Part 36 (1/2)
”Oh, nonsense, nonsense!” said the doctor kindly. ”Chair or no chair he would have died just the same. I saw it coming. And your presence there this summer freed him entirely from money worries. He even paid me.”
”Yes,” said Kenny, ”my money helped him drink himself to death.”
The doctor sighed.
”Oh, well,” he said, ”that too would have happened just the same.”
Kenny brushed his hair back dazedly from his forehead and rose. He felt as if he had fallen from a great height and hit his head. It was numbly aquiver. As he picked up the will and put it in his pocket, Adam Craig, sinister and una.s.sailable, seemed to mock him from the grave. His last trap! Almost Kenny could hear him chuckle: ”Checkmate, Kenny, checkmate! And the game is won.” How well he had known his opponent's excitable fancy!
”Doctor,” asked Kenny drearily, ”why were all the books in the farmhouse in Adam's room?”
”There,” said the doctor, ”I think he meant to be kind. Cordelia had had all sorts of schooling and so had he. I think by denying the youngsters books and too much knowledge, he thought to clip their wings at the start and keep them contented. In tune with the farm, I mean, and willing to stay. He'd seen enough of ruinous discontent when his sister and himself went out in the world and tried their wings. Just a fancy. I may be wrong. Well, Mr. O'Neill, I'm sorry. There's no mystery and no money--”
”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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 s.h.i.+vered. 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.