IN his life, Henry Vane had hitherto been prospecting. He had sunk several shafts deep into it, and had worked them honestly, but he had not had very much success. He had struck gold; but he had not struck much of anything else; and gold had now ceased to be of the first importance. The prime solution of the difficulty had only been postponed, in Brittany, that day five years before; it had not been met. The demands of a human life had never been liquidated; they had been funded, temporarily; and now the note was falling due. He, also, had been getting his daily bread, and had been delivered from evil.
But now the old question kept recurring, and the sphinx would have an answer. The premature harvest was over (he was in Spain), forced into sooner ripeness by those passionate skies; all the country was burned, the herbage gone, the hot earth cracked and ravined. Only the yellow oranges were yet to come, that ripened for the winter; and the orange groves still gave some verdure to the hills, contrasting with the sober skies. Along the ridge by the Mediterranean was a file of graceful palm trees, swinging their languid arms above the sea.
Vane had come along the coast as far as Tarragona; and he was lying in the shadow of the lovely hill of Monserrat, thinking. He had been reading his letters again; and was seeking to come to some resolve. Nobody in the world had any claim upon his action now, save only the old doctor at Rennes. Vane had promised him a visit every summer.
He had now no great duty in America; but still, he felt that he must soon be going back. For good or evil, his path lay there. And after all, this island in an eddy of the world, this shore of the Mediterranean, facing backward to the East—it was idle staying here. He smiled to himself as he thought of his own older thoughts, when he had melodramatically planned for a war or some forlorn hope in African discovery. There is something half shameful, half sad, in seeing one’s own older folly, one’s boyish vanity and egotism. He had the necessary money now, but there was no longer anything attractive to him in the life of Paris; even dreams of adventure in the Soudan did not now fire his imagination. Vane had learned that no American could do without America, least of all an American with nothing but his country left. What was he doing on this shelvage of a bounded sea? this stage setting for past dramas, where the play was over and the lights turned out. And Vane thought to himself of Bellefontaine, Ohio, and the great future of the West, and eager Wall Street. The phrases rolled off glibly, like a well-taught lesson. Still, their being trite did not prevent their being true. Surely there was something real, something actual, progressive in America, to make one’s life worth living there. His own country aroused his interest, was worth his study. As for the trivial girl with whom he had flirted—by whom he had been corrupted—he had wasted his time over her. When he went back he would go farther abroad.
And return he must. He was wanted in America. The—the affairs of his bank required his presence. His old partner, by this time, was probably wild with irritation and amazement at his prolonged absence; and there would be heaps of letters awaiting him at Seville; a crescendo of increasing urgency, ending with daily telegrams. Then there was the sale of the railway. If successful, it meant an assured fortune, to him and his heirs, if he had any. And an assured fortune is like a license, a ticket-of-leave to mould your future as you will. Vane spent much time in endeavoring to make this motive sufficient unto himself.
He took steamer at Valencia and sailed out, westward, between the Pillars of Hercules. After all, this was more than Ulysses had ever dared do, and Ulysses was a hero of epic. Moreover, like any Irish emigrant, Ulysses had believed in the blessed Western isles. But then Ulysses had been in search of a home; he, Vane, was only in search of a fortune.
The steamer touched at Cadiz for several days; and there Vane went ashore and ran up to Seville, by rail, to get his letters. There was no other letter from Miss Thomas. Then he went to Granada, and wandered for an evening through the Alhambra.
He had got his New York papers at Seville, and he spent half an hour or more looking over the stock quotations, on a hill near the Generalife. Stocks seemed to be higher than ever; he had made still more money. While he was doing this he heard the tinkling of a zither or guitar, and, looking down, he saw that the sound proceeded from the courtyard of what was, apparently, a little inn or venta.
The broad Vega lay smiling beneath him, stretching green and fertile to the last low hill from which the banished Moor had looked back upon Granada; while around him, in every street and alley, was the tinkle of the waters, still rushing from their source in the snows through the Moor’s aqueducts, which kept his memory green with the verdure of the one green spot in Spain. Far above, to the left of Vane as he sat, were the pale snows of the Sierra Nevada, amber or ashen in the brown air of evening. The short work of the Spanish day was over; the strumming of guitars was multiplied in the stillness; and, looking down again, Vane even saw a girl dancing in the little inn yard.
There was no other spectator but a swarthy man in black—her lover, probably—with a gray hat, and a black scarf about his waist. He was playing on the zither, and the girl began to sing some strange Spanish air with long, chromatic cadences, and a wild, unusual rhythm.
They did not know that he was looking on; and the girl went on with her dance, which no one else seemed to notice but the lover, who struck his hands together, now and then, in applause or to mark the rhythm. Vane watched with interest. It was curious to think that she was really dancing, dancing and singing, and neither of them was paid for it.
Vane landed in New York about the first of September.