THE CHAIR BY THE FIRE
He went with her as far as he dared, and turned back with shining eyes
and stumbling feet. He did not afterward remember his supper or what
he had eaten, though Hannah at his command had set the table in the
kitchen and Hughie had talked sensibly of pumpkins. He did not
remember climbing the stairs to Adam's room. The one thing that jarred
through his dreamy feeling of detachment was the old man's face.
"You're late!" he said.
"Yes," said Kenny happily, "I am." Even now with Adam's piercing eyes
upon him, he had a feeling of invincibility; as if, aloof in the aerial
sphere in which he seemed to float, he could shut the old man out.
Adam stared at him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His
face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore
strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once and be
on his guard.
"'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids.
And to-night the hills are open and the fairies are all out a-temptin'
mortals. I myself have heard the fairy pipes showerin' sweetness
everywhere. Wonderful music, Adam! Silver-soft and allurin' and the
kind you can't forget! It throws you into a trance and fills you with
beautiful longing. I forgot to come home. There! I must tell Hannah
to put a light under the churn to-night. Then the fairies, hating
fire, can't bewitch it."
[Illustration: "'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of
the druids."]
Adam stared at him blankly. He was in mad mood, this Irishman. His
eyes, ardently blue and tender and intense, danced with incautious
gleams of laughter. His color was high. He was gay and utterly
friendly.
An odd jealous hunger sprang up in the invalid's eyes.
"Are you mad?" he demanded.
"Quite!" said Kenny.
"More like," said the old man tartly, "you're drunk."
"Drunk," nodded Kenny, "with heather ale. Only the fairies know how to
make it now. And who wouldn't be drunk in the head of him to-night
with the Good People dancing on the hills and the dead dancing with
them."
Adam frowned and shivered.
"You Irish," he said harshly, "are as morbid as you are poetic."
"'Tis all a part of the night," cried Kenny gayly and poured himself
some brandy. "The druids," he remembered, "poured libations on the
ground to propitiate the evil spirits and the spirits of the dead; but,
Adam, I'm drinking to-night to Destiny! To Destiny," he added under
his breath, "and the foreverness of her gift!"
"What gift," demanded Adam Craig, "are you trying to clinch with a gift
to yourself of my brandy?"
"The gift," said Kenny cryptically, "of--Life!"
Well, he had spoken truth there. Life was love and love was life and
perhaps until now he'd known neither.
Still the old man stared at him in dazed and sullen envy. His wild
vitality seemed a barrier impossible to surmount.
"And it isn't just Samhain," said Kenny, setting down his glass. "Ugh,
Adam, your brandy's abominable! It's the Eve of All Souls. To-night
the dead revisit their homes. Once I remember when I was tramping
through Ireland, an old woman left a chair by the fireside that the
spirit of her son might come back to her. She even left some embers in
the fire."
"That," said Adam Craig with a shudder, "will be enough of your damned
ghosts and fairies."
Afterward to Kenny the evening was always a blur but he knew they had
gotten on badly. And Adam, quiet and sullen, had drunk more than usual.
Kenny sparkled through the evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to
everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling
curiously light and iridescent.
He meant not to sleep. He meant to roll the shades to the top and with
the cold wind upon his face and the stars winking in silver beneficence
overhead, to lie awake and think until the dawn came. He slept
soundly, dreaming of thistledown and a little old woman in a green
cloak who came out of a hill and played a tune upon a sort of
lantern-flute. The notes had winged off in bars of music written in
fire against the darkness. He had not finished the dream when he was
awakened by someone knocking at his door.
It was Hughie, his face pale and disturbed.
"Mr. O'Neill," he said, "I'm wondering if you'd drive down to the
village and telephone the doctor to come here first. Mr. Craig's had a
bad fall. He's unconscious."
"Unconscious!" exclaimed Kenny, changing color. "How on earth, Hughie,
did he fall?"
"I don't know," said Hughie sadly. "He must have climbed out of bed in
the night."
"But, Hughie, he couldn't!"
"He could stagger a step or two," explained Hughie. "Not far. The
trouble's in his spine. But he never dragged himself so far before."
"How far?"
"From his bed to his sitting room. I found him in a heap by the fire."
"Poor devil!" said Kenny, shocked.
He dressed quickly. Hannah helped him hitch the old mare to the buggy
and found him nervous and unfamiliar with his task. Kenny drove off
down the lane, oppressed by the bleak wind and the bare black tangle of
branches ahead of him. The tragic effort of Adam's wasted legs had
left him startled and uneasy. For the life of him he could not put out
of his mind the tale of the old Irish woman and the chair she had left
by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son. It
had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder. It bothered Kenny now.
He wished he hadn't remembered it last night or to-day. But the sound
of Nellie's hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more
recurrent than his own foreboding. It filled him with sadness and
guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a
drunken fit of superstition. Seeking what? Someone he had _wronged_?
The sinister spark inflamed his fancy. His brain whirled.
Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the
widow's bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before.
Then too Adam had fallen forward in his chair unconscious.
Nellie stumbled and jolted Kenny into sanity. He put his thoughts
aside in horror. But dreadful strings of mystery converged
persistently to one point: Adam Craig, the pitiful old miser who for
some reason huddled every book in the farmhouse on his shelves. Fate
cruelly had brought melancholy into this, the first morning of his
love. Kenny shivered with resentment.
He telephoned the doctor's farm and found him ready to start his weary
ambulant day; hamlet to hamlet, farm to farm, until dusk and often
after. The bare thought of it filled Kenny with sympathetic gloom.
Then his brain began again to burn in speculation. Frowning, he turned
back homewards up the hill and through the wood, where the road lay,
rough and lonely.
With his mind upon it he evolved Nellie from her harness and led her
into the stall. When he had done with her halter he found that Joan
had slipped into the barn and stood a little way off, her soft eyes
intent upon him.
"Joan!" he exclaimed radiantly. The sight of her was like a lilac wind
in fog. The fog fled and you found the world clear and fragrant.
She came to him instantly, her face like a colorless flower, a faint
shadow in her eyes.
"Colleen!" said Kenny. He kissed her gently. Again he was conscious
with a flurried feeling of impatience that the force of his tenderness
would not rise to his lips. He whose words of love had been so fluent
and poetic!
"Hannah sent me," said Joan. "She was afraid you wouldn't know how to
get Nellie out of the shafts. Oh, Kenny!" There was quick compassion
in her eyes.
"Let's not think of sorrowful things, dear!" said Kenny swiftly. "I
dreamed of a lantern."
"And I," said Joan, the rich rose tints he loved flaming in her face,
"I dreamed of you."
Kenny choked back the tender untruth he would have liked to utter. For
an instant he hated the little old fairy in the green cloak who had
come forth from the hill in his dream. How easy for the dream-god to
have made her--Joan!
"Joan," he said wistfully, "you're sure you love me!"
"Yes," said Joan. "There is no one in my life I love so well."
"And it will last?"
Disturbed she glanced at him, her eyes dark with rebuke.
"Until the judgment day!" persisted Kenny.
"Kenny," she said, "why do you speak so strangely. Love is love, isn't
it? And if you who have known all things love me, how much more must I
who have lived so much alone, love and cling to you?"
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
passionately 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.