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Page 69
And yet . . . how different that first dizzy sweep of delight at the
sight of Joan's loveliness, from this big, nameless something that
filled his heart with humility and longing! . . . How far away that
day beneath the willow when he had blown the horn! . . . An eternity
lay between.
This love of his--no, it was no longer merely a storm of unrest. It
was no longer merely a delirium of the senses in which he knew
suffering no less than ecstasy. It was a big, kind, selfless
tenderness that grew from day to day. A thing perhaps for eternity!
Kreiling was right.
Kenny's irreverent philosophy of the heart crumbled into ashes at his
feet. Love he had once believed was poetic like summer lightning. It
flashed, blinded in a glory of light and disappeared. If it lingered
it would lose its mystery, It was a quest in which the emotion was
paramount; the object that inspired it merely essential and
subordinate. Love was the only thing in the world worth while but
though a poet's love might fill his life with a perpetuity of delight
the object was bound to be a variant. Kenny had often mourned for
departed madness. He had never mourned the girl whom Chance had
appointed to inspire it. Why mourn a flower that has bloomed and faded
when the bush is full?
And marriage? That uncomfortable essential, legalists said, to
civilization and the transmission of property? To Kenny marriage had
always seemed a little like the Land of the Ever-Young. Mortals
imprisoned there soon tired of exile and longed for freedom and
distraction. His own marriage was but a memory he refused to face, dim
and distant, an inexplicable flurry of sentimentality that had ended
tragically with Brian in his arms. The brief year of it had been
poignant and at the end he had gone forth upon the hills, praying for
death. That girl of long ago with the black-lashed eyes of Irish blue
like Brian's, he had loved with all the passionate tumult of boyhood;
and in the end he had lived for Brian, coming to believe as life
carelessly unfolded for him its book of heart-things that in time he
must have tired. Lived for Brian! Had he? Or had he lived for
himself?
The memory he had crushed out of his heart in a panic long ago, now
left him with a terrified sense of obligation. Why in this dreadful
moment of crisis when he had to think must even his memories accuse
him? Brian! Brian! Always Brian!
The pang was spasmodic. The immensity of his love for Joan swept
everything before it and filled him with terror and amazement. To
stay! Any other thought was a profanation. And he must face another
problem. If Joan's madness was the kind that waned, if for her there
was no madness, if the summer had left her tranquil and
indifferent. . . . The uncertainty maddened him.
He struck a match and glanced at his watch. It was supper time. In an
hour now Joan likely would be coming to the cabin. So, alas! would Mr.
Abbott. Kenny struck off hurriedly toward the south.
The cabin was dark and silent. He waited near it, endlessly it seemed,
smoking and wondering if his heart would ever stop its nervous
thumping. If only she would come! His head had begun to ache. His
hand was shaking. Where the blood pounded in his wrists there was a
flurried sense of pain. And somehow the heavy odor of the pines and
the chill silence was depressing.
It was his fate to see Mr. Abbott come first. Unaware of the Irishman
who drew back at his approach, his hot heart sick with disappointment,
he opened the door of the cabin and went in, the inevitable book under
his arm. A second later the cabin window with its shade drawn, sprang
out of the shadow, a yellow checkerpane of light. Kenny stalked off,
chafing intolerantly at the anticlimacteric tenor of his summer.
He saw her coming a long way off, her lantern bobbing along like a
firefly, and walked faster. Impatience brought a cold sweat out upon
his forehead and then he needs must call her name before she could hear.
"Joan!" he called a little later. The tenderness in his heart hurt.
The light faltered and became a fixed point in the darkness ahead.
"It is I, Kenny!" he called again.
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