Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen again
upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, as
at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition cast
a shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through old
habit, suddenly checked themselves and passed on,--wondering they
should have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made an
absurd mistake.
It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowless
Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen
in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;--and in
that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and
gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had
passed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in that
strange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind
squared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet her
resting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under our
Southern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being
spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopic
mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--over
its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet
into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil
below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morning
glories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know
the name.
And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches in
the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color when
approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants,
journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;--the bees gathering
honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles
sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of
generations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of
Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of
flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten
crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the
vast light, a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it
quivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it:
its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not its
roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutriment
within?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen to
purple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wine
of the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the Wizard
Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...
... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in
the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of
life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the
human aggregate,--how insignificant his part as one living atom of the
social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made
able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and
complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even
as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in
the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences
eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a
pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had
learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks
of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place
therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he
had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty
altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had
kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had
made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors;
and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for
his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the
unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand
a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his
unanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for
sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight;
and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill
disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had
come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning
his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an
unlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed!
And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly,
passionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child
... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to God the story of
that stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...
Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself with
stars;--the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary
splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by
gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as
swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name
that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla
de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the
City of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before the
sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped
like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous
burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as
if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster,
a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth
groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no
place for thee!"