His individuality made its own appeal. But there were subtler forces working to the girl's surrender. One, a deep abiding gratitude to him and Brian. Though she ran down the lane each morning and peered into the letter box at the end for word of Donald, her disappointment now had nothing in it of terror. Donald, Kenny said, was with an O'Neill. He could not go wrong. She accepted the statement, as she had accepted the stage mother, with utter faith and gladness.
And Kenny was kind to her uncle and to her; kind with an infinite delicacy of tact and feeling. He seemed to understand the instinct for beauty and adornment that sent her roving to her mother's trunks. He understood her dreams and her hunger. He understood the spirit that had led her to make the garret a sort of shrine to be swept and dusted, to be kept apart and precious. There was another force, subtle and exacting: the girl's burgeoning womanhood. Wistful for homage, she craved his gallant tenderness and wanted always to be with him. His frank glance of admiration and his boyish smile were always a tribute. So was his voice, deep, gentle, sonorous as a sweet-toned bell. Tones of it she knew were kept for her alone. The knowledge thrilled her. She did not know why.
By the time the old wistaria vine outside her window shook in the wind with a glory of purple, the over-crowded days were gliding one into the other like a rain of stars. Most of all, wakeful in the dark of her room, she remembered the hours by the river when Kenny wove for her high, peaked hats of rushes such as he claimed the Irish fairies wore, and told her tales of Ireland with a trick of eloquence that made her laugh and made her cry. Odd! unlike her uncle he understood tears too. A tear, he said, was always trailing an Irishman's smile. His sympathetic brogue, smooth and soft and instinct with drollery, held for her a never-ending fascination.
And always at the end of the day there was Kenny's Gray Man of the Twilight stealing up the river all too soon.
Joan was not the only one to whom the sparkle of the irrepressible Irishman's wit and humor was an energizing boon. There was Hannah and Hetty; and Hughie, too, though he stoutly denied it. Life on the Craig farm was no longer dull.
Kenny, at a loose end, kept the farm in ferment, evading the work Garry had sent him, by a conscientious effort to assist others. He was glad he could paint if the mood seized him. Denied the opportunity he knew he would have fretted. There was one singular, inexplicable thing about work. If there was work at hand, one could always find something else to do, attractive and absorbing. If there wasn't work to do, the sheer shock of it seemed to dull you into mental vacuity and loose ends of time came up and hit you in the face. Garry had written something or other like that sarcastically in a letter.
He helped Hannah churn and sang with a soft brogue, to her abashed delight, a song he called "The Gurgling of the Churn." He helped Hetty milk the roan cow and sang while Hetty's apple-cheeks bloomed redder, an exquisite folk tune of a pretty girl who milked a cow in Ireland. Later in the summer he even helped Hughie rake the hay and had a song for that. As Hannah said, he seemed to have songs for everything and what he couldn't sing he could play with dazzling skill on the old piano.
"There's 'lectricity," said Hannah, "in the very air."
"I wished," grumbled Hughie, "he'd put it in the ground instid. The air don't need it. Workin' a farm like this on shares is like goin' to a picnic behind old Nellie and startin' late. You just know you won't git there. What ground up here ain't worked out is hills and stones and hollers."
Hannah sighed.