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Page 71
"You're late!" he said.
"Yes," said Kenny happily, "I am." Even now with Adam's piercing eyes
upon him, he had a feeling of invincibility; as if, aloof in the aerial
sphere in which he seemed to float, he could shut the old man out.
Adam stared at him with eagle-like intentness and a puzzled frown. His
face said plainly that Kenny's mood was without precedent and therefore
strategical. It behooved him to get to the bottom of it at once and be
on his guard.
"'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of the druids.
And to-night the hills are open and the fairies are all out a-temptin'
mortals. I myself have heard the fairy pipes showerin' sweetness
everywhere. Wonderful music, Adam! Silver-soft and allurin' and the
kind you can't forget! It throws you into a trance and fills you with
beautiful longing. I forgot to come home. There! I must tell Hannah
to put a light under the churn to-night. Then the fairies, hating
fire, can't bewitch it."
[Illustration: "'Tis Samhain, Adam," said Kenny, "the summer ending of
the druids."]
Adam stared at him blankly. He was in mad mood, this Irishman. His
eyes, ardently blue and tender and intense, danced with incautious
gleams of laughter. His color was high. He was gay and utterly
friendly.
An odd jealous hunger sprang up in the invalid's eyes.
"Are you mad?" he demanded.
"Quite!" said Kenny.
"More like," said the old man tartly, "you're drunk."
"Drunk," nodded Kenny, "with heather ale. Only the fairies know how to
make it now. And who wouldn't be drunk in the head of him to-night
with the Good People dancing on the hills and the dead dancing with
them."
Adam frowned and shivered.
"You Irish," he said harshly, "are as morbid as you are poetic."
"'Tis all a part of the night," cried Kenny gayly and poured himself
some brandy. "The druids," he remembered, "poured libations on the
ground to propitiate the evil spirits and the spirits of the dead; but,
Adam, I'm drinking to-night to Destiny! To Destiny," he added under
his breath, "and the foreverness of her gift!"
"What gift," demanded Adam Craig, "are you trying to clinch with a gift
to yourself of my brandy?"
"The gift," said Kenny cryptically, "of--Life!"
Well, he had spoken truth there. Life was love and love was life and
perhaps until now he'd known neither.
Still the old man stared at him in dazed and sullen envy. His wild
vitality seemed a barrier impossible to surmount.
"And it isn't just Samhain," said Kenny, setting down his glass. "Ugh,
Adam, your brandy's abominable! It's the Eve of All Souls. To-night
the dead revisit their homes. Once I remember when I was tramping
through Ireland, an old woman left a chair by the fireside that the
spirit of her son might come back to her. She even left some embers in
the fire."
"That," said Adam Craig with a shudder, "will be enough of your damned
ghosts and fairies."
Afterward to Kenny the evening was always a blur but he knew they had
gotten on badly. And Adam, quiet and sullen, had drunk more than usual.
Kenny sparkled through the evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to
everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling
curiously light and iridescent.
He meant not to sleep. He meant to roll the shades to the top and with
the cold wind upon his face and the stars winking in silver beneficence
overhead, to lie awake and think until the dawn came. He slept
soundly, dreaming of thistledown and a little old woman in a green
cloak who came out of a hill and played a tune upon a sort of
lantern-flute. The notes had winged off in bars of music written in
fire against the darkness. He had not finished the dream when he was
awakened by someone knocking at his door.
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