Kenny Part 31

He kissed her hair and pressed his cheek against it where the shadows were soft and golden.

"I want you, heart of mine," he said steadily, "to love me in this wonderful way that I love you. There are ways and ways of loving."

That, in her girlhood dream of love, she could not see. And Kenny was pa.s.sionately glad that his words were a riddle.

Then the horn came, clear and mellow, through the cold November air and Joan drew the hood of her cloak about her head.

Kenny sighed. He clung to her hand as she started away.

"Girleen," he said soberly, "the wind's cold. Must you ferry the river in winter, too?"

"Save when there's ice," said Joan. "The bridge is three long miles away."

From the barn doorway he watched the flutter of her cloak as she hurried down the path to the river.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

Kenny went back to the kitchen, hungry and depressed. To his fancy, as eager at times in its morbidity as in its lighter sparkle, the shadow of death seemed brooding over the farmhouse. This an hour later the weary little doctor confirmed. He had tired shadows around his eyes, that doctor; he seemed always bored to death at the p.r.o.neness of mankind to ills and aches and babies; and his kind tired voice never lost its drawl no matter what the crisis.

"It isn't just the spine trouble, Mr. O'Neill," he said. "With that alone he'd likely linger on for years. And it isn't the trouble here in his chest. That's chronic and unimportant. It's the brandy. He drinks a quart a night and he won't give it up."

"I know."

The doctor shook his head and pursed his lips.

"I think he'll just slip away without regaining consciousness. Pulse is barely a flutter. Joan can tend him. She's done it before. Every now and then for a good many years he's had a bedfast spell. Poor child!" The doctor cleared his throat. "Well, Mr. O'Neill, such is life! I'll stop back to-night on my way home."

Distraught and rebellious, Kenny fought the girl's refusal to let Hannah take her place. She hid the mended gown he hated under an ap.r.o.n of Hannah's, slipped into his arms and out again with tears upon her cheeks, and fled from his protestations with her hands upon her ears.

Kenny followed her to the door of Adam's sitting room, frantic with distress. Verily, he thought, as the door closed gently in his face, the quality of Joan's mercy was not strained. It came like Portia's gentle rain from Heaven. It forgot and forgave and condoned. But the thought of her, flowerlike in the shadow of death, was unendurable.

Anxious to help, Kenny sculled the old punt back and forth, whenever the horn blew, until dusk. He had humbly pledged himself to curb a tendency to speed and excitement and therefore ferried the river well until a wind rose at twilight, clouds thickened overhead and a spatter of rain blew into his face. Then his patience waned and he tacked an enormous sign upon the willow under one of Hughie's lanterns. Owing to illness, it said, the ferry had been discontinued. Afterward he went to tell Joan what he had done, and met the doctor on the stairway.

"By morning," he nodded slowly, answering Kenny's look. "Yes, I'm afraid he'll be gone. I'd like to stay, Mr. O'Neill, for Joan's sake.

But there's a baby coming over at the Jensen farm. There always is.

And my duty as I see it is more with life than with death."

"I'll stay with him," said Kenny. "Joan must rest."

But she would not.

"Donald should be here too," she said. "We are all he has."

"Then," said Kenny, his lips white, "I shall stay here with you."

The night closed in with gusty showers of rain. There was no sound from the high old-fas.h.i.+oned bed where Adam Craig lay, gray and still.

The silence, the gloom of dark wood, the grotesque shadows from a lamp burning dimly on the bureau and the loud licking of the clock drove Kenny with a shudder to the window. Death to him who so pa.s.sionately loved life's gayety and its music was more a thing of horror than of grief. He found no solace in the wind and rain of the autumn night.

They plunged him instead into a mood of morbid imagery. The weird music of the wind became Ireland's cry of lament for her dead. The tossing boughs beyond the window, rain-spattered and somber, took on eerily the outline of dark-cloaked women keeners rocking and chanting the music of death. The rain was tears.

Ochone! Ochone! The wind of sorrow rose and fell, rose and fell, with unearthly cadence. Kenny thought of the horrible Dullahaun who roves about the country with his head under his arm and a death-warning basin of blood in his hand ready to dash in the face of the unlucky wight who answers his knock.

He shuddered and choked. Then Joan slipped into the shelter of his arm, terrified at the thought of death, cried and watched the rain with him.

Adam Craig died at dawn with the rain he hated beating at the window.

And peace came wanly to his wrinkled face.

CHAPTER XXII

IN THE CABIN

They were hard days for Kenny, who hated gloom save when it was picturesque and transient. And they were harder for the pity and misgiving in his heart. He himself perhaps had hastened the old man's death with a careless story. Why had it bothered him? Why had it goaded his wasted legs to horrible effort?

Ordinarily Kenny knew he would have resented the intrusion of alien sorrow into his life. He hated sorrow. Now for Joan's sake he made himself a part of it. If Joan must endure it, so could he. But he sickened at the need.

He was doomed to a tragic, unforgettable hour in the churchyard when the voice of the old minister, conventional in its sadness, droned wearily into his very soul:

"Ashes to ashes . . . dust to dust." . . . The clock turned back and he stood in a church by an Irish hill. White and terrified, Kenny remembered what in its vivid agony of detail he would fain have forgotten. Why, now, when Joan was slipping into his life, a lonely waif of a girl in a black gown he hated, why must he think years back to that soft-eyed Irish girl and Brian? Had he broken his pledge to her, driving her son away with a pa.s.sion of self no less definite for its careless gayety? Eileen's son! Eileen's son! Sadness tore at Kenny's heart and twitched at his dry, white lips. Ah! why must he live again that agonizing day when Eileen had gone out of his life forever?

The voice went on, funereal, gentle. Kenny's eyes blurred. Sweat came coldly forth upon his forehead. At the first thud of earth he choked and turned away, the pain unbearable. Adam Craig had driven his nephew away . . . with a pa.s.sion of self . . . and he had died with mercy at his bedside, not love. A pa.s.sionate hunger for Brian stirred in Kenny's heart and made him lonely. Ah! how farcical his penance! Some nameless thing of self linked him to Adam Craig. The thought was horrible. Some nameless thing linked each mournful detail of to-day to the tragedy of long ago. . . . And then mercifully the thing became a blur of November wind, a monotonous voice of sorrow, the thud of earth and the end.

The coach toiled up the hill and Kenny, with Joan in his arms, forgot.

"Mavourneen," he said wistfully, "let's slip away, you and I, to the cabin in the pines. I want you to myself. And there in the house--"

he looked away. The thought of the old house, bleak and desolate at its best and haunted now by the sense of a presence gone, oppressed him.

Joan nodded.

"And not that dress!" begged Kenny with a shudder.

She laid her cheek against his shoulder.

"It was just for to-day, Kenny. Hannah thought it best." Her soft eyes, curiously child-like with the shadow of sadness in them, appealed to him for understanding. He kissed her, marveling afresh at the tender miracle of peace and tenderness her presence brought him.

"Had I loved Uncle a great deal more--it isn't wrong for me to say that now, Kenny?"

"It would be wrong, dear, if you made pretense of something you couldn't feel."

"I--I meant that even then I could have mourned him better with my heart than this--this dreadful dress. It would carry gloom wherever I went. And that would be selfish."

He blessed her shy intelligence and kissed her again. Then the carriage stopped at the farmhouse door and Kenny hurried up to his room to find clothes less formal and depressing. Afterward he went ahead to the cabin and built a fire.