He had been gone from home more than a year, his mother wrote. "One
cannot expect to carve a career in twelve months' time, Tony, and yet I
am so impatient for you, my darling, I am certain you have gone far and
have splendid things to show me. Are you sure that Albany is the place
for you? Would it not have been better to have stayed on with
Cedersholm? When will you run down to your old mother, dearest? I long
for the sound of your footstep, the dear broken footstep, Tony...." Then
she went on to say not to mind her foolishness, not to think of her as
mourning, but to continue with his beautiful things. She had not been
very well of late--a touch of fever, she reckoned: Emmeline took the
best of care of her. She was better.
He let the pages fall, reading them hastily, eagerly, approaching in his
thought of her everything he had longed to be, had yearned to be, might
have been, and the letter with its elegant fine writing and the
fluttering thin sheets rustled ghost-like in his hand. As he turned the
pages a leaf of jasmine she had put between the sheets fell unseen to
the floor.
He would go to New Orleans at once: he would throw himself at his
mother's knees and tell her his failures, his temptations, his griefs:
he would get a transfer to some Southern train, he would steal a ride,
but he would go. His mother's pride would suffer when she saw what he
had become, but he was not bringing her home a shameful story. She would
ask to see his beautiful creations--alas! even his ideals were buried
under grime and smoke, their voices drowned in whistles and bells! He
folded his arms across his breast, the last sheet of the long letter in
his hand, and again his room stifled him as it had done before when he
had flown out to walk with the Irish girl. The walls closed in upon him.
The ceiling seemed to confine him like a coffin lid, and the flickering
gas jet over his bureau burned pale like a burial candle....
He groaned, started forward to the door as though he would begin his
journey home immediately, but like many a wanderer who starts on his
voyage home and finds the old landmarks displaced, before Fairfax could
take the first step forward, his course was for ever changed.... He had
not heard Molly's knock at the door. The girl came in timidly, holding
out a telegram; she brought it as she had brought the other, without
comment, but with the Irish presentiment of ill, she remained waiting
silently, knowing in her humble breast that she was all he had.
Fairfax opened the despatch, held it transfixed, gave a cry and said to
Molly, staring her wildly in the eyes: "My mother, my mother!" and went
and fell on his knees by his bed and flung his arms across it as though
across a beloved form. He shook, agonized for a few moments, then sprang
up and stared at the desertion before him, the tears salt on his face
and his heart of steel broken. And the girl by the door, where she had
clung like a leaf blown there by a wind of grief, came up to him. He
felt her take his arm between her hands, he felt her close to him.
"It cuts the heart o' me to see ye. It's like death to see ye. Is it
your mother gone? The dear mother ye must be like? God knows there's no
comfort for that kind, but," she breathed devotedly, "I'd give the life
o' me to comfort ye."
He hardly heard her, but her presence was all he had. Her human
companionship was all that was left him in the world. He put his hand on
her shoulder and said brokenly--
"You don't know what this means. It is the end of me, the end. To think
I shall never see her again! Oh, _Mother_!" he cried, and threw up his
arms. The loving woman put hers about him as the gesture left him shorn
of his strength, and when his arms fell they were around her. He held
her for a moment as a drowning man holds to that which is flung out to
him to save his life; then he pushed her from him. "Let me get out of
this. I must get out of the room."
"You'll not do anything to yourself? Ah, tell me that."
He snatched up his hat and fled from her without reply.
He wandered like a madman all night long. Whither he did not know or
care. He was walking down his anguish, burying his new grief deep, deep.
His nails clenched into his palms, the tears ran over his face. One by
one as the pictures of his mother came to him, imperious, graceful,
enchanting, one by one he blessed them, worshipped before them until the
curtain fell at the end--he could not picture that. Had she called for
him in vain? Had she watched the open door to see him enter? In God's
name why hadn't they sent for him? "Suddenly of heart disease ..." the
morning of this very day--this very day. And on he tramped,
unconsciously going in the direction he had taken that morning, and at a
late hour found himself without the gates of the cemetery where he and
Molly Shannon had spent the late afternoon. The iron gates were closed;
within stretched the shining rows of the houses and palaces of the dead,
and on their snowy portals and their marble doors fell the first tender
glimmer of the day. Holding the gate between his convulsive hands,
staring in as though he begged an entrance as a lodger, Fairfax saw rise
before him the angel with the benign uplifting hand, and the lettering,
large and clear, seemed written that day for him as much as for any
man--
"_Why seek ye the living among the dead?_"
He raised his eyes to the angel face on whose brow and lips the light of
his visions had gathered for him that morning; and as he looked the
angelic figure brightened in the dawn; and after a few moments in which
he remained blotted against the rails like an aspirant at Heaven's gate,
he turned and more quietly took his way home.