Mrs. Horatio G. Barnes was sitting in lonely grandeur in the drawing-room of her suite at the Waldemere listlessly watching the scant life which crawled along the hot macadamized road below her. She was a tall woman with a serious face which on the whole was really beautiful. Her wistful gray eyes were set between rather high cheek bones and above a nose and mouth wonderfully well formed if a trifle masculine. The warm glow of her fine skin and her abundant white hair relieved them of prominence. She was tastefully dressed in black and wore no jewels save a single large stone guarded by her wedding ring.
The high semi-formal room in which she sat seemed no part of her. She looked as though she had stepped in here as into the waiting-room of one of the more pretentious hotels. In spite of the luxuriousness and the fairly good taste which she had forced upon her surroundings, she rose superior to them. They were too new to match the centuries which still lingered in her eyes; they were too obvious to match the quiet reserve of her own manner.
She lifted her eyes from the brass-trimmed touring car which slid by on the street below and raised them to the stark blue sky above. The strong family resemblance to her son was then obvious. Her eyes were the same which Barnes had raised to the cotton-blossom clouds. In them there was the same yearning for expression. But the mouth was different; there was no trace here of that shrewd humor which characterized Richard’s; nothing but the set capacity for infinite endurance. It was the mouth of a warrior mother. But as the sky gave her imaginings the freedom to roam a world common to her son, her lips grew tender.
She wondered what the boy might be doing at that moment. Perhaps he was sitting by the roadside sketching; perhaps admiring the work of other sketchers in that gallery of which he had spoken in one letter. She wondered if the money she sent him, had safely reached him. It might be as well to send him more if she didn’t hear from him by to-morrow. She might even make a flying trip down there to see what he was about. But there was Horatio. She realized that her husband’s sole pleasure at the end of those hot days lay in finding her waiting for him here. He had not seemed as well as usual during this last week. Though he never spoke of it, she suspected that he was missing the boy. At night he tossed uneasily and once she had heard him murmur “Richard” in his troubled dreams.
It was too bad that in spite of his disappointment at losing an heir to his business throne, that he could not understand. Not all men were created with the same ambitions. He himself had left the farm in which his father had taken such pride. If then her boy wished to paint pictures—
She started as she felt a pair of arms about her neck. Looking around she found a brown face next to hers.
“Dick,” she cried breathless.
“Home again, mother,” he assured her.
“Home,” she exclaimed. “I haven’t heard you say home for years, Dick.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At the office,” she answered sadly. “He has missed you, Dick.”
“I’ve come back—like a prodigal,” he answered, kissing her, “but I’m not repentant. I’m going to have a talk with Dad to-night.”
She looked a bit frightened.
“But first,” he said, “a talk with you. Put on your mildest bonnet and we’ll take a walk in the park.”
Without delay she obeyed and stepped with him into the elevator. It was with some pride that she passed through the office by the side of her tall son; it was with a renewed vision of life that she walked with him along the hot street and over the familiar course they had footed together so many times. She noticed with further pride that several passers-by glanced twice at them. She did not realize that this might have been prompted somewhat by her son’s costume which, in contrast to her own modish dress and that of the other pedestrians, was strikingly picturesque. He still wore his dusty walking-boots, his flannel shirt and loose tie. With his brown skin and erect bearing he looked like a soldier home on a furlough from active service.
In twenty minutes they reached the park which was associated more intimately with his life than any other spot in New York. For it was here that she used to bring him as a child, as a schoolboy, and finally whenever he came home from college. It was here that the first discussions took place on Art versus the Acme; it was here that she threshed out her own conflict of duty to her son and duty to her husband. Until now she had felt that she had failed miserably in attempting to harmonize the hawthorn in her blood with the pine in her husband’s. But to-day there was that in her son’s bearing which seemed to give her fresh hope. So they came to their favorite seat and sat down.
“Mother,” he began abruptly, “I’ve learned a great deal in this last week.”
“You hinted about your big picture. You have it nearly done?”
“I haven’t begun it yet—on canvas,” he answered.
“It sounded very attractive as you described it,” she encouraged.
“It’s a wonderful subject,” he exclaimed. “But it’s much easier to paint a landscape than—”
He paused. She finished for him,
“A woman?”
“Yes.”
“A young woman?”
“Yes.”
She was silent for a moment. Then, without looking at him, she rested her hand upon his arm.
“Tell me about her, Dick.”
“I had thought of using a big canvas and—”
“Tell me about her, Dick.”
“You think—”
“That my boy will never be content with a mere picture of her,” she interrupted.
“Mother, you’re a wizard,” he declared.
“Not I,” she answered almost a bit sadly. “It is she who is now the wizard.”
“It is her eyes,” he exclaimed. “Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her chin, her hair—her soul.”
She gently patted his arm still without looking at him. Her own eyes had grown wistful as though in fixing her gaze upon the sunshine which sprinkled through the leaf-shadows she was bidding something good-by.
“Tell me from the first day, Dick,” she murmured.
So he began with the sobbing by the letter-box and took her hour by hour through the events of the succeeding days, trying hard to make her see as vividly as possible every detail of them. But when he had concluded, she had clearly in her mind but one picture—that of a young woman painted in a bewildering combination of black and gold and damson preserves. And this woman met her eyes with something of a challenge. She continued to pat her son’s arm silently and very gently.
“So there she stands,” he ran on, “and every path in this old park seems to lead to her.”
He did not notice the quick flash in his mother’s eyes, followed by a deepened look of patient resignation. He did not know that he was hurting her. He did not know that he was making this park a foreign place to her.
He lowered his voice.
“And back there too is Langdon. Mother, do you think I was a fool to leave him?”
“I don’t see what else you could do.”
“Only that a man has a right to fight for his own—giving and taking no quarter.”
“But she isn’t your own, Dick.”
“No,” he admitted, “that’s true. And yet she’s already so big a part of me—”
“Don’t worry, boy.”
“There’s one other thing I wanted to see you about. I ought to settle down now into some sort of definite work. I might get some sort of a teaching position, I suppose.”
“No,” she answered quickly. “There’s no need of that.”
“Well, there’s always the Acme.”
“Nor the Acme either,” she said decidedly.
“But here I am twenty-five years old—”
“Dick,” she interrupted with some concern, “I don’t want to see you change. She would not wish to see you change. You’ll paint good pictures some day. Promise me you’ll not say anything to your father about coming into his business. Promise that to me and—to her.”
“Why are you so serious about it?” he asked.
“It is a serious matter. Will you promise?”
“Yes.”
“The world is changing for you, Dick,” she hurried on, “and the thing to do now is to hold fast to your true self. Don’t let the world change you.”
He was soon off again on another panegyric. She listened with her face grown tender but with that same far away look in her eyes. So they sat until the evening shadows began to creep in and she bethought herself of her husband.
“Be good to him, Dick,” she pleaded. “He has missed you. I think he’s changed some in this last week. I heard him say once that he might go back to the old farm for a visit.”
“Great,” exclaimed Barnes. “If we can keep that idea in his head, we’ll make a man of him yet.”
“Dick!”
“Well, that’s what he ought to do—go back there and stay. He ought to live a while now.”
As they were returning, she said, for the first time able to disentangle from his narrative a strand other than that of the girl herself,
“I’m glad, Dick, that you had an opportunity to ease the other father. It was a deed worthy of you.”
“And yet I think even if blind I should have known my own,” she mused.
“You mothers know more than anyone else in the world,” he replied, taking her arm.
“I’m glad you did it, Dick,” she said again. “It may in some way have had its effect upon your own father.”
“You’re getting mystical.”
“No,” she protested, “but I’ve never seen him so concerned with matters outside the—Acme. He’s quite changed.”
“Shall I tell him about this?”
“No. Let me tell him,” she said gently.
She looked up at him proudly. After all, he was hers. If anyone chose to care a great deal about him, why, that other was only caring for her boy. Even if he cared a great deal about someone else, it was still her boy who was caring.
They reached the Waldemere.
“Mr. Barnes has been inquiring for you,” announced the clerk.
“I have been to walk with my son,” she informed him.