"How-do-you-do? How-do-you-do? Awfully good of you. Daragh says you are interested in drawings--just look round, will you? I"ll have this mess ready in a minute. Daragh said he had to go up to town early, so we"ll have a combination supper tea." He flew to test the coffee, sputtering in a percolator.
Jane, slipping out of her wrap, moved slowly and graciously about the little room, well and pleasantly aware of Michael"s anxious eyes upon her. His wretched friend should have all the charm and cheer which he had begged for him, but he himself should sit hungry at the feast. She picked up a bold sketch in strong color and held it off with a very real exclamation of interest. "This is _good_, Mr. Randal! This thing of the old woman and pushcart! I like it a lot. And the bakeshop! It"s good stuff, all of it. What are you doing with it?"
"Nothing," said the young man, sullenly, his thin fingers beginning to pluck at his face. "I"ve just started again. I"ve been ... ill. I suppose Daragh"s told you--about me?"
"Yes," said Jane, easily, "he"s told me everything, I think, but what I"m interested in now is--what are you going to do with this stuff?"
"I don"t know," he said, slackly. "It depends on how I feel. Some days"--his eyes shifted and fled before her gaze--"well, you know how it is yourself with your own work,--when you"re in the mood--when you have an inspiration----"
"I don"t know anything about that sort of piffle," said his guest, severely. "It"s my mood to beat my poet"s piano four solid hours a day, and I shouldn"t know an inspiration if I met one in my mush bowl!"
He produced a nervous laugh. "Ah,--but you have your market! You"re _there_! There"s the urge--the spur----"
She looked from the crisp and living lines of his pictures to his dead, young flesh, to his fingers, locked together and straining, to keep them from their telltale plucking. "Look here," she said, "why shouldn"t we do something together?"
"We--togeth--" he sat down limply on the end of his bed-couch, staring, and she heard Michael"s quickened breath behind her.
"Yes! Let"s try a calendar of New York. I"ve always had one in the attic of my mind. Twelve pictures, you know, with bits of verse, of prose,--sketches like these of yours here. There are several which would do just as they stand. This sort of thing, you know, but balanced--Grand Street pushcarts and a group of girls going into Lucy-Gertrude"s on Fifth Avenue."
"I get you," he cried, jumping to his feet. "Colonel"s lady and Judy O"Grady----"
"But no propaganda!"
"No, no,--cut the Sob Sister stuff,--just the pattern of it all, the mosaic----"
"Yes,--done objectively!"
"Right! Gad,--that sounds like a corking idea! When can we start? Have you the text or--Good Lord--my eats!" He dashed to the noisy chafing-dish, a faint color creeping up into the unpleasant whiteness of his skin.
"Everything"s done! Where will you sit, Miss Vail? Give her this tray, will you, Daragh--_and_ the napkin, man! Can she reach the sandwiches?
Oh, I"m forgetting my perfectly good salad! Well, how is it? I"m not much of a cheffonier, but----"
"It"s melt-in-the-mouth," said Miss Vail, warmly. "I"m going to have twice of everything!" She drew him out; she led him on; she kept the color in his face and his fingers quiet. By every pretty means in her power she made it clear that she was having an uncommonly good time, that he was distinctly her sort of person.
Michael Daragh sat back with deep wonder in his eyes. In all her exquisite plumage she had alighted in this dull place, filling it with freshness. And an onlooker would have gathered that the young artist and the beautiful lady who wrote were the best of merry chums, the silent man in the background a civilly tolerated outsider.
After a while something of this seemed to strike young Randal. "Look here, Daragh, you haven"t to start uptown yet! Why don"t you contribute something to the gayety of nations? Haven"t you any parlor tricks?" Then he caught up his own work and his grin faded. "Tricks ... yes, that"s what he can do, Miss Vail. Conjuring tricks. He can turn a skulking alley rat into something faintly resembling a man--but"--his courage and brightness fell from him like a masker"s domino on the stroke of twelve and the fingers rose to his face, picking and plucking--"he can"t keep it from turning back again."
"I can, indeed, lad," said the Irishman, stoutly.
"I don"t know, Daragh ... I don"t know." He leaned back on the couch, spineless with nervous exhaustion, and Jane felt a sick distaste and horror enveloping her.
""Tis a true word, laddie," said Michael. "You don"t know; none of us know--and we don"t have to know, praises be, beyond the next hour, beyond the next step on the path." He rose and crossed slowly to the young man and pushed him gently down until he was resting at full length on the couch. "Easy, now! Let you lie there at your ease. Miss Vail knows how you haven"t the whole of your strength in you yet, and you painting and drawing the day long!"
Young Randal muttered something brokenly and tried to rise, but the big Irishman held him firmly. "Easy, I"m telling you!" The boy relaxed, stretching out to his lank length, one arm crooked childishly over his eyes, and Michael Daragh sat down beside him, his long legs folded under him, on the floor. ""Tis the true word, surely," he said. "We don"t know, indeed. And--glory be--there"s many the time that the thing you"ve braced yourself so fine and strong to stand doesn"t happen at all, and you never have to stand it. That was the way of it with Maggie Kinsella at home,"
he said.
Jane, seeing his intention, stepped to the door and snapped off the overhead light, and tilted the shade on the lamp until Randal"s couch was in shadow.
"I"m so ashamed ... with her here ..." it was a m.u.f.fled whisper from under the shrouding arm,--"so rotten weak...."
"This Maggie Kinsella makes the finest lace for miles about," said Michael, unhearing, unheeding. "Rare tales she would be telling me and I no higher than the sill of the window there, and I"d thought to find her long dead and buried surely, the way she was always as old as the Abbey itself. But no--there she was still in her bit of a cottage, the time I was just home, the oldest old woman I ever saw out of a mummy"s wrappings and like a witch indeed with the poor, pockmarked face she has."
The figure on the couch was relaxing more and more now, and the Irishman sank his voice to a purling murmur of brogue.
Jane found a low chair and propped her elbow on the arm of it and leaned her cheek on her hand and closed her eyes. She did not want to look at young Randal and she found that she could not look at Michael Daragh. She was glad to be in a corner of the little room where the faint light of the lamp did not penetrate; she wished it might have been complete darkness to cover her. She was so unutterably tired ... never in her life had she been so tired. And Michael Daragh, her best friend of four good years, her--what should she say?--dream lover? Yes, that was sufficiently cheap and sentimental and maudlin for the sort of thing she had indulged in,--her dream lover for two blissful months, seemed as much of a stranger to her now, as strange and as unpleasantly distasteful as the young artist and dope fiend on the sagging bed-couch.
When the boy fell asleep, she would creep away, and _away_!
CHAPTER XIX
Meanwhile, the Irishman"s voice went steadily on.
"Well, I told her there were great tales going the world over about her lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. "The loveliest lace, is it? Now, isn"t that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled old hag with the G.o.d-help-you face makes the loveliest lace--" Then she stopped short off and clapped a claw over her mouth and the scar on her pockmarked face was a pitiful thing to see.
""The curse of the crows on my tongue," she said. "Is himself out there in the sun the way he"d be hearing me? No? Glory be to G.o.d then, he"s off to the Crossroads, to be picking up a copper maybe and the people going by to the Fair."
"I asked her why she didn"t want her husband to be hearing her make mock of her face, and she said, "Have you the hunger on you for a tale, still, man grown that you are? Well, then, let you sit down, lad, and listen till I"m telling you the whole of it. Time was when I had a face on me would keep a man from his sleep, and "tis no lie I"m telling you. Tall and fine I was, hair like a blackbird"s wing, skin like new milk with the flush of the dawn on it, eyes like a still pool in the deep of a wood.
Larry Kinsella was ever the great lad for making verses up out of his own head. "Roses in Snow," is the silly name he would be calling me." Then she rocked herself to and fro and crooned in the cracked old voice she had--
""Faith and hope and charity, A man has need of three!
I"ve the faith and hope in you, You"ve charity for me!
""With your lips and cheeks the rose, That is blooming in the snow, Yourself is all the miracle A man would need to know!"
""The proud, brazen hussy I was, G.o.d be good to us! Tossing my head, stealing the other girls" lads the time we"d be footing it to the tune of the Kerry Dance at the Crossroads in the full of the moon! Father Quinn--may the angels spread his bed smooth--was always telling me to take heed of my soul which would last me forever, and have done with the sinful pride in the skin and the hair which would wither like gra.s.s. But I went my ways with a scandalous come-hither in my eye, leaning over a still pool till I"d see my bold face smiling back at me, and Larry Kinsella stealing behind to whisper his verses in my ear.
""Then came the sickness, the plague that shadowed five counties the way you"d see a black cloud sailing down the sky of a June day. Nary a village but paid its toll in death and doom. One of the first I was, and one of the worst. Wirra, the weeks I lay on the sill of death"s door,--the gray days, the black nights.
""Came the time when I heard Father Quinn"s voice and he sitting beside me, telling me slow and easy, the way you"d be talking to a child itself, that Larry Kinsella was mending and calling for me. Well, I rose up, destroyed with the weakness though I was, to be on the way to him, but there in the bit of a gla.s.s on my wall I saw my face ... my face ...
Mary, be good to us ... _my face_! Back I fell in the black pit of despair, praying for death itself. But it would not come to my bidding.
In the black of the night, in the gray of the dawn, the dreams that tormented me! Larry"s voice, wheedling and soft in my ear--
""With your lips and cheeks the rose, That is blooming in the snow----"
""And always Father Quinn, wasted and worn with care for the living and prayer for the dead, bidding me rise up on my two feet and go to the lad I loved. Love, was it? G.o.d forgive me, the way I misnamed it then.
""Well, then, in the dusk of one day I went with him, me leaning for weakness on his tired arm. Out of every house peered a face, but there was no lad begging a smile of me and no green envy at all in the glance of the girls. When we were well past the whole of them I went down on my two knees in the dirt of the road, the way I"d be praying at a shrine itself, for there was a white moon rising in the soul of me and I began to see clear. "Mary, Mother," I said, "G.o.d forbid the likes of me to be driving a bargain with yourself, but give me the one thing only and I"ll never pester your ear again all the days of my life. Here in the dust I make a heap of all my sins and vanities,--the toss of my head and the tilt of my chin, the love-looks of the lads and the black hate of the girls, and I"ll burn them for a sacrifice the way the heathen would be doing and go joyful on my way with the ashes in my mouth! Leave the children to run from me, me, the one-time wonder of the weeping west; leave the girls to make mock of my face; only Mary, Mother, for the sake of the joy he had in me, let Larry Kinsella only of all the world be seeing me still with the eyes of love, and see me fair!"
""Then was a glad cry sounding and the pinched face of Father Quinn shining like an altar and it lighted up for Easter itself. "Glory be to G.o.d," he cried out in a great voice. "Now let you make haste to your lad, for I heard the rustle of wings on that prayer will carry it high!"
""When Larry Kinsella heard the sound of my foot on his step he leapt up. Wirra ... down all the years I can hear the wild joy of him still---- "Core of my heart, have you come? Alannah!--_With your lips and cheeks the rose_----"
""I opened my mouth to cry shame on him, mocking my face, but then the peace of G.o.d came down on me like a deep rain on a parched field, and I knew what way it would be with the two of us all the long days of this world. Larry Kinsella was blind.""
Michael had been speaking more and more slowly and softly and he did not move for many moments after he had finished his tale. Then he stealthily rose and bent over young Randal, and tiptoed away. "Asleep," his lips barely formed the word, and he motioned Jane to follow him. She caught up her wrap and crept after him.