I.

The 3.20 train from Boston slowed up as it drew into a way station, and

Malcolm McCann, grim and sullen from his weary ride in the dirt and

cinders, the coal-smoke and the foetid air, the fretting babies and hot,

worrying men, that characterise a railway journey in August, hurried out

with a grunt of relief.

It was not a pretty station where he found himself, and he glared

ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls,

the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, "Gents,"

"Ladies," "Refreshment Saloon," the rough raftered roof over the

tracks,--everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching

even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned

thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob

that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling

business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat

cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over

the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue

of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the

annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between

his teeth.

Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled and

scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a five-year

old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough, who answered in

kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows flaunted on the

cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana-skins, cigar-butts, and

saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the scuffling mob.

Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere,--in the unhappy people no less than

in their surroundings.

McCann strode scornfully to the rear of the station and looked vaguely

around to see if Aurelian had sent any kind of a conveyance to take him

to his home,--of the location of which, save that it was to be reached

from this particular station, McCann knew nothing. The prospect was not

much better outside than in. The air was thick with fine white dust, and

dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side was a wall of brick

tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries, and a fish-market

below, all adding their mite to the virulence of the dead, stifling air.

Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out of the grimy windows, where

long festoons of half-washed clothes drooped sordidly. On the other

side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly repairing the ravages of a fire

that evidently had swept clear a large space in its well-meant but

ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt black chimneys wound with

writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of wall blistered white on one

side, piles of crumbling bricks where men worked sullenly loading blue

carts, mingled with new work, where the walls, girdled with yellow

scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier, than before; the plain factory

walls with their rows of square windows less hideous by far than those

buildings where some ignorant contractor was trying by the aid of

galvanised iron to produce an effect of tawdry, lying magnificence.

Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled or scurried along in

the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars jolted over the granite

pavement with a clanging, clattering din that was maddening. In fact,

none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far

as one could see.

McCann turned away from this spectacle of humiliating prosperity, and

ran his eyes over the vehicles about the station, searching for some

indication of his friend. He had thought that perhaps Aurelian might

come himself; but he saw no sign of a familiar figure, no indication

even of any conveyance that might belong to Aurelian Blake. The greater

part of the carriages had gone, and now only remained an express-waggon

or two, a decrepit old hack, an old-fashioned chaise, one or two

nondescript country conveyances, and a particularly gorgeous victoria,

drawn by a pair of splendid grey horses, a liveried driver sitting on

the box in Ethiopian state. None of these vehicles could possibly belong

to the fastidious but democratic Aurelian, and McCann almost thought

his telegram must have miscarried.

A black footman in fawn-coloured livery, wearing a small cockade of

scarlet and silver, touched his hat to the sulky traveller.

"Beg yo pahdon, suh, but ah yo Mistuh McCann, Mistuh Malcolm McCann, of

Boston, suh?"

"That is my name," said McCann, shortly.

"I have the honnoh to be Mistuh Blake's footman, suh," and he touched

the cockade in his hat again. "Will yo have the kindness to follow me,

suh?"

There was a touch of servile imperiousness in the voice, and McCann

followed in bewildered surprise. "Aurelian Blake's footman"--that did

not sound well. Could his pupil have become a backslider in the last two

years? "Aurelian Blake's footman"--the idea was surprising in itself;

but the fact of the big victoria with its luxurious trappings where he

soon found himself being whirled swiftly on through the screaming,

clattering city was more surprising still, and not a little disquieting.

The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles,

passing the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over

to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards,

through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy

machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small

areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some

factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green,

stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and

purples where the water had dried under the fierce sun. All around lay

piles of refuse,--iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans, old leather

stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere escape-pipes

vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of industrial

civilisation. McCann cast a pitying look at the pale, dispirited figures

passing languidly to and fro in the midst of the din and the foul air,

and set his teeth closely.

Presently they entered that part of the city where live the poor, they

who work in the mills, when they are not on strike, or the mills are not

shut down,--as barren of trees or grass as the centre of the city, the

baked grey earth trodden hard between the crowded tenements painted

lifeless greys, as dead in colour as the clay about them. Children and

goats crawled starvedly around or huddled in the hot shadow of the sides

of the houses. This passed, and then came the circle of "suburban

residences," as crowded almost as the tottering tenements, but with

green grass around them. Frightful spectacles these,--"Queen Anne" and

colonial vagaries painted lurid colours, and frantic in their cheap

elaboration. Between two affected little cottages painted orange and

green and with round towers on their corners, stood a new six-story

apartment-house with vulgar front of brown stone, "Romanesque" in style,

but with long flat sides of cheap brick. McCann caught the name on the

big white board that announced "Suites to let," "Hotel Plantagenet," and

grinned savagely.

Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end,

giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as

they left the town far behind. McCann's eyebrows were knotted in a

scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the

city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism

within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet

half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing

solemnly the town he had left: "I hope from my soul that I may live to

see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when

those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony

valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall

shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds

shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above;

when only rats and small snakes shall crawl through the ruin of that

'thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis;' when the very name

it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for

horror and despair!" Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and

felt better.

Presently a flash of recollection passed over his face, and he eagerly

dropped his hand into a side pocket, pulling therefrom a brierwood pipe,

discovered with a sigh of satisfaction that a sweet heel of "Dills

Best" still lurked in the bottom of the bowl, and, regardless of the

amazement of the immaculate footman, lighted it, and sank back in the

cushions, well content. As he smoked, his thoughts went back to Aurelian

with some uneasiness. "I am afraid he is a backslider," he mused

seriously. "Now, when I went over to England a couple of years ago, he

was a good socialist, the best pupil I ever had. He would rail at the

world in good set terms, better than I myself. And now he runs a trap

like this, with a coon slave for a driver and a footman beside him. Now,

I _can't_ lose a man like that; he was a born leader of men, when

leaders are what we lack. Besides, he had a lot of money, and we need

money as badly as we need leaders. I must get him back some way, if gone

he is; and I very much expect bad news from the boy when I get to--Now,

what did he call his place?" he pulled a letter from his pocket, shaking

tobacco ashes out of its folds. "Oh, yes, 'Vita Nuova.' Now, why the

devil did he name his place that?"

The stubby pipe sucked and sputtered, and McCann knocked the ashes into

the road. They had driven already nearly an hour, and he was growing

impatient; "how much farther had they to go?" He asked the coachman, who

only replied, "Just a fractional bit further, suh," which was

indefinite. They left the highway and struck into a hilly road where the

hedgerows grew thick on either side, with rough pastures beyond, on the

one hand, and on the other thick and ancient pine forests, where the

low sunlight struck under the sighing branches and rested on mossy

boulders and level patches of golden ferns. Now and then a grey

farmhouse appeared in its orchard, and once they passed a dingy white

meeting-house, with pointed wooden spikes on the four corners of its

belfry, its green blinds faded a sickly yellow. Just beyond they met the

country milk-team with its cantering horses and clattering cans, the

driver nodding on his seat, with a watchful collie beside him. Then the

pastures on the right ended, and they plunged into deep forests, black,

almost lightless, where the road wound like the bed of a dry torrent in

a vast green cañon. The carriage climbed steeply up the rocky road, with

no sound around but the rattle of pebbles under the feet of the horses,

and the melancholy calling of the wood thrushes. On the crown of the

hill heavy wrought-iron gates closed their passage, gates that swung

back slowly as the footman whistled twice. They passed through, turned

sharply to the left, and in a flash were out of the forest.

Malcolm McCann had not a very keen sense of beauty, but even to him the

vision that lay before him startled him into sudden enthusiasm. They

were riding along the comb of a ridge of high hills thick with ink-black

pine forests to the left, while to the right they swept down in gracious

undulations into a basin-shaped valley, the level floor of which was, it

may be, something over a thousand acres in extent, shaped like an

elongated ellipse, with lofty hills rising on all sides.

The sun dropped down and lay on the edge of the world; from the farther

side of the valley it poured a suave, golden glory of molten light down

over the purple, serrated hills, that lay in the valley like amber wine.

Smooth fields of ripening grain and velvet meadow-land chequered the

valley irregularly, slim elms and dark, heavy oaks rising among them. In

the midst, curling like level smoke, wound a narrow river with black

poplars and golden chestnut-trees leaning above. In all the valley was

no sign of a dwelling save far away at the distant end, where from the

midst of thick foliage rose dark roofs and towers and chimneys, as of

some château on the Loire.

McCann caught his breath. "Is that the place?" he said quickly.

"Suh, that is Vita Nuova," answered the footman.