He avoided Rainsford, gave himself up to his engine and his train, and
took a dislike to his black-headed fireman, who dared to be Italian and
to recall the aurora of days he had buried fathoms deep. The heat
pouring on him in summer time made him suffer physically. He rather
welcomed the discomfort; his skin grew hardened and tanned and oiled and
grimed, and his whole body strong and supple; and his devotion to his
work, the air that filled him as he flew, made him the perfect, splendid
animal that he was.
At night, when the darkness blotted out the steel rails, and the breeze
blowing through the car-window fluttered his sleeve till it bellied, and
the cinders, red and biting, whirled by, and on either side the country
lay dark and fragrant with its summery wealth--at night his eyes, fixed
on the track under the searchlight, showed him more than once a way to
end his unhappy life, but his confused reveries and his battle,
spiritual and physical, helped him, and he came out of it with a love
for life and a stronger hold upon it each time than the last. He gave up
wearing his Sunday clothes, he went as the others did; he had not been
for months to Albany or to Troy.
One Sunday in midsummer his local did not run on the seventh day. He
considered his own image in the glass over his bureau and communed with
his reflection. The result of his musings was that he opened his trunk
and took out the precious packet; started to unfold it, turned it over
in his uncertain hands, thrust it back, set his teeth and went out to
the junction and took the train for Troy.
He found her in the boarding-house where she was passing her Sunday,
rocking the landlady's teething baby. He bade her to come as she was,
not to fix up. The idea of a toilet which would end in a horrible frock
rasped his nerves. She detected a great change in him, simple-minded
though she was, and she tried to get him to talk and failed. Down at the
Erie Canal, by the moored boats and the motionless water, he seized her
arm and facing her, said, his lips working--
"I have come to ask you to marry me, Molly."
She grew as white as the drying linen on the windless air, as the family
wash hung on the canal boat lines behind her. Her grey eyes opened wide
on Antony.
"I'm making a good living: too much for me alone."
He saw her try to find her voice and her senses, and with something of
his old radiance, he said--
"I'm a brute. I reckon I don't know how to make love. I've startled
you."
"Ah, shure, ye don't know what ye're saying," she whispered; "the likes
o' me ain't good enough."
"Hush, hush," he answered, "don't say foolish things."
She gasped and shook her head. "Ye shouldn't tempt me so. It's crool. Ye
shouldn't tempt me so."
With a self-abandonment and a humility which he never afterward forgot,
as her life and colour came back Molly said under her breath--
"Take me as I am, shure, if I'm the least bit of good to ye. I love ye
enough for both."
He exclaimed and kissed her.
Dreams of women! Visions of the ecstasy of first love, ideals and
aspirations, palpitating, holy, the young man's impassioned dream of The
Woman, the Only Woman, the notion and conception that the man of nature
and of talent and of keen imagination sleeps upon and follows and seeks
and seeks and follows all his life, from boyhood to the grave--where
were they then?
He had brushed his aunt's cheek, he had touched her hand and trembled;
now he kissed fresh young lips that had yearned for his, and he gave his
first embrace to woman, put his arms round Molly Shannon and her young
body filled them. As she had said, she had love enough for both. He felt
a great gratitude to her, a relaxation of his tense senses, a melting of
his heart, and his tenderness was deep for her when his next kiss met
her tears.