WHEN he got home (Dr. Kérouec's house he called _home_) he found two
American letters. One was a business letter, but on the other he
recognized the familiar delicate angles of Miss Thomas's writing. He
was displeased at this. The note was like some petty daily duty busying
one in an hour of insight--like the call of the prompter in some stupid
play. It changed all, even to the language of his thought. What the
deuce can she have to say in a letter? he said to himself. He thought
he had done with her.
It was characteristic of the man that he opened the business letter
first. It was from his partner, who was growing old and more and more
reliant on Vane's judgment, and it contained an offer of a quarter of a
million from Welsh for their interest in the Bellefontaine and Pacific
Railway. Nearly every village in the Western States has a Pacific
railway, but comparatively few have reached the Pacific. Most of them
run vaguely in a westerly direction for a hundred miles or so, and are
managed by an agent of the bondholders. But the Bellefontaine P. R.
was parallel to another Pacific road, which had at last been put on a
successful basis by Welsh, the railroad king; and Welsh, who had sold
all his own stock in the successful road, of which he was president,
and who had further agreed to sell considerably more stock than he
owned, was now desirous of finishing the Bellefontaine and Pacific,
and running it in competition with his own road. Vane wrote a telegram
advising his partner to demand half a million for their interest in the
Bellefontaine Pacific; and then he opened Miss Thomas's letter. Cinerea
Lake, June 25, 187-, it was dated. Now, where and what, thought Vane,
is Cinerea?
"My dear Mr. Vane," it ran on, "I think of you all the day, and often
cannot sleep at night. What can you think of me? If I could only see
you, and feel that you would understand me; how unhappy you have
made me by what you told me the other evening! I wish now that I had
not told you of my forgiveness, although I had fully forgiven you in
my heart. I wish I had not spoken it, and then our friendship would
not have been broken. I feel now that you cannot think of me as your
friend; that you believe I have been intentionally cruel and unkind
to you. Why _did_ you tell me?
"I may be doing wrong, wrong again, in writing to you. I want so much
to ask you to come to see me--you will come, won't you? when you come
back?
"W. T. Sunday night."
"Pish!" said Vane, and he crumpled up the letter in his pocket and went
to walk, in the late afternoon. Returning, the doctor passed him in a
carriage with footmen, and he met him on the threshold of his house
with an invitation to visit at Monrepos. The people who had taken the
place were friends of the Greshams, and had known Mrs. Vane. Of course,
Vane could not go; but the question gave the needed fillip to his
action. He must do something; he must go somewhere. It is the nature of
man to go somewhere.
So Vane went to many places that summer. It is customary in romances
for men thus wandering to be haunted by the thought of something. Vane
was haunted by the thought of nothing. He did not even think of Miss
Thomas, or, if he thought of her, it was to think that he thought
nothing of her; it is nearly the same thing. He began by going to
Biarritz and Lourdes, in the path of the pilgrims. At Lourdes there
is a modern, ugly church upon a hill, with modern, manufactured glass
within; the grotto is underneath, surrounded always by hundreds of
pilgrims--many bedridden, some dying. The figure of the Virgin is robed
in a white gown, with a blue silk wrapper and a golden crown. You
may buy small replicas of it in the shops. Vane was duly shocked, as
becomes a Protestant. But one thing he liked in Lourdes--an expression
he heard used by an old priest in defending the miracle. It was, he
said, an example of the divine foolishness of the ways of God--the
Virgin's appearance to a simple child. Vane fancied that there might be
follies that had something in them of divine and much good sense that
smacked only of the world and the flesh. One got plenty of good sense
in New York.
When he left Lourdes he went eastward, through Gascony and Languedoc.
The sweet contentment of the harvest was over the country, the healthy
happiness of nature's reproduction, of fruitage and of growing seed.
All earth and nature is happy where it is not conscious. There was a
mighty harvest that year, and all the people of the country were busied
with it, getting themselves their daily bread, delivered, for the time,
from evil.
In the south of France there are wide plains and cornfields, and in
them is more than one great dead city, sleeping like some old warrior
in the peaceful afternoon of his days. The huge armor of cyclopean
walls has served its time, but still stands out, frowning, from the
sea of yellow grain; the city inside has shrunk within the walls, and
no longer fills them. Such a place is Aigues Mortes or Carcassonne;
nestling in the arms of fortresses, quiet and still, as if protected
by them and lulled to sleep. Stern in semblance as these walls may be,
they are pasteboard, like Don Quixote's helmet; they date from less
noisy days than ours; the mortarless masonry would rattle to the ground
at the sound of cannon. However, they have been of use in older days,
and it is pleasant, even now, to wander in the summer by the shadow of
the walls and look out upon the farms and the green things growing.
When a New Yorker enters these places, though, their atmosphere
is something deathlike to him. This merely vegetable growth, this
life of the market-day and harvest, is deathly dull; and the place
itself, as the phrase is, dead and alive. Possibly, our fabulous New
Yorker visiting these places (if he visits them we must make him
fabulous)--possibly, he may find things to admire in them; and the
first day, he smokes his cigar on the battlements and gets along well
enough. But towards the afternoon of the second--when he has had his
morning drive, and his daughter has brought home her water-color--a
terrible pall of silence, a stealthy, dread ennui comes over him. Ten
to one but he flies by the night express to the nearest city with an
evening paper--Marseilles, let us say, or Nice. And there, the daughter
finds a band in the Promenade des Anglais, and her water-color remains
unfinished.
Vane was conscious of some of this; he had been long enough in New York
for that. There was little here to interest an American. But still, it
was pleasant; and life was made so simple an affair! and its outside
was so sweet. How much more life promised to one in America! He did not
distrust the promise; but a question is the first shade of doubt. And
it really seemed, sometimes, as if, in ceasing to oppress one another,
men had forgotten how to make each other happy.
There is much beauty to be found in the South of France; with a
something grander, more venerable, in these old moulds of life than one
can expect among discordant sects and syncretisms. Vane enjoyed his
summer to the full, and drank in the sunlight like a wine, forgetting
that he was alone. And the people seemed so full and sound; with
qualities of their own, and self-supporting lives; not characters that
they assumed, or tried to make other people give them; nor with natures
colorless, flavorless, save for some spirit of a poor ambition.
I do not know what Vane had in his mind when this last thought so
struggled for expression. He was not ill-natured, nor yet excessively
captious. I suppose he was a little disappointed with his own country.
At all events, he soon forgot America that summer. And, after all, he
had seen but one unit, and there are more than fifty millions of them.
Nor, perhaps, did he yet know Miss Thomas--the unit whom he had known
best.