Old David was elated. "I tell ye, I never see anything like what he's got up there," he cried. "There's butterfly wings all sparklin' with jewels, and mosquito legs—"
Rachel taking his arm, guided him toward a car. Not an allusion to the real object of the call fell from the old man's lips. All memory of their purpose had apparently escaped him on the instant of his introduction into that sphere of ideal beauties. His face shone like a child's. Looking at him Rachel smiled a little sadly. How absolutely irresponsible he was, and how she had erred when she had withdrawn him from the simple duties which had acted as an anchor for his fantastic mind. Yet was not that which he expressed the highest poetry? The essence of an abstract delight was in him and shone through him, transforming his aged frame as an elixir transforms the delicate goblet that contains it. His eyes blazed, his lips were wreathed in smiles, and suddenly he no longer seemed to her an old man entering the drear regions of second childhood, but a seer, a bard, a singing poet, chanting a chant of Beauty, which is immortal. And because she was spirit of his spirit as well as flesh of his flesh, she nestled to him; and, seated side by side, they were conveyed rapidly through the city which resounded with the unparalleled bustle and confusion that precedes the subsidence and comparative silence of the night.
When they descended from the elevated station and turned into the "Street of Masts," as old David termed the alley in which they lived, he paused, "Jest—look a there!" he said, and extended a finger.
The sun shone on the muddy pools beside the road and into the inexpressibly weary eyes of horses. It glinted on the hair of the ragged children swarming in the doorways and put an added blush on the cheeks of apples swinging by the stems at the doors of tiny fruit shops and on stands. It made the outlines of factory stacks indistinct, enveloped in a haze. The sun, shining through streaks and trails and plumes of smoke, made the city appear to be waving flags of glory—the glory of a dream.
"And the ships—let's go and see what they've brought in," whispered the old man, and, in a kind of awe, the two approached the wharf where were ranged those patient, graceful visitors from foreign ports.
Their masts towering against the sky, the ships suggested a fantastic forest, or a chimerical orchard, for the undulations of the water imparted to them a gentle motion, so that they seemed to be in the act of shedding their gracious and varied fruits on the wharf. There were skins of mountain goats from Switzerland, and elephant tusks from Egypt; there was oil golden with the sunlight of Italy and there were winecasks bursting with the purple sweetness of her vineyards. There were bales of textile fabrics from China, there were strange-leaved plants, with their roots bound tightly in canvas, from the isles of Bermuda. It seemed to Rachel that all these fruits from every land and clime were treasures poured bounteously into the lap of a mystical city; and the last vestige of that fear, so foreign to her nature and so little to be harboured there in all the coming years, vanished from her heart. Were they not, she asked herself, in the land of fulfilment, in the city of realized dreams?
CHAPTER II
EMILY SHORT—TOY-MAKER
When the bells of St. Joseph trembled into motion, Emily Short opened her eyes; when those inverted cups of bronze began to move faster, flinging their summons over the roofs, tossing it in at open windows, emptying it into narrow courts, she arose. When the parish father, still half asleep, donned his robes and straightened his stole, she put the last pin in her collar and tied on her apron. When he began to say mass, she began to hum a tune; and as the high-sounding Latin escaped through the trefoiled windows, her artless warble escaped through the attic casement, and together the two strains, the one from the heart of the Church and the other from the heart of a woman, ascended straight to the throne of the good God and who shall say they were not equally acceptable?
Outwardly Emily was no friend of the church. Its frequent services, she declared, were disturbing, and a room on the other side of the house with a view of the ships and the wharfage would have been a deal more to her mind. However, it was noticeable that whenever one of these rooms fell vacant she held her peace and abode in her attic as tightly as a limpet in its shell when danger is toward. It must be confessed that she clung to the church very much as a limpet clings to its chosen rock. For forty years she had lived close to the church, for forty years been keenly alive to its spirit of consolation. Though unencumbered with a creed, Emily was a staunch reformer and the church represented a strong ally.