The grave Irishman, Michael Daragh, was a constant delight. He was no more aware, she saw clearly, of her as a person, as a woman, than he was of Emma Ellis of the lidlike hats and shabby hair. Nothing that was human was alien to him, certainly, and nothing that was feminine was anything more than merely human to him. It appeared, however, that he did have a sense of values of a sort, for he halted her in the hall, one dark December day, with a request. Would she be coming with him to-morrow to the Agnes Chatterton Home, where there was a girl in black sorrow?
"Why, yes, of course I"ll come, but--why?" Jane wanted to know. "What makes you think I could help? I don"t know very much about--that sort of thing."
He smiled swiftly and winningly and it was astonishing to see how the process lighted up his lean face. "Ah, that"s the reason! She"s had her fill of us, G.o.d help her. The way we"ve been exhorting her for days on end. You"ll be bringing a fresh face and a fresh feeling to the case.
And"--he stopped and looked her over consideringly--""tis your sort can help and heal."
"Why?" Jane persisted. She was finding the conversation piquantly interesting.
"Because," said Michael Daragh, and she had the startled feeling that he was not in the least paying her a compliment but rather laying a charge upon her, "you have been anointed with the oil of joy above your fellows." Then, quite as if the matter were wholly settled, he gave her directions and went his way.
Jane had never seen an Agnes Chatterton Home. She had heard of them, of course, as asylums for what the village called Unfortunate Girls, furtive and remote retreats for stricken creatures who fled the light of day, but when she found herself actually on her way to see one, the following day, she slackened her pace and made her way more slowly and with conscious reluctance. She was a little annoyed with herself for acquiescing so meekly to the big Irishman"s plan. After all, she had not broken the old home ties (to put it lyrically) for this sort of thing, now, had she? She had to come to New York to seek her fortune, not to--to--whatever it was that Michael Daragh wanted her to do. And yet, she was always being drawn, w.i.l.l.ynilly, into any woe within her ken. Herself a contained creature of radiant health and placid nerves with a positively masculine aversion to scenes and applied emotion of any sort, people were always coming and confiding in her. She had been the reluctant repository for the secrets of half her little town. As a matter of fact, and this she could not know of herself, it was because she demonstrated the solid theory that one happy person was worth six who were trying to make others happy. But now she was marching deliberately into the heart of a misery which did not in the least concern her and where, she felt sure, she would be wholly unwelcome. She stood still in an unsavory thoroughfare, seriously considering a retreat, but she saw Michael Daragh waiting for her on the next corner, and she kept on.
"I very nearly turned back," she said. "And I very nearly didn"t come at all. I had the most alluring invitation for matinee and tea." (Rodney Harrison had been most insistent.)
"I had your word you"d be coming," said the Irishman. He looked at her impersonally. She was b.u.t.toned to the chin in a cloak the color of old red wine and there was a jubilant red wing in her dark turban, and it may have occurred to him that she made a thread of good cheer in the dull woof of that street, but he went at once into the story.
"Ethel"s lived on at the Home ever since her baby was born. It"ll be two, soon, and herself going for eighteen."
"_Eighteen?_ Oh----"
"Yes. Doing grandly, she is, in the same shop as her good elder sister.
Well, one day she tells the matron she has a sweetheart, a decent chap, wanting to marry her.
""Fine," says Mrs. Richards. "What were we always telling you? And will he be good to the baby?"
""He doesn"t know I"ve the baby," says Ethel, "and what"s more he never will!"
""You"ll be giving up your child, that you kept of your own free will, that you"ve worked and slaved for, and be wedding him with the secret on your soul?"
""I will," says the girl, and not all the king"s horses and all the king"s men can move her, Jane Vail." They were picking their way through a damp and squalid street and he stooped to set a wailing toddler on its unsteady feet.
""Tis the sister"s doing, we think, she the hard, managing kind and Ethel the weak slip of a thing. Coming to-day, Irene is, to carry it off to the place she"s found for it--some distant kin down Boston way, long wanting to adopt and never dreaming this child is their own blood."
"Doesn"t Ethel care for the baby?"
"There"s the heart scald. "Tis the light of her eyes. But Irene, d"you see, has scared her into feeling sure she"ll lose him if she tells. Wait till you see the look she has on her. "Supping the broth of sorrow with the spoon of grief," they would be calling it, home in Wicklow."
"And I"m to talk to her--to beg her to tell him?"
He nodded.
Jane sighed. "She"ll loathe me, of course,--an absolute outsider. Coming in--n.o.bly giving up a matinee and tea--to rearrange her life for her. Oh, I don"t believe I dare!"
He nodded again, comprehendingly. "I know well the way you"re feeling.
But with the likes of her, poor child, somebody has to rearrange the lives they"ve mussed and mangled!"
Jane sighed again. "I"ll try, Michael Daragh. You know, your two names make me think of the wind off the three lakes on the road to Kenmare and the black line of the McGillicuddy Reeks against the sky?"
His eyes lighted. ""Tis good, indeed, to know you"ve seen Ireland.
Whiles, I"m destroyed with the homesickness." He kept a long silence after that, his eyes brooding.
Jane watched him and wondered. "He"s a mystery to me," Mrs. Hetty Hills always appended after a mention of him. (It teased her to have mysteries in her boarding-house.) "Has an income, of course--has to have, to live--doesn"t earn anything worth mentioning with all this uplift work--and gives away what he does get. Emma Ellis doesn"t know any more about him than I do. But I will say he"s less trouble than any man I ever had under my roof. And, of course, he"s not _common_ Irish." (Mrs. Hills had still her Vermont village feeling of red-armed, kitchen minions, freckled butcher boys running up alley-ways, short-tempered dames in battered hats who came--or distressingly didn"t come--to you of a Monday morning.)
They walked swiftly and without speech now, and Jane had again her sense of his resemblance to the Botticelli St. Michael. "He ought really to be carrying his sword and his symbol," she told herself, "and I daresay Raphael and Gabriel are beside him if I could only see them. Am I Tobias?
And have I a fish to heal a blindness?"
"There"s the house," said Michael Daragh, at length.
"Of course," said Jane, indignantly. "I should have known it at once, even without the hideous sign, for its smugly dreary look of good works!
_Why_ must they have that liver-colored gla.s.s in the door?" They mounted the worn steps. "And "Welcome" on the mat! Oh, Michael Daragh, how ghastly! Who did that to them?"
He shook his head. "Most of our things are given, you see." He rang the bell and they heard its harsh and startling clamor.
A sullen-faced girl in a coa.r.s.e, enveloping pinafore opened the door. Her hands and arms were red and dripping and from a dim region at the rear came the smell of dishwater. Down the narrow, precipitate stairway floated an infant"s thin, protesting wail and Jane felt a sick sense of sudden nausea.
"Thank you, Lena," said the Irishman. "This lady is Jane Vail, a good friend come to see us."
The girl, who might have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a portion of the stale smell.
Mrs. Richards was in her office. She greeted Jane civilly but eyed her in some puzzlement. Here was a strange bird, clearly, to alight in this dingy barnyard.
"Jane Vail will be trying her hand at Ethel for us," Michael Daragh said.
The matron bridled a little. She was a pallid, tired woman with skeptical eyes. "Well, I"m sure that"s very kind of her but I"m afraid it"s no use.
I"ve just come down from talking to her, nearly all her noon hour. She wouldn"t go to the table. She"s turned sullen, now. She won"t take any interest in the Christmas preparations; wouldn"t help the girls a bit."
She sighed and looked at a table cluttered with paper paraphernalia for holiday decorations. In her world of bleak realities the tinsel tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs for _fete_ days left her cold. "I declare, Mr. Daragh, I believe we"ve worried with her long enough. I"ve about made up my mind that we"d better tell the young man ourselves and have done with it. I believe it"s our duty."
"It"s her right," said Michael Daragh.
"But, if she won"t? They"re planning to be married Monday, and Irene"s coming to-day to take Billiken away with her."
"Let Jane Vail be trying her hand. Will you come up to her now?" He strode out of the room and Jane followed him, smiling back at Mrs.
Richards with a deprecatory shake of her head. She wished the matron could know how much of an intruder she felt. But once out of the severe little office, mounting the stairs after Michael Daragh, her usual vivid sense of drama came back to her. This was, after all, what she had left the snug harbor for and put out to sea. This was better than tea with Sarah Farraday in the "studio"--than "little gatherings of the young people,"--than walking home with Marty Wetherby--than laughing painstakingly at the jokes of Teddy-bear"s father. This was life more abundantly.
It didn"t even matter that the grave Irishman took so for granted her dedication to this obscure girl"s need. That had been very nice ... about the oil of joy.
"Here"s where she"ll be," he said, pausing at a closed door, "feeding her child."
"I"ll do what I can," said Jane, lifting a look of girded resolve.
"I know that, surely," said Michael Daragh, knocking for her.
CHAPTER VI