Kitabı oku: «Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel», sayfa 14
CHAPTER XXXI
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.
CHAPTER XXXII
He did not go to the studio for a month, but though he remained with her the poor girl profited little by his company. He smoked countless cigarettes, in spite of the fact that he had doctor's bills to look forward to. In the long winter evenings he read books that he fetched from the library while the blizzards and storms swept round the window, and the next day his duties stared him in the face. He dreamed before the stove, his cigarette between his fingers, and Molly watched him; but Rainsford, when he came, did not find her any more alone.
Finally, in the last Sunday of January, after the noon dinner, she fetched him his coat and muffler.
"I can't let you stay home any more like this, Tony," she told him. "Take your things and go to the studio; I'm sure you're dying to, and don't hurry back. I'm feeling fine."
He caught her suggestion with an eagerness that made her bite her lip; she kept her face from him lest he should see her disappointment. He exclaimed joyously —
"Why, I reckon you're right, Molly. I will go for awhile. I'll work all the better for the holiday."
He might have said "sacrifice."
As he got into his things he asked her: "You're sure you'll not need anything, Molly? You think it's all right for me to go?"
She assured him she would rest and sleep, and that the woman "below stairs" would come up if she wanted anything. He mustn't hurry.
He took the studio key. He was gone, his uneven step echoed on the narrow stairs. She listened till it died away.
Fairfax before his panel during the afternoon worked as though Fate were at his heels. When he came in the room was bitter cold, and it took the big fire he built long to make the shed inhabitable; but no sooner had the chill left the air, and he unwrapped his plaster, than a score of ideas came beating upon him like emancipated ghosts and shades, and he saw the forms, though the faces were still veiled. He sang and whistled, he declaimed aloud as the clay he mixed softened and rolled under his fingers… It let him shape it, its magic was under his thumb, its plasticity, its response fascinated the scupltor. He tried now with the intensity of his being to fix his conception for the gate of Death and Eternal Life. He had already made his drawing for the new scaffolding, and it would take him two Sundays to build it up. Falutini would help him.
It seemed strange to work without Molly sitting in her corner. He wondered how long the daylight would last; he had three months still until spring; that meant twelve Sundays. He thought of Molly's approaching illness, and a shadow crossed his face. Why had he come back only to tempt and tantalize himself with freedom and the joy of creation?
Sunday-Albany outside was as tranquil as the tomb, and scarcely a footstep passed under his window. The snow lay light upon the window-ledge and the roof, and as the room grew warmer the cordial light fell upon him as he worked, and a sense of the right to labour, the right to be free, made him take heart and inspired his hand. He began the sketch of his group on a large scale.
As he bent over his board the snow without shifted rustling from the roof, and the slipping, feathery shower fell gleaming before his window; the sound made him glance up and back towards the door. As he did so he recalled, with the artist's vivid vision, the form of his wife, as she had stood in the opened door, her arm along the panel, in the attitude of waiting and parting.
"By Jove!" he murmured, gazing as though it were reality. Half wondering, but with assurance, he indicated what he recalled, and was drawing in rapidly, absorbed in his idea, when some one struck the door harshly from without, and Rainsford called him.
Fairfax started, threw down his pencil, and seized his hat and muffler – he worked in his overcoat because he was cold – to follow the man who had come to fetch him in haste.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Over and over again that night in his watch that lasted until dawn, as he walked the floor of his little parlour-kitchen and listened, as he stood in the window before the soundless winter night and listened, Fairfax said the word he had said to her when she had paused in the doorway —
"Wait…!"
For what should she wait?
Did he want her to wait until he had caught the image of her on his mind and brain that he might call upon it for his inspiration?
He called her to "wait!"
Until he should become a great master and need her with her simplicity and her humble mind less than ever? Until he should be honoured by his kind and crowned successful and come at last into his own, and she be the only shadow on his glory? Not for that!
Until Fairfax one day should need the warmth of a perfectly unselfish woman's heart, a self-effacing tenderness, a breast to lean upon? She had given him all this.
He smelled the ether and strange drugs. The doctor came and went. The nurse he had engaged from the hospital, "the woman from below stairs" as well, came and went, spoke to him and shut him out.
He was conscious that in a chair in a corner, in a desperate position, his head in his hands, Rainsford was sitting. Of these things he was conscious afterward, but he felt now that he only listened, his every emotion concentrated in the sense of hearing. What was it he was so intent to hear? The passing of the Irrevocable or the advent of a new life? He stood at length close to her door, and it was nearly morning. A clock somewhere struck four presently, and the whistle of the Limited blew; but those were not the sounds he waited to hear.
At five o'clock, whilst it was still dark in the winter morning, he started, his heart thumping against his breast, a sob in his throat. Out of the stillness which to him had been unbroken, came a cry, then another, terribly sweet and heart-touching – the cry of life. He opened the door of his wife's room and entered softly in his stocking feet. There seemed to be a multitude between him and his wife and child. He did not dare to approach, but stood leaning against the wall, cold with apprehension and stirred to his depths. He seemed to stand there for a lifetime, and his knees nearly gave way beneath him. His hand pressed against his cheek. He leaned forward.
"Wait!"
He almost murmured the word that came to his lips.
For what should Molly Fairfax wait? Life had given her a state too high. She had brought much grace to it and much love. She had given a great deal. To wait for return, for such gifts, was to wait for the unattainable.
She went through the open door that she saw open, perhaps not all unwillingly; and she was not alone, for the child went with her, and they came to Fairfax and told him that she had gone through gently murmuring his name.
CHAPTER XXXIV
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.
CHAPTER XXXV
Fairfax had finished his lunch and was preparing to work again when, in answer to a knock, he opened the door for Tito Falutini, who bore in in his Sunday clothes, behind him a rosy, smiling, embarrassed lady, whom Fairfax had not seen for a "weary while."
"Mrs. Falutini," grinned his fireman. "I married! Shakka de han."
"Cora!" exclaimed Fairfax, kissing the bride on both her cheeks; "I would have come to see your mother and you long ago, but I couldn't."
"Shure," said the Irish girl tenderly, her eyes full of tears. "I know, Mr. Fairfax, dear, and so does the all of us."
He realized more and more how well these simple people knew and how kindly is the heart of the poor, and he wondered if "Blessed are the poor in spirit" that the Canon had spoken of in church on Sunday did not refer to some peculiar kind of richness of which the millionaires of the world are ignorant. He made Falutini and his bride welcome, and Cora's brogue and her sympathy caused his grief to freshen. But their boisterous happiness and their own content was stronger than all else, and when at last Cora said, "Och, show us the statywary 't you're makin', Misther Fairfax, dear," he languidly rose and uncovered again his bas-relief. Then he watched curiously the Irish girl and the Italian workman before his labour.
"Shure," Cora murmured, her eyes full of tears, "it's Molly herself, Mr. Fairfax, dear. It's living."
He let the covering fall, and its folds suggested the garments of the tomb.
The young couple, starting out in life arm-in-arm, had seen only life in his production, and he was glad. He let them go without reluctance, eager to return to his modelling, and to retouch a line in the woman's figure, for the bas-relief was still warm clay, and had not been cast in plaster, and he kept at his work until five o'clock in the afternoon, when there was another knock at his door. He bade the intruder absently "Come in," heard the door softly open and close, and the sound jarred his nerves, as did every sound at that door, and with his scalpel in his hand, turned sharply. In the door close to his shadow stood the figure of a slender young girl. There was only the space of the room between them, and even in his surprise he thought, "Now, there is nothing else!"
"Cousin Antony," she said from the doorway where he had seen the vision, "aren't you going to speak to me? Aren't you glad to see me?"
Her words were the first Fairfax had heard in the rich voice of a woman, for the child tone had changed, and there was a "timbre" now in the tone that struck the old and a new thrill. Her boldness, the bright assurance seemed gone. He thought her voice trembled.
"Why don't you speak to me, Cousin Antony? Do you think I'm a ghost?"
(A ghost!)
Bella came forward as she spoke, and he saw that she wore a girlish dress, a long dress, a womanly dress. With her old affectionate gesture she held out her hand, and on her dark hair was a little red bonnet of some fashion too modish for him to find familiar, but very bewitching and becoming, and he saw that she was a lovely woman, nearly seventeen.
"I lost the precious little paper you gave me, Cousin Antony, that day at church, and I only found it to-day in packing. I'm going home for the Easter holidays."
He realized that she was close to him, and that she innocently lifted up her face. Fairfax bent and kissed her under the red hat on the hair.
"Now," she cried, nodding at him, "I've hunted you down, tracked you to your lair, and you can't escape. I want to see your work. Show me everything."
But Fairfax put his hand up quickly, and before her eyes rested on the bas-relief he had let the curtain fall.
"You're not an engineer any more, then, Cousin Antony?"
"No, Bella."
"Tell me why you ran away from us as you did? Oh!" she exclaimed, clasping her pretty hands, "I've thought over and over the questions I wanted to ask you, things I wanted to tell you, and now I forget them all. Cousin Antony, it wasn't kind to leave us as you did, – Gardiner and me."
He watched her as she took a chair, half-leaning on its back before his covered work. Bella's pose was graceful and elegant. Girl as she was, she was a little woman of the world. She swung her gloves between her fingers, looking up at him.
"It's nearly five years, Cousin Antony."
"I know it."
She laughed and blushed. "I've been running after you, shockingly, haven't I? I ran away from home and found you in the queer little street in the queer little home with those angel Irish people! How are they all, Cousin Antony, and the freckled children?"
"Bella," her cousin asked, "haven't they nearly finished with you in school? You are grown up."
She shook her head vehemently. "Nonsense, I'm a dreadful hoyden still. Think of it! I've never been on the roll of honour yet at St. Mary's."
"No?" he smiled. "They were wrong not to put you there. How is Aunt Caroline?"
The girl's face clouded, and she said half under her breath —
"Why, don't you know?"
Ah, there was another grave, then? What did Bella mean?
She exclaimed, stopped swinging her gloves, folded her hands gravely —
"Why, Cousin Antony, didn't you read in the papers?"
He saw a rush of colour fill her cheeks. It wasn't death, then? He hadn't seen any papers for some time, and he never should have expected to find his aunt's name in the papers.
"I don't believe I can tell you, Cousin Antony."
He drew up a chair and sat down by her. "Yes, you can, little cousin."
Her face was troubled, but she smiled. "Yes, that was what you used to call me, didn't you? You see, I'm hardly supposed to know. It's not a thing a girl should know, Cousin Antony. Can't you guess?"
"Hardly, Bella."
Fairfax wiped his hands on a bunch of cloths, and the dry morsels of clay fell to the floor.
"Tell me what it is about Aunt Caroline."
"She is not my mother any more, Cousin Antony, nor father's wife either."
He waited. Bella's tone was low and embarrassed.
"I don't know how to tell it. She had a lovely voice, Cousin Antony."
"She had indeed, Bella."
"Well," slowly commented the young girl, "she took music lessons from a teacher who sang in the opera, and I used to hear them at it until I nearly lost my mind sometimes. I hate music– I mean that kind, Cousin Antony."
"Well," he interrupted, impatient to hear the dénouement. "What then, honey?"
"One night at dinner-time mother didn't come home; but she is often late, and we waited, and then went on without her… She never came home, and no one ever told me anything, not even old Ann. Father said I was not to speak my mother's name again. And I never have, until now, to you."
Fairfax took in his Bella's hands that turned the little rolled kid gloves; they were cold. He bent his eyes on her. Young as she was, she saw there and recognized compassion and human understanding, qualities which, although she hardly knew their names, were sympathetic to her. He bent his eyes on her.
"Honey," Fairfax said, "you have spoken your mother's name in the right place. Don't judge her, Bella!"
"Oh!" exclaimed the young girl, crimsoning. She tossed her proud, dark head. "I do judge her, Cousin Antony, I do."
"Hush!" he exclaimed sternly, "as you say, you are too young to understand what she has done, but not too young to be merciful."
She snatched her hands away, and sprang up, her eyes rebellious.
"Why should I not judge her?" Her voice was indignant. "It's a disgrace to my honourable father, to our name. How can you, Cousin Antony?" Fairfax did not remove his eyes from her intense little face. "She was never a mother to us," the young girl judged, with the cruelty of youth. "Think how I ran wild! Do you remember my awful clothes? My things that never met, the buttons off my shoes? Think of darling little Gardiner, Cousin Antony…!"
Her cousin again bade her be silent. She stamped her foot passionately.
"But I will speak! Why should you take her part?"
With an expression which Bella felt to be grave, Fairfax repeated —
"You must not speak her name, as your father told you. It's a mighty hard thing for one woman to judge another, little cousin. Wait until you are a woman yourself."
Fairfax understood. He thought how the way had opened to his weak, sentimental aunt; he fancied that he saw again the doe at the gate of the imposing park of the unreal forest; the gate had swung open, and, her eyes as mild as ever, the doe had entered the mystic world. To him this image of his aunt was perfect. Oh! mysterious, dreadful, wonderful heart of woman!
Bella stood by his side, looking up at him. "Cousin Antony," she breathed, "why do you take her part?"
"I want her daughter to take it, Bella, or say nothing."
Her dark eyes were on him intently, curiously. His throat was bare, his blond hair cut close around his neck; the marks of his recent grief and struggle had thinned and saddened his face. He had altered very much in five years.
"I remember," Bella said sharply, "you used to seem fond of her;" and added, "I loved my father best."
Fairfax made no reply, and Bella walked slowly across the studio, and started to sit down under the green lamp.
"No," cried Fairfax, "not there, Bella!"
Her hand on the back of the chair, the young girl paused in surprise.
"Why, why not, Cousin Antony?"
Why not, indeed! He had not prevented Rainsford from sitting there.
"Is the chair weak in its legs?" she laughed. "I'm light – I'll risk it," and, half defiantly, she seated herself by the table, leaning both elbows on it. She looked back at him. "Now, make a little drawing of me as you used to do. I'll show it to the girls in school to prove what a genius we have in the family; and I must go back, too, or I'll have more bad marks than ever."
Fairfax did not obey her. Instead, he looked at her as though he saw through her to eternity.
Bella sprang up impulsively, and came toward him. "Cousin Antony," she murmured, "I'm perfectly dreadful. I'm selfish and inconsiderate. It's only because I'm a little wild. I don't mean it. You've told me nothing." She lifted his cravat from the chair. "You wear a black cravat and your clothes are black. Is it for Aunt Arabella still?"
Fairfax seemed to himself to look down on her from a height. Her brilliance, her sparkle and youth were far away. His heart ached within him.
"One goes mighty far in five years, Bella… One loses many things."
"I know – Gardiner and your mother. But who else?"
He saw her face sadden; the young girl extended her hand to him, her eyes darkened.
"Who else?" she breathed.
Fairfax put out his arms toward her, but did not enfold her. He let his hands rest on her shoulders and murmured, "Bella, little Bella," and choked the other words back.
"No," she said, "I'm not little Bella any more. Please answer me, Cousin Antony."
He could not have told her for his life. He could tell her nothing; her charm, her lifted face, beautiful, ardent, were the most real, the most vital things the world had ever held for him. The fascination found him under his new grief. He exclaimed, turning brusquely toward his covered scaffolding —
"Don't you want to see my work, Bella? I've been at it nearly a year."
He rapidly drew the curtain and exposed his bas-relief.
There was in the distance a vague indication of distant sky-line – a far horizon – upon which, into which, a door opened, held ajar by a woman's arm and hand. The woman's figure, draped in the clinging garment of the grave, was passing through, but in going her face was turned, uplifted, to look back at a man without, who, apparently unconscious of her, gazed upon life and the world. That was all – the two figures and the feeling of the vast illimitable far-away.
It seemed to Fairfax as he unveiled his work that he looked upon it himself for the first time; it seemed to him finished, moreover, complete. He knew that he could do nothing more with it. He heard Bella ask, "Who is it, Cousin Antony? It is perfectly beautiful!" her old enthusiasm soft and warm in her voice.
At her repeated question, "Who is it?" he replied, "A dream woman." And his cousin said, "You have lovely dreams, but it is too sad."
He told her for what it was destined, and she listened, musing, and when she turned her face to him again there were tears in her eyes. She pointed to the panel.
"There should be a child there," she said, with trembling lips. "They go in too, Cousin Antony."
