Part 25 (1/2)

”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 navely 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 girl lying 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.

CHAPTER XX

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 threw himself down on his lonely bed in his room through which magic had pa.s.sed, and slept heavily until Mrs. Kenny pounded on the door and roused him an hour before his train.