JOAN
Thus, warm and fragrant, the summer came with Kenny in the house of Adam
Craig, drifting pleasantly he knew and cared not where; with Brian on the
road with Donald West.
And Joan? To her summer came with a new incomprehensible delight. Out
of the void a bright spirit had roved into her world, sweeping her, eager
and unresistant, into youth and life and laughter. He came from an
immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with
tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid
face.
She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving,
this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were
cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who
had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from
her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the
hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.
There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of
incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed
upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a
personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her
uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously
to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew
not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and
many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to
the willow.
His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces
working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him
and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the
letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had
nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He
could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the
stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.
And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite
delicacy of tact and feeling. He seemed to understand the instinct for
beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother's trunks. He
understood her dreams and her hunger. He understood the spirit that had
led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be
kept apart and precious. There was another force, subtle and exacting:
the girl's burgeoning womanhood. Wistful for homage, she craved his
gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him. His frank glance of
admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute. So was his voice,
deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell. Tones of it she knew were
kept for her alone. The knowledge thrilled her. She did not know why.
By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind
with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the
other like a rain of stars. Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her
room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high,
peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told
her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and
made her cry. Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too. A tear, he
said, was always trailing an Irishman's smile. His sympathetic brogue,
smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending
fascination.
And always at the end of the day there was Kenny's Gray Man of the
Twilight stealing up the river all too soon.
Joan was not the only one to whom the sparkle of the irrepressible
Irishman's wit and humor was an energizing boon. There was Hannah and
Hetty; and Hughie, too, though he stoutly denied it. Life on the Craig
farm was no longer dull.
Kenny, at a loose end, kept the farm in ferment, evading the work Garry
had sent him, by a conscientious effort to assist others. He was glad he
could paint if the mood seized him. Denied the opportunity he knew he
would have fretted. There was one singular, inexplicable thing about
work. If there was work at hand, one could always find something else to
do, attractive and absorbing. If there wasn't work to do, the sheer
shock of it seemed to dull you into mental vacuity and loose ends of time
came up and hit you in the face. Garry had written something or other
like that sarcastically in a letter.
He helped Hannah churn and sang with a soft brogue, to her abashed
delight, a song he called "The Gurgling of the Churn." He helped Hetty
milk the roan cow and sang while Hetty's apple-cheeks bloomed redder, an
exquisite folk tune of a pretty girl who milked a cow in Ireland. Later
in the summer he even helped Hughie rake the hay and had a song for that.
As Hannah said, he seemed to have songs for everything and what he
couldn't sing he could play with dazzling skill on the old piano.
"There's 'lectricity," said Hannah, "in the very air."
"I wished," grumbled Hughie, "he'd put it in the ground instid. The air
don't need it. Workin' a farm like this on shares is like goin' to a
picnic behind old Nellie and startin' late. You just know you won't git
there. What ground up here ain't worked out is hills and stones and
hollers."
Hannah sighed.
Kenny knew with regret that he might have been a helpful factor in the
work of the farm but for a number of unforeseen reasons. When he churned
the butter never came. The roan cow disliked music and kicked over the
milk-pail with inartistic persistence. The sun on the hay made his head
ache.
As for a picturesque task for which he had no song--well, he had promised
Joan to keep away from the punt when the horn beneath the willow blew for
a ferryman. He had sculled the old white-haired minister into a rock
with delight to no one but Adam Craig, who had spent a whole evening
cackling about it. He must always remember that it had not been his
fault. The rock had merely scraped the punt while he was listening with
politeness to why the old man had "doubled up" his charge and had a
church on either side of the river. And if Mr. Abbott had not risen in
gentle alarm and begun to teeter around, Kenny in an interval of frantic
excitement would not have been forced to fish him out of the stream by
his coattails. He considered always that he saved the old man's life.
Nor had he meant to dab at him with the oar, thereby encouraging the
unfortunate old chap to duck and misinterpret his obvious intention to
save him.
But Joan had understood. That was the chief essential. Always Joan was
there upon the horizon of his day. Whatever he thought, whatever he did,
was colored by a passionate desire for the girl's approval. Her pleasure
became his delight; her smile his inspiration. In that, he told himself,
pleased to interpret all things here in the sylvan heart of solitude in
the terms of romance and mystery, he was like the chivalrous warrior of
old who found his true happiness in gallantly serving a beautiful maid.
Joan was surely such a type as chivalry conceived. She filled his Celtic
ideal and aroused all his gladness as a woman should. And she was as shy
and beautiful as a wild flower and as unspoiled. He blessed the old
gowns that quaintly framed her loveliness anew from day to day. But they
had been his undoing. He felt that he might have kept his head a little
longer but for the blaze of the gold brocade in the last light of the sun.
Laughter made her lovely. Ah, there Brian had been right. But then, he
reflected sadly, Brian was always right. That, he could surely concede,
when Fate had put an end to his quest and doomed him to linger here in
the home of a miser, waiting, waiting, yes, waiting in impatience for
word of his son. Well, perhaps he was not impatient, but at least he was
waiting. And Brian had found in Joan's face the vigor of sweetness, not
the kind that cloys. Kenny liked the words.
It was inevitable, with songs for everything, that he would have songs,
like the tenderer tones of his voice, that he kept for Joan alone, songs
that came softly to his lips when Nature stirred his fancy and Joan was
at his side in an old-time gown.
A lone pine, a wild geranium, a lark or Joan's garden where the
heliotrope grew; they were sparks to a fire of inspiration that came
forth in song.
There was one song he sang most often.
"What is it, Kenny?" Joan asked one sunset when Kenny on the farm porch
was finding the subtleties of color for her in the darkening valley below
them and the western sky above the hills.
"What's what, Arbutus, dear?" he asked with guile.
The "dear" didn't bother her. It was frequently "Hannah, dear!" and
"Hetty, dear!" and Hughie was often "Hughie, darlin'."
"Why," asked Joan, "do you call me Arbutus?"
"Because you're like one," he said gently.
"And what was the song?"
"'My Love's an Arbutus,'" said Kenny demurely. He knew at once that he
must not step so far ahead again. She looked a little frightened. Kenny
instantly called her attention to a gap in the range of hills to the west.
"Like the Devil's Bit in Ireland," he said. "There the devil, poor lad,
bit a chunk out of a mountain and not liking the morsel over well,
treated it as you and I would treat a cherry pit."
Joan laughed.
"True." said Kenny, "every word of it. I myself have seen the chunk he
threw away. Tis the Rock of Cashel. He's been bitin' again over there,
I take it. To-morrow you and I will go down into the valley, seek the
unappetizin' rock he rejected and look it over."
"I think most likely," said Joan, "the farm's built on it."
And then the sound of the horn came over the water and Joan ran.
Kenny as usual cursed the horn.
With the valley filled with the first haze of twilight and the hills
still aglow, Kenny sat on the farm porch and brooded. He had not meant
to frighten her. The Arbutus gallantry he had considered strategic and
poetic. There was the baffling thing about her that kept him piqued.
She was always shy and elusive. Of convention she knew nothing at all;
yet like the shrine in the garret she kept herself apart and precious.
Always she seemed fluttering just ahead of him, like a will-of-the-wisp.
If he touched her hand ever so gently she drew it away. The caresses
most girls he had known would have understood and accepted as part of the
summer idyl, he knew, instinctively, would be evaded.
Ah! the truth of it was she was an incomprehensible torment of delight.
For she roamed the fields and woods with him gladly, lunched in glens
remote it seemed from everything but the call of that infernal horn,
yielded to the enthusiasm of his maddest moods, romped with him like a
kitten or a child--and kept miraculously the poise and reticence of a
woman. She talked freely of her brother; never of her uncle.
He was quick and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of
the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one
mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she
followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find
it out and wily enough to feign it when in reality his heart was as light
and buoyant as a feather.
Save for the call of the horn beneath the willow, the girl was as free to
come and go as an oriole in the orchard; for that he was grateful. But
whether Adam Craig's attitude was one of trust or cold indifference, he
could not fathom. With Hughie and Hannah it was different. They loved
Joan and trusted him. That trust, he resolved, should not be futile. He
could justify it and he would. Joan, of course, was foredoomed to know
the delirium of the heart that had come to him that day beneath the
willow. Fate could not deny him requital. She never had. Equally, of
course, Joan's delirium, like his own, would not last. It could not.
The thought hurt his vanity a little.
It remained for him who had aroused it to linger here at the farm until
the fancy had run its course and she was quite herself! Even if, long
before, his own madness had waned. That was apt to happen, for he was
handicapped by an earlier start. Yes, he would linger. And he would be
scrupulous and honorable and kind. Joan was young and a woman. She
would nurse the shadows of her summer's idyl long after the idyl was
gone, and would mistake them for reality. There with his wider
experience and the sad memory of much ebb and now he could be helpful.
Kenny shivered and refused to dwell upon a phase of life that was like
autumn and sere and drifting leaves. It bothered him that the thought of
Hannah and Hughie had driven him to think it out. He liked best in heart
things to think back, not too far, and never forward.
"Kenny!" It was Joan's voice in the dusk.
Kenny forgot the sadness of his wisdom and foreboding. He forgot the
future. The thing to do always was to live in the present and now Joan's
voice, joyous and young, filled him with tenderness.
"Yes, Joan."
"The Gray Man of the Twilight's here. See, he's climbed up from the
valley and he's coming down the walk."
From the Gray Man's misty robes came the fragrance of syringa.