Molly came and sat with him Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Fairfax
made studies of his wife as she sewed, a modern conception of a woman
sitting under a lamp, her face lifted, dreaming. He told Rainsford that
when the lease was up he should vacate the studio, for he could not go
on with his scheme for the monument. He had the memories of Molly's
coming to him during the late autumn and winter afternoons. The
remembrance of these holidays soothed and pardoned many faults and
delinquencies. She seemed another Molly to the Sheedy counter girl, the
Troy collar factory girl, and an indefinable Presence came with her,
lingered as she sewed or read some book she had picked up, and if
Fairfax the artist watched the change and transformation of her face as
it refined and thinned, grew more delicate and meditative, it was
Fairfax the man who recalled the picture afterward.
She was exceedingly gentle, very silent, ready with a word of
encouragement and admiration if he spoke to her. She knew nothing of the
art he adored, but seemed to know his temperament and to understand. She
posed tranquilly while the short days met the early nights; she
disguised her fatigue and her ennui, so that he never knew she grew
tired, and the Presence surrounded her like an envelope, until Antony,
drawing and modelling, wondered if it were not the soul of the child
about to be born to him, and if from the new emotion his inspiration
would not stir and bless him at the last?
What there was of humour and fantasy in her Irish heart, how imaginative
and tender she was, he might have gathered in those hours, if he had
chosen to talk with her and make her his companion. But he was reserved,
mentally and spiritually, and he kept the depths of himself down, nor
could he reveal his soul which from boyhood he had dreamed to give to
One Woman with his whole being. He felt himself condemned to silence and
only partially to develop, and no one but Molly Fairfax, with her
humility and her admiration, could have kept him from unholy dreams and
unfaithfulness.
His life on the engine was hard in the winter. He felt the cold
intensely, and as his art steadily advanced, his daily labour in the
yards grew hateful, and he pushed the days of the week through till
Sunday should come and he be free. His face was set and white when
Rainsford informed him that it would be impossible to give him
"Saturdays off" any longer. Antony turned on his heel and left the
office without response to his chief, and thought as he strode back to
his tenement: "It's Peter's personal feeling. He's in love with Molly,
and those days in the studio gall him."
Molly, who was lying down when he came in, brushed her hand across her
eyes as if to brush away whatever was there before he came. She took his
hat and coat; his slippers and warm jacket were before the stove.
"Rainsford has knocked me off my Saturdays," he said bitterly.
She stopped at the hook, the things in her hand. "That's hard on you,
Tony, and you getting on so well with your work."
She didn't say that she could not have gone on any more ... that the
walk she took the week before to Canal Street had been her last; but
Fairfax, observing her, rendered keen by his own disappointment,
understood. He called her to him, made her sit down on the sofa beside
him.
"Peter has been better to you than I have," he said sadly. "I've tired
you out, my dear, and I've been a selfish brute to you."
He saw that his words gave her pain, and desisted. He was going to be
nothing more from henceforth but an engineer. He would shut the studio
and take her out on Sundays. She received his decision meekly, without
rebuffing it, and he said--
"Molly, if I had not come along, I reckon you would have married Peter
Rainsford. There! Don't look like that!"
"Tony," she replied, "I'd rather be wretched with you--if I were, and
I'm not, dear. I'd rather be unhappy along of you than the happiest
queen."
He kissed her hand with a gallantry new to her and which made her
crimson, and half laugh and half cry.
She went early to bed, and Antony, alone in the kitchen, raked down the
coals, covered the fire in the stove, heard the clock tick and the
whistles of the boat on the river. In the silence of the winter night,
as it fell around him, he thought: "I reckon I'll have to try to make
her happy, even if I cut out my miserable talent and kill it." And as he
straightened himself he felt the Presence there. The solemn Presence
that had come with her to his workshop and kept him company, and it was
so impressive that he passed his hand across his forehead as though
dazed, and opened the door of his bedroom to see her and be assured. She
was already asleep; by her side, the little basket prepared, waited for
the life to come. He stepped in softly, and his heart melted. He knelt
down and buried his face in the pillow by her side, and without waking
she turned her face toward him in her sleep.