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 hoarded 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
asserted 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 circumstances 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 passionately 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
god--"
"Joan!" He stared at her in panic.
"Truly. And I'd rather have you human. I always thought of you with
thankful worship--"
"I approve the attitude," said Brian mischievously. "Please state
when and why discontinued."
"The minute I met you."
"Phew! That I consider unnecessarily heartless candor. Did you ever
hear of tempering the wind to the shorn lamb?"
"If I had met you in the end, alive and well," said Joan thoughtfully,
"I would have kept you up there on your pedestal out of mortal reach
but you came into my life, hurt and pitiful, and you needed help, my
sort of help, and something humanized you. You were no longer a god.
You were something human--"
"Thank God for that!" said Brian.
"Besides," added Joan, twinkling, "you had clay feet. Garry wrote me
that you had an Irish temper--"
"And I told you to write him!"
"I asked him _all_ about you," said Joan. "He wrote me such a splendid
letter. It made me like you--more. And you can't know what it meant
when you wrote and pledged yourself to help Don."
"Garry is my press agent," said Brian with a sniff, "I pay him. And
I'll dock him for the part about my temper."
"Brian, so often I--I've wanted to thank you!"
"Don't," he begged. "Please don't. What I did--you see," he
stammered, "it just--happened."
"Like the letter you wrote to me, praising someone else to guarantee
your own respectability. Is it always someone else, Brian? Don't you
ever think of yourself?"
"Lying here," said Brian moodily, "I've thought of little else.
There's Hannah with the tablecloth. It can't be six o'clock."
"It is," said Joan. "And Mr. Abbott's coming to supper."
She fled in a panic.
"Will the child never have done with chains?" Hannah demanded as the
weeks slipped by.
"When it wasn't Don, it was old Adam. And now it's someone else. And
Mr. O'Neill's got more patience, Hughie, than I ever thought was in
him."
"I like him better t'other way," said Hughie. "Things is livelier.
I'd sooner be diggin' dots than dronin' along so poky."
"It's my opinion," put in Hannah tartly, "that last summer just about
spoiled your taste for anything but the life of a pirate. If you must
have somebody throwin' a bottle at your head or dumpin' ministers into
the river or diggin' treasure, things have come to a pretty pass."
Hughie whistled.
"I ain't the only one that's restless," he defended. "Don's as
contraptious as a mule. And I've caught a look in young O'Neill's eye
once or twice like old Sim's black mare, mettlesome and anxious to
bolt."
"Until Joan slips into a chair with a book or some work," snapped
Hannah. "Then he's a lamb. If I was Mr. O'Neill I'd thrash Don into
common sense and I'd remind t'other young man, son or no son, that the
nurse ain't earnin' her keep. Joan's earnin' it for her."
Alone, Kenny owned, one can not be gay and lunch in glens where the wee
folk hide and whisper. And Joan and he himself had chains. He
accepted the summer with a wry grimace, reading in its irksome demands
a chance for real requital. He found no bitterness in the cup he had
set himself to drink. It was the price of Brian's welfare and Brian's
peace of mind. But he hungered for Joan and the long, gay days of
another summer. When had she grown up so, he wondered impatiently. He
missed the romping child with the sun shadows in her hair; he missed
her eager tears and laughter. To his skillful touch they had been but
strings of a beautiful harp, subtly, unfailingly responsive. Ah! she
had been a beautiful promise--that starved child of a summer ago--but
the promise fulfilled in the woman, he owned with a rush of feeling, he
loved more. Her essential tenderness, strumming kindred chords in his
sensitive Celtic soul, aroused an unfamiliar sense of the holiness of
love.
And he was splendidly afire with dreams.
In July the little doctor found his patient strong enough for crutches
and dismissed the nurse. And unexpectedly John Whitaker arrived,
growling his opinion of the rural trains.
"Can you walk without your crutches?" he barked, his glasses oddly
moist.
"A little," said Brian.
Whitaker sat down and blinked.
"You don't deserve a job," he grumbled, "turning me down for a dynamite
spree, but I'm going to send you to Ireland in the fall. There's a
story there--a big one. If," he added grimly, "you can manage to get
in."
Late August found the tension of worry at an end. Brian at last was
walking. And Don had fought a battle with his books and won.
Kenny's spirits soared.