The Art of Disappearing Part 8

"What a people to attempt this miracle," said Arthur.

"Now you have said it," cried the priest proudly. "The poor people to whom you now belong, moved by the spirit which raised the great shrines of Europe, are building out of their poverty and their faith the first really great temple on this continent. The country waited for them. This temple will express more than a desire to have protection from bad weather, and to cover the preacher's pulpit. Here you will have in stone faith, hope, love, sacrifice. What blessings it will pour out upon the city, and upon the people who built it. For them it will be a great glory many centuries perhaps."

"I shall have my share in the work," Arthur said with feeling. "I feel that I am here to stay, and I shall be a stranger to no work in which my friends are engaged. I'll not let the mysteries trouble me. I begin to see what you are, and a little of what you mean. Command me, for no other in this world to-day has any right to command me--none with a right like yours, father and friend."

"Thanks and amen, Arthur. Having no claim upon you we shall be all the more grateful. But in good time. For the present look to yourself, closely, mind; and draw upon me, upon Louis, upon your mother, they have the warmest hearts, for sympathy and consolation."

Not long before and Arthur Dillon would have received with the polite indifference of proud and prosperous youth this generous offer of sympathy and love; but now it shook him to the center, for he had learned, at what a fearful price! how precious, how necessary, how rare is the jewel of human love.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WEARIN' O' THE GREEN.

By degrees the effervescence of little Ireland, in which strange land his fortune had been cast, began to steal into his blood. Mirth ruled the East side, working in each soul according to his limitations. It was a wink, a smile, a drink, a pa.s.sing gossoon, a sly girl, a light trick, among the unspoken things; or a biting epigram, the phrase felicitous, a story gilt with humor, a witticism swift and fatal as lightning; in addition varied activity, a dance informal, a ceremonious ball, a party, a wake, a political meeting, the visit of the district leader; and with all, as Judy expressed it, "las.h.i.+ns an' lavins, an' divil a thought of to-morrow." Indeed this gay clan kept Yesterday so deeply and tenderly in mind that To-day's house had no room for the uncertain morrow. He abandoned himself to the spirit of the place. The demon of reckless fun caught him by the heels and sharpened his tongue, so that his wit and his dancing became tonics for eyes and ears dusty with commonplace. His mother and his chum had to admonish him, and it was very sweet to get this sign of their love for him. Reproof from our beloved is sweeter than praise from an enemy.

They all watched over him as if he were heir to a throne. The Senator, busy with his approaching entrance into local politics, had already introduced him to the leaders, who formed a rather mixed circle of intelligence and power. He had met its kind before on the frontier, where the common denominator in politics was manhood, not blue blood, previous good character, wealth, nor the stamp of Harvard. A member held his place by virtue of courage, popularity, and ability. Arthur made no inquiries, but took everything as it came. All was novelty, all surprise, and to his decorous and orderly disposition, all ferment. The clan seemed to him to be rus.h.i.+ng onward like a torrent night and day, from the dance to the ward-meeting, from business to church, interested and yet careless. The Senator informed him with pride that his debut would take place at the banquet on St. Patrick's Day, when he should make a speech.

"Do you think you can do it, me boy?" said the Senator. "If you think you can, why you can."

"I know I can," said the reckless Dillon, who had never made a speech in his life.

"An' lemme give you a subject," said Judy. They were all together in the sitting-room, where the Senator had surprised them in a game of cards.

"Give a bastin' to Mare Livingstone," said Judy seriously. "I read in the _Sun_ how he won't inspect the parade on St. Patrick's Day, nor let the green flag fly on the city hall. There must be an Orange dhrop in his blood, for no dacint Yankee 'ud have anny hathred for the blessed green. Sure two years ago Mare Jones dressed himself up in a lovely green uniform, like an Irish prince, an' lukked at the parade from a platform. It brought the tears to me eyes, he lukked so lovely. They ought to have kep' him Mare for the rest of his life. An' for Mare Livingstone, may never a blade o' gra.s.s or a green leaf grow on his grave."

The Senator beamed with secret pleasure, while the others began to talk together with a bitterness beyond Arthur's comprehension.

"He ought to have kept his feelings to himself," said quiet Anne. "If he didn't like the green, there was no need of insultin' us."

"And that wasn't the worst," Louis hotly added. "He gave a talk to the papers the next day, and told how many Irish paupers were in the poorhouse, and said how there must be an end to favoring the Irish."

"I saw that too," said Judy, "an' I sez to meself, sez I, he's wan o'

the snakes St. Pathrick dhruv out of Ireland."

"No need for surprise," Mona remarked, studying her cards, "for the man has only one thought: to keep the Irish in the gutter. Do you suppose I would have been a teacher to-day if he could have kept me out of it, with all his pretended friends.h.i.+p for papa."

"If you baste the Mayor like this now, there won't be much left for me to do at the banquet," said Arthur with a laugh for their fierceness.

"Ay, there it is," said Judy. "Yez young Americans have no love for the green, except for the fun yez get out of it; barrin' dacint Louis here, who read the history of Ireland whin he was tin years old, an' niver got over it. Oh, yez may laugh away! Ye are all for the red, white, an'

blue, till the Mare belts yez wid the red, white, an' blue, for he says he does everythin' in honor o' thim colors, though I don't see how it honors thim to insult the green. He may be a Livingshtone in name, but he's a dead wan for me."

The Senator grew more cheerful as this talk grew warmer, and then, seeing Arthur's wonderment, he made an explanation.

"Livingstone is a good fellow, but he's not a politician, Artie. He thinks he can ru--manage the affairs of this vil--metropolis without the Irish and especially without the Catholics. Oh, he's death on them, except as boot-blacks, cooks, and ditch-diggers. He'd let them ru--manage all the saloons. He's as mad--as indignant as a hornet that he could not boo--get rid of them entirely during his term of office, and he had to speak out his feelings or bu--die. And he has put his foot in it artistically. He has challenged the Irish and their friends, and he goes out of office forever next fall. No party wants a man that lets go of his mouth at critical moments. It might be a neat thing for you to touch him up in your speech at the banquet."

The Senator spoke with unctuousness and delight, and Arthur saw that the politicians rejoiced at the loquacity and bad temper of the Honorable Quincy Livingstone, whom the Endicotts included among their distant relatives.

"I'll take your subject, Judy," said he.

"Then rade up the histhory of Ireland," replied the old lady flattered.

Close observation of the present proved more interesting and amusing than the study of the past. Quincy Livingstone's strictures on the exiles of Erin stirred them to the depths, and his refusal to float the green flag from the city hall brought a blossoming of green ribbon on St. Patrick's Day which only Spring could surpa.s.s in her decorations of the hills. The merchants blessed the sour spirit which had provoked this display to the benefit of their treasuries. The hard streets seemed to be sprouting as the crowds moved about, and even the steps and corridors of the mayor's office glistened with the proscribed color. The cathedral on Mott Street was the center of attraction, and a regiment which had done duty in the late war the center of interest. Arthur wondered at the enthusiasm of the crowd as the veterans carrying their torn battle-flags marched down the street and under the arched entrance of the church to take their places for the solemn Ma.s.s. All eyes grew moist, and sobs burst forth at sight of them.

"If they were only marching for Ireland!" one man cried hoa.r.s.ely.

"They'll do it yet," said another more hopeful.

Within the cathedral a mult.i.tude sat in order, reverently quiet, but charged with emotion. With burning eyes they watched the soldiers in front and the priests in the sanctuary, and some beat their b.r.e.a.s.t.s in pain, or writhed with sudden stress of feeling. Arthur felt thrilled by the power of an emotion but vaguely understood. These exiles were living over in this moment the scenes which had attended their expulsion from home and country, as he often repeated the horrid scenes of his own tragedy. Under the reverence and decorum due to the temple hearts were bursting with pa.s.sion and grief. In a little while resignation would bring them relief and peace.

It was like enchantment for Arthur Dillon. He knew the vested priest for his faithful friend; but on the altar, in his mystic robes, uplifted, holding the reverent gaze of these thousands, in an atmosphere clouded by incense and vocal with pathetic harmonies, the priest seemed as far away as heaven; he knew in his strength and his weakness the boy beside him, but this enwrapped att.i.tude, this eloquent, still, unconscious face, which spoke of thoughts and feelings familiar only to the eye of G.o.d, seemed to lift Louis into another sphere; he knew the people kneeling about, the headlong, improvident, roystering crowd, but knew them not in this outpouring of deeper emotions than spring from the daily chase for bread and pleasure.

A single incident fixed this scene in his mind and heart forever. Just in front of him sat a young woman with her father, whom she covertly watched with some anxiety. He was a man of big frame and wasted body, too nervous to remain quiet a moment, and deeply moved by the pageant, for he twisted his hands and beat his breast as if in anguish. Once she touched his arm caressingly. And the face which he turned towards her was stained with the unwiped tears; but when he stood up at the close of the Ma.s.s to see the regiment march down the grand aisle, his pale face showed so bitter an agony that Arthur recalled with horror his own sufferings. The young woman clung to her father until the last soldier had pa.s.sed, and the man had sunk into his seat with a half-uttered groan. No one noticed them, and Arthur as he left with the ladies saw her patting the father's hand and whispering to him softly.

Outside the cathedral a joyous uproar attended the beginning of that parade which the Mayor had declined to review. As his party was to enjoy it at some point of Fifth Avenue he did not tarry to witness the surprising scenes about the church, but with Louis took a car uptown.

Everywhere they heard hearty denunciations of the Mayor. At one street, their car being detained by the pa.s.sing of a single division of the parade, the pa.s.sengers crowded about the front door and the driver, and an anxious traveler asked the cause of the delay, and the probable length of it. The driver looked at him curiously.

"About five minutes," he said. "Don't you know who's paradin' to-day?"

"No."

"See the green plumes an' ribbons?"

"I do," vacantly.

"Know what day o' the month it is?"

"March seventeenth, of course."

"Live near New York?"

"About twenty miles out."

"Gee whiz!" exclaimed the driver with a gasp. "I've bin a-drivin' o'

this car for twenty years, an' I never met anythin' quite so innercent.

Well, it's St. Patrick's Day, an' them's the wild Irish."

The traveler seemed but little enlightened. An emphatic man in black, with a mouth so wide that its opening suggested the wonderful, seized the hand of the innocent and shook it cordially.

"I'm glad to meet one uncontaminated American citizen in this city," he said. "I hope there are millions like you in the land."

The uncontaminated looked puzzled, and might have spoken but for a violent interruption. A man had entered the car with an orange ribbon in his b.u.t.tonhole.

"You'll have to take that off," said the conductor in alarm, pointing to the ribbon, "or leave the car."