Kenny

CHAPTER XXX

PLAYTIME

December found Joan with dark, happy eyes intent upon the rose-colored phantasmagoria of existence, her worriment past. Donald was safe with Brian. It hurt her a little that he did not write.

"I think, girleen," said Kenny, intuitional as always, "that he fears to write, thinking of course you are still at the farm and would try to tempt him back. And I haven't a doubt he's set his teeth and vowed not to come to you until he's made good." As indeed he had.

After that, save for a wistful moment now and then, she seemed content, trusting Brian.

Unhappiness lay behind her like a forgotten shadow. After the loneliness and the dreams and the hills, her playtime too had come as Donald's had come to him in Brian's world of spring; and life was whirling around her, brilliant, breathless, kaleidoscopic and altogether beautiful, a fantastic fairyland that kept her dazzled and delighted.

It had no shadows for her wondering eyes; the shadows lay behind her. New York with its shops where with Ann she had gasped and laughed and colored and stared into mirrors, its lights, its crowds, its theaters, its opera where Max Kreiling sang and left her with a sob in her heart, its amazing Bohemia of success of which Kenny was a part, seemed to her but a never-ending sparkle of romance and kindness. She spent unwearied hours in Ann's studio, masquerading in a sculptor's smock and staring at clay and marble with eyes of unbelief. And she tarried for amazed intervals in the studio upstairs where Margot Gilberte plied Cellini's art, embedding pennyweights of metal in hot pitch that, cooling, held it like a dark and shapeless hand while Margot sculptured elfin leaves and scrolls upon it. Curious things came to the jeweler's desk where Margot worked; jewels cut and uncut, soft-colored sea-pebbles, natural lumps of greenish copper, silver and gold and brass (to Margot's eye there were no baser metals) malachite and coral and New Zealand jade. Joan handled them all with gasps of reverence.

"And this, Margot? How green it is!"

"A peridot for a dewdrop in a leaf of gold. And there, Question-mark, are the pink tourmalines I propose to use for rosebuds in this necklace of silver leaves."

"And blue sapphires!"

"They are for pools of sea-water in some golden seaweed and the pearls are for buds in some cherry leaves."

"What an odd frail little tool, Margot!"

"I made it myself," said Margot. "And now, cherie, if you don't run along to Madame Morny, Kenny will scold me."

She delighted Madame Morny with her willingness to work. She delighted Kenny with her willingness to play. Nothing tired her. Together they roamed to the quaint little restaurants of Bohemia; the Italian table d'hotes where Kenny was inclined to twinkle at the youthful art students who affected pretentious ties, the quiet old German restaurant that once had been a church, Chinatown where you ate unskillfully with chopsticks upon a table of onyx, and the Turkish restaurant where everything, Sid said, was lamb.

"Garry found it," he insisted. "I didn't. I'm glad I didn't, though a lot of the Salmagundi men go over there and like it. The art students too. Forty cents. Proprietor's the real thing—he wears a fizz."

"Fuzz, darlin'," corrected Kenny gently.

"Fez!" sputtered Sid in disgust. "Fez, of course. Everything's got lamb in it, even the pastry and the coffee. I swear it has! I—I hate lamb. Didn't know the Turks went in for it so much, did you, Kenny? Jan computed a table of lamb percentages on the menu and I felt like bleating. 'Pon my word I did. Menu's got a glossary and needs it. Pilaf—that's rice. Lamb's something else. No, pilaf's lamb, and rice is something else. Oh, hanged if I know. Lamb's lamb no matter how you spell it."

"Come along with us," suggested Kenny. His kindliness of late had startled more than one, accustomed to his irresponsible caprices.

"Please do!" said Joan; and Sid, delighted, and amazed as always, repudiated at once his hatred of lamb. It was nourishing, he recalled at once with a brazen air of sincerity, and the Turks disguise it in amazingly enticing ways.

Joan laughed.

"Sid," she said, "you're a dear, blessed fibber and we want you with us."

Her poise and adaptability were startling. Her simplicity won them all. To the girls who lived in Ann's studio building she seemed all laughter and happiness and breathless eagerness to please.

"She's just herself," said Peggy Jarvis, who lived with Ann and smiled over the footlights each night in comedy that was comedy and to crowds that were crowds, "She doesn't know that half the world is posing."

Joan spent an afternoon in Peggy's dressing room during a matinee and came home with moist, excited eyes.

"Think, Peggy, think!" she exclaimed. "Once long ago that was my mother's life."

Peggy kissed her and rummaged for cigarettes. Joan's eyes rested upon her pretty face with troubled indulgence.

"Oh, Peggy," she pouted. "Why do you smoke?"

"Because," said Peggy honestly, "I like it. Does it shock you, dear?"

"It did at first," admitted Joan. "And even now I shouldn't care to smoke myself. But then when that old painter Kenny likes so came here with his wife, and her hair was so white and her face so kind, and she smoked like a chimney—"

"Joan!"

"She did," insisted Joan. "Well, then, Peggy, I just stayed awake that night and thought it all out. Peggy, do all painters' wives smoke? I mean—" she flushed and stammered.

Peggy's eyes were demure and roguish.

"You ridiculous child!" she said. "Who's the painter?"

Joan turned scarlet and bit her lip.

"And what, sweetheart," begged Peggy with ready tact, "did you think out?"

"If you smoke," said Joan, "because you really want to, Peggy, it's all right. But if a girl smokes just to—to appear startling and make men look at her, then it's all wrong!"

Peggy kissed her.

"Joan, dear," she said, "you've the most amazing intelligence in that small head that I ever met. Hum. If I'm not mistaken that's Kenny at the door. He never stops ringing until he's sure you know he's there."

Joan raced away to change her dress.

With excitement in her cheeks and eyes she was extraordinarily lovely. Kenny with difficulty kept his feet firmly upon the floor a yard away from her. Peggy laughed up at him, her piquant face impudent and understanding.

"Kenny," she said under her breath, "I suppose you know you're in love with your ward?"

Kenny had had his flare with Peggy; and he had come out of it with wounded vanity, somewhat baffled at Peggy's professed belief in the transiency of feminine love. After all, Peggy said pensively, she knew too many charming men to promise an indeterminate interval of concentration upon one. Kenny deemed such a viewpoint heretical and masculine; women were meant to be faithful.

Now he stared at the girl's saucy face with a startled flush.

"Peggy!" he said, "you little wretch!"

It was growing harder day by day to keep his love a secret.

Joan's first dance at the Holbein Club brought a train of complications.

Ann, interpretative, dressed her in snow-white tulle with here and there a glint of silver. The soft full skirt floated out above her silver slippers like a cloud, but little whiter than her throat and arms. Peggy and Ann never told the tale of her rebellion or her frantic wail:

"Oh, Peggy, Peggy! I can't go. They forgot the sleeves."

She came down the stairway like a flower, but her eyes were wistful and troubled.

"Kenny, should I?"

"Should you what, dear?"

"Dance when—when Uncle—"

"If your heart is glad and your feet want to dance, mavourneen," said Kenny gently, "then no conventional pretense of mourning shall stop them. You were kind and merciful while he lived. Even he, dear, would not ask more."

"If my Victrola arm has been winding in vain while you two practiced half the floor off the studio," put in Ann, "I shall be offended. I dreamed last night that I was an organ-grinder teaching Sid to dance."

Joan laughed and kissed her.

The Holbein Club accepted her with a hum of delight.

"She is beautiful!" said Jan.

"Beautiful, of course," said Somebody. "Any girl in Kenny's life would be beautiful or she wouldn't be there."

As for Kenny, his path was pleasant, as it always was. If a waving arm was not bidding for his attention, it was a laughing hail or a hearty hand upon his shoulder. His bright dark face sparkled with the zest of popularity.

Joan thought him as care-free as a boy.

"We dance in the club gallery," he told her, smiling at the look of wonder in her eyes.

"And the paintings and sculpture?"

"A members' exhibition. The sculptured lion staring from his pedestal at us is Jan's. Look at the superb muscle play of his flank! The midsummer woods—see, how well the lad has painted air!—is Garry's. And my pine picture's over there."

"And Sid?"

Kenny danced her the length of the gallery. A white line of sculpture gleamed on either side behind a rail of brass.

"Down here," he said. "I saved it for the last. The beggar's painted—me!"

It was Kenny in a painter's smock intent upon a palette, vividly, whimsically, delightfully Kenny. There was tenderness and sympathy in Sid's portrayal.

Joan clung to his hand in delight.

And was it all Bohemia, she asked.

Ah! admitted Kenny twinkling, there you had him. Bohemia, he fancied, was always wherever you yourself were not. The men and women who did big things were too busy for picturesque posing. Bohemia, as legend read it, had to do with rags and dreams and ambition without effort, a shabby, down-at-heel pretension that glittered without gratifying. The Bohemians of to-day were the failures of to-morrow. And the crowd who lived at the Holbein Club lived, loved, worked and died much in the fashion of less gifted folk. If there was a Bohemia of success, however, it danced here to-night.

But, girleen, the music was urging! And who could resist the sweet wild delirium of a violin's call? Certainly not an Irishman intent upon a moonbeam imprisoned in a girl's bright hair. But one sound sweeter!

"And that?" asked Joan as they glided away again among the dancers.

Kenny threw back his head and his eyes laughed.

"A robin singing in a blackthorn!"

Joan smiled at the boyish sparkle of his face. He was so charmingly, so irresponsibly young and gay.

His Bohemia of success she found a startling triumph.

"Joan's horribly disturbed," Ann telephoned in the morning. "As her guardian you'll have to settle a number of infatuated young men. The telephone's been ringing all morning. I think it's a case of 'The line forms on the right, gentlemen, on the right!'"

Kenny faced the problem with his fingers in his hair.

"Who's bothering her?" he demanded bluntly.

"The Art Students' League," said Ann demurely, "the Federation of Arts, National Society of Portrait Painters, Architectural League, Watercolor Society, Authors' League and the Prince who thinks he's a playwright."

"He's a piece of cheese!" said Kenny in intense disgust. "What did Joan think of him?"

"She said she didn't like him nearly so well as the art student who plays a banjo in the orchestra because he needs the money. Peggy knows him."

"That was wholesome," admitted Kenny. "But I don't think much of him either. He has absolutely no right when he's playing a banjo commercially to recognize the girls on the floor. I'll be over to lunch."

It was a nerve-racking hour for Ann. Kenny, pensive, ate but little. He seemed very sorry for himself and eyed Joan with melancholy tenderness. When at last the dreadful subject was broached, Ann stoutly defended everybody.

Frantic, Kenny pushed back his plate and began to stride around.

"Sit down," said Ann. "You're making everybody nervous. Of course you don't blame Joan. And of course you can't blame—"

"I'm not blaming anybody," sputtered Kenny. "That club is a hot-bed of shallow-minded, impressionable, fickle-minded boobs. I can see plainly that we'll have to be married to-day. To-morrow at the latest."

"Kenny, please!" said Joan and the conflict began.

Finding the year still strongly in her mind, he surrendered with a sigh, hurt and unhappy, remembering his vow that Joan's happiness should be the religion of his love.

"Oh, you dear foolish people!" cried Ann in despair. "Why don't you announce your engagement in the Times and discourage the line once and for all?"

"Of course!" said Kenny and looked at Joan.

"I shouldn't mind at all," said Joan, coloring.

Whereat Kenny called up the Times office, and the Holbein Club went mad with delight. Jan, without meaning to, got very drunk and shocked himself, and Margot made the ring. She did not know why Kenny wanted the golden circlet barred crosswise like a frail ladder. Nor why he insisted upon a cluster of wistaria set in amethysts.

Even then misgivings sent him to Ann in a panic of conscience.

"Am I ungenerous?" he demanded. "Perhaps Joan should have had a year of utter freedom. You know what I mean, Ann. To come and go as she pleases and with whom she pleases. She's so young." He flushed.

"Joan wouldn't have it different," said Ann, touched by the boyish wistfulness of his eyes. "She clings to you. And she's as shy and unspoiled as the day you brought her here. This flurry of admiration to her means nothing at all. She's unhappy with strangers."

Kenny knew it was true and marveled.

"I would like to be generous," he admitted with an effort. "But I can't. It's the simple truth, Ann, I can't. Even the thought of her liking other men—bothers me."

December was fated to hold for him another startling anticlimax. It came one snowy morning when he had slept even later than usual, dreaming of an iridescent balloon that climbed higher and higher with Joan peeping radiantly over the edge until at the peal of the telephone bell it disappeared entirely.

Joan's voice instantly dispelled his irritation.

"Mavourneen!" he exclaimed. "Up already! And you danced half the night."

"It's eleven o'clock," said Joan. "Besides, I couldn't sleep. I've been thinking. Remember, Kenny, when you read the will and I said that Donald should have the farm?"

"Yes," said Kenny, somewhat mystified. "I remember."

"If he's going to study and work his way through college, I don't think he'd want it, do you?"

"No, dear, I doubt if he would. What's in your mind, girleen?"

"Oh, I'm so glad you think so too! Kenny—"

"Yes?"

"Do you know Jan's cousin, the pretty girl who's a model? I know that doesn't sound at all as if it had anything to do with the farm but it has. Jan's cousin said—I hardly know how to tell you, Kenny. I don't think I like telephones. If I could see your face—"

"I'm wearing my guardian's face!"

"Oh!"

"And evidently it isn't popular."

"I like you—different. Jan's cousin said that she could get me a great deal of work if I wanted it—posing for head and shoulders—"

"Joan!"

"Oh, dear!" wailed Joan. "That was a guardian's voice. Please wait, Kenny."

"I'm waiting."

"I'm going to keep the farm and give Don the rest of the four thousand dollars. … Did you say anything, Kenny?"

"No. … No, I was just clearing my throat."

"I've only spent a little of it yet. From now on I want to earn my living like Peggy and Ann and Margot and all the others. I'll still have plenty of time to study and practice. I wonder I didn't think of it before. It was selfish when I had the farm and Don not even mentioned in the will. I suppose I didn't think of it because here things seem to happen so—so fast. I'm always in a whirl."

"Yes," said Kenny sincerely. "Things do happen fast."

She waited his approval and was the first to speak, a wondering hint of reproach in her voice.

"Kenny, please say something!"

"To be truthful, dear," said Kenny in a queer voice, "you've taken my breath away. I'm thinking—just thinking."

"It's fair—"

"Yes, dear, it's fair enough."

"You don't disapprove? Oh, I hope you won't. It will make me so happy to help Don through college."

"It will make you happy!" said Kenny and sighed.

"Ann had so many, many things to say against it. She said she was trying to see it all with your eyes—as a guardian. But I told her you're hardly ever—a guardian. And your Bohemia is democratic, isn't it? And painters are respectable and worthy men and nothing like so flighty as you read. You've said so yourself. And I like to work. And there are so many charming girls who are models and Jan's cousin is a Vassar girl—" In her eagerness to convince him she lost her breath.

"I'll come for you at Madame Morny's at four," Kenny told her, sick at heart. "And then, dear, I'll tell you exactly what I think."

And when he had rung off, he sat down weakly and laughed, his laugh unmusical and sad. The dreadful, dreadful irony of it! How could he deny her? How could he? He who had surrounded her with women friends, talented and independent, who believed in the gospel of work! He liked her generosity. He liked her willingness to work. He blessed the dear, selfless instincts of her heart, his eyes moist and tender. And yet … and yet! Kenny laughed again. He had hidden his own money in the fireplace to send through college a runaway youth he had never seen!

On the way home from Madame Morny's in a taxi, for the snow had become a blizzard, he made one final desperate effort to break her resolution. It was futile. Again she was passionately eager to please him. Again he found it a problem that involved her happiness and peace of mind. Again, with his heart sore, be kissed her and surrendered to her wishes with a sigh.

But he found the work for her himself with the older painters.

"Kenny, I'm so glad you asked me to bring mother's trunks with me," Joan told him. "Aranyi has asked me to pose in the gold brocade."

Something sharp stabbed at Kenny's heart.

"I meant them," he said with a sigh, "for costume dances, but Aranyi paints the texture of things with marvelous skill."

By the end of the month Joan's work day was full and he was seeing her less than he had, save at night. Garry begged her to pose for him, carried his case to Kenny and met with blank refusal.

"I'm sorry, old man," Kenny finished inexorably, "but nothing under forty need apply. You, my son, are particularly flighty and fickle. Just now you happen to be raving about Peggy, but every pretty face, I've noticed, makes you forget the one before."

And Garry, who had been trying to marry Peggy for a year and was by no means as uncertain and mercurial in his affections as Kenny would have him believe, stared with eyes intelligent and reminiscent.

"Well," he said softly, "I'll be jiggered. That's the limit!"

"Be jiggered!" Kenny told him shortly. "And have done with it."

Garry raised his eyebrows and departed. And Kenny, reverting to one of his old frantic minutes, walked the floor. He had accepted portrait commissions that would keep him busy for months; for the ragged money he had hidden in the fireplace had made his need of work imperative. Otherwise he himself could have painted Joan in the gold brocade and in all the others.

What had the money in the fireplace done for him? It had doomed him to work apart while other men painted the golden shadows in her hair.

CHAPTER XXXI

FATE STABS

March came to Kenny and found his studio with its haunting odor of coffee and cigarettes, his brushes, his head and his heart, furiously at work. He was giving himself up to love and labor with a Celtic intensity that Garry found appalling. He planned endlessly to one purpose: Joan's happiness, Joan's pleasure, Joan's future with him. The memory of the ragged money laid aside for Don he dismissed with a wry smile, gritting his teeth. What mattered in the face of the splendid fact that he was so joyously, so recklessly, so absurdly happy?

His life, with its deadly singleness of purpose, should have been simple. It attained a complexity at times at which he marveled. An inclination to blurt out the truth with panicky abruptness when he wanted to lie, plunged him into more than one predicament.

"I'm always explaining to somebody," he complained bitterly to Garry, "why I tell the truth—"

"You told Kenneth his dancing urchin was rotten—"

"It was," insisted Kenny. "Garry, why is truth always unpleasant? Why can't it be as romantic and agreeable as the things you want to say?"

"Why," countered Garry, "isn't peace as romantic as war? Ask somebody who knows. I don't."

He stared curiously at Kenny and shook his head. A heavy hand with the truth, that Irishman; and about as understandable in these splendid, tender days of his idiocy and bliss, as March wind, comets or star-dust. His passion for truth was literally a passion, relentless and exact. He worked harder. His steadiness, as Jan said, was grim and conscious and a thing of terror to anything in his path. He wrestled with his check book and managed somehow to keep his studio in order. And he was kinder. Fahr, in particular, remarked it; and Fahr, worshipping Kenny, had sputtered and endured the brunt of many tempests.

"But, Garry," he confided, round-eyed and apprehensive, "honest Injun, I don't think he ought to bottle up his temper that way. Sometimes I can almost see him swelling up and then when he speaks and I'm waiting for an Irish roar, his voice is so quiet and pleasant that I feel queer. I—I swear I do. Damn it all, I'm liking him more every day."

"So am I," said Garry honestly. "But—"

"But what?"

"I wish he'd be less turbulently happy."

"Let him," said Sid sagely, "Darn few can."

"A pendulum," reminded Garry, "swings both ways. And he's an extremist. If he'd just plant his two feet solidly on the ground and get his head out of the clouds. He's got to do it sometime."

"Oh, hell," said Sid. "Give him time. If that girl was going to marry me I'd climb up a few air-steps myself and stick my head into any old cloud."

"Good old Sid!" said Garry affectionately. "You'd be sure to hit your head on a star and then you'd be amazed and—"

"Oh, you go to thunder!" blustered Sid.

By now Kenny's Bohemia was rushing through its yearly cycle of costume dances. Motley groups emerged at times from Ann's castle and departed in taxis.

"And Gawd knows where," said Mrs. Ryan from the third floor front of the tenement that faced the street. "They're a wild bunch and my Cassie'll never travel wid 'em. Last week the architeks rigged up somethin' fierce and danced in 'the streets of Paris,' wid bullyvard cafes, they called 'em, built into the dance hall, an actress singin' the Marseillaise in a flag, and a Roosian hussy dancin' in boots. And Mr. O'Neill, God save him for a pleasant gentleman though a bit wild in the eye, took my Dinny up to be a gamin. Gay-min. I thought myself he said a 'gay mon' and Dinny's a bit young; but I found he meant him to peddle cigarettes about among the tables."

In the quaint old gowns that were delighting the older painters, Joan glided through the shifting blare and color unaware of the eyes that watched and liked her. Not so Kenny.

He knew who stared and smiled and he knew who stared too long. He was inordinately proud of her.

"Kenny, please!" begged Garry. "Let me paint her. I'm going to California in April and I won't have another chance. I won't be back until fall."

"My son—" began Kenny wearily. Then he smiled. "Oh, go ahead, Garry, darlin'. I'll not be mindin' a bit."

And Garry curiously enough caught the tantalizing charm of her sweetness that had baffled many an older and wiser man.

Shadows had no part in the wonder of Kenny's winter, but an inclination to forget his quarrel with Brian and his flare of penance, violent and incomplete—for he had never reached the longed-for grail of his son's forgiveness—troubled him vaguely. In spasmodic moments of remorse he read his notebook, tremendously buoyed up by an augmenting consciousness of evolution. Faint inner voices warned him at times not to misinterpret his exultant happiness in terms of infallibility and when they called to him he had his moments of humility and panic.

In one of them he tried to coax the fern back to life; once with an alarming air of energy and importance, he departed in a taxi and bought a great many things for Brian's room; once when miraculously the bank and he agreed for a brief period upon his balance, he succumbed to a mathematical fit of uplift and conscience, dashed off a bewildering number of checks and left the overladen slate of his credit unmarked by even an I.O.U. His brilliant air of calm and satisfaction thereafter was distinctly noticeable.

On the whole he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective. Brian's absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had been the price of Joan's content and the welfare of her brother.

Whitaker, journalism and God's green world of spring he had chosen jealously to resent. The thought of Donald West and a dim conviction of quarry hardships filled him with a new sense of solidarity in Brian and a passionate respect. The current of his affection for his son was subtly altering. It was no longer careless and frenzied and sentimental. Nor was it selfish. Something big and abiding had sprung up out of the ashes of his penance.

By the end of March, with a record-breaking period of work behind him and a furore of notoriety over his striking portrait of a famous beauty compelling him to a radiant admission of success, Kenny found himself lulled into the self-respecting quietude he craved.

Days back self-confidence had come to him in Hannah's kitchen and Adam Craig, in the course of time, had crushed it out with a keen and understanding leer. Later it had returned with Adam's death, and the weary voice of Doctor Cole had shattered it.

So now on a March night of wind and hail—and this time by telephone after much tedious trouble with the wire, Doctor Cole's voice, tired, sorrowful and kind, came stabbing intrusively into his full-blown equanimity with a message of terror.

"Mr. O'Neill—"

"Yes."

"This is Doctor Cole of Briston, Pennsylvania."

Kenny stiffened. He had never quite forgiven the doctor for that bleak, anticlimacteric morning when he had driven dazedly away with Nellie. Adjectives, like a man's laughter, were to him an irrefutable test. With one you could definitely prefigure a man's degree of refinement; with the other the aesthetic color of his soul. And gray was no color for any mortal's soul.

"Yes?"

"Mr. O'Neill," came the kind, tired voice, "I'm sorry, sorrier than I can tell. I've bad news for you. There has been an accident, a quarry explosion, and your son is badly injured."

A hot quiver swept through Kenny's body, ended at his face in a stinging rush of blood and left him icy cold.

"Brian!"

"Yes. … Are you there, Mr. O'Neill?"

"Yes. … Yes, I am here. Doctor… How—badly?"

"He is—well, conscious. I can hardly say more," owned the doctor. "Thank God he's young and strong. There are no developed symptoms of fracture yet but his skull—"

"Fracture! Skull!"

"There's a chance. Contusion now merely and a swollen condition. The soft parts are unbroken and that makes an accurate diagnosis difficult, but I must warn you that there is an immediate risk to his life from shock and perhaps compression—"

"Oh, my God!" said Kenny, his eyes wet.

"You see, Mr. O'Neill," said the doctor sadly, "there may be depressed fragments of bone or effused blood. We are watching closely. But I think you had better come to him at once. There is a possibility—"

But there were some things that even the little doctor could not say.

"Still there, Mr. O'Neill?" he asked a little later.

"Yes. Where is Brian now?"

"In a quarry shack on what we call up here the Finlake mountain."

"Finlake mountain!"

"Yes, barely eighteen miles across the valley from the farm. They couldn't find a doctor. Carson is nearer but he was out. Has a widely scattered farm practice like my own and Don, frantic with terror, telephoned to me. We've done everything possible for him, Mr. O'Neill, but his pulse is pretty feeble and it's difficult to rouse him. Sensibility of course is blunted. Bound to be—"

"I will be there," said Kenny, "as soon—as soon as it is possible. There are but three north-bound trains at Briston?"

"Morning—eight-ten. Noon, one-twenty-nine and night, seven-fifteen. But don't get off at Briston, Mr. O'Neill. Finlake, fifteen miles on, is nearer—"

"I can not possibly make the morning train. The changes make the trip long. Twelve hours… God!"

"I myself will meet you at Finlake. It's three miles farther to the quarry. If you are not on the noon train I will meet the night—"

"I—I cannot thank you, Doctor Cole." Kenny hung up, unaware that the doctor was adding further detail.

Almost at once he unhooked the receiver and summoned the club central. Afterward Pietro, who took his turn at the switchboard when the day operator departed, spoke of the quiet curtness of his voice.

"Pietro? Mr. O'Neill speaking. I want you, at once, to look up the earliest connecting train with Finlake, Pennsylvania, any road."

"Yes, sir," began Pietro. "What—" but the receiver had clicked into place.

Kenny stared with a shudder at the withered fern, his face as white as chalk.

A tearing hand seemed clinging to his brain.

In the face of this grief-stricken terror that quaked and burned in his soul, etching unforgettable scars, the recollection of his unsteady spurts of penance rose to mock him with their artificiality. His remorse had been but a pale, theatric spree! And now in this forgetful winter of his love, Fate had decoyed him into optimistic quietude only to thrust savagely and deep. Remorse in the raw! Was it punishment—punishment for the farcical penitent on the highway who had smiled into a woman's soft eyes, forgetting—

He answered Pietro's ring with a throbbing sense of confusion in his forehead.

The best connecting train and the earliest left the Pennsylvania Terminal at eleven. It was now but five. How could he wait?

"Pietro," he said, "give me now Doctor Barrington's office. And tell the operator to put me through to his private wire. It's urgent. I do not want the nurse in the anteroom. When you ring for me I want Dr. Barrington ready at the other end and I want you yourself, Pietro, to be sure he's there."

Pietro, obeyed, amazed and loyal.

"Frank?" Hot relief surged in Kenny's heart at the chance ease of connection. "Kenny speaking."

"Hello, Kenny. Nothing doing for me tonight, old man. I've got to sleep."

"I need you, Frank. Brian has been injured—badly—in a quarry explosion."

"Kenny!"

"A chance of skull fracture," said Kenny steadily. "That means?"

"A possible operation."

"Can you leave with me at eleven o'clock to-night, Pennsylvania Terminal? It will mean at least two days. He's at Finlake, Pennsylvania, barely conscious—in the hands of a country doctor."

The brilliant industrious young surgeon on the other end gasped and whistled. He worked and played at heavy pressure.

"Kenny, old man," he said, "nothing is impossible. Almost this is. But it's you and Brian and that's enough, I'll meet you at quarter of eleven. I'll go—thoroughly prepared. Do you feel like telling me more?"

"No."

Two receivers clicked and Kenny, remembering that he could not definitely locate Joan until six, felt the tautness of his control slip dangerously.

Eleven o'clock… How could he wait? He paced the floor, his mind in its chaotic desperation, numb and inelastic. With his glance upon the psaltery stick, a dim notion of accounting filtered curiously into his mind and became obsessional. He went shaking to Brian's room and put the key of the chiffonier in his pocket. Thank God the studio was in order, save a chair or two. Brian … would … be … pleased. Kenny stared at the withered fern and blinked. An augury? God forbid! Then he flung the bill-file with its heterogeneous collection of receipted I.O.U.'s into his bulging suit case and called up Simon Meyer.

"Simon," he said, "whatever I happen to have there—there's a shotgun, I know, and a tennis racket and some fishing rods. … The rest for the moment I can't recall… I want you to put all of it in a bundle and send it here at once by special messenger. I have the tickets here… I'll have them ready… Yes, I'll give him a check… No, Simon, it won't be certified and he'll take it as it is."

He rang off and searched impatiently for pawn tickets. Simon's messenger arrived and, strained and hostile, Kenny looked over the contents of the bundle and wrote a check.

Alone in the studio again, he flung up a window, his mind pushing ahead to eleven o'clock. It seemed to him then that he could not possibly wait and go on fighting for his self-control. A gust of sleet and hail swept in with a pattering sound upon the floor. Its cold, stinging contact with his face refreshed him. Kenny's brain cleared. He gulped and gasped. Garry's car! He would not wait.

"Frank," he telephoned after an unavailing interval of search for Garry, "if you're willing we'll motor to Finlake in Garry's car. He'll not be mindin'. I borrow it often. It's a bad night of course—but we could start now. And we can make time on the road. It's barely two hundred and fifty miles but the branch roads and changes make unendurable delay. Shall I come for you in half an hour?"

Again Barrington gasped. Again he whistled. "Make it three quarters," he said, "and I think I can swing it."

"You're a jewel for sense," Kenny told him, a passionate note of gratitude in his voice. "I love you for it."

He called Ann's studio at six. Joan had not returned. Ann took the message, startled and sympathetic.

"I'll wire her in the morning," he said and, hanging up, found that Sidney Fahr had come in. He stood with his back against the door, his round face blank with terror.

"Kenny," he stammered, "I—I couldn't help hearing." The hot sympathy he could not bring himself to utter, flamed desperately in his face—almost to the ruin of Kenny's iron control. "I—I—I can do something, can't I, Kenny?"

"Yes, Sid, darlin', you can," said Kenny gently. "I'm taking Garry's car. You can square me with him."

"I—I'd even thrash him," mumbled Sid.

"Then if you will I'd like you to get in touch with Westcott's wife and tell her. I'm painting her portrait. She comes to-morrow at ten. Sid, could you—could you clean off those two chairs?"

Sid fell upon the nearest chair with fearful energy. At the table Kenny hurriedly wrote a check.

"And to-morrow I want you to deposit this to Brian's account. I'm paying back—what I owe him." His mouth worked.

"Oh, Sid!" he said, his face scarlet.

"Now, now, now, Kenny," choked the little painter, winking and making horrible faces at the littered chair, "don't you go to taking on. Don't you do it. I'll call up Westcott. The old gladiator!" Somehow he turned his sniffle to a snort. "What in thunder does she want to be painted for anyway? She's got a nose like a triangle and the composition of her face is all wrong."

He blinked away the wetness on his lashes and wondered why, with every other chair in the studio clear, Kenny should make a point of the littered two. But he did not ask. Instead he entered upon a period of fruitless and agitated trotting that lasted until Kenny came hack from the garage with Garry's car. Then Sid packed him in, made one last terrible face and bolted across the sidewalk for the door.

Beyond the threshold he bolted for a telephone.

"Jan," he said in shocked tones, "I want you to come down to the bar and watch me. I—I've made up my mind to get drunk. I've got to." He gulped. "I'll tell you why when you come down."

"Oh, fiddlesticks!" said Jan in a bored voice. "Go down to the grill and eat something. And order me an English mutton chop and some macaroni. I'll be down to dinner in five minutes."

Sid aggrievedly obeyed.

CHAPTER XXXII

ON FINLAKE MOUNTAIN

Frank Barrington was to tell wryly in the grillroom of that night-ride in the sleety wind through a polar world of ghostly, ice-hung trees. Every flying rod of the sleazy road he knew was a peril. Even the chains failed at times to grip. For eight hours the whir of the motor and the tearing sound of the wind blared in his ears. For eight hours he marveled at the silence and efficiency of the muffled driver beside him who had apparently said all he intended to say upon the ferry. He drove even faster than Frank had anticipated; and he drove with more care, as if, defiantly, he feared the traps of an evil destiny to keep him from his goal. At times he turned the swiveled searchlight upon a road-sign and evoked a glistening play of silver on the trees. Once, cursing, he changed a tire; once the car skidded dangerously in a circle but to Frank his air of confidence was hypnotically convincing. The final stretch of the journey became a dim and frosty blur of sleety trees.

At Finlake they began to climb. It was after three when the headlights blazed upon the quarry.

"I wired the doctor to wait," said Kenny. "He knows you're with me."

"We leave the car here?"

"We'll have to." He turned his searchlight on the cliff ahead. "There's a path yonder."

"And which shack, I wonder?"

"There's a light in only one."

Frank worked his stiffened face to relieve the feeling of cold contorted rubber and followed Kenny up the path. Light glimmered dimly through the jungle of frost upon the shack window. Fronded whitely by the sleet, the panes loomed out of the dark like an incandescent series of camera plates, bizarre and oriental. Frank shivered in the wind.

Doctor Cole opened the door. Beyond in the rude room of the shack a lamp flared smokily.

"Brian?" said Kenny, his color gone.

"Why," said Doctor Cole, "his pulse is a lot stronger, Mr. O'Neill, and he complains now of pain—"

"That means?"

"It means, Kenny," said Frank Barrington, "that he has passed on normally to the stage of reaction." But his keen, intelligent eyes sought Doctor Cole with a furtive lifting of his brows and asked a question.

"Not a sign," said the little doctor gladly. "If anything he's a shade too wide awake. And irritable. I've been setting his leg—"

Kenny wheeled fiercely.

"His leg!" he said. "His leg!"

"I'm sorry," stammered the doctor. "I—I quite forgot you didn't know. … Broken between the knee and the hip," he added, turning to Barrington. "I thought it merely paresis of the muscles until—"

"Where is he?" put in Kenny sharply. "What room?"

"There are only two rooms here," said Doctor Cole. "The stairway's yonder."

"Just a minute, Kenny." Frank checked him with a gesture. "I'm going up first with Doctor Cole."

Kenny groaned.

"Sit down," said Frank kindly. "Where's some brandy? Thank you, Doctor. Now, Kenny, listen, please. The first risk to Brian's life is past. I mean death from shock. He's not drowsy and he's feeling pain. His leg, in the face of other possibilities, is merely painful. But I must look at his head—"

"Frank, darlin'," said Kenny patiently, "I brought you up here to order us all around. Go to it."

He flung himself into a chair by the stove and drowsing after a while in a reactive sweep of exhaustion, awakened with a terrified jerk. A boy was banking the red-hot stove, his white face like and yet unlike—Joan's.

"Mr. O'Neill," he blurted with a boyish sob, "I—I did it. I was driving the mule-cart up the path. Grogan told me not to but I—I coaxed Tony. And when some earth crumbled ahead I jerked back—too quickly—and scared the mule. I've got to tell somebody. I've got to… And nobody listens—"

"Tell me the rest," said Kenny wanly. "I've been wonderin'."

"You see, Mr. O'Neill," he gulped, his eyes dark with grief and horror, "the mule went back upon his haunches and drove the cart against a boulder. It came out and crashed over the ledge and through the roof of the dynamite shack—"

"God!" In that vivid moment of his picturing, Kenny wondered why he should think of bouillon cups crashing loudly on a roof.

"And the other men were only scratched. A while ago—when Brian sent for me—he thought of it through all his pain—"

"He would," said Kenny.

"I—I wanted to kill myself."

"Oh, nonsense," said Kenny kindly.

Don flung his arm across his eyes and sobbed aloud.

"Oh," he choked, "if someone would only swear at me!"

"I—I'd like to," said Kenny wryly, "for your sake and for my own, but I'm all—in."

He stared dully at the fire until the stair creaked and Frank came in with Doctor Cole.

"There isn't yet," Frank told him, "a single pressure symptom that I consider alarming and Doctor Cole has done wonders with his leg. But any emotional excitement is a danger. Three minutes, old man." He followed Kenny up the stairway, watch in hand.

The raftered room was dim and quiet. Kenny sickened at the faint odor of antiseptics and softly closed the door.

Brian opened his eyes.

"Kenny, old dear," he said softly, "all these doctors are boobs. Frank in particular is an awful ass. I told him so. He's loaded with fool questions. One look at the Irish face of you is worth them all."

Kenny, staring at the pallid face upon the pillow, blinked and smiled.

"Frank told me you drove up here through the sleet," marveled Brian, clinging to his hand. "A god-forsaken spot! I'm sorry—"

"Three minutes!" warned Frank Barrington at the door. He knew Kenny much too well to trust him further.

And Kenny made a wry face and departed—with torture in his throat. His voice had failed him utterly.

A sleety dawn was graying at the windows.

"Bed!" commanded Barrington briefly.

"Doctor Cole has found another shack. He's waiting for you."

"And you?"

"I'll sleep to-morrow."