When he left Lourdes he went eastward, through Gascony and Languedoc. The sweet contentment of the harvest was over the country, the healthy happiness of nature’s reproduction, of fruitage and of growing seed. All earth and nature is happy where it is not conscious. There was a mighty harvest that year, and all the people of the country were busied with it, getting themselves their daily bread, delivered, for the time, from evil.
In the south of France there are wide plains and cornfields, and in them is more than one great dead city, sleeping like some old warrior in the peaceful afternoon of his days. The huge armor of cyclopean walls has served its time, but still stands out, frowning, from the sea of yellow grain; the city inside has shrunk within the walls, and no longer fills them. Such a place is Aigues Mortes or Carcassonne; nestling in the arms of fortresses, quiet and still, as if protected by them and lulled to sleep. Stern in semblance as these walls may be, they are pasteboard, like Don Quixote’s helmet; they date from less noisy days than ours; the mortarless masonry would rattle to the ground at the sound of cannon. However, they have been of use in older days, and it is pleasant, even now, to wander in the summer by the shadow of the walls and look out upon the farms and the green things growing.
When a New Yorker enters these places, though, their atmosphere is something deathlike to him. This merely vegetable growth, this life of the market-day and harvest, is deathly dull; and the place itself, as the phrase is, dead and alive. Possibly, our fabulous New Yorker visiting these places (if he visits them we must make him fabulous)—possibly, he may find things to admire in them; and the first day, he smokes his cigar on the battlements and gets along well enough. But towards the afternoon of the second—when he has had his morning drive, and his daughter has brought home her water-color—a terrible pall of silence, a stealthy, dread ennui comes over him. Ten to one but he flies by the night express to the nearest city with an evening paper—Marseilles, let us say, or Nice. And there, the daughter finds a band in the Promenade des Anglais, and her water-color remains unfinished.
Vane was conscious of some of this; he had been long enough in New York for that. There was little here to interest an American. But still, it was pleasant; and life was made so simple an affair! and its outside was so sweet. How much more life promised to one in America! He did not distrust the promise; but a question is the first shade of doubt. And it really seemed, sometimes, as if, in ceasing to oppress one another, men had forgotten how to make each other happy.
There is much beauty to be found in the South of France; with a something grander, more venerable, in these old moulds of life than one can expect among discordant sects and syncretisms. Vane enjoyed his summer to the full, and drank in the sunlight like a wine, forgetting that he was alone. And the people seemed so full and sound; with qualities of their own, and self-supporting lives; not characters that they assumed, or tried to make other people give them; nor with natures colorless, flavorless, save for some spirit of a poor ambition.
I do not know what Vane had in his mind when this last thought so struggled for expression. He was not ill-natured, nor yet excessively captious. I suppose he was a little disappointed with his own country. At all events, he soon forgot America that summer. And, after all, he had seen but one unit, and there are more than fifty millions of them. Nor, perhaps, did he yet know Miss Thomas—the unit whom he had known best.
XVIII.
IN his life, Henry Vane had hitherto been prospecting. He had sunk several shafts deep into it, and had worked them honestly, but he had not had very much success. He had struck gold; but he had not struck much of anything else; and gold had now ceased to be of the first importance. The prime solution of the difficulty had only been postponed, in Brittany, that day five years before; it had not been met. The demands of a human life had never been liquidated; they had been funded, temporarily; and now the note was falling due. He, also, had been getting his daily bread, and had been delivered from evil.
But now the old question kept recurring, and the sphinx would have an answer. The premature harvest was over (he was in Spain), forced into sooner ripeness by those passionate skies; all the country was burned, the herbage gone, the hot earth cracked and ravined. Only the yellow oranges were yet to come, that ripened for the winter; and the orange groves still gave some verdure to the hills, contrasting with the sober skies. Along the ridge by the Mediterranean was a file of graceful palm trees, swinging their languid arms above the sea.