This fact, however, had less to do with Barnes to-day than the more romantic one that his father in the days of beginnings, married his book-keeper, a fine-souled English girl, niece of the late Lord Dunnington. Her father, a younger son, came to America to make his fortune, died soon after, and left the girl penniless. To-day the one romantic spot left in Barnes, Sr., was his ambition to accumulate a fortune so vast that it might overawe his caddish English relatives. It was the mother in Barnes, Jr., and not the father who now stood upon the top of the hills dreaming into the cotton-blossom clouds.
His pose was misleading. Barnes was proprietor of nothing but himself. That was much or little as you happened to feel about it. To himself it was enough to make him glad that he stood here to-day even with only a trifle over ten round dollars to his name. The position was of his own choosing. He might have been secretary to the Acme Manufacturing Co. had he wished, instead of a painter of very good water-colors which as yet, however, had not found so ready a market as the cook-stoves.
The father put it bluntly when he declared, “People must eat to live; they can worry along without pictures.” Perhaps. But he couldn’t. He could worry along better without cook-stoves, as he was proving.
But when a gay shaded patch of blue seen through the straggling cloud-mist made him think of his mother’s wet eyes as they were when in something of a temper he had quit the gorgeous apartment house for good, it occurred to him that his father might have been less irascible about the matter. The man had some grounds for temper to be sure. In college Barnes had devoted himself to Fine Arts and similar subjects when the elder, not recognizing the courses as expressed in the University cipher code, had thought him working assiduously at economics and other useful branches of manufacturing. Then, too, instead of studying the market conditions of Europe when abroad, he had used the opportunity for living a bit in the Latin quarter and visiting the galleries. He reported home that so far as he could see, people over there had to have pictures; they could worry along without cook-stoves. But even so, he couldn’t stand being browbeaten like an errant schoolboy, and therefore when matters came to a crisis he packed up his sketch-book and started on a jaunt through the Catskills, where Rip Van Winkle had found surcease before him.
Below him stretched acre after acre of farm lands made rich by three generations of toilers. Gray stone walls told bluntly what the task had been. They gave the scene a history such as crumbling castle walls lend to English landscapes. The farms swept down a valley cut by a lazy lowland stream, which looked as though it might furnish good trout fishing. He turned to the left and saw through the birches bordering the road what he had not before noticed—a red brick house half hidden behind a row of elms. Just above, a wagon track led to it. He took a position where he could see the house more in detail. He caught a glimpse of a white-pillared porch and a Dutch door, the upper part swung open. The brass handle shone brightly in the sunshine. To the left there was a capacious barn with chickens scratching industriously before the open door. From somewhere came the coppery tinkle of homing cows. It looked like a place where for the asking one could get milk and honey and good rye bread.
The rural free delivery carrier jogged up the hill and, stopping to drop some mail in a letter-box out of sight behind the hedge, nodded a cheery “Howdy” to Barnes and jogged on again. This man in his officious Federal uniform destroyed something of the sleepy atmosphere of the place. “Here I am,” he seemed to declare as boisterously as the circular letters of the Acme Manufacturing Co. “Here I am, dear sir or madame, and beg to remain most respectfully yours, the United States of America.”
Barnes, who had opened his portfolio with an idea of sketching the spot, closed it again, tying it in one of those hard knots which invariably in the end he had to cut. But he was checked by a sound from the direction of the letter-box. At first he thought it was a distant whip-poor-will. It was low and had the same note of subdued pathos. Then he concluded that it was a straggling brook running with gentle sobbing among the ferns. But the peculiar sound soon became more individualized. It took on a human note; then a feminine. Finally he awoke to the fact that it was nothing else but the sobbing of a woman. He strode up the grass-grown road to the hidden stretch beyond the fringe of trees. There he found himself confronting a young woman who was kneeling upon the grass, bowed above an open letter in her lap.
She was not over twenty, but tall and lithe. Her heavy hair, black and silken, lay coiled about her head in heavy braids. She was dressed in white with a collar of exquisite lace fastened at her throat with a turquoise pendant. A great orange-colored cat arched its back in apparent sympathy against her skirt. The soft grass had muffled his approach so that for a moment she was unaware that she was not alone.
“I beg your pardon,” he apologized, hat in hand, now not at all sure that he ought to be here.
She was upon her feet in an instant. She looked as though about to run. The cat challenged him with a little spit.