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Page 35
The river ran high and brown. The horn beneath the willow was silent.
Each night Adam Craig sent for his guest. The rain, he said, made him
lonesome. Each night in a hopeless conflict of pity and dislike Kenny
went, rain and wind and Adam Craig getting horribly upon his nerves.
He was glad when the sun came and filled the valley, panoramic from the
farmhouse ridge, with a glory of light. Milk-white clouds capped the
western hills. Nearer, dotted peacefully with farms, red barns and
dark, straggling clumps of evergreen, the rolling valley stretched
unevenly among intersecting lines of trees. At the foot of a hill rose
the spire of the village church. To the south a crystal blaze of sun
showed water.
A world of lilac and dogwood and a few late apple blossoms clinging
bravely through the storm to sunshine. And the world held Joan with
shadows of the sun in her hair and eyes and shadows of the past in her
gowns.
Ah, truly, it was good to be alive!
CHAPTER VIII
JOAN
Thus, warm and fragrant, the summer came with Kenny in the house of Adam
Craig, drifting pleasantly he knew and cared not where; with Brian on the
road with Donald West.
And Joan? To her summer came with a new incomprehensible delight. Out
of the void a bright spirit had roved into her world, sweeping her, eager
and unresistant, into youth and life and laughter. He came from an
immensity of romantic experience, holding out his hands to her, with
tender eyes and a look of youth and charm and understanding in his vivid
face.
She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving,
this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were
cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who
had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from
her kind and a vague hunger for some fuller, sweeter life beyond the
hills. And with a blast of a horn the drab had vanished.
There were times when the girl's soft eyes opened wide in a panic of
incredulity. He was a famous painter, this Irishman who had prevailed
upon her in a laughing moment to call him Kenny; a famous painter with a
personality as vivid as his face. And yet he chose to linger at her
uncle's farm. The color, the gayety, the sparkle, he seemed miraculously
to infuse into existence, left her breathless and startled. And he knew
not one spot and one land. He knew many spots, some wild and remote, and
many lands. Joan marveled at the twist of Fate that had brought him to
the willow.
His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces
working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him
and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the
letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had
nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He
could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the
stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.
And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite
delicacy of tact and feeling. He seemed to understand the instinct for
beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother's trunks. He
understood her dreams and her hunger. He understood the spirit that had
led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be
kept apart and precious. There was another force, subtle and exacting:
the girl's burgeoning womanhood. Wistful for homage, she craved his
gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him. His frank glance of
admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute. So was his voice,
deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell. Tones of it she knew were
kept for her alone. The knowledge thrilled her. She did not know why.
By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind
with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the
other like a rain of stars. Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her
room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high,
peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told
her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and
made her cry. Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too. A tear, he
said, was always trailing an Irishman's smile. His sympathetic brogue,
smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending
fascination.
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