Part 23 (1/2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His nails clenched into his palms, the tears ran over his face. One by one as the pictures of his mother came to him, imperious, graceful, enchanting, one by one he blessed them, wors.h.i.+pped before them until the curtain fell at the end--he could not picture that. Had she called for him in vain? Had she watched the open door to see him enter? In G.o.d's name why hadn't they sent for him? ”Suddenly of heart disease ...” the morning of this very day--this very day. And on he tramped, unconsciously going in the direction he had taken that morning, and at a late hour found himself without the gates of the cemetery where he and Molly Shannon had spent the late afternoon. The iron gates were closed; within stretched the s.h.i.+ning 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, s.h.i.+ning still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and did not untie; he did not wish to open his wound. And his face, thinner from his illness and his loss, looked ten years older. The early happy ecstasy of youth was gone, and a bitter, mature recklessness took its place, and there was no hand to soothe him but Molly's, and she had gone back to Troy. He tried what ways were open to a man of his age and the cla.s.s he had adopted, and he turned for distraction and relief and consolation to their doors. But at those portals, at the threshold of the houses where other men went in, he stopped. If his angel had deserted him, at any rate the beast had not taken its place. The vast solitude and the cruel loneliness, the isolation from his kind, made him an outcast too wretched not to cry for help and too clean to wallow in order to forget his state. His work saved his health and his brain. He made a model of an engine in plaster and went mad over it; he set it on a shelf in his room and when in June he drove his own engine and was an engineer on the New York Central, he knew his locomotive, body and soul and parts, as no other mechanic in the Company knew it. His chiefs were conscious of his skill and intelligence. There were jealousies and enmities, and instead of driving the express as he had hoped, he was delegated to a local on a branch line, with an Italian for fireman who could not speak a word of any but his own language.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVI

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

The boss, his thin hand opening and shutting over a small book which looked like a daily ledger, regarded the engineer in his red s.h.i.+rt 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?”