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Page 126
"But not in the way you love Brian."
"No."
"And that, mavourneen, is as it should be."
He told her of the stage mother. Let the lie go with the castle he had
built upon it. And he would begin afresh.
"Ah," said Joan, dismissing it with shining eyes, "there, Kenny, you
meant only to be kind."
He wondered wearily why the lie with all its torment had not shocked
her. Truth was queer.
Joan glided toward the door. He caught in her face the look of a white
flame and dropped his eyes. A Botticelli look. Ah, well, it was
beautiful to be young and joyous!
"I must tell Brian," she said.
"Yes," said Kenny. "Of course."
And she was gone. Kenny lay back in his chair and closed his eyes; the
sound of her flying feet death in his ears.
CHAPTER XLI
WHEN THE ISLE OF DELIGHT RECEDED
Often Kenny had appreciatively dramatized for himself possible minutes of
tragedy. They were always opportunities for Shakespearian soliloquy and
gesture.
Now he lay back in his chair much too tired for tragedy and gesture. And
the need of soliloquy would have found him dumb. Upper-most in his mind
was a dream in which Joan had peeped down at him from a balloon that went
ever and ever higher--like the Isle of Delight that was always--receding.
He had sensed in her to-night that aerial aloofness he had felt when he
blocked old Adam out from his dream of love. Liebestraum! The stabbing
pain in his heart grew hotter.
It was lonely here in the pines. He wondered why he had never caught
before that chill pervading sense of solitude--sad solitude. The pines
whispered. It was not merely poetry. They whispered plaintively. . . .
And he was very tired.
Rebellion came flaming into his apathy and Kenny caught his breath and
held it, fiercely striking his hands together again and again. Sacrifice
and suffering! Must it be like this? What had he written in his
notebook anyway? He seemed almost to have forgotten.
The book opened at a touch to the page he wanted.
"Sunsets and vanity," he read drearily and penciled the rebuke away with
a faint smile. Like his hairbrained, unquenchable youth, bright with
folly, the sunsets and vanity lay in the past. Vanity! Ah, dear God! he
could not feel humbler.
Nor was he irresponsible--or a failure as a parent. He had made good
to-night. Surely, surely, he had made good to-night. The one thing that
he might not mark out was his failure as a painter.
"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."
Well, he was--learning. . . . Nay, he had learned. Kenny fiercely drew
his pencil through the sentence and read the rest.
The truth, though he did not fully understand it, he would always try to
tell. He had no debts. The chairs in the studio were cleared of litter.
A plebeian regularity had made him uncomfortably provident.
So much for that part of his self-arraignment. One by one he marked the
items out and stared with a twisted smile at the next.
"I borrow Brian's girls, his money and his clothes!" Hum! Once Garry
had barked at him for sending orchids to a girl or two whom Brian liked.
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