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Page 54
Exhausted by blind fits of rage, racking spells of coughing and more
brandy than usual, the invalid's weakness became pitifully apparent.
He seemed now but a shaking shadow, gray and gaunt. Even the doctor,
who accepted him with fatalistic calm, confessed alarm. And Kenny,
with his teeth set and his fingers clenched in his hair, faced another
problem. He was to blame and he alone! What in the literal name of
mercy was he to do?
There was one alternative left and one only. Either he must meet the
old man's hunger for battle with a show of temper, the blacker the
better, or leave the farm for good. But even with his thraldom heavy
on his soul the prospect of leaving Joan filled him with pain and
panic. There remained then but the show of temper in which Adam would
be sure to thrive.
So Kenny set himself to his freak of mercy. Thereafter, when the need
arose, he walked the floor under the piercing battery of Adam's eyes,
blazing forth a fury that, in the circumstances, with his sense of the
ridiculous upper-most, could not be real. He raved and swore when he
wanted to collapse in a chair and rock with nervous laughter.
Keen, alert, intensely delighted, Adam began to thrive. Chuckling he
slipped back to his normal state of debility. Finding in the stress of
his victim's tempestuous surrender that he forgot the megaphone, he
perversely began again to have trouble with his ears.
Kenny and his megaphone returned to the fray.
Thus September came, warm and golden. Haze, soft and indistinct lay in
the valley and on the hills. Summer lingered in the garden but on the
ridge the nights were cool and in the swamplands, Hughie said, already
the maples were coloring with a hint of colder weather. Here and there
on birch and poplar fluttered a yellowing leaf.
And Donald had not written.
Kenny, as the days slipped by, faced a new and tragic problem. October
was at hand. Work beckoned with urgent hand. If he did not go soon
somebody would have to balance up his check book for him and tell him
how long he could live without working. Brian, dear lad, had been a
jewel at figures.
But how _could_ he work with the thought of the winter wind and Joan
tormenting him? And the snow-bound cabin in the pines? And the ferry
and the ladder of icy vine? And Adam Craig?
He could not, would not go! And where in the name of all lunatics was
Brian? Life in the studio without him would be impossible. What did
he intend to do? Could he, Kenny, settle down to work with the problem
of his penitential quest for his son still unsettled?
And why in the name of the Sacred Question-mark, was his life a string
of questions!
In the end he fled from Adam's tongue. So he told himself. In reality
panic plunged him into action. His summer was ending. His madness was
not. And for that alarming fact he blamed Brian.
"I was worried," he remembered irritably, "and just in the mood to make
a colossal fool of myself. And I have!"
Otherwise this seizure must have run its course by now. It bothered
him that he had pledged himself to linger at the farm until Joan was
quite herself. Surely the gods of love and honor would understand that
he had foreseen no such troublous dilemma as that which faced him now.
He must take himself in hand. He must find an undisturbing level of
common sense and keep his roving feet upon it. The need was drastic.
"I'll be back in a month," he told Joan, his lips white with compassion
for himself and her, and stared moodily at the blaze of autumn on the
hills, knowing he would not return. "Often I've longed for a winter of
sketching in such a wild and lonely spot."
"And then," said Joan, "when Donald writes you must be here."
"I must be here," said Kenny.
That he felt was the kindest way. Surely, surely it was the kindest.
It saved Joan the painful thought of permanent separation. In a month
without him she would soon forget. A month, he knew of old, worked
wonders. Absence, he had proved again and again, never made a heart
grow fonder. Propinquity was at once a danger and a cure.
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