Vane did not feel deeply his mother’s death. Indeed it hardly seemed that she could have died so lately; it was rather as if she had been dead many years. All the old seemed to have faded away out of his life, and everything new was rather unreal. As for Baby Thomas, she was either forgotten completely or dismissed with a slighting half-memory. The older love was as much in his mind and its ghost was as real a figure as this memory of yesterday. He walked over to Monrepos one afternoon when the doctor had a meeting at his house. The place was rented by an English family, and some stout girls were playing lawn tennis, while a comely youth, lying lazily on the grass, looked on critically over a short pipe. Vane sat on the walk and began to poke pebbles with his stick again. He had succeeded; and the result was emptiness. Why could not this poor sordid success have come sooner,—and his father, and so his mother, might have been alive to-day.
XVII.
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.