Jane Journeys On

17. Chapter XVII

Once, long ago, coming home from her self-imposed exile to the lean, clean Island in Maine, Jane had dreaded, a little, her re-meeting with Michael Daragh, but on the trip home from Mexico and California she had no such feeling. Doubts were over and done with forever. The flight had been for the purpose of getting perspective; perspective made her grave Irishman, her stern St. Michael, loom up and up until he filled her horizon. Her heart had been allowed to drift with the tide in the lyrical interlude in the lovely, lazy land she had come from, but--save perhaps for certain misty moments--it had insisted on swimming stoutly upstream. "I am going back to Michael Daragh," she told herself gladly and unashamed, and the rhythm of the train, hurrying across the continent, repeated it in a joyful, endless litany--"Going--back--to--Michael--Daragh!"

Jane leaned back in her quiet compartment (tangible evidence of solid success) and watched the desert miles and the prairie miles sliding away beside her, and warmed her heart and soul with the thought of Michael's face when he should first see her again. Now, when the swift gladness leapt up in his eyes and the color ran up in his thin cheeks and his whole face glowed from within with its stained-glass-window look, she would not turn away from him, but to him,--gladly, royally, lavishly, with all that she had and all that she was.

She wired Mrs. Hills from Chicago the day but not the hour of her return, but sent no word to Michael Daragh. That would savor of a command, a summons, and she was too happily humble for that. He would know from the boarding-house keeper that she was near, and he would be waiting for her.

Like a timid tourist, she was hatted and veiled and gloved long before they entered the grimy outskirts of the city, and sat, hot-cheeked, breathing fast, on the edge of her seat, far more thrilled and shaken than she had been, four years and more ago, when she made her exodus from the village to the wide world. The narrow strip of mirror between the windows framed her radiant face; now indeed was she anointed with the oil of joy above her fellows.

Between a slight delay of the train, and the snail's pace of the taxicab through the traffic, it would be quite six o'clock before she reached Mrs. Hetty Hills' house in Washington Square; he would be absolutely certain to be home.

Everything took on an especial beauty and significance,--the crowded streets, the shop windows, the lights, the people,--her heart went out to all of them--rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; they were Michael's and they would be hers. He should have that oil of joy for his work, for his high, selfless purposes.

It was hard to wait even an instant to see him, to have him ask, and to answer, but it was wonderful to wait, in faith and utter confidence. The sense of haste and impatience fell away; it must happen as it would, serenely, naturally.

She did not mind that it took her many seconds to find the exact amount and then a lavish tip for her driver, and she noted with satisfaction that the faithful Mabel had seen her from an upper window and would spread the glad tidings.

Mrs. Hetty Hills, a little stouter and grayer and more prosperous than she had been four years earlier, stood in the doorway. "Well, now, I am glad!" she declared. "I'm free to say I thought it was a risk, your traipsing round Mexico with all those revolutions and epidemics and things! My, but you look fine, child! I believe my soul it's done you a world of good! 'Praise to the face is open disgrace,' but you don't look a day over eighteen and I'd swear it on a stack of Bibles!"

"Nice Mrs. Hills," said her star boarder, hugging her heartily. "How are you? And how is everybody?"

"Well, I'm pretty good now," said the ex-villager, earnestly, "but you can tell your folks I was miserable enough a week ago yesterday. I guess if I was the give-up kind I'd have been flat on my back. I don't know when I've ever had such a spell. My throat ached and I could hardly drag one foot after another, and even my eyeballs----"

"But you're fine now, aren't you? I'm so glad! I'm sure you'd been overdoing. And how is--how are all the others?"

"Oh ... about the same. Mrs. Ramsey doesn't get out to her concerts any more, on account of her leg, and that makes her bluer'n a whetstone, but otherwise I guess we're all pretty much of a muchness. Everybody misses--land t' goodness," she caught herself up, "I guess there is one piece of news! I guess there is one change, sure enough!"

"What?" asked Jane, sitting down suddenly on one of the stiff hall chairs.

"Why, Mr. Daragh! He's gone home to Ireland!"

("You've got to say something! You've got to make a remark!") Jane told herself, fiercely, but it seemed a fearful pause before she heard her voice and it sounded thin and queer. "Oh, is that so? Has he?"

"Yes, went off like a shot! Got a cable from some of his folks. All he said was he was called home. Awful close-mouthed for an Irishman. All the Irish I ever knew before--I think he gave Mabel a note to put in your room. Want I should send her up for it?" asked the landlady eagerly.

"No, thanks," said Jane, very creditably. "There isn't any hurry. And how is Emma Ellis, Mrs. Hills?" She sat chatting for ten minutes by her wrist watch and then took her leisurely way upstairs and then she chatted another five with Mabel before she attacked the mile of mail upon the desk in her sitting room.

It was a brief little note; illness and imminent death in his family--he had time for this line only--and he wanted God to save her kindly and he was her friend, Michael Daragh. It was the sort of little note, she told herself, that a thoughtful man would write with the good Mabel in the back of his mind. She felt a sense of daze and dizziness and she sat with her hat and cloak on until the dinner gong rent the air, waiting much as Michael Daragh had waited, long ago, when he had listened for the sound of the motor, bearing her uptown with Rodney Harrison, and then had torn up the narrow strip of paper which bore her foolish little postscript. She took herself resolutely in hand and went briskly down to dinner, and regaled Mrs. Hills and the music students and the teachers and bank clerks and elderly, concert-going ladies (one of whom went no more) with the gay but expurgated text of her conquest of Mexico. There was talk of Michael Daragh, and one of the younger music students ventured, pinkly, the theory that Mr. Daragh had been called home to inherit a title.

"Yes," said Jane with quick sympathy, "I shouldn't wonder in the least! He's always seemed a belted earl sort of person, for all his other-worldly ways, hasn't he?" It was a relief to talk of him lightly and easily like this. "Or a Squire, at any rate! Something picturesque,--something story bookish!"

"Oh," giggled the music student, delighted at her backing, "won't it be thrilling to get a letter with a crest and be told that he'll never be back again?"

"Lord Lovel, he stood at his castle gate,
A-combing his milk-white steed,----"

chanted Jane, merrily. "I can quite picture him, can't you? Only the milk-white steed will be immediately hitched to a delivery wagon of his worldly goods, for distribution to the poor. Yes, that is without doubt what has happened! I can see adoring yokels pulling their forelocks to him! He'll fit beautifully into that background!" Thus her tongue, running ripplingly on, while her heart, suddenly released from its numb depression, wired her blithe reassurance. "He's coming back,--coming back to me--coming back soon;"

The high mood stayed with her, even though the days and weeks slipped by without word from him. She was entirely happy and confident, but she found herself too restless to settle down to her work. She had a sense of excited waiting for something beautiful to happen, and a warm and kindly yearning to make every one else as happy as herself. She went often to Hope House and sparred with Emma Ellis; neither of them had heard from the Irishman, and while Jane was secretly able to interpret this with comfort to herself, the other was not. Miss Ellis leaned romantically toward the theory of the younger music student; Mr. Daragh had probably gone home to inherit property and assume responsibilities; she had always known there was nothing ordinary about Mr. Daragh; she had always felt that he was a great person, stooping to this life of abnegation.

"But I think," said Jane flippantly, "he's much more likely to have been a Sin-eater!"

"A--what?"

"A Sin-eater. I'm sure they're still being worn in Ireland. A Sin-eater is a man who has had a great sorrow or committed a great crime----"

"Miss Vail;"

"--and lives in a damp and dismal cave across a slimy moor and whenever any one dies unshriven, he is sent for, and he comes after dark, his face shrouded, and prays and moans all night beside the corpse, eating all he possibly can of the food which has been placed about it, and what he can't consume on the spot he takes away before dawn, in a sack, and that is his larder, you see, until the next sudden death! And, of course, the idea is that he has taken the sins of the departed upon his own soul, and that when he has done it long enough and meekly enough he will be permitted to die, himself, and other people's sins will have miraculously cleansed him of his own!"

"I never heard anything so--so revolting," said the Superintendent in her most smothered voice.

"Oh, do you find it so? To me it seems very quaint and charming." She was ashamed of her small-boy impishness but for sheer high spirits she could not seem to stop. "But perhaps," she allowed it grudgingly, "he didn't commit a crime; perhaps he was merely crossed in love, or--likeliest of all--assumed the burden of another's misdeed! A wild young brother, or The Heir! That's it,--The Heir! And Michael, with proper younger-son humility, realized that he didn't count, and took the blame and fled to the States, and now The Heir has died, first doing the decent thing in the way of death-bed remorse and confession. And, of course, there's a girl in it somewhere, and I'm sure she has waited for Michael all these years instead of marrying The Heir, aren't you?"

But for the most part her mood was one of amazing gentleness and serenity, with that insistent desire for being good enough and worthy enough for the glory about to descend upon her. She made little pilgrimages to all the people they had helped together,--to Ethel and Jerry and Billiken in Rochester, snugly prosperous and happy, with a little Jerry, now, whose ears flanged exactly as his father's did; to Chicago, to confer with little Miss Marjorie and the Roderick Frosts about the making of the old house where Roderick IV was born into a Maternity Home, and to gladden the good little Stranger's Friend with a fat check for her work, and to puncture Mrs. Mussel's gloom with substantial gifts and the bright and bonny refurnishing of the Christian room for girls such as Edna Miles pretended to be; to catch up with the girl who had taken her "CROWDED HOUR" to success, always on tour now, in one of her playlets, and married to the brother of "BROTHER" ("BROTHER" himself having given up and gone to make the long fight on the desert). She went, fur-bundled and red-cheeked, to spend a week-end with Deacon Gillespie and "Angerleek" at Three Meadows, and found one of the daughters at home, and the old man told her that two of the sons were coming for their summer vacations. Angelique was animated with timid cheer; he'd been different, gentler, since Danny....

Jane went back to New York with June in her heart. Was not this a part of her life with Michael since he had sent her to that lean, clean island to snare back her soul? This was part of the harvest they had sown together, for everything she had done since coming to know him had been shared with him. There came a moment, of course, when her sense of sanctification broke like a bubble. "I feel like the Elsie Books," she said, grinning her boy's grin at herself. "I'd better go home and let Mrs. Wetherby put me in my place!"

But even in her Vermont village she found balm. They might hold, with Mrs. Hills, that "Praise to the face is open disgrace," and be chary of effusions, but Jane Vail was the brightest jewel in their crown, and it was only the deafest and dimmest old ladies who asked her if she was still going on with her literary work.

Mrs. Wetherby, although she would never forgive Jane to her dying day, was clearly thankful to have Martin all to herself. She fed him to repletion and washed and ironed his silk shirts with her own hands, and she loved to say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club, "Well, Marty says his mother's his girl!" Martin himself was heavily cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down. It would not be very long, now, before there was no "Asst." in front of the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.

The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be, without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered, and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping them....

Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy which was coming as certainly as the morning.

Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was there--Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and welcome home the wanderer--and at once the old life, the old routine, the old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.

Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been filled with meaning; that it was inevitable that he should take Emma Ellis home to Hope House; that there had been no opportunity to ask her to wait up for him; that she had done the only possible thing in taking a bright and cheery leave of Mrs. Hills and coming up to her rooms. She had waited an hour in her sitting room--Michael Daragh had often dropped in for a chat before she went to Mexico--but when at last she heard his feet upon the stairs, they had carried him steadily on and up to his own floor.

And the next day and the day after that she told herself that it was perfectly natural for Hope House and Agnes Chatterton and kindred calls to fill his every hour. She was waiting happily and surely, and a special delivery letter from Rodney Harrison hardly registered on her consciousness when Mabel brought it up to her one afternoon. It was a brief letter, turgid, almost fierce in its tone. Rodney Harrison was not going to be put off any longer, it appeared. He would meet Jane at the theater that evening (where she must go to pass upon the performance of a new character-man in her second gay little play) and then she was going to supper with him, and to drive in his new speedster, and to make up her mind--no, not that, he'd made it up for her, once and for all--but to settle this matter definitely and right. She read it with an indulgent smile and put it down on her desk. Good old Rodney ... good old man-she-met-on-the-boat....

Her telephone rang at her elbow. She had had a soft little sleigh bell substituted for the harsh, commercial clang and even the most utilitarian call took on a tone of revelry, but now it had an especially gay and lilting sound, she thought. Michael Daragh's voice over the wire lacked its usual quality of serenity; he sounded unsure of himself; almost--shy, and Jane's grip on the receiver grew taut and her cheeks flamed.

"It's the way I'm asking you something now I've never dared ask you before, Jane Vail," purled the brogue, "and I'm wondering, dare I?"

"I--I'm wondering, too," said Jane.

"'Tis nothing at all you might be thinking it is! Ever since I'm back I've been screwing up my courage--but 'tis the boldest and brazenest thing my like would ever be daring to ask the likes of you!" She had never heard him talk so like a stage Irishman before; she had never known him so moved. "Whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'yes,' and whiles I'm thinking you'll say me 'no' and whiles I'm destroyed entirely with the doubt! I'll be there inside the hour, or a half-hour itself, and let you be merciful, Jane Vail!"

"I will be waiting," she said, "and I will be merciful."

"God love you!" he cried and hung up abruptly.

She rose from her chair and stood in the middle of her clever orange and black room, icy hands clamped tightly to her burning cheeks. So! Journeys' end! She flew into the other room and with unsteady fingers divested herself of her severely smart business dress and flung a creamy cloud over her head. She justified this costume vigorously to herself. It was five o'clock--almost evening--and she wanted him to see her thus, he who had hardly ever seen her in other than the bread-and-butter garb of every day, but when she looked in the glass she shook her head. If he had at last dared to ask her to leave her sunny fields for his shadowed paths, was this the vision to reassure him?

She put on a mellow velvet of deepest brown, cunningly cut, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it made her look like a young queen in an old frieze, but not, it was to be admitted, like a durable help-meet for a Settlement worker.

Her windows were wide to the tentative advances of spring and now she heard a ringing tread upon the pavement below, and with breathless haste she pulled off her regal raiment and flung herself into the primmest and plainest of her work frocks--a stern little brown serge with Puritan collar and cuffs, and this time she nodded approval at her reflection. Here was, indeed, a creature for human nature's daily food!

She heard his feet upon the stairs, his knuckles on the door of her sitting room, but she waited for a last long look. When she looked into that mirror again, she would see the glorified, glad face of Michael Daragh's love.