When recess came, Claire had distinguished herself. Everybody was convinced that her powers of mind were much above the common. Two of the teachers, both ladies of gentle bearing and kindly disposition, came to her side, and cheered her with a few words of complimentary encouragement. The grand Mrs. Arcularius did not come; she was elsewhere, in her elegant little reception-room; she had not yet heard of her new pupil's handsome exploits. But if she had already heard of them she would have paid Claire no congratulations. Good scholarship, she would have argued, with splendid egotism, was in this case a form of gratitude to which she was of course amply entitled, since she had allowed Twining the honor of seeing her autograph on his daughter's future receipted bills.
During the first portion of the recess hour Claire ate her modest lunch, choking it down with strong reluctance. But one teacher now remained in the large class-room, and she was closely occupied in the examination of some written exercises. The girls were gathered here and there, among the files of desks, in whispering groups. They were all discussing Claire; she herself knew it; an instinct told her so. She was very much excited, but outwardly quite calm. The girls no longer stared at her; not a single giggle now broke the air; they had been impressed, startled, and perhaps a little awed as well; their pariah had turned out a sort of notability; she had clad herself in a sudden armor of cool defiance against impudence. They might have regarded her lately-revealed endowments as a queerness collateral with the eccentric quality of her clothing. But the pink robe, the brittle-looking curls, the beflowered hat, had vanished and left them no chance for such associative ridicule.There had been a transformation, abrupt and baffling. Claire was not going to be their butt; of this there was no doubt; she must either be accepted as an equal, or avoided as an inferior; she could no longer hold the position of a target for their covert raillery.
The freckled girl, of the sumptuous mid-day meal, however, preserved opposite opinions. Her name was Ada Gerrard, and her family was one of great wealth and distinction. Her elder sister, a mindless blonde with creamy skin and exuberant figure, had made a notable English marriage, having wedded no less a potentate than the young Marquis of Monogram, heir of a renowned ducal house. Miss Ada was a leader in her way, and she felt keenly disappointed by the unforeseen turn of affairs. She had anticipated prodigious fun out of the new scholar. She was by nature cruel and arrogant, and she was now affected as some feline creature that has been cheated of the prey it has meant to maul and maim.
Her reddish-hazel eyes, that showed so little white as to look like two large beads of clouded amber, and were fringed with scant lashes of lighter red, kept up a persistent scrutiny of Claire. She was sitting not far away from the latter, who caught, now and then, a waft of the delicate violet perfume which exhaled from her fine foreign apparel. She was occupied with her epicurean repast, whose dainties she devoured with a solemn gluttony; but this did not prevent her from keeping up a little fusillade of whispers to a friend on whom she had bestowed one or two bites of luscious cake as a mark of peculiar clemency.
The converse was at first low-toned. Claire had finished her brief refreshment. She had opened abook, and maintained at least the semblance of being engaged in its contents. Suddenly she heard Ada Gerrard speak these words, in a voice lifted above her former key, though doubtless meant solely for her companion's ears:
"I don't carehowmuch she knows. She's a common little thing, andIwouldn't notice her if she got on her knees and begged me to."
Claire waited a few seconds, with head lowered above her book. She trembled while she so waited. The tremor was half from anger, half from intimidation. She felt, in every fibre of her being, the coarseness of this speech, but through her sensitive soul had shot a pang of false shame, dealt by the piercing sense of contrast between her own humble state and the probable grandeur and comfort of life which had fed Ada Gerrard's present superciliousness. But anger conquered. She ceased to tremble, and closed her book. Then she rose, quietly, and faced her classmate. It may have been that the generations of gentlewomen from which, on her father's side, she had sprung, helped to nerve and steady her now; since the primal source of all aristocracy is a cogent self-assertion, and those races alone gain heights overbrowing their kind whose first founders have had the will and vigor to push forward resisted claims.
Everybody saw her rise. It flashed through the little throng, in an instant, that something had spurred her into a course of retaliation. At least fifteen pairs of eager eyes were leveled upon her pale face. But she regarded Ada Gerrard only; and when she spoke, with enough clearness to be heard in all parts of the room, her first words were addressed strictly to that special offender.
"You say that you will not notice me," Claire began, "and yet you say it so loudly that I can hear you, and thus you very plainly contradict yourself; or, in other words, you try to attract my attention by speaking a falsehood."
Here she paused. A dead silence ensued. Many bewildered looks were exchanged. The presiding teacher stopped her task, and sat with a gaze of puzzled alarm fixed upon this resolute young combatant. Ada Gerrard flushed crimson, and ceased to discuss her savory confections.
Claire's voice quivered as she now proceeded, but she quickly controlled this perturbed sign: "I do not think there is much chance of my begging you on my knees to notice me," she said. "But I might be tempted to take such a way of begging that you would try and help me to forget, as long as I remain here, how I have had the ill-luck of being thrown near anyone so unkind, so impudent, and so vulgar as yourself."
Ada Gerrard sprang to her feet as the last calm word sounded from Claire's lips. She had clenched both of her plump hands, and there was a wrathful scowl on her face. Several titters were heard from her companions; they seemed to sting her; it was impossible for her to fail in perceiving that she had met an adversary of twice her own prowess. She knew to which side the sympathy had veered; all her imposing superiority in the way of dress, of diet, of home-splendor, of titled kindred, were momentarily as nothing beside Claire's placid antagonism. She was only an ugly girl in an ugly rage, who had behaved insolently and been rebuked with justice; while Claire, pale, unflinching, wholly in the rightand wholly aware of it, her drawbacks of uncouth costume no longer present, her beauty a fact beyond dispute, her intelligence a recent discovery and a sharp surprise, stood clad with the dignity of easy and complete conquest.
Ada Gerrard suddenly burst into tears. They were very irate tears; there was not the least tincture of remorse or shame in them. She flung herself back into her chair, and covered her face for several minutes while she wept.
Claire watched her, tranquilly, for a little while. Then she sat down again and reopened her book. An intense silence reigned, broken by the sobs of Ada Gerrard. Claire leaned her head on her hand, feigning abrupt absorption in the page that she regarded, and feigning it very well. But her mind was in a secret whirl, now. She was mutely, but impetuously asking herself: "Will they think I was right? Will they take my part? Will they treat me any more kindly, or just as before?"
These silent, pathetic queries were fated to receive a speedy answer. Before the school hours of that same day had ended, the ostracism which had so wrung poor Claire's spirit was in a measure ended likewise. Less than a week had elapsed before she was on friendly terms with a number of her classmates. A little adverse clique soon shaped itself against her. Ada Gerrard, fiercely unforgiving, headed this hostile faction; its remaining members were a few stanch personal adherents who had never been able to resist the dazzling fascination of Miss Gerrard's toilets and lunches. But this opposing element was not actively inimical. Claire's party had the strength of multitude and the courage of its opinions. Still, its members were by no means ardent devotees; they sometimes hurt her with the sly stab of patronage, and they often gave her furtively to understand that her claims upon their favor were of a sort which they practically recognized without theoretically approving.
It would be hard to define just how they conveyed this impression. And yet Claire frequently felt its weight, like that of some vague tyranny which offers no tangible excuse for revolt. She could neither realize nor estimate the force with which she had been thrown into contact. Her years were yet too few, her experience was yet too limited; nor was the force manifest in active strength at Mrs. Arcularius's school, a narrow enough theatre for its exercise, and one where its full-grown momentum must of necessity dwindle into something like mere juvenile parody. Claire was yet to learn with how much rank haste its evil growth had sprung up in the big metropolis outside, thwarting and clogging any pure development of what has been called the republican idea, and making us sometimes bitterly wonder if the great dead philosophers were not tricked, after all, by wills-o'-the-wisp no less lovely than elusive.
But there were a few girls who met Claire on a perfectly equal footing, and left from their intercourse, at all times, the least frosty sparkle of condescension. Some of these may or may not consciously have undertaken their rôles. But with one, past doubt, and for excellent reasons, the kindly impulse was in every way spontaneous. The name of this pupil was Sophia Bergemann. She professed a deep fondness for Claire, and it was evidently sincere. She belonged among Mrs. Arcularius's tolerated plutocrats. Her father was a German brewer who had made a very large fortune out of lager-beer, and who dwelt in Hoboken, where he had built an immense house on spacious grounds. It was said that the lawns were adorned with statues in bronze and marble, and that the main drawing-room of the mansion was frescoed with a design representing Germany offering a tankard of foaming beer to Columbia, in colossal sociability. But the latter statement may have been only the caustic invention of Sophia's foes. She was stoutly disapproved by the conservative element, and this fact had helped to make her so warm a supporter of Claire. Being at daggers drawn with Ada Gerrard, she naturally hailed Claire's public rebuke with rapture, and immediately became her stanch ally.
"I was afraid you'd stay meek and mild right straight along, just as you began," she afterward confessed. "Somehow you looked as if you hadn't got any spunk. And I do like spunk. I believe in it." This article of faith Sophia had several times frankly verified. She had once pulled the ear of her fellow-pupil, and again narrowly escaped expulsion by slapping another's face. She had a buxom figure, a broad-blown countenance, nearly as round as a moon at the full, solid cheeks of constant vivid coloring, and hair so yellow that its keen tint blent with her brilliant complexion in producing the effect of an expensive wax doll enlarged and animated. She was drearily stupid at all her lessons, rivaling Ada Gerrard as the regnant ignoramus of the academy. Her gestures were painfully awkward; her walk was a cumbrous prance; she seemed incapable of seating herself without an elastic bounce. She grew veryfond of Claire, as weeks went on, and gave her repeated invitations to pass a portion of the summer holidays at the grand Hoboken abode.
But before the summer holidays arrived, Claire had left Mrs. Arcularius's school for good. Twining had awakened to one more dismayed perception of having been grossly duped; the reed on which he had leaned had snapped beneath him; prompt retrenchments became inevitable; his poor ventured thousands were dissolved, as a last ironical sort of ingredient, in the worthless elixir.
For a long time his affairs stood miserably involved. His innocent share in a matter of imposture and chicanery was misconstrued and sharply censured by his employers. He was discharged from his clerkship, and put face to face with the worst threats of need. Mrs. Twining, forced to resign her briefly-worn robes of ease for the old garb of drudgery, spared no zeal in proving herself not to have been a false prophetess of disaster.
"I ain't a bit surprised," she would declare, with one of her thin, acid laughs. "Mercy, no! Don't mind me. I was prepared for it, Francis. So here we are over in Jersey City, and a pretty shabby part of it, too! Oh, well, it's better'n keeping a peanut-stand, anyhow. You'll bring me there, some day; you're bound to. I ain't eaten a peanut in ever so long. I'm saving my taste for 'em."
Twining secretly writhed under these thrusts. His meagre stock of money was slipping from him daily. But he was still cheerful. The tough texture of his optimism still refused to be rent. A few more years, and its severance must come, warp and woof, but as yet the sturdy fibres held good against every strain.
He secured another position at last. The salary, smaller than before, was at least regular. But the quarters in Jersey City, though humble and restricted, made too strong an annual drain upon his impoverished purse. After two years of pitiful struggle, the family removed to Greenpoint. Claire was then sixteen. But before this new change occurred, Twining's evil genius had again tempted him, and with the usual malign result. He trusted a fellow-man once more, and once more he was confounded. This time it was of necessity a much smaller hazard. Only three hundred dollars went, though millions were of course to be ultimately realized. One day a sallow, elderly man, with eyes bleared from dissipation and clothes that hung glazed round a bony figure, fell in with poor Twining, and talked to him glibly about a miraculous patent. It concerned the giving of signals on railroads by an electrical process. It was to effect a sublime security against all future accidents of travel by land. A few primary steps were to be taken before this marvel should obtain the indorsements of eager capitalists. The sallow little man, in three interviews, during which he cleverly contrived not to smell too strongly of liquor, convinced Twining that he was a neglected genius. The money was given him, and a receipt for it was signed with a hand whose insecurity passed for grateful emotion. But this origin might have been ascribed with more truth to the rheumy moisture that filled the recipient's eyes when he placed a plump roll of bills within his threadbare waistcoat-pocket. Twining never saw him after that eventful conference. He died about three weeks later of delirium tremens in a city hospital. It was his seventh attack.
This fresh blow leveled Twining. Neither his wife nor his child ever knew of it. But it struck into him a sort of terror at himself from which he never recovered. He had trusted humanity for the last time. He still remained amiable, genial, gentle. But despair had turned his heart to lead. Both Claire and Mrs. Twining saw the change, though ignorant of its cause. The Greenpoint epoch had now begun.
In Jersey City Claire had been sent to a public school. Here she had met genuine daughters of the people. Some of them were almost in rags; others represented thrifty home-surroundings; all were very different from the sleek children of wealth and caste whom she had known at Mrs. Arcularius's. At first she suffered torments of disgust. But by degrees the slow, continual pressure of habit wore away the edge of her distaste, as a constant sea-wash will blunt the rim of a shell. She absorbed herself in study, made rapid progress, and learned much that a fashionable school would have left untaught.
Her fastidiousness in a measure vanished. A good deal of the old acquired nicety stayed, but her age was impressionable, and ceaseless contact with rough manners and crude opinions wrought its certain effect. She was now rubbing against taffetas, and before it had been against silk. She was hearing the boorish laugh and the slovenly idiom to-day, when yesterday she had heard the mirth of culture and the phrase of decorum. Her young life had thus far been a strange discord of opposing influences. She felt this in periods of half-bewildered retrospect, and sometimes with moods of passionate melancholy as well. The intense contrast of the changes throughwhich she had passed, disheartened while it stimulated her. She meant to try her best; she wanted with all her energy to gain secure and permanent elevation; she had no intent of sitting down and resting before she reached the top of the hill, for her father's heated words of admonition and entreaty yet swept their insistent echo through her spirit.
But the hill seemed a sheer steep, defiant of any foothold. If she was eager to ascend, loath to rest, full of splendid activity, what mattered these favoring conditions when circumstances turned them to mockery?
They were at Greenpoint, now. They had been there three years. Claire was nineteen. Her school days had ended. They could no longer afford to keep a servant; she had to help her mother in all menial domestic offices. She had to bake, to sweep, to wash, to sew. She hated the place; she hated the life. But she saw her father's hidden despair, and so hid her own. More than this, she trembled at certain signs that his health was failing. He would have seizures of sudden weakness at morning or night; she feared to ask him whether they also occurred when he was absent at his business, lest he might suspect the acute nature of her anxiety, and so acquire new cause for worriment.
She loved him more than ever. The dread of his loss would steal with ghastly intrusion along her dreams at night. She thought of her grim, acrimonious mother, and said to herself: 'If he should die! It would be terrible! I should be worse than alone!' Every kiss that she gave him took a more clinging fondness.
He never spoke of his future. He never spoke ofhers. She understood why. Each always met the other with a smile. There was something beautiful in their reciprocal deceit. They heard the dead leaves crackle under their footsteps, but they strove to talk as if the boughs were in bud.
And so the weeks went on. The bitterness of their second winter in Greenpoint had now yielded to the mildness of a second spring. But the vernal change brought no cheer to Claire. In the little yellowish-drab wooden house where they dwelt, with lumber-yards and sloop-wharves blocking all view of the river, with stupid, haggling neighbors on either side of them, with ugliness and stagnation and poverty at arm's-reach, was a girl so weighed upon and crushed by the stern arbitraments of want, that she often felt herself as much a captive as if she could not have moved a limb without hearing the clank of a chain.
Oneafternoon Claire said to her mother: "I intend to take a little holiday. I am going out for a walk." Mrs. Twining and her daughter were in the kitchen when this very novel announcement was made. The elder lady had just taken her preliminary steps toward the getting of supper. She let her big knife remain bedded in the side of a large, soggy potato that she was peeling, and glanced up at Claire with her quick black eye. A long spiral of skin hung from the half-pared vegetable. It seemed to denote with peculiar aptness the paralyzing effect of Mrs. Twining's astonishment.
"Going to take a holiday, are you?" she exclaimed, with the favorite jerky, joyless laugh. "And what amIgoing to do, if you please? Stay at home, no doubt, and slave over this stove till supper's cooked. Hey?"
"I cooked the supper yesterday," said Claire, "and you vowed that everything I had done was bad, and that I should never make myself so smart again. I recollect your exact words—'make myself so smart,'" continued Claire, with cutting fidelity of quotation. "I would readily do the whole cooking every afternoon, on Father's account. For he likes the food I prepare better than he likes what you prepare. There's no doubt about that."
"Oh, not a bit," returned Mrs. Twining, who could never cow her daughter nowadays, and avoided all open skirmishes with Claire, preferring to fire her volleys under cover of ambiguous sneers, being sure of rout in any fair-fought engagement. "Not a bit, certainly. When he knows you've pottered away at anything, he'll eat it and smack his lips over it whether it's roasted to a cinder, or as raw as a fresh clam."
"I'm very glad to hear you say so," returned Claire, with a weary little smile. "It's pleasant to think Father loves me like that."
Mrs. Twining vigorously resumed work on her potato, speaking at the same time. "Pity about both o' you two, Idodeclare," she retorted, lapsing into the vernacular with which she loved to accompany her worst gibes. "'Pears to me that if he's so fond o'youhe mightn't have made you the poor mean fag at nineteen that he's made o' me at forty-four; and if you are so fond o'him, why, you might try and catch a decent husband, with a few dollars in his pocket, to raise up the family out o' the mud and muck Francis Twining's got it in."
Claire's eyes flashed a little; but she was not specially angered; she was so used to this kind of verbal savagery.
"Father never meant anything but good to either of us," she said, "and you know it. I don't want to hear you speak against him when he is away and can't defend himself.Iam able to defend him, if I choose. I think you know that, Mother, by this time. I'm going out, as I told you. I shall be back rather soon, I suppose."
She left the kitchen, and presently the house aswell. She might have stayed to wrangle; but she knew that would be for no purpose. She had stood up for her loved father so often, and always with the same results. Her wit was quicker than her mother's; it could thrust deeper and parry more dexterously; but she was very tired of this aimless warfare, where she got wounds that she hid and gave wounds that it cost her only pain to deal. She had no definite idea whither she would go, on quitting the house. At first she took her way through the cheap and vulgar main street of Greenpoint. It was the first real day of Spring; the air was bland; something had called her forth to breathe it, even here in this dreary spot. She did not quite know whence the silent summons had come. She was by no means sure if it were her own youth that had called her, conspiring in some subtile way with the push of leaves and grasses out toward the strengthened sunshine. She had felt old and tired, of late; the monotony of toil had dulled her spirits; her mother's arrowy slurs had pierced and hurt her more than she guessed. But the mild atmosphere, stirred by tender breezes, made it pleasant to be abroad, even in this malodorous thoroughfare.
Everything was dull and common. It seemed a sort of beautiful outrage that the pure, misty blue of the afternoon sky should arch so contentedly over these slimy gutters, shabby tenements, dirty children, and neglected sidewalks. A German woman jostled against her as she pressed onward; the woman carried a pail of liquid refuse, and issued from a near doorway. She had a tawdry red bow at her throat, one or two smaller bows to match it in her tossed blonde hair, and an immense flat water-curl glued againsteither temple, with the effect of some old hieroglyph. She was a beer-seller's wife, and she was about to empty her vessel of stale malt upon the neighboring cobble-stones. But the random speed of her gait caused her to collide abruptly with Claire's passing figure, and some of the contents of her pail shot out upon the latter's dress, making an instant stain. Claire paused, and looked at the woman with a slight annoyed motion of the head. The offender was a high-tempered person; it was currently whispered by members of their special Teuton clique that her husband was a rank socialist who had been forced to fly the police of his native town overseas, and that she shared in secret his rebellious opinions. This may or may not have been truth; but the woman flung her pailful fiercely into the street, and then as fiercely confronted Claire.
"Vell, vat you got to say?" she cried, shrilly. "You looks at me as if I vass to blame for you running against me, ain't it? I see you before. You ain't much, annerhow. You got a big lot uf airs; you valks shust like a grant laty." Here the virago dropped her pail, set a hand on either hip, and attempted, with sad lack of success, while two long, tarnished ear-rings oscillated in her big, flushed ears, to imitate Claire's really graceful walk. "Sho," she continued, in sarcastic explanation of her parody. "You valks jush sho! Bud you ain't much. You ain't no laty. You better stop ride avay treing to be one. Dot's too thin, dot iss. Aha, you're off. I t'ought I'd freiden you!"
Claire was indeed "off," and moving somewhat briskly, too. She had grown rather white. This rude encounter left a harsh memory behind it. Forsome time she could not dissipate the recollection of the German jade's insolence.
"Perhaps she was right," her set lips at length murmured. "I amnota lady. Ihadbetter stop right away trying to be one."
A little later she had quitted the main street of the town, and gained an open expanse at whose verge the houses stood with wide gaps between them, as though a forlorn effort had been made to conquer vacancy by ugliness. But vacancy had won the fight; space never resisted time with more complete conquest. An immense drab plain, shorn of the least green feature, now stretched before Claire's gaze. On one hand, like a slow, interminable snake, wound a black thread of slimy creek, flanked by ragged embankments of crumbling clay. On the other hand was a dull, bare sweep, unrelieved by even a single hut. Far to the eastward, facing Claire, gleamed a wide assemblage of cottages; this was a settlement that some wag or optimist, whichever he may have been, had long ago named Blissville.
Claire had a fanciful thought, now, as she walked along the hard macadamized road which the incessant trains of funerals took toward Calvary, that Blissville, seen so distantly at the end of this treeless, herbless waste, was like the mirage glimpsed by a wanderer on a desert. But she might more aptly have compared the lonely desolation which encompassed her to those classic fields where the Greek and Roman dead found their reputed bourne. The shocking creek would have made an excellent Styx, and even the most barren imagination could have traced ready analogy between these monotonous levels of sun-baked mud and the flowerless lands where disconsolate shades were supposed to wander.
The tender amethyst sky, arching over this hideous spot, alone saved it, to-day, from the last sort of infernal suggestiveness. An enormous funeral presently appeared in sight, just as Claire reached a certain uncouth bridge that spanned a curve of the impure current. The slow procession of dark carriages uncoiled itself, so to speak, from the massed habitations of Greenpoint, and drew gradually nearer without yet revealing its final vehicle. It was a mortuary cavalcade of phenomenal length, even for the present place, where New York quite often sends some of her worst reprobates to their graves under conditions of the most imposing solemnity. The whole retinue was at last unfurled upon the smooth roadway, along which it crawled with something of the same serpentine stealthiness as that of the almost parallel creek. A sombre rivalry seemed evident, now, between the two differing streams. This blank tract of repulsive land, so strangely dedicated to death, had lost every hint of Lethean likeness. The arrival of the funeral had wrought striking change. Here we had the modern mode of dealing with death. It seemed to make paganism wither and vanish. An old, half-rotten barge, moored in a slushy cove, might have served for an emblem of the decay and contempt now fallen upon antique legend. Was this the melancholy boat that once ferried the ghosts to Hades? Ah! but if so, the oars were lost, the planks leaked wofully, and the grim pilot had gone permanently away into the great shadow-land of all the dead gods! Claire looked toward the coming funeral, and shuddered in silence. There seemed so unholy a contrast between her own fresh, vital maidenhood and this ghastly, morbid domain. How had herhealthful young spirit ever courted death, that it should thus force upon her its continual grisly fellowship? She placed both elbows on the rough balustrade of the bridge, leaned her fair girlish chin against both hands, and stared straight before her across the bleak heath. Not far off several venturesome swine were waddling; they were near enough for their absurd grunts now and then to reach her, and for her to see the pink flush of their cumbrous bodies between coarse, soiled hairs, and the earthward thrust of their long, gray, cylindrical noses. But a moment later a flock of pigeons suddenly lighted just at the foot of the bridge, on a little loamy flat. The sight gave her a thrill of pleasure. It was so odd to get any bit of beauty here, and each bird was a true bit of beauty, with its flexible irised neck, its rounded sleekness, and its rosy feet. Presently the flock began their rich peculiar coo, and the sound fascinated Claire as much as their shapes had done. She quite forgot the advancing funeral; here were color, grace, and a sort of music. They had fallen to her, as might be said, from the skies. In a dumb, unformulated way she wished that more of all three charms would so fall to her. It was such a wretched doom to dwell in this abominable suburb. All her youth was being wasted here. She was already getting rather old. She was already nearly twenty—four months of her twentieth year had gone—and she had been accustomed to think people quite old when they were twenty. Would it last years longer? Ah! to fly as those lovely birds could! Why had they come hither, of all places in the world? If she were a green-and-purple thing, with strong wings, like any of them, she would soar away to the window of some richlady's house on Fifth Avenue, and be taken inside some handsome chamber, perhaps, and fed and petted—yes, even put into a cage, if the lady chose. A cage there would be better than one's full freedom here, where the dead were always going to their graves.
From a reverie which may or may not have resembled this if it had been made into actual language, the sudden spontaneous flight of the whole charming flock roused poor ruminative Claire. She now perceived that the funeral train had drawn much nearer. A sort of metallic resonance sounded from the many horse-hooves on the hard surface of the road. But another sound, at this point, turned her attention elsewhere. It was a cracked, thin, piping voice, and its utterances were delivered only a short distance from her side. She discovered that an old man had joined her on the bridge during her absorbed preoccupation with the pigeons. He was a very old man; he leant on a staff, and was clad in an evident holiday-attire of black, whose rusty broadcloth hung about his shrunken shape with tell-tale looseness; it had too evidently been cut for a far more portly person. He had a wrinkled face, and yet one of rubicund plumpness; a spot of red flushed each cheek, centring in a little crimson net-work of veins there, while the same peculiarity cropped out a third time, as it were, on the ball-like lump at the end of his irregular nose. Claire had a feeling, as she looked at him, that he was a reformed toper. Everything about him told of present sobriety, but he was like a colored lantern seen without the illuminative candle; you had a latent certainty, as you regarded him, that only a few glasses of sufficientlybad liquor were needed to warm up those three red spots into their old auroral splendor. While speaking, he put forth a brown hand that trembled a good deal. The tremor came, no doubt, from senile feebleness, and the hand was so gnarled and knotty that it might almost have been one of those rough excrescences which sometimes bulge from tree-trunks, instead of the sad rheumatic member that it really was. The new-comer spoke with an extremely strong Irish accent, and in a hollow, husky voice that implied, on first hearing it, a kind of elfin and subterranean origin.
"Begorra, ma'am, here it is, ma'am! I'm alludin' to the funeral, ma'am. Shure I made th' ould woman dresh me up in mee besht clothes thish day, ma'am, so I did. Fur it's Mishter Bairned McCafferty that's to be buried thish day, I sez, ma'am, sez I to th' ould woman, I sez, an' sez I, ever since I haird he wasn't expected, I sez, it's his wake I wants to be goin' to. An' if I wus too ould, I sez, to crossh over an' pay mee respechts when they waked him in the city, sez I, it'll be meeself, I sez, that'll shtand here an' watch 'em parade 'im to Calvary, ma'am, sez I."
Claire had a pity for the old man, at first. But before his speech ended he had roused in her a repulsion. He appeared quietly hilarious; he had produced several distinct chuckles, and his watery, peering eyes, which one of his misshapen hands soon shaded, revealed an actually gay twinkle.
"I don't see why you wanted to come out and watch the person go to his grave," said Claire. "What pleasure can that possibly give you?"
"Pleasure, ma'am, is it, ma'am?" was the startled response. "Why, shure, ma'am, it's the foinest funeral that's been seen in these parts, ma'am, fur manny a day! An' it's mee own son, Larry, that's drivin' the hairse, ye'll understand, ma'am, an' it's a proud day for Larry, so it is. Excuse me, ma'am, but do ye take sight o' the hairse yet?"
"Oh, yes; very well," said Claire. "It has a number of wooden ornaments along its top, that are gilded and look like large black cabbages." She gave a little burst of weary laughter as she finished the last sentence, whose irony was quite lost on her dim-sighted companion. "And its sides are glass," she continued, "and you can see the large coffin within quite plainly, and there are four horses with white and black plumes."
"An'—an'—the carriages, ma'am, if ye plaise, ma'am?" eagerly questioned the old man. "Shure there should be forty if there's wan, ma'am, an' a few loight wagons thrown in behoind as well. How's that, ma'am?"
"I think there must be forty," said Claire, turning a curious look on the questioner, as he bent excitedly forward to hear her answer. "And there are several light wagons, also."
The old man rubbed his weird hands together in gleeful ecstasy, nearly toppling over as he did so, because the act necessitated a transient disregard of the needful prop lent by his staff. "Shure I towld th' ould woman jusht that!" he cried, in great triumph. "Shure I sez to her, sez I, Barney McCafferty's too daicent a man, I sez, to go to his grave, sez I, anny less daicenter nor that, I sez. It'll be forty carriages, I sez, if it's wan. An' there'll be a shport or so, sez I to her, ma'am (bee thish shtick in mee hand, ma'am, I sed it, ma'am!) there'll be a shportor so that'll bring a buggy or so, sez I, for a woind up at the end, I sez, like the laugh that comes, ye mind, at the tail of a joke, I sez. An' it's you I'm thankful to, ma'am, fur the loan o' your two broight eyes, ma'am, that lets me see the soight that God's denied me, ma'am: an' I mean, wid a blessin' to yer, the shtyle o' the hairse an' the gineral natur o' the intertainmint altogether, ma'am, the Lord love yer fur yer frindly assistance!"
"Perhaps you can see the funeral better when it gets in front of the bridge," said Claire, somewhat kindly, but with a shocked sense still remaining. Her varied past, that had shown her so many differing human phases, had not till now presented to her the extraordinary fact of how positively festal are the associations with which the Irish, as our shores find them, are wont to accompany death. At the same time, she felt interested, and rather curious. She could always manage, on brief notice, to feel interested and curious regarding any fellow-creature; and this trait (one that has grown historic among the most noted charmers of her own sex) was now tested to perhaps its last limits.
"Does your son always drive hearses?" she continued, unconsciously looking at the old man as if he were something in a museum, to be marveled at for antiquity and strangeness, but not, on pain of expulsion, to be touched.
"Oh, no, ma'am. Larry's wan o' the hands to a livery shtable, ma'am; but yer see, ma'am, he's timperance, an' so they gives 'im the hairse at mosht o' the high-toned funerals, bekase they're shure, then, that there'll be no dishrespect showed to the corpse, y' undershtand. An' it's always the behavior o' thehairse that's mosht cruticized, fur if that goes an' comes quiet, wid no singin' nur shkylarkin' on the part o' him that drives it, d' y' undershtand, why there's lesh talk nur if all the mourners an' relashuns should come home shtavin' drunk, ma'am, d' ye mind?"
"And who is this Bernard McCafferty?" asked Claire.
"Is it Barney McCafferty that ye're ashkin' about?" was the old man's amazed response, a sharp falsetto note piercing through his usual huskiness. "Why, shure, ma'am, he run six places acrosh in the city fur tin year all to wanst, so he did, an' that ain't countin' the wan he kep' in Harlem, naythur."
This explanation was delivered with an air of astonished rebuke, as though one should enumerate the possessions of some slighted prince.
"What sorts of places do you mean?" inquired Claire.
The old man put his head on one side and looked at her with uneasy suspicion, as though he feared she was making sport of him.
"Places? Why, liquor-sthores, to be sure."
"Oh," said Claire. "And what did he die of? Drink?"
Her companion brightened noticeably, and seemed to gain confidence in his questioner. He scratched one cheek, where the unshorn beard showed in white, bristly patches along the fleshless jaw, and winked at Claire as though she had at once put the matter upon a basis of mutual and intimate comprehension.
"I guess itwusthe drink ash laid 'im out at lasht, ma'am. Manny is the good glass I had wid Barneyafore he went into politics an' got shut of his besht frinds, bad luck to 'im. But he shtood well up to his liquor fur nigh forty year, though I'm thinkin' it fetched 'im in the end, ma'am."
This was said with the manner and tone of a person who might have alluded to some rather genteel foible in the deceased, like a fondness for chess or whist. Claire found herself confronting another fact in the lower Irish nature, hitherto but half surmised: the enormous indulgence and sympathetic tolerance with which this unique race regards every form and feature of drunkenness.
"If he sold liquor all his life and died of it himself," she exclaimed, with heat and force, "he doesn't deserve to have half so large a funeral. And I think it's dreadful," she went on, with a little angry stamp of the foot, while she lifted one finger and shook it at the old man in a way with which her sex had doubtless familiarized him at an earlier stage in his long career—"yes, I think it's perfectly horrible that you people should ever dare to get drunk at funerals as you do! I often see the carriage-loads come back from the cemetery through Greenpoint, laughing and smoking, and sometimes yelling and swearing as well! Oh, I don't know how youcando it! There is something so grand, so terrible about death! You ought to be ashamed, all of you! Such actions make this place more sad and wretched than it really is. It is a miserable place enough, Heaven knows!"
She moved away from the old man as she spoke the last sentence. Going forth upon the road, she retraced her steps in the direction of the town, and thus met each separate vehicle of the long funeral asit stole laggingly onward. First came the black-and-gilt hearse, flaunting its interior coffin with horrid ostentation, as though it wanted you to see how many wreaths and crosses had been lavished upon the remains of Mr. McCafferty by his bereaved constituents. Then followed a carriage to whose driver had been confided a capacious wooden box which would doubtless receive the coffin before its interment, and into which the driver, having placed its glaring unpainted mass on a line with the dashboard, had thrust his feet, and by the act engulfed, as it were, nearly half his person. He was a man of sallow, cadaverous visage and very gaunt frame; he looked as if he might possess some eerie fellowship with the corpse itself; he seemed to alter the popular phrase about having a foot in the grave, and to make it quite thinkable that life could exist under still more moribund conditions. In the conveyance which he drove was a group of four people. Two of them were stout Irishwomen, swathed in crape, and two were middle-aged Irishmen, dressed with a holiday smartness. In this vehicle silence appeared to reign; its occupants, all four, sat with lowered eyes. But in the other carriages, as one by one passed Claire, not a sign of grief was manifest. There was a good deal of audible conversation; there was considerable leaning of heads out of windows; there were not a few querulous children of various ages, some of whom had been given oranges to suck or sticks of striped candy to munch; there were buxom women and spare women, massive men and slim men, little girls and little boys, all huddled together, quite often three or even more on a seat. But in the whole long panorama of human visages, as it glidedpast her, Claire could not discern a single trace of solemnity. The impression of mere hollow and senseless form was produced, by this crudecortège, with complete and dismal success. Nobody—with the slight exceptions recorded—seemed to be sorry that Mr. McCafferty had made a permanent departure from the liquor-business.
"I wonder why they come, if they are not sorry," Claire said to herself, as she reëntered the town, leaving the great serpentine funeral behind her. "I suppose it is because of the ride. They seize on even this grim excuse for getting a little pastime." ... Then her thoughts took a new, self-questioning turn. "And what reason have I to pity them and call them 'poor'? They come here only in the way of holiday, but I never get a glimpse of anything better or worse, month after month. I dare say thereareworse places than this. I should like to see one, if there really are, just for the change."
Passing back through the unlovely streets again, Claire had a desire to be near the water before she returned in-doors. She now regretted not having gone thither at first, instead of taking her dolorous inland walk. It was nearly sunset; the twilight had not yet learned to loiter, as it does in maturer Spring, and a gloom had already crept, with purplish effect, into the sweet pale azure of the heavens. Claire made as short a cut toward one special place at the water's edge as her regretted familiarity with Greenpoint would permit, and presently stood on a raised spot close beside the river. It was a bare scarp of earth, touched faintly, here and there, with the most meagre intervals of struggling green. Its site commanded the delightful view beyond, and now,at the ruddy but transient advent of evening, this view was peculiarly delightful. You saw the wrinkled river, drab and tremulous, under a stretch of sky which the sinking sun had made from verge to zenith a turmoil of little rosy and feathery clouds. Each cloud had the damask glow, without its fleetness, that we see in the scales of a darting trout. The whole ember-colored array arched over the wide stream in brief, unusual brilliancy, and stole now and then from the gray waves beneath it a slight gleam, no larger than the bud of a carnation, but quite as rich-hued. Just beneath Claire was a low, uncouth, many-patched hut, near to the muddy strand, and looking not unlike something that had drifted up from aqueous recesses with the intent of making itself habitable for men. A ragged contiguous wharf had been built here, at whose edge, when summer came, small boats would be grouped to let. A little northward, great yellowish piles of lumber loomed, tier after tier, with big sloops moored beside them, and with one acute red pennon, on one slim mast, blown out bright against the darkening air. Steamboats and sail-boats were slipping over the ruffled river, these urged by their steady mechanic push, those winning the capricious breeze to favor their full-stretched canvas. Beyond, in dusky, irregular semicircle, lay the opposite city. Its many church-spires pierced the dimness, but all its other traits of architecture, viewed at this distance, had a flat, massed look. There was something symbolic in the isolated saliency of these spires; they seemed to typify the permanence of a faith which had already defied centuries. But still more, their vague group merged every detail of creed into one pictorial whole;you forgot, as you gazed, what various paths toward salvation this or that steeple might be supposed to point. The whole effect was simply and powerfully Christian.
Claire fixed her eyes upon the shadowy city. A few early lights already dotted its expanse with gold, as if to outspeed the tardier stars overhead. It spread away, for the gaze that watched it, like a huge realm of fascinating mystery. Claire forgot how much sin it hid; perhaps she scarcely knew if it hid any. She thought only of the diversions, relaxations, festivities that would soon hold sway there. Odd memories of her old school-fellows crossed her mind. Doubtless Ada Gerrard was there now, thinking of some new robe in which she would show her plump white neck with the little freckles on it, that very evening. It should be a pale-blue dress, Claire decided; that would suit Ada's red hair the best. How full was the big city, yonder, of happy, handsome, prosperous people! And so many of them were saying, now that the nightfall had begun, "I shall go to this ball to-night," or "I shall go to that theatre." They were getting the theatres ready for the plays, now; the entrances were being lighted. She could see Wallack's and the Union Square, each with its small court and the baize doors beyond. Oh, how pleasant it would be to do something, to look at something, to hear something, to-night, that she had not done and looked at and heard, again and again, for weeks and months past! The girl's blood and bone hungered for a holiday. She must go back home, soon. And there was only one thought to make the prospect of return endurable; that thought was meeting her father. But he would be tired; hewas always more tired nowadays than in other times. When he lay upon the lounge in the basement, and she got the stool and sat down beside him, he would smile to have her put both arms round his neck and press her cheek up close to his, but he would go to sleep very soon afterward; he would be so tired that he would forget even to ask her if she had had a hard time with her mother that day. And then her mother would grumble a hint that the dishes were yet to be washed, and she would take her arms away from the beloved neck, and scrape and clean for quite a long time; and then she would get sleepy, more because she remembered how early she must rise to-morrow than because a very little diversion would not have made the alert young lids loath to shade her eyes for hours to come.
It would all be the same as on other nights. It was always, every new night, the same as on that which went before. There was the dull burden of it. When would the burden be shifted? Would it ever be shifted? Would it not merely grow heavier, and slowly crush her down, till her back should get the crook of age, and so bear it with better ease?
She went nearer to the edge of the hillock, and set her eyes once more upon the city, as if for a farewell view. Its lights had become more numerous; the tips of its spires were lost in tender vapor. Above, the tiny scraps of luminous cloud had begun to fade; the river had roughened and grown dull, and there was a damp keenness in the freshening breeze. That exquisite melancholy which is sure to breathe from evening when it sheds a spell over the triple charm of blended sky, land, and water, was now in the full tide of its lovely power.
Claire lifted her hand to her lips, and waved a kiss toward the glooming city. It was a pretty gesture, and so furtive and stealthy that it might have fled the notice of any one who stood quite close at her side. And the low words that now succeeded it, too, were just low enough to escape such heed, though their sense might easily have met a possible listener with the effect of broken and half-audible speech.
"Good-night," she said to the city. "Good-night, and be merry for hours to come. You seem just like something alive and breathing, but I know that if you had one mind and one heart to think and to feel with, instead of the thousands and thousands that you have got, you would pity me because I'm so sorry that this big, cold river is always between us!"
Claire nearly broke into a laugh at her own soft and quaint little apostrophe. Like most lonely people who dislike their solitude, she often felt the temptation to soliloquize; especially since her imagination was vigorous, and sometimes loved, as well, to let mount from its wrist the agile falcon of fancy. But a practical bent, as we call it, and a rather sharp sense of the humor of things besides, usually mingled to repress this volatile impulse. As it was, she gave a strong, tired sigh instead of a laugh, and turned her face homeward, though not her steps quite yet, for she still remained standing on the mound beside the water.
"My holiday," she thought, "is over." She did not know that it was just beginning.
Her last action had brought her into abrupt contact with a girlish figure, whose countenance she might have recognized had not the dusk so deepened.
"Iwas mos' sure 'twasyou, Miss Twining," said the new-comer, holding out a hand to Claire, "so I run a little further up the hill, jus' to make reelcertainsure."
"Well, you were not wrong, Josie," said Claire, giving her own hand. It did not occur to her that she had been called "Miss Twining" and had answered by "Josie." In this case she took her rights of superiority without thinking; she did not stop to consider their soundness; it had always been to her an accepted fact that she was an alien and an exile, here in Greenpoint, and that the few residents whom she knew must of necessity admit her claim to having existed under better previous conditions. There was no taint of arrogance in this unargued assumption.
"You ain't often out's late's this, Miss Twining," said Josie, with a little burst of laughter. "Are you, now?"
"No, indeed," answered Claire. "I am not often out at all." She sighed again, quite unconsciously. "Well, Josie," she went on, "I must be getting back home. I've been away too long, as it is. You seem to be dressed in your very finest. Does it mean that you are going to enjoy yourself somewhere?"
Josie gave another laugh. "I expect so, MissTwining," she said, with a touch of mysterious piquancy in her manner. She turned herself quickly about, looking over her shoulder all the while with the air of waiting for some one to appear. Claire watched her closely during the unconscious but significant by-play.
The name of this young girl was Josephine Morley. She was of Irish parents, but felt ashamed of the fact. Perhaps consciously, perhaps not, she had banished from her speech all hereditary traces. She spoke in a rattling way, and every now and then she would heap massive emphasis on one special word. Her talk made you think of a railway that is all broken up withdépôts, none of which the engine discountenances. Her widowed mother kept a grocery store, not amply patronized, and of moderate prices. By pre-arrangement with the Twinings on a basis of the most severe economy, Josie would bring them their needed supply of vegetables thrice a week. She was not so jaunty-looking on those occasions as she now appeared. Then she would be clad in any flotsam and jetsam of apparel that charity might have drifted toward her. But to-night she was smartly dressed. Now that Claire scanned her closer in the dimness, it was plain that she wore very unusual gear. Josie was not much over twenty. She was extremely thin, but still rather shapely, and endowed with a good deal of grace. Her face would have been pretty but for its high cheek-bones and the hectic blotch of color that was wont to flush them, in sharp contrast with her remaining pallor. She had had several sisters who had died of a speedy consumption. Her eyes were black, and would glitter as she moved them; she was always moving hereyes; like herself, they never seemed at rest. She constantly smiled, and the smile would have had a charm of its own if it had failed to reveal somewhat ruinous teeth. Claire had always liked her vivacity, though it had seemed to possess a spur that came from an unhealthy impulse, like the heat of internal fever. She wore a wide-brimmed hat of dark straw, with a great crimson feather, and a costume of some cheap maroon stuff, violently relieved by trimmings of broad white braid. Theensemblewas very far from ugly. She had copied its effect from a popular weekly journal, whose harrowing fiction would sometimes be supplemented by prints of the latest fashions, "given away" to its devoted patrons.
Claire, having drawn nearer to Josie, took in all her details of costume with ready swiftness. This fleet sort of observation was always an easy matter for Claire. In most cases of a like sort, she would both see and judge before others had accomplished even the first process.
"You seem to be waiting for somebody, Josie," she now said.
"Yes, I am," returned Josie, with another laugh. She put one slim hand to her mouth as she laughed; she nearly always employed this gesture at such a time; it came, no doubt, from a consciousness of dental deficiencies. "I ain't goin' to beshy, Miss Twining," she pursued. "WhyshouldI? I'm expectin' a gent'man friend o' mine. We was goin' over t' the city together. We was goin' toNiblo's. There's an el'gant play there, theysay." ... Here Josie paused, drew backward for an instant, and then impulsively seized one of Claire's hands in both of her own. "Oh, Miss Twining!" she suddenly exclaimed, "I know I hadn't ought to ask you ifyou'dcome along, too, but I do wish you justwould! You ain't the same kind as me a bit, and there's more'n me in Greenpoint—now, 'pon my word there is—that's said when they see you that youwasa reel lady. But still, you might come with me and my friend, Mr. MacNab, and just get a spell of'musement. I know you ain't had any 'musement in goodness sakeshowlong! It's a reel el'gant play! Do say you will! Now I ain't a bitsofton Mr. MacNab. P'aps he'dlikeme to be, but I ain't. So three won't spoil comp'ny. Now,do! Oh, Miss Twining, I'd be awful glad if youwould!"
Josie's tones, like her words, were warmly persuasive. She still retained Claire's hand. Nor did Claire withdraw it. She was tempted. She turned her head toward the darkling city, in whose realm of deepened shadow many new lights had begun to burn.
"Ah, Josie," she said, "you are very kind to ask me. But I'm quite shabby beside you, you know."
"Pshaw!" flatly objected Josie; "you look fust rate. That ain'tnosort of reason.... Do! Now,do!"
Claire laughed nervously. She was thinking how pleasant it would be to hear an orchestra play, to see a curtain rise, to watch a drama roll its story out, behind vivid footlights, between painted scenes.
"I am sure Mr. MacNab wouldn't like," she said. And then she thought of how her father would soon come home and miss her, and have to be told, when they next met, that she had been to the theatre over in New York with the girl who brought them vegetables thrice a week. She seemed quite to havemade up her mind, presently. She withdrew her hand from Josie's with a good deal of placid force.
"No, Josie, I can't," she said.
"Yes, youcan!" was the fervid reply. "Yes, you justshall, Miss Twining; nowthere! I ain't goin' t' let youoff! When I get my mind set rightontoanything, I'm as stubb'n as ever I canbe! An' I'm sure you'dliketo come. There ain't no doubt of 't—not one singlegrain!"
Josie was laughing while she thus spoke, and had again caught Claire's unwilling hand with more of entreaty than boldness.
"What makes you sure?" Claire asked. She smiled now, though the smile was sad.
Josie's laughter became a high treble ripple. She put both feet, visible beneath her short skirt, suddenly very close together, and curved her lithe body in an abrupt burlesque bow. The trick was graceful, though vulgar; it savored of the cheaper variety entertainments, where Josie had no doubt found it. She still held Claire's hand, and she was looking straight into the eyes of her companion with her own dark, brisk eyes.
"Whatmakesme sure you'd like to go?" she said. "Why, sakes alive, Miss Twining, I can see the need of a little fun oozin' right out of yourface—now, 'pon my word and sacred honor I justcan! Oh, pshaw! We'll be home early 'nough. It won't bemuchmore'n quarter past 'leven, I guess. B'sides, who'llknow? 'Tain't anybody's business butours."
'Father would know. It would be his business,' Claire thought. But she did not answer aloud, as yet. She permitted Josie to retain her hand, while she turned and gave another glance toward the city across the river.
The rapid darkness had thickened. Where New York had lain, dim as a mirage, hundreds of lights had clustered; their yellow galaxy more than rivaled the pale specks of fire now crowding with silent speed into the heavens domed so remotely above them.
She faced Josie again. She trembled, though imperceptibly. Drooping her eyes, at first, she then raised them. "Well," she said, "I will let you persuade me. I will go with you, Josie."
It was the first time she had ever made a resolve whose fulfillment she felt sure would displease her father. The certainty that he would not sanction her going in companionship of this proposed sort made Claire's decision a sacrilege to herself, even while she perversely took it. She trampled on her own filial loyalty, and she seemed to feel it tremble in pained protest under the outrage. It was in vain that a troop of self-excusing pleas sprang to battle against her shamed afterthought. She knew that remorse was already whetting for her its poniard. The gloom of her father's future rebuke had already made itself a part of the increasing nightfall.
"Oh, ain't I glad, though!" Josie broke forth, gleefully. Her triumph was one of pure good-natured impulse, but at the same time she had a flattered sense that her evening's amusement would now gain a stamp of distinction. One or two girls in Greenpoint had derided her for encouraging Mr. MacNab as a devotee. She herself secretly derided the young man in that same tender office. For this reason she had arranged that they should meet here to-night at the foot of the little hillock near the river, and invest their purposed trip with enough clandestine association to defeat the couchant raillery of certain unsparing neighbors.
Almost immediately Mr. MacNab made his appearance below, and Josie tripped lightly down toward him, followed by Claire at a much more sober pace. The introduction promptly followed, and Josie's glib, matter-of-course explanation soon succeeded that. The reason of Claire's presence was given Mr. MacNab by Josie with a handsome, off-hand patronage. "It's awful nice o' Miss Twining toconsentto go along with us," she ended. "Aintit, now?"
"Oh, yes, indeed," said Mr. MacNab.
The young man was inwardly tortured by this abrupt announcement. He was very much in love with Josie, and he had felt deeper and deeper thrills of anticipation all day long, as the hour of their rendezvous drew near. He was a youth of about two-and-twenty. His stature was so low as to be almost dwarfish; both Claire's and Josie's well overtopped it. He was very stout, however; the breadth of his shoulders and the solid girth of his limbs might have suited six feet of clean height. He had a large, smooth, moon-like face, a pair of little black eyes, and a pair of huge red ears. He was immoderately ugly, but with an expression so simply amiable as quite to escape repulsiveness. You felt that his ready smile possessed vast hidden funds of geniality; there was no telling what supple resources that long slit of big-lipped mouth might draw upon, at a really mirthful emergency. One glance at his abnormal hands, where every joint was an uncouth protuberance and every nail a line of inky darkness, left it certain that they held no dainty share of the world's manual requirements. Mr. James MacNab was an oyster-opener for about eight months in the year, and a clam-opener through the remaining four. The narrow window of his employer's shop looked upon Greenpoint Avenue, wedged between the stores of a butcher and a candy-seller. Like Josie Morley, James was of Irish parentage; like her, he abjured the accent of his ancestors, having been born here, and having breathed into his being at an early age that peculiar shame of Celtic origin which belongs among our curiosities of immigration. His wages were meagre, and his hours of work numerous. To-night was a precious interval of relaxation. He had been released at three o'clock that afternoon, and had gone heavy-lidded to a tiny cot in a garret-room, where he had slept the exhausted sleep of one who is always in arrears to the drowsy god. Not long ago he had waked, highly refreshed, and pierced with the expectation of soon meeting his beloved Josie. He had four dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, and the possession of this sum gave him a firm sense of pecuniary security. The strong faith that he was finely dressed, too, increased his confidence. He had a little low hat of black felt, tipped sideways on his ungainly head; an overcoat of muddy cinnamon-brown, with broad black binding along its lappels and edges; and a pair of boots so capably polished that their lustre dissuaded you from too close scrutiny of the toe-joint bulging from either clumsy foot. He was entirely satisfied with his general effect. He knew that nature had not made him comely, but he felt complete repose of conscience in the matter of having atoned artistically for this personal slight.
Josie's tidings left him almost speechless. In a trice his glowing hopes had crumbled to ashes. He had long known Claire by sight. He had, in a way,admired her. But she was not of hismonde, and he saw with woe and dismay that for this reason her company would prove all the more burdensome. As a matter of expense, too, it presented the most painful objections. New drafts must be made upon his limited capital. All his past calculations were suddenly rendered null. Who could say what financial disaster might overtake him, if he should now aspire to three oyster-stews after three seats at the theatre? Would his four dollars and seventy-five cents not pass its powers of elasticity if subjected to this unforeseen stretching-process? Claire, meanwhile, was wholly unconscious of his distress. It was not till they had embarked on the ferry-boat that the thought of her escort's possible poverty occurred to her flurried mind. "Oh, Josie," she soon found a chance to whisper, "I am afraid I shall be a great expense to your friend! I would have thought of it sooner if you had not pressed me so, without any warning beforehand. And I have only a little change in my pocket, so I can't"—
But here Josie interrupted her with a magnificent murmured fiction to the effect that they were under the protection of a young man who "jus' made money hand over fist"; and Claire, believing this handsome falsehood, let Josie talk with her gallant while she relapsed into silence.
They were all on the forward deck of the steamboat, close against its wooden railing. Claire was a little apart from her companions; she had instinctively withdrawn from them. The night had now woven its web to the full. Overhead the stars beamed more richly; below, the black river shimmered with glassy lustre where it met the sides ofthe speeding vessel, and then rolled off again into darkness with great swollen waves. Long points of light pierced the gloom below the opposite shore, like golden plummets that were slowly fathoming its opaque tide. Here and there scarlet or green lights moved over the waters, given by the viewless barks that bore them the look of weird, wandering jack-o'-lanterns. These were simply fantastic; they held no human analogies. A sloop, thus brilliantly decked, hove on a sudden into sight, not many yards from Claire's peering gaze. Its expanse of canvas, tense in the sharp breeze, caught a momentary unearthly pallor; it slipped into view like a monstrous phantom, and like a phantom it vanished again. This, too, was a merely elfin and quaint apparition; no sense of vital reality lay behind it. But the journeying ferry-boats, that voyaged to their several goals on either side the river, took, with their curved lines of small, keen-lit windows and their illuminations at various other points, the likeness of stately galleys gliding after nightfall to some opulent port. All their horrors of nautical architecture were deadened by merciful shadow. Claire felt the quiet splendor of the suggestion. Her varied educational past made this fully possible. But the whole effect of transformation, of magic, of mystery, and of beauty, which follows the advent of night along all the watery environs of our great metropolis, appealed to her with deep force.
She had a fancy that the hard prose had left her life forever; that she was now being softly swept into luxurious and romantic surroundings; that the festal and poetic look of city and river symbolized a fairer and kindlier future. The indulgence of this fancythrilled her delightfully; it was a sort of intoxication; she no longer felt culpable, unfilial; she leaned her graceful young head far over the boat-rail, as though to gain by this act a stronger intimacy with the sweet, drowsy sorceries that encompassed her.
"My! ain't itreelchilly out here, though?" said Josie. "We'd ought to 'a stayed inside,hadn'twe, Miss Twining?"
This half broke the spell with Claire. "I like it so much better out here," she answered. "The air isn't too sharp for me, and then everything is so beautiful and strange." She slightly waved one hand toward the brilliant city as she spoke.
Josie did not understand at all. How could there be anything beautiful in a lot of boats screaming to each other after dark with steam-whistles? But she said "yes," and cast a glance at Mr. MacNab, which was meant to veto in him the first symptom of surprise. Claire's superiority must not have the least slight cast upon it. It would never do to encourage Mr. MacNab in undervaluing the compliment of her companionship.
The boat soon landed, and all Claire's lovely illusions fled. Still, here was the city, noisy, populous, alluring. After disembarking at the ferry they were yet far away from Niblo's, and a long ride ensued, in a car crowded and of ill odor. Then came a walk of considerable length, fleetly taken, for they were a little late by Mr. MacNab's silver time-piece, which afterward proved to be fast.
Mr. MacNab was meanwhile in a sort of nervous trance. He had made what for him was atour de forcein mental arithmetic, though he still remained insecure about the exactitude of his calculation.However, he felt confident of one thing: three seats, of a certain kind, would cost three dollars. A dollar would solidly remain to him, though the precise amount of surplus change now in his pocket defied all his mathematical modes of discovery. Pride forbade that he should take out the silver bits and count them. But his residual dollar could at least pay the homeward fares. Cold as this comfort may have been, it took, no doubt, a certain relative warmth when contrasted with dire pecuniary exposure.
They at length reached the theatre, and easily procured upstairs seats that commanded an excellent view of the stage. The curtain had not yet risen. Claire was glad of that; she had the desire not to miss a single detail of the coming performance. She was intently examining her play-bill, when, on a sudden, a man's voice, close at her right, spoke to this effect:—
"Hello, Jimmy, is that yerself?"
The next moment Claire perceived a hand and arm to have been unceremoniously thrust in front of her, while a young man leaned his body very much sideways indeed. She receded, herself, not without annoyance.
Josie sat next to her, and then came Mr. MacNab, who now permitted himself to be shaken hands with across the laps of the two girls.
"Hello, Jack," he responded, at the same time. "What you doin' here?"
"Come t' see the show," said the person called Jack.
"Is that so?"
"'Course. Nuthin' strange 'bout it, is there?"
"That's all right."
"S'pose you're on the same racket yerself. Hey?"
"You bet, ole boy."
All these utterances were exchanged in tones of the most easy cordiality. The two young men had ceased to shake hands, but were leaning each toward the other, apparently quite unconscious of the inconvenience which they inflicted upon both Josie and Claire.
"I got sold t'night," Jack continued, with a blended wink and giggle.
"How's that?"
Jack gave a demonstrative jerk of the elbow, meant to indicate a vacant seat on his further side. "Me an' my gal was comin' t'gether, but she gimme the slip after I'd got mer seats. Sent word she had the headache. Well, I dunno how 'tis, but I reckon I'll have to punch some feller's head, 'fore long. Hey, Jimmy?"
This hostile prophecy was hailed by Jimmy with a laugh whose repressed enjoyment took the semblance of a goose's hiss, except that its tone was more guttural and its volume more massive.
"I guess that's 'bout the size of it, Jack," he replied. The next moment he straightened himself in his seat, having received an exasperated nudge from Josie.