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Page 85
"No," said Kenny dully, "no mystery and no money." He moved toward the
door with a curious trance-like feeling that this was still a part of
his dream.
"Just a commonplace story of self," said the doctor, following him to
the door, "with two ragged little kids the victims. Myself I think
it's just as well, Mr. O'Neill, to say as little as possible about
things of this sort. Tales up here grow. And fire that isn't fed goes
out. It's bound to. I never had the heart myself to deny the old
man's miser yarn. When I do talk, I try to say as little as possible
and keep my two feet solidly on the ground."
He watched Kenny down the steps and into the buggy.
"Humph!" said the little doctor. "Thought he had his fingers on a
regular swap-dollinger of a mystery, didn't he? To my thinking, the
only mystery in the farmhouse is himself!"
And Kenny, climbing into the buggy in hot rebellion, felt that he had
come decked out gorgeously in rainbow balloons. And the doctor,
practical and unromantic, had pushed a weary finger through them, one
by one, watching them collapse with his bored and kindly smile of
understanding. Life after all, reflected Kenny irritably, was a matter
of adjectives and any man was at the mercy of his biographer. He
himself could have told that story of Adam and Cordelia Craig until no
man could have called it commonplace and unromantic.
CHAPTER XXVI
AN INSPIRATION
Afterward Kenny thought that Nellie must have ambled into the doctor's
barnyard and turned herself, for he had no memory of guiding her. A
paralyzed conviction of another anti-climax had gripped him. He
remembered turning into the road with a haunting sense of eyes upon
him--Adam's eyes, piercing and bright with malevolent amusement. The
chart! The hints! The will! The cunning of him! What would he tell
Hughie and Hannah and Hetty? What would he tell Joan? What was there
to tell save that he had put two and two together and made five, a
romantic five lurid with melodrama?
And the brutal practice hour in Adam's room when he had told the truth!
Kenny went sick and cold and shivered. How unwittingly he had flung
the old man's poverty in his teeth! How at times it must have hurt!
The memory made him shrink. And it hadn't been truth. He had battled
for Joan with misinterpretation and cruelty; he had practiced the truth
with the telling of untruth. And the proud old man who veiled his
poverty with pretense, had listened, listened inscrutably and laughed,
ready to thrust from the grave itself.
Ah! Fate was forever flinging down her gauntlet.
"To Kennicott O'Neill, my friend, my signet ring." His friend! In
spite of the practice hour--his friend. Kenny's eyes smarted.
"Oh, Adam, Adam!" he said, sick at heart, "I beg your pardon."
The snow crunched steadily under Nellie's feet. Kenny stared sadly at
the road ahead. Could he tell Joan what now he knew: that when the few
bills were paid and the estate balanced, there would be no money left
for the year of study?
Perhaps Joan would marry him now--at once--to-morrow! And they could
leave the farm together. After all there was silver to his cloud.
Kenny brightened.
A preposterous notion of hers, that unfitness. The memory of the
sunset hour in the cabin came again to darken the silver lining of his
cloud. Joan's arms, Joan's voice, Joan's eyes had pleaded; it would
make her happier to wait and study and watch his world before she came
to it, his wife.
Kenny sighed.
It would make her--happier. And the problem still was with him.
Kenny cursed the evil in the world that had forced men to convention.
If only he could help her! If only--
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