"A minute ago," reminded Kenny coldly, "when I told you you were drinking too much brandy, you said you were deaf to-night."

"It's an intermittent affliction," purred Adam with a chuckle. "You struck me in a minute of vacation."

But the careless sobriquet of Kenny's rankled in the old man's mind and bore a startling aftermath of fruit.

Kenny was Irish and conversational. He had as usual talked too much, unaware that Adam, with fiendish insight, was reading steadily between the lines, ready to pounce.

"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward, baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth.

You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't.

It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget yourself. d.a.m.n you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the most amazing liar I've ever met."

But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and slammed the door.

There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot content.

Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void and linked himself to Whitaker--to Brian, to Garry--and his barbs stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion.

Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of the other three.

Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment.

The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought, lay at his feet p.r.i.c.ked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections, intensely human and delightful. He pa.s.sionately demanded that it accept him so without question. Good G.o.d! No one had seemed to question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about his ears.

Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he knew, to hold his head above it.

In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile interest.

"Sunsets and vanity," he wrote with a flourish and lost his temper.

Well, that phase in Brian's life was closed forever, thanks to Whitaker's meddling tongue. Never again would Kenny lay himself open to misinterpretation by seeking commissions for his son. Brian could write truth for Whitaker with a blue pencil and be d.a.m.ned!

"Hairbrained, unquenchable youth," he wrote next and added airily after this: "This is likely hair and teeth."

"Irresponsible."

"Failure as a parent." This he underlined.

"Need to suffer and learn something of the psychology of sacrifice."

"Romantic att.i.tude toward the truth."

"Improvidence. Need for plebeian regularity in money affairs and petty debt."

"Disorder--chairs to sit down on without looking first."

"I borrow Brian's money and his clothes."

"p.a.w.ned shotgun, tennis racket, some fishing tackle and golf clubs."

"Note: Look over tickets."

"A tendency to indolence."

He had begun with an air of bored amus.e.m.e.nt; he finished grimly, read and reread. In the light of the Craig-and-Whitaker a.n.a.lysis, which dovetailed in the similarity of their venom, the details might, he fancied with a lifting of his brows, be cla.s.sified under three general headings: youth, irresponsibility and a romantic att.i.tude toward the truth.

The envious charge of youth he attributed instantly to the thinning of John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic att.i.tude toward the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which life would be insufferably dull.

He read the list again with colors flying and drum beating victory.

Though singly he could refute each item, an unguarded perusal when he felt complacent, brought the hot blood back to his face in a rush of mortification and dismay.

With a curse he flung the book across the room. Then unreasonably he went after it and wrote at the end: "Life is a battle. I do not fight.

And life is not an individual adventure."

The final sentence startled him most of all.

Again he read it all and the memory of Brian, white, aggressive, desperately intent upon escape, came between him and his quest of self-content. It always bothered him. It had driven him to hunt the psaltery stick, repent his lie to Garry and water the fern. It had driven him out upon the road. Mocking voices rose now from the depths.

Was it--could it all be true? The shock of the thought was cataclysmic and he longed for the self-respect and confidence in which he had basked that night in Hannah's kitchen. Must the world side with Brian?

He was sorry about the shotgun. He was sorry about the sunsets. By the Blessed Bell of Clare, he was willing to be sorry about anything, little as he felt himself to blame. Was he to blame? Had he not paid for it all in his days of stormy penance?

Out of his white-hot revolt clear vision came to him, as it sometimes did, with incomprehensible, dart-like swiftness, and leveled him to the dust. Some of it he would not face but he saw his days upon the road with truth and shame. He had failed in his penance. Garry was right.

He did everything by fits and starts. And he could justify whatever was most conducive to his comfort and his inclination. His pilgrimage had been farcical. He had fled from discomfort, magnifying pettiness into tragedy. And he had been disloyal to the son he loved. For there under the willow when his startled eyes had found Joan, he had pa.s.sionately made up his mind to linger. Nay more, even then in the dim recesses of his mind, he had hoped there would be no clue to send him forth again in quest of Brian. And if there had been, Kenny faced the fact that he would not have gone. . . . No, he would not have gone. . . . And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in his heart that he had hoped to stifle.

He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted the front door and went out upon the porch.

The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the voice of the river.

The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.

In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its silver sheen of stars.

A ladder? Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still. It was a ladder. Some one was climbing down. Branch after branch the climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through the orchard to the south.

Kenny's heart throbbed with a ghastly fear.

It was Joan.

He knew what lay to the south beyond the orchard: woodlands and wildness, nothing else. The fields Hughie cultivated stretched to the north from the kitchen windows. There in the forest to the south where the river curved off at a tangent and flowed directly east, Brian had had his camp. On farther Joan had never cared to go. Where did she go now in the starlit darkness, climbing down the wistaria ladder with a cloak around her shoulders? To what did she venture through the solitude of whispering trees and the gloom of the pine forest?

A lover's tryst? Kenny sickened and choked. He could not follow her.

He would not.

He turned back instead and went to bed to lie wakeful until dawn with something new and horrible gnawing at his heartstrings. Then he fell asleep and dreamed of monsters.

CHAPTER XI

THE CABIN IN THE PINES

He did not mean to go again. He did not mean to watch the wistaria vine. He went, he told himself wildly, to evade the summons that was sure to come from Adam Craig. But when the glimmer of wistaria swayed beneath a footfall, madness came upon him and he went stealthily through orchard and forest, stalking the flutter of a cloak.