CHAPTER XIII
MRS. GRAHAM WOODS BARTLETT
The great house stood on a hilltop quite two miles from the station, and cut into the immense iron door standing guard to the grounds was the name "Bartlett Villa."
Here for a small part of the year the Graham Woods Bartletts lived. The family consisted of mother, father, and son, named for his father. In the city another house as large and more palatial received the family when they tired of the country home.
Mr. Graham Woods Bartlett held large interests in the Massey Steel Mills. That he might be on the ground part of the time he had built Bartlett Villa. In his heart he loved the small town. It was like a retreat to him to come back to its quiet after feverish hours spent in the crowded city. Here he seemed to recall in part a few of his vanished dreams—those dreams so bright, so well-nigh impossible of fulfillment, which as a young man fresh from college he had cherished. While young, he met and loved the girl he married. That she had visions he perfectly believed. That her visions were unworthy no power then could have made him believe. She came from an impecunious family whose lineage was older and greater than his. How she could have thought the high-browed, sensitive-faced young man the one who could fulfill her grasping desires is not to be fathomed. She had believed so, and he did bring to pass all her aspirations. That in doing so he killed his finest ideals mattered not.
Young Graham, too, was always glad when the time came for a stay at Bartlett Villa in Anchorville. He loved the big upstanding elms; loved the many gardens, and the flaunting flowers. He loved the two people who belonged properly in the environs of Bartlett Villa—old Nancy, who had been his mother's nurse and his own, and David, the gardener, with his little daughter Daphne.
Nancy, old, with hard rosy cheeks, was still so real. She worked and sang, loved and sometimes resented on behalf of those whom she served. Often, when quite a little boy, Graham would seek her in the old nursery of the city home and climb into her lap, rest his curly head against her loving breast, and sometimes contentedly fall asleep.
He never so cuddled with his mother, no matter how fervent the longings that filled his heart. She was always finely dressed; and her eyes were never for him alone. They were fixed on some distant and glittering goal, quite beyond the boy's understanding.
Then there was David, big of stature, big of mind. David, given over to many long, silent periods, because David had lost a loved and cherished one.