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 class 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 canpoint," laughed the engineer, "inanylanguage! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini."
The boss was a Massachusetts 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 class, 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 passed 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."
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 glass 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 passing 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 Canal, 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 canal 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 impassioned 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 gratitude 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.
He returned to Nut Street dazed, excited but less sentimentally miserable and more profoundly touched. He had made himself a mechanical career; he had assumed the responsibilities of a man. He might have been a miserable failure as a sculptor, perhaps he would be a good mechanic. Who knows where any flight will carry a man? Making his life, married and founding a home, he would be a factor in the world's progress, and a self-supporting citizen. He tried to fire himself with this sacrifice. At any rate, in order to save his body he had lost his soul—that is, his spiritual soul. "Is not the life more than the meat?" In the recesses of his artist's mind a voice which he had strangled tried to tell him that he had done his soul a great, great wrong. Nevertheless, a solemn feeling of responsibility and of manhood came upon him, a grave quiet strength was his, and as he journeyed back to his lodgings, he did not then regret.
Mrs. Kenny and her husband and the children were in the kitchen as he passed and the landlady called out something, but he did not hear for he was half-way upstairs. As he opened the door and went into his room he saw some one was standing by the window—no, leaning far out of the window, very far; a small figure in a black dress.
"Bella!" he cried.
She flashed about, rushed at him, and for the first time since "Going to Siberia" he felt the entwining arms. He suffered the dashing embrace, then, freeing himself, saw her hair dark under her black hat, and that she had grown in eighteen months, and he heard—
"Oh, Cousin Antony, how long you have been coming home! I have been waiting for your engine to comeunder the window, but I didn't see you. How did you get here without my seeing you?"
If the sky had opened and shown him the vision of his own mother he could not have been more overwhelmed with surprise.
"Where did you come from, Bella? Who is with you?"
She took her hat off, dropped it easily on the floor, and he saw that her hair was braided in a great braid. She sat on the ledge of the open window and swung her feet. Her skirts had been lengthened, but she was still a little girl. The charming affectionate eyes beamed on him.
"But you are like anybody else, Cousin Antony, to-day. When I saw you in your flannel shirt I thought you were a fireman."
At the remembrance of when she had seen him, a look of distress crossed her mobile face. She burst out crying, sprang up and ran to him.
"Oh, Cousin Antony, I want him so, my little brother, my little playmate."
He soothed her, made her sit on his bed and dried her tears, as he had dried them when she had cried over the blackbird.
"Who is with you, honey? Who brought you here?"
As though she had stored up all her sorrow, as though she had waited with a child's loyal tenderness for this moment, she wound her arms around Fairfax's neck and brought her face close to his cheek.
"I miss him perfectly dreadfully, Cousin Antony. Nobody took care of him much but me. Now father is broken-hearted. You loved him, didn't you? He perfectly worshipped you."
"There, Bella, you choke me, honey. I can't breathe. Now tell me who let you come. Is Aunt Caroline here?"
She had no intention of answering him, and wiped her eyes briskly on the handkerchief that he gave her.
"Tobacco," she sniffed, "your handkerchief has got little wisps of tobacco on it. I think it is perfectly splendid to be an engineer! I wouldn't have thought so though, if I hadn't seen you in the flannel shirt. Wouldn't yourather be ageniusas you used to think? Don't you make casts any more? Isn't itsweetin your little room, and aren't the tracks mixing? How do you ever know which ones to go on, Cousin Antony? Andwhichis your engine? Take me down to see it. How Gardiner would have loved to ride!"
She was a startling combination of child and woman. Her slenderness, her grace, her tender words, the easy flow of speech, the choice of words caught and remembered from the varied books she devoured, her ardour and her rare brilliant little face, all made her an unusual companion.
"Now answer me," he ordered, "who came with you to Albany?"
"No one, Cousin Antony."
"What do you mean?"
"I came alone."
"From New York? You're crazy, Bella!"
She sat up with spirit, brought her heavy braid around over her shoulder and fastened the black ribbon securely.
"I lose my hair ribbons like anything," she said. "Why, I've done things alone for years, Cousin Antony. I've been all over New York matching things. I used to buy all Gardiner's things alone and have them charged. I know my way. I'm going on fourteen. You dropped your telegram, the one Miss Mitty sent you, when you rushed out that night. I found it on the stairs." She fished it out of her pocket. "Mr. Antony Fairfax, 42, Nut Street, West Albany. I had to watch for a good chance to come, and when I got to Forty-second Street I just took a ticket for West Albany, and no one ever asked me my name or address, and the people in the cars gave me candy and oranges. At the station down here I asked the ticket man where Nut Street was, and he said: 'Right over those tracks, young lady,' and laughed at me. Downstairs the woman gave me a glass of milk—and aren't the children too sweet, Cousin Antony, with so many freckles? And doesn't she speak with a brogue just like old Ann's?"
"This is the wildest thing I ever heard of," said her cousin. "I must telegraph your mother and take you home at once."
She gasped. "Oh, you wouldn't do that? I'm not going home. I have run away for good."
"Don't be a goose, little cousin."
"I hate home," she said hotly, "it's lonely, and I miss my little brother. They won't let me go to school, and mother takes lessons from an opera singer, and there is no quiet place to read. I never go to the Top Floor where we used to play." She clung to his hand. "Let me stay, Cousin Antony," she pleaded, "I want to live with you."
She coloured furiously and stopped. And Fairfax saw that she was like his mother, and that the promises were fulfilled. Her low collar, edged with fine lace, fell away from the pure young throat. Her mouth, piquant and soft, half-coaxing and half-humorous, and her glorious eyes fast losing the look of childhood, were becoming mysterious.
"You are too big a girl," he said sternly, "to talk such nonsense. You are too old to be so silly, Bella. Why, your people must be insane with anxiety."
But her people, as it turned out, were at Long Branch for the summer, and Bella, presumably to go to the dentist, had come up to stay for a day or two with the little Whitcomb ladies. She had chosen her time well.
"No one knows where I am. The Whitcombs don't know I am coming to New York, and the family think I am with Miss Eulalie and Miss Mitty."
"There is a train to New York," he said, "in half an hour."
"Oh," she cried, "Cousin Antony, how horrid! You've changed perfectly dreadfully. I see it now. You used to be fond of me. I thought you were fond of me. I don't want to force myself on you, Cousin Antony."
Fairfax was amazed, charmed and bewildered by her. What did Mrs. Kenny think? He opened the door and called her, and said over his shoulder to Bella—
"What did you tell the woman downstairs?"
Bella picked her hat up from the floor and wound the elastic around her fingers. Her face clouded.
"Tell me," Antony urged, "what did you say to Mrs. Kenny?" He saw her embarrassment, and repeated seriously: "For heaven's sake, Bella, tell me."
"No," she whispered, "I can't."
He shrugged in despair. "Come, it can't be anything very dreadful. I've got to know, you see."
The bell of the Catholic Church tolled out eight o'clock.
"Come, little cousin."
Half-defiantly and half-shamefacedly, she raised her eyes.
"It's rather hard to tell you," she stammered, "you seem to be so mad at me." She put a brave face on it. "I just told them that I was engaged to you and that I had come to marry you." And she stood her ground, her little head held up.
Fairfax stifled a shout, but was obliged to laugh gently.
"Why, Bella, you are the most ridiculous little cousin in the world. You have read too much. Now, please don't cry, Bella."
He flung the door open and called: "Mrs. Kenny, Mrs. Kenny! Will you come up-stairs?"
Those five hours were short to him travelling back to New York. Bella talked to Fairfax until she was completely talked out. Leaning on him, pouring out her childish confidences, telling him things, asking him things, until his heart yearned over her, and he stored away the tones of her sweet gay voice, exquisite with pathos when she spoke of Gardiner, and naïvely tender when she said—
"Cousin Antony, I love you better than any one else. Why can't I stay with you and be happy? I want to work for my living too. I could be a factory girl."
A factory girl!
Then she fell asleep, her head on his shoulder, and was hardly awake when they reached Miss Mitty's house and the cab stopped.
He said, "Bella, we are home."
She did not answer, and, big girl as she was, he carried her in asleep.
"I wish you could make her believe it's all a dream," he said to the Whitcombs. "I don't want the Carews to know about it. It would be far better if she could be induced to keep the secret."
"I am afraid you can't make Bella believe anything unless she likes, Mr. Antony."
No one had missed her. From the Long Branch boat she had gone directly to the Forty-second Street station, and started bravely away on her sentimental journey.
The little ladies induced him to eat what they could prepare for him, and he hurried away. He was obliged to take his train out at nine Monday morning.
He bade them look after bold Bella and teach her reason, and before he left he went in and looked at the little girllying with her face on her hand, the stains of tears and travel on her face.
"I told her that I had come to marry you, Cousin Antony...."
"Little cousin! Honey child!"
His heart was tender to his discarded little love.
Bella Carew's visit did disastrous work for Fairfax. The day following he was like a dead man at his engine, mechanically fulfilling his duties, his eyes blood-shot, his face worn and desperate. The fireman Falutini bore Fairfax's rudeness with astonishing patience. Their run was from nine until four, with a couple of hours lying off at Fonda, and back again to Albany along in the night.
The fatality of what he had been doing appeared to Antony Fairfax in its full magnitude. He had cut himself off from his class, from his kind for ever. Bella Carew, baby though she was, exquisite, refined, brilliant, what a woman she would be! At sixteen she would be a woman, at eighteen any chap, who had the luck and the fortune, could marry her. She would be the kind of woman that a man would climb for, achieve for, go mad for. As far as he was concerned, he had made his choice. He was engaged to be married to an Irish factory girl, and her words came back to him—
"If I'm any good, take me as I am. You couldn't marry the likes o' me."
Why had he ever been such a short-sighted Puritan, so little of a worldling as to entangle himself in marriage? More terribly the sense of his lost art had come in with the little figure he had admitted.
When he flung himself into his room Monday morning his brain was beyond his usual control, it worked like magic, and one by one they passed before him, the tauntingly beautiful aerial figures of his visions, the angelic forms of his ideals, and if under his hands there had been any tools he would have fallen upon them and upon the clay like a famished man on bread. He threwhimself down on his lonely bed in his room through which magic had passed, and slept heavily until Mrs. Kenny pounded on the door and roused him an hour before his train.
At Fonda, in the shed, he climbed stiffly from his cab, his head aching, his eyes drunk with sleep. All there was of brute in him was rampant, and anything that came in his way would have to bear the brunt of his unbalanced spleen.
Falutini, a great bunch of rags in his hand, was at the side of the engine, wiping the brass and softly humming. Fairfax heard it—
"Azuro puro,Cielo azuro,Mia Maddalena..."
"Stop that infernal bellow," he said, "will you?"
The Italian lifted himself upright and responded in his own tongue—
"I work, I slave, I endure. Now I may not sing? Macché," he cried defiantly, "I will sing, I will."
He threw his chest out, his black eyes on Tony's cross blue ones. He burst out carolling—
"Ah Mia Maddalena."
Fairfax struck his face; the Italian sprang at him like a cat. Falutini was as tall as Fairfax, more agile and with a hard head. However, with one big blow, Fairfax sent him whirling, and as he struck and felt the flesh and blood he discovered how glorious a thing a fight is, how nerve relaxing, and he received the other's assault with a kind of ecstasy. They were not unequally matched. Falutini's skin and muscles were like toughened velvet; he was the cock of his village, a first-rate boxer; and Tony's muscles were of iron, but Fairfax was mad and gloomy, and the Italian was desperate and disgusted, and he made the better show.
A few men lounged in and one called out: "You darned cusses are due to start in ten minutes."
Fairfax just then had his arm round the Italian's neck, the close cropped head came under his chin, and as Fairfax panted and as he smelt the garlic that at firsthad nauseated him in his companion, he was about to lay his man when the same voice that called before, yelled in horror—
"Look out, for God's sake, Fairfax, he's got a knife."
At the word, Fairfax gave a wrench, caught his companion's right hand with his left and twisted the wrist, and before he knew how he had accomplished it, he had flung the man and knife from him. The knife hit Number Twenty-four and rattled and the fireman fell in a lump on the ground. Fairfax stood over him.
"What a mean lout you are," he said in the jargon he had learned to speak, "what a mean pup. Now you get up, Tito, and clear out."
The fellow rose with difficulty, white, trembling, punched a little about the face, and breathing like a saw-mill. Some one handed the knife to Fairfax.
"It never was made in America. It's a deadly weapon. Ugh, you onion!"
The Italian wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve and spat out on the floor.
Fairfax felt better than he had felt for years. He went back to his engine.
"Get up, Tito," he commanded his fireman; "you get in quickly or I'll help you up. Give me the oil can, will you?" he said. And Tito, trembling, his teeth dry between his lips, obeyed.
Fairfax extended his hand, meeting his companion's eyes for the first time, and said frankly—
"My fault. No hard feeling, Tito. Bene benissimo."
He smiled and slapped the Italian on the back almost affectionately. Tito saw that radiant light for the first time—the light smile. The old gentleman had said a man could win the world with an expression like that upon his face.
"Keep your knife, Falutini; cut up garlic with it: don't use it on me, amico—partner."
They went to work without a word further on the part of either, and Number Twenty-four slipped out on to the switch and was wedded to the local on the main line.
Fairfax was relieved in mind, and the morbid horror of his crisis had been beaten and shaken out.
"What brutes we are," he thought, "what brutesand animals. It is a wonder that any spirit can grow its wings at any time."
He drew up into a station and stopped, and, leaning out of his window, watched the passengers board the train. Pluff, pluff, pant, pant. The steal and flow and glide, the run and the motion that his hand on the throttle controlled and regulated, became oftentimes musical to him, and when he was morose he would not let the glide and the roll run to familiar melodies in his head, above all, no Southern melodies. "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," that was the favourite with Number Twenty-four. He had used to whistle it as he modelled in his room in New Orleans, where the vines grew around his window and Maris made molasses cake and brought it up hot when the syrup was thick on the side, and downstairs a voice would call, "Emmeline, oh, Emmeline." That sacred voice...! When Number Twenty-four was doing her thirty miles an hour, that was the maximum speed of the local, her wheels were inclined to sing—
"Flow gently, sweet Afton,Among thy green braes:Flow gently, I'll sing theeA song in thy praise.My Mary's asleepBy thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,Disturb not her dream."
And little Gardiner leaned hard against his arm and Bella ran upstairs to escape the music because she did not like to cry, and his aunt's dove-like eyes reproached him for his brutal flight. He would not hear any ballads; but to-night, no sooner had he rolled out again into the open country than he began to hum unconsciously the first tune the wheels suggested. They were between the harvest fields and in the moonlight lay the grain left by the reapers.
"Cielo azuroGiornata splendida,Mia Maddalena."
Fairfax laughed when he recognized it. He glanced over at Falutini who was leaning out of his windowdejectedly. At the next station, whilst the engine let off steam, Fairfax called to his fireman, and the man, as he turned his face to his chief, looked more miserably homesick than revengeful.
"Iused to know a chap from Italy!" Fairfax said in his halting Italian, "a molto bravo diavolo. Shake her down, Tito, and brace her up a little, will you?"
The fireman bent to the furnace, its blast red on his face; from under the belly of the engine the sparks sang as they fell into the water gutter along the track.
"My chap was a marble cutter from Carrara."
Tito banged the door of the furnace. "Itoo am from Carrara."
"Good!" cried Fairfax, "good enough." And to himself he said: "I'll be darned if I ever knew Benvenuto Cellini's real name!"
"Carrara," continued his companion, "is small. He may have been a cousin. What was his name?"
"Benvenuto Cellini," replied Tony, easily, and rang his bell.
Once more they rolled out into the night. As they drove through the country Fairfax saw the early moonlight lie along the tracks, sifting from the heavens like a luminous snow. No breeze stirred and over the grain fields the atmosphere hung hot and heavy, and they rushed through a sea of heat and wheat and harvest smells. The wind of their going made a stir, and as Fairfax peered out from his window his head was blown upon by the wind of the speed.
Falutini from his side of the cab said, "Benvenuto Cellini. That is not a Carrara man, no, no."
"I never knew him by any other name," said the engineer. "I like Italians." He threw this cheerfully over his shoulder at his inferior.
There was a childlike and confiding smile on the Italian's face; brutal as all Italian peasants are, brutal but kindly and unsuspicious as a child, ready to love and ready to hate.
"Only you mustn't use your knife; it's not well thought of in America. You'll get sent to gaol."
The Limited whistled from around a curve, came roaring toward them, tore past them, cutting the air, andFairfax's local plugged along when the mile-a-minute left them. Tony was conscious that as he hummed the sound grew full and louder; he was accompanied by a voice more assured than his own, and in melodious fraternity the two men sang together. So they took their train in.
The Kennys did not know what had happened to Misther Fairfax. He sang on the stairs now and again as he had done when he first came to Nut Street. He bought the children sweet Jackson balls and the baby nearly died from "wan in its troat," and his mother picked him up by his socks and rattled the sticky sweet out of the child's larynx, and the cat finished it.
Tony's foreman was asked in to have supper and a late cup of coffee, and Miss Cora Kenny, whom "Pop" had sent to the Troy convent the first week of Antony's appearance in the Gents' Boarding and Lodging House, came home for a Catholic holiday, and she helped her mother. They made macaroni for Tito Falutini—"high Falutini," as Mrs. Kenny called him. The name stuck, and the macaroni stuck as well, fast to the plate; but the Italian, in bashful gratitude, his eyes suffused with smoke and tears, ate gratefully, gesticulating his satisfaction, and Cora Kenny studied him from the stove where she slaved to tempt the appetites of Fairfax and his friend.
Fairfax was proud of Falutini: he was not an ordinary acquaintance; he sang after supper, standing stiffly in a corner of the kitchen, his red shirt well opened at the throat, and his moustache like black velvet above his red lips.
"He sings betther than the theayter, Misther Fairfax," Mr. Kenny said; "it makes yer eyes thrick ye," and blew his nose, and Cora asked the singer softly if he could give them "When the band begins to play," or "Gallagher's Daughter Belle." Tito smiled hopefully, and when Fairfax laughingly translated, assured Cora Kenny by means of Fairfax again, that if determination could make a manlearn a foreign song, he would sing her "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" next Saturday night.
"Ah," she breathed, "she'd not be home then!"
"No," said Kenny, who was a lazy husband but a remarkable father, "that shewudnot!"
The Italian fireman and the Irish lodging-house keeper's daughter gazed in each other's eyes. "Gallagher's Daughter Belle" ... dum ... dum ... Fairfax hummed it, he knew it. Kenny's daughter Cora—thatwould be more to the point: and he thought of Molly. He had not seen her since he had kissed her a fortnight before. Cora said she had never been bold before, had never let herself think how jealous she was, but to-night Mr. Tito High-Falutini's eyes made her a new woman. Cora said to her mother over her shoulder—
"Shure, Molly Shannon's the onlucky gurl."
"How's that, Cora?"
"Lost her job."
"No!" exclaimed Mrs. Kenny, sympathetically, "and with what doin'?"
Shure, the foreman's daughter was a chum with Cora. The boss had made the girl prisents of collars, and it seemed, so Bridget said—Cora with exquisite subtlety dropped her voice, and after a second Mrs. Kenny exclaimed—
"Cora, you're a bad gurl to hark to such goings on, much less belave thim," and pushed her daughter back and brought out herself the crowning delicacy of the feast, a dish that needed no foreign help to compose, steaming praties cooked in their shimmies, as she expressed it. Cora sat down by High-Falutini, Mrs. Kenny went into the next room to her littlest children, and Kenny lit a fresh pipe, held the bowl in his hand, and opposite his distractingly pretty little daughter kept a thoughtful eye upon the pair. And Fairfax went upstairs two steps at a time.
It was after eleven, dense and hot, but he had gone up eagerly. Of late, whenever he had a few spare moments he took them, and all Sundays he remained in his room. There was an odour in the apartment, one that persistently rose above the tenement smells, a damp, moist, earthyperfume, to Fairfax delicious beyond words. Mosquitoes were rampant, but he had been brought up in a mosquito-ridden country, and he had rigged a bit of muslin across his window, and burned Mrs. Kenny's gas with heartless inconsideration.
On a small wooden stool stood something covered with cloths damped night and morning by Fairfax, and during the day by Matty Kenny, a public-school girl of twelve years of age, a pretty, half-witted little creature, whom of all Nut Street Fairfax liked and whom he blindly trusted. Between school hours the little girl ran up and patted with a sponge the mysterious image in Misther Fairfax's hall room. Tell? Ah, shure, Misther Fairfax, cross her heart and hope to die but she'd not. As her duties consisted in tidying Antony's room, her visits were not remarked. Now Antony lifted off the first cloth; he drew out the stool under the light, flung off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his cravat, got from his drawer a small spatular instrument, and looking at his unveiled work, meditatively wiped the dried clay from his tool. Then he drew off the last bit of cheesecloth, uncovering a statuette modelled in clay with great delicacy and great assurance. The gaslight fell yellow on it and the little statue seemed to swim, to oscillate and illumine. It was the figure of a little girl, her hair loose around her face, holding to her cheek a dead blackbird. The art of the work was its great sincerity, the calm, assured modelling, the tender truthfulness; the form of the child, her dress, even her strapped shoes were only indicated, nevertheless it was a perfect bit of realism, though crude. But the head, the attitude, the cheek and the face, the little caressing enfolding hands, were Greek in their perfect execution.
A flush rose on the young man's face, his eyes brightened, he gave a soft touch here and there with the little instrument, but he had done all he could to this creation. It was only in perishable clay, it must crumble and dry; how could he perpetuate it? He thought of having it cast in terra-cotta, but how and where? The figure vacillated in the gaslight, and taunted him with its perishability, its evanescence, frail, transient as childhood is transient. "Bella," he mused before it, "littlecousin." His right hand had not quite lost its cunning, then? He could construct and direct a locomotive, but he had not lost all his skill. For what the statue proved to him, for its evidence of his living art and his talent, he loved it, he turned it and viewed it on all sides, whistling softly under his breath, not morbid about his tunes now.
Tito High-Falutini pushed the door open. "Goin' home, Tony, la Signora Kenni has turned me out."
Fairfax pointed to his statue. "Look. If we were in Carrara somebody would lend me a quarry or I would steal one, and turn little Bella into a snow image." He spoke in English, entirely uncomprehended by his companion. He put his hand on Tito's arm.
"Did you do that, Tony? It is valuable. In Italy we make terra-cotta figures like that and sell them."
"Do you think, Tito," his companion replied, "that I would sell little Bella for a few lire, you commercial traveller?"
Tito was acquainted with the Italian quarter, he would find some one who baked in terra-cotta. They had brought their trades with them. Tony could do others: a Savoyard with a hand-organ, those things were very gentile, very brave indeed, and money, said Tito, gloating, money,—why that would cost a dollar at least.
Fairfax covered up the clay and pushed the stool back in its corner.
"You can make a fool of yourself, too," he said good-humouredly, and pushed Falutini out. "Go home and dream of Kenny's daughter Cora, and don't forget to buy a can of crude oil and order a half dozen of those cock-screws. Good-night." He banged the door.
He undressed, still softly whistling, unpinned the curtain from the window, and what there was of heat and freshness came into the room with the mosquitoes that had huddled at the glass and the sill. He had heard Cora Kenny's information: Molly had lost her place because she would not do what the boss wanted. They always wanted one thing in the collar factories. The boss was a beast. He heaved a deep sigh. He had not been lonely the last fortnight, his work had absorbed him. There was no way for him to go on with it, he had no time, nor means. It had brought him nearto his people, to his mother, to his kinsmen, to the child who had died, to the one that remained. But he knew his loneliness would return, his need of companionship, of expression and life, and he was too healthy, too strong to be nourished by his sentimental thought of the child-woman or to live on the sale of terra-cotta statues. He cradled his young head with its fair hair on his arm and fell asleep, and over the yards the harvest moon rose yellow and shone through the small window and on Antony. He might have been a boy asleep at school, his face looked so young and so unstained, and the same light shone on the angel of the resurrection at the gate of the rural cemetery, on Gardiner's little grave in Woodlawn, and on his mother's grave in New Orleans, where the brick walls keep the coffins high above the Mississippi's tide and silt.
The moonlight could not penetrate to the corner where, under the damp cloths, Bella wept over the blackbird pressed against her cheek.
Fairfax expected to find a melancholy, wet-eyed little creature with a hard-luck story when he went to Troy, and although he knew that Molly would never reproach him, he knew as well that he had treated her very badly. From the day he had asked her to become Mrs. Antony Fairfax, and heard Cora Kenny's news, he had not been near his sweetheart. His sweetheart! Since he had read "The Idylls of the King" in his boyhood, no woman had seemed too high or too fine for him: he had been Lancelot to Guinevere, the Knight to the Lady: Molly Shannon had not been in any romance he had ever read.
He found her sitting among her lodging-house keeper's children in a room tidied by her own hands. During her leisure, she had made herself a pink gingham dress with small white rosebuds on it, and around her neck a low white collar she had pinned with a tortoise-shell brooch. Her dress was the simplest Fairfax had ever seen her wear. It was cool and plain, and the Irish girl's milk-white skin, her auburn hair, her eyes with the black flecks in them, her young round breast, her bare fore-arm, as she rocked Patsy O'Brien, were charming, and her cry, as Fairfax came in, and the hands she pressed to her heart were no less charming.
She sprang up, her work fell to the floor: she stood deathly white and trembling. Her emotion, her love, affected the young man very deeply. He did not think of the obstacles between them, of her station, or of anything as he came into Mrs. O'Brien's parlour-bedroom amongst her six ubiquitous children and disturbed the cradle to get to Molly Shannon. He thought of one fact only, that he had kissed her: how had he forgotten the honey of it for a fortnight? Without so much as biddingher good-morning, he repeated the ecstasy and kissed her. She had time to grow faint and to regain her life in his arms, and under her happy breath she whispered: "Ah, I must quiet Patsy. Ah, let me go, he'll hurt his throat." And she bent, blooming and heart-breakingly happy, over the cradle.
Mrs. Kenny called him as he went past the door. "Shure," she said, "I've got bad news for ye, Misther Fairfax, dear."
He stopped on the threshold. "There is only one death on the earth that could give me any pain, Mrs. Kenny. I reckon it's——"
"It's not death then," she hastened, "shure it's a little thing, but poor Matty's that crazy that the child has gone out to her aunty's and wurra a bit will she come home."
"Matty!" Fairfax exclaimed.
"Shure, the moniment in your bedroom, Misther Fairfax."
He flew upstairs. The corner inhabited for him by a fairy companion was empty. The image of his talent, of his little love, of his heart's hope, had disappeared. Mrs. Kenny did not follow him upstairs as one would have supposed that she would do. He locked his door, the cloths lay in a pile, damp and soggy. Why had they not left the fragments—the precious morsels? His eyes filled with impotent, angry grief; he tore his table drawer open and found the designs which he had made for the figure. The sketches seemed crude and poor beside the finished work whose execution had been inspired. This destruction unchained again his melancholy. He was overwhelmed; the accident seemed like a brutal insistence of Destiny, and he seemed bound to the coarse, hard existence to which he had taken in desperation. With this destruction he saw as well the wiping out of his life of Bella.
Ah, at Troy that day he had done more than break a clay image of her. He opened the door as if he would have called to Mrs. Kenny, then slammed it, unable to speak from excitement, and a dogged look crossed his face. The night was muggy, his throat burned with asudden thirst, and he exulted that it did so. On his empty room, empty to him for ever, for the figure in the corner had disenchanted it of all its horrors for fourteen happy days and nights, he looked once and then he fled. He threw himself down the stairs and out into the late mid-summer night.
The coloured porter at the Delavan put him to bed at one o'clock in a comfortable room. As the fellow's black face bent above him, Tony, who saw it blur and waver before his intoxicated eyes, murmured—
"Emmy, Emmy, don't tell my mother, and wake me at seven, for I run out at nine sharp."
The paymaster, Peter Rainsford, had found little in West Albany to excite the tepid interest he still retained in life, but Tony Fairfax, the driver of Number Twenty-four, had attracted his attention. Each time that Fairfax came to report Rainsford made a vain effort to engage him in conversation. The agent wondered what the engine-driver's story was, and having one of his own, hoped for Fairfax's sake that there was anything but a class resemblance between them.
Detained late this night at his desk, he pushed back his lamp to contemplate Tito Falutini, who, his hat pressed against his red flannel breast, his teeth sparkling, came in to report. Tito told a tale in a jargon which only an etymologist could have sifted into words.
"Well, what do you think has become of him?" Rainsford asked.
The Italian gesticulated with his hat far and wide.
"Youtook the train to Fonda alone, without an engineer, Falutini? How was it the fellows didn't stop you at Fonda? It doesn't seem possible."
The official opened a ledger and ran his eye over the names.
"I can put Steve Brodie on Number Twenty-four to-morrow morning. You should have reported at once in West Albany, Falutini."
The name of Steve Brodie was intelligible to Tito. "Nota io," he said, "not a fire for any man, only Toni."
Rainsford wrote a few moments in his ledger. "Want me to strike your name right off the books now, Falutini? I've a good mind to do it anyway. You should have reported at nine this morning."
"Want to find Fairfax," said the Italian.
The disappearance did not speak well for the young man in whom the boss had taken an interest.
"Has he paid up at Kenny's?" Rainsford asked hopelessly.
Falutini did not understand. "Signora Kenni," informed the fireman, "mutche cri, kids mutche cri, altro." Fairfax, the fellow made Rainsford understand, had left his clothes and belongings.
"Ah," Rainsford thought, "it looks worse than at first."
"No," Falutini explained, "no fight." Then he broke forth into an explanation from which Rainsford vainly tried to create some order. Statues and terra-cotta figures mingled with an explanation of theft of some property of Fairfax's and his flight in consequence.
"I'll close up here in a quarter of an hour, and go over and see Mrs. Kenny. Steve Brodie will take your engine, and you look out for yourself, my man, and don't get bounced when you come in to report to-morrow."
Rainsford saw Mrs. Kenny in the kitchen-bedroom-parlour of the first-class hotel (Gents only). When he came in and sat down in the midst of the Irish family Rainsford did not know that he was the second gentleman that had crossed the threshold since the sign had swung in the window. Mary Kenny was intelligible, charmingly so, and her account was full of colour; and the young man's character was drawn by a woman's lips, with a woman's tenderness.
"Ah, wurra sor," she finished, "Oi cud go down on me knees to him if it wasn't for Pathrick Kenny. It was an evil day when that Hitalian came to the dure. Wud ye now?" she offered, as though she suggested that he should view sacred relics, "wud ye feel like goin' up to his room and castin' an eye?"
Peter Rainsford did so, feeling that he was taking a man at a disadvantage, but consoling himself with the thought that Fairfax's disappearance warranted the invasion. Mrs. Kenny, the baby on her arm, stood by his side, and called over the objects as though she were a showman at a museum.
"That's his bury, sor, and the best wan in the hotel, and them's his little ornyments an' foolin's in order onthe top. Matty reds his room up, an' never a hand but mine puts his wash to rights." She pulled a drawer open. "His beautiful starched shirts, I doos them with me own hands and charges him as though he was me son; an' there is his crayvats, an' over there," she pointed with her thumb, "stud the image, bad cess to the Hitalian an' his likes, Mr. Rainsford, an' many's the time I've stud beyont the dure an' heard him sing and whustle beautiful, whilst he was a-carvin' of it."
Rainsford looked at a small design pinned against the wall: he considered it long.
"Do ye think that he's kilt then?" asked the Irish woman.
The paymaster returned briskly. "No, I don't think so. I hope he has not come to any harm."
"His readin' buks, sor," she said, "wud ye cast an eye?"
But here Rainsford refused, and returning to his own lodgings higher up in the town, and on a better scale, went home thoughtful, touched, and with a feeling of kinship with the truant engineer. Before, however, he could take any steps to look for Fairfax, a coloured man from somewhere appeared with the request that Mrs. Kenny send all Fairfax's things. The mysterious lodger enclosed, moreover, a week's board in advance, but no address; nor had the coloured man any information for Nut Street, and a decided antipathy existed between George Washington and Mary Kenny. She was pale when she packed up Fairfax's belongings and cried into his trunk, as she laid the drawing of Bella Carew next to the unopened packet of his mother's treasures. She was unconscious of what sacred thing she touched, but she was cut to the heart, as was poor Falutini. Peter Rainsford, who had not gone far in his friendship with the elusive Fairfax, was only disappointed.
At the close of the following Sunday afternoon, Rainsford was reading in his room when Fairfax himself came in.
"Why, hello, Fairfax," the paymaster's tone was not that of a disaffected patron to a delinquent engineer. "You are just two weeks late in reporting NumberTwenty-four. But I'm sincerely glad you came, whatever the reason for the delay."
Rainsford's greeting was that of a friend to a friend. Fairfax, surprised, lifted his eyebrows and smiled "thanks." He took the chair Rainsford offered. "Whythankyou, Rainsford." He took a cigar which Rainsford handed him. He was in the dress of a railroad man off duty.
"Now I don't know anybody I've been more curious about," said the paymaster. "Where on earth did you go to, Fairfax? You don't know how you have mystified us all here, and in fact, me from the first."
"There are no end of mysteries in life," said the young man, still smiling; "I should have wondered about you, Mr. Rainsford, if I had had either the time or the courage!"
"Courage, Fairfax?"
"Why yes," returned the engineer, twisting his cigar between his fingers, "courage to break away from the routine I've been obliged to follow."
Fairfax saw before him a spare man of about forty years of age. The thin hair, early grey, came meekly around the temples of a finely made and serious brow, but the features of Rainsford's face were delicate, the skin was drawn tightly over the high cheek-bones. There was an extreme melancholy in his expression; when defeat had begun to write its lines upon his face, over the humiliating stain, Resignation had laid a hand.
"Well, I'll spare you wondering about me, Fairfax," the agent said; "I am just a plain fellow, that's all, and for that reason, when I saw that one of the hands on my pay-roll was clearly a gentleman, and a very young one too, it interested me, and since I have been to Kenny's"—he hesitated a little—"since I have heard something about you from that good soul, why, I am more than interested, I am determined!"
Fairfax, his head thrown back, smoked thoughtfully, and Rainsford noted the youthfulness of the line of his neck and face, the high idealism of the brow, the beautiful mouth, the breeding and the sensitiveness there.
"Why, it's a crime, that's what it is. You are young, you're a boy. Thank God for it, it is not too late. Would you care to tell me what brought you here like this?I won't say what misfortune brought you here, Fairfax,"—he put his nervous hand to his lips—"but what folly on your part."
Rainsford took for granted the ordinary reasons for hard luck and the harvest of wild oats.
Fairfax said, "I have no people, Rainsford; they are all dead."
"But you have influential friends?"
"No," said Fairfax, "not one."
"You have extraordinary talent, Fairfax."
The young man started. "But what makes you think that?"
"Falutini told me."
Fairfax laughed harshly. "Poor Tito. He's a judge, I daresay." His face clouded, grew quite stern before Rainsford's intent eyes. "Yes," he said slowly, "I think I have talent; I think I must have a lot somewhere, but I have got a mighty dangerous Pride and it has driven me to a sort of revenge on Fate, an arrogant showing of my disdain—God knows of what and of whom!" More quietly he said: "Whilst my mother lived I could not beg, Rainsford, I couldn't starve, I couldn't scratch and crawl and live as a starving artist must when he is making his way. I wanted to make a living first, and I was too proud to take the thorny way an artist must."
Fairfax got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked across Rainsford's small room. It was in excellent order, plainly furnished but well supplied with the things a man needs to make him comfortable. There were even a few luxuries, like pillows on the hard sofa, bookshelves filled with books and a student's lamp soft under a green shade. As he turned back to the paymaster Fairfax had composed himself and said tranquilly—
"I reckon you've got a pretty bad note against me in the ledger, haven't you, Rainsford?"
"Note?" repeated the other vaguely. "Oh, your bad conduct report. Well, rather."
"Who has got my job on Number Twenty-four?"
"Steve Brodie."
Fairfax nodded. "He surely does know how to drive an engine all right, and so do I, Rainsford."
"You mustn't run any more engines, Fairfax."
"I don't want to come back to West Albany and to the yards," said the engineer.
"I haven't much influence now," Rainsford said musingly, "but I have some friends still. I want you to let me lend you some money, a very small sum."
The blood rushed to Fairfax's face. He extended his hand impulsively.
"There, Rainsford, you needn't go on. You are the first chap who has put out a rope to me. I did have twenty-five cents given me once, but otherwise——"
"I mean it sincerely, Fairfax."
"Rainsford," said the young man, with emotion in his voice, "you are a fine brand of failure."
"Will you let me stand by you, Fairfax?"
"Yes, indeed," said the other, "I will, but not in the way you mean. I reckon I must have felt what kind of a fellow you were or I wouldn't be here. At any rate you're the only person I wanted to see. I quite understand you can't take me back at the yards, and I don't want to drive in and out from West Albany. Could you do anything for me at the general company, Rainsford? Would they give me a job in Albany? I'd take a local though I'm up to an express."
"No," said Rainsford, "you mustn't think of driving engines; I won't lift my hand to help you."
"It is all I can do," returned the engineer quietly, after a second, "all I want." Then he said, "I'vegotto have it...."
"Why I'lllendyou enough money, Fairfax, to pay your passage to France!"
"Stop!" cried the young man with emotion, "it's too late."
"Nonsense," said the other warmly, Fairfax's voice and personality charming him as it charmed others. "Why, you are nothing but a big, headlong boy! You have committed a tremendous folly; you've got art at your finger tips. Are you going to sweat and stew all your life in the cab of an engine? Why, you are insane."
"Stop," cried Fairfax again, "for the love of heaven...."
Rainsford regarded him, fascinated. He saw in himhis own lost promises, his own lost chance; it seemed to him that through this young man he might in a way buy back the lost years.
"I'llnotstop till I have used every means to make you see the hideous mistake you're making."
"Rainsford," said Antony, paling, "if you had made me this offer the day before I left Nut Street, I would have been in France by this. My God!" he murmured beneath his breath. "HowI would have escaped!"—checked himself with great control for so young a man and so ardent a man. He was a foot taller than his desk-bowed pale companion, and he laid his hand impulsively on his chief's shoulder.
"If you can give me ajob, Rainsford, do so, will you? I know I have no right to ask you, after the way I have treated the Company, but I am married. I have married Molly Shannon. You know her, the girl at Sheedy's." He waited a second, looking the other man in the eyes, then, with something of his old humour, he said, "There are two of us now, Rainsford, and I have got to make our living."
Death does not always make the deepest graves. His art was buried deepest of all, and there was just one interest in his life, and that was not his wife. He was kind to her, but if he had beaten her she would have kissed his hand; she could not have loved him better. Her life was "just wrapped round him." He treated her as a lady, and he was a gentleman. Her manners were always soft and gentle, coming from a sweet good heart. She grew thinner, and her pride in him and her love for him and her humility made Molly Fairfax beautiful. There was a great deal of cruelty in the marriage and in their mating. It was no one's fault, and the woman suffered the most. Their rooms were in a white frame building with green blinds, one of the old wooden houses that remained long in Albany. It did not overlook the yards, for Fairfax wanted a new horizon. From her window, Molly could see the docks, the river, the night and day boats as they anchored, and she had time to watch and know them all. Nothing in his working life or in his associations coarsened Antony Fairfax; it would have been better for him had it done so. She was not married to an engineer, but to a gentleman, and he was as chivalrous to her as though she had been the woman of his dreams; but she spent much of the time weeping and hiding the traces from him, and in the evenings, when he came home to the meal that she prepared each day with a greater skill and care, sometimes after greeting her he would not break the silence throughout the evening, and he did not dream that he had forgotten her. His new express engine became his life. He drove her, cared for her, oiled and tended her with art and passion. There were no bad notes against him at the office. His recordswere excellent, and Rainsford had the satisfaction of knowing that the man whom he had recommended was in the right place. The irony of it all was that his marrying Molly Shannon did not bring him peace, although it tranquillized him, and kept part of his nature silent. He had meditated as he drove his engine, facing the miles before him as the machine ate them up, and these miles began to take him into other countries. There was a far-awayness in the heavens to him now, and as he used to glance up at the telegraph wires and poles they became to him masts and riggings of vessels putting out to sea, and from his own window of his little tenement apartment of two bedrooms and a kitchen, he watched the old river boats and the scows and the turtle-like canal boats that hugged the shore, and they became vessels whose bows had kissed ports whose names were thrilling, and in the nest he had made his own, thinking to rest there, his growing wings began to unprison and the nest to be too small. There was no intoxication in the speed of his locomotive to him, and he felt a grave sense of power as he regulated and slowed and accelerated, and the smooth response of his locomotive delighted him. She flew to his hand, and the speed gave him joy.
At lunch time Falutini had told him of Italy, and the glow and the glamour, the cypress and the pines, the azure skies, olive and grape vines brought their enchantment around Fairfax, until No. 111 stood in an enchanted country, and not under the shed with whirling snows or blinding American glare without. He exchanged ideas with Rainsford. The agent became his friend, and one Sunday Fairfax led him into the Delavan House, and George Washington nearly broke his neck and spilled the soup on the shoulder of the uninteresting patron he was at the moment serving, in his endeavour to get across the floor to Antony.
"Yas,sah, Mistah Kunnell Fairfax, sah! Mighty glad to see yo', and the Capting?—Hyah in de window?"
"Rainsford," said the young man, "isn't it queer? I feel at home here. This dingy hotel and this smiling old nigger, they are joys to me—joys. To this very table I have brought my own bitter food to eat and bitter water to drink, and half forgotten their tastes as I have eatenthe Delavan fare, and been cheered by this faithful old darkey. Perhaps all the chaps round here aren't millionaires or Depuysters, but there are no railroad men such as I am lunching here, and I breathe again."
The two ate their tomato soup with relish. Poor Molly was an indifferent cook, and the food at Rainsford's hash-house was horrible.
"Don't come here often now, Fairfax, do you?"
"Every Sunday."
"Really?And do you bring Mrs. Fairfax?"
"No," frowned the young man, "and I wonder you ask. Don't you understand that this is my holiday? God knows I earn it."
Rainsford finished his soup. The plate was whisked away, was briskly replaced by a quantity of small dishes containing everything on the bill of fare from chicken to pot-pie, and as Rainsford meditated upon the outlay, he said—
"She's a gentle, lovely creature, Fairfax. I don't wonder you were charmed by her. She has a heart and a soul."
Fairfax stared. "Why when did you see her?"
He had never referred to his wife since the day he had announced his marriage to his chief.
"She came on the day of the blizzard to the office to bring a parcel for you. She wanted me to send it up the line by the Limited to catch you at Utica."
"My knit waistcoat," nodded Fairfax. "I remember. It saved my getting a chill. I had clean forgotten it. She's a good girl."
Rainsford chose amongst the specimens of food.
"She is a sweet woman."
Here George Washington brought Fairfax the Sunday morningTribune, and folded it before his gentleman and presented it almost on his knees.
"Let me git ye a teenty weenty bit mo' salid, Kunnell?"
Fairfax unfolded theTribuneleisurely. "Bring some ice-cream, George, and some good cigars, and a little old brandy. Yes, Rainsford, it isn't poison."
Fairfax read attentively, and his companion watched him patiently, his own face lightened by the companionshipof the younger man. Fairfax glanced at the headlines of theTribune, said "By George!" under his breath, and bent over the paper. His face underwent a transformation; he grew pale, read fixedly, then laughed, said "By George!" again, folded the paper up and put it in his pocket.
The ice-cream was brought and described as "Panillapolitancream, sah," and Fairfax lit a cigar and puffed it fast and then said suddenly—
"Do you know what hate is, Rainsford? I reckon you don't. Your face doesn't bear any traces of it."
"Yes, Fairfax," said the other, "I know what it is—it's a disease which means battle, murder, and sudden death."
The young man took the paper out of his pocket and unfolded it, and Rainsford was surprised to see his hands tremble, the beautiful clever hands with the stained finger ends and the clean, beautiful palm. Falutini did more work than Fairfax now. He slaved for his master.
"Read that, Rainsford." He tapped a headline with his forefinger. "It sounds like an event."
The Unveiling of the Abydos Sphinx in Central ParkCedersholm's Wonderful Pedestal.The Difficult Transportation of the EgyptianMonument from the Port to the Park.Unveiling to take place next Saturday.
The article went on to speak of the dignified marble support, and hinted at four prehistoric creatures in bronze which were supposed to be the masterpieces of modern sculpture.
Rainsford read it through. "Very interesting. An event, as you say, Tony. Cedersholm has made himself a great reputation."
"Damn him!" breathed the engineer. His heart was beating wildly, he felt a suffocation in his breast. A torrent of feeling swept up in him. No words could say what a storm and a tempest the notice caused.
"Jealous," Rainsford thought. "Cedersholm has all that poor Fairfax desires."
Overcome by the memories the headlines recalled,overcome by his anger and the injustice, Fairfax's face grew white.
"Take a little more coffee, Kunnell," said George Washington at his elbow.
"No." Antony repulsed him rudely. "Did you read it all, Rainsford?"
"I think so. I dare say this will bring Cedersholm close on a hundred thousand dollars."
"It will pave his way to hell one day, Rainsford," said the engineer, leaning across the table. "It will indeed! Why, it is a monument of injustice and dishonour. Do you know what that Sphinx rests on, Rainsford, do you know?"
For a moment the railroad agent thought his friend had lost his senses brooding over his discarded art, his spoiled life.
"Four huge prehistoric creatures," Rainsford read mildly.
Fairfax's lips trembled. "It rests on a man's heart and soul, on his flesh and blood, on his bleeding wounds, Rainsford. I worked in Cedersholm's studio, I slaved for him night and day for eighteen months. I spilled my youth and heart's blood there, I did indeed." His face working, he tapped his friend's arm with his hand. "I made the moulds for those beasts. I cast them in bronze, right there in his studio. Every inch of them is mine, Rainsford, mine. By ... you can't take it in, of course, you don't believe me, nobody would believe me, that's why I can do nothing, can't say anything, or I'd be arrested as a lunatic. But Cedersholm's fame in this instance is mine, and he has stolen it from me and shut me out like a whipped dog. He thinks I am poor and unbefriended, and he knows that I have no case. Why, he's ahound, Rainsford, the meanest hound on the face of the earth."