Barnes noted that Miss Van Patten had a personality which asserted itself even in the dark. Though he could see nothing of her more than an outline, he was able to follow every expression. This made it easier to understand how the blind father gave himself up completely to that other illusion.
“Will you ring for a light, Eleanor?” requested Aunt Philomela.
“The dark is very restful,” hazarded Barnes.
He rather enjoyed the situation. It gave his imagination freer play.
“The dark may keep us all in better countenance,” assented the aunt tartly.
“You left him happy? He suspected nothing?” inquired Miss Van Patten, eagerly.
“I left him asleep,” answered Barnes.
“Oh, that’s good. He hasn’t slept at night.”
“He has worried a great deal?”
“It’s been enough to break one’s heart to hear him call for Joe night after night in the dark.”
“If ever I meet the boy,” observed Barnes with impressive deliberateness, “I shall try to make him live for himself the hour I’ve just lived for him. I listened to a saint, feeling like the Devil.”
“I don’t understand how Joe had the heart to hurt him,” choked the girl.
“He didn’t have the heart—that’s the trouble,” answered Barnes. “No one in the world will venture so far to give us pain as our own.”
Aunt Philomela stirred uneasily.
“For sheer mercilessness,” added Barnes, “give me a relative. It made me squirm to have to save the boy from the shame he deserves.”
“How can we ever thank you for this!” exclaimed Miss Van Patten.
“By letting me stand face to face with the boy sometime.”
Aunt Philomela broke in.
“This act is not like Joe. He was never brutal. I don’t think he understood.”
“No. He probably didn’t understand. That’s the brutal part of it. It’s the brutes who don’t understand.”
He spoke with some heat—more than he intended, but he was still fresh from that interview. The old man’s grip was still on his arm; those sightless eyes were still straining into his. He still heard the irregular breathing and the panting questions—childish questions, trivial questions made great by the love back of them. And to these he had been forced to give lying answers which would never have been accepted save for this same great love and trust. He needed now to be diverted from the memory of it. He was eager to stir up Aunt Philomela—to turn to the lighter side of it though even the comedy of it was tragical.
“If we’re going to be consistent travelers, Aunt Philomela,” he began, “it will be necessary for me to repeat my story to you.”
“Is travelers the word?” she snapped back.
“The more polite word at any rate,” answered Barnes.
“I believe in calling a spade a spade.”
“But that isn’t any reason for calling everything a spade,” he ventured to suggest. “What I was forced to tell him didn’t have sufficient truth in it to make it a lie. It was pure fiction. I am sorry I didn’t have more time for preparation. My effort was necessarily in the nature of an inspiration. It was crude. It made me sorry that when a boy I neglected physical geography.”
Aunt Philomela groaned.
“I’m sure you did the best you could,” declared Miss Van Patten. “It was a very awkward position for you.”
“It was to say the least humiliating. He asked a great many questions.”
“Poor Daddy.”
“He will probably ask still more of Aunt Philomela,” he remarked.
“If he does!” she exploded.
“If he does?” he inquired.
“Why—this is disgraceful! We’re getting in deeper and deeper.”
“And he?”
Aunt Philomela did not answer.
“Well,” Barnes finished, “we will hold him high out of the water as long as we can. Shall I repeat to you what I told him?”
“Yes, yes,” broke in the girl, “our stories must agree.”
“The best I could do was to paint a picture,” he half apologized.
“Picture making is your profession, I believe?” questioned Aunt Philomela.
“Yes,” he answered slowly. “But my public has eyes. There are some advantages in painting for the blind. But, for that matter, many supposedly good eyes are blind.”
“And many supposedly weak ones are sound.”
“Exactly. The soul is the vision. I remembered the heading of the boy’s letter—‘The Last Chance’—and so had a starting-point. Given, too, the mystical white name ‘Alaska’ and what setting ought we to furnish a penniless young man with more spirit than heart? It was only a guess but I chose this: a green-blue sky, brittle, stinging; a panorama of white undulating to a horizon shrouded in virgin snow; in the middle distance a few slab huts; in the foreground a closer huddling of camps with the gaudy sign of the ‘Nugget’ saloon conspicuous. In the single street, bearded men as ungainly as bears in their heavy clothing, glancing with fevered eyes now towards the ‘Nugget,’ now towards the rugged banker mountains. Lean mongrels attached to sleds, passing from time to time, but no other animals; no birds, no felines, no wasted brute life.”
The Princess stole across the room and sprang into the girl’s lap. She passed her hand over the silken hair.
“The notable other buildings,” continued Barnes, dreamily, “are the post-office, the bank, the assayer’s offices, all of which are distinguished by their signs. In the bank the sheriff has diplomatically taken up quarters. So much for the stage.
“In a shanty on the outskirts of the settlement, sits Joe—sits myself. I am in heavy trousers tucked into cowhide boots and wear a bearskin coat. I am studying a batch of papers. They are the giddily-printed stock certificates of ‘The Lucky Find.’”
“I know them,” nodded Aunt Philomela, now quite lost in the narrative.
“I’m indebted to you for that suggestion,” answered Barnes. “I pore over the papers for a minute and then go to a corner where there’s a stout wooden chest marked ‘Joe Van Patten, His box,’ I take out a package of letters from home. I place them on the table and my eyes grow moist.”
“I never saw the boy blubber in my life,” objected Aunt Philomela.
“You mustn’t interrupt,” protested Miss Van Patten.
“While I’m thus sentimentalizing,” Barnes hurried on, “enter—three-fingered Bill.”
“Bah,” interrupted the aunt again.
“The name isn’t mine,” he explained, “I stole it from a magazine story. Besides, Bill was falsely so called—they neglected to count his thumb. Bill is a rough dog with whiskers like an anarchist but with a kindly heart beating beneath his faded pink sweater. This was a relic of the days when he served as a rubber down at prize fights.”
“A pleasant companion,” snorted Aunt Philomela.
“A useful one, at any rate. He greets me with a cheery ‘Hello, pard, back in the home camp?’ I guiltily thrust the packet aside and we come down to business on how most advantageously to use our relatives in the matter of the gorgeous stock certificates.”
“So Bill was responsible for that!” exclaimed the aunt.
“Responsible?”
“For disposing of that worthless paper.”
She checked herself quickly.
“I hope,” she added, “that you didn’t hint to Mr. Van Patten what I inadvertently let drop about ‘The Lucky Find.’”
“I was very cautious about particularizing in any matter capable of substantiation.”
“I wouldn’t for the world have him know. The loss—er the loss was slight.”
Barnes felt his heart warm towards Aunt Philomela. It would have warmed still more had he known that this investment involved half her scant property.
“I mentioned the fact that Bill with his wider experience held out very bright prospects for the mine.”
“It was thoughtful of you to lay it to Bill.”
Mr. Van Patten instantly offered to assist me to the limits of his means.
“If you dare allow him to invest—”
“I haven’t even any gilded certificates,” he reminded her.
“Of course not. I forgot.”
“This is merely a picture. As you see picture making can be the most harmless of occupations. We artists produce the effect, without the danger; we present the rose, without the thorns; we develop our mines, without certificates. I assured Mr. Van Patten that this was no time to invest.”
“You did very well,” Aunt Philomela complimented him.
“Thank you. Following this I went into the details of the cold weather, but—you know all about that. I assured him that I was warm and that I had plenty to eat.”
“Daddy hasn’t been able to take food at all without wondering if Joe were hungry.”
“I was well supplied, I assure you. He wished to know more about my friends and so I introduced him to Sam Foss, a most likeable fellow; Ranston, an old college friend of mine out there somewhere; and Bart Stanton, a Massachusetts Technology graduate. So you see my friends averaged up pretty well.”
“They certainly were an improvement on one fingered Bill.”
“Three fingered Bill,” he corrected, “you must be careful of your details.”
“I shall venture to repeat nothing,” she asserted. “And you think he believed all that nonsense?”
“As an eager child believes.”
“I suppose,” she mused sadly, “he has become a bit childlike.”
“He was a child when listening,” Barnes continued, “but when he talked to me it was the father who talked. I’m sorry the real child who wrote the childish letter didn’t hear what he said to me.”
He paused. Aunt Philomela waited expectantly and so, too, did her niece. But he told them nothing more. That which was not part of the dream—that which was sober reality, he had no heart to repeat.
“That concludes my report,” he said as the silence remained unbroken.
Again a silence. Then Miss Van Patten spoke.
“You’ve been most kind to us. It’s hard to know how to thank you.”
“It isn’t necessary. I’ve been well repaid—if that were essential.”
Somewhere about the house an old clock chimed nine.
Aunt Philomela rose.
“We retire early in the country,” she said wearily, “I’ll call John.”
“Thank you. I trust your dreams will be pleasant.”
“They will be of Alaska. I feel it in my bones.”
“They might be worse located—on a summer evening,” he hazarded.
She swept like a royal dowager towards the door. The girl followed but stopped a moment before him.
“Thank you again,” she murmured. “Good night.”
Then, with the Princess close behind her, she too swept queen like from the room.
As with something of a sigh Barnes half turned, he found John beside him as though he had come up through a trap in the floor.
“Ah, you?” he exclaimed.
“Yes, sir,” faltered John, wondering what else his master’s son had expected, “will you follow me, sir?”
Lighting a candle, the man escorted him to the room where the dimity curtains were bulging in from a brisk night breeze. As he placed the flickering light upon the dresser, Barnes inquired,
“You haven’t seen—”
“Good Lord, sir. No, sir.”
“Very well, John. You may go.”
He went, leaving Barnes to the fragrance of the night. The dark of the orchard made him think of her hair.