Kenny

CHAPTER VIII

JOAN

Thus, warm and fragrant, the summer came with Kenny in the house of Adam Craig, drifting pleasantly he knew and cared not where; with Brian on the road with Donald West.

And Joan? To her summer came with a new incomprehensible delight. Out of the void a bright spirit had roved into her world, sweeping her, eager and unresistant, into youth and life and laughter. He came from an immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid face.

She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving, this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.

There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to the willow.

His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.

And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite delicacy of tact and feeling. He seemed to understand the instinct for beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother's trunks. He understood her dreams and her hunger. He understood the spirit that had led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be kept apart and precious. There was another force, subtle and exacting: the girl's burgeoning womanhood. Wistful for homage, she craved his gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him. His frank glance of admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute. So was his voice, deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell. Tones of it she knew were kept for her alone. The knowledge thrilled her. She did not know why.

By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the other like a rain of stars. Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high, peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and made her cry. Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too. A tear, he said, was always trailing an Irishman's smile. His sympathetic brogue, smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending fascination.

And always at the end of the day there was Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight stealing up the river all too soon.

Joan was not the only one to whom the sparkle of the irrepressible Irishman's wit and humor was an energizing boon. There was Hannah and Hetty; and Hughie, too, though he stoutly denied it. Life on the Craig farm was no longer dull.

Kenny, at a loose end, kept the farm in ferment, evading the work Garry had sent him, by a conscientious effort to assist others. He was glad he could paint if the mood seized him. Denied the opportunity he knew he would have fretted. There was one singular, inexplicable thing about work. If there was work at hand, one could always find something else to do, attractive and absorbing. If there wasn't work to do, the sheer shock of it seemed to dull you into mental vacuity and loose ends of time came up and hit you in the face. Garry had written something or other like that sarcastically in a letter.

He helped Hannah churn and sang with a soft brogue, to her abashed delight, a song he called "The Gurgling of the Churn." He helped Hetty milk the roan cow and sang while Hetty's apple-cheeks bloomed redder, an exquisite folk tune of a pretty girl who milked a cow in Ireland. Later in the summer he even helped Hughie rake the hay and had a song for that. As Hannah said, he seemed to have songs for everything and what he couldn't sing he could play with dazzling skill on the old piano.

"There's 'lectricity," said Hannah, "in the very air."

"I wished," grumbled Hughie, "he'd put it in the ground instid. The air don't need it. Workin' a farm like this on shares is like goin' to a picnic behind old Nellie and startin' late. You just know you won't git there. What ground up here ain't worked out is hills and stones and hollers."

Hannah sighed.

Kenny knew with regret that he might have been a helpful factor in the work of the farm but for a number of unforeseen reasons. When he churned the butter never came. The roan cow disliked music and kicked over the milk-pail with inartistic persistence. The sun on the hay made his head ache.

As for a picturesque task for which he had no song—well, he had promised Joan to keep away from the punt when the horn beneath the willow blew for a ferryman. He had sculled the old white-haired minister into a rock with delight to no one but Adam Craig, who had spent a whole evening cackling about it. He must always remember that it had not been his fault. The rock had merely scraped the punt while he was listening with politeness to why the old man had "doubled up" his charge and had a church on either side of the river. And if Mr. Abbott had not risen in gentle alarm and begun to teeter around, Kenny in an interval of frantic excitement would not have been forced to fish him out of the stream by his coattails. He considered always that he saved the old man's life. Nor had he meant to dab at him with the oar, thereby encouraging the unfortunate old chap to duck and misinterpret his obvious intention to save him.

But Joan had understood. That was the chief essential. Always Joan was there upon the horizon of his day. Whatever he thought, whatever he did, was colored by a passionate desire for the girl's approval. Her pleasure became his delight; her smile his inspiration. In that, he told himself, pleased to interpret all things here in the sylvan heart of solitude in the terms of romance and mystery, he was like the chivalrous warrior of old who found his true happiness in gallantly serving a beautiful maid. Joan was surely such a type as chivalry conceived. She filled his Celtic ideal and aroused all his gladness as a woman should. And she was as shy and beautiful as a wild flower and as unspoiled. He blessed the old gowns that quaintly framed her loveliness anew from day to day. But they had been his undoing. He felt that he might have kept his head a little longer but for the blaze of the gold brocade in the last light of the sun.

Laughter made her lovely. Ah, there Brian had been right. But then, he reflected sadly, Brian was always right. That, he could surely concede, when Fate had put an end to his quest and doomed him to linger here in the home of a miser, waiting, waiting, yes, waiting in impatience for word of his son. Well, perhaps he was not impatient, but at least he was waiting. And Brian had found in Joan's face the vigor of sweetness, not the kind that cloys. Kenny liked the words.

It was inevitable, with songs for everything, that he would have songs, like the tenderer tones of his voice, that he kept for Joan alone, songs that came softly to his lips when Nature stirred his fancy and Joan was at his side in an old-time gown.

A lone pine, a wild geranium, a lark or Joan's garden where the heliotrope grew; they were sparks to a fire of inspiration that came forth in song.

There was one song he sang most often.

"What is it, Kenny?" Joan asked one sunset when Kenny on the farm porch was finding the subtleties of color for her in the darkening valley below them and the western sky above the hills.

"What's what, Arbutus, dear?" he asked with guile.

The "dear" didn't bother her. It was frequently "Hannah, dear!" and "Hetty, dear!" and Hughie was often "Hughie, darlin'."

"Why," asked Joan, "do you call me Arbutus?"

"Because you're like one," he said gently.

"And what was the song?"

"'My Love's an Arbutus,'" said Kenny demurely. He knew at once that he must not step so far ahead again. She looked a little frightened. Kenny instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.

"Like the Devil's Bit in Ireland," he said. "There the devil, poor lad, bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well, treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit."

Joan laughed.

"True." said Kenny, "every word of it. I myself have seen the chunk he threw away. Tis the Rock of Cashel. He's been bitin' again over there, I take it. To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the unappetizin' rock he rejected and look it over."

"I think most likely," said Joan, "the farm's built on it."

And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.

Kenny as usual cursed the horn.

With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded. He had not meant to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued. She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all; yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious. Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp. If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.

Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight. For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn, yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a kitten or a child—and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a woman. She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.

He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light and buoyant as a feather.

Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to come and go as an oriole in the orchard; for that he was grateful. But whether Adam Craig's attitude was one of trust or cold indifference, he could not fathom. With Hughie and Hannah it was different. They loved Joan and trusted him. That trust, he resolved, should not be futile. He could justify it and he would. Joan, of course, was foredoomed to know the delirium of the heart that had come to him that day beneath the willow. Fate could not deny him requital. She never had. Equally, of course, Joan's delirium, like his own, would not last. It could not. The thought hurt his vanity a little.

It remained for him who had aroused it to linger here at the farm until the fancy had run its course and she was quite herself! Even if, long before, his own madness had waned. That was apt to happen, for he was handicapped by an earlier start. Yes, he would linger. And he would be scrupulous and honorable and kind. Joan was young and a woman. She would nurse the shadows of her summer's idyl long after the idyl was gone, and would mistake them for reality. There with his wider experience and the sad memory of much ebb and now he could be helpful.

Kenny shivered and refused to dwell upon a phase of life that was like autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart things to think back, not too far, and never forward.

"Kenny!" It was Joan's voice in the dusk.

Kenny forgot the sadness of his wisdom and foreboding. He forgot the future. The thing to do always was to live in the present and now Joan's voice, joyous and young, filled him with tenderness.

"Yes, Joan."

"The Gray Man of the Twilight's here. See, he's climbed up from the valley and he's coming down the walk."

From the Gray Man's misty robes came the fragrance of syringa.

CHAPTER IX

ADAM CRAIG

Joan, Kenny called his torment of delight in days that were exquisite intaglios. Adam Craig was a torment of another caliber. He claimed the evenings of his guest.

Kenny knew too well for his own peace of mind the pitiful diversions of the old man's day. It sapped his powers of resistance. In the morning there was the doctor, a weary little man, untemperamental and mercifully impervious to insult, who chugged up the lane in a car that needed but one twist of the crank to release a great many clattering things. All of them Kenny felt should be anchored more securely. There was an occasional hour in the open. At nightfall he sent for Kenny and by nine he was drunk.

Again and again, wrought to a high pitch of resentment by the traps the invalid baited with an air of courtesy, Kenny cursed his own weak-kneed spasms of pity and surrender and resolved to break away. Always when Hughie rapped at his bedroom door he remembered the melancholy drip of the blossom storm at Adam's windows, the invalid's hunger for news of the outside world and the Spartan way he bore his pain. Whatever the nature of the disease that had wasted his body and etched shadows of pain upon his subtle face, he never spoke of it. Nor did he speak of Donald or Joan, whom Kenny felt despairingly he hated and taunted into secret tears. If he resented the runaway's rebellion, he kept it to himself.

One evening when he seemed to be quiet and in pain, and was taking, Kenny noticed, the medicine that marked vague periods of crisis, Adam said pensively that he had not meant to impugn the Gaelic folk lore. He liked it. It reflected the warm, poetic soul of a people. Brandy, alas, always made him quarrelsome and undependable of mood. When the rain came again and he had to have a fire, they would have more tales of the Dark Rose Kenny loved. Ireland, the Dark Rose! The name was like her history. Yes, folk lore went with the crackle of a log and the mournful music of rain upon a roof. He could have his brandy later.

The rain came with its lonely patter and Kenny told him tales of Ireland, delighted at the sympathetic quiet of his mood. Unbrandied, the evenings, after all, might become endurable.

"You see," Adam said once a little sadly, "without the brandy—"

Kenny nodded his approval.

When the clock struck nine he was in splendid fettle, brogue and all.

"For Ireland's harpers," he was boasting with a reckless air of pride, "were better than any harpers in the world."

"Liars?" asked Adam blankly.

Kenny found his occasional pretense of deafness trying in the extreme.

"Harpers!" he repeated in a loud voice. "And you heard me before."

Adam nodded.

"What do you mean," demanded Kenny suspiciously, "that you did hear me or you didn't?"

"I did," said Adam suavely. "Both times. Go on with the story."

Somewhat nettled, Kenny obeyed. Conscious, the minute he began, of a muffled whistle, he glanced sharply at his host and found his glance returned with a guileless air of inquiry.

"Adam," he said, "are you whistling?"

"My dear Kenny!" protested Adam. "It's the wind. I hear it myself."

Somewhat suspicious, for he fancied now he read in the invalid's alertness a feline readiness to pounce, Kenny returned to the tale of the harper who proved the right of Ireland to lead the world. This time the insolent whistle, louder and a shade defiant, convinced him that his listener's mood had changed. Adam was resenting his guest's insistence upon the merits of his race by whistling "Yankee Doodle."

Kenny stopped and smiled, and the whistle rang out fiercely.

"A good old Irish tune, that, Adam," he said languidly. "It's 'All the way to Galway!' Funny how it came to be known as Yankee Doodle."

In a fury of exasperation Adam propelled himself in his wheel-chair the length of the room and back.

"You damned bragging Irishman!" he hissed. "I think you lie. You're Irish and you hate to be outdone. But I'll look it up."

His spirit was unconquerable, his ingenuity persistent and amazing. Often when the clash of wit was sharp he cackled in perverse delight. But composure maddened him. Again and again, inwardly provoked to the point of murder, Kenny threatened to break away from the goad of his tongue. Always then Adam appealed to his habits of pity and treacherously on the strength of it wheedled him into other tales of folk lore merely to refute them. And always he blamed the brandy. Kenny knew now that he lied. Drunk, the old man was stupid; sober, he was satanic in his cunning.

There was one tale of a fairy mill that, in startling circumstances, Kenny told without interruption. Fairies, in Ireland, said Kenny, had ground the corn of mortals without pay until someone stole a bag of meal that belonged to a widow. Then the fairies, shocked at the ways of men, abandoned the fairy mill forever.

He braced himself for the usual shaft of insolence, in a mood for battle. It did not come. Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious. Kenny rang for Hughie and stared at the huddled figure in the wheel-chair with eyes of new suspicion. Adam Craig, he remembered, with a sharp unbridled instinct for adding two and two, was a miser and he hated the children of his widowed sister. There could be a sinister reason.

CHAPTER X

A NOTEBOOK

It seemed that Adam too could add his two and two. In his quieter hours of pain, when every warmer instinct of his guest was uppermost, he was as curious as a woman. His questions, put with the sad, querulous courtesy of an invalid claiming privileges by reason of his pain, were sometimes difficult to answer.

"Paul Pry!" murmured Kenny to himself one night.

Adam's sharp eyes snapped.

"Paul Pry, eh?" he quivered. "You impudent devil!"

"A minute ago," reminded Kenny coldly, "when I told you you were drinking too much brandy, you said you were deaf to-night."

"It's an intermittent affliction," purred Adam with a chuckle. "You struck me in a minute of vacation."

But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and bore a startling aftermath of fruit.

Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much, unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between the lines, ready to pounce.

"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward, baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth. You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't. It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the most amazing liar I've ever met."

But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and slammed the door.

There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot content.

Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void and linked himself to Whitaker—to Brian, to Garry—and his barbs stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion.

Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of the other three.

Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment. The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought, lay at his feet pricked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections, intensely human and delightful. He passionately demanded that it accept him so without question. Good God! No one had seemed to question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about his ears.

Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he knew, to hold his head above it.

In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile interest.

"Sunsets and vanity," he wrote with a flourish and lost his temper. Well, that phase in Brian's life was closed forever, thanks to Whitaker's meddling tongue. Never again would Kenny lay himself open to misinterpretation by seeking commissions for his son. Brian could write truth for Whitaker with a blue pencil and be damned!

"Hairbrained, unquenchable youth," he wrote next and added airily after this: "This is likely hair and teeth."

"Irresponsible."

"Failure as a parent." This he underlined.

"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."

"Romantic attitude toward the truth."

"Improvidence. Need for plebeian regularity in money affairs and petty debt."

"Disorder—chairs to sit down on without looking first."

"I borrow Brian's money and his clothes."

"Pawned shotgun, tennis racket, some fishing tackle and golf clubs."

"Note: Look over tickets."

"A tendency to indolence."

He had begun with an air of bored amusement; he finished grimly, read and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker analysis, which dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he fancied with a lifting of his brows, be classified under three general headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic attitude toward the truth.

The envious charge of youth he attributed instantly to the thinning of John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic attitude toward the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which life would be insufferably dull.

He read the list again with colors flying and drum beating victory. Though singly he could refute each item, an unguarded perusal when he felt complacent, brought the hot blood back to his face in a rush of mortification and dismay.

With a curse he flung the book across the room. Then unreasonably he went after it and wrote at the end: "Life is a battle. I do not fight. And life is not an individual adventure."

The final sentence startled him most of all.

Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive, desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of self-content. It always bothered him. It had driven him to hunt the psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern. It had driven him out upon the road. Mocking voices rose now from the depths. Was it—could it all be true? The shock of the thought was cataclysmic and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had basked that night in Hannah's kitchen. Must the world side with Brian? He was sorry about the shotgun. He was sorry about the sunsets. By the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything, little as he felt himself to blame. Was he to blame? Had he not paid for it all in his days of stormy penance?

Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the dust. Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right. He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had passionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send him forth again in quest of Brian. And if there had been, Kenny faced the fact that he would not have gone. … No, he would not have gone. … And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in his heart that he had hoped to stifle.

He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted the front door and went out upon the porch.

The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the voice of the river.

The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.

In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its silver sheen of stars.

A ladder? Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still. It was a ladder. Some one was climbing down. Branch after branch the climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through the orchard to the south.

Kenny's heart throbbed with a ghastly fear.

It was Joan.

He knew what lay to the south beyond the orchard: woodlands and wildness, nothing else. The fields Hughie cultivated stretched to the north from the kitchen windows. There in the forest to the south where the river curved off at a tangent and flowed directly east, Brian had had his camp. On farther Joan had never cared to go. Where did she go now in the starlit darkness, climbing down the wistaria ladder with a cloak around her shoulders? To what did she venture through the solitude of whispering trees and the gloom of the pine forest?

A lover's tryst? Kenny sickened and choked. He could not follow her. He would not.

He turned back instead and went to bed to lie wakeful until dawn with something new and horrible gnawing at his heartstrings. Then he fell asleep and dreamed of monsters.

CHAPTER XI

THE CABIN IN THE PINES

He did not mean to go again. He did not mean to watch the wistaria vine. He went, he told himself wildly, to evade the summons that was sure to come from Adam Craig. But when the glimmer of wistaria swayed beneath a footfall, madness came upon him and he went stealthily through orchard and forest, stalking the flutter of a cloak.

The river turned. Joan followed the bend for a little way and struck off again into the thick of the forest through the cloistered gloom of many pines. She came, after what seemed to Kenny a long, long time, to a rude cabin made of logs. There was a light in the window. Joan opened the door and disappeared.

If he had known definitely what he thought, he told himself with an Irish twist, the agony of his suspense would have been worse and less. The sharp intensity of the pain in his heart terrified him. Whatever lay in the cabin of logs was something apart from him. The night noises of the forest blared strangely in his ears. He was conscious of the odor of pines; conscious of a shower of pine-needles when he brushed back against a tree. And there were cones beneath his feet. But his madness would not bear him on to the cabin door. At intervals with fire in his brain he knew he heard the voice of a man.

In a vague eternity of minutes he waited until the door opened and lamplight streamed brightly over the sill. A man stepped forth. Something seemed to snap in Kenny's heart. Relief roared in his ears and rushed unbidden to his lips.

"Oh, my God!" he gasped.

It was the gentle, white-haired minister with a book beneath his arm.

Startled the old man drew back and peered uncertainly into the darkness. Kenny approached.

"I—I beg your pardon," he said, wiping his forehead. "I'm sorry."

Joan came to the door and stared.

"Kenny!" she exclaimed. And her voice had in it a note of distress. She glanced at Mr. Abbott, who glanced in turn at Kenny with an air of gentle inquiry. His confidence in Mr. O'Neill, never very robust, had waned that day upon the river. It was weakening more and more.

Tongue-tied and scarlet, Kenny stared into the cabin. Its single room with its raftered walls, books and a lamp, an old-fashioned stove, a work-basket, a faded rag-carpet and the trophies of childhood, boy and girl, was snug and comfortable.

"It's Donald's and mine," said Joan. "We've always studied here with Mr. Abbott."

"Mr. O'Neill," said the minister stiffly, "it—it has been a sort of secret. Mr. Craig was strangely opposed to the tuition I offered years ago. Joan settled the problem for herself."

It was evident all of it had lain a little sorely on the old man's conscience. It had been a singular problem, deception or the welfare of the two children suffering at the hands of Adam Craig; and the need of choice had driven him to prayer.

Kenny, glad at last to find his tongue, warmly commended his decision.

Joan blew out the light and locked the door.

"How did you find the cabin, Kenny?" she asked wonderingly. "It's off so in the wilder part of the forest. No one comes this way."

Kenny told fluently of walking toward a star.

It was like him. Joan smiled.

But the faith in her eyes upset him. He wanted to be truthful. Ah! if only Fate would let him!

"And I startled you!" marveled Mr. Abbott.

"Yes," said Kenny.

He walked back through the silence of the pines with remorse in his heart, paying little heed to Mr. Abbott's talk of vacation. The wistaria ladder, the cloister of pines, the lonely cabin where Joan spent truant hours of peace, were to him things of infinite pathos. And like the day in the garret, yesterday seemed aeons back. He wondered why, conscious of a subtle, unforgettable sense of change in himself. Something mysteriously had altered.

The memory of the pain and horror in his heart, he dismissed with a frown. As Adam said, he never dwelt upon the things that failed to please him. The pain was past. The peace of the present lay in his heart. It had even crowded out the memory of Adam and the notebook.

He was glad when Mr. Abbott said good night and took a footpath to the west. Well, it had been a mystery this time that he hadn't wanted to keep. But why, Oh, why, he wondered a little sadly, must all his mysteries end in anticlimax? Absurd, the little man in his frock coat trotting out of the cabin door!

"Joan, Joan!" he pleaded. "Why didn't you tell me? Am I then not your friend?"

"I'm sorry, Kenny." She laid her hand wistfully upon his arm. "Mr. Abbott asked me not to tell you."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"You go there often?"

"Yes, at night. I sew there and read and study. To Donald and me it was always a little like a home. I used to patch his clothes there. He hated them so. You're not hurt?"

"Not—now."

"I'm glad."

At the wistaria ladder Kenny sighed.

"Must you?" he asked. "I mean, Joan, can't you steal in by the door?"

"It's better not," said Joan, one hand already on the vine. "Hughie would scold if he knew. For the wood is lonely. And he would talk so much of rain and snow. Now I can come and go as I please."

She caught her cloak up and fastened it to insure the freedom of both her hands.

"Good night, Kenny," she said shyly. "I hope you find your star."

"I did," said Kenny. "'Twas hiding in a cabin. Good night, dear."

CHAPTER XII

THRALDOM

Hughie met him at the door.

"He's been askin' for you, Mr. O'Neill," he said. "And he hasn't drank a drop all evening."

"I shan't go," said Kenny. "Depend upon it, Hughie, it's another trick."

"I don't know," said Hughie hopelessly. "It may be. It's not for me to deny, with all you take from him." Hughie looked ashamed of himself. "I—I'm sorry for him."

Kenny groaned and set his teeth.

"I think," said Hughie, "he wants to apologize. He wrote you a note this morning and tore it up. And when I put his brandy bottle on his chair to-night he flung it at my head."

"I'll go this once," said Kenny. "But, so help me Heaven, I'll never go again!"

He went dully up the stair, cursing the blossom storm. Its monotonous patter on the roof had inspired Adam Craig to his first plea of loneliness; it had left Kenny himself with a haunting memory of drab solitude, pain and melancholy that seeped with a dripping sound into his very marrow; and it had begun for him the singular thraldom, inspired by pity, that he could not bring himself to understand.

Hughie had left the door of Adam's room ajar. The invalid sat by the table in his wheelchair, a book upon his knees, likely one of the pirate tales in which he reveled. His face was drawn and haggard, his eyes closed. With the wine of his excitement gone, he seemed but a huddled heap of skin and bone. A death's-head! Kenny shuddered. Unspeakable pity made him kind. The old man yonder was off his guard; he had pride and spirit that compelled respect.

Kenny softly closed the door and rapped.

"Come in!" said Adam Craig. Almost Kenny could see him chirking up into insolence and the pertness of a bird. It was precisely as he had expected. When the door swung back, Adam was erect in his wheel-chair, electric with challenge. His eyes were once more bright and sharp.

"Kenny," he demanded with asperity, "where have you been?"

Kenny glanced at the faded books stacked upon the bookshelves; and with the cabin uppermost in his mind he swung back dangerously to the hostile mood of the night before. Adam Craig was a miser, cruel and selfish. He had driven Joan and Donald to a refuge in the pines.

"I said," repeated Adam in a louder voice, "where have you been?"

"Picking wild flowers," said Kenny.

"You lie!" said Adam. "It's your way of telling me to mind my own business."

Kenny did not trouble to deny it.

"You've been sulking."

"Very well, then," said Kenny evenly, making use of his one weapon of composure, "let's concede that I've been sulking."

He was sorry instantly.

Infuriated, Adam brought his fist down upon the arm of his wheel-chair and, coughing, propelled himself up and down the room.

Kenny walked away to the window, sick with remorse. For the old man had coughed himself into gasping quiet. What could he do?

A wayward Irish tune, ludicrously fitting, danced into his head and made him smile.

"What shall I do with this silly old man?" whistled Kenny softly at the window.

"What's that?" demanded Adam suspiciously.

The insolence in his voice struck fire again. Kenny remembered his notebook and the hour of accounting. Never again would the forces Adam had revived sink into the quietude of his first days here at the farm.

"What's what?" he asked perversely.

"That asinine tune you're whistling?"

"It's a song," said Kenny innocently, "about a wild flower. And it was very wild. It had thorns."

"I think you lie," said Adam, glaring. "But as I have no womanish repertoire of songs to prove it, you can whistle it all you want and be damned to you."

Kenny at the window availed himself of the privilege.

"What's the name of it?" snapped Adam after a while, ruffled by his guest's persistence.

"'What shall I do with this silly old man?'" explained Kenny with a grin.

"You impudent liar!" cried the old man in a high, angry voice. "Do you ever tell the truth?"

"Almost never," said Kenny. "Do you?" And he went on with his whistling.

Adam ignored his impudence.

"Well, then," he said, "it's time you began. You're young enough, God knows. But it's not a youth of years. It's a superficial youth of spirit. And you're old enough to tell the truth."

"How shall I learn?"

"Practice!"

Kenny wheeled. Adam's careless dart had struck deep and sharp and it rankled.

"Very well, Adam," he said, "I'll practice on you."

Truth! Truth! he reflected passionately at the window. Was the world mad about it? And what was the matter with himself? Why did the romantic freaks of his fancy always fill him now with vague worry?

"What," gasped Adam, staring, "did you say?"

"I said," flung out Kenny, "that I'd practice telling the truth and I'd practice on you. And by Heaven I will!"

He wiped his forehead with a shaky hand. The room was warm, the lamp flickering hotly in the summer breeze. He thought of Joan and the ferry. Did she scull the old, flat-bottomed punt back and forth, back and forth, when the winter wind was howling up the river? What did she wear when winter settled, sharp and bleak, upon the ridge? Kenny shivered. He pictured her vividly in furs, warm and rosy, and hated the lynx-like eyes of the miser in the wheel-chair who doled out grudging pennies for nothing but his brandy. There was much that he could say if he told the truth; much the old man must be told if later Joan with her secret tears was to be saved the brunt of his hellish torment. He would force Adam Craig to stop the ferry. He would force him to buy furs. He would force him to endorse Mr. Abbott and his kindness, force him to grant Joan her books and the right to study, if she chose. Why in Heaven's name should she creep through rain and snow and shadows to the refuge in the pines?

He was dangerously excited with the fever of the old crusader in his veins. And then he thought of the trust in Joan's eyes when his tongue rambled, and went cold with shame. He must learn to tell the truth. He would practice for his own sake—and for the sake of Joan.

With a sense of shock he realized that he had been very far away. Adam was choking and wheezing and gasping himself into weakness.

"For God's sake," exclaimed Kenny with a feeling of guilt, "what's the matter? Are you laughing or choking?"

"I'm laughing," said Adam, shaking with mirth. "Kenny, I'm just laughing."

"Well," said Kenny huffily, "laugh your head off if you want to. I mean what I say."

The old man chuckled.

"I'd be disappointed," he said, "if you didn't."

Kenny stared at him in intense disgust. A perverse old lunatic! He would like his new diversion less perhaps as time went on.

"I want you to forget," Adam said abruptly, "about last night. I was—jealous. I hate your health. I—hate your straight legs—Oh, My God!" he whispered, shuddering, and closed his eyes. When he opened them his smile was ghastly.

"Kenny," he said with a pitiful air of bravado, "do you know a tune, an Irish tune called 'Eileen Aroon'?"

"Yes," said Kenny, clearing his throat. "Yes."

"Whistle it."

Kenny obeyed. His eyes were sympathetic,

"Well," said Adam in muffled tones, "it isn't Irish. It's Robin Adair and it came from Scotland."

But his voice was tired.

Kenny rummaged in the closet for his brandy.

"There are times," said Adam queerly, "when you've an open-hearted, understanding way about you. I believe you even know why I get drunk."

"Yes," said Kenny, "I think I do."

Adam dropped hack limply in his chair.

"It's because," he whispered, "I've—got—to—sleep!"

Startled at his manner, Kenny remembered the fairy mill and wondered.