The Prodigal Pro Tem

by Frederick Orin Bartlett

Barnes sprang from the bed and taking a chair by the open window inhaled the perfumed night breeze. He was tempted hard to throw this whole matter from his mind, but he gripped himself. Langdon had said, “She has filled my soul with song.”

And his own soul this same woman had filled with pictures. He saw down the whole long gallery. There were the pictures by the Thames, by the Seine, by the saffron road, and by the Schuyler brook. They waited but the touch of her fingers upon his arm to spring into reality for all the world to admire. Barnes was breathing rapidly. He checked himself.

There, too, in another heart were the songs. They waited but the brush—of her lips—to be sung. It came hard to acknowledge that. His ancestors, facing English guns, never did a harder thing.

Looking at the matter frankly then, as an artist as well as a brother, there was no ground upon which he could contest Langdon’s right to sue for this girl’s hand. There remained only his own man right to fight for his life. But he could not avail himself of this except by deserting this old gentleman—except by coming upon the field frankly as an enemy. His thoughts continually went back to the army code; he was here, as it were, upon parole. To abuse that position would be as cowardly a thing as to fire upon a flag of truce.

It took Barnes four feverish hours to thresh out these manifest truths, but when it was over he found himself in a state of curious self-possession. He had never felt calmer in his life. But somehow this room was not big enough for him; he felt the need of getting out where there was nothing overhead between him and the stars, where to the right and left he should be bounded only by the East and the West. He had not undressed, so he stole out of the room, down the stairs and out by the little Dutch door. It was odd how important a part, first and last, this inanimate object had played in his life. It was this which had first attracted him to the house; it was through this that he had led her when they had gone to the hill-top together; hard by this that Langdon had made his confession; and now it furnished him a temporary means of escape from his prison.

Barnes made his way to the top of the hill. The air was cool, the sky was deep, and below him, but the ghost of itself, lay the saffron road. He studied it with grim interest. It was no longer a glad highway through the King’s dominions and it no longer led on, but away. Even the big atlas in the library had proven that in whatever direction he might journey, it must always be away.

There was only one path now which offered him even a destination and that was back to his mother. If it had been possible he would have pushed on in the dark along this ghost road until he reached her. He would like to sit in the park with her and talk over things. He strode a half dozen steps down the hill. Then he came back. When the old gentleman now sleeping so peacefully awoke, he would ask for his son. The thin hands would fumble about for another hand and they must find what they sought.

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.

The dawn came softly, tenderly, and like evil before a good woman, the shadows stole away. The dawn came just as Eleanor might come into a room at dusk and light the candles. In the ivory East appeared the red that was in her cheeks; in the black, lowhanging clouds, appeared the gold that was in the black of her hair. A fierce desire for his paints seized him. No one had ever pictured the dawn because no one before had ever divined its secret. The dawn was Eleanor.

He heard footsteps behind and glancing around saw Langdon. The latter paused, started, and then came on again. His face was alight and he looked like one inspired.