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?"