Fairfax and His Pride Part 23

Fairfax opened the despatch, held it transfixed, gave a cry and said to Molly, staring her wildly in the eyes: "My mother, my mother!" and went and fell on his knees by his bed and flung his arms across it as though across a beloved form. He shook, agonized for a few moments, then sprang up and stared at the desertion before him, the tears salt on his face and his heart of steel broken. And the girl by the door, where she had clung like a leaf blown there by a wind of grief, came up to him. He felt her take his arm between her hands, he felt her close to him.

"It cuts the heart o' me to see ye. It's like death to see ye. Is it your mother gone? The dear mother ye must be like? G.o.d knows there's no comfort for that kind, but," she breathed devotedly, "I'd give the life o' me to comfort ye."

He hardly heard her, but her presence was all he had. Her human companionship was all that was left him in the world. He put his hand on her shoulder and said brokenly--

"You don't know what this means. It is the end of me, the end. To think I shall never see her again! Oh, _Mother_!" he cried, and threw up his arms. The loving woman put hers about him as the gesture left him shorn of his strength, and when his arms fell they were around her. He held her for a moment as a drowning man holds to that which is flung out to him to save his life; then he pushed her from him. "Let me get out of this. I must get out of the room."

"You'll not do anything to yourself? Ah, tell me that."

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat and fled from her without reply.

He wandered like a madman all night long. Whither he did not know or care. He was walking down his anguish, burying his new grief deep, deep.

His nails clenched into his palms, the tears ran over his face. One by one as the pictures of his mother came to him, imperious, graceful, enchanting, one by one he blessed them, worshipped before them until the curtain fell at the end--he could not picture that. Had she called for him in vain? Had she watched the open door to see him enter? In G.o.d's name why hadn't they sent for him? "Suddenly of heart disease ..." the morning of this very day--this very day. And on he tramped, unconsciously going in the direction he had taken that morning, and at a late hour found himself without the gates of the cemetery where he and Molly Shannon had spent the late afternoon. The iron gates were closed; within stretched the shining rows of the houses and palaces of the dead, and on their snowy portals and their marble doors fell the first tender glimmer of the day. Holding the gate between his convulsive hands, staring in as though he begged an entrance as a lodger, Fairfax saw rise before him the angel with the benign uplifting hand, and the lettering, large and clear, seemed written that day for him as much as for any man--

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

He raised his eyes to the angel face on whose brow and lips the light of his visions had gathered for him that morning; and as he looked the angelic figure brightened in the dawn; and after a few moments in which he remained blotted against the rails like an aspirant at Heaven's gate, he turned and more quietly took his way home.

CHAPTER XV

He did not go South. There was nothing for him to go for. The idea of his home uninhabited by her made him a coward. Emmeline sent him her thimble, her lace collar, her wedding ring and a lock of her hair, shining still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and did not untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the cla.s.s he had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of any but his own language.

"You speak Italian, don't you, Fairfax?" his boss at the office asked him.

("Cielo azuro ... Giornata splendida...!") and he smelt the wet clay.

"I can _point_," laughed the engineer, "in _any_ language! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini."

CHAPTER XVI

The boss was a Ma.s.sachusetts man and new to Nut Street, and Fairfax, when he took the paper with his orders from Rainsford's hand, saw for the first time in months a man of his own cla.s.s, sitting in the revolving chair before the desk where his papers and schedules and ledgers were filed. The man's clothes were too thin for the season, his linen was old and his appearance meagre, and in his face with its sunken cheeks, the drooping of the eyes and the thinness of the brow, were the marks of the sea of life and its waste, and the scars of the storm. A year ago Fairfax would have pa.s.sed Rainsford by as a rather pitiful-looking man of middle age.

The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red shirt as Fairfax paused.

"Irish, I expect? Your name, Fairfax, is Irish. I understand you've had a hard blow this year, been sick and lost your mother."

At the quiet statement of this sacred fact Fairfax started painfully, his face flushed.

"He would not have spoken to me like that," he thought, "if he had not imagined me a working man."

"Work is the best friend a young man can have," Rainsford went on; "it is a great safeguard. I take it that you are about thirty?"

"Twenty-three," said Fairfax, shortly.

His report was brief. Just then his fireman came in, a black-haired, tall young fellow with whom Fairfax knew he should never sing "Mia Maddelena."

CHAPTER XVII

He avoided Rainsford, gave himself up to his engine and his train, and took a dislike to his black-headed fireman, who dared to be Italian and to recall the aurora of days he had buried fathoms deep. The heat pouring on him in summer time made him suffer physically. He rather welcomed the discomfort; his skin grew hardened and tanned and oiled and grimed, and his whole body strong and supple; and his devotion to his work, the air that filled him as he flew, made him the perfect, splendid animal that he was.

At night, when the darkness blotted out the steel rails, and the breeze blowing through the car-window fluttered his sleeve till it bellied, and the cinders, red and biting, whirled by, and on either side the country lay dark and fragrant with its summery wealth--at night his eyes, fixed on the track under the searchlight, showed him more than once a way to end his unhappy life, but his confused reveries and his battle, spiritual and physical, helped him, and he came out of it with a love for life and a stronger hold upon it each time than the last. He gave up wearing his Sunday clothes, he went as the others did; he had not been for months to Albany or to Troy.

One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He considered his own image in the gla.s.s over his bureau and communed with his reflection. The result of his musings was that he opened his trunk and took out the precious packet; started to unfold it, turned it over in his uncertain hands, thrust it back, set his teeth and went out to the junction and took the train for Troy.

He found her in the boarding-house where she was pa.s.sing her Sunday, rocking the landlady's teething baby. He bade her to come as she was, not to fix up. The idea of a toilet which would end in a horrible frock rasped his nerves. She detected a great change in him, simple-minded though she was, and she tried to get him to talk and failed. Down at the Erie Ca.n.a.l, by the moored boats and the motionless water, he seized her arm and facing her, said, his lips working--

"I have come to ask you to marry me, Molly."

She grew as white as the drying linen on the windless air, as the family wash hung on the ca.n.a.l boat lines behind her. Her grey eyes opened wide on Antony.

"I'm making a good living: too much for me alone."

He saw her try to find her voice and her senses, and with something of his old radiance, he said--

"I'm a brute. I reckon I don't know how to make love. I've startled you."

"Ah, shure, ye don't know what ye're saying," she whispered; "the likes o' me ain't good enough."

"Hush, hush," he answered, "don't say foolish things."

She gasped and shook her head. "Ye shouldn't tempt me so. It's crool. Ye shouldn't tempt me so."

With a self-abandonment and a humility which he never afterward forgot, as her life and colour came back Molly said under her breath--

"Take me as I am, shure, if I'm the least bit of good to ye. I love ye enough for both."

He exclaimed and kissed her.

Dreams of women! Visions of the ecstasy of first love, ideals and aspirations, palpitating, holy, the young man's impa.s.sioned dream of The Woman, the Only Woman, the notion and conception that the man of nature and of talent and of keen imagination sleeps upon and follows and seeks and seeks and follows all his life, from boyhood to the grave--where were they then?

He had brushed his aunt's cheek, he had touched her hand and trembled; now he kissed fresh young lips that had yearned for his, and he gave his first embrace to woman, put his arms round Molly Shannon and her young body filled them. As she had said, she had love enough for both. He felt a great grat.i.tude to her, a relaxation of his tense senses, a melting of his heart, and his tenderness was deep for her when his next kiss met her tears.

CHAPTER XVIII