“What dignity there is in this people!” Ethel said to Will. “See the old goodman there, with his spade on his shoulder, how he saluted us as he passed by. Our people would think it servility, but it is far from that; it is like the refined greeting of a marquis who does the honors of his land.”
Will thought long over this. All these villages were the same now as they had been in other days. They had always been the refuge of simple ideas, and brave hearts had been born and had died in them, content to consider the smoke of the horizon only from afar. These lowly lives had passed between the old church and the little cemetery on the hill, with its cypresses among the tombs.
“Yes, here we breathe to the full filial piety and the reverence of forefathers,” Ethel said. “There is something good in all that, you know. You are right, M. Caracal, to prepare a romance on this country life. It’s a beautiful subject and full of striking pictures. Look at that village before us, with its gardens cut by a network of hedges and walls, and at the roofs pressed one against the other as if they were afraid of the horizon, and the smoke mounting straight up to the sky.”
“But all that smells of the stable,” Caracal murmured, “the country—pouah!”
“It doesn’t smell so strong as your Montmartre cafés,” Phil whispered in his ear.
For his part, Phil was living strange days. The valley and hill and the woods he looked at mechanically, thinking of Miss Rowrer the while. The deep charm of the young woman possessed him more and more; he no longer tried to resist it. She had taken possession of him without knowing it. Her mind was large, cosmopolitan, human. All Phil’s happiness was now in being at her disposition, in living near her, and seeing and hearing her. He felt that he grew morally in her presence, and he was more in love with her soul than with her beauty. When he walked through the country with her, he fancied that Columbia herself was at his side, explaining France to him.
The feeling of his littleness in her presence gave him pain. He could not imagine himself letting her know what he felt, either by word or gesture—he would never dare. She was too immensely rich. Ah! if he only could, he would give all the riches of the world that she might be poor!
It was especially when evening came, with its melancholy, that such thoughts arose in him. One night, after dinner, Phil, to please grandma, took his banjo and played the “Arkansaw Traveler.” The perfume of roses filled the tent, which was lighted dimly. The raised canvas showed a cloudless sky; the stars were rising and the crystal notes of the banjo were lost in the great silence.
“What a beautiful night!” said Ethel, “and how calm! It is like the infinite.”
“But what are we in it all?” said Phil. “In a hundred years nothing of all this will remain; a new mankind will take the place of our own. We count no more than the flower or the drop of water.”