Chapter 7 THE BLOSSOM STORM

At nightfall, with his telegram to Garry depressingly linked with a memory of winding, sodden, lonely roads, dripping woods and the clink of milk-cans, Kenny was summoned to the sitting room of Adam Craig.

A fire burned in the open fireplace. Lamp-light softened the shabbiness of the old room and shone pleasantly on dark wood and a great many faded books. Later Kenny knew that every book in the farmhouse was here upon his shelves. Adam Craig sat huddled in a wheelchair. Kenny thought of the runaway who hated him. He thought of Joan. He thought of the bleak old rooms that seemed one in spirit with the man before him. A wrinkled, evil old man, he told himself with a shudder, with piercing eyes and a face Italian in its subtlety.

Adam Craig looked steadily at the Irishman in the doorway and found his stare returned. The gaze of neither faltered. So began what Kenny, when his singular relations with the old man had goaded him to startled appraisal, was pleased to call a "friendship that was never a friendship and a feud that was never a feud."

"I sent you a message," said Adam Craig.

"Your niece brought it."

The old man tapped with slender, wasted fingers upon the arm of his chair.

"What was it?" he asked guilelessly.

"As I remember it," stammered Kenny in surprise, "you were good enough to say that I might stay here as long as I chose."

"Like all women and some Irishmen," said Adam Craig, "she lied. I said you could stay as long as you were willing to pay."

Kenny changed color. The invalid chose to misinterpret his interval of constraint.

"So," he said softly, "you don't always pay!"

The random shot of inference went home. It was the first of many. Kenny fought back his temper. Affronted, he crossed the room and laid a roll of bills upon the table. Craig counted them with an irritating show of care.

"That, Mr. O'Neill," he said, "will guarantee my hospitality for the space of a month!"

He put the roll of money in the pocket of his bathrobe and Kenny fancied his fingers loathe to leave it.

The drip of the rain and the gusty noise of wind that by daylight had been no more than a melancholy adjunct to the poetry of wet blossoms, became suddenly sinister and tragic and irresistibly atmospheric. Kenny stared with new vision at the dreadful old man in the bathrobe. One by one Kenny was fated to solve his mysteries when he wanted to keep them. He knew now in a flare of intuition why the old rooms had been abandoned, why Joan ferried folk from the village in the valley to the village across the river, why her gown of the morning and the rags of the runaway had been pitifully patched and mended. And he remembered the mystery of her color, when, questing an inn, he had glanced at the house on the cliff and hinted that her uncle might consent to be his host.

"I know he would!" Joan's low voice rang in his ears again with new meaning.

Adam Craig was a miser.

He shrank at the thought. Annoyed to find the old man's eyes boring into him again, he cleared his throat and looked away.

"So," said Adam Craig, "you are a famous painter!"

"I am a painter," said Kenny stiffly.

"With medals," purred Adam.

"With medals."

A fit of coughing seemed for an interval to threaten the old man's very life.

"Yonder in the closet," he said huskily, "is a bottle and some glasses. Bring them here."

Kenny obeyed.

"Sit down."

With the old man's eyes upon him, hungry and expectant, as if he clutched at the thought of companionship, Kenny reluctantly found a chair for himself and sat down. Pity made him gentle. Year in and year out, he remembered with a shiver, Adam Craig sat huddled here in his wheel-chair listening to wind and rain, sleet and snow, the rustle of summer trees and the wind of autumn. It was a melancholy thought and true.

Smoothly hospitable, the invalid poured brandy for himself and his guest and chatted with an air of courtesy. Kenny found himself in quieter mood. Reminiscence crackled in the wood-fire. Nights in the studio by the embers of a log many a Gaelic tale had glowed and sparkled in his soft, delightful brogue for the ears of men who loved his tales of folk lore and loved the teller.

Ah, Ireland, dark rosaleen of myths and mirth and melancholy. The thought of it all made him tender and sad.

Well, he would give this lonely man by the fire an hour of unalloyed delight. He would tell him tales of Ireland when brehons made the laws and bards and harpers roved the green hills. Kenny made his opportunity and began. He told a tale of Choulain, the mountain smith who forged armor for the Ultonians. He told a lighter tale of three sisters whom he called Fair, Brown and Trembling. With the brogue strong upon him he told how Finn McCoul had stolen the clothes of a bathing queen and he told in stirring phrase the exploits of Ireland's mighty hero, Cuchullin.

He had never had a better listener. Adam Craig fixed his piercing eyes inscrutably upon the teller's face, drank glass after glass of brandy, and remained polite, intent and silent. Kenny, with his heart in the telling, went on to the tale of Conoclach and the first harp. Conoclach, he said, hating Cull, her husband, had run away from him toward the sea. There upon the sand lay the skeleton of a whale and the wind playing upon the taut sinews made sounds low and soothing enough to lull her to sleep. And Cull, coming up, marveled at her slumber, heard the murmuring of the wind through the sinews and made the first harp. Kenny liked the tale and he liked the way he told it.

Adam Craig nodded.

"Lies!" he said, springing the trap it had pleased him to bait with an air of courtesy, "All lies."

Kenny flushed with annoyance. The sacrilege of doubt when the tale was Irish jarred.

"Lies!" said Adam Craig again, "adapted centuries ago by some Irish word-thief."

"You are pleased to be humorous," said Kenny, glancing coldly at his host.

"I am pleased," said the old man insolently, "to be truthful, not being Irish. Fair, Brown and Trembling!" he added with a sneer. "Word for word, it's the tale of Cinderella."

"The pattern for Cinderella!" corrected Kenny with a shrug.

Adam Craig glanced at him with narrowed eyes.

"And Finn McCoul and the bathing queen. I can find you the German tale of a stolen veil from which it's-borrowed."

"You can find me likely the name of a German who chose to delve into Gaelic for his plot."

"You've a ready tongue."

"There are times when it's needed."

"As for the first harp," snapped Adam Craig, nettled, "there's a Grecian lyre tale yonder on the shelf like it."

"Liar tale," said Kenny purposely misunderstanding. Hum! The Greeks, he remembered regretfully, were clever adapters.

His air of assurance incensed the old man.

"As for that fool of a Cuchullin," he rasped, coughing a little, "where is he different from Achilles?"

"A little different," said Kenny. "Achilles, poor old scout, was much the inferior of the two."

Again in fury Adam Craig coughed until it seemed that his life must end. Again he drank. Kenny knew by the flurried brightness of his eyes sunk deep in the yellowed gauntness of his face that he was drunk. He shuddered and rose. Already the old man's head was drooping toward his chest in a drunken stupor. With an effort he roused and leered.

"Cinderella, damn you!" he said. "Cinderella and Achilles!"

"Cinderella," repeated Kenny pityingly. "Cinderella and Achilles."

He stood uncertain what to do while Adam Craig slipped down in his chair. Drunk, perverse and cruel! With the rain beating at the windows Kenny thought of Joan, compassion in his heart, and rang for Hughie.

"I-I'm afraid he's drunk," he whispered with a sense of guilt when Hughie came. "Perhaps I shouldn't have given him the bottle."

Hughie glanced at his watch.

"It's nine o'clock," he said. "He's late."

"You mean?"

"Every night," said Hughie. "The doctor gave up fightin' long ago."

Kenny went to his room filled with pity and disgust.

Gusts of wind and rain battered at the orchard blossoms the next day and the next. Kenny found a tuning outfit in a closet and spent his days with Joan tuning the Craig piano. He was grateful in the gloom of dark wood and dust for the fantastic thing of lavender she wore. It was like a bit of iris in a bog, he told her, and was sorry when he saw her glance with troubled eyes at the dust and cobwebs.

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!