“Well, you’ll be able to make up your mind,” said his guide, slowing down the rattletrap car. “Here we are at the Fay place, now—or the Drake place, as maybe I ought to call it—and there’s the Mirador. No wonder old Drake wants to get it fixed up again! The way it is now, it spoils the look of the whole property.”
The “Fay place” gave a first impression of having been an orange plantation transformed into a vast garden. There were acres and acres of land, Denin could not guess how many. In the midst of orange trees in fruit and blossom, and pepper trees shedding coral, and tall palm trees with long gray beards which were last year’s fronds, stood the big, rambling pink bungalow that had been Barbara’s home. Its tiled roof and wide loggias were just visible from the road; but the Mirador, to which the driver pointed, was in plain sight. Denin’s heart bounded. He almost expected to see a young girl with smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair (it had been red in those days, she’d told him) open one of the shuttered windows and look out with a smile.
Once, while she and her mother were staying at Gorston Old Hall, he had tried to teach Barbara chess. In the midst of a game which she hoped to win, she suddenly saw herself facing defeat. “Let’s begin again, and play it all over!” she had cried out, laughing.
Ah, if they could do that now: begin again, and play the game all over!
Well, the ghost of John Denin could begin to play hero with the ghost of Barbara Fay’s childhood, when he came to have his home in her old playhouse. He knew that this must and should be his home, now that he had come and seen the place and felt its influence even more subtly than he had thought to feel it. He could not get through his shorn life anywhere else.
The Mirador was distant at least four acres from the house. It too was pink, like the parent bungalow, or it had once been pink, before the fire which destroyed the addition for servants at the back had marred the rose color of its plastered adobe walls. A roof of Spanish tiles dropped low like a visor, giving cover to the balcony of the upper story; and the floor of that balcony roofed the one below. On each of these balconies only one window—which was also a door—looked out; but it was a huge window, with green exterior shutters; and the stout, square columns of the two verandas were almost hidden with roses, passion-flower, and convolvulus which had either survived the fire or grown up since. Though the front was so nearly intact, from each side of the little house could be seen the blackened wreck of burnt beams; and to screen the parent bungalow from any possible glimpse of this eyesore, a high barrier of trellis-work had been erected about two hundred feet distant from the Mirador. Over this barrier some quick-climbing creepers had been trained, and they had grown in such thick masses that an almost impenetrable green wall had already grown up between the big house and the tiny one.
“This will suit me exactly,” said Denin, trying to speak coolly. “We’ll drive back at once, please, to the agent who has the selling of the Mirador.”
·····
He was almost afraid to hear the price, lest his last dollar might not suffice to secure the treasure. But the agent in whose hands “old Drake” had put his business named the sum of two thousand dollars. This, he said, was a mere song for land so near Santa Barbara; and, no doubt, he was right. But it was a large slice of John Sanbourne’s capital, and left him only a small remnant for repairing the place, as he must agree to do before the contract could be signed.
The journey from New York had cost a good deal, and—he must live somehow, unless he could get work fitted for a “lame dog” to do. Mr. Sibley had talked vaguely of “royalties,” but it seemed impossible to Denin that many people should actually care to buy his book—the strange little book written for himself, and sent wandering out into the world to find Barbara. Even if people did buy it, the sales could surely never go beyond the three thousand dollars Eversedge Sibley had recklessly pressed upon him in advance! However, Denin did not hesitate for any of these reasons. “I’ll buy the Mirador and the acre and a half of ground Mr. Drake is willing to sell with it,” he said to the agent. “And I’d like to pay for it if possible and settle up everything to-day. Then I could move into the house at once.”