His Own People | Page 4

had worn
them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes half-
closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation from
one of his own poems:
While trails of scent, like cobweb's films Slender and faint and rare, Of
roses, and rich, fair fabrics, Cling on the stirless air, The sibilance of
voices, At a wave of Milady's glove, Is stilled--
He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as
he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them
three months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna
McCord's "coming-out tea." "Milady" meant Mrs. McCord; she had
"stilled" the conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the
poem called a "sweet, pale singer") rose to sing Mavourneen; and the
stanza closed with the right word to rhyme with "glove." He felt a
contemptuous pity for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three
months ago, if, indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses
about Anna McCord's "coming-out tea" and referred to poor, good old
Mrs. McCord as "Milady"!
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