That happy Joe, who had no pride and was quite as satisfied without a seat to his small trousers as with one! Then he told me how hard it was for Lawrence to learn; how he had to grind and grind at the simplest lesson, but once having acquired it, it was his for life.
"Why, even now," said he, "in confidence I'm telling you, my brother is studying like a little child at French, and it does seem that he cannot learn it. He works so desperately over it, a doctor has warned him he must choose between French and his many 'parts' or break down from overwork. But he will go on hammering at his parlez-vous until he learns them or dies trying."
"If you were to live with your brother, might not that help to keep you strong?" I asked.
"Now, my dear little woman," he smiled, "Larry is human, in some respects, if he is almost God-like toward me. Remember he has a young family now, and though his wife is as good as gold and always patient with me, I am not the kind of example a man would care to place before his little ones, and as Lawrence is devoured with ambition for them and their future, he rightly guards them from too close contact with the drag and curse of his own life, in whom he, and he alone, can see the sturdy tow-headed brother of the old boyish days, who saved him from many and many a kick and thump his delicate body could ill have borne."
Joe told me of his dead wife—Viola Crocker that was—the niece of Mrs. Bowers and Mrs. Conway; of their happiness and their misery. Describing himself as having been "in heaven or in hell—without any betwixts and betweens." His devotion to me was very great. He was "hard-up" for money, as the men express it, but he would manage to bring me a single rose or one bunch of grapes or a half-dozen mushrooms or some such small offering every day; and learning of his bitter mortification because he could not hire a carriage to take me out to see the curious old French cemetery, I made him supremely happy by expressing a desire to ride in one of those funny bob-tailed, mule-drawn street-cars—the result being a trip by my mother, Mr. Barrett, and myself to the famous cemetery.
I don't know that I ever heard anyone sing Irish and Scottish ballads more tenderly, more pathetically than did Joe Barrett, and as my mother was very fond of old songs, he used to sit and sing one after another for her. That day there was no one in the crawling little car but we three, and presently he began to sing. But, oh, what was it that he sang? Irish, unmistakably—a lament, rising toward its close into the keen of some clan. It wrung the very heart.
"Don't!" I exclaimed. My mother's face was turned away, my throat ached, even Joe's eyes had filled. "What is it?" I asked.
"I don't know its name," he answered, "I have always put it on programmes as 'A Lament.' I learned it from an Irish emigrant-lad, who was from the North, and who was dying fast from consumption and home-hunger. Is not that wail chilling? As he gave the song it seemed like a message from the dying."
At the end of our stroll among the flowers and trees and past those strange stone structures that look so like serious-minded bake-ovens, having to wait for a car, we sat on a stone bench, and in that quiet city of the dead Joe's voice rose, tenderly reverent, in that simple air that was yet an anguish of longing, followed by a wail for the dead.
My mother wept silently. I said, softly: "It's a plaint and a farewell," and Joe brought his eyes back from the great cross, blackly silhouetted against the flaming sky, and slowly said: "Beloved among women, it is a message—a message from the dying or the dead, believe that."