Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

She stopped at the foot of the avenue and said something was beautiful, and he looked up. The marble figure of an angel on a grey pedestal rose at the gate, a colossal figure in snowy marble, with folded wings and one uplifted hand. There was a solemn majesty in the creation, a fine, noble, holy majesty, and the sculptor halted before it so long, his face grave and his eyes absorbed, that when Molly sighed, he started. Along the base ran the words —

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

"Come," he said brusquely to his companion; "come. This is no place for us." And he hurried her out of the grounds.

On the way home his silence was not flattering to his companion, who was too meek to be offended. Already the pleasure of being by his side was well-nigh too much for her swelling heart to bear. The lengthening twilight filled Nut Street as they turned into it, and very nearly every member of the little working colony was out of doors, including the Sheedys and the new tenants of Sanders' old room. Walking alongside of Molly Shannon, Fairfax understood what his promenade would mean. He glanced at his companion and saw her colour, and she raised her head with a dignity that touched him, and as they passed the Sheedys he said "Good-evening" in his pleasant Southern voice, lifting his hat as though they had been of his own kind. He drew the Irish girl's arm within his own.

For Molly, she walked a gamut of misery, and the sudden realization of the solemnity of the thing he was doing made the young man's heart beat heavily.

CHAPTER XIV

He had been gone from home more than a year, his mother wrote. "One cannot expect to carve a career in twelve months' time, Tony, and yet I am so impatient for you, my darling, I am certain you have gone far and have splendid things to show me. Are you sure that Albany is the place for you? Would it not have been better to have stayed on with Cedersholm? When will you run down to your old mother, dearest? I long for the sound of your footstep, the dear broken footstep, Tony…" Then she went on to say not to mind her foolishness, not to think of her as mourning, but to continue with his beautiful things. She had not been very well of late – a touch of fever, she reckoned: Emmeline took the best of care of her. She was better.

He let the pages fall, reading them hastily, eagerly, approaching in his thought of her everything he had longed to be, had yearned to be, might have been, and the letter with its elegant fine writing and the fluttering thin sheets rustled ghost-like in his hand. As he turned the pages a leaf of jasmine she had put between the sheets fell unseen to the floor.

He would go to New Orleans at once: he would throw himself at his mother's knees and tell her his failures, his temptations, his griefs: he would get a transfer to some Southern train, he would steal a ride, but he would go. His mother's pride would suffer when she saw what he had become, but he was not bringing her home a shameful story. She would ask to see his beautiful creations – alas! even his ideals were buried under grime and smoke, their voices drowned in whistles and bells! He folded his arms across his breast, the last sheet of the long letter in his hand, and again his room stifled him as it had done before when he had flown out to walk with the Irish girl. The walls closed in upon him. The ceiling seemed to confine him like a coffin lid, and the flickering gas jet over his bureau burned pale like a burial candle…

He groaned, started forward to the door as though he would begin his journey home immediately, but like many a wanderer who starts on his voyage home and finds the old landmarks displaced, before Fairfax could take the first step forward, his course was for ever changed… He had not heard Molly's knock at the door. The girl came in timidly, holding out a telegram; she brought it as she had brought the other, without comment, but with the Irish presentiment of ill, she remained waiting silently, knowing in her humble breast that she was all he had.

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

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

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

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

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

He snatched up his hat and fled from her without reply.

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

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

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

CHAPTER XV

He did not go South. There was nothing for him to go for. The idea of his home uninhabited by her made him a coward. Emmeline sent him her thimble, her lace collar, her wedding ring and a lock of her hair, shining still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and did not untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the 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 can point," laughed the engineer, "in any language! and I reckon I'll get on with Falutini."

CHAPTER XVI

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."

CHAPTER XVII

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

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

One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He considered his own image in the 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

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 come under 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 you rather be a genius as you used to think? Don't you make casts any more? Isn't it sweet in your little room, and aren't the tracks mixing? How do you ever know which ones to go on, Cousin Antony? And which is 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?"

CHAPTER XIX

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.