"Elles vous rendent heureuses, les roses, Mesdames," he says, with a little smile and a bow; "alors vous rendez heureuses les roses--et votre serviteur."
We try to make a co-operative bow (bowing was not Barbara's strong point), and to indicate as well as we can that only in this delightful country had we ever met with such lovely roses or such kind people.
The first part of the day was occupied in wandering over the open country that surrounds this placid little town of the Romans. The plain is wide--immense in its spaces, marked with the inevitable walls of cypresses and dotted with shrubs and farms as far as the eye can follow.
The strange, almost grotesque outline of the Alpilles closes in this view to the South, and between these mountains and the town there are endless rough tracks and paths among the hollows and risings of the land, quaint cuttings in the soil which lead the eye to the blue of the hills.
[Illustration: LA CROIX DE VERTU, ST. REMY. _By E. M. Synge._]
Here and there would be a small dwelling, here and there a field enclosed for pasture, but this was rare. The greater part was wild, rough country, owing little to the care of man.
In one of the highest spots of this singular district stands a curious stone cross, called by the people _La Croix de Vertu_, why it is impossible to discover. It is a monolith supporting a small iron cross, which is doubtless of much later date than its support.
It is approached from four sides and occupies the highest ground at which the four paths meet.
A strange, little lonely mysterious monument, whereby, doubtless, hangs many an ancient tale!
We spent the rest of the day in visiting the Roman remains--two well-preserved relics of Imperial days--a triumphal arch and a tall monument which is said to have been built to celebrate the great victory of Marius over the Teutons.
They stand lonely and singularly unspoiled, at the foot of the Alpilles, and before them stretches a wide plain over which the light is growing soft and warm, the few shadows of olives and low bushes beginning to lengthen.
And we sit down on the dry grass near the monuments and are silent.
The agitated figures on the bas-relief of the triumphal edifice stand out well in the glowing light. They are fighting and struggling in some unknown contest which they take, poor things, so very seriously, and which really matters so very little after all! The broad, long lines of the landscape speak eloquently of the folly of that old death-struggle. It is strange to think of those stone warriors fighting on century after century as the seasons go by, always there and always fighting when the sun touches them in the morning, when the white moon peers over the jagged outline of the little mountains just behind, and finds them at it still! Do they not even rest when there is neither sun nor moon but only a great wide darkness over the land and the mountains are blotted out?