II
A dream, a dream—all a dream!
The lights of Telegraph Hill showed nebulous through the evening coast-mist on the night of the twenty-fifth. The following day they were on their way through Nevada. They reached Chicago on the twenty-ninth and Albany eighteen hours later. Thence they traveled in a chair-car to Springfield.
Madelaine had time to call her mother on the long-distance telephone in Albany. Mrs. Theddon was meeting them with the motor at the Union station in Springfield. And as all journeys must have an end some time, even a Dream Journey, the steel girders of the railroad bridge across the Connecticut finally vibrated to the dull roar of their incoming train. A moment later they had crossed over the stone arch with the brilliant illumination of Main Street, Springfield, stretching north and south. The train came to a stop. Gracia Theddon espied them through the Pullman windows.
Nathan turned to help Madelaine down the steps. Never was there such a reunion.
“And this is Nathan!” cried Mrs. Theddon. She did everything but kiss him. “It makes me happy to greet you because I can see you have made my Madelaine so happy! Come, the car is waiting. We will go up at once.”
A chauffeur seemed to materialize out of atmosphere and appropriate the suit cases. They passed through the big waiting room to the portico steps on the south, where a limousine throbbed softly.... And as Nathan followed into that car and the driver closed the door, the man who had always known crude and sordid things, even though he rebelled against them, had an overwhelming sense of peace. He was finding his own. A world of beautiful things awaited him, beauty and richness,—not for cheap, provincial show, not because they had to do with The Best People, but beauty for beauty’s sake because at heart he had ever been the artist. It was not the awed provincial finding himself suddenly amid patrician environment. It was fine, rare, delicate atonement at last with all the best things which deepen life and enrich it, the delectable attributes toward which mankind has aspired on all the long climb from mumbling over bones in the river bottoms of the Neanderthal age to the twentieth century and as Nathan had once expressed it—“art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight.” The worship of beauty had become a religion with Nathan. It stood for God. And what is there irreverent in that?
It had never occurred to Nathan that he was “marrying money.” He knew in a general way that Madelaine’s foster-mother was wealthy. But when the limousine rolled under the Long Hill porte-cochère and old Murfins, gray-haired now—what hair remained—was waiting for them in the opened doorway, the home into which the young Vermonter passed brought the realization to him with perturbing force. He felt immediately chagrined. He was impatient to start his work and show these people who were accepting him for their own that he was worthy of their confidence.
Dinner was served almost as soon as Nathan could groom himself. And after it was over—though they sat for a long time over their coffee while Madelaine tried to convey to her mother a faint idea of what the two had experienced—they went out upon the wide veranda at the back of the house. The place was softly lighted and awning shaded. The broad sweep of the Connecticut was calm as a mill pond at their feet, the serried lights of the South End bridge prinkling in the water as the afterglow died upon the distant Berkshires.