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? ...
