CHAPTER XXI
AN OLD PRODIGAL COMES HOME
Mrs. Barnes retired that night with uneasy foreboding, leaving father and son together. As she went out, she patted her son’s shoulder and stooping pressed her lips against his light hair.
Horatio Barnes watched her until the curtains closed behind her, and then faced his son determinedly. He was taller than the latter and heavier. His smooth-shaven face was pale and clouded. A physician would have noted many little danger signals. His expression was that of a man who has summoned all his reserve strength to some grim crisis. Barnes was surprised at the change which had taken place even in the short time he had been away. Aggressiveness had degenerated into petulance; self-confidence into bull-headedness. Yet below all this he saw an outcropping of sentiment which surprised him.
“Well,” demanded the father, lighting a black cigar, “what do you propose to do now?”
“Paint,” answered Barnes, “harder than ever.”
“Haven’t you had enough of that yet?”
Before the mother, the two had avoided this subject.
“No,” Barnes answered, “I’m just awaking to the possibilities in Art.”
The father chewed his cigar a moment.
“Boy,” he said finally, “this business here is getting too big for me alone. I can’t hold on much longer.”
“Then chuck it,” advised Barnes.
For another minute the father silently chewed his cigar. He kept control of himself because to do so meant just one chance of keeping control of this business.
“The Acme,” he resumed with an effort, “needs Youth. It needs someone who can put in twenty hours a day and not come to the office the next morning with a twitching face.”
“What it needs, then,” suggested Barnes, “is a man of cast-iron—with a scroll on his forehead.”
“It’s a big business,” went on the father with unexpected calmness. “It’s a business to be proud of. It’s a business that a young man would take over with forty years already put into it.”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Barnes, “isn’t that enough of good red years to feed into cook-stoves?”
Barnes, Sr., rose to his feet. He paced the room once or twice. He looked like a man fighting off bankruptcy. Barnes pitied him—pitied him from the bottom of his heart. But that was no reason why he should help him to his doom.
“God!” exclaimed the father, taking a stand directly in front of the boy, “I wonder how you ever happened to be a son of mine!”
“I am a son of yours,” answered Barnes, coolly, “but I am no son of the Acme’s. Sit down, father. Don’t tear yourself to pieces. Let me make a proposition of my own.”
He placed his hands upon his father’s shoulders.
“Dad,” he said soberly, “I want you to take up Art.”
Barnes, Sr., met his son’s eyes a moment in astonished stupefication. Then he sank weakly into his chair. Which left Barnes standing with the appearance of occupying the superior position.
“Dad,” he ran on, “I’m serious. This damned business of the Acme must be stopped. You’ve sat in your office down there until you’re baked as dry as though you had been sitting in one of your own ovens. It’s burning the soul out of you. I’ve seen these last few days just how small at best a cook-stove is.”
The older man made no reply, but his lips began to twitch. Barnes seated himself before those twitching lips and resumed.
“I’ve been down where people live. Dad, I’ve been back on a farm—just such another farm as gave you the strength to be alive to-day in spite of the way you’ve misused your strength. I’ve been back where trees count for something and where the blue sky is a big item of return for the day’s work. I’ve been back where you still see the sun in the daytime and the stars at night. I’ve been with an old man who expected to have to leave those things—who would then have given every cent he had to stay another day in the midst of it. If you had strewn cook-stoves end to end across the continent, he would not have swapped five breaths of night air for the whole of them.”
The old man scowled up at him as though wondering if he had lost his reason.
“I ought to have taken you along on that walk with me,” ran on Barnes, reminiscently. “It would have shown you what life can mean. You ought to have stood on the hill with me and watched the cotton-blossom clouds. It would have helped you understand that look in mother’s eyes which puzzles you every time you boast of another hundred thousand. You think you are rich and powerful. But listen to this; you haven’t money enough in all your banks to buy one minute of that single week of me. You think I’ve been idle, but let me give you an inventory: five minutes on a hill-top—value five thousand dollars; ten minutes by a letter-box—value ten thousand dollars; a half hour with Aunt Philomela—value thirty thousand dollars; an hour by a trout stream—value one hundred thousand dollars; an hour in the library, value—”
“Bah, you’re a fool!” broke in Barnes, Sr.
“I’ll submit to any jury who’s the greater fool—you or I,” answered Barnes, calmly.
“D’ye think you can live on such dream money as that?” demanded the father.
“Better than you are living on what you have,” declared his son.
He paused a minute and then added soberly.
“My capital would buy for mother what you haven’t been able to buy with yours. It wouldn’t leave her in June staring out of a window at a macadamized road.”
“What’s that?” demanded the father, straightening up.
“It wouldn’t leave her to sit alone and wonder when you’re going to drop with apoplexy,” he went on calmly.
He was almost brutal, and he knew it. It seemed the only way. To drive a new fact into that steel-chilled brain one had to use a sledge hammer. And Barnes realized that it was now or never.
“You—you think your mother is not happy?”
“Dad,” answered Barnes, “figure it out for yourself. Mother came from a green land—a land where even the fences are made of hawthorn; where even in the heart of London the sheep still nibble the grass; where acres of green grass are within walking distance of the Bank of England. The love of open spaces is in her blood. Yet you’ve taken her and shut her up here in this damned cage, and here you leave her all day long, only to come home at night with your face twitching. She isn’t doing any grumbling. She is isn’t that kind. I’ve never heard a word of complaint out of her. But I’ve eyes that aren’t covered up with sheet iron. When I saw her to-day I felt like helping her escape as though she were in prison.”
“Lord, boy!”
“What are you giving her?” demanded Barnes, pressing home his point. “Only this,” he answered, waving his hand about the apartments. “And yet she’s kept your books for you and stood by you for forty years. You remember your own boyhood. I’ve heard you tell about those fair days back on the farm. Why don’t you give her a bit of that to remember? Why don’t you chuck a few flowers and a ray of sunshine into her life? I’ve given her more than you have, myself; I’ve taken her out in the park. Why don’t you take her back to the best days of your life? It’s time you had a honeymoon. It’s time you lifted her face to the dew. It’s time you let the sun beat down upon her a while.”
The father had dropped his cigar. He fixed his worried eyes upon his son. He looked as though he were stunned. Barnes lowered his voice.
“I want you to see this, Dad,” he went on. “I want you to see it for her sake and your sake. I don’t think we have grown very far apart—you and I. If I’m not the son of your brain, I’m the son of your heart. I’ve been sitting by the side of an old man and he made me see that.”
The father met his boy’s eyes.
“It hurt to have you go, Dick,” he said.
“It was an act of Providence,” declared the latter. “If I hadn’t, we might have gone on this way until—it was too late to do anything.”
“To do anything?”
“Too late for you to take up Art.”
The father glanced up with the old evil spirit again in his eyes.
“Don’t go back to that,” he pleaded.
“Why not? That’s what you’ve got to do. And after all, you’re an artist in your own way. Look at the scroll on the Acme doors! Look at your stand against the Union! That was a stroke of art. Art is nothing but independence. Art is nothing but being yourself—expressing yourself. You’ve done that consistently whenever you’ve really been yourself. You didn’t stop to consider how much you were going to lose in shekels when you told the crowd you’d go busted by yourself rather than make a fortune under them.”
Horatio Barnes smiled grimly.
“No one but a true artist could have done that,” insisted the son. “Any other would have reckoned the cost and swallowed the pill.”
“But I beat ’em,” chuckled the father.
“Art beats every time,” declared Barnes. “It’s the one thing a man may pin his faith to. But that wasn’t your biggest piece of work as an artist. You transcended that. You really proved yourself when you married mother. It was then that you were true to your highest standard, because then you were truest to yourself. You could have married a fortune had you chosen and saved yourself twenty years of hard work. You could have married old Arbuckle’s daughter and placed the Acme where it is to-day two decades ago. Are you sorry you didn’t?”
“Sorry!” exploded the father. “Your mother, sir, is worth more to me than all the money in the Bank of England.”
“Of course she is. That’s bully of you, Dad. And you’ve lived up to that. You’ve fought for Art in fighting for her against Lord Dunnington and all his caddish tribe. Like any good artist, you’d sacrifice every round dollar to make her stand well before them. That isn’t business, it’s Art. It’s living up to your ideal against all the world.”
“But,” protested the father, “that isn’t painting pictures.”
“Lord forgive your blindness, Dad,” Barnes exclaimed. “Painting pictures is only one little way of expressing yourself. A man may be a great artist without ever having held a brush. A man may be a great artist in song, in verse, in prose, in life, even in business. But in business you mustn’t forget that back of it lies life. That’s where you slipped up. You forgot that you’re here to live—to give life to Mother, your masterpiece. To be sure, I’ve chosen to paint pictures. That seemed to me the only way in which I could live up to my best. But that doesn’t make me any better or worse than you. The whole game is to get broad and big through whatever you do.”
“Then why shouldn’t I stick to business?”
“Because you aren’t getting big; because you’ve gone stale. You need a change.”
Barnes, Sr., shifted in his chair. He reached for his cigar-box. That was a good sign.
“I—I don’t know but what you’re right, Dick,” he admitted.
“I’m sure of it, Dad.”
“I’ve thought lately that it—it wouldn’t be bad to take your mother back to the old place.”
“Do it! Do it!” exclaimed Barnes. “Make up your mind to-night. Decide before you go to bed.”
“That means giving up opening a—London office.”
“You’ve too many offices already. Cut ’em down. Tell mother you’re thinking of taking a rest, and you’ll see her grow ten years younger.”
“You think that she—”
But the question was answered by the mother herself who stole through the door in her dressing-gown. Her cheeks were pale with worry. In negligee she appeared so much older and tired that Barnes was startled. He crossed to her side, placed an arm about her waist, and led her to his chair.
“What is it, mother?” he asked.
“Nothing. Only—it’s very late. What have you two been talking about?”
“Ask Dad,” he replied.
She turned her worried eyes upon her husband. The latter too saw for the first time the years in his wife’s face. He quailed.
“Horatio,” she cried, “what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
He roused himself.
“Wife,” he said, rising to his feet. “Wife.”
He placed an arm about her. He threw back his shoulders.
“Wife,” he announced with emphasis, “I’m going to take up Art!”