Jane Journeys On

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9. Chapter IX



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.