His answering look was full of reproach. At least his face was frank and open for any man to read, the emotions chasing each other across it like ripples of wind on a mountain lake. There was something attractive, too, about the youth and vitality and daring of his make-up.
“Faith, that’s not yerself, sor. Did I not tell ye there was the look of the seeker about ye? There’s lines of pain an’ fear an’ anxious nights and days in yer face, sor, an’ that’s God’s truth, beggin’ yer pardon, sor. I saw that at once. An’ I’d like foine to hilp ye to yer desire, the way we would be worrkin’ together on it. If there’s a bit of excitement about it, so much the better, sor. Have ye a ‘man’ already?”
“You know who I am, then,” I told him sharply; “that is evident.”
“I do not, sor,” he answered, triumph in his voice. “But I’m right then, sor?”
“Yes, you’re right,” I answered wearily. “Well—you’d better come home with me now and we’ll talk over what’s to be done with you.” I started the car again and so drove home with him.
I put the car away and then took him up to my study, set him down and fell to cross-examining him on his past life, with a view to getting a better line on the man himself from his way of answering. Some mix-up over a colleen had sent him out of Ireland as a boy and he had drifted to New York, that Mecca of the Irish. He told me frankly that his father had argued and occasionally beaten into him the conviction that the world owed him a living and a good one. In New York he had tried common labor, odd jobs and work as a shipping clerk, but had found no good living at any of them. So he had drifted into bad company and a manner of life that promised an easy existence, plenty of pickings, and above all, the excitement that his soul craved. The pickings had not been all he had hoped, it seemed. But there had certainly been plenty of excitement.
“So,” I told him calmly, “I’m to take you on here and install you, so that you can clean the place out in my absence, without even the trouble of breaking in!”
The hurt, resentful look on his face was enough to convince me. But he turned away and started for the door, his cap in his hand. “Faith, sor,” he answered quietly, “I took ye for a man of more—sinse, beggin’ yer pardon, sor. I’ll just be goin’, unless ye’d like to give me up still?”
“Come back here and turn out your pockets.”
He came slowly back to the table, a glint in his eye and rebellion latent in every line of him. I took a quick step forward. “On the table,” I told him quietly.