Indian Summer | Page 2

said. It was a withering rebuke to treason, in the opinion of
this gentleman; it was a good joke, anyway, with the Democratic
managers who had taken Colville up, being all in the Republican family;
whichever it was, it was a mortification for Colville which his pride
could not brook. He stood disgraced before the community not only as
a theorist and unpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what
was worse, he could not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad
faith; his conscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money
was found, and a printer bought up with it to start a paper in opposition
to the Democrat-Republican. Then Colville contemptuously offered to
sell out to the Republican committee in charge of the new enterprise,
and they accepted his terms.
In private life he found much of the old kindness returning to him; and
his successful opponent took the first opportunity of heaping coals of
fire on his head in the public street, when he appeared to the outer eye
to be shaking hands with Colville. During the months that he remained
to close up his affairs after the sale of his paper, the _Post-Democrat-
Republican_ (the newspaper had agglutinated the titles of two of its
predecessors, after the fashion of American journals) was fulsome in its
complimentary allusions to him. It politely invented the fiction that he
was going to Europe for his health, impaired by his journalistic labours,
and adventurously promised its readers that they might hope to hear
from him from time to time in its columns. In some of its allusions to
him Colville detected the point of a fine irony, of which he had himself
introduced the practice in the Democrat-Republican; and he
experienced, with a sense of personal impoverishment, the curious fact
that a journalist of strong characteristics leaves the tradition of himself
in such degree with the journal he has created that he seems to bring
very little away. He was obliged to confess in his own heart that the
paper was as good as ever. The assistants, who had trained themselves
to write like him, seemed to be writing quite as well, and his honesty
would not permit him to receive the consolation offered him by the
friends who told him that there was a great falling off in the
Post-Democrat-Republican. Except that it was rather more Stalwart in

its Republicanism, and had turned quite round on the question of the
tariff, it was very much what it had always been. It kept the old
decency of tone which he had given it, and it maintained the literary
character which he was proud of. The new management must have
divined that its popularity, with the women at least, was largely due to
its careful selections of verse and fiction, its literary news, and its full
and piquant criticisms, with their long extracts from new books. It was
some time since he had personally looked after this department, and the
young fellow in charge of it under him had remained with the paper. Its
continued excellence, which he could not have denied if he had wished,
seemed to leave him drained and feeble, and it was partly from the
sense of this that he declined the overtures, well backed up with money,
to establish an independent paper in Des Vaches. He felt that there was
not fight enough in him for the work, even if he had not taken that
strong disgust for public life which included the place and its people.
He wanted to get away, to get far away, and with the abrupt and total
change in his humour he reverted to a period in his life when
journalism and politics and the ambition of Congress were things
undreamed of.
At that period he was a very young architect, with an inclination toward
the literary side of his profession, which made it seem profitable to
linger, with his Ruskin in his hand, among the masterpieces of Italian
Gothic, when perhaps he might have been better employed in designing
red-roofed many-verandaed, consciously mullioned seaside cottages on
the New England coast. He wrote a magazine paper on the zoology of
the Lombardic pillars in Verona, very Ruskinian, very scornful of
modern motive. He visited every part of the peninsula, but he gave the
greater part of his time to North Italy, and in Venice he met the young
girl whom he followed to Florence. His love did not prosper; when she
went away she left him in possession of that treasure to a man of his
temperament, a broken heart. From that time his vague dreams began to
lift, and to let him live in the clear light of common day; but he was
still lingering at Florence, ignorant