Kenny

CHAPTER XXXIII

IN THE SPAN OF A DAY

Kenny slept heavily until three that afternoon. Don wakened him.

"My sister is here," he said.

"Joan!"

Don stared a little at his quick, astonished warmth.

"She wired Doctor Cole," he said, "and went to the farm. He brought her back with him at noon."

"The heart of her! I might have known. And Brian?"

Brian, it seemed, was wakeful and nervous, his pain intense. The pressure symptoms had not advanced.

"Head's better," Don finished. "They've watched him like a hawk. But they're letting up a bit now—"

"And Dr. Barrington?"

"Asleep downstairs."

"Here?"

"Yes. We found another cot. The car's in Grogan's shed."

From the quarry below came the rumble of a blast.

"Would you think—" he demanded, but the futility of his protest made him dumb.

"The world keeps on going," said Kenny. He dressed hurriedly.

"Women," commented Don gloomily, following him down the stairs, "are queer. My sister wept all over me. As if I hadn't had enough shocks—"

He caught his breath and stumbled. In the room below Barrington stirred.

"Quiet, Don!" warned Kenny, sensing the tears of heartbreak that quivered on his lashes. He read the boy's hot heart with a renewed shock of understanding; they were namelessly akin.

Cold sunlight lay upon the cluster of shacks. The wind that bore the rumble of the quarry upward was sharp and gusty and laden with stinging particles of grit. A group of Italian women, chattering and gesticulating in, apparently, unheeded unison, lingered near the shack where Brian lay, agonizingly conscious of nerve and body, irritably weary of the inevitable doctor at his bedside. Kenny charged them with a look of indignation and shooed them to retreat in maledictory Italian.

Inside Joan was busy at the stove.

Kenny caught her hands, protesting, praising, thanking in a breath, and Don, regarding them with a look of frank and bitter comprehension, moved off toward the window with all a boy's disgust. In the span of a day he had learned and suffered over-much. Grogan's world of drills and noise down there was heartless and insistent. … It went on and on, puffing, drilling, sorting rattling stone. Up here in the shack was the lunacy of heart-things apart from him. The thought filled him with jealous anger. And upstairs— He wheeled and glared, fighting down the agony in his throat. Kenny was moving toward the stairway.

"Mr. O'Neill," barked Don, "Dr. Barrington particularly said you—you were not to go up there. He said that Brian's got to have the—the quiet kind around—"

Joan's quick stare of reproach brought the color to his face.

"I—I beg your pardon, Mr. O'Neill," he blurted. "He said—he said he must have quiet."

"It's all right," said Kenny ruefully. "Quite all right. You've been up?" he added quietly.

Don dug his toe into the floor and a hot flush suffused his forehead.

"To tell you the truth," he said with some annoyance, "Doctor Barrington wouldn't let me in. He seems to be able to manage a good many things at once."

"Ah!" said Kenny.

"We must find still another cot," said Joan, pouring coffee at the stove.

So in the dark hours of nervous unrestraint that marked for Don and Kenny that lagging period of terror and suspense, Joan stepped to the helm and steered. And there was need of steering.

Chaos would have reigned without it.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A FACE

Vagueness lay for Brian in that shack room where the noise of forest trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp … colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon him … and minutes of a diffused reaching out when the world, torn by internal explosion, seemed flying away from him in fragments, even walls receding from his cot which stayed, by a miracle, alone upon a wind-swept moor.

Intervals were an eternity. Familiarity with the detail of the room engendered frantic loathing. His brain conned over the faded colors in the rag rug and encountered the unchangeable, bayonet-like crack in the mirror with nervous fury. No peace came with the darkness. Each familiar thing persisted, looming clearer to his tired mind by the very effort his straining eyes made to reach it. There was the table clogged with doctors' litter … and there the other cot where Frank pretended to sleep and kept his vigil … there the chair … and there the dab of yellow in the rug that the sun struck into faded gayety in the morning … and there the crack across the mirror, the wriggling, distorted, foolish crack that seemed alive for all its sameness. And there was always the noise of wind which became a corollary of his pain, pulsing with it, never quiet, an overtone that tragically would not yield.

Into the blur of wind and weakness and pain came two miracles—a red geranium peering out of the dusk of the room like a glowing coal, unfamiliar and therefore a delight—a bit of velvet laughter in the drab that caught his whole attention … the other a face. The face came first in a cloud of flower-spotted purple that he knew clearly was in some way related to the hypodermic needle Frank had plunged into his arm while the sunset still lay painted on the window. … It took form in the purple like a pansy—that face—grew sweet and vivid and very real. Mercifully its loveliness was changeable, losing its pansy purples and gaining glints of gold … becoming less a pansy … more a face flower-like with compassion.

"And now?" wondered Brian when the face came again.

"It is morning," said Joan.

At the sound of her voice there came within him an extraordinary fusing, at once a pain and a delight … fragments of memory … a moonbeam … tears … the crackle of a fire … a quarry mist … the glory of stars … a meaning … a motive that startled and defied him.

"There should be moonlight on your hair," said Brian, drifting slowly back to a knowledge of reality and pain.

"Moonlight?"

"You are Joan."

"Yes. At least until Doctor Cole finds someone else, I am at times your nurse. The pain, Brian?" She bent over him, straightening a pillow, touching his forehead with cool, questioning fingers.

"Not worse," said Brian.

"I am glad."

"There was a purple cloud," he said, frowning.

"The drug. Doctor Barrington wanted you to sleep."

"And the geranium?" His eyes sought it with relief.

"Kenny found it. Grogan's wife had it in her window. I think he must have bullied her a little—"

"Bless him! … Where's the mirror?"

"Downstairs. I'm sleeping there."

"Thank God!" He closed his eyes, his color ebbing. "This plaster cast," he apologized, "is like a suit of armor. It bothers me."

"Poor fellow! … Can you eat?"

"Not—yet… Who's cooking?"

"Sometimes Don; sometimes I—unless the doctor sends me here. Once—Kenny."

Brian smiled.

"You are very good," he said simply.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE PENITENT

Brian's skull was young and elastic. It saved him much, but Barrington lingered until the period of suspense was at an end. Kenny drove him to the Finlake station.

"This car has been a godsend," he said.

"And Garry's wired me to keep it. He's going to the coast."

"When?"

"Thursday."

Kenny's eyes were moist and grateful.

"Ah, Frank, darlin', you're a jewel!"

"Piffle!" countered Frank. "Kenny, old dear, I think you hit a chicken. If at any time," he added at the station, "you feel the need of me, I want you to wire. He's bound to be nervous. And if his convalescence seems slow and irksome, remember that the reaction of a shock like that isn't merely physical."

Kenny wrung his hand in silence. He motored home, oppressed by the bare line of hills and the noise of the quarry.

As usual the sight of Joan dispelled his gloom. Brian's pain was less. He had fallen asleep of his own accord.

"He asked for you," she added.

"You told him Frank wouldn't let me in?"

"Yes."

"Hum… Where's Don?"

"I sent him to the store."

Kenny darted away with an air of expectancy to the other shack, whence, after an excited period of foraging, he emerged, carrying a bundle. Frank, knowing him well enough to read his shining enthusiasm aright, would have turned him back at Brian's door without a qualm. But Frank was not at hand.

"You look like a kid sneaking home with a stray cat!" Brian told him with a grin.

"What's in the bundle?"

"I've tried so many times to get in," admitted Kenny, "with Frank nippin' me just as my hand was on the knob, that I'm feelin' a bit surreptitious." He held up a tennis racket and a shotgun.

"And everything else," he boasted with an air of triumph, "that I took to Simon."

"And the bill-file!" exclaimed Brian, staring at the litter on the floor. "Jemima!"

"You remember it, Brian? You hated the sight of it. 'Tis the stiletto I stuck in a chunk of wax—"

"Lord, yes! And you wrote the I.O.U.'s on anything from a playing card to the end of a shirt."

"And never paid 'em until I had to," said Kenny with an unyielding air of self-contempt. "Many the time you checked 'em off, Brian, and rebuked me as you should. But that, by the Blessed Bell of Clare, is all behind me."

He proudly exhibited the bizarre collection of scraps, initialed in token of debt and reinitialed in token of payment.

"Brian—I—I—"

"Go ahead, old boy," said Brian, his eyes tender. "I can see you've got a lot on your mind."

"I paid 'em—every one!"

"So I see."

"And never again will you have to bookkeep lies. I'm that truthful now Sid worries a bit!"

Brian's amazed eyes twinkled.

"You delicious lunatic!" he said.

"I practiced," went on Kenny with his lips compressed. "I practiced hard—up at the farm with Adam."

"Joan's told me you were there. I can't quite hitch things together yet, but I will in time."

"A landslide of things seemed to happen the minute you went—"

"I always had a feeling," admitted Brian, "that if I didn't stick around and keep an eye on you, a lot of things would happen."

"They did. They've been happenin' ever since."

Brian flushed and put out his hand.

"Kenny, surely you guessed. I was sorry—"

"Jewel machree, I was fair sick about the shotgun. And after you went I was willing to be sorry about anything—to get you back."

"And Ann's statuette. Lord, I burn when I think of it."

"You couldn't be blamed for a bit of temper. You're Irish, lad, and an O'Neill. 'Tis a splendid inheritance but volcanic too." He changed color and began to roam around the room, his mind casting up a painful memory.

"You'll never guess," he went on moodily, "what fell upon the head of me after you went. John Whitaker came up and took a shot at me. And Garry. And then after a while when I was quieter, old Adam, stirring me up afresh. My ears are as used to the truth as my tongue."

"It's a darned shame!" said Brian warmly. Kenny sighed.

"Ah, Brian," he said wistfully, "I was needin' it all. You can't conceive until you put your mind to it or—or write it down, what a failure I've been—"

"Failure!"

"As a parent. Even my penance on the road was—was like the rest."

"Your penance!"

"I bought a corncrib and a mule," flung out Kenny, roaming turbulently around the room, "and thrashed a farmer. And I hated the rain and the smell of cheese and burned up the corn-crib—"

"Kenny, what are you talking about?"

Inexorably intent upon the easing of his conscience Kenny told the tale of his penance with terrifying honesty and truth.

Brian listened and dared not smile.

"At first I—I hoped to find a clue," finished Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "And then after I—I saw Joan I hoped I wouldn't. You're not blamin' me, Brian?"

"Not a bit. I'd have lingered myself."

"The heart of you!" said Kenny, biting his lips. "I don't deserve it. Lad, dear, the sunsets are past. I'm understandin'. And if you want Whitaker's job, I—I'm willing. If you'd rather come back to the studio and free-lance, I—I want you to know—" he gulped—"that things are different. There's order there and the—the chairs are cleared. Never a chair but what you can sit down on without staring behind you. You wished that, Brian—"

Brian turned his head.

"Yes," he said. There were tears and laughter in his voice.

"The money and clothes I borrowed," went on Kenny fervidly, "are paid back. The clothes are safe in a new chiffonier and here's the key. I sealed it in an envelope and well I did. I was badly needin' some things you had and Pietro went out and bought them for me. As for my temper, it's a lot better. A lot! Sid marvels at it. I—I do myself. It all comes from the hell up there on the ridge with Adam." He drew a long breath. "I've a record of work that will fill you with pride. And though I seem to have a lot of money, I haven't bought a foolish thing since the corncrib. There's plebeian regularity enough in my money affairs now, Brian, to please even you! Though I'm havin' a bit of a struggle with my check book. You can see for yourself, can't you, Brian, 'twould not be the disorderly Bohemia you seem to hate? 'Twould not be hand-to-mouth. Mind, I'm not seekin' to persuade you. So help me God, I—I want you to do just what you want to do yourself—"

"Kenny," said Brian dangerously, "if you go on one second more, you'll have me sniffling—"

Horrified and guilty, Kenny bolted for the door, his hand clenched in his hair.

"One thing more, Brian," he said, wheeling, "I—I've got to say it. I've anchored that damned stick to the psaltery with a shoestring. We—we couldn't lose it!"

And closing the door, Kenny again wiped his forehead, remembering sadly that he had planned to wind his son around his finger and induce him to return. It had been the trend of all his preparation and resolve. And now—what? He had choked back his inclination and begged Brian, with impassioned sincerity, to do precisely what would please him most.

He wondered why the anticlimax brought him—peace.

When Doctor Cole arrived an hour later he found the shack in turmoil. The truant hour of laughter and excitement, Kenny told him in a panic of remorse, had sharpened Brian's pain. His pulse was galloping. With a sigh the little doctor drugged his tossing patient into troubled sleep.

Again through a cloud of flower-spotted purple shot now with gleams of light as from a camp fire, Brian drifted unquietly, conscious of odd and unrelated things, stars that turned to eyes, a moonbeam that broke upon a pine-bough and fell in a shower of moon-silvered tears; in the tears a face that turned perversely to a pansy. Then something snapped and crackled sharply and he sat beside a camp fire, conscious of an indefinable fusing within him. Beyond in a curling milk-white mist lay the pansy, half a flower—half a face. It floated toward him, sometimes part of the smoke from his fire, sometimes but a flower-shadow in the cloud of purple. Brian strained to see it clearly and could not until the inner fusing came again and Joan stood by the fire, the sheen of moonlight on her hair.

"You did so much for him," she said, "and now—the boulder!"

Brian furrowed his forehead in painful concentration.

"I thought I did it all for Don," he said. "For months I've thought so but since something fused here in my heart, something linked to tears and stars and moonlight and the crackle of a fire, I know I did it all for you."

"For me, Brian!"

"For you!"

In the cloud of purple Joan's eyes grew round and unbelieving.

"Your face, all tears and sorrow and sweetness," said Brian stubbornly, "etched itself on my memory the night Don ran away."

"I—I did not know you saw me."

"I know now that all I did that night I did for you. Don swore at you—remember?"

The flower-like face in the purple cloud saddened. Brian distinctly heard the crackle of the camp fire.

"I thrashed him for it!"

"You said in your letter—"

"I said I would help him, yes, but I wrote and I made Don write because I could not bear to have you hurt and worried. And even at the quarry, when I was keen to be off to Whitaker, I saw your face in the mist, urging me to stay—to stay and help Don. And I did—for you. I know that all these things I did for you. I know!"

But again he was staring at a pansy and the cloud of purple floated hazily away. Tired, ill and aeons old, Brian opened his eyes.

"I'm glad you're awake," said Joan gently. "You were dreaming. Drugs frighten me."

"Nothing was clear," said Brian, touching his forehead, "but the pansy and you. And purple—like that." He pointed to her ring. "What an odd ring it is, Joan! Wistaria?"

Joan nodded, her color bright.

"Wistaria on a ladder. It's the ring Kenny gave me."

Brian's startled eyes met and held her own. "Why?" he asked.

"I'm going to marry him. Didn't you know?"

"No," said Brian. "I—I didn't know."

CHAPTER XXXVI

APRIL

April with its tender flame of green brought lagging days of worry. Brian, said Kenny wistfully, was just—not Brian. He was an irritable convalescent in a plaster cast, too nervous to be patient. His pain had been intense, the shock disastrous to his self-control. The haggard mark of it upon his face Don read with scalding heart and brooded. When after a refractory week of undisciplined nerves and temper that strained the doctor's endurance to the breaking point, Brian went out of his head for forty-eight hours and babbled like a madman about a face in the mist, Kenny in terror wired for Frank Barrington. Brian, he thought, must be frantic with pain.

Frank came, mystified and apprehensive. He found a white and apathetic patient who, with his delirium gone, denied abnormal pain.

"It isn't pain," Frank reported. "Of that I'm convinced. His head's in excellent condition and his danger of lameness is at an end. Though he resented the suggestion, I think there's something on his mind. And whatever it is, he's much too shattered nervously to give it a normal valuation."

"Keep that kid out of his room," advised Kenny hotly. "I can't. He moons around up there like a ghost. Brian admits that he's so sorry for him at times that it makes him feel sick."

"Hum!" said Frank and went in search of Don.

"I suppose you think I'm too much of a kid to have an opinion," Don told him, his face white and fierce, "but I—I did it. And I watch him more than anybody else—" He choked and blinked back boyish tears of indignation.

"Keep Mr. O'Neill out of Brian's room," he snorted. "He'd excite anybody!"

"I intend to keep you all out," was Frank's verdict in the end. "All but the nurse and Joan. Joan's not temperamental and she has nothing on her conscience. She has moreover a sedative convincing type of cheer that's a mighty good influence. The rest of you are simply on a sentimental spree of penance. You, Kenny, are so anxious to square yourself that you make him nervous and he fumes and blames himself. And Don can't look at him without remorse in his eyes. You're both too flighty and penitential for Brian's good."

Frank departed and Joan compassionately set herself to sentinel the sickroom. There were trying hours when her voice alone had power to soothe the querulous young savage whose tired eyes begged them all to forgive him.

Nurses came and nurses hopelessly departed. Brian hated and hounded them all with savage and impartial persistence. He was jarring even the little doctor out of his normal weary calm.

"I've seen him flat on the back of him before," Kenny confided to Joan in some distress, "a lamb for sense! But now he's tiring you out."

"You mustn't blame him," urged Joan. "He never asks me to come. I go always of my own accord and oftener now since Frank scolded. He's lonely without you and Donald and he hates the nurse—"

"He hates 'em all," said Kenny.

"No matter how nervous he is, I can read him to sleep."

"Ah, colleen!" There was a flash of reverence in Kenny's eyes. It mutely thanked her.

"I can't forget what he did for Don. Nor can I forget that Don's impulse—"

"Don remembers too."

Joan sighed.

"He worries me, Kenny—Don, I mean. Sometimes I think he sees in my help the one atonement he can make: he fumes and reproaches so when Brian is nervous or lonely. He even dreams of the boulder."

"And the year of study, mavourneen?"

Joan's face clouded.

"Don needs me," she said. "He would be frantic here alone. I cannot desert him."

"Nor I," said Kenny. "But the year of waiting ends at Samhain."

"Yes," said Joan, coloring. "I have given Don the money," she added. "If now he would only study!"

"He shall!" said Kenny and set himself to the finishing of Brian's winter task. That sacrifice, at least, he decided, nagging Don into hours of study that were a godsend to them both, should not become an anticlimax. He had paid once—in ragged money. For Joan's sake he would pay willingly again in time. Brian and Joan and Don—and he himself, with indolence for once in his life unwelcome, would be happier for the effort. But there were moments of clash and irritation when Don's energy flagged and he flung his books aside in black disgust.

"No use," he said moodily. "I can't work. I've got too much on my mind."

Kenny merely looked at him.

Don flushed.

"Mr. O'Neill," he barked.

"Shut up!" thundered Kenny, "I don't propose to quarrel now or at any other time."

They glared at each other in nervous indignation.

"Brian," Kenny added with a sniff, "was sure you could swing it. I never was. You need balance and a sense of responsibility."

Don gritted his teeth and worked in an inexhaustible spurt of endurance.

"Stop wandering around the room and kicking things," Kenny commanded more than once with his own hand clenched in his hair. "If you don't remember, you don't remember, and that's an end of it. Here's the book. Look it over while I'm smoking."

Once when the clash had a suspicious ring of familiarity, he grinned.

"What's the matter?" demanded Don huffily. "What are you laughing at? Me?"

"No," said Kenny. "I was just thinking of a man I know. Name's Whitaker."

Thus May came with a warm wind of spice and fresh misgivings furrowed the doctor's brow.

"Now that the windows are opened so much," he fretted, "the rumble of that quarry is inferno. The blasts bother him?"

"He jumps," said Joan.

"I thought so. He must have peace and quiet. If Mr. O'Neill is willing, we'll move him to the farm."

By the time the orchard flung out its white prayer of blossoms to the sun, the doctor had his patient at the farm.

And summer dreamed again upon the hills.

CHAPTER XXXVII

HONEYSUCKLE DAYS

Pine-sweet wind still blew around the cabin, the sylvan river laughed in the sun, wistaria hung grape-like on the ladder of vine; but over it all, to Kenny, brooded the pathos of change.

He longed wistfully for the gay vitality of that other summer when every day had been an exquisite intaglio of laughter. There were times when unreasonably he even missed Adam. How the nights in contrast had sharpened the joy of his days! And he hated the village boy who ferried the punt back and forth upon the river, hated the horn with its transforming miracles of reminiscence, for it pointed the nameless lack of sparkle now that struck melancholy into his soul. He had lived in Arcady and jealously he would have hoarded each detail of its charm.

The days were long and quiet. Life for all of them centered around the wheel-chair on the porch. There Joan read aloud while the nurse kept wisely in the background, and Hannah at meal-times set the table on the porch.

In the long afternoons of study that Kenny spent with Don, Brian asserted his independence and banished books. He seemed content to talk. Joan listened eagerly to his tales of the road, never tiring of Don's vagabond adventures. After the worried months of monotony and pain, the afternoons of reminiscence were tonic for them both. Lazy humor crept back to Brian's eyes. At times he whistled. Wind and sun were tanning his skin to the hue of health.

He had his dark hours. Every effort then to cheer him left him tired and quiet. Talk of the chain of circumstances that had, oddly, brought them all together, he avoided with a frown. Any reference to her life in New York, Joan found, plunged him into gloom. Was it, she wondered, because he knew his accident had brought her year of play and study to an end? She longed passionately to tell him how easy it had been for her—how trifling, as a sacrifice, in the face of his kindness to Don; but shyness held her back.

"Honeysuckle days!" Brian called his days of convalescence, for the vine upon the porch hung full.

"Is it so hot in the pines?" he wondered one sultry afternoon.

"No," said Joan. "There it's always dark and cool and quiet. When you can walk, Brian, you must see the cabin."

Heat quivered visibly in the valley. A faint breeze frolicked now and then upon the ridge, fluttering the honeysuckle and the pages of an open book upon the table.

"I'm glad it isn't," said Brian in relief. "Somehow I can't imagine Kenny off there in a hot cabin striding up and down and grilling Don. He's so—so combustible. As a matter of fact," he added, "I can't imagine him in any sort of cabin grilling Don. Soft-hearted lunatic!"

"Don gets awfully on his nerves," said Joan, shaking her head. "If it wasn't that he's doing it for you—"

"For me, Joan!"

Joan nodded.

"What you began, he'll finish for you. He said so. It bothered him that all those dreary months you spent at the quarry just to help Don might be in vain. Don went so dreadfully to pieces."

"Sentimental old hothead," grumbled Brian, touched and pleased. "I love him for it."

"I wonder if you realize how much he cares!"

"For—you?" asked Brian quietly. "Yes."

"No, no," said Joan, coloring. "For you. For you he has worked through splendidly to—to less of self. And so has Don. It's a wonderful tribute, Brian. To inspire something fine and beautiful is fine and beautiful itself."

Brian stared uncomfortably at a red barn in the valley.

"To have something dormant inside that catches fire and burns up splendidly into unselfishness is better," he said. "This porch is like a throne. One sits up here among the honeysuckles and finds a world of summer at his feet."

"Last summer," remembered Joan, "Kenny used to tell me over and over again that you were all things in one. All, Brian. Think of it! Almost," she finished demurely, "I came to believe it."

Brian glanced at her in droll suspicion. Her eyes laughed at him with the wholesome mischief of a child.

"Almost!" he countered. "I insist upon my full meed of perfection. When did I lose it?"

"When you hounded the nurse—"

"Plural noun," amended Brian wryly.

"Plural," agreed Joan. "I knew then that the idol had clay feet."

Brian groaned.

"Haven't you?"

"Yes," he said. "And a clay head. But I was never an idol."

"Oh, yes you were!" said Joan. "When you gave up your trip abroad to help Don, you became to me a wonderful sort of—of selfless young god—"

"Joan!" He stared at her in panic.

"Truly. And I'd rather have you human. I always thought of you with thankful worship—"

"I approve the attitude," said Brian mischievously. "Please state when and why discontinued."

"The minute I met you."

"Phew! That I consider unnecessarily heartless candor. Did you ever hear of tempering the wind to the shorn lamb?"

"If I had met you in the end, alive and well," said Joan thoughtfully, "I would have kept you up there on your pedestal out of mortal reach but you came into my life, hurt and pitiful, and you needed help, my sort of help, and something humanized you. You were no longer a god. You were something human—"

"Thank God for that!" said Brian.

"Besides," added Joan, twinkling, "you had clay feet. Garry wrote me that you had an Irish temper—"

"And I told you to write him!"

"I asked him all about you," said Joan. "He wrote me such a splendid letter. It made me like you—more. And you can't know what it meant when you wrote and pledged yourself to help Don."

"Garry is my press agent," said Brian with a sniff, "I pay him. And I'll dock him for the part about my temper."

"Brian, so often I—I've wanted to thank you!"

"Don't," he begged. "Please don't. What I did—you see," he stammered, "it just—happened."

"Like the letter you wrote to me, praising someone else to guarantee your own respectability. Is it always someone else, Brian? Don't you ever think of yourself?"

"Lying here," said Brian moodily, "I've thought of little else. There's Hannah with the tablecloth. It can't be six o'clock."

"It is," said Joan. "And Mr. Abbott's coming to supper."

She fled in a panic.

"Will the child never have done with chains?" Hannah demanded as the weeks slipped by.

"When it wasn't Don, it was old Adam. And now it's someone else. And Mr. O'Neill's got more patience, Hughie, than I ever thought was in him."

"I like him better t'other way," said Hughie. "Things is livelier. I'd sooner be diggin' dots than dronin' along so poky."

"It's my opinion," put in Hannah tartly, "that last summer just about spoiled your taste for anything but the life of a pirate. If you must have somebody throwin' a bottle at your head or dumpin' ministers into the river or diggin' treasure, things have come to a pretty pass."

Hughie whistled.

"I ain't the only one that's restless," he defended. "Don's as contraptious as a mule. And I've caught a look in young O'Neill's eye once or twice like old Sim's black mare, mettlesome and anxious to bolt."

"Until Joan slips into a chair with a book or some work," snapped Hannah. "Then he's a lamb. If I was Mr. O'Neill I'd thrash Don into common sense and I'd remind t'other young man, son or no son, that the nurse ain't earnin' her keep. Joan's earnin' it for her."

Alone, Kenny owned, one can not be gay and lunch in glens where the wee folk hide and whisper. And Joan and he himself had chains. He accepted the summer with a wry grimace, reading in its irksome demands a chance for real requital. He found no bitterness in the cup he had set himself to drink. It was the price of Brian's welfare and Brian's peace of mind. But he hungered for Joan and the long, gay days of another summer. When had she grown up so, he wondered impatiently. He missed the romping child with the sun shadows in her hair; he missed her eager tears and laughter. To his skillful touch they had been but strings of a beautiful harp, subtly, unfailingly responsive. Ah! she had been a beautiful promise—that starved child of a summer ago—but the promise fulfilled in the woman, he owned with a rush of feeling, he loved more. Her essential tenderness, strumming kindred chords in his sensitive Celtic soul, aroused an unfamiliar sense of the holiness of love.

And he was splendidly afire with dreams.

In July the little doctor found his patient strong enough for crutches and dismissed the nurse. And unexpectedly John Whitaker arrived, growling his opinion of the rural trains.

"Can you walk without your crutches?" he barked, his glasses oddly moist.

"A little," said Brian.

Whitaker sat down and blinked.

"You don't deserve a job," he grumbled, "turning me down for a dynamite spree, but I'm going to send you to Ireland in the fall. There's a story there—a big one. If," he added grimly, "you can manage to get in."

Late August found the tension of worry at an end. Brian at last was walking. And Don had fought a battle with his books and won.

Kenny's spirits soared.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

ARCADY ELUDES A SEEKER

"Come," Kenny begged one night when the dusk lay thick in the valley. "Let's pace the Gray Man, Joan, in Garry's car. Nobody needs you now as much as I."

His bright dark face pleaded.

The girl smiled.

"Kenny, Kenny, Kenny," she said, "will you ever grow up?"

"Did Peter Pan? Better get your cloak, dear. You may need it."

He went off whistling to the barn. Kenny had blessed the car and Garry many times. He blessed them again as the engine throbbed in the dusk. Hot silence lay upon the ridge, broken only by the noise of insects.

"A long road and a straight road and Samhain at the end!" he sang as Joan climbed in. "And bless the Irish heart of me, dear, there's a moon scrambling up behind the hill and peeping over. Lordy, Lordy!" he added under his breath, "what a moon!"

"'On such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew
And with an unthrift love did run to Venice
As far as—'

"Hum! I've forgotten. Wonder why Shakespeare looked ahead and harpooned me with that word unthrift. Where to, Jessica? Where shall the unthrift lover drive on such a night?"

Joan stared absently at the road ahead.

"To Ireland," she said.

The answer pleased him.

"I mind me," he said instantly, "of an Irish tale of Finn McCoul."

Joan did not answer.

"Tell me," she said at last. "Finn and you are always delightful."

Kenny stared at her in marked reproach.

"Joan!" he exclaimed.

"What—what is it, Kenny?"

"That's just the sort of polite nothing you learned in New York!"

"I'm sorry, Kenny. I'm—tired. And just for a minute I wasn't listening. You know how it is. You hear an echo in your mind a long while after and answer in a panic." She brushed her cheek against his sleeve with a remorseful gesture of appeal. His arm went round her.

"There!" he said with a sigh of relief. "That's better. I'm lonesome when we're not in tune."

"And the story?"

Kenny told of a fairy face that Finn had seen in a lake among the heather.

"Leaf-brown eyes had the nymph, I take it, and satin-cream skin with a rose showin' through and allurin' lashes maybe dipped in the ink-pots of the fairies."

"What," said Joan from the shelter of his arm, "is a blarney stone?"

"A substitute for lips!" said Kenny instantly and kissed her.

"And Finn?"

"Plunged into the waters of the lake, he did, as any son of Erin would—and found the maid."

But Joan's eyes were absently fixed upon the road again and Kenny abandoned his legend with a sigh until he bethought himself to use its climax in reproach.

"And when Finn reappeared, he was an old, old man, as old as a man may feel when his lady's attention wanders."

Joan colored and laughed, her eyes faintly mischievous, wholly apologetic.

"Finn's youth," Kenny gallantly assured her, "was restored to him by magic and surely there is magic in a woman's smile."

They motored on in a silence that Kenny found depressing. When would Arcady come again, he wondered rebelliously, wistful for the sparkle of that other summer when fairies, silver-shod, had danced upon the moonlit lake. The strain of worry had tired them both.

The wind swept coolly toward them sweet with pine. Wind and pine up here were always mingling. A night—a moon for lovers! The clasp of his arm tightened.

The peace of the night was insistent. After all with worry at an end Arcady might not lie so very far away—it was creeping into his heart, sweet with the music of many trees. Joan too perhaps—he stole a glance at the girl's face, colorless in the moonlight like some soft, exquisite flower—and drew up the emergency brake with a jerk. Her lashes were wet.

"Joan," he exclaimed, "you're not crying!"

She tried to smile and buried her face on his shoulder.

"I think," she said forlornly, "it—it's just because everything has turned out so—so nicely."

He motored homeward, ill at ease, aware after a time that the girl cradled in his arm had fallen asleep. Her tears worried him.

"But I'm quite all right now, Kenny," she protested as they drove up the lane. "It's partly the heat. Why didn't you wake me?"

He swung her lightly to the ground.

"I liked to think I was helping you rest," he said gently. "You need it. Don't wait, dear. It's late."

He climbed back in the car and glided off barnwards, waving his arm. Joan went slowly up the stairway to her room.

Latticed moonlight lay upon a chair by the window. She dropped into it, weary and inert, grateful for the rushing sound of the river; it soothed her with familiar music. A clock downstairs chimed the hour, then the half—and then another hour. Below in the moonlight a man was climbing up from the river.

"Brian," she called breathlessly, "is it you?"

"Yes."

"Dr. Cole will scold. It's twelve o'clock."

Brian tossed his cigarette away with a sigh.

"He'll never know. I've been sitting down there in the punt. The river's silver. Come down for a while," he implored. "All evening I've been as lonely as a leper. Ever since you motored off with Kenny, Don's been a grouch. Can't you climb down the vine?"

"I—I can't, Brian."

"Please, Joan. I'll tell Kenny myself in the morning."

"No," said Joan. "I—can't. I—I wish I could."

"So do I," said Brian. He walked away.

Shaking and sobbing, Joan flung herself upon the bed.

"Sid writes me you're home," Kenny wrote to Garry in September. "What about the car? Come up for a while and drive it home. We can do some sketching. Brian's full of Irish melancholy and waiting for word from Whitaker. He may go any time. Joan's tired and busy with clothes. Don's cranky and I'm rather at a loose end, hunting things to do."

Puzzled, Garry went.

"I can't make out what's wrong," he wrote to Sid, "Kenny's rational enough, but Brian's strung to the breaking point. I suspect it's just as it always has been—they're miserable apart and hopeless together. But the year has been a sobering one, and what used to flash, they bottle up. In my opinion the sooner Brian gets away the better. He's not himself."