Kenny Part 51

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 x.x.xVII

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 h.o.a.rded 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 a.s.serted 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d--"

"Joan!" He stared at her in panic.