Sarria and Vanamee found their way to a stone bench against the side wall of the Mission, near the door from which they had just issued, and sat down, Sarria lighting a cigar, Vanamee rolling and smoking cigarettes in Mexican fashion.
All about them widened the vast calm night.All the stars were out.The moon was coming up.There was no wind, no sound.The insistent flowing of the fountain seemed only as the symbol of the passing of time, a thing that was understood rather than heard, inevitable, prolonged.At long intervals, a faint breeze, hardly more than a breath, found its way into the garden over the enclosing walls, and passed overhead, spreading everywhere the delicious, mingled perfume of magnolia blossoms, of mignonette, of moss, of grass, and all the calm green life silently teeming within the enclosure of the walls.
From where he sat, Vanamee, turning his head, could look out underneath the pear trees to the north.Close at hand, a little valley lay between the high ground on which the Mission was built, and the line of low hills just beyond Broderson Creek on the Quien Sabe.In here was the Seed ranch, which Angele's people had cultivated, a unique and beautiful stretch of five hundred acres, planted thick with roses, violets, lilies, tulips, iris, carnations, tube-roses, poppies, heliotrope--all manner and description of flowers, five hundred acres of them, solid, thick, exuberant; blooming and fading, and leaving their seed or slips to be marketed broadcast all over the United States.This had been the vocation of Angele's parents--raising flowers for their seeds.All over the country the Seed ranch was known.Now it was arid, almost dry, but when in full flower, toward the middle of summer, the sight of these half-thousand acres royal with colour--vermilion, azure, flaming yellow--was a marvel.When an east wind blew, men on the streets of Bonneville, nearly twelve miles away, could catch the scent of this valley of flowers, this chaos of perfume.
And into this life of flowers, this world of colour, this atmosphere oppressive and clogged and cloyed and thickened with sweet odour, Angele had been born.There she had lived her sixteen years.There she had died.It was not surprising that Vanamee, with his intense, delicate sensitiveness to beauty, his almost abnormal capacity for great happiness, had been drawn to her, had loved her so deeply.
She came to him from out of the flowers, the smell of the roses in her hair of gold, that hung in two straight plaits on either side of her face; the reflection of the violets in the profound dark blue of her eyes, perplexing, heavy-lidded, almond-shaped, oriental; the aroma and the imperial red of the carnations in her lips, with their almost Egyptian fulness; the whiteness of the lilies, the perfume of the lilies, and the lilies' slender balancing grace in her neck.Her hands disengaged the odour of the heliotropes.The folds of her dress gave off the enervating scent of poppies.Her feet were redolent of hyacinths.
For a long time after sitting down upon the bench, neither the priest nor Vanamee spoke.But after a while Sarria took his cigar from his lips, saying:
"How still it is! This is a beautiful old garden, peaceful, very quiet.Some day I shall be buried here.I like to remember that; and you, too, Vanamee.""Quien sabe?"
"Yes, you, too.Where else?No, it is better here, yonder, by the side of the little girl.""I am not able to look forward yet, sir.The things that are to be are somehow nothing to me at all.For me they amount to nothing.""They amount to everything, my boy."
"Yes, to one part of me, but not to the part of me that belonged to Angele--the best part.Oh, you don't know," he exclaimed with a sudden movement, "no one can understand.What is it to me when you tell me that sometime after I shall die too, somewhere, in a vague place you call Heaven, I shall see her again? Do you think that the idea of that ever made any one's sorrow easier to bear?
Ever took the edge from any one's grief?""But you believe that----"
"Oh, believe, believe!" echoed the other."What do I believe?
I don't know.I believe, or I don't believe.I can remember what she WAS, but I cannot hope what she will be.Hope, after all, is only memory seen reversed.When I try to see her in another life--whatever you call it--in Heaven--beyond the grave--this vague place of yours; when I try to see her there, she comes to my imagination only as what she was, material, earthly, as Iloved her.Imperfect, you say; but that is as I saw her, and as I saw her, I loved her; and as she WAS, material, earthly, imperfect, she loved me.It's that, that I want," he exclaimed.
"I don't want her changed.I don't want her spiritualised, exalted, glorified, celestial.I want HER.I think it is only this feeling that has kept me from killing myself.I would rather be unhappy in the memory of what she actually was, than be happy in the realisation of her transformed, changed, made celestial.I am only human.Her soul! That was beautiful, no doubt.But, again, it was something very vague, intangible, hardly more than a phrase.But the touch of her hand was real, the sound of her voice was real, the clasp of her arms about my neck was real.Oh," he cried, shaken with a sudden wrench of passion, "give those back to me.Tell your God to give those back to me--the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the clasp of her dear arms, REAL, REAL, and then you may talk to me of Heaven."Sarria shook his head."But when you meet her again," he observed, "in Heaven, you, too, will be changed.You will see her spiritualised, with spiritual eyes.As she is now, she does not appeal to you.I understand that.It is because, as you say, you are only human, while she is divine.But when you come to be like her, as she is now, you will know her as she really is, not as she seemed to be, because her voice was sweet, because her hair was pretty, because her hand was warm in yours.
