Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/434

THE AMERICAN "I thank you for your letter and for your being with Valentin. It is the most inexpressible sorrow to me that I was not. To see you will be only anguish; there's no need therefore to wait for what you call brighter days. It is all one now, and I shall have no brighter days. Come when you please; only notify me first. My brother is to be buried here on Friday, and my family is to remain.—"

On receipt of this Newman had gone straight to Paris and to Poitiers. The journey had taken him far southward, through green Touraine and across the far-shining Loire, into a country where the early spring deepened divinely about him, but he had never made one during which he had heeded less the lay of the land. He alighted at an hotel in respect to which he scarce knew whether the wealth of its provincial note more graced or compromised it, and the next morning drove in a couple of hours to the village of Fleurières. But here, for all his melancholy, he could n't resist the intensity of an impression. The petit bourg lay at the base of a huge mound, on the summit of which stood the crumbling ruins of a feudal castle, much of whose sturdy material, as well as that of the wall that dropped along the hill to enclose the clustered houses defensively, had been absorbed into the very substance of the village. The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a small place of interment. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep as they slanted into the grass; the patient elbow of the rampart held 404