The quiet choir-master stared at him. "Oh, come, come!" he smiled.
Fairfax thrust his cane under his arm, drew off his glove, and held out his hand, looking into the other man's eyes. The musician's hand closed over Fairfax's.
"My dear young fellow," he said gravely, "you are a terrible loss to art. You would make your way in the musical world."
Fairfax laughed outright, and the choir-master watched him as others did as he limped away, his broad, fine back, his straight figure, and Fairfax's voice swelling out in the processional came to the musician's mind.
"There is a mystery about that chap," he thought. "He is a gentleman. The Bishop would be interested."
By contrast Sundays were delightful to Antony. Amusements possible to a workingman with the tastes of a gentleman were difficult to obtain. Church in the morning, a lazy stroll through the town, an excellent dinner at the Delavan House, set Fairfax up for the week.
The coloured waiter thought his new patron was a Southerner, and suspected him of being a millionaire.
"Yass, sar, Mr. Kunnell Fairfax, sar."
Antony, in a moment of heart hunger for the South, had told George Washington his name. George Washington kept the same place for him every Sunday, and polished the stone china plates till they glistened, displayed for Antony all his dazzling teeth, bowed himself double, his napkin under his arm, and addressed Antony as "Kunnell"; and Antony over his dessert laughed in his sleeve (he took great pains to keep his hands out of sight). After luncheon he smoked and read the papers in the lobby, lounged about, wrote a Sunday letter to his mother, and then loitered about through old Albany. On Sunday afternoons when it was fine, he would choose School Street and the Cathedral close, and now, under the falling of the yellow leaves there was a beauty in the day's end that thrilled him hour by hour. He made these pilgrimages to keep himself from thinking, from dreaming, from suffering; to keep his hands from pencil and design; to keep his artist soul from crying out aloud; to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he had no means to give. Sometimes, however,—sometimes, when the stimulus of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George Washington's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.
Taking advantage of his lassitude, like peris whose wings had been folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would nearly sink under the beating of their wings—under their voluptuous appeal, under their imperious demand.