Garry looked at him.

"Just what are you talking about?" he asked.

"I know," pursued Kenny elaborately, "that it's unfortunate I haven't wrecked my own life when I'm an accidental success at wrecking Brian's.

I'm full of cobwebs. I d.a.m.n irrefutable things and I've forced Brian to a profession of sunsets to gratify my vanity. Can you personally, Garry, think of anything else?"

"Sit down!" said Garry. "You're about as logical as a lunatic--"

"Tell Whitaker, do," begged Kenny. "There's one he missed. Garry, what's back of all this turmoil? What's the real reason for Brian's brain-storm? I'm sick to death of Whitaker's wordy arabesque and abuse. I want facts."

"Brian said it all last night," reminded Garry. "It's just another case of a last straw."

"You honestly mean that the ancestors of the straw are the sunsets, the disorder here--the--the--" He thumped the table. "Garry, I don't lie. I swear I don't. I hate a liar. I mean a dishonorable liar. A lie is an untruth that harms. That's my definition. Any man embroiders sordid fact on occasion."

"On occasion!" admitted Garry.

Kenny, with his eye upon the fern in the window, missed the significance. It had registered his sincere regret--that fern--at the need of p.a.w.ning Brian's fishing rods and golf clubs. Like Brian! He had failed utterly to comprehend the delicacy of the tribute.

Finding this point upon which he dwelt with some length equally over-nice for Garry's perception, Kenny in a huff sent him home, watered the fern, without in the least understanding the impulse, and went to bed. And dreaming as usual, he seemed to be hunting cobwebs with a gun made of ferns. He found them draped over huge pillars of ice, marked in Brian's familiar sunset colors. Truth. And when panting and sweating he had swept them all away with a wedge of cheese he seemed to hear Whitaker's voice--calling him a failure.

Kenny felt that he had been visited by Far Darrig, the Gaelic bringer of bad dreams.

CHAPTER III

IN THE GAY AND GOLDEN WEATHER

Spring came early and with the first marsh hawk Brian was on the road, his eager youth crying out to the spring's hope and laughter.

Everywhere he caught the thrill of it. Brooks released from an armor of ice went singing by him. Hill and meadow deepened verdantly into smiles. A little while now and the whole green earth in its tenderness would dimple exquisitely, with every dimple a flower. Mother Earth, moistening the bare brown fields for the plough with a capricious tear or so for the banished winter, was beginning again. And so was he.

Hope swelled wistfully within him like song in the throat of the bluebird and sap in the trees. With the sun warm upon his face and the gladness of spring in his veins, he sang with Pippa that "G.o.d's in his Heaven, all's right with the world!"

Well, New York, thank G.o.d, lay to the back of him, veiling her realities and truth in glitter, defying nearness. Every human thing that made for life lay there as surely as it lay here in G.o.d's quieter world, but you never came close to it.

So he tramped away to green fields and hills and winding quiet roads, spring riding into his heart, invincible and bold.

An arbutus filled him with the wonder of things, a sense of eternity, a swift, inexplicable compa.s.sion, a longing for service to the needs of men. His ears thrilled to the song of the earth and the whistle of the ploughman turning up the fresh brown earth. He filled his lungs with the wind of the open country, drank in the enchantment of the morning and the dusk, his nostrils joyously alive to the smell of the furrowed ground and a hint of burgeoning wild flowers.

But the first robin brought misgivings and remorse. Brian remembered Kenny's legend of the thorn ("worst of them all it was," said Kenny gently, "and p.r.i.c.kin' deepest!") and the robin who plucked it from the bleeding brow of Christ. So by the blood of the Son of Man had the robin come by his red breast.

The legend filled Brian with yearning. He softened dangerously to the memory of a sketching tramp with Kenny fuming at his heels, his excitement chronic. Adventure had endlessly stalked Kenny for its own, waylaid him at intervals when he pa.s.sionately proclaimed his desire for peace, and saddled Brian with the responsibilities of constant guardianship.

Brian stubbornly put it all behind him. Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege. His promises were fluent always and alluring. Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for emanc.i.p.ation a thing a.s.sured.

So he tramped the highway, lingering by fence and rail to talk with men, living and learning. For the highway meant to him the pa.s.sion of life. Hope and sorrow traveled it day and night in homely hearts.

And often his thoughts harked wistfully back to the words of a modern poet which Kenny with his usual skill had set to music:

"And often, often I'm longing still, This gay and golden weather, For my father's face by an Irish hill, And he and I together."

In the gay and golden weather things were going badly with the unsuccessful parent. For weeks now his life had been in ferment, his moods as freakish as the wind. What little regularity his life had known departed to that limbo that had claimed his peace of mind. That he felt himself abnormally methodic lay entirely in the fact that he watered the fern each day. It had for him a morbid fascination.

Incomprehensible forces were sapping his faith in himself and the future; and viciously at war with them, he nursed his grievance against Brian only to find that it was less robust than any grievance should be. At any cost he wanted Brian back.

"He's taken care of me," remembered Kenny sadly, "since he was a bit of a lad."

As ever, the thing withheld, Kenny ardently desired. That thing was Brian's presence. Any Irishman, he decided fiercely, would understand his terrified clinging to the things of the heart that belonged to him by birth. It was part of his race and creed. He hated to be alone.

And Brian was all he had. How lightly he had prized that one possession until it became a thing denied, Kenny, sentimentalizing his need, forgot.

Studio gossip, having concerned itself with Brian's going, almost to the disruption of the Holbein Club, took up in perturbed detail the glaring problem of Kenny's tantrums. He was keeping everyone excited.

"Of course," mused Garry, "you could earn your living as a moving picture actor--"

"Adams owes me five thousand dollars for his wife's portrait,"

sputtered Kenny. "But I can't get it. He's been sick for weeks.

Typhoid."

"And in the meantime?"

The shaft went home. Kenny sent for a model--and sent her home.

"She was too ornamental and decidedly sympathetic," he explained gloomily to Garry. "I'm just in the mood to make a colossal fool of myself. She was the sort of girl you'd invite to tea to meet your brother's wife."

"Kenny!"

"She was!" insisted Kenny.

"Any number of models are and you know it. And that girl is Jan's cousin."

"I make a point of never losing my head over a model," declared Kenny with an air. "It's a hindrance to work. You concentrate on a type and every picture you do advertises your devotion. Suppose I married her!"

"Heaven help her!" snapped Garry, and went out, slamming the door.

Kenny offended, followed him home. He felt aggrieved and talkative.

If Kenny had succeeded in propelling himself into one of his nervous ecstasies of inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ahead of him depended now upon the hairtrigger of impulse. A wind, a sketch, the perfume of a flower, and he would be off wherever the reminiscence called him. He whistled constantly. That, as Jan pointed out, was always a bad sign with Kenny. It meant that he felt perilously transient and would rocket up in the air when a spark came that pleased him. He had been much the same, Fahr remembered, the summer he embarked for Syria upon a tramp steamer--to the captain's frantic regret.

In the end, feeling absurdly sorry for him, Garry unwittingly sent the spark in by Pietro.

It was a letter from Brian.

"Tavern of Stars Open Country G.o.d's Green World of Spring

"Dear Garry:

"The purpose of this letter is primarily a favor. Therefore without pretense I'll have done with it at once. You'll find in the studio a sc.r.a.pbook of clippings which represent my ebullitions in print.

Whitaker wants them, I believe, for purposes of conference. It will save him running through his files.