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Our route wound through groves of palms surrounding the tumble-down tomb of some holy man, occasional collections of squalid little huts, and in the intervening "despoblado" we would catch sight of a jackal crouching in the hollow or slinking off through the scrub. Deli Abbas proved a half-deserted straggling town which gave evidence of having once seen prosperous days.
The upper river would have been much the same, but as he came to that part of it which was wealthy and populous, as he turned the corner of Witham Hill, he would already have seen far off, larger and a little nearer than the many spires of Oxford, a building such as to-day we never see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns. It was the Abbey of Osney.
And she kept her word, when in the half-deserted foyer she had shaken hands with a young man who wore a white rose in his buttonhole. "Please tell me frankly if you don't like me as well by daylight," she gasped. "I like you better," he said. "You're still my white rose. See, I've adopted it as your symbol. I shall never wear any other flower on my coat. This is yours. No, it's you!
The table with its litter of ash-trays, empty cups, empty small glasses, and ravaged sweets, and the half-deserted restaurant, and the polite expectant weariness of the priests and acolytes, all showed that the hour was in fact not quite three an hour at which such interiors have invariably the aspect of roses overblown and about to tumble to pieces.
The place that witnessed it remains unchanged a half-deserted church among the silent grass-grown lanes, the crumbling convent walls, and ill-tended vineyards of the Aventine; a hill that has retained in Christian times a look of its sinister fame in Pagan ones.
The picturesque, half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles further up the river. The im- mense round towers of its old citadel and the long stretches of ruined wall covering the slope on which it lies, are the most striking features of the nearer view, as you look from Avignon across the Rhone.
Fabia did not realize this fact until late in the afternoon, when she started forth, on foot and unattended, to visit a friend on the Cælian. The half-deserted streets and barricaded houses filled her with uneasy tremors.
Those who were conscious of guilt fled from the city, which was left half-deserted. The barons and the serfs of the surrounding country swooped like vultures upon Laon, pillaged the empty houses and fought with one another for the spoil. For the next sixteen years the remnant of the citizens lived a miserable existence as the mere serfs of Waldric's successors.
While the rigours of the conscription had invaded every family in France, from Normandie to La Vendee while the untilled fields, the ruined granaries, the half-deserted villages, all attested the depopulation of the land, those talismanic words, "l'Empereur et la gloire," by some magic mechanism seemed all-sufficient not only to repress regret and suffering, but even stimulate pride, and nourish valour; and even yet, when it might be supposed that like the brilliant glass of a magic lantern, the gaudy pageant had passed away, leaving only the darkness and desolation behind it the memory of those days under the empire survives untarnished and unimpaired, and every sacrifice of friends or fortune is accounted but little in the balance when the honour of La Belle France, and the triumphs of the grand "armee," are weighted against them.
Into this house he went, mounting the stairs swiftly, and disappeared for a few moments into some upper room; then as swiftly he came down again, and, gliding up alleys and half-deserted streets, entered one little cafe after another, and mounted to many a room whose occupants listened eagerly to his words and made a sign that they were understood.
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