Frederick Orin Bartlett

“ It was three days before Barnes was allowed to see Miss Van Patten. On the whole they were three of the most uncomfortable days he ever passed. The father demanded more and more of his time and succeeded, whether deliberately or not, in a pretty form of torture. He pressed him harder in his questioning both about Alaska and about Carl and never withdrew from his face those closed eyes which still seemed at times to flicker as though opened the tiniest crack. But that may have been pure imagination. There are holy images which if one gazes long enough upon them appear to move their eyes. ”

“ The sunset appeared in her cheeks.
“Your true lover,” he went on, pursuing his own fancy, “when footing the soft grass of a country lane is, in reality, blazing a trail through the tangled everglades of Florida. He is in search of the Fountain of Youth. He is on a voyage of discovery as momentous as that of Columbus for he, too, is after a new world. Your lover, even at home, is ever challenging the rugged heights of Alaska in search of hidden gold.” ”

“ As an artist he had admired her first, then as a mere man, then as a lover; but now, as he waited for her reply, it was as Richard Barnes that he loved her. For the first time he had to wrestle hard with himself for control. He hungered to feel her in his arms, to brush with his lips the scarlet in her cheeks, which was as rose upon ivory. ”

“ And Eleanor herself seemed very close to him. It was as though she were keeping pace the other side of him. How the old world sang of her! The sun was dropping towards the horizon line, seeking, as he knew, her black hair. An oriole, high in an elm, was caroling her name. The lazy locusts were rattling like gray-haired crones over their tea—of her.
[277] He felt his attitude towards Van Patten changing. The keen sentences which he had framed by the bedside of the sick father lost their edge with every foot he neared her. All the passion and bitterness went from them. ”

“ Miss Van Patten paused. But the orange-colored cat preceded them and stepped daintily over the sill.
“Shall we follow her Highness?” whispered Barnes.
The girl shrank back a little.
“If we fail?” she gasped.
“Then,” answered Barnes, “there’ll be nothing left but to explain.”
“Would he ever forgive us? Would he ever trust us again?”
“That comes later,” he reminded her. “We haven’t failed yet.”
“So much depends upon you!”
“Much more depends upon him. If his hunger for the boy is great enough, he will forget everything but the fact that he has at last something tangible—something to grasp.” ”

“ And Barnes realized that it was now or never.
“You—you think your mother is not happy?”
“Dad,” answered Barnes, “figure it out for yourself. Mother came from a green land—a land where even the fences are made of hawthorn; where even in the heart of London the sheep still nibble the grass; where acres of green grass are within walking distance of the Bank of England. The love of open spaces is in her blood. ”

“ Barnes himself was a bit surprised.
“All honest men are artists,” he replied vaguely.
“And all honest men keep their accounts,” stuck in Aunt Philomela.
“If they have any to keep. I doubt if strictly honest men have any.”
“Are you a Socialist?” inquired Carl.
“No. I keep an account with myself. If I don’t use figures, why I lie awake longer at night.”
“And don’t care whether you come out right or not,” snapped Aunt Philomela.
“Your true artist cares more than anyone else in the world how he comes out,” he answered soberly. ”

“ Barnes studied the big-framed, big-faced man a second and continued more soberly.
“What you call imagination are the grim facts of life for him and for me, doctor. His fiddle isn’t a detail of his life—it’s life itself for him. Cripple his arm and you cripple his soul. You’ve got to fight as hard for those fingers as you would for his life.”
If Dr. Merriweather was at first only annoyed by what he took to be mere extravagance of speech, there was something now in the tense face of Barnes which made him pause and think. ”

“ Barnes threw himself down flat and elbows on the ground rested his chin in his hands. Below him in shadow lay all that vast unexplored country upon which only yesterday he had gazed with her by his side. To-night it was boundless—limitless. Where before it had seemed like a virgin woodland, sun-lighted, it now seemed as somber as a Doré forest. It would be a grim affair—adventuring through this land alone. The pictures a man would bring back with him—Ah, they would be pictures of Hell. ”

“ IN WHICH EVERYONE LEARNS SOMETHING
Twice now Eleanor had seen in a man’s eyes the dumb pain of an unuttered tragedy,—once when Barnes had gone back to New York; again this afternoon, when Carl had bade her good-by and been driven off down the saffron road. In the first case she had played no part, though the ache of it still haunted her; in the second it was clear that she was the direct cause. And yet as she stood by the sitting-room window after supper and retraced this last summer, she saw nothing that she could have managed differently. ”

“ Horatio Barnes smiled grimly.
“No one but a true artist could have done that,” insisted the son. “Any other would have reckoned the cost and swallowed the pill.”
“But I beat ’em,” chuckled the father.
“Art beats every time,” declared Barnes. “It’s the one thing a man may pin his faith to. But that wasn’t your biggest piece of work as an artist. You transcended that. You really proved yourself when you married mother. ”

“ Barnes noted that Miss Van Patten had a personality which asserted itself even in the dark. Though he could see nothing of her more than an outline, he was able to follow every expression. This made it easier to understand how the blind father gave himself up completely to that other illusion.
“Will you ring for a light, Eleanor?” requested Aunt Philomela.
“The dark is very restful,” hazarded Barnes.
He rather enjoyed the situation. It gave his imagination freer play.
“The dark may keep us all in better countenance,” assented the aunt tartly. ”

“ But—well, I don’t suppose you realize how big a part a woman plays in work of my sort.”
“I think I do.”
“She’s the very life of it.”
“The very life,” repeated Barnes.
“In business, it’s every man for himself; but in music you’ve got to have someone to sing to, someone to play for.”
“What about the masters?”
“Oh, when a man’s a genius, it’s different. But when you’re just human—well, that’s all I am and I’m glad of it. ”

“ The wonder was, thought Barnes as from his window he caught glimpses of it winding in and out among the trees up the hill and so on, either way, until it ran straight into an ocean—the wonder was how these young fellows hereabouts resisted its call. If a man but followed it in its intricacies he would pass, on the way, every palace and hovel in the land. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, a traveler would come upon them every one. ”

“ Carl glanced up quickly.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
Barnes sat down on the turf a little way from Langdon and stared at the saffron road. The tawny ribbon seemed such an integral part of all the strange occurrences of this last month that he turned to it now, as to a comrade, for help in explaining.
“In some ways,” he began, “because you’re an artist it makes it easier to tell you; but in other ways that fact makes it harder.” ”

“ Barnes smiled grimly.
[184] “If I were an artist,” he said, “I’d paint you as you stand there saying that, Langdon. There’s a big triumphant picture in you—of some sort!”
Barnes made his feet and for a moment the men stood side by side looking down upon the green valley which was slowly coming to life there below them. What a song it was; what a picture it was! The blazing sun was big enough to make both of it. For a second Barnes caught a flash of some hidden meaning in this thought. Then his face hardened; even the sun could not do both through one man alone. ”

“ What has he to gain by giving his time to us?”
“It is not easy to understand men—especially young men,” affirmed Aunt Philomela.
“There isn’t anything to understand, when one is just kind.”
“A great deal more sometimes than when one is merely unkind.”
Miss Van Patten met her aunt’s eyes.
“Aunt,” she declared, “if you could have seen the joy in Daddy’s face you wouldn’t bother yourself with suspicions. We haven’t any right to consider ourselves at all in this matter. We’ve saved father a great grief. Isn’t that enough?” ”

“ She dreamed that Eleanor had run away with a ne’er do well artist, deserting her poor old aunt and her sick father. Then, in her dream, Mr. Van Patten had died, thereby leaving her a lonely, heart-broken old woman finding what solace she might in consecrating her life to the poor of the village. And that, after all, was a poor sort of consolation.
So when Aunt Philomela came down she was in no mood to be trifled with. Yet it was just this inopportune moment that John chose to explode a bomb-shell at her feet.
[193] “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” he stammered, “but I wishes to give my notice.” ”

“ These tawny ribbons drained every spring of human life. They demanded their toll of time from all the world. And in the end, when the legs failed, all the world was finally borne over this same road and lowered to one side of it. The wonder was, then, that instead of a few dreaming poets and a few lawless vagabonds that all the young men in the world were not caught by the spell of the highway and the pageant it promised. ”

“ She wondered about that tragedy in his eyes which Carl had pointed out to her. She had noticed it particularly the day Barnes had left. If ever a man’s eyes expressed a secret woe, his did then. He had seen a great deal of the world and it would be small wonder if during that time he had met someone—someone—
She found it difficult to be more concrete. There were a great many different kinds of women and it would be very hard to visualize her whom such a man might choose. She might be tall or slight or dark or brunette or—she doubted if her appearance would matter very much to such a man. ”

“ Her hands were folded in her lap and her head was bowed.
“You see,” whispered Miss Van Patten. “The music made her drowse too in spite of herself.”
“What did you say?” inquired Aunt Philomela suddenly sitting up with the exaggerated look of wide awakeness of one who endeavors thereby to prove she has been wide awake all the time.
“I thought you were asleep,” answered the girl, stepping into the room.
“Asleep?” she answered tartly, “with that thing buzzing in one’s ears.”
“I quite agree with you,” smiled Barnes. “The ’cello is the last thing in the world to inspire sleep in the young.” ”

“ In them there was the same yearning for expression. But the mouth was different; there was no trace here of that shrewd humor which characterized Richard’s; nothing but the set capacity for infinite endurance. It was the mouth of a warrior mother. But as the sky gave her imaginings the freedom to roam a world common to her son, her lips grew tender.
She wondered what the boy might be doing at that moment. Perhaps he was sitting by the roadside sketching; perhaps admiring the work of other sketchers in that gallery of which he had spoken in one letter. ”

“ Aunt Philomela glanced up sharply. But she was not in her usual spirit. Her heart was in her mouth.
“When a man gets old he clings to his own,” declared the doctor. “It is as natural as for youth to reach for the new.”
“At any age,” opined Aunt Philomela, “there is nothing like one’s own flesh and blood.”
“Not so,” objected the doctor, “if my son didn’t stand by his sweetheart against me I’d disown him.”
Barnes felt his heart warming towards this man at once.
[154] “There’s Carl,” pursued the doctor with a wink at Eleanor, “he’s reaching out—reaching out.” ”

“ Langdon began, “that as long as Mr. Van Patten is so ill and you’re the man of the family now, I ought to come to you.”
“Yes,” answered Barnes in surprise.
Langdon faltered on.
“Since I’ve been down here this summer my music has meant more to me than it ever did before. I’ve been able to express things through it.”
He paused.
“Your sister sort of makes a man understand,” he ventured.
Barnes drew a deep breath.
“What are you driving at?” he demanded.
“I’m trying to tell you,” answered Langdon, earnestly, “but I want you to understand me first. I know how business men feel about music.” ”

“ But neither to the older man nor to the younger man did the theme itself much matter—it served only to wing their thoughts. The underlying baritone voice of the ’cello lent to Barnes’ imaginings eagle wings. He rode the winds with a sure power that lifted him above the heads of the huddled group of Welshmen—above the greater [111] huddled group called London, even to that brighter upper region where men and cities and nations count in the prospect not so much as the unpeopled mountains. There he beat the ether with his strong new-fledged wings and soared into some vague halcyon future. ”

“ However slight the chances, so long as a man may fight, victory is at least within his grasp. Yet Barnes was neither confident nor even sanguine. His thoughts did not go so far as to speculate upon the result. It was enough that he need no longer remain passive.
His plan was simple. He would tell Langdon the whole story and claim the rights of which he had been deprived. He would claim the privilege of ignoring the engagement which had not yet been publicly announced, which had not as yet even been announced to her father, so far as it might restrict him in any honorable approach to the girl. ”