"I am quite sure you are," said O'Dowd promptly, but without a trace of unfriendliness in his manner. "Bedad, loving him as I do, I can't help saying that Curtis is a bally old crank. Mind ye, I'd say it to his face,—I often do, for the matter of that. Of course," he went on seriously, "he is a sick man, poor devil. I have the unholy courage to call him a chronic crank every once in awhile, and the best thing I can say for his health is that he grins when I say it to him. You see, I've known him for a dozen years and more, and he likes me, though God knows why, unless it may be that I once did his son a good turn in London."
"Sufficient excuse for reparation, I should say," smiled Barnes.
"I introduced the lad to me only sister," said O'Dowd, "and she kept him happy for the next ten years. No doubt, I also provided Mr. Curtis with three grandchildren he might never have had but for my graciousness. As for that, I let meself in for three of the most prodigious nephews a man ever had, God bless them. I'll show you a photograph of them if ye'd care to look." He opened the back of his watch and held it out to Barnes. "Nine, seven and five, and all of them as bright as Gladstone."
"They must be stunning," said Barnes warmly.
"They'll make a beggar of me, if I live long enough," groaned O'Dowd. "It beats the deuce how childer as young as they are can have discovered what a doddering fool their uncle is. Bedad, the smallest of them knows it. The very instant I pretend to be a sensible, provident, middle-aged gentleman he shows me up most shamelessly. 'Twas only a couple of months ago that his confounded blandishments wiggled a sixty-five dollar fire engine out of me. He squirted water all over the drawing-room furniture, and I haven't been allowed to put foot into the house since. My own darlin' sister refused to look at me for a week, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if she changed me namesake's title to something less enfuriating than William." A look of distress came into his merry eyes. "By Jove, I'd like nothing better than to ask you in to have a dish of tea,—it's tea-time, I'm sure,—but I'd no more think of doing it than I'd consider cutting off me head. He doesn't like strangers. He—"
"My dear fellow, don't distress yourself," cried Barnes heartily. "There isn't the least reason in the world why—"
"You see, the poor old chap asks us up here once or twice a year,—that is to say, De Soto and me,—to keep his sister from filling the house up with men he can't endure. So long as we occupy the only available rooms, he argues, she can't stuff them full of objectionables. Twice a year she comes for a month, in the late fall and early spring. He's very fond of her, and she stands by him like a major."
"Why does he continue to live in this out-of-the-world spot, Mr. O'Dowd? He is an old man, I take it, and ill."
"You wouldn't be wondering if you knew the man," said O'Dowd. "He is a scholar, a dreamer, a sufferer. He doesn't believe in doctors. He says they're all rascals. They'd keep him alive just for the sake of what they could get out of him. So he's up here to die in peace, when his time comes, and he hopes it will come soon. He doesn't want it prolonged by a grasping, greedy doctor man. It's his kidneys, you know. He's not a very old man at that. Not more than sixty-five."
"He certainly has a fanciful streak in him, building a place like that," said Barnes, looking not at the house but into the thicket above. There was no sign of the blue and white and the spun gold that still defied exclusion from his mind's eye. He had not recovered from the thrall into which the vision of loveliness plunged him. He was still a trifle dazed and distraught.