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Page 29
It was in his mind gallantly to scull the thing across. The
announcement brought Joan to the edge of the water in a panic.
"You'd scull us both into a rock!" she exclaimed. "The river is full
of them. I know the best way over."
"Professional jealousy!" retorted Kenny, his eyes droll and tender. "I
suppose you belong to the ferryman's union." He dropped his knapsack
into the boat and busied himself with the painter. "If the boat had
two oars," he told her laughing, "or I one arm, I know I could manage.
As it is, one oar and two arms--"
"It's much better," said Joan sensibly, "than two oars and one arm.
Please get in."
She went to the stern and stood there, waiting, one hand upon the oar.
Fascinated, Kenny climbed in.
What a ferryman! he mused as Joan sculled the punt from shore. What a
gown and what a background! The old brocade, flapping in the wind, was
gold like the afterglow behind the gables and the soft, haunting
shadows in the girl's eyes and hair. What an ecstasy of unreality!
Boat and ferryman seemed some exquisite animate medallion of another
age.
Garry could have told him it was the way he saw his pictures, romantic
in his utter abandon, but Garry was not there and Kenny with his head
in the clouds rushed on to his doom. The punt was a fairy boat sailing
him over a silver river to Hy Brazil, the Isle of Delight. Ah! Hy
Brazil! You saw it on clear days and it receded when you followed. It
was a melancholy thought and true. The madness never lasted.
There are those for whom the present is merely anticipation of the
future or reminiscence of the past. Kenny had the supreme gift of
living intensely and joyously in the present and the present for him
shone in the soft brown eyes of the ferryman in the stern. Past and
future he shrugged to the winds. For he was sailing across to romance,
he hoped, and surely to mystery. Yes, surely to mystery! Mystery
enough for any Celt in the battered horn, the ferry and the ferryman
yonder in the old-time gown.
[Illustration: He was sailing across to romance, he hoped, and surely
to mystery.]
"It was down there," said Joan, nodding, "where the river bends, that
Brian had his camp."
Brian's name was a shock. Kenny came to earth for an instant. Only
for an instant. The monochrome of gold behind the gables was drifting
into color. Here between the wooded heights where the river ran,
already there was shadow. Twilight and afterglow! Kenny in poetic
vein told of the Gray Man of the Path. The Path was in Ireland, a
fissure in the cliff at Fairhead. If you climbed well you could use
the Gray Man's Path and scale the cliff. Kenny himself had climbed it.
Joan, busy with the single oar, lost nevertheless no single word of it.
She was eager and intent.
"I suppose," said Kenny, "that the Gray Man is the spirit of the mists
of Benmore. But to me he's always Twilight. Twilight anywhere."
The girl nodded, quick to catch his mood.
"And to-night," she said, "his path is the river. He's coming now."
Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight was stealing closer when they landed.
With the feeling of dreams still upon him he followed the girl up the
path. It wound steeply upward among the trees, with here and there a
rude step fashioned of a boulder, and came out in an orchard on a hill.
Kenny stood stock-still. Fate, he told himself, needed nothing further
for his utter undoing. And if she did, it lay here in the orchard. He
had come in blossom time.
Well, thanks to the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew
precisely what it meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the
torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's
name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and
glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the
sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant
rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and
blossoms and the disillusion of intrusive fact!
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