He started to jerk his arm free, and glanced down with some impatience; but the sight of what rested there made him pause. So that was the monster he had dreamed was holding him fast! He had forgotten the child for the moment, forgotten, too, the part he was playing; then everything came back with a rush as he gazed at her peaceful little face.
“Sure, ’tis no shtiffness at all, at all,” he muttered. “What’s the weight av a feather fer a man to complain av? ’Tis like the touch av an angel’s wing, so it is, an’ proud I am to fale it,—proud an’ plazed. Lie shtill, Cushla machree, lie shtill.”
But she had been partially aroused by his attempt to ease himself, and very obligingly changed her position, cuddling down on the seat. He helped to fix her anew, murmuring fond little phrases, and as her eyelids fluttered open he bade her go to sleep again. She obeyed without question; the air made her very drowsy, and the steady forward motion of the sleigh was like the lulling of a cradle. He began to sing again almost immediately, though in a subdued key, and still about “Kelly’s Cat.” But he took scant pleasure in the song; half of its fun lay in hearing the laughter it always evoked, and he missed her silvery merriment. To sing a comic song just for one’s own amusement is rather dreary work, after all. Everything is better when it is shared; a laugh is always jollier, and even the heaviest sorrow will grow lighter at a true word of sympathy.
He did not complete the history of the celebrated combat, therefore, but after a few lines brought it to a close and began something else. Then, before he knew it, a song that had lived in the background of his memory for many years found its way, for the little child’s sake, to his lips. Curiously enough it didn’t seem to him that he was singing it, for through the words he could hear his mother’s worn voice carrying the tune forward, and his own voice, the best in all the country round for trolling out a drinking catch or some fantastic rigamarole set to music, grew so tender that the roisterers at Wistar’s, or up at Merle, would never have recognized it. But if they could have heard him they wouldn’t have laughed; the song would have been like a little key unlocking the gates of childhood; even if the words had been unfamiliar to them the sweet sounds would have taken them back.
After he had finished singing he sat very still, one hand holding the reins, the other resting gently on the warm little bundle at his side; but his thoughts were far back in that distant past where, because of his light heart, he only dwelt on the golden spots—and his nature had made many such. Then he began to build some castles in that dear, impossible, ever-true country where one may rear the most beautiful houses and have them ready to be lived in in the wink of an eye; where there are never any vexing questions of rent, or taxes, and one doesn’t have to bother about gas, or electricity (such a wonderful lighting system as they have there, by the way!), and there are never any repairs to be made. Perhaps a prosaically minded architect would never have called Terry’s dream-house a castle, but such sober matter-of-factness is not to be envied. Very much happier are the people who live in the clouds at times, though they do have many a tumble to earth, than the ones who never see things through the rose-colored glasses of fancy, but plod along in the dull light of a common grayness.
Terry belonged to the first kind, and because his mind was still full of the nonsense he had uttered to his companion he began to build a beautiful palace where the dreams of little children could come true. On every side he could see their wishes written plainly, sometimes in copy-book writing, sometimes in big print, and sometimes again in those funny, wavering uphill lines that Santa Claus never fails to read. And everywhere he could hear merry laughter and shouts, and the sounds of scrambling, racing feet. It was a beautiful palace! He chuckled to himself, seeing it so distinctly, and then, suddenly—very suddenly—just in front of him, a trifle at one side of the road, stood a small, square house of the sort that your eminently practical, no-thought-of-beauty contractor would build. Terry’s hand, reins and all, went up to his eyes to clear the mist from before them. Impossible! He knew the country as well as Danny and Whitefoot, and he knew, too, that no such house stood there; the shantymen’s hut, the only human habitation for miles, was still some distance off. He looked again sharply, convinced that in the darkening land some snow-covered tree had taken on the likeness to a building. And he was quite right—there was no house.
The bells smote the air sullenly and soberly as the horses started once more on their patient, even course; they did not merit the sharp flap of the reins on their backs,—they were doing their best. Terry tried to go on with his dreams, but the thread of fancy once broken is hard to recover; he caught bravely at it—and there stood the house again, square, squat, unpicturesque, with the low stable at one side connected by the covered way, as is the custom in cold countries. He rubbed his eyes, and it was gone again—they had driven right through it! He laughed, but not gayly. Two parts of him seemed to be dreaming—the one that built a castle for little children, the other that thought of solemn, elderly folk. He began to sing:
“Now Mrs. McGrath to the Sargint said,
‘Sure I’d like me son to be a corpril made,
Wid a foine rid coat an’ a goold laced hat—
Och Tiddy me b’y, wuddent you like that?
Musha ti ral la—’”
It was no use! The house was quite near him again, with its chimney breathing out a soft little line of smoke, and its tin roof dull in the level light—the roof that had flashed like a reproving eye hours earlier. And then he knew! He turned and looked back fearfully. As far as he could see there was no sign of life; before him it was the same tale—even the house his fancy had conjured up had vanished. It was very still save for the bells on his horses, and they were not clinking merrily just then, only giving out a monotonous jog-trot sound that did not deafen him to the faint voice crying very far away: “Dear my little own, where are you?” He shivered among his furs, still looking back, and sobbingly the words came again: “Dear my little own, where are you?”
Danny and Whitefoot pawed the snow uneasily. Merle was still distant, and they were anxious to be at rest; they even determined to pull more steadily, more swiftly; they had been saving their best wind for that, but the hand on the reins kept them still.