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.