The Professors House
hurrying home to serve in any capacity he might.
The rugged old man stayed in Hamilton only four
days, but in that time Outland made up his mind,
had a will drawn, packed, and said good-bye. He
sailed with Father Duchene on the Rochambeau.
To this day St. Peter regretted that he had never
got that vacation in Paris with Tom Outland. He
had wanted to revisit certain spots with him: to go
with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg
Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were
bright and bitter after rain; to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun
gleam on the bronze figures—Time, bearing away
the youth who was struggling to snatch his palm—
or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It
might have mattered to Tom, had not chance, in
one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.
And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He couldn’t see Tom building “Outland,” or becoming a public-spirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he
—260—
