bit hard to express, but I can give you examples—" He broke off suddenly and laughed at himself. "After all," he began again in a different voice, "what's the use? I forgot that the things I should compare you with are all things you haven't seen. They would mean nothing."
"Tell me, anyhow," she commanded.
"Very well. There is a style of architecture in the Orient: The Temple of Omar at Jerusalem has it. The Taj Mahal has it. Interiors crusted with the color of gems and mosaics and rich inlay; the Italian renaissance has it; splashed from a palette that knew no stint—no economy. It's a brilliant, triumphant sort of pæan in which the notes are all notes of color. You have it, too—and now I'm going to drive on. But don't forget that it's easier to be kind when people call you spindle-legs than it will be when they come with offerings of flattery."
"You must have seen a lot of things." Mary Burton's voice was that of admiring wonder, and the young man's face became grave, almost pained for an instant.
"In a way," he answered, "I have. But I may not see much more. Most men look back on life when they are old and wise, but I am doing it while still young and perhaps the backward glance is the same in age or youth. It's a summary."
"I don't understand half of what you are saying," she confessed a little regretfully. It seemed to her from what she did grasp that the rest would be well worth while.
"If it were otherwise," he laughed with a return of the whimsical glint to his pupils and the little wrinkles about the corners of his eyes, "I should not have said half of it. A good part of my conversation has been in the manner of soliloquy. Hermits often talk to themselves. I shall now say something else you won't understand. Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft—the freakish beauty of your perfect unmatched eyes."
And all the way home Mary Burton walked on air, and the lonely woods seemed to have grown of a sudden spicy and glorious. When she stole up to the room under the eaves and looked again into the little mirror, she did not turn away so unhappy as she had been. The brown eye dared to meet the brown eye in the glass—and the violet eye, the violet.
Under her breath she repeated over and over, lest she forget some of its polysyllables, a sentence which was half-incomprehensible to her, yet which was sonorous enough and grandiloquent enough to impress her deeply. At last, also lest memory prove illusive, she wrote the sentence down: "Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft—the freakish beauty of your perfect unmatched eyes."
Down the road, two miles from the Burton home, was the wayside church with its small and unpretentious organ, and this afternoon Paul had been pumping its wheezy bellows while the young woman who contributed the Sabbath music practised. As he came out of the small building and took his way across the hills, Paul was exalted as he always was by music.
Once he had passed through the gates of dream, which swung wide to a key of sound, he wandered on, fancy led, until some actuality broke the spell, bringing him back with a shock and an inward sigh for the awakening.
But when he drew near the house, a footstep crackled in the underbrush, and Ham emerged from the woods. As the elder boy came up, Paul, roused out of his dreams, gave a start and then fell into step.
"Been out there listenin' to the leaves fallin' again?" inquired Ham shortly.
"I've been pumping the organ." Paul's reply was half-apologetic.
"You don't think about much except music, do you, Paul?"
"Isn't music all right?" For once the lad spoke almost aggressively in defense of his single enthusiasm.
"I wasn't exactly finding fault, Paul. Only, I don't see much hope for a feller in this country that doesn't think about anything else. You're in pretty much the same fix as an Esquimo that can't be happy without flowers. Grand opera doesn't come as often as the circus, and some years the circus doesn't come. Listen!" He put one hand into his trousers' pockets, and noisily rattled a handful of coins. "That music is understood everywhere. Even in this God-forsaken place, they know how to dance to its tune."
"Where did you get it?" For an instant Paul halted in his tracks and forgot his air-castles. Money was so rare a thing in their narrow little world that even to his impracticability it partook of magic.
Yesterday Ham's pockets had been as empty as his own and today there emanated from them the clash of silver—not the tinkle of light nickels and dimes, but the substantial clatter of halves and dollars.
"I sold some lambs to Slivers Martin," was the succinct reply, "and I got ten dollars for 'em."
"Some lambs?" Paul's face puckered with perplexity. "But, Ham, you haven't got any lambs."
Ham laughed with a debonair indulgence. "Sure I haven't," he cheerfully acquiesced, "but I've got the ten."
Paul shook his head, baffled. "I don't see," he persisted, "how you could sell something you didn't have." They were drawing near the house now, and Ham stopped him in the road.
"Who sells more wheat than all us farmers, Paul? Men in Wall street, don't they? And how much wheat do you suppose those fellers have got amongst the lot of them? Not enough to feed a sick pigeon with. I sold these lambs first—for ten dollars. Then I bought them off of Bill Heffers, an' Henry Berry an' Ben Best—for seven dollars."
He paused a moment, then added, while a grin of satisfaction spread over his face: "What's more, Slivers Martin had to go an' get 'em, an' he had to go in three directions. If he'd had sense enough, he could have got 'em himself in the first place for seven instead of ten. The three dollars I got clear was my margin of profit, Paul, an' a margin of profit is what a feller gets by turnin' his margin of brain into money."
The younger lad looked up with a mist of perplexity in his deep eyes. He realized vaguely that Ham had accomplished a feat somehow savoring of business acumen, which was a matter he could not hope to comprehend. Yet some comment seemed expected of him, so out of a slack interest he inquired, "Were they good lambs, Ham? What were they like?"
The embryonic speculator favored his brother with an indulgent laugh. "I guess they were all right," he enlightened casually. "As for me, I didn't see 'em—any more than the Wall-street men see the wheat they buy an' sell."
"Oh!" The little boy with the cameo face found himself still more at sea. For a while they trudged along in silence; then, with an impulsive, almost impassioned gesture, Ham clapped his hand on the other's shoulder and halted. Paul, too, stopped, and, looking up, was startled to behold features set in a rapt expression and dominated by eyes glowing with an inward ardor.
"Listen to me, Paul," began Ham in a voice which carried an electric thrill into the dreamy soul of the listener. "You love music and you live in a place where they don't know the difference between Tannhäuser and a tom-tom. Mary would like to be pretty and she lives in a place where if she was as beautiful as Cinderella, nobody but a bunch of hill-bullies would ever see her. I want power, power that the world's got to bow down to and acknowledge—and I might just as well be locked up in somebody' hen-house. Well, maybe it's enough for you only to dream about the music you don't ever expect to hear, but as for me, I dream, too, and a dream ain't much use to me unless I can turn it into facts. I'm going to make your dreams come true—every one of 'em. I'm going to make Mary's dreams come true. There ain't no better blood in the world, Paul, than you an' me have got in our veins an' I'm goin' to see that we get what we're entitled to."
Paul's pale cheeks colored for an instant and something deep within him stirred in response to the trumpet-like confidence
