," said Jane, reasonably. "But I shall have to keep you waiting a little longer then." She went into the other room and shut the door slowly and softly to demonstrate the perfect control of her nerves, and proceeded to make her fourth toilet for the hour. She took her time and did her best, which was very good indeed when she put her mind to it, and she hummed a s.n.a.t.c.h of song all the while, just loud enough to carry to the study, but every time she met her shamed and furious eyes in the gla.s.s her face crisped into hotter flame and she stopped singing.

She kept him waiting for twenty-five minutes, but his eyes silently acquitted her of having wasted her time. They set off at once, Jane agreeing pleasantly that it would be better to walk. Michael Daragh had never seen her more alert and alive to the things about her. Nothing escaped her darting glance,--the lyrical, first gra.s.s in the Square, the stolid and patient tiredness of an Italian crone on a bench, the pictorial quality of a hurdy-gurdy man, and yet, for all her chattiness, the smart young person beside him seemed leagues upon leagues away from him. He supposed, miserably, that she was aghast at him for this preposterous demand upon her, but he was not penitent; he would have done it again. His people's needs were to be met with anything he would buy, borrow, or beg for them, and this radiant creature's beauty and light were only given to her in trust, after all, to be dispensed and diffused.

"You've the step of a gypsy boy," he said presently, "for all the foolish shoes you will be wearing. We're here now. 'Tis here he has his little hole of a studio."

It was a decent enough place for working and living and Jane had no doubt whatever that Daragh paid the rent. Their host was discovered bending over a chafing dish which gave forth an arresting aroma. He was a sallow youth with quick hands and too-bright eyes and he spoke in nervous jerks.