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, God 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, willynilly, 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 matineé 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 buttoned 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--nobly giving up a matinée 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 glass 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 coarse, 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 trimmings
for _fête_ 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.