第23章

When Newman related to Mrs.Tristram his fruitless visit to Madame de Cintre, she urged him not to be discouraged, but to carry out his plan of "seeing Europe" during the summer, and return to Paris in the autumn and settle down comfortably for the winter."Madame de Cintre will keep," she said;"she is not a woman who will marry from one day to another."Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back to Paris;he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintre's continued widowhood.

This circumstance was at variance with his habitual frankness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the incipient stage of that passion which is more particularly known as the mysterious one.

The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes that were at once brilliant and mild had become very familiar to his memory, and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospect of never looking into them again.He communicated to Mrs.Tristram a number of other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose;but on this particular point he kept his own counsel.

He took a kindly leave of M.Nioche, having assured him that, so far as he was concerned, the blue-cloaked Madonna herself might have been present at his interview with Mademoiselle Noemie;and left the old man nursing his breast-pocket, in an ecstasy which the acutest misfortune might have been defied to dissipate.

Newman then started on his travels, with all his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure, and all his essential directness and intensity of aim.No man seemed less in a hurry, and yet no man achieved more in brief periods.He had certain practical instincts which served him excellently in his trade of tourist.

He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, not understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had desired to ascertain.

His appetite for facts was capacious, and although many of those which he noted would have seemed woefully dry and colorless to the ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful inspection of the list would have shown that he had a soft spot in his imagination.

In the charming city of Brussels--his first stopping-place after leaving Paris--he asked a great many questions about the street-cars, and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this familiar symbol of American civilization; but he was also greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hotel de Ville, and wondered whether it would not be possible to "get up"something like it in San Francisco.He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn;and he wrote the names of these gentlemen--for reasons best known to himself--on the back of an old letter.

At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been intense;passive entertainment, in the Champs Elysees and at the theatres, seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and although, as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious, satisfying BEST, he had not the Grand Tour in the least on his conscience, and was not given to cross-questioning the amusement of the hour.

He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe.

He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even--a false shame, possibly--if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror.

Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man's life should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a matter of course.The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where one might stroll about and purchase handsome things;but he was no more conscious, individually, of social pressure than he admitted the existence of such a thing as an obligatory purchase.

He had not only a dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust, of uncomfortable thoughts, and it was both uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to square one's self with a standard.

One's standard was the ideal of one's own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take.

To expand, without bothering about it--without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other--to the full compass of what he would have called a "pleasant" experience, was Newman's most definite programme of life.He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had always caught them;and just so an undue solicitude for "culture" seemed a sort of silly dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women, foreigners, and other unpractical persons.All this admitted, Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante.One's theories, after all, matter little; it is one's humor that is the great thing.

Our friend was intelligent, and he could not help that.He lounged through Belgium and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy, planning about nothing, but seeing everything.

The guides and valets de place found him an excellent subject.

He was always approachable, for he was much addicted to standing about in the vestibules and porticos of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities for impressive seclusion which are so liberally offered in Europe to gentlemen who travel with long purses.