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 proneness 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 apron
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-fashioned 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 passionately
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.