Kenny Part 11

"Wonderful!" repeated Kenny with a vague air of enthusiasm. But he rather wished she hadn't said it.

"What will you do?"

"I shall find an inn," said Kenny firmly, "and stay here until you do hear."

"There is no inn."

"Then," said Kenny irresponsibly, "I shall camp here under the willow, buying beans. I have a can opener."

He caught in Joan's eyes a glint of gold and laughter and glanced wistfully across the river at the house upon the cliff. It was undeniably roomy.

"If only your house had been an inn!" he said. "An old, old ramshackle inn, quaint and archaic like the punt yonder and your gown! It's such a wonderful spot."

Joan met his eyes and made no pretense of misunderstanding. She could not.

"Your uncle!" exclaimed Kenny with an air of inspiration and then looked apologetic.

The girl's face flamed. Oddly enough she looked at her gown. Kenny wondered why. He found her distress and the hot color of her face mystifying and lovely.

"I--I know he would!" said Joan in a low voice and looked away. "The house is large. Rooms and rooms of it. And only Uncle and I, save Hughie and his family. Hughie works the farm and lives yonder in the kitchen wing."

Kenny reached for his knapsack and started toward the boat.

"Thank Heaven, that's settled!" he said pleasantly. "You saw for yourself what Garry said about work. Honestly, Miss West, I ought to work. I ought to put in a summer sketching. I can sketch here and wait."

The punt, flat-bottomed and old, he proclaimed a delight. When the girl did not answer he turned and found her staring. She seemed a little dazed.

"I'm thinking," said Joan, her eyes round and grave with astonishment, "how you seem always to have been here."

He laughed, his color high. His face, Joan thought, was much too young and vivid for anybody's father. Their eyes met in new and difficult readjustment and Kenny, his heart turbulent, turned back to the punt.

It was in his mind gallantly to scull the thing across. The announcement brought Joan to the edge of the water in a panic.

"You'd scull us both into a rock!" she exclaimed. "The river is full of them. I know the best way over."

"Professional jealousy!" retorted Kenny, his eyes droll and tender. "I suppose you belong to the ferryman's union." He dropped his knapsack into the boat and busied himself with the painter. "If the boat had two oars," he told her laughing, "or I one arm, I know I could manage.

As it is, one oar and two arms--"

"It's much better," said Joan sensibly, "than two oars and one arm.

Please get in."

She went to the stern and stood there, waiting, one hand upon the oar.

Fascinated, Kenny climbed in.

What a ferryman! he mused as Joan sculled the punt from sh.o.r.e. What a gown and what a background! The old brocade, flapping in the wind, was gold like the afterglow behind the gables and the soft, haunting shadows in the girl's eyes and hair. What an ecstasy of unreality!

Boat and ferryman seemed some exquisite animate medallion of another age.

Garry could have told him it was the way he saw his pictures, romantic in his utter abandon, but Garry was not there and Kenny with his head in the clouds rushed on to his doom. The punt was a fairy boat sailing him over a silver river to Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight. Ah! Hy Brazil! You saw it on clear days and it receded when you followed. It was a melancholy thought and true. The madness never lasted.

There are those for whom the present is merely antic.i.p.ation of the future or reminiscence of the past. Kenny had the supreme gift of living intensely and joyously in the present and the present for him shone in the soft brown eyes of the ferryman in the stern. Past and future he shrugged to the winds. For he was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery. Yes, surely to mystery! Mystery enough for any Celt in the battered horn, the ferry and the ferryman yonder in the old-time gown.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely to mystery.]

"It was down there," said Joan, nodding, "where the river bends, that Brian had his camp."

Brian's name was a shock. Kenny came to earth for an instant. Only for an instant. The monochrome of gold behind the gables was drifting into color. Here between the wooded heights where the river ran, already there was shadow. Twilight and afterglow! Kenny in poetic vein told of the Gray Man of the Path. The Path was in Ireland, a fissure in the cliff at Fairhead. If you climbed well you could use the Gray Man's Path and scale the cliff. Kenny himself had climbed it.

Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it.

She was eager and intent.

"I suppose," said Kenny, "that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists of Benmore. But to me he's always Twilight. Twilight anywhere."

The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.

"And to-night," she said, "his path is the river. He's coming now."

Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.

With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the path. It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a rude step fas.h.i.+oned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.

Kenny stood stock-still. Fate, he told himself, needed nothing further for his utter undoing. And if she did, it lay here in the orchard. He had come in blossom time.

Well, thanks to the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew precisely what it meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and blossoms and the disillusion of intrusive fact!

Joan, lovelier to Kenny's eye than any blossom, seemed unaware of the romance in the orchard. She was intent upon a man coming down the orchard hill. Kenny sighed as he turned his eyes from her.

"It's Hughie," she said. "He's watched for you too since the letter came. We all have. Hughie! Hughie!"

Hughie came toward them, st.u.r.dy, middle-aged and unpoetic for all his head was under blossoms.

"Hughie!" called Joan. "It's Mr. O'Neill. He must have some supper.

Tell Hannah. And I'll go speak to Uncle Adam."

Romance flitted off through the twilight with her. Hungry, Kenny embarked upon a reactive interval of common sense and followed Hughie, who seemed inclined to talk of rain, to the kitchen door. It was past the supper hour. Beyond in a huge, old-fas.h.i.+oned kitchen, yellow with lamp light, Hughie's daughter, a ruddy-cheeked girl plump and wholesome as an apple, was was.h.i.+ng dishes. Kenny liked her. He liked the s.h.i.+ning kitchen. The wood was dark and old. He liked too the tiny bird-like wife who trotted to the door at Hughie's call. Her hair was white and scant, her skin ruddy, her eyes as small and black as berries.

Kenny made her his slave. He begged to eat in the kitchen.

Joan found him there a little later with everything in the pantry spread before him. His voice, gay and charming, sounded as if he had liked Hannah for a very long time. And Hannah's best lamp was on the table. There was a pleasant undercurrent of excitement in the kitchen.

Joan found her guest's engaging air of adaptability bewildering. He seemed all ease and sparkle.

At the rustle of her gown in the doorway, he sprang to his feet.

"Please sit down," she said, coloring at the unaccustomed deference.

"I've a message from Uncle Adam. He understands about your son. He said you may wait here as long as you choose. In any room."

Trotting flurried paths to the pantry and the stove, Hannah at this point must needs halt midway between the two with the teapot in her hand to tell the tale of Kenny's considerate plea for supper in the kitchen. Though it had been largely a matter of old wood and lamp-yellow shadows, Kenny wished that a number of people who had never troubled to be just and call him considerate could hear what she said.

Thank Heaven his self-respect was returning. These simple people were splendidly intuitional. They understood. An agreeable wave of confidence in his own judgment filled him with benevolence. He was to lose that confidence strangely in a little while. It came to him sitting there that he felt much as he had felt in the old care-free past before Brian had deserted, plunging him into abysmal despair.

"Perhaps to-night," Joan said, "you'd better sleep wherever Hannah says. And then tomorrow you can pick a room for yourself."