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Fogarty's best bacon, which the holy man had concealed in the folds of that sacred vestment, to elude the predatory instincts of the women, and from which he and Mr. Mahony were wont to cut their jovial rashers. The shutter of poor Mahony's window was by this time open, and the gray light disclosed the grimly form of Father Roach, in his surplice, floating threateningly into the chamber.
There were no dangers that the sea could unfold which this silent surfman had not met and conquered, and would again. Every fisherman on the coast knew Fogarty's pluck and skill, and many of them owed their lives to him. To-night, before this invisible power slowly closing about his child he was as powerless as a skiff without oars caught in the swirl of a Barnegat tide.
They needed considerable hitching up and pinning, for they were as minus of buttons as all the garments seemed to be which had to pass through Mary Fogarty's hands and washtub; but a few strings would help and maybe Timothy Dowd could supply those; and if once Take-a-Stitch could get her fingers upon a needle and thread my, how she would alter everything!
But the suggestion of a frown flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once been "stage-struck" how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty's case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where was Julia or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself?
"Now, what's these young people been doin' that makes ye so almighty narvous?" he continued, lying back in his chair and looking at her from under his bushy eyebrows, his fingers supporting his forehead. "Everything. Goes out sailin' with her and goes driftin' past with his head in her lap. Fogarty's man who brings fish to the house told me." She had regained something of her old composure now.
She never let him know it, but it pained her all the same. "I would like to, but I cannot." All his heart was in his eyes as he spoke. "Someone ill?" she asked. "Yes, Fogarty's child. The little fellow may develop croup before morning. I saw him to-day, and his pulse was not right, he's a sturdy little chap with a thick neck, and that kind always suffers most.
A woman was passing along the edge of the bluffs, carrying a basket in one hand and a green umbrella in the other; a tall, thin, angular woman, with the eye of a ferret. It was Ann Gossaway's day for visiting the sick, and she had just left Fogarty's cabin, where little Tod, with his throat tied up in red flannel, had tried on her mitts and played with her spectacles.
An' you could hear a pin drop, an' in a minute you couldn't, along of them questions an' answers, firing around, from one person to another, hit-or-miss-like, an' all talkin' to onct, or sayin' never a word, any one. An' so this is the trouble, Mary Fogarty, that Dennis wouldn't mention. The Angel is their own child, and Dennis Fogarty's the clever chap suspicioned it himself." "Huh!
She had not understood a word of Miss Gossaway's outburst. "Why, yesterday afternoon, of course didn't I tell ye so? I'd been down to Fogarty's; it's my week. Miss Jane and Bart didn't see me didn't want to. Might a' been a pair of scissors, they was that close together." "Miss Jane warn't on the beach yesterday afternoon," said Martha in a positive tone, still in the dark.
"Come, old girl," he said; "I'm sorry, but it can't be helped," and springing into the gig, he walked the mare clear of the gravel beyond the gate, so as not to rouse his mother, touched her lightly with the whip, and sent her spinning along the road on the way to Fogarty's.
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