Nevertheless, when Emma Ellis came in to luncheon, a little early, the
third day following, she espied at Michael Daragh's place a letter with a
Boston postmark, addressed in a firm, small hand she knew. She was the
only person in the room and she had time to examine it thoroughly, even
as to thickness, before Mrs. Hills came in. It happened that there were
mail deliveries just before the three meal times and it was the
boarding-house keeper's guileless custom to sort and distribute letters
at the table, thus saving a wearisome climb and much pedestrianism
through long halls.
"Well, I've got a line from Jane and I'm free to say I'm relieved. I was
afraid she was sick or something, rushing off like that, rousing me out
of a sound sleep at six in the morning, just saying she was going out of
town. _I_ supposed, of course, she was going home to her Aunt Lydia
Vail."
"Didn't she?"
"No, she didn't." Mrs. Hills took the note out of her apron pocket and
consulted it. "No, she's going to Maine. Foot'n alone. Says she needs
quiet for some special work."
"Mr. Daragh has something from her, too." Emma Ellis stood behind the
Irishman's chair, her pale eyes lapping up the inscription.
"No!" said Mrs. Hills, advancing with interest, frank and unashamed. "You
don't say! Well, he has! Sure's you're a foot high! Well, now, that beats
me!"
Emma Ellis tucked in her lips in a way she had before making a certain
type of remark. "It is rather strange.... They were out walking in the
evening, and in the morning she left, precipitately."
"'Tis kinder queer," Mrs. Hills clucked. "Couldn't have quarreled or
anything--never paid enough attention to each other for that."
"Oh," said Emma Ellis in a hushed voice, "don't you think Miss Vail has
always devoted a great deal of attention to Mr. Daragh?"
"Well, Jane's a great one to make up to folks and be friendly; always
was, as a child. I can remember her, four years old, after her folks died
and she came to live with Miss Lydia. Wasn't afraid of anything or
anybody, ever. Used to slip out and run off down Main Street after a
peddler or a gypsy or anybody she took a fancy to. But--" she came back
into the present--"Mr. Daragh's been kinder queer these last two, three
days. But then, far's that goes, he's always queer. Oddest mortal I ever
met up with in all my born days. Odder'n Adam's off ox."
"If it is odd," said the Settlement worker, dull color flooding her
sallow skin, "for a man to turn his back on greed and gain and devote his
life to altruism----"
"Now, now," said the boarding-house keeper, pacifically, "you've no call
to take me up like that. Land knows I set a great store by Mr. Daragh, if
he is Irish as the pigs. Never had a human being under my roof that was
easier to suit and made less fuss, but he's _queer_ and I'd say it on my
dying bed!"
The other woman stood looking down at Jane Vail's pretty letter which
managed, in spite of the plain, creamy envelope and the many alien hands
through which it had passed, to retain a startling individuality, and she
spoke in the little smothered voice which was her proclamation of intense
feeling. "If--_she_--with the life she leads--has--has disturbed Mr.
Daragh----"
"Now, then, you look here," said the Vermont villager with sudden
sharpness, "I guess her life is about as important as anybody else's I
might name! I guess if Mr. Daragh's 'disturbed,' as you call it, it's no
worse for him than it's been for others. My land, Jane Vail could of had
her choice of the town, where she comes from. There's _four_ wanted her,
to my certain knowledge, and they say Martin Wetherby (Wetherby Ridge is
named for his family--they go back to Revolutionary days) never _will_
get over it. And I guess that Mr. Harrison that rolls up here in taxis
and limousines is sitting up and taking notice, sure's gun's iron! And
if Mr. Michael Daragh----"
"Sh ..." said Emma Ellis.
The big Irishman came into the room, graver even than usual, but his eyes
lighted warmly at sight of the missive at his place. He nodded to the
watching women, tore it open and read it swiftly, and as he read the
gladness spread and deepened in his face.
"_I_ had a letter from Jane, too," said Mrs. Hills, seating herself.
"Going to Maine for some special work she's got to do."
"Yes," said Michael Daragh. "Special work, indeed." He folded the letter
and put it back in his pocket, and the table filled up with the other
members of the household, the music students and the school teachers and
the elderly concert-going ladies in their staid silks ... all the sound
and sensible persons whom the missing boarder made so drab and colorless
by her glowing presence. He smiled sunnily at Emma Ellis and was
astonished to see tears in her light eyes, but he was used to tears and
woes and secret sorrows, so he smiled again and more convincingly and
went sturdily on with his meal. When he was alone in his bare and austere
room on the top floor he took out Jane's letter and read it again, slowly
and with thankful care.
I've decided to forgive you, Michael Daragh, it began, but it takes a
bit of doing! It's easy enough to forgive any one for being in the
wrong; that's a really pleasant and soothing sensation; but to pardon
you for being in the right--that's taken me all these hours! I said
that you always saw life through a stained-glass window and that it
gave you distorted values, didn't I? That was temper, pure and
simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own
Banshees because the likes of me--once content when the pale shadow
of Pegasus passed her by--is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed
gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE
CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and
watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from
Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this
isn't what I intended to do. It's been warm, human, jolly sort of
work, knitting up the spatted broker in the box to the newsboy in the
gallery and I've adored it, but I've lost my way, Michael Daragh. It
isn't what I intended to do; it isn't what I intended to be; the dew
is drying on my dreams and my soul shrieks S.O.S.!
For the first time in my snug, smug life I've had large chunks of
truth told me; I didn't like it. I don't _enjoy_ it even yet, but
I've arrived at the decent stage of gratitude, Michael Daragh. Thank
you--and good-by. Shall I send you bulletins of my pilgrim progress?
I'm off to a lean, clean island in Maine, to live on eight dollars a
week and snare back the thing I lost.
JANE VAIL.
Thereafter, Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis were to see and to marvel over the
creamy buff envelopes which came to the Irishman, now thin, now thick,
postmarked in Maine, often only two or three days apart, never less
frequently than once a week. The boarding-house keeper had her own
pleasant little note, occasionally, and Emma Ellis had three
conscientious picture postcards, but it was to Michael Daragh that the
letters came in a steady stream.
"Mark my words," said Mrs. Hills, "there's nothing in it. My land, he's
as offhand about 'em as if they were circulars, and I don't believe he
answers one in six."
"Yet she continues to write him constantly," said Emma Ellis.
"Well, if she does, it's _her_ business, that's all I've got to say,"
said the older woman, dangerously. "Jane Vail never ran after anybody
yet and I don't believe she's going to begin now. He says--and _she_
says--she's doing some special work, and I suppose maybe he's advising
her about it."
"I've never understood before that Mr. Daragh was a literary authority,"
said the Settlement worker in her little, smothered voice.
"Well, I'm free to say it beats me. But all I know is, Jane Vail's
nobody's fool."
And Michael Daragh, meanwhile, read his letters in his room, monklike in
its simplicity, three times, and then he tore them up, quickly, the line
of his lean jaw salient. The second one to come had been dated at six in
the morning, on the wharf at Bath, and ran--
I'm shivering, Michael Daragh,--shivering in September! The
incredible freshness of this morning, the bracing miracle of cold! I
left Boston on the night boat and the stewardess rapped me firmly up
at three-thirty to see the sun rise. I stayed stubbornly in my berth,
at first, but presently a length of Quaker gray sky interlined with
faintest rose brought me to my elbow and then to the window. The
little steamer was feeling her cautious way up a river of dull silver
between banks of taupe and mauve. After a moment I could pick up
objects here and there in somber silhouette--a windmill, a battered
barn, crude landings reaching out to graze the boat. In that
tremulous moment before the break of day, shore and stream and sky
melted and ran together in the liquid pattern of an abalone shell.
Then, suddenly, the sun shot up over the rim of the world, "out of
the gates of the day," a clear persimmon, gorgeous as a Chinese
lantern, and the realm of faery warmed into reality,--river and river
banks, houses and little hummocky hills.
I must walk now to keep warm. There is a young old woman in shabby
corduroy footing it briskly to and fro, who may be going to take my
toy steamer,--tossing a mane of smoke and champing its bit at the
upper wharf--and I'm going to speak to her.
_7 A.M. Going up the River._
She was taking the down boat, but she gave her valuable
experience to me. She asked me for which island I was heading,
and when I said I didn't know,--that I meant to line them up and
say,--"My-mother-told-me-to-take-_this_,--" she said,--"Oh, then do
take Three Meadows!" She has been there all summer, and she thinks I
can board at the same place--with Angelique Larideau Gillespie,
"Mis' Deac'n Gillespie." She is Canadian-French and the only woman
on the island who can cook any other way than frying. The bad little
hotel is closing. She was so merry and footloose and free, Michael!
That's exactly the sort of old maid I mean to be----
"_Love of roving foot and joy of roving eye_----"
We have been wriggling up a cunning little river, bumping into
clumsy landings here and there and now the porter-purser-steward-
newsagent-cabin-boy-and-guide says the next one is mine.
Wish me luck, Michael Daragh!
J. V.
_Three Meadows, Maine,
Friday Afternoon._
It would be tea time anywhere else, Michael Daragh, but it gives no
tea here. Eating between meals is deplored and is referred to as
"piecing." Will you ask Mrs. Hills to express my tea basket and two
cups?
This is a lamb of an island. The land lifts away to low hills and the
village has splashed a little way up on the sides. A curtain of filmy
fog has just risen clear of the treetops and everything is graciously
gray. No one ever comes so late in the season and this awful, little
hotel is closing,--it ought to be closed and sealed forever.
Everything about the tiny town is refreshing. A citizen finished up a
game of checkers before he went down to consider the case of my
trunk. Then it took him some time to wake up his horse, which did a
bewildered Lady Macbeth up the street. I was walking beside, and
suddenly a roly-poly puppy slipped away from a boy and ran straight
under the clumsy hoofs.... You never heard such ki-yi's. You'd think
he was being vivisected. There was a shrieking streak of white and he
disappeared under a culvert. The old mare stopped, wide-awake and
horror-stricken, and the boy--a pitiful little person with his head
held tautly back, almost a hunchback--and the driver and I flew to
the spot and all the village Hectors laid their helmets by and gave
themselves to the hour. The sweetest old man in rusty black laid
right down flat on his stomach and peeked into the dusty tunnel,
calling, "Come, pup! Come, pup! Come, _dear_!" But the yammerings
went on.
Finally the blacksmith next door put down a pink horseshoe and came
out. I'm much obliged for blacksmiths nowadays, aren't you, Michael
Daragh? I love their leaping fires and their worn, leather aprons and
their dim, rich Flemish interiors,--in our soft world of push
buttons.
This one said, "Was they a string around his neck, Dan'l?" Then he
went back into his shop and returned with a long stick with a bent
nail in the end and began to fish absorbedly into the culvert.
Presently a wild crescendo of shrieks announced his catch. I shut my
eyes and covered my ears and when I looked again he was hauling out a
quivering lump of baby dog. He felt him all over with grimy, gentle
fingers and "allowed they warn't nothin' broke ... just skairt him
outer a year's growth," handed him back to the boy and went again to
his horseshoe. The people pressed close with little clucks of
sympathy and made the nicest fuss about it, and the boy turned out to
be Daniel Gillespie and I went right on home with him and arranged to
move there to-morrow--his mother desiring a day in which to "red up"
for me. I wanted to go at once--I'm so afraid this hotel might close
with a snap, with me on the inside. At noon to-day I did not crave
any of the ready-to-wear effects on the zebra menu card and asked the
aloof young lady under the pompadour how long the chops would take.
"'Bout fifteen minutes." "Very well, then," I said, "I'll take the
chops." "_Ain't_ any."
Don't you adore that, Michael Daragh?
_The Next Friday,
At Deacon Gillespie's._
The top of the morning to you, Michael Daragh! Here in the rich cream
of the day we're waiting for the mail, Dan'l and I and the pup. Guess
where? In the graveyard, and I'm sitting on a tumbled-over tombstone.
I wish I could make you see this spot. I've always hated cemeteries,
the sleek, prosperous, well-fed, well-groomed sort, but this is
indeed God's Acre. You step over the broken stones of the wall into a
land of gracious gray; gray stone and moss, gray sky and feathery
fog. Twice only in my vista a note of color--a low-growing lobelia,
intensely blue against the foot of a new grave, and further on a
brave geranium, flaunting the scarlet flag of defiance at death; for
the rest, the quiet gray of peace and permanence. Involuntarily, one
treads softly, as in a room with sleepers ... sleepers of a long,
soft sleep ... who have laid them thankfully down to rest and left no
call!
I hear the _klip-klup_ of Lizzie, the postman's horse, so I can't
tell you about the Gillespies until next letter.
Dear M.D., I'm growing so nice you wouldn't know me for the frenzied
vaude-villain of a fortnight past. Some of the old cells in my brains
are coming to life again. _Thanks_, Michael Daragh! Do you know what
M.D. stands for?--Do-er of Miracles. Isn't it pretty much of a
miracle to make me turn my back on five orders and bring my soul up
here to renovate it?
J. V.
_Tuesday._
Michael Daragh, I'm up in my cunning little room with its heaving
ceiling and its braided mats and patchwork quilt, and I can look down
on the corner of the graveyard and see Dan'l and his dog waiting for
Uncle Robert. He is not a real postman but he drives down for his own
mail every day and "stops by" with the Gillespies'. (Not that they
ever have any!) He's the old man who got down on his rusty black
stomach to peek into the culvert and call "Come, pup, come, _dear_!"
He's the sweetest old thing with Dan'l. The child lives in constant
hope of a letter, and every day Uncle Robert (he's everybody's
uncle) says, "Wall, not _to-day_, Dan'l!" And then Dan'l and the pup
trot home.
Dan'l is the most appealing child! I've always fancied the freckles
and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan'l gets
into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto's
young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the
unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance
with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother
explains that,--"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors
say, and that just expresses it. She was--but she isn't any more.
She's just the Deacon's "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I
guess likely my woman'll cal'late she c'n do fer y'u," he said when I
asked for board.)
She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a
face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness
have hardened about the sweetness of long ago--like a rose imbedded
in ice at a country fair.
And the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He
has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue
eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning
Erring Daughters Out into the Snow.
Dan'l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,--the
mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression.
Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it
Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when
you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon
is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in
their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast
whenever the head of the house is near.
There is some mystery about Dan'l's watching for a letter. His mother
yearns over him and says,--"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his
father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes.
I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on
your burning brow!
J. V.
_Some Day in October._
My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I
honestly haven't an idea of the date. But I know Dan'l's story. We
were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a sturdy old patriarch
who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day,
and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought----
"But I did get a letter, once!"
I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three
Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony
broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny's
clipped phrases I could build up the rogue's personality,--the gay,
lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the cockles of the
little lad's hungry heart.
He was here four months, and then a pal wrote him he could get him a
job as handy man with a small circus then in Vermont. But Dan'l's
beloved vagabond hadn't a sou, and before he could tramp there, the
show would be far on its southern way. Naturally, the Deacon refused
a loan--I can just see the way his mouth would snap shut like a trap,
but Dan'l, what with egg money and his tiny garden, and errand money
from summer boarders, had gathered together twenty slow dollars, and
he came lavishly forward. The rover blithely promised to pay him back
in two monthly payments. He's never sent a penny. He wrote once;
Danny showed me the letter, worn with many rapt readings,--a silly,
flowing hand which looks as if it had been done up in curl papers
over night--and explained that he'd been sick, and had to buy
clothes, but next month, _sure_! And Dan'l was a sport and true
blue and a little old pal, and he'd never forget him.
Dan'l's "bein' so puny" saved him the whole brunt of his father's
rage, but this sneering scorn has been harder to bear,--and the
amazing part of it is that the boy doesn't really care about the
money,--lean little Islander though he is. That is merely the symbol
of his friend's good faith. "Ef only he'd jest write 'n tell me
things," he sighed, "th' money c'd wait. He needs it worse'n I do."
Meanwhile, with eternal-springing hope in his little flat chest he
trots down to the graveyard corner every day, and every day Uncle
Robert says, with a cheery chirp in italics, "Wall, not
_to-day_, Dan'l!"
The child is getting thinner and paler, now the sharp weather is
coming. His father wrote a laborious letter by the lamp, one evening,
and a week later a good gruff old doctor came over from the mainland
and chaffed Danny about his pup and told him to play in the sun and
drink plenty of milk and not to fret about school this year. I
waylaid him privately and asked if there was anything I could get or
do--a tonic, a change. He patted my shoulder and said, "Land
t'goodness, no! That youngun's been a-dying ever since I borned him,
fourteen years ago. He warn't meant for old bones."
Oh, Michael Daragh, I can't stand it--poor little Daniel in a Lion's
Den of broken faith, and scorn, and creeping death! What can I
_do_?
J. V.