“‘Good night and good-by—it has been a great week!’” The Frenchwoman mimicked the young man’s words to herself. “Ciel, what manner of man can he be? Or have I grown so old?” And she answered herself with a sigh: “No, he’s only a poet, and he is in love with—an idea! Mélodie! Foolish poet!”
So that was the final judgment of Mme. Vernon.
But out in the gentle June night, under the dark Paris sky, the poet was sauntering beneath the dusky shadow of the Louvre, the music of the lines he had heard that evening floating through his brain. He drifted on past the empty courts of the old palace, toward the river, exalted by all that he had seen and felt during these last seven wonderful days. The spinning moments of his brief dream were too precious to waste in sleep. As he went, he talked aloud to himself.
“We ought to have something like it over there. It could be done, too! Melody should do it for us, with a portion of all this loot that I am bringing back to her. She should give something to America to justify her name!”
If Mme. Vernon had heard these muttered words, she would doubtless have qualified her judgment of the young American by adding:
“He is a crazy poet!”
Indeed there was something scarcely rational in the young American’s enthusiasm, the glowing intoxication of spirit in which he enveloped Paris. That too had been preparing for him through all the vicissitudes of the past weeks,—by the sudden resolves to commit himself to the sick man’s purpose, the growth of will as he met each fresh complication, the physical and moral regeneration of the long trail into Mexico, above all by the sense of triumph gained in his encounter with the Berlin banker. The crust of his starved nature had broken, and at the magic touch of Paris there appeared the better spirit of the man,—fearless, enthusiastic, worshiping,—the spirit of the artist, as Mme. Vernon had said. Even in his quixotic renunciation, his determination to turn away from the happiness he had found, there was a glowing conviction that this was not the end. The spirit would survive. ’Twas, indeed, but the start, the preparation for another adventure, larger, more thrilling, that loomed before him, across the ocean. Paris also was but revelation and preparation; more was to come! . . .
The graceful lines of the Palace of the Louvre rose mysteriously into the night, and recalled to Brainard the pages of old Dumas, from whom he had learned to know France. Home of the past, of a great race, home of beauty and art and romance, it called to him, young barbarian that he was, cast by chance upon its shores!
Beneath the stone parapet on which he was leaning, a laden barge passed stealthily over the black surface of the river. He followed it up the quays, crossing the Pont Neuf, over which loomed the shadowy figure of the king on horseback, on toward Notre Dame. All was still and silent about the old cathedral as he paced under the shadows of the springing buttresses. At last, while he lingered on the point of the island, out of the east came a rosy light that touched the great gray towers of the cathedral. It was the misty dawn.
“To think,” he murmured prayerfully, “that I might have died without knowing all this!”