As Nut Street, with the destruction of his little statue, had been wiped
out of his history, so the two rooms overlooking the river and
steamboats knew Antony Fairfax no more. He turned the key in the door
the day they carried away the body of his wife, and when he came back
from the snowy earth and the snowy white city where he left her with his
hour-old child, he went to the Delavan House as he had done before, and
buried his head in his arms on his lowly bed in a hotel room and wept.
The following day he sent word to Rainsford to look out for another
engineer in his place. He had driven his last trip.
Tito Falutini wrung his friend's hand, and told Fairfax, in his broken
Italian-English, that he knew a fellow would take the rooms as they
stood. "Would Tony give the job to him?" Save for his clothes and
Molly's things, and they were few, he took nothing, not even the
drawings decorating the wall on which other Irish eyes should look with
admiration.
He interviewed the jewellers again. They gave him four hundred dollars
and took his mother's ring. He paid his doctor's bills and funeral
expenses, and had fifty dollars left until he should finish his
bas-relief. He went to live at the Canal Street studio and shut himself
up with his visions, his freedom, his strange reproach and his sense of
untrammelled wings.
He worked with impassioned fervour, for now he _knew_. He modelled with
assurance, for now he _saw_. His hands were so eager to create the idea
of his brain that he sighed as he worked, fairly panted at his task as
though he ran a race with inspiration. Half-fed, sometimes quite
sleepless, he lost weight and flesh. He missed the open-air life of the
engine and the air at his ears. But now at his ears were the audible
voices of his conceptions. February and March passed. His models were, a
mannequin, his studies of Molly Fairfax, and once the daughter of the
man who rented him the workshop stood before him draped in the long
garment; but he sent her away: she was too _living_ for his use. He ate
in little cheap restaurants down by the riverside, or cooked himself
coffee and eggs over his lamp, and wondered who would be the first to
break the silence and isolation, for it was six weeks before he saw a
single human being save those he passed in the street.
"Rainsford," he said to the agent, who on the last day of March came
slowly in at noon, walking like a man just out of a long illness, "I
reckoned you'd be along when you were ready. I've waited for you here."
Fairfax's hand was listlessly touched by his friend's, then Rainsford
went over and took Molly's place by the lamp. Fairfax checked the words,
"Not _there_, for God's sake, Rainsford!" He thought, "Let the living
come. Nothing can brush away the image of her sitting there in the
lamplight, no matter how many fill the place."
Rainsford's eyes were hollow, and his tone as pale as his face, whose
sunken cheeks and hollows, to Fairfax, marked the progress of a fatal
disease. His voice sounded hoarse and strained; he spoke with effort.
"I've come to say good-bye. I've given up my job here in West Albany.
I'm going to try another country, Tony."
The sculptor sat down on the lounge where he had used to sit near his
wife, and said solicitously--
"I see you're not well, old man. I don't wonder you're going to try a
better climate. I hope to heaven I shall never see another snow-flake
fall. I assure you I feel them fall on graves."
There was a moment's silence. The agent passed his hand across his face
and said, as if reluctant to speak at all--
"Yes, I am going to try another country." He glanced at Fairfax and
coughed.
"California?" questioned Antony. "I hope you'll get a job in some such
paradise. Do you think you will?"
The other man did not reply. He looked about the studio, now living-room
and workshop, and said--
"I should like to see what you have been doing, Fairfax. How are you
getting on?"
Tony, however, did not rise from the sofa nor show any inclination to
comply, and his friend irrelevantly, as though he took up the young
man's problems where he had left them, before his own sentiment for
Molly had estranged him from her husband--
"You must be pretty hard up by now, Tony." He drew from his waistcoat
pocket his wallet, and took out a roll of bills which he folded
mechanically and held in his transparent hand. "Ever since the day you
came in to take your orders from me in West Albany, I've wanted to help
you. Now I've got the money to do so, old man."
"No, my kind friend."
"Don't refuse me then, if I am that." The other's lip twitched. "Take
it, Tony."
"You mustn't ask me to, Peter."
"I made a turnover last week in N. Y. U. I can afford it. I ask you for
the sake of old times."
Fairfax covered the slender hand with his. He shook it warmly.
"I'm sorry, old man. I can't do it."
The near-sighted eyes of the paymaster met those of Fairfax with a
melancholy appeal, and the other responded to his unspoken words--
"No, Rainsford, not for anything in the world."
"It's your _Pride_," Rainsford murmured, and he put on his shining
glasses and looked through them fully at Fairfax. "It's your Pride,
Tony. What are you going to do?"
For answer, Fairfax rose, stretched out his arms, walked toward his
covered bas-relief and drew away the curtain.
His friend followed him, stood by his side, and, with his thin hand
covering his eyes, looked without speaking at the bas-relief. When he
finally removed his hand and turned, Fairfax saw that his friend's face
was transformed. Rainsford wore a strangely peaceful look, even an
uplifted expression, such as a traveller might wear who sees the door
open to a friendly shelter and foretastes his repose.
Rainsford held out his hand. "Thank you, Tony," and his voice was clear.
"You're a great artist."
When he had gone, Fairfax recalled his rapt expression, and thought,
sadly, "I'm afraid he's a doomed man, dear old Rainsford! Poor old
Peter, I doubt if any climate can save him now." And went heavy-hearted
to prepare his little luncheon of sandwiches and milk.