Part 6

From the steps she turned and, not trusting herself to speak, grasped his hand impulsively. Then she was gone.

As he stood looking down into the dusk after her, he wondered why she turned west, away from her home. He cleared his throat, to call after her.

But, well, she had always done things herself, in her own way. And she was always right.

Augusta did not know that Wardwell a few hours earlier had sauntered just this way that she was hurrying. She did not know as she crossed West street, now silent and deserted as a country road, that Jimmie had walked recklessly through its roaring traffic, weakly half hoping that something would happen to him. She did not know that he had stood just where she came to stand, looking down over the railing into the slip between two docks, asking questions of the lapping water.

A dock watchman who stood within a few feet of her put his lantern out of his hand, merely as a precaution. She did not look like any of the many kinds that he had seen coming to look too curiously at the water. But, she was in trouble. Happy people do not come peering down into rivers. He cautiously moved a little closer to her.

Then she turned and, without so much as a look back, crossed the street again and turned north.

"Whatever she was lookin' for," the watchman grumbled, "it wasn't here."

Augusta was not thinking or reasoning, or consciously searching for Jimmie. She had loosened her mind, as it were, and was letting herself drift in his wake. She understood him now. She knew now what he had been going through. She was following every thought of his as it had worked through his brain and had turned out into action. She was feeling with him and suffering the hurt that he had felt. But she was not following him now because she pitied him. It was not because she wished to care for him, to mother him, to make good her debt to him.

She was following him now because she loved him. Up to now she had needed him, his protection, his kindness, his dear thoughtfulness and his cheer. Now she needed him because she had found out, in this last half hour, that she loved him with a desperation that would have frightened her if she had been able to think of it. She did not care whether he was sick or well. She did not care whether he wanted to stay or go. She would find him. She would hold him. She would not stop walking until she had found him. And then she would put her arms around him. And not any other woman, nor even death itself would get him from her.

Now she knew that she was on the right way. Her start towards the river had been a false one, just as Jimmie's had been. Jimmie had had no more real thought of harming himself than she had had of finding the end of her search in the river.

He had just set himself adrift aimlessly, and unconsciously she seemed to know that mere physical weariness would bring him to where all the drifting logs of the city's stream sooner or later come to rest, the park benches.

Through the endless night she trudged, scanning the thousand figures that weariness and misery and failure take when they finally slump down to the friendly darkness of a shaded bench.

Policemen looked sharply after her. Good men looked wonderingly after her. Bad men looked discriminatingly after her. Her soul was sick with the misery and the sordidness that she searched among. But her heart was not afraid. She was right, and love was at the end of her search.

In the gray, haggard dawn she saw him at a little distance, sitting jauntily erect, his hand extended resting lightly on his cane, peering interestedly up into the coming light of the new day--as though he had that moment sat down to enjoy the fresh morning and to wonder at the miracle of dawn.

Augusta trembled in every aching nerve, but her heart laughed as she stole toward him. It was so like him, sitting up making a play at interest, when, as she knew, he probably didn't care whether the day dawned or not.

Then with a little desperate run she was kneeling on the bench beside him and had fairly dragged his head into her arms and was kissing him wildly, passionately.

Now Wardwell said not a word. He did not at first seem surprised. It is doubtful if, knowing Augusta and remembering her actions in those days when her mother had been lost, he really had thought that he could lose himself from her in the way he had taken.

But when he found Augusta's arms tight around him something within him awoke with a start. Augusta had kissed him before this--But--

Jimmie Wardwell knew as little of women's love and the ways of it as most men do. But he suddenly straightened up and deliberately pulled one of Augusta's arms away and caught her little face in his hand and looked boldly, hungrily down into her eyes.

For a little while, unashamed and fearless, her eyes gave him back his answer. Then her lashes dropped in surrender, and Wardwell, as though life and strength had suddenly been poured into him, caught her up bodily to him and hugging her tight started to carry her to the nearest street.

IV

"Donahue," said Jimmie earnestly, "you may be frank. We do not invite criticism, but we can stand observation. What, then, after two thoughtful days, is your fairly honest opinion of this--ah--institution, of which you are an ornament?"

"Jimmie, you shall not make fun of Donahue. I know he's not pretty. But his eyes are kind, and he is good. He is not for ornament," Augusta defended.

Jimmie laughed wickedly. "All the homely people I ever knew have had that said about them. They are not pretty, but their eyes are good, and they are useful. And they _do_ love to hear it! Yes! The men swear great deep oaths under their breath. And what the women do I was never able even to guess." And he shook his head in utter inability to deal with the matter.

"But, pardon me, you are divinely right--as always--about Donahue. Not only is he useful and good; he is more. He is essential, and virtuous. I would defend his morals in open court. And when I think of his temptations, of the wild free and frisky gypsy life that he has led, and then contemplate the shining nobility of his stern virtues, I am positively ashamed of myself. At such times I even resolve to lead a better life.

"He is a thief, of course," he continued reflectively, "but then, stealing is a gypsy virtue, so--"

"He isn't any such thing," Augusta said, again drawn out to the defense. "I know he ate the bag of apples, bag and all. But he thought they were--"

"Woman, you interrupt. You digress. You trifle. You dissipate and confuse the issue. Let us get on. We are not discussing Donahue. _He_ is considering _us_. Does he approve, or does he merely tolerate? That is the point."

Augusta was at the instant fearfully engaged in the perilous strategy of turning a good sized steak on a very small pan, and was not paying the slightest attention to what he said.

"Again I say, Donahue, let us have your decently reserved opinion. I do not ask for brutal frankness. No rough work, you understand. You have now, for the afore-mentioned two thoughtful days, listened to my uplifting conversation. You have been blessed with the vision of Augusta's beauty. You have eaten her apples. What then? It is time for you to speak."

Thus adjured, Donahue turned his head slightly and sniffed delicately of the mingled tang of Augusta's wood fire and the savor of the cooking steak. His head was close to the ground. He wriggled one ear in a deliberate and patent pretense that a fly was bothering him. Then, as though realizing that that subterfuge would not serve, he calmly and meditatively lifted his off fore leg and deliberatively scratched the prominence back of his ear, with the soft side of his hock.

"Aha! A diplomat! Did you see that, Augusta? He has that rarest combination of all--outstanding virtue coupled with tact and good manners. How many very good people are there who could have refrained from giving us their honest opinion? Their duty would have forced them to it. But Donahue, no. He scratches his ear, and refrains. How beautiful it is to be able to refrain!

"All right, Donahue. All in your own good time. Either you do not care to hurt our feelings, or you are not yet sure that you have made us out. Scratch on, oh gentle minded philosopher, and--"

"Jimmie, get the big plate. You might as well help as sit on that rock and talk. He isn't listening anyway."

Leaving Donahue to his own thoughts, Jimmie went obediently over to the wagon and stepping up on the cross-bar reached a long arm in back of the seat to a swinging rack and deftly brought forth a heavy platter.

"We'll dine out to-night," said Augusta, nodding at the little folding table that she had set out on the grass.

"Oh hear ye, Donahue, our beloved Lady cracketh a pun!"

"Don't jiggle the plate. And _don't drop_ it!"

Craftily, his eye on the shifting level of the gravy, his feet feeling for the uneven places of the ground, Jimmie made his perilous journey, with the combined manner of a sleep walker and of a priest of some terrible temple of sacrifice, from the stove to the table.

Then, when Augusta had followed with other things, they sat down on little camp stools close together. A sudden timid, half-fearful reverence and diffidence came over them, as of a perfect moment that could not be held nor ever fully repeated. A fleeting, intangible joy in each other caught them, joy in their very aloneness, in their oneness of thought and heart and soul. And they knew, almost fearfully, that such moments are rare in even the very happiest of all lives. A little tear glistened in the sunlight on Augusta's lashes.

But Jimmie knew better than to let the moment fade out trying to prolong it. Better break it while the beauty of it was yet in the glow.

"I am dying, Egypt, dying, for the half of that steak! Is it any concern of yours, Madam, that your husband has had no food for the last four and twenty hours?"

"You've had six egg's and three quarts of milk, and you fought--"

"Food! I said. Didn't I, Donahue? I repeat, I've had nothing to eat since this time last night. And I am ravening. If you don't cut, I shall tear!"

"Hold the table steady, then."

They ate with happy hunger, laughing at the untried makeshifts with which they tried to bridge over the distance between sacred table manners and the bird-in-hand necessities of the rickety little board, spatting a little now and then as each insisted on giving the other the choicest bits of the food.

Once Jimmie spilled over the salt in a moment of forgetfulness, and he watched curiously as he saw Augusta furtively pick up a tiny pinch of it and pretend to look at it and then, just naturally, throw it over her shoulder. Strangely enough, he had nothing to say on the matter. This little girl woman of his made him think a great deal.

Augusta had brought him home that other morning, out of the park, and sent him to bed. Then she had gone rapidly and ruthlessly to work as though she had been planning just what she was to do.

She saw the boarders of the house at breakfast and told them that she must close the house at once. Some of them had been friends and it pained her to give them any inconvenience. But she told them just why she was forced to do what she was doing. And, before she had finished, there was not one of them who would not have agreed to move his or her trunk out to the sidewalk on the instant, if it would help her.

Then she went to renting agents. And before another day she had sublet the house for the remainder of the term of her mother's lease.

The next part of her work was the worst. She had to bring into the house dirty, pock-marked men whose business it was to paw around with grimy hands and shake the furniture and try to bluff her into discouragement. But she had fixed upon a certain sum of cash money that she must have from the sale of the furniture. And from that determination she was not to be moved. One after another, Ann joyfully drove these men from the house, and Augusta waited.

The dealers had, of course, run around and seen each other and had agreed among themselves to force her to sell for very little cash. Her husband was sick. She had to go away with him. What could she do? It did not so much matter, they told each other, which of them got the furniture. That could be all fixed up. The thing was to protect the business, so that people shouldn't think that they ought to get new prices in cash for old stuff.

But finally Augusta's steady insistence on one price convinced one dealer that she would never sell for less. He talked with her over the phone. Then he came hurrying to the house, not because he wished to beat his brothers with whom he had agreed, but because he was afraid some one of them would beat him.

He offered Augusta half what she had demanded. Augusta did not argue. She called Ann to do her duty. The wordy battle raged down the stairs and out through the front hall to the door. On the doorstep, with Ann jamming the door on his foot where he had stuck it to prevent her shutting the door, he came to within ten dollars of the sum which Augusta had fixed. With another bang at his foot, Ann relented and let him come back to the foot of the stairs.

Augusta was standing at the head of the stairs. She did not feel any of the zest of battle which inspired Ann. Jimmie was worse that day than she had dreamed of his being. She was keeping him to his room and, as far as possible, hiding from him the things that were taking place in the house. She dreaded now to have him hear any of this argument, and she was sickened with the thought that the ten dollars over which they were haggling might some day be just the price of the difference between life and death for her Jimmie. Who could tell? The day might come when just for that ten dollars he might be denied the some one thing that would mean life for him. A wild, unknown anger flamed up in her and she took a step down the stairs, threatening in a tense, bitter voice:

"If you do not give me all, I will take everything out into the street and burn it."

The man took one look up into her flaming eyes, and--his hands dropped from the argument which they had been preparing. He turned quickly, grabbed a bill from his pocket and handed it over to Ann, to bind the contract.

Augusta left the two of them to quarrel out the details, for there were some things which she had stipulated that Ann must have. For herself she had reserved only some cooking things and plenty of blankets.

In the meantime she had accomplished the most ambitious part of the whole enterprise. She had bought a horse. She owned Donahue.

Back in her not distant school days Augusta had known Mary Donahue. Old Greenwich village, which nowadays harbors its thousands of intellectual gypsies and free riders of every shade and hobby, used to, and does still, furnish a winter home for a circle--they were not a tribe--of Irish gypsies. They did not form a community, nor did they travel the country in caravans. Each family went out by itself in the spring, through the northern part of the state, sold its own laces, told its own fortunes, swapped its own horses. But by what seemed an unspoken agreement they all returned late in the fall to the same neighborhood. With the instinct for places, which is strong in even the most unreliable of migratory birds, they came to refuge in the rickety jumbles of houses between Washington Square and West Fourteenth street, where one street blunders into another, and gets nowhere, and turns back, until, in desperation, West Fourth street crosses West Twelfth street and ties the whole business up in a knot.

Patrick Sarsfield Donahue was one of these gypsies, coming honestly and anciently into his way of living and having no intention of leaving it for any other. But Mary Donahue, his daughter, was untrue to the traditions of her kind in that she had insisted on going to school every day of the time they were in New York. Augusta had been interested in her. Augusta _would_ be.

Now Augusta went down across Fourteenth street to find Mary Donahue. If Mary Donahue could, and she did, manage, cook for, boss and generally hold together on the road, an enterprise that consisted of a father, six horses--more or less according to the balance of trade, four growing sisters, two wagons, two small healthy brothers, and uncounted, and wholly unaccountable, dogs; if Mary Donahue could manage this, and drive a team of horses, then Augusta could drive one horse and keep Jimmie out in the air and free from worry until he should be cured.

The idea was so simple and so much to her own liking that Augusta was almost ashamed to think of the fun she was going to have with it. And she hugged it jealously to herself so that Jimmie should not know until the wagon was at the door for him.

She knew how he would loathe and fret at the thought of going to any sort of a sanitarium or a resort. And she had a terrible dread that her money would not be enough for that. Now this way, once the horse and wagon were paid for, they would not need any money except for the things they actually ate, they and the horse. She was necessarily a little vague about the latter item. But Mary Donahue could give her the facts as an expert.

Mary Donahue, red haired, quick, a woman where Augusta was a child, understood and glowed with sympathy. But she could not entirely suppress the little smile of the professional at the ardent amateur. Mentally she gave them about three days to stay out on the road.

But then Augusta talked to her. And Mary Donahue came and saw the business-like way in which Augusta had dismantled the house. And she saw Jimmie. And Augusta talked to her more.

The result was that Patrick Donahue sold Augusta a gypsy horse and a gypsy wagon. And Mary Donahue drove the spectacle to Augusta's door one morning early and announced that she herself would pilot the expedition out of the perils of New York.

She drove the length of Broadway, until that thoroughfare became a country road well beyond the sacred, constable haunted terraces of Yonkers. All the while she discoursed valuable information and wise counsel. Augusta listened greedily, cramming mental notes until her head swam. Wardwell listened too, half asleep, lying most of the day in a bunk that stretched along the side of the wagon, not really believing that this thing was going on as it seemed to be, but not interested enough, and really too sick, to bother about a protest.

Before sun-down Mary Donahue helped them with their first camping and cooking. And Augusta, meekly submitting to the rulings of her mentor, was filled with the secret inner triumph of the dreamer who sees his dream come true under the last commonplace test of practicability. She could do it! Her plan would work!

Wardwell, standing around, easing the soreness out of his joints, and sniffing with water in his mouth at the cooking meat--. He had at this time an almost animal craving for red meat, and Augusta's diet would not allow it until night--Wardwell, too, knew with a sudden conviction that Augusta's plan was going to work.

By the time the busy gypsy girl had shown how to stow the things away for the night she had become so interested in the project that she began to feel a certain responsibility for it.

"What would you do," she asked, eyeing Augusta speculatively as the latter sat on a low stump with a red framing of low sumach bushes hanging about her shoulders, "what could you do if you lost your money on the road, or went broke, or--?"

"Oh, but," Augusta broke in quickly, "Jimmie's going to be all right in no time. And he'll be writing lots and lots. And since it won't cost us hardly anything to live, why we'll be getting rich--rich!"

She did not want the financial outcome of their venture discussed in Jimmie's hearing. She herself had no more thought or fear of the future than have the birds when they start to follow the spring into the north. But she knew that Jimmie's mind was raw on just this, and she wanted it plain that he was the man and the provider.

"Of course," said Mary Donahue, not listening. "But--with eyes like yours"--she was studying Augusta out loud--"and with the look that comes in them at times--why, it'd be a shame not to--" She wheeled quickly and jumped up into the wagon.

She came back with a bundle which she dropped on Augusta's lap. Out of it she shook a long flaming red veil which she wound quickly and bewilderingly around Augusta's head and shoulders.

Wardwell looked on, a benign and philosophical spectator. It seemed that the gypsy girl had packed the wagon. Jimmie was wondering mildly if she had, perhaps, packed in a witch's cauldron, and a package or two of forked lightning, and a few snail's teeth. If so, he would look forward to an interesting summer.

"Your hair's all wrong for a fortune teller, of course," Mary Donahue admitted. "But that don't make any difference--mine's worse, and I can make as much as the best of them. If it does you no good, it'll do you no harm," she grumbled as she felt Augusta's rising resistance.

"You don't have to keep the money, you know. But always make them pay some money, anyway. Do you hear? Never tell a fortune without money to pay."

She gave Augusta no time to answer but dove at the bundle again, unfolding a red board and breaking out on it a pack of cards.

"You are a 'heart' woman," she said, continuing aloud her study of Augusta. "You are almost too light now, but you'll get darker, and you're married; that makes a difference."

She laid the cards at Augusta's hand, commanding:

"With your left hand, cut three piles towards your heart."

Augusta gingerly lifted the cards as she was told. She was just a little frightened, but she would not protest or let Jimmie see that she felt it to be anything more than a joke.

The gypsy gravely inspected the cards, top and bottom, of the three piles, and said nothing. Then she put them together and began dealing out from top and bottom into eight piles, a single card to each pile as she went.

"To your house"--she named the piles as she laid down each card--"to yourself--to the one you love best--what you do expect--what you do not expect--sure to come true--this night--your wish."

When she had dealt out all the cards in this way, she turned up the first pile and began to read:

"_To your house_: there is love and good times, lots of fun making. You'll both still be laughing and taking fun out of it no matter what comes. It is all good, good!" She was kneeling at Augusta's side now. There was none of the air of mystery of the professional card reader. She had forgotten that she was giving Augusta a lesson. She was poring eagerly over the cards reading them swiftly as they came up to her, with all of a child's abandon in a game.

"_To yourself_: there is shortness of money. You will be worried about money, not right away, maybe, but some time before very long. And a horse, a horse will be in a part of the worry.

"_To the one you love best_: a dark--!" She stopped and turned about with a swift, tigerish twist of her lithe body. Wardwell, who had been gangling about, amused, and yet feeling somewhat left out of the picture, suddenly found himself pierced by the angriest pair of blue eyes he had ever seen. He did not know what it was about. But from the look the girl gave him he would not have been surprised if she had leapt upon him and buried claws in him.

"What--what is it?" Augusta asked wonderingly.

"Nothing," said the gypsy girl shortly. And she turned back to the cards.

"_What you do expect_: there is sickness and long journeying, and black and white all mixed together.

"_What you do not expect_: deceit. Deceit will break your life." Again the girl turned sharply to eye Wardwell. Evidently he stood the scrutiny well, for she turned back and said quite gently: