CHAPTER VI.
CONVERGING LINES.
On the prairies of Vermilion and Lafayette, winter is virtually over by the first week in February. From sky to sky, each tree and field, each plain and plantation grove, are putting on the greenery of a Northern May. Even on Côte Gelée the housewife has persuaded le vieux to lay aside his gun, and the early potatoes are already planted. If the moon be at the full, much ground is ready for the sower; and those ploughmen and pony teams and men working along behind them with big, clumsy hoes, over in yonder field, are planting corn. Those silent, tremulous strands of black that in the morning sky come gliding, high overhead, from the direction of the great sea-marshes and fade into the northern blue, are flocks that have escaped the murderous gun of the pot-hunter. Spring and Summer are driving these before them as the younger and older sister, almost abreast, come laughing, and striving to outrun each other across the Mexican Gulf.
Those two travellers on horseback, so dwarfed by distance, whom you see approaching out of the north-west, you shall presently find have made, in their dress, no provision against cold. At Carancro, some miles away to the north-east, there is a thermometer; and somewhere in Vermilionville, a like distance to the south-east, there might possibly be found a barometer; but there is no need of either to tell that the air to-day is threescore and ten and will be more before it is less. Before the riders draw near you have noticed that only one is a man and the other a woman. And now you may see that he is sleek and alert, blonde and bland, and the savage within us wants to knock off his silk hat. All the more so for that she is singularly pretty to be met in his sole care. The years count on her brows, it is true, but the way in which they tell of matronhood—and somehow of widowhood too—is a very fair and gentle way. Her dress is plain, but its lines have a grace that is also dignity; and the lines of her face—lines is too hard a word for them—are not those of time, but of will and of care, that have chastened and refined one another. She speaks only now and then. Her companion’s speech fills the wide intervals.
“Yesterday morning,” he says, “as I came along here a little after sunrise, there was a thin fog lying only two or three feet deep, close to the level ground as far as you could see, hiding the whole prairie, and making it look for all the world like a beautiful lake, with every here and there a green grove standing out of it like a real little island.”
She replies that she used to see it so in her younger days. The Acadian accent is in her words. She lifts her black eyes, looks toward Carancro, and is silent.
“You’re thinking of the changes,” says her escort.
“Yass; ’tis so. Dey got twenty time’ many field’ like had befo’. Peop’ don’t raise cattl’ no more; raise crop’. Dey say even dat land changin’.”
“How changing?”
“I dunno. I dunno if ’tis so. Dey say prairie risin’ mo’ higher every year. I dunno if ’tis so. I t’ink dat land don’t change much; but de peop’, yass.”