HE went to the bank, and found that nothing more had been heard from
Welsh. There was nothing doing; even his partner was out of town. The
city was empty. Vane's first act was to send to Doctor Kérouec a sum
sufficient to endow liberally and for all time all the _sociétés de
consommation_ that there were in Rennes. It did not cost much; and the
money was thriftily invested by the doctor, with a most gratifying
increase in the annual statistics of soup. This he quarterly reported
to his young friend with as much satisfaction as if the statistics were
of souls saved for heaven; but there was a note of sadness now in the
old doctor's letters which had not been noticeable before.
The city was a mass of undistinguished humanity. Vane rather liked
this; and found much satisfaction in going to Coney Island and similar
places where the people asserted themselves with frankness and
sincerity. One's fellow-man is always interesting, when not factitious.
But after a very few weeks of New York, he wearied of it. He could not
bring himself to take so much interest in his business, now that it
was so very successful. The labor did not seem to him so healthy, so
satisfying as of old; it could hardly be termed his daily bread, even
by a stretch of metaphor. Moreover, one's daily bread is got for one
by wholesale in America; machine-raised, by the thousand bushels, in
Minnesota, and brought ready to hand for the million, like the other
raw materials of life.
Vane was tired of the raw material of life--he felt a want for
something that was not ground out by the wholesale. But the only
finished product he had yet seen was Miss Winifred Thomas. She was a
product of the city--perhaps he ought to go further afield. Wemyss had
once said that people only got the means of living in New York. They
went elsewhere to live.
And the young man was anxious, above all things, to live, to find in
life what was earnest and genuine: not the mere means, like money, nor
the makeshifts, like fashion. Vane wanted happiness, not pleasure; like
most young men, he felt injured if he did not get it.
It may have been this craving for humanity that made the city
unendurable to him, or it may have been the heat, which, late in
September, was most intense. Whatever it was, he felt restless and
uneasy in the city, and cast about him where he could best go for
seclusion and fresh air. Some acquaintance suggested Cinerea Lake.
It was at that time crowded with people, which would make seclusion
easy; and it was a "popular summer resort," which, he thought, would
be a novelty to him, coming from Carcassonne and the monasteries of
Monserrat. Moreover, Cinerea was one of the places in America which
people visited solely in search of happiness.
Cinerea Lake was formerly known as Butternut Pond; it belonged to a
Mr. Sabin; and the village was Sabin's simply. But the pond is really
a lake, and it lies near a spur of the Appalachian Mountains. The
place had originally been marked by a farmhouse only, to which some
popular preacher had betaken himself for the summer months. In an
evil moment he had come back, one autumn, and written a book about
the delights of the hills; the delights that he found in the hills.
In the next year seven-eighths of the ladies in his parish, and their
friends, had settled upon the country, in search, they too, of the
delights of the hills; they occupied the farmhouses within a radius of
several miles, and crocheted. The year after that had witnessed, at
only a few weeks' interval, the foundation and the completion of the
Butternut Grand Hotel. And now the place was beginning to be known to
that world which calls itself _society_, and which the rest of society
calls fashionable. Little of all this was known to Vane, however. He
understood that it was cool and crowded, and thither he accordingly
went.
Vane had his days of self-gratulation, like another; and it was in
one of them that he left town for his vacation. He felt that soon a
fortune, and a large one, would be assured him. He was an independent
and successful citizen of America, with all his country before him,
and the chances in his favor. He had lately seen something of a friend
or two also in town for the summer; and had had an occasional little
dinner with John or some other man, in the club, or by the sea; Vane
was sociable enough, though not gregarious, and he felt rich in
acquaintances with half a dozen or so. They were most of them still in
the city; and Vane felt a sense of freedom, of adventure, as he left
it, which became stronger every moment as the train flew northward. But
the journey was one of many hours, and it was late in the twilight of
the next afternoon before he alighted at Cinerea Lake--called Cinerea
by the ladies who had looked in the lexicon to christen it anew.