Carl was asked to supper and Mr. Van Patten insisted that the prize should be cooked for the guest. The king trout was avenged for his fate. Yet there could be no denying that he made a pretty dish. Through the crackling skin, thin as gold-leaf, the scarlet speckles still showed, so that, garnished with parsley as he was, he looked as content upon the platter as though he were still nosing through water-cress in his native element.
Carl was placed opposite Miss Van Patten, and Barnes was thus left to face Aunt Philomela.
“I trust your accounts balanced,” he ventured to inquire of her.
“Within a peck of potatoes,” answered Aunt Philomela indifferently.
“That I should say was doing very well.”
“For an artist, perhaps.”
“Accounts are an awful bother,” Carl chipped in.
“We waste so much time,” said Barnes. “We waste so much time in details. When all is said and done what is a peck of potatoes?”
“Never cared for potatoes,” vouchsafed Carl.
“Where would our accounts be if we permitted such slipshod methods as yours?” Aunt Philomela challenged Barnes.
“Lord, they’d be always as they are,” he replied lightly. “I’ve noticed that if you’ll allow it, your creditors do all the figuring for you.”
“For themselves rather,” snapped Aunt Philomela.
“It comes to the same in the end,” he opined.
“Even so, it’s just as well to retard the process.”
“The sooner they get it, the less they trouble you.”
“Then where would you be?” she demanded.
“You’d be in the hole,” nodded Carl.
“Lord, you’d be just where you were to start with,” Barnes affirmed grandly. “Creditors can’t disturb you. They can only get your money.”
“That may be all very well for an artist,” Aunt Philomela answered darkly, as though at best artists were but jail-birds.
Carl was devouring his portion of the trout with evident relish.
“You’re a great fisherman, Joe,” he complimented.
“Thank you.”
Barnes turned back to Aunt Philomela.
“Artists are human,” he declared, “perhaps a little more human than other humans.”
Miss Van Patten put in a word.
“I don’t see why artists are always placed in a class by themselves.”
“Quite right,” agreed Barnes. “The distinction is a purely arbitrary one. If there is any class, it belongs to the others—to the green-grocer and his peck of potatoes.”
“You’re an artist then?” inquired Carl in surprise.
Barnes himself was a bit surprised.
“All honest men are artists,” he replied vaguely.
“And all honest men keep their accounts,” stuck in Aunt Philomela.
“If they have any to keep. I doubt if strictly honest men have any.”
“Are you a Socialist?” inquired Carl.
“No. I keep an account with myself. If I don’t use figures, why I lie awake longer at night.”
“And don’t care whether you come out right or not,” snapped Aunt Philomela.
“Your true artist cares more than anyone else in the world how he comes out,” he answered soberly.
“But the potatoes—”
“The potatoes. When all is said and done what is a peck of potatoes? I am like Mr. Langdon, I don’t care for them.”
“But you aren’t like me about trout. You don’t seem to care for trout.”
“I enjoy catching them at least. Perhaps I’m like my sister in that.”
He turned to Miss Van Patten.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “I’ve been hopelessly beaten in my own waters.”
“I suppose you had plenty of sport in Alaska,” broke in Carl.
“In Alaska?” answered Barnes absent-mindedly.
“With four fingered William,” Aunt Philomela hastily reminded him.
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Polar bear and—such things?” persisted Carl.
“Exactly. Polar bear and such things.”
There was a long pause. Barnes stubbornly refused to expound. Miss Van Patten came to the rescue. She asked Carl about the new song he was composing. That answered through the dessert, but with the cheese and coffee Carl turned once more upon Barnes.
“I suppose you had a rough time of it where you came from. Nothing like this, was it?”
“Snow everywhere I suppose. Nothing green?”
“From the house where I lived, you couldn’t see a sprig of green,” Barnes answered truthfully.
“Jove, it must be a desolate country.”
“Ghastly.”
“And everyone grubbing for gold, eh?”
“Every mother’s son doing nothing else. Night and day; day and night. It’s all they think of—where I came from.”
“Must be depressing.”
“It’s killing.”
Aunt Philomela was following every word breathlessly. The girl, too, held herself ready to rush into the breach should there be need.
“You didn’t like it then?” asked Carl.
“No. That’s why I left.”
“I suppose a lot of men don’t get much out of it even after putting up with all the hardships.”
“Nothing. I know a man who has cleaned up two million dollars without getting anything out of it.”
“Jove. A friend of yours?”
“A sort of friend,” answered Barnes.
He referred to his father. What had he got out of it? He was tied hand and foot in a gingerbread apartment house. His two million had never given him an hour like that by the trout-brook.
“I suppose,” suggested Carl, “it’s the spell that makes them stand it—a sort of mountain Lorelei.”
Barnes started.
“That wouldn’t make a bad theme for an opera,” mused Carl.
Barnes turned to him with renewed interest.
“Have you ever done anything in that line?” he asked.
A new light came into Langdon’s face at the question.
“Not yet.”
“You hope to?”
Langdon flushed boyishly.
“This summer has made me hope,” he answered quietly.
Aunt Philomela rose. Out of a full heart Barnes silently thanked her.
“I suppose you two will practice to-night?” she asked her niece.
Barnes waited for the answer. Miss Van Patten turned to Carl.
“I’d like to,” he answered, “but I promised Dr. Merriweather to play to him after supper.”
Barnes no longer begrudged him the brook-trout. When shortly after Carl took his departure Barnes felt actually glad that he had been the humble means of furnishing him so good a supper.
“Let’s go out and see the after-glow,” he suggested as standing on the door step with Miss Van Patten, he saw Carl turn the corner, by the letter-box.
She was upon the point of hesitating when he led the way in so determined a manner that after throwing a shawl about her shoulders, she followed. He trampled a trail through the knee-deep grass to the summit in the rear of the house. Below them lay a sweep of undulating hills unbroken to the horizon line.
At the edge of the world a mass of clouds impersonated the Alps—towering to an impressive height above the purple hills. Their whiteness was tinted with pink and one of them burned with a ghostly fire. Above these, in flat strips, lay ribbons of old-rose and greenish-yellow, while still higher the sky was a golden haze. For a moment they stared in silence at the gorgeous picture. Then he declared,
“That looks like Alaska.”
“It’s hard for me to realize that you haven’t really been in Alaska,” she said. “You make it all so vivid.”
“I’m willing to let my proxy attend to the actuality,” he answered, “but I thank him for transferring his dreams to me.”
“I’m afraid Joe never dreamed very beautifully. The dreams are all your own.”
“He must have dreamed some,” he mused, “or he wouldn’t have undertaken the journey.”
“He dreamed of gold, perhaps.”
“Well, a dream is always a dream. There’s some good in a man who will go adventuring even for gold.”
“But the object of the quest makes some difference,” she insisted.
“Undoubtedly. Though not as much as you would think. It’s the way a man handles the obstacles to his quest that counts.”
“Then for that matter a man might go adventuring in his own house,” she suggested.
“Or along a country road.”
“Because,” she explained, “there are obstacles everywhere.”
“It would be a dull world without them. Your greatest adventurer after all is a child. De Soto never ran the gauntlet of half the thrilling hazards that confront an infant in his toddling course from the nursery to the garden-gate. And if the gate is a-swing and he is successful in reaching the saffron road, he has before him an open field that might well make Pizarro pause and gasp.”
“You almost tempt one to start upon a quest,” she laughed.
“You’ve probably already started,” he affirmed. “Everyone starts as soon as he finds his feet.”
“But the joy of it lies in the consciousness of it,” she suggested.
“Exactly.”
He was silent for a moment. Their eyes met at a focus point in the fiery clouds at the edge of the earth.
“Next to children, lovers are your true adventurers,” he declared.
She offered no opinion upon this, but turned her head a little to the right, away from him. The sunset appeared in her cheeks.
“Your true lover,” he went on, pursuing his own fancy, “when footing the soft grass of a country lane is, in reality, blazing a trail through the tangled everglades of Florida. He is in search of the Fountain of Youth. He is on a voyage of discovery as momentous as that of Columbus for he, too, is after a new world. Your lover, even at home, is ever challenging the rugged heights of Alaska in search of hidden gold.”
She kept her eyes fixed upon the burning West.
“And the dangers he faces?”
“My soul, the dangers!” exclaimed Barnes. “The dangers are innumerable and terrifying. If he stumbles on so much as a phrase, he is plunged into a chasm of despair a mile deep. On every side he is confronted by icy glaciers of reserve that half hide the stars in his firmament. If he swerve one whit from the straight path, he is involved in a tangle of misunderstandings. Hostile Indians of the tribe Jaloux attack him at every point. If he move too fast, he is torn to shreds by rebuking thorns; if he go too slow, he perishes and no one mourns. Fever and thirst and heart-hunger are his. In ambush lie shaggy bears of prejudices, wild hyenas of relatives, and—”
“Don’t,” she laughed uneasily, “you quite frighten one.”
“This falling in love is no small matter,” he avowed.
“You would not think then that so many men would venture.”
“You would not think that so many men would go to sea in boats; you would not think that so many men would go to wars; you would not think that so many men would try to paint.”
The sky was like a burnished gold floor; was like the yellow sand that lies below Indian waters. The world looked marvelously serene to her. And yet she felt as though the West were calling her. It was as though a soft hand had suddenly been put within hers and were tenderly drawing her towards the sunset. When she turned back to the house, it was as though she were turning away from something. The brick house looming before her in the dusk gave less a promise of shelter than of restriction. The walls which had always given her a peaceful sense of security, now appeared more like those of a retaining castle. It is an odd illusion which can turn a fortress into a prison. It is equaled only by that which turns a prison into a fortress.
It is small wonder that it leaves a maiden thoughtful. It is small wonder that so slight a matter as the closing of an old Dutch door behind her, is enough to bring her heart up into her throat.