“Rather shabby, when you come to think of it,” laughed the Poet, “to spurn my approval and advice to keep on. If you’d gone ahead—”
“If I had, I should be seizing a golden opportunity like this to make a touch—begging you for a few dollars to carry me over Saturday night! No; I tell you my talent wasn’t big enough; I was sharp enough to realize my limitations and try new pastures. Where a man can climb to the top, art’s all right; but look at McPherson, Banning, Myers,—these other fellows around here we’re all so proud of,—and where have they got? Why, even Stiles, who gets hung in the best exhibitions and has a reputation, barely keeps alive. I saw him in New York last week, and he was in the clouds over the sale of a picture for two hundred dollars! Think of it—and I wormed it out of him that that fixed his high-water mark. He was going to buy an abandoned farm up in Connecticut somewhere; two hundred dollars down on a thousand dollars of New England landscape; said he hoped to paint enough pictures up there this summer to make it possible to keep a horse! There’s an idea for you; being rich enough to keep a horse, just when the zoölogical museums are hustling to get specimens of the species before the last one dies! You could do something funny, awfully funny on that—eminent zoölogist out looking for a stuffed horse to stand up beside the ichthyosaurus and the diplodocus.”
The Poet expressed his gratitude for the suggestion good-naturedly. He was studying the man before him in the hope of determining just how far he had retrograded, if indeed there had been retrogression. Redfield was a trifle stouter than he had been in the days of their intimacy, and spoke with a confidence and assurance that the Redfield of old days had lacked. The interview had come about much easier than he had hoped, and Redfield’s warmth was making it easier. He was relieved to find on this closer inspection that Redfield had not changed greatly. Once or twice the broker’s brown eyes dimmed with a dreaminess that his visitor remembered. He was still a handsome fellow, not over thirty-five the Poet reckoned, and showing no traces of hard living. The coarse, unruly brown hair had not shared the general smoothing-out that was manifest in the man’s apparel. It was a fine head, set strongly on broad shoulders. The Poet, always minutely observant in such matters, noted the hands—slim, long, supple, that had once been deft with brush and graver. In spite of the changes of seven years, concretely expressed in the “Investment Securities” on the outer door, the Poet concluded that much remained of the Miles Redfield he had known. And this being true increased his difficulties in reconciling his friend with the haunting picture of Marjorie as she had stood plaintively aloof at the children’s party, or with the young wife whose cheery, hopeful letter he had read in the early hours of the morning.
“I passed your old house this afternoon,” the Poet observed casually. “I was out getting a breath of country air and came in through Marston. You were a pioneer when you went there and it’s surprising how that region has developed. I had a hard time finding the cottage, and shouldn’t have known it if it hadn’t been for some of the ineffaceable marks. The shack you built for a studio, chiefly with your own hands, seems to have been turned into a garage by the last tenant—Oh, profanest usurpation! But the house hasn’t been occupied for some time. That patch of shrubbery you set out against the studio has become a flourishing jungle. Let me see,—I seem to recall that I once did a pretty good sonnet in the studio, to the gentle whizz of the lawn-mower you were manipulating outside.”
“I remember that afternoon perfectly—and the sonnet, which is one of your best. I dare say a bronze tablet will be planted there in due course of time to mark a favorite haunt of the mighty bard.”
Redfield had found the note of reminiscence ungrateful, and he was endeavoring to keep the talk in a light key. He very much hoped that the Poet would make one of his characteristic tangential excursions into the realms of impersonal anecdote. It was rather remarkable that this man of all men had happened in just now, fresh from an inspection of the bungalow and the studio behind the lilacs that Elizabeth had planted. He began to feel uncomfortable. It was not so much the presence of the small, compact, dignified gentleman in the chair by the window that disturbed him as the aims, standards, teachings that were so inseparably associated with his visitor’s name. Redfield’s perplexity yielded suddenly to annoyance, and he remarked shortly, as though anticipating questions that were presumably in his friend’s mind:—
“Elizabeth and I have quit; you’ve probably heard that.” And then, as though to dispose of the matter quickly, he added: “It wouldn’t work—too much incompatibility; I’m willing to take the blame—guess I’ll have to, anyhow!” he ended grimly. “I suppose it’s rather a shock to a friend like you, who knew us at the beginning, when we were planting a garden to live in forever, to find that seven years wound it up. I confess that I was rather knocked out myself to find that I had lost my joy in trimming the hedge and sticking bulbs in the ground.”
“I noticed,” said the Poet musingly, “that the weeds are rioting deliriously in the garden.”
“Weeds!” Redfield caught him up harshly; “I dare say there are weeds! Our trouble was that we thought too much about the crocuses, and forgot to put in cabbages!”
“Well, you’re putting them in now!”