and under some
glamour of new desire was forgetting pictures and playing at the love of
man. Playing at it? Osmond did not know; but everything seemed play to
him in the divergences of a man who had a gift and stinted using it. If
Osmond had had any gift at all, he knew how different it would have made
his life. A tragedy of the flesh would have been slighter to a man who
felt the surge of fancy in the brain. He had nothing, at the outset, but
a faltering will and a deep distaste for any task within his reach. He
remembered well the day when he first found Peter had that aptitude for
painting, and realized, with the clarity of great revealings, what it
meant to them both. All through his boyhood Peter had been drawing, with
a facile hand, caricatures, fleeting hints of homely life, but always
likenesses. One day he came home from the post-office in a gust of
rapture. A series of random sketches had been accepted by a journal.
From that time the steps had led always upward, and Osmond climbed them
with him. But the day itself--Osmond remembered the June fervor of it
when, after a word or two to the boy, surprising to Peter in its
coldness, he went away alone and threw himself under an apple tree, his
face in the grass, to realize what had come. His own life up to this
time had seemed to him so poor that the hint of riches dazzled him. He
saw the golden gleam, not of money, but of the wealth of being. Peter
had the gift, but they would both foster it. Peter should sleep softly
and live well. He should have every luxurious aid, and to that end
Osmond would learn to wring out money from the ground. That was his only
possibility, since he must have an outdoor life. Then he began his
market-gardening. Grandmother was with him always. She even sold a piece
of land for present money to put into men and tools, and the boy began.
At first there were only vegetables to be carried to the market; then
the scheme broadened into plants and seeds. He was working passionately,
and so on honor, and his works were wanted. To his grandmother even he
made no real confidence, but she still walked with him like a spirit of
the earth itself. He knew, as he grew older, how she had drained herself
for him, how she had tended him and lived the hardiest life with him
because he needed it. There were six months of several years when she
took him to the deep woods, and they camped, and she did tasks his heart
bled to think of, as he grew up, and look