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His Own People
by
The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets may reveal:
She sang to that great assembly,
They thought, as they praised her tone;
But she and my heart knew better:
Her song was for me alone.
He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet, and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment: young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her “God-speed” to him cost her. He came very near telling her how fond of her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain with her always.
“Ah!” He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly averted. “The fates were good that I only came near it!”
He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his possession the action had become a habit.
“Comtesse de Vaurigard,” was the name engraved, and below was written in pencil: “To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o’clock Thursday.”
There had been disappointment in the first stages of his journey, and that had gone hard with Mellin. Europe had been his goal so long, and his hopes of pleasure grew so high when (after his years of saving and putting by, bit by bit, out of his salary in a real-estate office) he drew actually near the shining horizon. But London, his first stopping-place, had given him some dreadful days. He knew nobody, and had not understood how heavily sheer loneliness–which was something he had never felt until then–would weigh upon his spirits. In Cranston, where the young people “grew up together,” and where he met a dozen friends on the street in a half-hour’s walk, he often said that he “liked to be alone with himself.” London, after his first excitement in merely being there, taught him his mistake, chilled him with weeks of forbidding weather, puzzled and troubled him.
He was on his way to Paris when (as he recorded in his journal) a light came into his life. This illumination first shone for him by means of one Cooley, son and inheritor of all that had belonged to the late great Cooley, of Cooley Mills, Connecticut. Young Cooley, a person of cheery manners and bright waistcoats, was one of Mellin’s few sea-acquaintances; they had played shuffleboard together on the steamer during odd half-hours when Mr. Cooley found it possible to absent himself from poker in the smoking-room; and they encountered each other again on the channel boat crossing to Calais.
“Hey!” was Mr. Cooley’s lively greeting. “I’m meetin’ lots of people I know to-day. You runnin’ over to Paris, too? Come up to the boat-deck and meet the Countess de Vaurigard.”
“Who?” said Mellin, red with pleasure, yet fearing that he did not hear aright.
“The Countess de Vaurigard. Queen! met her in London. Sneyd introduced me to her. You remember Sneyd on the steamer? Baldish Englishman–red nose–doesn’t talk much–younger brother of Lord Rugden, so he says. Played poker some. Well, yes!”
“I saw him. I didn’t meet him.”
“You didn’t miss a whole lot. Fact is, before we landed I almost had him sized up for queer, but when he introduced me to the Countess I saw my mistake. He must be the real thing. She certainly is! You come along up and see.”
So Mellin followed, to make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair through an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself sitting beside her. He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he would have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary Kramer and other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him engaged in what he thought of as “conversational badinage” with the Comtesse de Vaurigard.