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Ebook has 298 lines and 18807 words, and 6 pages

Illustrator: Amy M. Sacker

Release date: September 26, 2023

Original publication: United States: Joseph Knight Company, 1893

A PROVENCE ROSE.

A PROVENCE ROSE

LOUISA DE LA RAM?

BOSTON JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY 1894

PAGE

"A YOUNG GIRL HAD FOUND AND RESCUED ME" 7

"IN A VERY NARROW STREET" 13

"HE WAS A PAINTER" 22

"ONE NIGHT ... LILI CAME TO MY SIDE BY THE OPEN LATTICE" 28

"SHE FELL ON HER KNEES BEFORE IT" 39

A PROVENCE ROSE.

PART FIRST.

I was a Provence rose.

A little slender rose, with leaves of shining green and blossoms of purest white,--a little fragile thing, but fair, they said, growing in the casement in a chamber in a street.

I remember my birth-country well. A great wild garden, where roses grew together by millions and tens of millions, all tossing our bright heads in the light of a southern sun on the edge of an old, old city--old as Rome--whose ruins were clothed with the wild fig-tree and the scarlet blossom of the climbing creepers growing tall and free in our glad air of France.

I remember how the ruined aqueduct went like a dark shadow straight across the plains; how the green and golden lizards crept in and out and about amongst the grasses; how the cicala sang her song in the moist, sultry eves; how the women from the wells came trooping by, stately as monarchs, with their water-jars upon their heads; how the hot hush of the burning noons would fall, and all things droop and sleep except ourselves; how swift amongst us would dart the little blue-winged birds, and hide their heads in our white breasts and drink from our hearts the dew, and then hover above us in their gratitude, with sweet, faint music of their wings, till sunset came.

I remember-- But what is the use? I am only a rose; a thing born for a day, to bloom and be gathered, and die. So you say: you must know. God gave you all created things for your pleasure and use. So you say.

There my birth was; there I lived--in the wide south, with its strong, quivering light, its radiant skies, its purple plains, its fruits of gourd and vine. I was young; I was happy; I lived: it was enough.

One day a rough hand tore me from my parent stem and took me, bleeding and drooping, from my birthplace, with a thousand other captives of my kind. They bound a score of us up together, and made us a cruel substitute for our cool, glad garden-home with poor leaves, all wet from their own tears, and mosses torn as we were from their birth-nests under the great cedars that rose against the radiant native skies.

Then we were shut in darkness for I know not how long a space; and when we saw the light of day again we were lying with our dear dead friends, the leaves, with many flowers of various kinds, and foliage and ferns and shrubs and creeping plants, in a place quite strange to us,--a place filled with other roses and with all things that bloom and bear in the rich days of midsummer,--a place which I heard them call the market of the Madeleine. And when I heard that name I knew that I was in Paris.

For many a time, when the dread hand of the reaper had descended upon us, and we had beheld our fairest and most fragrant relatives borne away from us to death, a shiver that was not of the wind had run through all our boughs and blossoms, and all the roses had murmured in sadness and in terror, "Better the worm or the drought, the blight or the fly, the whirlwind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout that levels our proudest with the earth--better any of these than the long-lingering death by famine and faintness and thirst that awaits every flower which goes to the Madeleine."

It was an honor, no doubt, to be so chosen. A rose was the purest, the sweetest, the haughtiest of all her sisterhood ere she went thither. But, though honor is well no doubt, yet it surely is better to blow free in the breeze and to live one's life out, and to be, if forgotten by glory, yet also forgotten by pain. Nay, yet: I have known a rose, even a rose who had but one little short life of a summer day to live through and to lose, perish glad and triumphant in its prime because it died on a woman's breast and of a woman's kiss. You see there are roses as weak as men are.

I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long night of travel, with my kindred beside me in exile, on a flower-stall of the Madeleine.

It was noon--the pretty place was full of people: it was June, and the day was brilliant. A woman of Picardy sat with us on the board before her,--a woman with blue eyes and ear-rings of silver, who bound us together in fifties and hundreds into those sad gatherings of our pale ghosts which in your human language you have called "bouquets." The loveliest and greatest amongst us suffered decapitation, as your Marie Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes did, and died at once to have their beautiful, bright heads impaled--a thing of death, a mere mockery of a flower--on slender spears of wire. I, a little white and fragile thing, and very young, was in no way eminent enough amongst my kind to find that martyrdom which as surely awaits the loveliest of our roses as it awaits the highest fame of your humanity.

I was bound up amongst a score of others with ropes of gardener's bass to chain me amidst my fellow-prisoners, and handed over by my jailer with the silver ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a piece of gold--whether of great or little value I know not now. None of my own roses were with me: all were strangers. You never think, of course, that a little rose can care for its birthplace or its kindred; but you err.

O fool! Shall we not care for one another?--we who have so divine a life in common, who together sleep beneath the stars, and together sport in the summer wind, and together listen to the daybreak singing of the birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf in slumber--we who know that we are all of heaven that God, when He called away His angels, bade them leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now and then make man remember Him!

You err. We love one another well; and if we may not live in union, we crave at least in union to droop and die. It is seldom that we have this boon. Wild flowers can live and die together; so can the poor amongst you: but we of the cultivated garden needs must part and die alone.

All the captives with me were strangers: haughty, scentless pelargoniums; gardenias, arrogant even in their woe; a knot of little, humble forget-me-nots, ashamed in the grand company of patrician prisoners; a stephanalis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath was peace and sweetness; and many sprays of myrtle born in Rome, whose classic leaves wailed Tasso's lamentation as they went.

I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest were, for in the rough, swift motion of the youth who bore us my bonds gave way and I fell through the silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.

There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so far as I had consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise and waft me on his wings away to some shadow, some rest, some fresh, cool place of silence.

I was tortured with thirst; I was choked with dust; I was parched with heat.

The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal; the sun scorched like flame on the glare of the staring walls; the heavy feet of the hurrying crowd tramped past me black and ponderous; with every step I thought my death would come under the crushing weight of those clanging heels.

It was five seconds, five hours--which I know not. The torture was too horrible to be measured by time. I must have been already dead, or at the very gasp of death, when a cool, soft touch was laid on me; I was gently lifted, raised to tender lips, and fanned with a gentle, cooling breath,--breath from the lips that had kissed me.

A young girl had found and rescued me,--a girl of the people, poor enough to deem a trampled flower a treasure-trove.

She carried me very gently, carefully veiling me from sun and dust as we went; and when I recovered perception I was floating in a porcelain bath on the surface of cool, fresh water, from which I drank eagerly as soon as my sickly sense of faintness passed away.

My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small chamber; it was, I knew afterward, but a white pan of common earthenware, such as you buy for two sous and put in your birdcages. But no bath of ivory and pearl and silver was ever more refreshing to imperial or patrician limbs than was that little clean and snowy pattypan to me.

Under its reviving influences I became able to lift my head and raise my leaves and spread myself to the sunlight, and look round me. The chamber was in the roof, high above the traffic of the passage-way beneath; it was very poor, very simple, furnished with few and homely things. True, to all our nation of flowers it matters little, when we are borne into captivity, whether the prison-house which receives us be palace or garret. Not to us can it signify whether we perish in S?vres vase of royal blue, or in kitchen pipkin of brown ware. Your lordliest halls can seem but dark, pent, noisome dungeons to creatures born to live on the wide plain, by the sunlit meadow, in the hedgerow, or the forest, or the green, leafy garden-way; tossing always in the joyous winds, and looking always upward to the open sky.

But it is of little use to dwell on this. You think that flowers, like animals, were only created to be used and abused by you, and that we, like your horse and dog, should be grateful when you honor us by slaughter or starvation at your hands. To be brief, this room was very humble, a mere attic, with one smaller still opening from it; but I scarcely thought of its size or aspect. I looked at nothing but the woman who had saved me. She was quite young; not very beautiful, perhaps, except for wonderful soft azure eyes, and a mouth smiling and glad, with lovely curves to the lips, and hair dark as a raven's wing, which was braided and bound close to her head. She was clad very poorly, yet with an exquisite neatness and even grace; for she was of the people no doubt, but of the people of France. Her voice was very melodious; she had a silver cross on her bosom; and, though her face was pale, it had health.

She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even when she held me and pierced me with steel and murmured over me, "They say roses are so hard to rear so, and you are such a little thing; but do grow to a tree and live with me. Surely, you can if you try."

She had wounded me sharply and thrust me into a tomb of baked red clay filled with black and heavy mould. But I knew that I was pierced to the heart that I might--though only a little offshoot gathered to die in a day--strike root of my own and be strong, and carry a crown of fresh blossoms. For she but dealt with me as your world deals with you, when your heart aches and your brain burns, and Fate stabs you, and says in your ear, "O fool! to be great you must suffer." You to your fate are thankless, being human; but I, a rose, was not.

I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that little, dull clay cell; I tried to forget my sweet, glad southern birthplace, and not to sicken and swoon in the noxious gases of the city air. I did my best not to shudder in the vapor of the stove, and not to grow pale in the clammy heats of the street, and not to die of useless lamentation for all that I had lost--for the noble tawny sunsets, and the sapphire blue skies, and the winds all fragrant with the almond-tree flowers, and the sunlight in which the yellow orioles flashed like gold.

I did my best to be content and show my gratitude all through a parching autumn and a hateful winter; and with the spring a wandering wind came and wooed me with low, amorous whispers--came from the south, he said; and I learned that even in exile in an attic window love may find us out and make for us a country and a home.

So I lived and grew and was happy there against the small, dim garret panes, and my lover from the south came, still faithful, year by year; and all the voices round me said that I was fair--pale indeed, and fragile of strength, as a creature torn from its own land and all its friends must be, but contented and glad, and grateful to the God who made me, because I had not lived in vain, but often saw sad eyes, half blinded with toil and tears, smile at me when they had no other cause for smiles.

"It is bitter to be mewed in a city," said once to me an old, old vine who had been thrust into the stones below and had climbed the house wall, Heaven knew how, and had lived for half a century jammed between buildings, catching a gleam of sunshine on his dusty leaves once perhaps in a whole summer. "It is bitter for us. I would rather have had the axe at my root and been burned. But perhaps without us the poorest of people would never remember the look of the fields. When they see a green leaf they laugh a little, and then weep--some of them. We, the trees and the flowers, live in the cities as those souls amongst them whom they call poets live in the world,--exiled from heaven that by them the world may now and then bethink itself of God."

And I believe that the vine spoke truly. Surely, he who plants a green tree in a city way plants a thought of God in many a human heart arid with the dust of travail and clogged with the greeds of gold. So, with my lover the wind and my neighbor the vine, I was content and patient, and gave many hours of pleasure to many hard lives, and brought forth many a blossom of sweetness in that little nook under the roof.

Had my brothers and sisters done better, I wonder, living in gilded balconies or dying in jewelled hands?

I cannot say: I can only tell of myself.

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