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Ramona

by Helen Hunt Jackson · English · Gutenberg #2802 · 857,321 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ramona

Author: Helen Hunt Jackson


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2802]
                Most recently updated: April 28, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAMONA ***




RAMONA

By Helen Hunt Jackson




I

IT was sheep-shearing time in Southern California, but sheep-shearing
was late at the Senora Moreno's. The Fates had seemed to combine to
put it off. In the first place, Felipe Moreno had been ill. He was the
Senora's eldest son, and since his father's death had been at the head
of his mother's house. Without him, nothing could be done on the ranch,
the Senora thought. It had been always, “Ask Senor Felipe,” “Go to Senor
Felipe,” “Senor Felipe will attend to it,” ever since Felipe had had the
dawning of a beard on his handsome face.

In truth, it was not Felipe, but the Senora, who really decided all
questions from greatest to least, and managed everything on the place,
from the sheep-pastures to the artichoke-patch; but nobody except the
Senora herself knew this. An exceedingly clever woman for her day and
generation was Senora Gonzaga Moreno,--as for that matter, exceedingly
clever for any day and generation; but exceptionally clever for the day
and generation to which she belonged. Her life, the mere surface of it,
if it had been written, would have made a romance, to grow hot and
cold over: sixty years of the best of old Spain, and the wildest of New
Spain, Bay of Biscay, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Ocean,--the waves of them
all had tossed destinies for the Senora. The Holy Catholic Church had
had its arms round her from first to last; and that was what had brought
her safe through, she would have said, if she had ever said anything
about herself, which she never did,--one of her many wisdoms. So quiet,
so reserved, so gentle an exterior never was known to veil such an
imperious and passionate nature, brimful of storm, always passing
through stress; never thwarted, except at peril of those who did it;
adored and hated by turns, and each at the hottest. A tremendous force,
wherever she appeared, was Senora Moreno; but no stranger would suspect
it, to see her gliding about, in her scanty black gown, with her rosary
hanging at her side, her soft dark eyes cast down, and an expression of
mingled melancholy and devotion on her face. She looked simply like a
sad, spiritual-minded old lady, amiable and indolent, like her race, but
sweeter and more thoughtful than their wont. Her voice heightened this
mistaken impression. She was never heard to speak either loud or fast.
There was at times even a curious hesitancy in her speech, which came
near being a stammer, or suggested the measured care with which people
speak who have been cured of stammering. It made her often appear as if
she did not known her own mind; at which people sometimes took heart;
when, if they had only known the truth, they would have known that the
speech hesitated solely because the Senora knew her mind so exactly that
she was finding it hard to make the words convey it as she desired, or
in a way to best attain her ends.

About this very sheep-shearing there had been, between her and the head
shepherd, Juan Canito, called Juan Can for short, and to distinguish him
from Juan Jose, the upper herdsman of the cattle, some discussions which
would have been hot and angry ones in any other hands than the Senora's.

Juan Canito wanted the shearing to begin, even though Senor Felipe were
ill in bed, and though that lazy shepherd Luigo had not yet got back
with the flock that had been driven up the coast for pasture.
“There were plenty of sheep on the place to begin with,” he said one
morning,--“at least a thousand;” and by the time they were done, Luigo
would surely be back with the rest; and as for Senor Felipe's being in
bed, had not he, Juan Canito, stood at the packing-bag, and handled the
wool, when Senor Felipe was a boy? Why could he not do it again? The
Senora did not realize how time was going; there would be no shearers
to be hired presently, since the Senora was determined to have none
but Indians. Of course, if she would employ Mexicans, as all the other
ranches in the valley did, it would be different; but she was resolved
upon having Indians,--“God knows why,” he interpolated surlily, under
his breath.

“I do not quite understand you, Juan,” interrupted Senora Moreno at the
precise instant the last syllable of this disrespectful ejaculation had
escaped Juan's lips; “speak a little louder. I fear I am growing deaf in
my old age.”

What gentle, suave, courteous tones! and the calm dark eyes rested on
Juan Canito with a look to the fathoming of which he was as unequal
as one of his own sheep would have been. He could not have told why he
instantly and involuntarily said, “Beg your pardon, Senora.”

“Oh, you need not ask my pardon, Juan,” the Senora replied with
exquisite gentleness; “it is not you who are to blame, if I am deaf. I
have fancied for a year I did not hear quite as well as I once did.
But about the Indians, Juan; did not Senor Felipe tell you that he
had positively engaged the same band of shearers we had last autumn,
Alessandro's band from Temecula? They will wait until we are ready for
them. Senor Felipe will send a messenger for them. He thinks them the
best shearers in the country. He will be well enough in a week or two,
he thinks, and the poor sheep must bear their loads a few days longer.
Are they looking well, do you think, Juan? Will the crop be a good one?
General Moreno used to say that you could reckon up the wool-crop to a
pound, while it was on the sheep's backs.”

“Yes, Senora,” answered the mollified Juan; “the poor beasts look
wonderfully well considering the scant feed they have had all winter.
We'll not come many pounds short of our last year's crop, if any.
Though, to be sure, there is no telling in what case that--Luigo will
bring his flock back.”

The Senora smiled, in spite of herself, at the pause and gulp with which
Juan had filled in the hiatus where he had longed to set a contemptuous
epithet before Luigo's name.

This was another of the instances where the Senora's will and Juan
Canito's had clashed and he did not dream of it, having set it all down
as usual to the score of young Senor Felipe.

Encouraged by the Senora's smile, Juan proceeded: “Senor Felipe can see
no fault in Luigo, because they were boys together; but I can tell him,
he will rue it, one of these mornings, when he finds a flock of sheep
worse than dead on his hands, and no thanks to anybody but Luigo. While
I can have him under my eye, here in the valley, it is all very well;
but he is no more fit to take responsibility of a flock, than one of
the very lambs themselves. He'll drive them off their feet one day, and
starve them the next; and I've known him to forget to give them water.
When he's in his dreams, the Virgin only knows what he won't do.”

During this brief and almost unprecedented outburst of Juan's the
Senora's countenance had been slowly growing stern. Juan had not seen
it. His eyes had been turned away from her, looking down into the
upturned eager face of his favorite collie, who was leaping and
gambolling and barking at his feet.

“Down, Capitan, down!” he said in a fond tone, gently repulsing him;
“thou makest such a noise the Senora can hear nothing but thy voice.”

“I heard only too distinctly, Juan Canito,” said the Senora in a sweet
but icy tone. “It is not well for one servant to backbite another.
It gives me great grief to hear such words; and I hope when Father
Salvierderra comes, next month, you will not forget to confess this sin
of which you have been guilty in thus seeking to injure a fellow-being.
If Senor Felipe listens to you, the poor boy Luigo will be cast out
homeless on the world some day; and what sort of a deed would that be,
Juan Canito, for one Christian to do to another? I fear the Father will
give you penance, when he hears what you have said.”

“Senora, it is not to harm the lad,” Juan began, every fibre of his
faithful frame thrilling with a sense of the injustice of her reproach.

But the Senora had turned her back. Evidently she would hear no more
from him then. He stood watching her as she walked away, at her usual
slow pace, her head slightly bent forward, her rosary lifted in her left
hand, and the fingers of the right hand mechanically slipping the beads.

“Prayers, always prayers!” thought Juan to himself, as his eyes followed
her. “If they'll take one to heaven, the Senora'll go by the straight
road, that's sure! I'm sorry I vexed her. But what's a man to do, if
he's the interest of the place at heart, I'd like to know. Is he to
stand by, and see a lot of idle mooning louts run away with everything?
Ah, but it was an ill day for the estate when the General died,--an ill
day! an ill day! And they may scold me as much as they please, and set
me to confessing my sins to the Father; it's very well for them, they've
got me to look after matters. Senor Felipe will do well enough when he's
a man, maybe; but a boy like him! Bah!” And the old man stamped his
foot with a not wholly unreasonable irritation, at the false position in
which he felt himself put.

“Confess to Father Salvierderra, indeed!” he muttered aloud. “Ay, that
will I. He's a man of sense, if he is a priest,”--at which slip of the
tongue the pious Juan hastily crossed himself,--“and I'll ask him to
give me some good advice as to how I'm to manage between this young boy
at the head of everything, and a doting mother who thinks he has the
wisdom of a dozen grown men. The Father knew the place in the olden
time. He knows it's no child's play to look after the estate even now,
much smaller as it is! An ill day when the old General died, an ill
day indeed, the saints rest his soul!” Saying this, Juan shrugged his
shoulders, and whistling to Capitan, walked towards the sunny veranda of
the south side of the kitchen wing of the house, where it had been for
twenty odd years his habit to sit on the long bench and smoke his pipe
of a morning. Before he had got half-way across the court-yard, however,
a thought struck him. He halted so suddenly that Capitan, with the quick
sensitiveness of his breed, thought so sudden a change of purpose could
only come from something in connection with sheep; and, true to his
instinct of duty, pricked up his ears, poised himself for a full run,
and looked up in his master's face waiting for explanation and signal.
But Juan did not observe him.

“Ha!” he said, “Father Salvierderra comes next month, does he? Let's
see. To-day is the 25th. That's it. The sheep-shearing is not to come
off till the Father gets here. Then each morning it will be mass in the
chapel, and each night vespers; and the crowd will be here at least
two days longer to feed, for the time they will lose by that and by
the confessions. That's what Senor Felipe is up to. He's a pious lad.
I recollect now, it was the same way two years ago. Well, well, it is a
good thing for those poor Indian devils to get a bit of religion now and
then; and it's like old times to see the chapel full of them kneeling,
and more than can get in at the door; I doubt not it warms the Senora's
heart to see them all there, as if they belonged to the house, as
they used to: and now I know when it's to be, I have only to make my
arrangements accordingly. It is always in the first week of the month
the Father gets here. Yes; she said, 'Senor Felipe will be well enough
in a week or two, he thinks.' Ha! ha! It will be nearer two; ten days or
thereabouts. I'll begin the booths next week. A plague on that Luigo for
not being back here. He's the best hand I have to cut the willow boughs
for the roofs. He knows the difference between one year's growth and
another's; I'll say that much for him, spite of the silly dreaming head
he's got on his shoulders.”

Juan was so pleased with his clearing up in his mind as to Senor
Felipe's purpose about the time of the sheep-shearing, that it put him
in good humor for the day,--good humor with everybody, and himself most
of all. As he sat on the low bench, his head leaning back against the
whitewashed wall, his long legs stretched out nearly across the whole
width of the veranda, his pipe firm wedged in the extreme left corner
of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, he was the picture of placid
content. The troop of youngsters which still swarmed around the kitchen
quarters of Senora Moreno's house, almost as numerous and inexplicable
as in the grand old days of the General's time, ran back and forth
across Juan's legs, fell down between them, and picked themselves up by
help of clutches at his leather trousers, all unreproved by Juan, though
loudly scolded and warned by their respective mothers from the kitchen.

“What's come to Juan Can to be so good-natured to-day?” saucily asked
Margarita, the youngest and prettiest of the maids, popping her head out
of a window, and twitching Juan's hair. He was so gray and wrinkled
that the maids all felt at ease with him. He seemed to them as old as
Methuselah; but he was not really so old as they thought, nor they so
safe in their tricks. The old man had hot blood in his veins yet, as the
under-shepherds could testify.

“The sight of your pretty face, Senorita Margarita,” answered Juan
quickly, cocking his eye at her, rising to his feet, and making a mock
bow towards the window.

“He! he! Senorita, indeed!” chuckled Margarita's mother, old Marda the
cook. “Senor Juan Canito is pleased to be merry at the doors of his
betters;” and she flung a copper saucepan full of not over-clean water
so deftly past Juan's head, that not a drop touched him, and yet he had
the appearance of having been ducked. At which bit of sleight-of-hand
the whole court-yard, young and old, babies, cocks, hens, and turkeys,
all set up a shout and a cackle, and dispersed to the four corners of
the yard as if scattered by a volley of bird-shot. Hearing the racket,
the rest of the maids came running,--Anita and Maria, the twins, women
forty years old, born on the place the year after General Moreno brought
home his handsome young bride; their two daughters, Rosa and Anita the
Little, as she was still called, though she outweighed her mother; old
Juanita, the oldest woman in the household, of whom even the Senora was
said not to know the exact age or history; and she, poor thing, could
tell nothing, having been silly for ten years or more, good for nothing
except to shell beans: that she did as fast and well as ever, and was
never happy except she was at it. Luckily for her, beans are the one
crop never omitted or stinted on a Mexican estate; and for sake of old
Juanita they stored every year in the Moreno house, rooms full of beans
in the pod (tons of them, one would think), enough to feed an army. But
then, it was like a little army even now, the Senora's household; nobody
ever knew exactly how many women were in the kitchen, or how many men
in the fields. There were always women cousins, or brother's wives or
widows or daughters, who had come to stay, or men cousins, or sister's
husbands or sons, who were stopping on their way up or down the valley.
When it came to the pay-roll, Senor Felipe knew to whom he paid wages;
but who were fed and lodged under his roof, that was quite another
thing. It could not enter into the head of a Mexican gentleman to make
either count or account of that. It would be a disgraceful niggardly
thought.

To the Senora it seemed as if there were no longer any people about the
place. A beggarly handful, she would have said, hardly enough to do the
work of the house, or of the estate, sadly as the latter had dwindled.
In the General's day, it had been a free-handed boast of his that never
less than fifty persons, men, women and children, were fed within his
gates each day; how many more, he did not care, nor know. But that time
had indeed gone, gone forever; and though a stranger, seeing the sudden
rush and muster at door and window, which followed on old Marda's
letting fly the water at Juan's head, would have thought, “Good heavens,
do all those women, children, and babies belong in that one house!” the
Senora's sole thought, as she at that moment went past the gate, was,
“Poor things! how few there are left of them! I am afraid old Marda has
to work too hard. I must spare Margarita more from the house to help
her.” And she sighed deeply, and unconsciously held her rosary nearer to
her heart, as she went into the house and entered her son's bedroom. The
picture she saw there was one to thrill any mother's heart; and as it
met her eye, she paused on the threshold for a second,--only a second,
however; and nothing could have astonished Felipe Moreno so much as to
have been told that at the very moment when his mother's calm voice was
saying to him, “Good morning, my son, I hope you have slept well, and
are better,” there was welling up in her heart a passionate ejaculation,
“O my glorious son! The saints have sent me in him the face of his
father! He is fit for a kingdom!”

The truth is, Felipe Moreno was not fit for a kingdom at all. If he had
been, he would not have been so ruled by his mother without ever finding
it out. But so far as mere physical beauty goes, there never was a
king born, whose face, stature, and bearing would set off a crown or a
throne, or any of the things of which the outside of royalty is made up,
better than would Felipe Moreno's. And it was true, as the Senora said,
whether the saints had anything to do with it or not, that he had the
face of his father. So strong a likeness is seldom seen. When Felipe
once, on the occasion of a grand celebration and procession, put on the
gold-wrought velvet mantle, gayly embroidered short breeches fastened at
the knee with red ribbons, and gold-and-silver-trimmed sombrero, which
his father had worn twenty-five years before, the Senora fainted at her
first look at him,--fainted and fell; and when she opened her eyes, and
saw the same splendid, gayly arrayed, dark-bearded man, bending over her
in distress, with words of endearment and alarm, she fainted again.

“Mother, mother mia,” cried Felipe, “I will not wear them if it makes
you feel like this! Let me take them off. I will not go to their cursed
parade;” and he sprang to his feet, and began with trembling fingers to
unbuckle the sword-belt.

“No, no, Felipe,” faintly cried the Senora, from the ground. “It is my
wish that you wear them;” and staggering to her feet, with a burst of
tears, she rebuckled the old sword-belt, which her fingers had so many
times--never unkissed--buckled, in the days when her husband had bade
her farewell and gone forth to the uncertain fates of war. “Wear
them!” she cried, with gathering fire in her tones, and her eyes dry
of tears,--“wear them, and let the American hounds see what a Mexican
officer and gentleman looked like before they had set their base,
usurping feet on our necks!” And she followed him to the gate, and stood
erect, bravely waving her handkerchief as he galloped off, till he was
out of sight. Then with a changed face and a bent head she crept slowly
to her room, locked herself in, fell on her knees before the Madonna at
the head of her bed, and spent the greater part of the day praying that
she might be forgiven, and that all heretics might be discomfited. From
which part of these supplications she derived most comfort is easy to
imagine.

Juan Canito had been right in his sudden surmise that it was for Father
Salvierderra's coming that the sheep-shearing was being delayed, and not
in consequence of Senor Felipe's illness, or by the non-appearance of
Luigo and his flock of sheep. Juan would have chuckled to himself still
more at his perspicacity, had he overheard the conversation going on
between the Senora and her son, at the very time when he, half asleep
on the veranda, was, as he would have called it, putting two and two
together and convincing himself that old Juan was as smart as they were,
and not to be kept in the dark by all their reticence and equivocation.

“Juan Can is growing very impatient about the sheep-shearing,” said
the Senora. “I suppose you are still of the same mind about it,
Felipe,--that it is better to wait till Father Salvierderra comes? As
the only chance those Indians have of seeing him is here, it would seem
a Christian duty to so arrange it, if it be possible; but Juan is very
restive. He is getting old, and chafes a little, I fancy, under your
control. He cannot forget that you were a boy on his knee. Now I, for my
part, am like to forget that you were ever anything but a man for me to
lean on.”

Felipe turned his handsome face toward his mother with a beaming smile
of filial affection and gratified manly vanity. “Indeed, my mother, if
I can be sufficient for you to lean on, I will ask nothing more of the
saints;” and he took his mother's thin and wasted little hands, both at
once, in his own strong right hand, and carried them to his lips as a
lover might have done. “You will spoil me, mother,” he said, “you make
me so proud.”

“No, Felipe, it is I who am proud,” promptly replied the mother; “and I
do not call it being proud, only grateful to God for having given me
a son wise enough to take his father's place, and guide and protect me
through the few remaining years I have to live. I shall die content,
seeing you at the head of the estate, and living as a Mexican gentleman
should; that is, so far as now remains possible in this unfortunate
country. But about the sheep-shearing, Felipe. Do you wish to have it
begun before the Father is here? Of course, Alessandro is all ready
with his band. It is but two days' journey for a messenger to bring
him. Father Salvierderra cannot be here before the 10th of the month. He
leaves Santa Barbara on the 1st, and he will walk all the way,--a good
six days' journey, for he is old now and feeble; then he must stop
in Ventura for a Sunday, and a day at the Ortega's ranch, and at the
Lopez's,--there, there is a christening. Yes, the 10th is the very
earliest that he can be here,--near two weeks from now. So far as your
getting up is concerned, it might perhaps be next week. You will be
nearly well by that time.”

“Yes, indeed,” laughed Felipe, stretching himself out in the bed and
giving a kick to the bedclothes that made the high bedposts and the
fringed canopy roof shake and creak; “I am well now, if it were not for
this cursed weakness when I stand on my feet. I believe it would do me
good to get out of doors.”

In truth, Felipe had been hankering for the sheep-shearing himself. It
was a brisk, busy, holiday sort of time to him, hard as he worked in it;
and two weeks looked long to wait.

“It is always thus after a fever,” said his mother. “The weakness lasts
many weeks. I am not sure that you will be strong enough even in two
weeks to do the packing; but, as Juan Can said this morning, he stood
at the packing-bag when you were a boy, and there was no need of waiting
for you for that!”

“He said that, did he!” exclaimed Felipe, wrathfully. “The old man is
getting insolent. I'll tell him that nobody will pack the sacks but
myself, while I am master here; and I will have the sheep-shearing when
I please, and not before.”

“I suppose it would not be wise to say that it is not to take place till
the Father comes, would it?” asked the Senora, hesitatingly, as if the
thing were evenly balanced in her mind. “The Father has not that hold
on the younger men he used to have, and I have thought that even in
Juan himself I have detected a remissness. The spirit of unbelief is
spreading in the country since the Americans are running up and down
everywhere seeking money, like dogs with their noses to the ground! It
might vex Juan if he knew that you were waiting only for the Father.
What do you think?”

“I think it is enough for him to know that the sheep-shearing waits for
my pleasure,” answered Felipe, still wrathful, “and that is the end of
it.” And so it was; and, moreover, precisely the end which Senora Moreno
had had in her own mind from the beginning; but not even Juan Canito
himself suspected its being solely her purpose, and not her son's. As
for Felipe, if any person had suggested to him that it was his mother,
and not he, who had decided that the sheep-shearing would be better
deferred until the arrival of Father Salvierderra from Santa Barbara,
and that nothing should be said on the ranch about this being the real
reason of the postponing, Felipe would have stared in astonishment, and
have thought that person either crazy or a fool.

To attain one's ends in this way is the consummate triumph of art. Never
to appear as a factor in the situation; to be able to wield other men,
as instruments, with the same direct and implicit response to will that
one gets from a hand or a foot,--this is to triumph, indeed: to be as
nearly controller and conqueror of Fates as fate permits. There have
been men prominent in the world's affairs at one time and another, who
have sought and studied such a power and have acquired it to a
great degree. By it they have manipulated legislators, ambassadors,
sovereigns; and have grasped, held, and played with the destinies
of empires. But it is to be questioned whether even in these notable
instances there has ever been such marvellous completeness of success
as is sometimes seen in the case of a woman in whom the power is an
instinct and not an attainment; a passion rather than a purpose.
Between the two results, between the two processes, there is just that
difference which is always to be seen between the stroke of talent and
the stroke of genius.

Senora Moreno's was the stroke of genius.




II

THE Senora Moreno's house was one of the best specimens to be found
in California of the representative house of the half barbaric, half
elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there by Mexican men
and women of degree in the early part of this century, under the rule of
the Spanish and Mexican viceroys, when the laws of the Indies were still
the law of the land, and its old name, “New Spain,” was an ever-present
link and stimulus to the warmest memories and deepest patriotisms of its
people.

It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gayety in it, more
also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen
again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still;
industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out its
century,--in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is left
standing one such house as the Senora Moreno's.

When the house was built, General Moreno owned all the land within a
radius of forty miles,--forty miles westward, down the valley to the
sea; forty miles eastward, into the San Fernando Mountains; and good
forty miles more or less along the coast. The boundaries were not very
strictly defined; there was no occasion, in those happy days, to reckon
land by inches. It might be asked, perhaps, just how General Moreno
owned all this land, and the question might not be easy to answer. It
was not and could not be answered to the satisfaction of the United
States Land Commission, which, after the surrender of California,
undertook to sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the
way it had come about that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor
woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her; it
looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the claims
based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Fico, her husband's most
intimate friend, was disallowed. They all went by the board in one
batch, and took away from the Senora in a day the greater part of
her best pasture-lands. They were lands which had belonged to the
Bonaventura Mission, and lay along the coast at the mouth of the valley
down which the little stream which ran past her house went to the sea;
and it had been a great pride and delight to the Senora, when she was
young, to ride that forty miles by her husband's side, all the way on
their own lands, straight from their house to their own strip of shore.
No wonder she believed the Americans thieves, and spoke of them always
as hounds. The people of the United States have never in the least
realized that the taking possession of California was not only a
conquering of Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the
real bitterness of the surrender was not so much to the empire which
gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up.
Provinces passed back and forth in that way, helpless in the hands of
great powers, have all the ignominy and humiliation of defeat, with none
of the dignities or compensations of the transaction.

Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite of having to acknowledge herself
beaten; but California lost all. Words cannot tell the sting of such
a transfer. It is a marvel that a Mexican remained in the country;
probably none did, except those who were absolutely forced to it.

Luckily for the Senora Moreno, her title to the lands midway in the
valley was better than to those lying to the east and the west, which
had once belonged to the missions of San Fernando and Bonaventura;
and after all the claims, counter-claims, petitions, appeals, and
adjudications were ended, she still was left in undisputed possession of
what would have been thought by any new-comer into the country to be a
handsome estate, but which seemed to the despoiled and indignant Senora
a pitiful fragment of one. Moreover, she declared that she should never
feel secure of a foot of even this. Any day, she said, the United States
Government might send out a new Land Commission to examine the decrees
of the first, and revoke such as they saw fit. Once a thief, always a
thief. Nobody need feel himself safe under American rule. There was
no knowing what might happen any day; and year by year the lines of
sadness, resentment, anxiety, and antagonism deepened on the Senora's
fast aging face.

It gave her unspeakable satisfaction, when the Commissioners, laying out
a road down the valley, ran it at the back of her house instead of
past the front. “It is well,” she said. “Let their travel be where it
belongs, behind our kitchens; and no one have sight of the front doors
of our houses, except friends who have come to visit us.” Her enjoyment
of this never flagged. Whenever she saw, passing the place, wagons
or carriages belonging to the hated Americans, it gave her a distinct
thrill of pleasure to think that the house turned its back on them. She
would like always to be able to do the same herself; but whatever she,
by policy or in business, might be forced to do, the old house, at any
rate, would always keep the attitude of contempt,--its face turned away.

One other pleasure she provided herself with, soon after this road was
opened,--a pleasure in which religious devotion and race antagonism were
so closely blended that it would have puzzled the subtlest of priests to
decide whether her act were a sin or a virtue. She caused to be set
up, upon every one of the soft rounded hills which made the beautiful
rolling sides of that part of the valley, a large wooden cross; not a
hill in sight of her house left without the sacred emblem of her faith.
“That the heretics may know, when they go by, that they are on the
estate of a good Catholic,” she said, “and that the faithful may be
reminded to pray. There have been miracles of conversion wrought on the
most hardened by a sudden sight of the Blessed Cross.”

There they stood, summer and winter, rain and shine, the silent, solemn,
outstretched arms, and became landmarks to many a guideless traveller
who had been told that his way would be by the first turn to the left
or the right, after passing the last one of the Senora Moreno's crosses,
which he couldn't miss seeing. And who shall say that it did not
often happen that the crosses bore a sudden message to some idle
heart journeying by, and thus justified the pious half of the Senora's
impulse? Certain it is, that many a good Catholic halted and crossed
himself when he first beheld them, in the lonely places, standing out in
sudden relief against the blue sky; and if he said a swift short prayer
at the sight, was he not so much the better?

The house, was of adobe, low, with a wide veranda on the three sides of
the inner court, and a still broader one across the entire front, which
looked to the south. These verandas, especially those on the inner
court, were supplementary rooms to the house. The greater part of the
family life went on in them. Nobody stayed inside the walls, except when
it was necessary. All the kitchen work, except the actual cooking, was
done here, in front of the kitchen doors and windows. Babies slept,
were washed, sat in the dirt, and played, on the veranda. The women said
their prayers, took their naps, and wove their lace there. Old Juanita
shelled her beans there, and threw the pods down on the tile floor,
till towards night they were sometimes piled up high around her, like
corn-husks at a husking. The herdsmen and shepherds smoked there,
lounged there, trained their dogs there; there the young made love, and
the old dozed; the benches, which ran the entire length of the walls,
were worn into hollows, and shone like satin; the tiled floors also were
broken and sunk in places, making little wells, which filled up in times
of hard rains, and were then an invaluable addition to the children's
resources for amusement, and also to the comfort of the dogs, cats, and
fowls, who picked about among them, taking sips from each.

The arched veranda along the front was a delightsome place. It must
have been eighty feet long, at least, for the doors of five large rooms
opened on it. The two westernmost rooms had been added on, and made four
steps higher than the others; which gave to that end of the veranda the
look of a balcony, or loggia. Here the Senora kept her flowers; great
red water-jars, hand-made by the Indians of San Luis Obispo Mission,
stood in close rows against the walls, and in them were always growing
fine geraniums, carnations, and yellow-flowered musk. The Senora's
passion for musk she had inherited from her mother. It was so strong
that she sometimes wondered at it; and one day, as she sat with Father
Salvierderra in the veranda, she picked a handful of the blossoms, and
giving them to him, said, “I do not know why it is, but it seems to me
if I were dead I could be brought to life by the smell of musk.”

“It is in your blood, Senora,” the old monk replied. “When I was last in
your father's house in Seville, your mother sent for me to her room,
and under her window was a stone balcony full of growing musk, which so
filled the room with its odor that I was like to faint. But she said
it cured her of diseases, and without it she fell ill. You were a baby
then.”

“Yes,” cried the Senora, “but I recollect that balcony. I recollect
being lifted up to a window, and looking down into a bed of blooming
yellow flowers; but I did not know what they were. How strange!”

“No. Not strange, daughter,” replied Father Salvierderra. “It would have
been stranger if you had not acquired the taste, thus drawing it in with
the mother's milk. It would behoove mothers to remember this far more
than they do.”

Besides the geraniums and carnations and musk in the red jars, there
were many sorts of climbing vines,--some coming from the ground, and
twining around the pillars of the veranda; some growing in great bowls,
swung by cords from the roof of the veranda, or set on shelves against
the walls. These bowls were of gray stone, hollowed and polished,
shining smooth inside and out. They also had been made by the Indians,
nobody knew how many ages ago, scooped and polished by the patient
creatures, with only stones for tools.

Among these vines, singing from morning till night, hung the
Senora's canaries and finches, half a dozen of each, all of different
generations, raised by the Senora. She was never without a young
bird-family on hand; and all the way from Bonaventura to Monterey, it
was thought a piece of good luck to come into possession of a canary or
finch of Senora Moreno's 'raising.

Between the veranda and the river meadows, out on which it looked, all
was garden, orange grove, and almond orchard; the orange grove always
green, never without snowy bloom or golden fruit; the garden never
without flowers, summer or winter; and the almond orchard, in early
spring, a fluttering canopy of pink and white petals, which, seen from
the hills on the opposite side of the river, looked as if rosy sunrise
clouds had fallen, and become tangled in the tree-tops. On either hand
stretched away other orchards,--peach, apricot, pear, apple pomegranate;
and beyond these, vineyards. Nothing was to be seen but verdure or
bloom or fruit, at whatever time of year you sat on the Senora's south
veranda.

A wide straight walk shaded by a trellis so knotted and twisted with
grapevines that little was to be seen of the trellis wood-work, led
straight down from the veranda steps, through the middle of the garden,
to a little brook at the foot of it. Across this brook, in the shade
of a dozen gnarled old willow-trees, were set the broad flat stone
washboards on which was done all the family washing. No long dawdling,
and no running away from work on the part of the maids, thus close to
the eye of the Senora at the upper end of the garden; and if they had
known how picturesque they looked there, kneeling on the grass, lifting
the dripping linen out of the water, rubbing it back and forth on the
stones, sousing it, wringing it, splashing the clear water in each
other's faces, they would have been content to stay at the washing day
in and day out, for there was always somebody to look on from above.
Hardly a day passed that the Senora had not visitors. She was still
a person of note; her house the natural resting-place for all who
journeyed through the valley; and whoever came, spent all of his time,
when not eating, sleeping, or walking over the place, sitting with the
Senora on the sunny veranda. Few days in winter were cold enough, and
in summer the day must be hot indeed to drive the Senora and her friends
indoors. There stood on the veranda three carved oaken chairs, and a
carved bench, also of oak, which had been brought to the Senora for safe
keeping by the faithful old sacristan of San Luis Rey, at the time of
the occupation of that Mission by the United States troops, soon after
the conquest of California. Aghast at the sacrilegious acts of the
soldiers, who were quartered in the very church itself, and amused
themselves by making targets of the eyes and noses of the saints'
statues, the sacristan, stealthily, day by day and night after night,
bore out of the church all that he dared to remove, burying some
articles in cottonwood copses, hiding others in his own poor little
hovel, until he had wagon-loads of sacred treasures. Then, still more
stealthily, he carried them, a few at a time, concealed in the bottom of
a cart, under a load of hay or of brush, to the house of the Senora, who
felt herself deeply honored by his confidence, and received everything
as a sacred trust, to be given back into the hands of the Church again,
whenever the Missions should be restored, of which at that time all
Catholics had good hope. And so it had come about that no bedroom in the
Senora's house was without a picture or a statue of a saint or of the
Madonna; and some had two; and in the little chapel in the garden the
altar was surrounded by a really imposing row of holy and apostolic
figures, which had looked down on the splendid ceremonies of the San
Luis Rey Mission, in Father Peyri's time, no more benignly than they
now did on the humbler worship of the Senora's family in its diminished
estate. That one had lost an eye, another an arm, that the once
brilliant colors of the drapery were now faded and shabby, only enhanced
the tender reverence with which the Senora knelt before them, her eyes
filling with indignant tears at thought of the heretic hands which
had wrought such defilement. Even the crumbling wreaths which had been
placed on some of the statues' heads at the time of the last ceremonial
at which they had figured in the Mission, had been brought away with
them by the devout sacristan, and the Senora had replaced each one,
holding it only a degree less sacred than the statue itself.

This chapel was dearer to the Senora than her house. It had been built
by the General in the second year of their married life. In it her four
children had been christened, and from it all but one, her handsome
Felipe, had been buried while they were yet infants. In the General's
time, while the estate was at its best, and hundreds of Indians living
within its borders, there was many a Sunday when the scene to be
witnessed there was like the scenes at the Missions,--the chapel full of
kneeling men and women; those who could not find room inside kneeling
on the garden walks outside; Father Salvierderra, in gorgeous
vestments, coming, at close of the services, slowly down the aisle, the
close-packed rows of worshippers parting to right and left to let him
through, all looking up eagerly for his blessing, women giving him
offerings of fruit or flowers, and holding up their babies that he might
lay his hands on their heads. No one but Father Salvierderra had ever
officiated in the Moreno chapel, or heard the confession of a Moreno. He
was a Franciscan, one of the few now left in the country; so revered and
beloved by all who had come under his influence, that they would wait
long months without the offices of the Church, rather than confess
their sins or confide their perplexities to any one else. From this
deep-seated attachment on the part of the Indians and the older Mexican
families in the country to the Franciscan Order, there had grown up,
not unnaturally, some jealousy of them in the minds of the later-come
secular priests, and the position of the few monks left was not wholly a
pleasant one. It had even been rumored that they were to be forbidden
to continue longer their practice of going up and down the country,
ministering everywhere; were to be compelled to restrict their labors
to their own colleges at Santa Barbara and Santa Inez. When something
to this effect was one day said in the Senora Moreno's presence, two
scarlet spots sprang on her cheeks, and before she bethought herself,
she exclaimed, “That day, I burn down my chapel!”

Luckily, nobody but Felipe heard the rash threat, and his exclamation of
unbounded astonishment recalled the Senora to herself.

“I spoke rashly, my son,” she said. “The Church is to be obeyed always;
but the Franciscan Fathers are responsible to no one but the Superior of
their own order; and there is no one in this land who has the authority
to forbid their journeying and ministering to whoever desires their
offices. As for these Catalan priests who are coming in here, I cannot
abide them. No Catalan but has bad blood in his veins!”

There was every reason in the world why the Senora should be thus warmly
attached to the Franciscan Order. From her earliest recollections the
gray gown and cowl had been familiar to her eyes, and had represented
the things which she was taught to hold most sacred and dear. Father
Salvierderra himself had come from Mexico to Monterey in the same ship
which had brought her father to be the commandante of the Santa Barbara
Presidio; and her best-beloved uncle, her father's eldest brother, was
at that time the Superior of the Santa Barbara Mission. The sentiment
and romance of her youth were almost equally divided between the
gayeties, excitements, adornments of the life at the Presidio, and the
ceremonies and devotions of the life at the Mission. She was famed as
the most beautiful girl in the country. Men of the army, men of the
navy, and men of the Church, alike adored her. Her name was a toast
from Monterey to San Diego. When at last she was wooed and won by Felipe
Moreno, one of the most distinguished of the Mexican Generals, her
wedding ceremonies were the most splendid ever seen in the country.
The right tower of the Mission church at Santa Barbara had been just
completed, and it was arranged that the consecration of this tower
should take place at the time of her wedding, and that her wedding feast
should be spread in the long outside corridor of the Mission building.
The whole country, far and near, was bid. The feast lasted three days;
open tables to everybody; singing, dancing, eating, drinking, and making
merry. At that time there were long streets of Indian houses stretching
eastward from the Mission; before each of these houses was built a booth
of green boughs. The Indians, as well as the Fathers from all the other
Missions, were invited to come. The Indians came in bands, singing songs
and bringing gifts. As they appeared, the Santa Barbara Indians went
out to meet them, also singing, bearing gifts, and strewing seeds on
the ground, in token of welcome. The young Senora and her bridegroom,
splendidly clothed, were seen of all, and greeted, whenever they
appeared, by showers of seeds and grains and blossoms. On the third
day, still in their wedding attire, and bearing lighted candles in their
hands, they walked with the monks in a procession, round and round the
new tower, the monks chanting, and sprinkling incense and holy water
on its walls, the ceremony seeming to all devout beholders to give a
blessed consecration to the union of the young pair as well as to the
newly completed tower. After this they journeyed in state, accompanied
by several of the General's aids and officers, and by two Franciscan
Fathers, up to Monterey, stopping on their way at all the Missions, and
being warmly welcomed and entertained at each.

General Moreno was much beloved by both army and Church. In many of the
frequent clashings between the military and the ecclesiastical powers
he, being as devout and enthusiastic a Catholic as he was zealous and
enthusiastic a soldier, had had the good fortune to be of material
assistance to each party. The Indians also knew his name well, having
heard it many times mentioned with public thanksgivings in the Mission
churches, after some signal service he had rendered to the Fathers
either in Mexico or Monterey. And now, by taking as his bride the
daughter of a distinguished officer, and the niece of the Santa Barbara
Superior, he had linked himself anew to the two dominant powers and
interests of the country.

When they reached San Luis Obispo, the whole Indian population turned
out to meet them, the Padre walking at the head. As they approached the
Mission doors the Indians swarmed closer and closer and still closer,
took the General's horse by the head, and finally almost by actual force
compelled him to allow himself to be lifted into a blanket, held high
up by twenty strong men; and thus he was borne up the steps, across
the corridor, and into the Padre's room. It was a position ludicrously
undignified in itself, but the General submitted to it good-naturedly.

“Oh, let them do it, if they like,” he cried, laughingly, to Padre
Martinez, who was endeavoring to quiet the Indians and hold them back.
“Let them do it. It pleases the poor creatures.”

On the morning of their departure, the good Padre, having exhausted all
his resources for entertaining his distinguished guests, caused to
be driven past the corridors, for their inspection, all the poultry
belonging to the Mission. The procession took an hour to pass. For
music, there was the squeaking, cackling, hissing, gobbling, crowing,
quacking of the fowls, combined with the screaming, scolding, and
whip-cracking of the excited Indian marshals of the lines. First came
the turkeys, then the roosters, then the white hens, then the black, and
then the yellow, next the ducks, and at the tail of the spectacle
long files of geese, some strutting, some half flying and hissing in
resentment and terror at the unwonted coercions to which they were
subjected. The Indians had been hard at work all night capturing,
sorting, assorting, and guarding the rank and file of their novel
pageant. It would be safe to say that a droller sight never was seen,
and never will be, on the Pacific coast or any other. Before it was done
with, the General and his bride had nearly died with laughter; and the
General could never allude to it without laughing almost as heartily
again.

At Monterey they were more magnificently feted; at the Presidio, at the
Mission, on board Spanish, Mexican, and Russian ships lying in harbor,
balls, dances, bull-fights, dinners, all that the country knew of
festivity, was lavished on the beautiful and winning young bride. The
belles of the coast, from San Diego up, had all gathered at Monterey for
these gayeties, but not one of them could be for a moment compared to
her. This was the beginning of the Senora's life as a married woman.
She was then just twenty. A close observer would have seen even then,
underneath the joyous smile, the laughing eye, the merry voice, a look
thoughtful, tender, earnest, at times enthusiastic. This look was the
reflection of those qualities in her, then hardly aroused, which made
her, as years developed her character and stormy fates thickened around
her life, the unflinching comrade of her soldier husband, the passionate
adherent of the Church. Through wars, insurrections, revolutions,
downfalls, Spanish, Mexican, civil, ecclesiastical, her standpoint,
her poise, remained the same. She simply grew more and more proudly,
passionately, a Spaniard and a Moreno; more and more stanchly and
fierily a Catholic, and a lover of the Franciscans.

During the height of the despoiling and plundering of the Missions,
under the Secularization Act, she was for a few years almost beside
herself. More than once she journeyed alone, when the journey was by
no means without danger, to Monterey, to stir up the Prefect of
the Missions to more energetic action, to implore the governmental
authorities to interfere, and protect the Church's property. It
was largely in consequence of her eloquent entreaties that Governor
Micheltorena issued his bootless order, restoring to the Church all the
Missions south of San Luis Obispo. But this order cost Micheltorena his
political head, and General Moreno was severely wounded in one of the
skirmishes of the insurrection which drove Micheltorena out of the
country.

In silence and bitter humiliation the Senora nursed her husband back
to health again, and resolved to meddle no more in the affairs of her
unhappy country and still more unhappy Church. As year by year she
saw the ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties
melting away, like dew before the sun, in the hands of dishonest
administrators and politicians, the Church powerless to contend with the
unprincipled greed in high places, her beloved Franciscan Fathers driven
from the country or dying of starvation at their posts, she submitted
herself to what, she was forced to admit, seemed to be the inscrutable
will of God for the discipline and humiliation of the Church. In a sort
of bewildered resignation she waited to see what further sufferings
were to come, to fill up the measure of the punishment which, for some
mysterious purpose, the faithful must endure. But when close upon
all this discomfiture and humiliation of her Church followed the
discomfiture and humiliation of her country in war, and the near and
evident danger of an English-speaking people's possessing the land,
all the smothered fire of the Senora's nature broke out afresh. With
unfaltering hands she buckled on her husband's sword, and with dry eyes
saw him go forth to fight. She had but one regret, that she was not the
mother of sons to fight also.

“Would thou wert a man, Felipe,” she exclaimed again and again in tones
the child never forgot. “Would thou wert a man, that thou might go also
to fight these foreigners!”

Any race under the sun would have been to the Senora less hateful than
the American. She had scorned them in her girlhood, when they came
trading to post after post. She scorned them still. The idea of being
forced to wage a war with pedlers was to her too monstrous to be
believed. In the outset she had no doubt that the Mexicans would win in
the contest.

“What!” she cried, “shall we who won independence from Spain, be beaten
by these traders? It is impossible!”

When her husband was brought home to her dead, killed in the last fight
the Mexican forces made, she said icily, “He would have chosen to die
rather than to have been forced to see his country in the hands of
the enemy.” And she was almost frightened at herself to see how this
thought, as it dwelt in her mind, slew the grief in her heart. She had
believed she could not live if her husband were to be taken away from
her; but she found herself often glad that he was dead,--glad that he
was spared the sight and the knowledge of the things which happened;
and even the yearning tenderness with which her imagination pictured
him among the saints, was often turned into a fierce wondering whether
indignation did not fill his soul, even in heaven, at the way things
were going in the land for whose sake he had died.

Out of such throes as these had been born the second nature which made
Senora Moreno the silent, reserved, stern, implacable woman they knew,
who knew her first when she was sixty. Of the gay, tender, sentimental
girl, who danced and laughed with the officers, and prayed and confessed
with the Fathers, forty years before, there was small trace left now,
in the low-voiced, white-haired, aged woman, silent, unsmiling,
placid-faced, who manoeuvred with her son and her head shepherd alike,
to bring it about that a handful of Indians might once more confess
their sins to a Franciscan monk in the Moreno chapel.




III

JUAN CANITO and Senor Felipe were not the only members of the Senora's
family who were impatient for the sheep-shearing. There was also Ramona.
Ramona was, to the world at large, a far more important person than the
Senora herself. The Senora was of the past; Ramona was of the present.
For one eye that could see the significant, at times solemn, beauty of
the Senora's pale and shadowed countenance, there were a hundred that
flashed with eager pleasure at the barest glimpse of Ramona's face; the
shepherds, the herdsmen, the maids, the babies, the dogs, the poultry,
all loved the sight of Ramona; all loved her, except the Senora. The
Senora loved her not; never had loved her, never could love her; and
yet she had stood in the place of mother to the girl ever since her
childhood, and never once during the whole sixteen years of her life had
shown her any unkindness in act. She had promised to be a mother to her;
and with all the inalienable stanchness of her nature she fulfilled the
letter of her promise. More than the bond lay in the bond; but that was
not the Senora's fault.

The story of Ramona the Senora never told. To most of the Senora's
acquaintances now, Ramona was a mystery. They did not know--and no one
ever asked a prying question of the Senora Moreno--who Ramona's parents
were, whether they were living or dead, or why Ramona, her name not
being Moreno, lived always in the Senora's house as a daughter, tended
and attended equally with the adored Felipe. A few gray-haired men and
women here and there in the country could have told the strange story
of Ramona; but its beginning was more than a half-century back, and much
had happened since then. They seldom thought of the child. They knew she
was in the Senora Moreno's keeping, and that was enough. The affairs of
the generation just going out were not the business of the young people
coming in. They would have tragedies enough of their own presently; what
was the use of passing down the old ones? Yet the story was not one to
be forgotten; and now and then it was told in the twilight of a summer
evening, or in the shadows of vines on a lingering afternoon, and all
young men and maidens thrilled who heard it.

It was an elder sister of the Senora's,--a sister old enough to be wooed
and won while the Senora was yet at play,--who had been promised in
marriage to a young Scotchman named Angus Phail. She was a beautiful
woman; and Angus Phail, from the day that he first saw her standing in
the Presidio gate, became so madly her lover, that he was like a man
bereft of his senses. This was the only excuse ever to be made for
Ramona Gonzaga's deed. It could never be denied, by her bitterest
accusers, that, at the first, and indeed for many months, she told Angus
she did not love him, and could not marry him; and that it was only
after his stormy and ceaseless entreaties, that she did finally promise
to become his wife. Then, almost immediately, she went away to Monterey,
and Angus set sail for San Blas. He was the owner of the richest line
of ships which traded along the coast at that time; the richest stuffs,
carvings, woods, pearls, and jewels, which came into the country, came
in his ships. The arrival of one of them was always an event; and
Angus himself, having been well-born in Scotland, and being wonderfully
well-mannered for a seafaring man, was made welcome in all the best
houses, wherever his ships went into harbor, from Monterey to San Diego.

The Senorita Ramona Gonzaga sailed for Monterey the same day and hour
her lover sailed for San Blas. They stood on the decks waving signals to
each other as one sailed away to the south, the other to the north.
It was remembered afterward by those who were in the ship with the
Senorita, that she ceased to wave her signals, and had turned her face
away, long before her lover's ship was out of sight. But the men of the
“San Jose” said that Angus Phail stood immovable, gazing northward,
till nightfall shut from his sight even the horizon line at which the
Monterey ship had long before disappeared from view.

This was to be his last voyage. He went on this only because his honor
was pledged to do so. Also, he comforted himself by thinking that he
would bring back for his bride, and for the home he meant to give her,
treasures of all sorts, which none could select so well as he. Through
the long weeks of the voyage he sat on deck, gazing dreamily at the
waves, and letting his imagination feed on pictures of jewels, satins,
velvets, laces, which would best deck his wife's form and face. When
he could not longer bear the vivid fancies' heat in his blood, he would
pace the deck, swifter and swifter, till his steps were like those
of one flying in fear; at such times the men heard him muttering and
whispering to himself, “Ramona! Ramona!” Mad with love from the first
to the last was Angus Phail; and there were many who believed that if he
had ever seen the hour when he called Ramona Gonzaga his own, his reason
would have fled forever at that moment, and he would have killed either
her or himself, as men thus mad have been known to do. But that hour
never came. When, eight months later, the “San Jose” sailed into the
Santa Barbara harbor, and Angus Phail leaped breathless on shore, the
second man he met, no friend of his, looking him maliciously in
the face, said. “So, ho! You're just too late for the wedding! Your
sweetheart, the handsome Gonzaga girl, was married here, yesterday, to a
fine young officer of the Monterey Presidio!”

Angus reeled, struck the man a blow full in the face, and fell on the
ground, foaming at the mouth. He was lifted and carried into a house,
and, speedily recovering, burst with the strength of a giant from the
hands of those who were holding him, sprang out of the door, and ran
bareheaded up the road toward the Presidio. At the gate he was stopped
by the guard, who knew him.

“Is it true?” gasped Angus.

“Yes, Senor,” replied the man, who said afterward that his knees shook
under him with terror at the look on the Scotchman's face. He feared he
would strike him dead for his reply. But, instead, Angus burst into
a maudlin laugh, and, turning away, went staggering down the street,
singing and laughing.

The next that was known of him was in a low drinking-place, where he was
seen lying on the floor, dead drunk; and from that day he sank lower and
lower, till one of the commonest sights to be seen in Santa Barbara was
Angus Phail reeling about, tipsy, coarse, loud, profane, dangerous.

“See what the Senorita escaped!” said the thoughtless. “She was quite
right not to have married such a drunken wretch.”

In the rare intervals when he was partially sober, he sold all he
possessed,--ship after ship sold for a song, and the proceeds squandered
in drinking or worse. He never had a sight of his lost bride. He did not
seek it; and she, terrified, took every precaution to avoid it, and soon
returned with her husband to Monterey.

Finally Angus disappeared, and after a time the news came up from Los
Angeles that he was there, had gone out to the San Gabriel Mission,
and was living with the Indians. Some years later came the still more
surprising news that he had married a squaw,--a squaw with several
Indian children,--had been legally married by the priest in the San
Gabriel Mission Church. And that was the last that the faithless Ramona
Gonzaga ever heard of her lover, until twenty-five years after her
marriage, when one day he suddenly appeared in her presence. How he
had gained admittance to the house was never known; but there he stood
before her, bearing in his arms a beautiful babe, asleep. Drawing
himself up to the utmost of his six feet of height, and looking at her
sternly, with eyes blue like steel, he said: “Senora Ortegna, you once
did me a great wrong. You sinned, and the Lord has punished you. He has
denied you children. I also have done a wrong; I have sinned, and the
Lord has punished me. He has given me a child. I ask once more at your
hands a boon. Will you take this child of mine, and bring it up as a
child of yours, or of mine, ought to be brought up?”

The tears were rolling down the Senora Ortegna's cheeks. The Lord
had indeed punished her in more ways than Angus Phail knew. Her
childlessness, bitter as that had been, was the least of them.
Speechless, she rose, and stretched out her arms for the child. He
placed it in them. Still the child slept on, undisturbed.

“I do not know if I will be permitted,” she said falteringly; “my
husband--”

“Father Salvierderra will command it. I have seen him,” replied Angus.

The Senora's face brightened. “If that be so, I hope it can be as you
wish,” she said. Then a strange embarrassment came upon her, and looking
down upon the infant, she said inquiringly, “But the child's mother?”

Angus's face turned swarthy red. Perhaps, face to face with this gentle
and still lovely woman he had once so loved, he first realized to the
full how wickedly he had thrown away his life. With a quick wave of
his hand, which spoke volumes, he said: “That is nothing. She has other
children, of her own blood. This is mine, my only one, my daughter. I
wish her to be yours; otherwise, she will be taken by the Church.”

With each second that she felt the little warm body's tender weight in
her arms, Ramona Ortegna's heart had more and more yearned towards the
infant. At these words she bent her face down and kissed its cheek. “Oh,
no! not to the Church! I will love it as my own,” she said.

Angus Phail's face quivered. Feelings long dead within him stirred in
their graves. He gazed at the sad and altered face, once so beautiful,
so dear. “I should hardly have known you, Senora!” burst from him
involuntarily.

She smiled piteously, with no resentment. “That is not strange. I hardly
know myself,” she whispered. “Life has dealt very hardly with me.
I should not have known you either--Angus.” She pronounced his name
hesitatingly, half appealingly. At the sound of the familiar syllables,
so long unheard, the man's heart broke down. He buried his face in his
hands, and sobbed out: “O Ramona, forgive me! I brought the child here,
not wholly in love; partly in vengeance. But I am melted now. Are you
sure you wish to keep her? I will take her away if you are not.”

“Never, so long as I live, Angus,” replied Senora Ortegna. “Already I
feel that she is a mercy from the Lord. If my husband sees no offence in
her presence, she will be a joy in my life. Has she been christened?”

Angus cast his eyes down. A sudden fear smote him. “Before I had thought
of bringing her to you,” he stammered, “at first I had only the thought
of giving her to the Church. I had had her christened by”--the words
refused to leave his lips--“the name--Can you not guess, Senora, what
name she bears?”

The Senora knew. “My own?” she said.

Angus bowed his head. “The only woman's name that my lips ever spoke
with love,” he said, reassured, “was the name my daughter should bear.”

“It is well,” replied the Senora. Then a great silence fell between
them. Each studied the other's face, tenderly, bewilderedly. Then by a
simultaneous impulse they drew nearer. Angus stretched out both his arms
with a gesture of infinite love and despair, bent down and kissed the
hands which lovingly held his sleeping child.

“God bless you, Ramona! Farewell! You will never see me more,” he cried,
and was gone.

In a moment more he reappeared on the threshold of the door, but only to
say in a low tone, “There is no need to be alarmed if the child does not
wake for some hours yet. She has had a safe sleeping-potion given her.
It will not harm her.”

One more long lingering look into each other's faces, and the two
lovers, so strangely parted, still more strangely met, had parted again,
forever. The quarter of a century which had lain between them had been
bridged in both their hearts as if it were but a day. In the heart
of the man it was the old passionate adoring love reawakening;
a resurrection of the buried dead, to full life, with lineaments
unchanged. In the woman it was not that; there was no buried love to
come to such resurrection in her heart, for she had never loved Angus
Phail. But, long unloved, ill-treated, heartbroken, she woke at that
moment to the realization of what manner of love it had been which she
had thrown away in her youth; her whole being yearned for it now, and
Angus was avenged.

When Francis Ortegna, late that night, reeled, half-tipsy, into
his wife's room, he was suddenly sobered by the sight which met his
eyes,--his wife kneeling by the side of the cradle, in which lay,
smiling in its sleep, a beautiful infant.

“What in the devil's name,” he began; then recollecting, he muttered:
“Oh, the Indian brat! I see! I wish you joy, Senora Ortegna, of your
first child!” and with a mock bow, and cruel sneer, he staggered by,
giving the cradle an angry thrust with his foot as he passed.

The brutal taunt did not much wound the Senora. The time had long since
passed when unkind words from her husband could give her keen pain. But
it was a warning not lost upon her new-born mother instinct, and from
that day the little Ramona was carefully kept and tended in apartments
where there was no danger of her being seen by the man to whom the sight
of her baby face was only a signal for anger and indecency.

Hitherto Ramona Ortegna had, so far as was possible, carefully concealed
from her family the unhappiness of her married life. Ortegna's
character was indeed well known; his neglect of his wife, his shameful
dissipations of all sorts, were notorious in every port in the country.
But from the wife herself no one had even heard so much as a syllable of
complaint. She was a Gonzaga, and she knew how to suffer in silence, But
now she saw a reason for taking her sister into her confidence. It was
plain to her that she had not many years to live; and what then would
become of the child? Left to the tender mercies of Ortegna, it was only
too certain what would become of her. Long sad hours of perplexity the
lonely woman passed, with the little laughing babe in her arms, vainly
endeavoring to forecast her future. The near chance of her own death had
not occurred to her mind when she accepted the trust.

Before the little Ramona was a year old, Angus Phail died. An Indian
messenger from San Gabriel brought the news to Senora Ortegna. He
brought her also a box and a letter, given to him by Angus the day
before his death. The box contained jewels of value, of fashions a
quarter of a century old. They were the jewels which Angus had bought
for his bride. These alone remained of all his fortune. Even in the
lowest depths of his degradation, a certain sentiment had restrained him
from parting with them. The letter contained only these words: “I send
you all I have to leave my daughter. I meant to bring them myself this
year. I wished to kiss your hands and hers once more. But I am dying.
Farewell.”

After these jewels were in her possession, Senora Ortegna rested not
till she had persuaded Senora Moreno to journey to Monterey, and had
put the box into her keeping as a sacred trust. She also won from her a
solemn promise that at her own death she would adopt the little
Ramona. This promise came hard from Senora Moreno. Except for Father
Salvierderra's influence, she had not given it. She did not wish any
dealings with such alien and mongrel blood, “If the child were pure
Indian, I would like it better,” she said. “I like not these crosses. It
is the worst, and not the best of each, that remains.”

But the promise once given, Senora Ortegna was content. Well she knew
that her sister would not lie, nor evade a trust. The little Ramona's
future was assured. During the last years of the unhappy woman's life
the child was her only comfort. Ortegna's conduct had become so openly
and defiantly infamous, that he even flaunted his illegitimate relations
in his wife's presence; subjecting her to gross insults, spite of her
helpless invalidism. This last outrage was too much for the Gonzaga
blood to endure; the Senora never afterward left her apartment, or spoke
to her husband. Once more she sent for her sister to come; this time, to
see her die. Every valuable she possessed, jewels, laces, brocades, and
damasks, she gave into her sister's charge, to save them from falling
into the hands of the base creature that she knew only too well would
stand in her place as soon as the funeral services had been said over
her dead body.

Stealthily, as if she had been a thief, the sorrowing Senora Moreno
conveyed her sister's wardrobe, article by article, out of the house, to
be sent to her own home. It was the wardrobe of a princess. The Ortegnas
lavished money always on the women whose hearts they broke; and never
ceased to demand of them that they should sit superbly arrayed in their
lonely wretchedness.

One hour after the funeral, with a scant and icy ceremony of farewell
to her dead sister's husband, Senora Moreno, leading the little
four-year-old Ramona by the hand, left the house, and early the next
morning set sail for home.

When Ortegna discovered that his wife's jewels and valuables of all
kinds were gone, he fell into a great rage, and sent a messenger off,
post-haste, with an insulting letter to the Senora Moreno, demanding
their return. For answer, he got a copy of his wife's memoranda of
instructions to her sister, giving all the said valuables to her in
trust for Ramona; also a letter from Father Salvierderra, upon reading
which he sank into a fit of despondency that lasted a day or two, and
gave his infamous associates considerable alarm, lest they had lost
their comrade. But he soon shook off the influence, whatever it was, and
settled back into his old gait on the same old high-road to the devil.
Father Salvierderra could alarm him, but not save him.

And this was the mystery of Ramona. No wonder the Senora Moreno never
told the story. No wonder, perhaps, that she never loved the child. It
was a sad legacy, indissolubly linked with memories which had in them
nothing but bitterness, shame, and sorrow from first to last.

How much of all this the young Ramona knew or suspected, was locked in
her own breast. Her Indian blood had as much proud reserve in it as was
ever infused into the haughtiest Gonzaga's veins. While she was yet a
little child, she had one day said to the Senora Moreno, “Senora, why
did my mother give me to the Senora Ortegna?”

Taken unawares, the Senora replied hastily: “Your mother had nothing
whatever to do with it. It was your father.”

“Was my mother dead?” continued the child.

Too late the Senora saw her mistake. “I do not know,” she replied; which
was literally true, but had the spirit of a lie in it. “I never saw your
mother.”

“Did the Senora Ortegna ever see her?” persisted Ramona.

“No, never,” answered the Senora, coldly, the old wounds burning at the
innocent child's unconscious touch.

Ramona felt the chill, and was silent for a time, her face sad, and her
eyes tearful. At last she said, “I wish I knew if my mother was dead.”

“Why?” asked the Senora.

“Because if she is not dead I would ask her why she did not want me to
stay with her.”

The gentle piteousness of this reply smote the Senora's conscience.
Taking the child in her arms, she said, “Who has been talking to you of
these things, Ramona?”

“Juan Can,” she replied.

“What did he say?” asked the Senora, with a look in her eye which boded
no good to Juan Canito.

“It was not to me he said it, it was to Luigo; but I heard him,”
 answered Ramona, speaking slowly, as if collecting her various
reminiscences on the subject. “Twice I heard him. He said that my mother
was no good, and that my father was bad too.” And the tears rolled down
the child's cheeks.

The Senora's sense of justice stood her well in place of tenderness,
now. Caressing the little orphan as she had never before done, she said,
with an earnestness which sank deep into the child's mind, “Ramona must
not believe any such thing as that. Juan Can is a bad man to say it.
He never saw either your father or your mother, and so he could know
nothing about them. I knew your father very well. He was not a bad man.
He was my friend, and the friend of the Senora Ortegna; and that was the
reason he gave you to the Senora Ortegna, because she had no child of
her own. And I think your mother had a good many.”

“Oh!” said Ramona, relieved, for the moment, at this new view of the
situation,--that the gift had been not as a charity to her, but to the
Senora Ortegna. “Did the Senora Ortegna want a little daughter very
much?”

“Yes, very much indeed,” said the Senora, heartily and with fervor. “She
had grieved many years because she had no child.”

Silence again for a brief space, during which the little lonely heart,
grappling with its vague instinct of loss and wrong, made wide thrusts
into the perplexities hedging it about, and presently electrified the
Senora by saying in a half-whisper, “Why did not my father bring me to
you first? Did he know you did not want any daughter?”

The Senora was dumb for a second; then recovering herself, she said:
“Your father was the Senora Ortegna's friend more than he was mine. I
was only a child, then.”

“Of course you did not need any daughter when you had Felipe,” continued
Ramona, pursuing her original line of inquiry and reflection without
noticing the Senora's reply. “A son is more than a daughter; but most
people have both,” eying the Senora keenly, to see what response this
would bring.

But the Senora was weary and uncomfortable with the talk. At the very
mention of Felipe, a swift flash of consciousness of her inability
to love Ramona had swept through her mind. “Ramona,” she said firmly,
“while you are a little girl, you cannot understand any of these things.
When you are a woman, I will tell you all that I know myself about your
father and your mother. It is very little. Your father died when you
were only two years old. All that you have to do is to be a good child,
and say your prayers, and when Father Salvierderra comes he will be
pleased with you. And he will not be pleased if you ask troublesome
questions. Don't ever speak to me again about this. When the proper time
comes I will tell you myself.”

This was when Ramona was ten. She was now nineteen. She had never again
asked the Senora a question bearing on the forbidden subject. She had
been a good child and said her prayers, and Father Salvierderra had been
always pleased with her, growing more and more deeply attached to her
year by year. But the proper time had not yet come for the Senora to
tell her anything more about her father and mother. There were few
mornings on which the girl did not think, “Perhaps it may be to-day
that she will tell me.” But she would not ask. Every word of that
conversation was as vivid in her mind as it had been the day it
occurred; and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that during
every day of the whole nine years had deepened in her heart the
conviction which had prompted the child's question, “Did he know that
you did not want any daughter?”

A nature less gentle than Ramona's would have been embittered, or at
least hardened, by this consciousness. But Ramona's was not. She never
put it in words to herself. She accepted it, as those born deformed seem
sometimes to accept the pain and isolation caused by their deformity,
with an unquestioning acceptance, which is as far above resignation, as
resignation is above rebellious repining.

No one would have known, from Ramona's face, manner, or habitual
conduct, that she had ever experienced a sorrow or had a care. Her face
was sunny, she had a joyous voice, and never was seen to pass a human
being without a cheerful greeting, to highest and lowest the same. Her
industry was tireless. She had had two years at school, in the Convent
of the Sacred Heart at Los Angeles, where the Senora had placed her
at much personal sacrifice, during one of the hardest times the Moreno
estate had ever seen. Here she had won the affection of all the Sisters,
who spoke of her habitually as the “blessed child.” They had taught her
all the dainty arts of lace-weaving, embroidery, and simple fashions
of painting and drawing, which they knew; not overmuch learning out of
books, but enough to make her a passionate lover of verse and romance.
For serious study or for deep thought she had no vocation. She was a
simple, joyous, gentle, clinging, faithful nature, like a clear brook
rippling along in the sun,--a nature as unlike as possible to the
Senora's, with its mysterious depths and stormy, hidden currents.

Of these Ramona was dimly conscious, and at times had a tender,
sorrowful pity for the Senora, which she dared not show, and could only
express by renewed industry, and tireless endeavor to fulfil every duty
possible in the house. This gentle faithfulness was not wholly lost on
Senora Moreno, though its source she never suspected; and it won no new
recognition from her for Ramona, no increase of love.

But there was one on whom not an act, not a look, not a smile of all
this graciousness was thrown away. That one was Felipe. Daily more and
more he wondered at his mother's lack of affection for Ramona. Nobody
knew so well as he how far short she stopped of loving her. Felipe knew
what it meant, how it felt, to be loved by the Senora Moreno. But Felipe
had learned while he was a boy that one sure way to displease his mother
was to appear to be aware that she did not treat Ramona as she treated
him. And long before he had become a man he had acquired the habit of
keeping to himself most of the things he thought and felt about his
little playmate sister,--a dangerous habit, out of which were slowly
ripening bitter fruits for the Senora's gathering in later years.




IV

IT was longer even than the Senora had thought it would be, before
Father Salvierderra arrived. The old man had grown feeble during the
year that she had not seen him, and it was a very short day's journey
that he could make now without too great fatigue. It was not only his
body that had failed. He had lost heart; and the miles which would have
been nothing to him, had he walked in the companionship of hopeful and
happy thoughts, stretched out wearily as he brooded over sad memories
and still sadder anticipations,--the downfall of the Missions, the loss
of their vast estates, and the growing power of the ungodly in the land.
The final decision of the United States Government in regard to the
Mission-lands had been a terrible blow to him. He had devoutly believed
that ultimate restoration of these great estates to the Church was
inevitable. In the long vigils which he always kept when at home at the
Franciscan Monastery in Santa Barbara, kneeling on the stone pavement
in the church, and praying ceaselessly from midnight till dawn, he had
often had visions vouchsafed him of a new dispensation, in which the
Mission establishments should be reinstated in all their old splendor
and prosperity, and their Indian converts again numbered by tens of
thousands.

Long after every one knew that this was impossible, he would narrate
these visions with the faith of an old Bible seer, and declare that they
must come true, and that it was a sin to despond. But as year after year
he journeyed up and down the country, seeing, at Mission after Mission,
the buildings crumbling into ruin, the lands all taken, sold, resold,
and settled by greedy speculators; the Indian converts disappearing,
driven back to their original wildernesses, the last traces of the noble
work of his order being rapidly swept away, his courage faltered, his
faith died out. Changes in the manners and customs of his order itself,
also, were giving him deep pain. He was a Franciscan of the same type as
Francis of Assisi. To wear a shoe in place of a sandal, to take money in
a purse for a journey, above all to lay aside the gray gown and cowl for
any sort of secular garment, seemed to him wicked. To own comfortable
clothes while there were others suffering for want of them--and
there were always such--seemed to him a sin for which one might not
undeservedly be smitten with sudden and terrible punishment. In vain the
Brothers again and again supplied him with a warm cloak; he gave it away
to the first beggar he met: and as for food, the refectory would have
been left bare, and the whole brotherhood starving, if the supplies had
not been carefully hidden and locked, so that Father Salvierderra could
not give them all away. He was fast becoming that most tragic yet often
sublime sight, a man who has survived, not only his own time, but
the ideas and ideals of it. Earth holds no sharper loneliness: the
bitterness of exile, the anguish of friendlessness at their utmost,
are in it; and yet it is so much greater than they, that even they seem
small part of it.

It was with thoughts such as these that Father Salvierderra drew near
the home of the Senora Moreno late in the afternoon of one of those
midsummer days of which Southern California has so many in spring. The
almonds had bloomed and the blossoms fallen; the apricots also, and the
peaches and pears; on all the orchards of these fruits had come a filmy
tint of green, so light it was hardly more than a shadow on the gray.
The willows were vivid light green, and the orange groves dark and
glossy like laurel. The billowy hills on either side the valley were
covered with verdure and bloom,--myriads of low blossoming plants, so
close to the earth that their tints lapped and overlapped on each other,
and on the green of the grass, as feathers in fine plumage overlap each
other and blend into a changeful color.

The countless curves, hollows, and crests of the coast-hills in Southern
California heighten these chameleon effects of the spring verdure; they
are like nothing in nature except the glitter of a brilliant lizard in
the sun or the iridescent sheen of a peacock's neck.

Father Salvierderra paused many times to gaze at the beautiful picture.
Flowers were always dear to the Franciscans. Saint Francis himself
permitted all decorations which could be made of flowers. He classed
them with his brothers and sisters, the sun, moon, and stars,--all
members of the sacred choir praising God.

It was melancholy to see how, after each one of these pauses, each fresh
drinking in of the beauty of the landscape and the balmy air, the old
man resumed his slow pace, with a long sigh and his eyes cast down.
The fairer this beautiful land, the sadder to know it lost to the
Church,--alien hands reaping its fulness, establishing new customs,
new laws. All the way down the coast from Santa Barbara he had seen,
at every stopping-place, new tokens of the settling up of the
country,--farms opening, towns growing; the Americans pouring in, at
all points, to reap the advantages of their new possessions. It was
this which had made his journey heavy-hearted, and made him feel, in
approaching the Senora Moreno's, as if he were coming to one of the last
sure strongholds of the Catholic faith left in the country.

When he was within two miles of the house, he struck off from the
highway into a narrow path that he recollected led by a short-cut
through the hills, and saved nearly a third of the distance. It was
more than a year since he had trod this path, and as he found it growing
fainter and fainter, and more and more overgrown with the wild mustard,
he said to himself, “I think no one can have passed through here this
year.”

As he proceeded he found the mustard thicker and thicker. The wild
mustard in Southern California is like that spoken of in the New
Testament, in the branches of which the birds of the air may rest.
Coming up out of the earth, so slender a stem that dozens can find
starting-point in an inch, it darts up, a slender straight shoot, five,
ten, twenty feet, with hundreds of fine feathery branches locking
and interlocking with all the other hundreds around it, till it is an
inextricable network like lace. Then it bursts into yellow bloom still
finer, more feathery and lacelike. The stems are so infinitesimally
small, and of so dark a green, that at a short distance they do not
show, and the cloud of blossom seems floating in the air; at times it
looks like golden dust. With a clear blue sky behind it, as it is often
seen, it looks like a golden snow-storm. The plant is a tyrant and a
nuisance,--the terror of the farmer; it takes riotous possession of a
whole field in a season; once in, never out; for one plant this year, a
million the next; but it is impossible to wish that the land were freed
from it. Its gold is as distinct a value to the eye as the nugget gold
is in the pocket.

Father Salvierderra soon found himself in a veritable thicket of these
delicate branches, high above his head, and so interlaced that he could
make headway only by slowly and patiently disentangling them, as one
would disentangle a skein of silk. It was a fantastic sort of dilemma,
and not unpleasing. Except that the Father was in haste to reach his
journey's end, he would have enjoyed threading his way through
the golden meshes. Suddenly he heard faint notes of singing. He
paused,--listened. It was the voice of a woman. It was slowly drawing
nearer, apparently from the direction in which he was going. At
intervals it ceased abruptly, then began again; as if by a sudden but
brief interruption, like that made by question and answer. Then, peering
ahead through the mustard blossoms, he saw them waving and bending, and
heard sounds as if they were being broken. Evidently some one entering
on the path from the opposite end had been caught in the fragrant
thicket as he was. The notes grew clearer, though still low and sweet
as the twilight notes of the thrush; the mustard branches waved more and
more violently; light steps were now to be heard. Father Salvierderra
stood still as one in a dream, his eyes straining forward into the
golden mist of blossoms. In a moment more came, distinct and clear to
his ear, the beautiful words of the second stanza of Saint Francis's
inimitable lyric, “The Canticle of the Sun:”

“Praise be to thee, O Lord, for all thy creatures, and especially for
our brother the Sun,--who illuminates the day, and by his beauty and
splendor shadows forth unto us thine.”

“Ramona!” exclaimed the Father, his thin cheeks flushing with pleasure.
“The blessed child!” And as he spoke, her face came into sight, set in
a swaying frame of the blossoms, as she parted them lightly to right and
left with her hands, and half crept, half danced through the loop-hole
openings thus made. Father Salvierderra was past eighty, but his blood
was not too old to move quicker at the sight of this picture. A man must
be dead not to thrill at it. Ramona's beauty was of the sort to be best
enhanced by the waving gold which now framed her face. She had just
enough of olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin
without making it swarthy. Her hair was like her Indian mother's, heavy
and black, but her eyes were like her father's, steel-blue. Only those
who came very near to Ramona knew, however, that her eyes were blue, for
the heavy black eyebrows and long black lashes so shaded and shadowed
them that they looked black as night. At the same instant that Father
Salvierderra first caught sight of her face, Ramona also saw him, and
crying out joyfully, “Ah, Father, I knew you would come by this path,
and something told me you were near!” she sprang forward, and sank on
her knees before him, bowing her head for his blessing. In silence he
laid his hands on her brow. It would not have been easy for him to speak
to her at that first moment. She had looked to the devout old monk, as
she sprang through the cloud of golden flowers, the sun falling on
her bared head, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, more like an
apparition of an angel or saint, than like the flesh-and-blood maiden
whom he had carried in his arms when she was a babe.

“We have been waiting, waiting, oh, so long for you, Father!” she said,
rising. “We began to fear that you might be ill. The shearers have been
sent for, and will be here tonight, and that was the reason I felt so
sure you would come. I knew the Virgin would bring you in time for mass
in the chapel on the first morning.”

The monk smiled half sadly. “Would there were more with such faith as
yours, daughter,” he said. “Are all well on the place?”

“Yes, Father, all well,” she answered. “Felipe has been ill with a
fever; but he is out now, these ten days, and fretting for--for your
coming.”

Ramona had like to have said the literal truth,--“fretting for the
sheep-shearing,” but recollected herself in time.

“And the Senora?” said the Father.

“She is well,” answered Ramona, gently, but with a slight change of
tone,--so slight as to be almost imperceptible; but an acute observer
would have always detected it in the girl's tone whenever she spoke of
the Senora Moreno. “And you,--are you well yourself, Father?” she asked
affectionately, noting with her quick, loving eye how feebly the old
man walked, and that he carried what she had never before seen in his
hand,--a stout staff to steady his steps. “You must be very tired with
the long journey on foot.”

“Ay, Ramona, I am tired,” he replied. “Old age is conquering me. It will
not be many times more that I shall see this place.”

“Oh, do not say that, Father,” cried Ramona; “you can ride, when it
tires you too much to walk. The Senora said, only the other day, that
she wished you would let her give you a horse; that it was not right for
you to take these long journeys on foot. You know we have hundreds of
horses. It is nothing, one horse,” she added, seeing the Father slowly
shake his head.

“No;” he said, “it is not that. I could not refuse anything at the hands
of the Senora. But it was the rule of our order to go on foot. We
must deny the flesh. Look at our beloved master in this land, Father
Junipero, when he was past eighty, walking from San Diego to Monterey,
and all the while a running ulcer in one of his legs, for which most men
would have taken to a bed, to be healed. It is a sinful fashion that
is coming in, for monks to take their ease doing God's work. I can no
longer walk swiftly, but I must walk all the more diligently.”

While they were talking, they had been slowly moving forward, Ramona
slightly in advance, gracefully bending the mustard branches, and
holding them down till the Father had followed in her steps. As they
came out from the thicket, she exclaimed, laughing, “There is Felipe, in
the willows. I told him I was coming to meet you, and he laughed at me.
Now he will see I was right.”

Astonished enough, Felipe, hearing voices, looked up, and saw Ramona and
the Father approaching. Throwing down the knife with which he had been
cutting the willows, he hastened to meet them, and dropped on his knees,
as Ramona had done, for the monk's blessing. As he knelt there, the wind
blowing his hair loosely off his brow, his large brown eyes lifted in
gentle reverence to the Father's face, and his face full of affectionate
welcome, Ramona thought to herself, as she had thought hundreds of times
since she became a woman, “How beautiful Felipe is! No wonder the Senora
loves him so much! If I had been beautiful like that she would have
liked me better.” Never was a little child more unconscious of her own
beauty than Ramona still was. All the admiration which was expressed
to her in word and look she took for simple kindness and good-will.
Her face, as she herself saw it in her glass, did not please her. She
compared her straight, massive black eyebrows with Felipe's, arched and
delicately pencilled, and found her own ugly. The expression of gentle
repose which her countenance wore, seemed to her an expression of
stupidity. “Felipe looks so bright!” she thought, as she noted his
mobile changing face, never for two successive seconds the same. “There
is nobody like Felipe.” And when his brown eyes were fixed on her, as
they so often were, in a long lingering gaze, she looked steadily back
into their velvet depths with an abstracted sort of intensity which
profoundly puzzled Felipe. It was this look, more than any other one
thing, which had for two years held Felipe's tongue in leash, as it
were, and made it impossible for him to say to Ramona any of the loving
things of which his heart had been full ever since he could remember.
The boy had spoken them unhesitatingly, unconsciously; but the man found
himself suddenly afraid. “What is it she thinks when she looks into my
eyes so?” he wondered. If he had known that the thing she was usually
thinking was simply, “How much handsomer brown eyes are than blue!
I wish my eyes were the color of Felipe's!” he would have perceived,
perhaps, what would have saved him sorrow, if he had known it, that a
girl who looked at a man thus, would be hard to win to look at him as a
lover. But being a lover, he could not see this. He saw only enough to
perplex and deter him.

As they drew near the house, Ramona saw Margarita standing at the gate
of the garden. She was holding something white in her hands, looking
down at it, and crying piteously. As she perceived Ramona, she made an
eager leap forward, and then shrank back again, making dumb signals
of distress to her. Her whole attitude was one of misery and entreaty.
Margarita was, of all the maids, most beloved by Ramona. Though they
were nearly of the same age, it had been Margarita who first had charge
of Ramona; the nurse and her charge had played together, grown up
together, become women together, and were now, although Margarita never
presumed on the relation, or forgot to address Ramona as Senorita, more
like friends than like mistress and maid.

“Pardon me, Father,” said Ramona. “I see that Margarita there is in
trouble. I will leave Felipe to go with you to the house. I will be with
you again in a few moments.” And kissing his hand, she flew rather than
ran across the field to the foot of the garden.

Before she reached the spot, Margarita had dropped on the ground and
buried her face in her hands. A mass of crumpled and stained linen lay
at her feet.

“What is it? What has happened, Margarita mia?” cried Ramona, in the
affectionate Spanish phrase. For answer, Margarita removed one wet hand
from her eyes, and pointed with a gesture of despair to the crumpled
linen. Sobs choked her voice, and she buried her face again in her
hands.

Ramona stooped, and lifted one corner of the linen. An involuntary cry
of dismay broke from her, at which Margarita's sobs redoubled, and
she gasped out, “Yes, Senorita, it is totally ruined! It can never be
mended, and it will be needed for the mass to-morrow morning. When I saw
the Father coming by your side, I prayed to the Virgin to let me die.
The Senora will never forgive me.”

It was indeed a sorry sight. The white linen altar-cloth, the cloth
which the Senora Moreno had with her own hands made into one solid front
of beautiful lace of the Mexican fashion, by drawing out part of the
threads and sewing the remainder into intricate patterns, the
cloth which had always been on the altar, when mass was said, since
Margarita's and Ramona's earliest recollections,--there it lay, torn,
stained, as if it had been dragged through muddy brambles. In silence,
aghast, Ramona opened it out and held it up. “How did it happen,
Margarita?” she whispered, glancing in terror up towards the house.

“Oh, that is the worst of it, Senorita!” sobbed the girl. “That is the
worst of it! If it were not for that, I would not be so afraid. If it
had happened any other way, the Senora might have forgiven me; but she
never will. I would rather die than tell her;” and she shook from head
to foot.

“Stop crying, Margarita!” said Ramona, firmly, “and tell me all about
it. It isn't so bad as it looks. I think I can mend it.”

“Oh, the saints bless you!” cried Margarita, looking up for the first
time. “Do you really think you can mend it, Senorita? If you will mend
that lace, I'll go on my knees for you all the rest of my life!”

Ramona laughed in spite of herself. “You'll serve me better by keeping
on your feet,” she said merrily; at which Margarita laughed too, through
her tears. They were both young.

“Oh, but Senorita,” Margarita began again in a tone of anguish, her
tears flowing afresh, “there is not time! It must be washed and ironed
to-night, for the mass to-morrow morning, and I have to help at the
supper. Anita and Rosa are both ill in bed, you know, and Maria has gone
away for a week. The Senora said if the Father came to-night I must help
mother, and must wait on table. It cannot be done. I was just going
to iron it now, and I found it--so--It was in the artichoke-patch, and
Capitan, the beast, had been tossing it among the sharp pricks of the
old last year's seeds.”

“In the artichoke-patch!” ejaculated Ramona. “How under heavens did it
get there?”

“Oh, that was what I meant, Senorita, when I said she never would
forgive me. She has forbidden me many times to hang anything to dry on
the fence there; and if I had only washed it when she first told me, two
days ago, all would have been well. But I forgot it till this afternoon,
and there was no sun in the court to dry it, and you know how the sun
lies on the artichoke-patch, and I put a strong cloth over the fence,
so that the wood should not pierce the lace, and I did not leave it more
than half an hour, just while I said a few words to Luigo, and there
was no wind; and I believe the saints must have fetched it down to the
ground to punish me for my disobedience.”

Ramona had been all this time carefully smoothing out the torn places,
“It is not so bad as it looks,” she said; “if it were not for the hurry,
there would be no trouble in mending it. But I will do it the best I
can, so that it will not show, for to-morrow, and then, after the Father
is gone, I can repair it at leisure, and make it just as good as new.
I think I can mend it and wash it before dark,” and she glanced at the
sun. “Oh, yes, there are good three hours of daylight yet. I can do it.
You put the irons on the fire, to have them hot, to iron it as soon
as it is partly dried. You will see it will not show that anything has
happened to it.”

“Will the Senora know?” asked poor Margarita, calmed and reassured, but
still in mortal terror.

Ramona turned her steady glance full on Margarita's face. “You would not
be any happier if she were deceived, do you think?” she said gravely.

“O Senorita, after it is mended? If it really does not show?” pleaded
the girl.

“I will tell her myself, and not till after it is mended,” said Ramona;
but she did not smile.

“Ah, Senorita,” said Margarita, deprecatingly, “you do not know what it
is to have the Senora displeased with one.”

“Nothing can be so bad as to be displeased with one's self,” retorted
Ramona, as she walked swiftly away to her room with the linen rolled up
under her arm. Luckily for Margarita's cause, she met no one on the way.
The Senora had welcomed Father Salvierderra at the foot of the veranda
steps, and had immediately closeted herself with him. She had much to
say to him,--much about which she wished his help and counsel, and much
which she wished to learn from him as to affairs in the Church and in
the country generally.

Felipe had gone off at once to find Juan Canito, to see if everything
were ready for the sheep-shearing to begin on the next day, if the
shearers arrived in time; and there was very good chance of their coming
in by sundown this day, Felipe thought, for he had privately instructed
his messenger to make all possible haste, and to impress on the Indians
the urgent need of their losing no time on the road.

It had been a great concession on the Senora's part to allow the
messenger to be sent off before she had positive intelligence as to the
Father's movements. But as day after day passed and no news came, even
she perceived that it would not do to put off the sheep-shearing much
longer, or, as Juan Canito said, “forever.” The Father might have fallen
ill; and if that were so, it might very easily be weeks before they
heard of it, so scanty were the means of communication between the
remote places on his route of visitation. The messenger had therefore
been sent to summon the Temecula shearers, and Senora had resigned
herself to the inevitable; piously praying, however, morning and night,
and at odd moments in the day, that the Father might arrive before the
Indians did. When she saw him coming up the garden-walk, leaning on
the arm of her Felipe, on the afternoon of the very day which was the
earliest possible day for the Indians to arrive, it was not strange that
she felt, mingled with the joy of her greeting to her long-loved friend
and confessor, a triumphant exultation that the saints had heard her
prayers.

In the kitchen all was bustle and stir. The coming of any guest into the
house was a signal for unwonted activities there,--even the coming of
Father Salvierderra, who never knew whether the soup had force-meat
balls in it or not, old Marda said; and that was to her the last extreme
of indifference to good things of the flesh. “But if he will not eat,
he can see,” she said; and her pride for herself and for the house was
enlisted in setting forth as goodly an array of viands as her larder
afforded, She grew suddenly fastidious over the size and color of the
cabbages to go into the beef-pot, and threw away one whole saucepan full
of rice, because Margarita had put only one onion in instead of two.

“Have I not told you again and again that for the Father it is always
two onions?” she exclaimed. “It is the dish he most favors of all; and
it is a pity too, old as he is. It makes him no blood. It is good beef
he should take now.”

The dining-room was on the opposite side of the courtyard from the
kitchen, and there was a perpetual procession of small messengers going
back and forth between the rooms. It was the highest ambition of each
child to be allowed to fetch and carry dishes in the preparation of
the meals at all times; but when by so doing they could perchance get a
glimpse through the dining-room door, open on the veranda, of strangers
and guests, their restless rivalry became unmanageable. Poor Margarita,
between her own private anxieties and her multiplied duties of helping
in the kitchen, and setting the table, restraining and overseeing her
army of infant volunteers, was nearly distraught; not so distraught,
however, but that she remembered and found time to seize a lighted
candle in the kitchen, run and set it before the statue of Saint Francis
of Paula in her bedroom, hurriedly whispering a prayer that the lace
might be made whole like new. Several times before the afternoon had
waned she snatched a moment to fling herself down at the statue's feet
and pray her foolish little prayer over again. We think we are quite
sure that it is a foolish little prayer, when people pray to have torn
lace made whole. But it would be hard to show the odds between asking
that, and asking that it may rain, or that the sick may get well. As the
grand old Russian says, what men usually ask for, when they pray to God,
is, that two and two may not make four. All the same he is to be pitied
who prays not. It was only the thought of that candle at Saint Francis's
feet, which enabled Margarita to struggle through this anxious and
unhappy afternoon and evening.

At last supper was ready,--a great dish of spiced beef and cabbage in
the centre of the table; a tureen of thick soup, with force-meat balls
and red peppers in it; two red earthen platters heaped, one with the
boiled rice and onions, the other with the delicious frijoles (beans)
so dear to all Mexican hearts; cut-glass dishes filled with hot stewed
pears, or preserved quinces, or grape jelly; plates of frosted cakes of
various sorts; and a steaming silver teakettle, from which went up an
aroma of tea such as had never been bought or sold in all California,
the Senora's one extravagance and passion.

“Where is Ramona?” asked the Senora, surprised and displeased, as she
entered the dining-room, “Margarita, go tell the Senorita that we are
waiting for her.”

Margarita started tremblingly, with flushed face, towards the door. What
would happen now! “O Saint Francis,” she inwardly prayed, “help us this
once!”

“Stay,” said Felipe. “Do not call Senorita Ramona.” Then, turning to his
mother, “Ramona cannot come. She is not in the house. She has a duty to
perform for to-morrow,” he said; and he looked meaningly at his mother,
adding, “we will not wait for her.”

Much bewildered, the Senora took her seat at the head of the table in a
mechanical way, and began, “But--” Felipe, seeing that questions were to
follow, interrupted her: “I have just spoken with her. It is impossible
for her to come;” and turning to Father Salvierderra, he at once engaged
him in conversation, and left the baffled Senora to bear her unsatisfied
curiosity as best she could.

Margarita looked at Felipe with an expression of profound gratitude,
which he did not observe, and would not in the least have understood;
for Ramona had not confided to him any details of the disaster. Seeing
him under her window, she had called cautiously to him, and said: “Dear
Felipe, do you think you can save me from having to come to supper? A
dreadful accident has happened to the altar-cloth, and I must mend it
and wash it, and there is barely time before dark. Don't let them call
me; I shall be down at the brook, and they will not find me, and your
mother will be displeased.”

This wise precaution of Ramona's was the salvation of everything, so far
as the altar-cloth was concerned. The rents had proved far less serious
than she had feared; the daylight held out till the last of them was
skilfully mended; and just as the red beams of the sinking sun came
streaming through the willow-trees at the foot of the garden, Ramona,
darting down the garden, had reached the brook, and kneeling on the
grass, had dipped the linen into the water.

Her hurried working over the lace, and her anxiety, had made her cheeks
scarlet. As she ran down the garden, her comb had loosened and her hair
fallen to her waist. Stopping only to pick up the comb and thrust it in
her pocket, she had sped on, as it would soon be too dark for her to see
the stains on the linen, and it was going to be no small trouble to get
them out without fraying the lace.

Her hair in disorder, her sleeves pinned loosely on her shoulders, her
whole face aglow with the earnestness of her task, she bent low over
the stones, rinsing the altar-cloth up and down in the water, anxiously
scanning it, then plunging it in again.

The sunset beams played around her hair like a halo; the whole place was
aglow with red light, and her face was kindled into transcendent beauty.
A sound arrested her attention. She looked up. Forms, dusky black
against the fiery western sky, were coming down the valley. It was the
band of Indian shearers. They turned to the left, and went towards the
sheep sheds and booths. But there was one of them that Ramona did not
see. He had been standing for some minutes concealed behind a large
willow-tree a few rods from the place where Ramona was kneeling. It was
Alessandro, son of Pablo Assis, captain of the shearing band. Walking
slowly along in advance of his men, he had felt a light, as from a
mirror held in the sun, smite his eyes. It was the red sunbeam on the
glittering water where Ramona knelt. In the same second he saw Ramona.

He halted, as wild creatures of the forest halt at a sound; gazed;
walked abruptly away from his men, who kept on, not noticing his
disappearance. Cautiously he moved a few steps nearer, into the shelter
of a gnarled old willow, from behind which he could gaze unperceived on
the beautiful vision,--for so it seemed to him.

As he gazed, his senses seemed leaving him, and unconsciously he spoke
aloud; “Christ! What shall I do!”




V

THE room in which Father Salvierderra always slept when at the Senora
Moreno's house was the southeast corner room. It had a window to the
south and one to the east. When the first glow of dawn came in the sky,
this eastern window was lit up as by a fire. The Father was always on
watch for it, having usually been at prayer for hours. As the first ray
reached the window, he would throw the casement wide open, and standing
there with bared head, strike up the melody of the sunrise hymn sung in
all devout Mexican families. It was a beautiful custom, not yet wholly
abandoned. At the first dawn of light, the oldest member of the family
arose, and began singing some hymn familiar to the household. It was the
duty of each person hearing it to immediately rise, or at least sit up
in bed, and join in the singing. In a few moments the whole family would
be singing, and the joyous sounds pouring out from the house like
the music of the birds in the fields at dawn. The hymns were usually
invocations to the Virgin, or to the saint of the day, and the melodies
were sweet and simple.

On this morning there was another watcher for the dawn besides Father
Salvierderra. It was Alessandro, who had been restlessly wandering about
since midnight, and had finally seated himself under the willow-trees by
the brook, at the spot where he had seen Ramona the evening before. He
recollected this custom of the sunrise hymn when he and his band were
at the Senora's the last year, and he had chanced then to learn that the
Father slept in the southeast room. From the spot where he sat, he could
see the south window of this room. He could also see the low eastern
horizon, at which a faint luminous line already showed. The sky was like
amber; a few stars still shone faintly in the zenith. There was not
a sound. It was one of those rare moments in which one can without
difficulty realize the noiseless spinning of the earth through space.
Alessandro knew nothing of this; he could not have been made to believe
that the earth was moving. He thought the sun was coming up apace,
and the earth was standing still,--a belief just as grand, just as
thrilling, so far as all that goes, as the other: men worshipped the sun
long before they found out that it stood still. Not the most reverent
astronomer, with the mathematics of the heavens at his tongue's end,
could have had more delight in the wondrous phenomenon of the dawn, than
did this simple-minded, unlearned man.

His eyes wandered from the horizon line of slowly increasing light, to
the windows of the house, yet dark and still. “Which window is hers?
Will she open it when the song begins?” he thought. “Is it on this side
of the house? Who can she be? She was not here last year. Saw the saints
ever so beautiful a creature!”

At last came the full red ray across the meadow. Alessandro sprang to
his feet. In the next second Father Salvierderra flung up his south
window, and leaning out, his cowl thrown off, his thin gray locks
streaming back, began in a feeble but not unmelodious voice to sing,--

     “O beautiful Queen,
     Princess of Heaven.”

Before he had finished the second line, a half-dozen voices had joined
in,--the Senora, from her room at the west end of the veranda, beyond
the flowers; Felipe, from the adjoining room; Ramona, from hers, the
next; and Margarita and other of the maids already astir in the wings of
the house. As the volume of melody swelled, the canaries waked, and the
finches and the linnets in the veranda roof. The tiles of this roof were
laid on bundles of tule reeds, in which the linnets delighted to build
their nests. The roof was alive with them,--scores and scores, nay
hundreds, tame as chickens; their tiny shrill twitter was like the
tuning of myriads of violins.

     “Singers at dawn
     From the heavens above
     People all regions;
     Gladly we too sing,”

continued the hymn, the birds corroborating the stanza. Then men's
voices joined in,--Juan and Luigo, and a dozen more, walking slowly up
from the sheepfolds. The hymn was a favorite one, known to all.

     “Come, O sinners,
     Come, and we will sing
     Tender hymns
     To our refuge,”

was the chorus, repeated after each of the five verses of the hymn.

Alessandro also knew the hymn well. His father, Chief Pablo, had been
the leader of the choir at the San Luis Rey Mission in the last years of
its splendor, and had brought away with him much of the old choir music.
Some of the books had been written by his own hand, on parchment. He not
only sang well, but was a good player on the violin. There was not at
any of the Missions so fine a band of performers on stringed instruments
as at San Luis Rey. Father Peyri was passionately fond of music, and
spared no pains in training all the neophytes under his charge who
showed any special talent in that direction. Chief Pablo, after the
breaking up of the Mission, had settled at Temecula, with a small band
of his Indians, and endeavored, so far as was in his power, to keep
up the old religious services. The music in the little chapel of the
Temecula Indians was a surprise to all who heard it.

Alessandro had inherited his father's love and talent for music, and
knew all the old Mission music by heart. This hymn to the

     “Beautiful Queen,
     Princess of Heaven,”

was one of his special favorites; and as he heard verse after verse
rising, he could not forbear striking in.

At the first notes of this rich new voice, Ramona's voice ceased in
surprise; and, throwing up her window, she leaned out, eagerly looking
in all directions to see who it could be. Alessandro saw her, and sang
no more.

“What could it have been? Did I dream it?” thought Ramona, drew in her
head, and began to sing again.

With the next stanza of the chorus, the same rich barytone notes. They
seemed to float in under all the rest, and bear them along, as a great
wave bears a boat. Ramona had never heard such a voice. Felipe had
a good tenor, and she liked to sing with him, or to hear him; but
this--this was from another world, this sound. Ramona felt every note of
it penetrating her consciousness with a subtle thrill almost like pain.
When the hymn ended, she listened eagerly, hoping Father Salvierderra
would strike up a second hymn, as he often did; but he did not this
morning; there was too much to be done; everybody was in a hurry to
be at work: windows shut, doors opened; the sounds of voices from all
directions, ordering, questioning, answering, began to be heard. The sun
rose and let a flood of work-a-day light on the whole place.

Margarita ran and unlocked the chapel door, putting up a heartfelt
thanksgiving to Saint Francis and the Senorita, as she saw the snowy
altar-cloth in its place, looking, from that distance at least, as good
as new.

The Indians and the shepherds, and laborers of all sorts, were coming
towards the chapel. The Senora, with her best black silk handkerchief
bound tight around her forehead, the ends hanging down each side of her
face, making her look like an Assyrian priestess, was descending the
veranda steps, Felipe at her side; and Father Salvierderra had already
entered the chapel before Ramona appeared, or Alessandro stirred from
his vantage-post of observation at the willows.

When Ramona came out from the door she bore in her hands a high silver
urn filled with ferns. She had been for many days gathering and hoarding
these. They were hard to find, growing only in one place in a rocky
canon, several miles away.

As she stepped from the veranda to the ground, Alessandro walked slowly
up the garden-walk, facing her. She met his eyes, and, without knowing
why, thought, “That must be the Indian who sang.” As she turned to the
right and entered the chapel, Alessandro followed her hurriedly, and
knelt on the stones close to the chapel door. He would be near when she
came out. As he looked in at the door, he saw her glide up the aisle,
place the ferns on the reading-desk, and then kneel down by Felipe in
front of the altar. Felipe turned towards her, smiling slightly, with a
look as of secret intelligence.

“Ah, Senor Felipe has married. She is his wife,” thought Alessandro, and
a strange pain seized him. He did not analyze it; hardly knew what it
meant. He was only twenty-one. He had not thought much about women. He
was a distant, cold boy, his own people of the Temecula village said.
It had come, they believed, of learning to read, which was always bad.
Chief Pablo had not done his son any good by trying to make him like
white men. If the Fathers could have stayed, and the life at the Mission
have gone on, why, Alessandro could have had work to do for the Fathers,
as his father had before him. Pablo had been Father Peyri's right-hand
man at the Mission; had kept all the accounts about the cattle; paid the
wages; handled thousands of dollars of gold every month. But that was
“in the time of the king;” it was very different now. The Americans
would not let an Indian do anything but plough and sow and herd cattle.
A man need not read and write, to do that.

Even Pablo sometimes doubted whether he had done wisely in teaching
Alessandro all he knew himself. Pablo was, for one of his race, wise and
far-seeing. He perceived the danger threatening his people on all sides.
Father Peyri, before he left the country, had said to him: “Pablo, your
people will be driven like sheep to the slaughter, unless you keep them
together. Knit firm bonds between them; band them into pueblos; make
them work; and above all, keep peace with the whites. It is your only
chance.”

Most strenuously Pablo had striven to obey Father Peyri's directions. He
had set his people the example of constant industry, working steadily in
his fields and caring well for his herds. He had built a chapel in his
little village, and kept up forms of religious service there. Whenever
there were troubles with the whites, or rumors of them, he went from
house to house, urging, persuading, commanding his people to keep the
peace. At one time when there was an insurrection of some of the Indian
tribes farther south, and for a few days it looked as if there would
be a general Indian war, he removed the greater part of his band, men,
women, and children driving their flocks and herds with them, to
Los Angeles, and camped there for several days, that they might be
identified with the whites in case hostilities became serious.

But his labors did not receive the reward that they deserved. With every
day that the intercourse between his people and the whites increased,
he saw the whites gaining, his people surely losing ground, and his
anxieties deepened. The Mexican owner of the Temecula valley, a friend
of Father Peyri's, and a good friend also of Pablo's, had returned
to Mexico in disgust with the state of affairs in California, and was
reported to be lying at the point of death. This man's promise to Pablo,
that he and his people should always live in the valley undisturbed,
was all the title Pablo had to the village lands. In the days when the
promise was given, it was all that was necessary. The lines marking off
the Indians' lands were surveyed, and put on the map of the estate. No
Mexican proprietor ever broke faith with an Indian family or village,
thus placed on his lands.

But Pablo had heard rumors, which greatly disquieted him, that such
pledges and surveyed lines as these were coming to be held as of no
value, not binding on purchasers of grants. He was intelligent enough
to see that if this were so, he and his people were ruined. All these
perplexities and fears he confided to Alessandro; long anxious hours the
father and son spent together, walking back and forth in the village, or
sitting in front of their little adobe house, discussing what could be
done. There was always the same ending to the discussion,--a long sigh,
and, “We must wait, we can do nothing.”

No wonder Alessandro seemed, to the more ignorant and thoughtless young
men and women of his village, a cold and distant lad. He was made old
before his time. He was carrying in his heart burdens of which they
knew nothing. So long as the wheat fields came up well, and there was
no drought, and the horses and sheep had good pasture, in plenty, on the
hills, the Temecula people could be merry, go day by day to their easy
work, play games at sunset, and sleep sound all night. But Alessandro
and his father looked beyond. And this was the one great reason why
Alessandro had not yet thought about women, in way of love; this,
and also the fact that even the little education he had received was
sufficient to raise a slight barrier, of which he was unconsciously
aware, between him and the maidens of the village. If a quick, warm
fancy for any one of them ever stirred in his veins, he found himself
soon, he knew not how, cured of it. For a dance, or a game, or a
friendly chat, for the trips into the mountains after acorns, or to the
marshes for grasses and reeds, he was their good comrade, and they were
his; but never had the desire to take one of them for his wife, entered
into Alessandro's mind. The vista of the future, for him, was filled
full by thoughts which left no room for love's dreaming; one purpose and
one fear filled it,--the purpose to be his father's worthy successor,
for Pablo was old now, and very feeble; the fear, that exile and ruin
were in store for them all.

It was of these things he had been thinking as be walked alone, in
advance of his men, on the previous night, when he first saw Ramona
kneeling at the brook. Between that moment and the present, it seemed
to Alessandro that some strange miracle must have happened to him. The
purposes and the fears had alike gone. A face replaced them; a vague
wonder, pain, joy, he knew not what, filled him so to overflowing that
he was bewildered. If he had been what the world calls a civilized man,
he would have known instantly and would have been capable of weighing,
analyzing, and reflecting on his sensations at leisure. But he was not
a civilized man; he had to bring to bear on his present situation only
simple, primitive, uneducated instincts and impulses. If Ramona had been
a maiden of his own people or race, he would have drawn near to her as
quickly as iron to the magnet. But now, if he had gone so far as to even
think of her in such a way, she would have been, to his view, as far
removed from him as was the morning star beneath whose radiance he had
that morning watched, hoping for sight of her at her window. He did not,
however, go so far as to thus think of her. Even that would have
been impossible. He only knelt on the stones outside the chapel door,
mechanically repeating the prayers with the rest, waiting for her to
reappear. He had no doubt, now, that she was Senor Felipe's wife; all
the same he wished to kneel there till she came out, that he might see
her face again. His vista of purpose, fear, hope, had narrowed now down
to that,--just one more sight of her. Ever so civilized, he could hardly
have worshipped a woman better. The mass seemed to him endlessly long.
Until near the last, he forgot to sing; then, in the closing of the
final hymn, he suddenly remembered, and the clear deep-toned voice
pealed out, as before, like the undertone of a great sea-wave, sweeping
along.

Ramona heard the first note, and felt again the same thrill. She was as
much a musician born as Alessandro himself. As she rose from her knees,
she whispered to Felipe: “Felipe, do find out which one of the Indians
it is has that superb voice. I never heard anything like it.”

“Oh, that is Alessandro,” replied Felipe, “old Pablo's son. He is a
splendid fellow. Don't you recollect his singing two years ago?”

“I was not here,” replied Ramona; “you forget.”

“Ah, yes, so you were away; I had forgotten,” said Felipe. “Well, he
was here. They made him captain of the shearing-band, though he was only
twenty, and he managed the men splendidly. They saved nearly all their
money to carry home, and I never knew them do such a thing before.
Father Salvierderra was here, which might have had something to do with
it; but I think it was quite as much Alessandro. He plays the violin
beautifully. I hope he has brought it along. He plays the old San Luis
Rey music. His father was band-master there.”

Ramona's eyes kindled with pleasure. “Does your mother like it, to have
him play?” she asked.

Felipe nodded. “We'll have him up on the veranda tonight,” he said.

While this whispered colloquy was going on, the chapel had emptied,
the Indians and Mexicans all hurrying out to set about the day's work.
Alessandro lingered at the doorway as long as he dared, till he was
sharply called by Juan Canito, looking back: “What are you gaping at
there, you Alessandro! Hurry, now, and get your men to work. After
waiting till near midsummer for this shearing, we'll make as quick work
of it as we can. Have you got your best shearers here?”

“Ay, that I have,” answered Alessandro; “not a man of them but can shear
his hundred in a day, There is not such a band as ours in all San Diego
County; and we don't turn out the sheep all bleeding, either; you'll see
scarce a scratch on their sides.”

“Humph.” retorted Juan Can. “'Tis a poor shearer, indeed, that draws
blood to speak of. I've sheared many a thousand sheep in my day, and
never a red stain on the shears. But the Mexicans have always been famed
for good shearers.”

Juan's invidious emphasis on the word “Mexicans” did not escape
Alessandro. “And we Indians also,” he answered, good-naturedly,
betraying no annoyance; “but as for these Americans, I saw one at work
the other day, that man Lomax, who settled near Temecula, and upon my
faith, Juan Can, I thought it was a slaughter-pen, and not a shearing.
The poor beasts limped off with the blood running.”

Juan did not see his way clear at the moment to any fitting rejoinder to
this easy assumption, on Alessandro's part, of the equal superiority
of Indians and Mexicans in the sheep-shearing art; so, much vexed, with
another “Humph!” he walked away; walked away so fast, that he lost the
sight of a smile on Alessandro's face, which would have vexed him still
further.

At the sheep-shearing sheds and pens all was stir and bustle. The
shearing shed was a huge caricature of a summerhouse,--a long, narrow
structure, sixty feet long by twenty or thirty wide, all roof and
pillars; no walls; the supports, slender rough posts, as far apart
as was safe, for the upholding of the roof, which was of rough planks
loosely laid from beam to beam. On three sides of this were the
sheep-pens filled with sheep and lambs.

A few rods away stood the booths in which the shearers' food was to be
cooked and the shearers fed. These were mere temporary affairs, roofed
only by willow boughs with the leaves left on. Near these, the Indians
had already arranged their camp; a hut or two of green boughs had
been built, but for the most part they would sleep rolled up in their
blankets, on the ground. There was a brisk wind, and the gay colored
wings of the windmill blew furiously round and round, pumping out into
the tank below a stream of water so swift and strong, that as the men
crowded around, wetting and sharpening their knives, they got well
spattered, and had much merriment, pushing and elbowing each other into
the spray.

A high four-posted frame stood close to the shed; in this, swung from
the four corners, hung one of the great sacking bags in which the
fleeces were to be packed. A big pile of bags lay on the ground at the
foot of the posts. Juan Can eyed them with a chuckle. “We'll fill more
than those before night, Senor Felipe,” he said. He was in his element,
Juan Can, at shearing times. Then came his reward for the somewhat
monotonous and stupid year's work. The world held no better feast for
his eyes than the sight of a long row of big bales of fleece, tied,
stamped with the Moreno brand, ready to be drawn away to the mills.
“Now, there is something substantial,” he thought; “no chance of wool
going amiss in market!”

If a year's crop were good, Juan's happiness was assured for the next
six months. If it proved poor, he turned devout immediately, and
spent the next six months calling on the saints for better luck, and
redoubling his exertions with the sheep.

On one of the posts of the shed short projecting slats were nailed, like
half-rounds of a ladder. Lightly as a rope-walker Felipe ran up these,
to the roof, and took his stand there, ready to take the fleeces and
pack them in the bag as fast as they should be tossed up from below.
Luigo, with a big leathern wallet fastened in front of him, filled with
five-cent pieces, took his stand in the centre of the shed. The thirty
shearers, running into the nearest pen, dragged each his sheep into
the shed, in a twinkling of an eye had the creature between his knees,
helpless, immovable, and the sharp sound of the shears set in. The
sheep-shearing had begun. No rest now. Not a second's silence from the
bleating, baa-ing, opening and shutting, clicking, sharpening of shears,
flying of fleeces through the air to the roof, pressing and stamping
them down in the bales; not a second's intermission, except the hour of
rest at noon, from sunrise till sunset, till the whole eight thousand
of the Senora Moreno's sheep were shorn. It was a dramatic spectacle. As
soon as a sheep was shorn, the shearer ran with the fleece in his
hand to Luigo, threw it down on a table, received his five-cent piece,
dropped it in his pocket, ran to the pen, dragged out another sheep, and
in less than five minutes was back again with a second fleece. The shorn
sheep, released, bounded off into another pen, where, light in the head
no doubt from being three to five pounds lighter on their legs, they
trotted round bewilderedly for a moment, then flung up their heels and
capered for joy.

It was warm work. The dust from the fleeces and the trampling feet
filled the air. As the sun rose higher in the sky the sweat poured off
the men's faces; and Felipe, standing without shelter on the roof, found
out very soon that he had by no means yet got back his full strength
since the fever. Long before noon, except for sheer pride, and for
the recollection of Juan Canito's speech, he would have come down and
yielded his place to the old man. But he was resolved not to give up,
and he worked on, though his face was purple and his head throbbing.
After the bag of fleeces is half full, the packer stands in it, jumping
with his full weight on the wool, as he throws in the fleeces, to
compress them as much as possible. When Felipe began to do this, he
found that he had indeed overrated his strength. As the first cloud of
the sickening dust came up, enveloping his head, choking his breath,
he turned suddenly dizzy, and calling faintly, “Juan, I am ill,” sank
helpless down in the wool. He had fainted. At Juan Canito's scream of
dismay, a great hubbub and outcry arose; all saw instantly what had
happened. Felipe's head was hanging limp over the edge of the bag, Juan
in vain endeavoring to get sufficient foothold by his side to lift him.
One after another the men rushed up the ladder, until they were all
standing, a helpless, excited crowd, on the roof, one proposing one
thing, one another. Only Luigo had had the presence of mind to run to
the house for help. The Senora was away from home. She had gone with
Father Salvierderra to a friend's house, a half-day's journey off.
But Ramona was there. Snatching all she could think of in way of
restoratives, she came flying back with Luigo, followed by every servant
of the establishment, all talking, groaning, gesticulating, suggesting,
wringing their hands,--as disheartening a Babel as ever made bad matters
worse.

Reaching the shed, Ramona looked up to the roof bewildered. “Where is
he?” she cried. The next instant she saw his head, held in Juan Canito's
arms, just above the edge of the wool-bag. She groaned, “Oh, how will he
ever be lifted out!”

“I will lift him, Senora,” cried Alessandro, coming to the front, “I am
very strong. Do not be afraid; I will bring him safe down.” And swinging
himself down the ladder, he ran swiftly to the camp, and returned,
bringing in his hands blankets. Springing quickly to the roof again,
he knotted the blankets firmly together, and tying them at the middle
around his waist, threw the ends to his men, telling them to hold him
firm. He spoke in the Indian tongue as he was hurriedly doing this,
and Ramona did not at first understand his plan. But when she saw
the Indians move a little back from the edge of the roof, holding the
blankets firm grasped, while Alessandro stepped out on one of the narrow
cross-beams from which the bag swung, she saw what he meant to do. She
held her breath. Felipe was a slender man; Alessandro was much heavier,
and many inches taller. Still, could any man carry such a burden safely
on that narrow beam! Ramona looked away, and shut her eyes, through
the silence which followed. It was only a few moments; but it seemed an
eternity before a glad murmur of voices told her that it was done, and
looking up, she saw Felipe lying on the roof, unconscious, his face
white, his eyes shut. At this sight, all the servants broke out afresh,
weeping and wailing, “He is dead! He is dead!”

Ramona stood motionless, her eyes fixed on Felipe's face. She, too,
believed him dead; but her thought was of the Senora.

“He is not dead,” cried Juan Canito, who had thrust his hand under
Felipe's shirt. “He is not dead. It is only a faint.”

At this the first tears rolled down Ramona's face. She looked piteously
at the ladder up and down which she had seen Alessandro run as if it
were an easy indoor staircase. “If I could only get up there!” she said,
looking from one to another. “I think I can;” and she put one foot on
the lower round.

“Holy Virgin!” cried Juan Can, seeing her movement. “Senorita! Senorita!
do not attempt it. It is not too easy for a man. You will break your
neck. He is fast coming to his senses.”

Alessandro caught the words. Spite of all the confusion and terror of
the scene, his heart heard the word, “Senorita.” Ramona was not the
wife of Felipe, or of any man. Yet Alessandro recollected that he had
addressed her as Senora, and she did not seem surprised. Coming to the
front of the group he said, bending forward, “Senorita!” There must
have been something in the tone which made Ramona start. The simple word
could not have done it. “Senorita,” said Alessandro, “it will be nothing
to bring Senor Felipe down the ladder. He is, in my arms, no more
than one of the lambs yonder. I will bring him down as soon as he is
recovered. He is better here till then. He will very soon be himself
again. It was only the heat.” Seeing that the expression of anxious
distress did not grow less on Ramona's face, he continued, in a tone
still more earnest, “Will not the Senorita trust me to bring him safe
down?”

Ramona smiled faintly through her tears. “Yes,” she said, “I will trust
you. You are Alessandro, are you not?”

“Yes, Senorita,” he answered, greatly surprised, “I am Alessandro.”




VI

A BAD beginning did not make a good ending of the Senora Moreno's
sheep-shearing this year. One as superstitiously prejudiced against
Roman Catholic rule as she was in favor of it, would have found, in the
way things fell out, ample reason for a belief that the Senora was
being punished for having let all the affairs of her place come to a
standstill, to await the coming of an old monk. But the pious Senora,
looking at the other side of the shield, was filled with gratitude
that, since all this ill luck was to befall her, she had the good Father
Salvierderra at her side to give her comfort and counsel.

It was not yet quite noon of the first day, when Felipe fainted and fell
in the wool; and it was only a little past noon of the third, when
Juan Canito, who, not without some secret exultation, had taken Senor
Felipe's place at the packing, fell from the cross-beam to the ground,
and broke his right leg,--a bad break near the knee; and Juan Canito's
bones were much too old for fresh knitting. He would never again be able
to do more than hobble about on crutches, dragging along the useless
leg. It was a cruel blow to the old man. He could not be resigned to
it. He lost faith in his saints, and privately indulged in blasphemous
beratings and reproaches of them, which would have filled the Senora
with terror, had she known that such blasphemies were being committed
under her roof.

“As many times as I have crossed that plank, in my day!” cried Juan;
“only the fiends themselves could have made me trip; and there was that
whole box of candles I paid for with my own money last month, and burned
to Saint Francis in the chapel for this very sheep-shearing! He may sit
in the dark, for all me, to the end of time! He is no saint at all! What
are they for, if not to keep us from harm when we pray to them? I'll
pray no more. I believe the Americans are right, who laugh at us.” From
morning till night, and nearly from night till morning, for the leg
ached so he slept little, poor Juan groaned and grumbled and swore, and
swore and grumbled and groaned. Taking care of him was enough, Margarita
said, to wear out the patience of the Madonna herself. There was no
pleasing him, whatever you did, and his tongue was never still a minute.
For her part, she believed that it must be as he said, that the fiends
had pushed him off the plank, and that the saints had had their reasons
for leaving him to his fate. A coldness and suspicion gradually grew up
in the minds of all the servants towards him. His own reckless language,
combined with Margarita's reports, gave the superstitious fair ground
for believing that something had gone mysteriously wrong, and that the
Devil was in a fair way to get his soul, which was very hard for the old
man, in addition to all the rest he had to bear. The only alleviation he
had for his torments, was in having his fellow-servants, men and women,
drop in, sit by his pallet, and chat with him, telling him all that was
going on; and when by degrees they dropped off, coming more and more
seldom, and one by one leaving off coming altogether, it was the one
drop that overflowed his cup of misery; and he turned his face to the
wall, left off grumbling, and spoke only when he must.

This phase frightened Margarita even more than the first. Now, she
thought, surely the dumb terror and remorse of one who belongs to the
Devil had seized him, and her hands trembled as she went through the
needful ministrations for him each day. Three months, at least, the
doctor, who had come from Ventura to set the leg, had said he must lie
still in bed and be thus tended. “Three months!” sighed Margarita. “If I
be not dead or gone crazy myself before the end of that be come!”

The Senora was too busy with Felipe to pay attention or to give thought
to Juan. Felipe's fainting had been the symptom and beginning of a
fierce relapse of the fever, and he was lying in his bed, tossing and
raving in delirium, always about the wool.

“Throw them faster, faster! That's a good fleece; five pounds more; a
round ton in those bales. Juan! Alessandro! Captain!--Jesus, how this
sun burns my head!”

Several times he had called “Alessandro” so earnestly, that Father
Salvierderra advised bringing Alessandro into the room, to see if by any
chance there might have been something in his mind that he wished to say
to him. But when Alessandro stood by the bedside, Felipe gazed at
him vacantly, as he did at all the others, still repeating, however,
“Alessandro! Alessandro!”

“I think perhaps he wants Alessandro to play on his violin,” sobbed out
Ramona. “He was telling me how beautifully Alessandro played, and said
he would have him up on the veranda in the evening to play to us.”

“We might try it,” said Father Salvierderra. “Have you your violin here,
Alessandro?”

“Alas, no, Father,” replied Alessandro, “I did not bring it.”

“Perhaps it would do him good it you were to sing, then,” said Ramona.
“He was speaking of your voice also.”

“Oh, try, try.” said the Senorita, turning to Alessandro. “Sing
something low and soft.”

Alessandro walked from the bed to the open window, and after thinking
for a moment, began a slow strain from one of the masses.

At the first note, Felipe became suddenly quiet, evidently listening. An
expression of pleasure spread over his feverish face. He turned his head
to one side, put his hand under his cheek and closed his eyes. The three
watching him looked at each other in astonishment.

“It is a miracle,” said Father Salvierderra. “He will sleep.”

“It was what he wanted!” whispered Ramona.

The Senora spoke not, but buried her face in the bedclothes for a
second; then lifting it, she gazed at Alessandro as if she were praying
to a saint. He, too, saw the change in Felipe, and sang lower and lower,
till the notes sounded as if they came from afar; lower and lower,
slower; finally they ceased, as if they died away lost in distance. As
they ceased, Felipe opened his eyes.

“Oh, go on, go on!” the Senora implored in a whisper shrill with
anxiety. “Do not stop!”

Alessandro repeated the strain, slow, solemn; his voice trembled; the
air in the room seemed stifling, spite of the open window; he felt
something like terror, as he saw Felipe evidently sinking to sleep by
reason of the notes of his voice. There had been nothing in Alessandro's
healthy outdoor experience to enable him to understand such a
phenomenon. Felipe breathed more and more slowly, softly, regularly;
soon he was in a deep sleep. The singing stopped; Felipe did not stir.

“Can I go?” whispered Alessandro.

“No, no.” replied the Senora, impatiently. “He may wake any minute.”

Alessandro looked troubled, but bowed his head submissively, and
remained standing by the window. Father Salvierderra was kneeling on
one side of the bed, the Senora at the other, Ramona at the foot,--all
praying; the silence was so great that the slight sounds of the rosary
beads slipping against each other seemed loud. In a niche in the wall,
at the head of the bed, stood a statue of the Madonna, on the other side
a picture of Santa Barbara. Candles were burning before each. The long
wicks smouldered and died down, sputtering, then flared up again as
the ends fell into the melted wax. The Senora's eyes were fixed on the
Madonna. The Father's were closed. Ramona gazed at Felipe with tears
streaming down her face as she mechanically told her beads.

“She is his betrothed, no doubt,” thought Alessandro. “The saints will
not let him die;” and Alessandro also prayed. But the oppression of the
scene was too much for him. Laying his hand on the low window-sill, he
vaulted over it, saying to Ramona, who turned her head at the sound,
“I will not go away, Senorita, I will be close under the window, if he
awakes.”

Once in the open air, he drew a long breath, and gazed bewilderedly
about him, like one just recovering consciousness after a faint. Then
he threw himself on the ground under the window, and lay looking up into
the sky. Capitan came up, and with a low whine stretched himself out at
full length by his side. The dog knew as well as any other one of the
house that danger and anguish were there.

One hour passed, two, three; still no sound from Felipe's room.
Alessandro rose, and looked in at the window. The Father and the Senora
had not changed their attitudes; their lips were yet moving in prayer.
But Ramona had yielded to her fatigue; slipped from her knees into a
sitting posture, with her head leaning against the post of the bedstead,
and fallen asleep. Her face was swollen and discolored by weeping, and
heavy circles under her eyes told how tired she was. For three days and
nights she had scarcely rested, so constant were the demands on her.
Between Felipe's illness and Juan Can's, there was not a moment without
something to be done, or some perplexing question to be settled, and
above all, and through all, the terrible sorrow. Ramona was broken down
with grief at the thought of Felipe's death. She had never known till
she saw him lying there delirious, and as she in her inexperience
thought, dying, how her whole life was entwined with his. But now, at
the very thought of what it would be to live without him, her heart
sickened. “When he is buried, I will ask Father Salvierderra to take
me away. I never can live here alone,” she said to herself, never for a
moment perceiving that the word “alone” was a strange one to have come
into her mind in the connection. The thought of the Senora did not enter
into her imaginations of the future which so smote her with terror. In
the Senora's presence, Ramona always felt herself alone.

Alessandro stood at the window, his arms folded, leaning on the sill,
his eyes fixed on Ramona's face and form. To any other than a lover's
eyes she had not looked beautiful now; but to Alessandro she looked more
beautiful than the picture of Santa Barbara on the wall beyond. With a
lover's instinct he knew the thoughts which had written such lines
on her face in the last three days. “It will kill her if he dies,”
 he thought, “if these three days have made her look like that.” And
Alessandro threw himself on the ground again, his face down. He did not
know whether it were an hour or a day that he had lain there, when he
heard Father Salvierderra's voice speaking his name. He sprang up, to
see the old monk standing in the window, tears running down his cheeks.
“God be praised,” he said, “the Senor Felipe will get well. A sweat has
broken out on his skin; he still sleeps, but when he wakes he will be in
his right mind. The strength of the fever is broken. But, Alessandro, we
know not how to spare you. Can you not let the men go without you, and
remain here? The Senora would like to have you remain in Juan Can's
place till he is about. She will give you the same wages he had. Would
it not be a good thing for you, Alessandro? You cannot be sure of
earning so much as that for the next three months, can you?”

While the Father was speaking, a tumult had been going on in
Alessandro's breast. He did not know by name any of the impulses which
were warring there, tearing him in twain, as it were, by their pulling
in opposite directions; one saying “Stay!” and the other saying “Go!”
 He would not have known what any one meant, who had said to him, “It
is danger to stay; it is safety to fly.” All the same, he felt as if he
could do neither.

“There is another shearing yet, Father,” he began, “at the Ortega's
ranch. I had promised to go to them as soon as I had finished here, and
they have been wroth enough with us for the delay already. It will not
do to break the promise, Father.”

Father Salvierderra's face fell. “No, my son, certainly not,” he said;
“but could no one else take your place with the band?”

Hearing these words, Ramona came to the window, and leaning out,
whispered, “Are you talking about Alessandro's staying? Let me come
and talk to him. He must not go.” And running swiftly through the hall,
across the veranda, and down the steps, she stood by Alessandro's side
in a moment. Looking up in his face pleadingly, she said: “We can't let
you go, Alessandro. The Senor will pay wages to some other to go in your
place with the shearers. We want you to stay here in Juan Can's place
till he is well. Don't say you can't stay! Felipe may need you to sing
again, and what would we do then? Can't you stay?”

“Yes, I can stay, Senorita,” answered Alessandro, gravely. “I will stay
so long as you need me.”

“Oh, thank you, Alessandro!” Ramona cried. “You are good, to stay. The
Senora will see that it is no loss to you;” and she flew back to the
house.

“It is not for the wages, Senorita,” Alessandro began; but Ramona
was gone. She did not hear him, and he turned away with a sense of
humiliation. “I don't want the Senorita to think that it was the money
kept me,” he said, turning to Father Salvierderra. “I would not leave
the band for money; it is to help, because they are in trouble, Father.”

“Yes, yes, son. I understand that,” replied the monk, who had known
Alessandro since he was a little fellow playing in the corridors of San
Luis Rey, the pet of all the Brothers there. “That is quite right of
you, and the Senora will not be insensible of it. It is not for such
things that money can pay. They are indeed in great trouble now, and
only the two women in the house; and I must soon be going on my way
North again.”

“Is it sure that Senor Felipe will get well?” asked Alessandro.

“I think so,” replied Father Salvierderra. “These relapses are always
worse than the first attack; but I have never known one to die, after
he had the natural sweat to break from the skin, and got good sleep. I
doubt not he will be in his bed, though, for many days, and there will
be much to be seen to. It was an ill luck to have Juan Can laid up,
too, just at this time. I must go and see him; I hear he is in most
rebellious frame of mind, and blasphemes impiously.”

“That does he!” said Alessandro. “He swears the saints gave him over to
the fiends to push him off the plank, and he'll have none of them from
this out! I told him to beware, or they might bring him to worse things
yet if he did not mend his speech of them.”

Sighing deeply as they walked along, the monk said: “It is but a sign
of the times. Blasphemers are on the highway. The people are being
corrupted. Keeps your father the worship in the chapel still, and does a
priest come often to the village?”

“Only twice a year,” replied Alessandro; “and sometimes for a funeral,
if there is money enough to pay for the mass. But my father has the
chapel open, and each Sunday we sing what we know of the mass; and the
people are often there praying.”

“Ay, ay! Ever for money!” groaned Father Salvierderra, not heeding the
latter part of the sentence. “Ever for money! It is a shame. But that it
were sure to be held as a trespass, I would go myself to Temecula once
in three months; but I may not. The priests do not love our order.”

“Oh, if you could, Father,” exclaimed Alessandro, “it would make my
father very glad! He speaks often to me of the difference he sees
between the words of the Church now and in the days of the Mission. He
is very sad, Father, and in great fear about our village. They say the
Americans, when they buy the Mexicans' lands, drive the Indians away as
if they were dogs; they say we have no right to our lands. Do you think
that can be so, Father, when we have always lived on them, and the
owners promised them to us forever?”

Father Salvierderra was silent a long time before replying, and
Alessandro watched his face anxiously. He seemed to be hesitating for
words to convey his meaning. At last he said: “Got your father any
notice, at any time since the Americans took the country,--notice to
appear before a court, or anything about a title to the land?”

“No, Father,” replied Alessandro.

“There has to be some such paper, as I understand their laws,” continued
the monk; “some notice, before any steps can be taken to remove Indians
from an estate. It must be done according to the law, in the courts. If
you have had no such notice, you are not in danger.”

“But, Father,” persisted Alessandro, “how could there be a law to take
away from us the land which the Senor Valdez gave us forever?”

“Gave he to you any paper, any writing to show it?”

“No, no paper; but it is marked in red lines on the map. It was marked
off by Jose Ramirez, of Los Angeles, when they marked all the boundaries
of Senor Valdez's estate. They had many instruments of brass and wood to
measure with, and a long chain, very heavy, which I helped them carry.
I myself saw it marked on the map. They all slept in my father's
house,--Senor Valdez, and Ramirez, and the man who made the measures. He
hired one of our men to carry his instruments, and I went to help, for I
wished to see how it was done; but I could understand nothing, and Jose
told me a man must study many years to learn the way of it. It seemed to
me our way, by the stones, was much better. But I know it is all marked
on the map, for it was with a red line; and my father understood it, and
Jose Ramirez and Senor Valdez both pointed to it with their finger, and
they said, 'All this here is your land, Pablo, always.' I do not think
my father need fear, do you?”

“I hope not,” replied Father Salvierderra, cautiously; “but since the
way that all the lands of the Missions have been taken away, I have
small faith in the honesty of the Americans. I think they will take all
that they can. The Church has suffered terrible loss at their hands.”

“That is what my father says,” replied Alessandro. “He says, 'Look at
San Luis Rey! Nothing but the garden and orchard left, of all their vast
lands where they used to pasture thirty thousand sheep. If the Church
and the Fathers could not keep their lands, what can we Indians do?'
That is what my father says.”

“True, true!” said the monk, as he turned into the door of the room
where Juan Can lay on his narrow bed, longing yet fearing to see Father
Salvierderra's face coming in. “We are all alike helpless in their
hands, Alessandro. They possess the country, and can make what laws they
please. We can only say, 'God's will be done,'” and he crossed himself
devoutly, repeating the words twice.

Alessandro did the same, and with a truly devout spirit, for he was full
of veneration for the Fathers and their teachings; but as he walked on
towards the shearing-shed he thought: “Then, again, how can it be God's
will that wrong be done? It cannot be God's will that one man should
steal from another all he has. That would make God no better than a
thief, it looks to me. But how can it happen, if it is not God's will?”

It does not need that one be educated, to see the logic in this formula.
Generations of the oppressed and despoiled, before Alessandro, had
grappled with the problem in one shape or another.

At the shearing-shed, Alessandro found his men in confusion and
ill-humor. The shearing had been over and done by ten in the morning,
and why were they not on their way to the Ortega's? Waiting all day,--it
was now near sunset,--with nothing to do, and still worse with not
much of anything to eat, had made them all cross; and no wonder. The
economical Juan Can, finding that the work would be done by ten, and
supposing they would be off before noon, had ordered only two sheep
killed for them the day before, and the mutton was all gone, and old
Marda, getting her cue from Juan, had cooked no more frijoles than the
family needed themselves; so the poor shearers had indeed had a sorry
day of it, in no wise alleviated either by the reports brought from time
to time that their captain was lying on the ground, face down, under
Senor Felipe's window, and must not be spoken to.

It was not a propitious moment for Alessandro to make the announcement
of his purpose to leave the band; but he made a clean breast of it in
few words, and diplomatically diverted all resentment from himself by
setting them immediately to voting for a new captain to take his place
for the remainder of the season.

“Very well!” they said hotly; “captain for this year, captain for next,
too!” It wasn't so easy to step out and in again of the captaincy of the
shearers!

“All right,” said Alessandro; “please yourselves! It is all the same
to me. But here I am going to stay for the present. Father Salvierderra
wishes it.”

“Oh, if the Father wishes it, that is different.” “Ah, that alters
the case!” “Alessandro is right!” came up in confused murmur from the
appeased crowd. They were all good Catholics, every one of the Temecula
men, and would never think of going against the Father's orders. But
when they understood that Alessandro's intention was to remain until
Juan Canito's leg should be well enough for him to go about again, fresh
grumblings began. That would not do. It would be all summer. Alessandro
must be at home for the Saint Juan's Day fete, in midsummer,--no doing
anything without Alessandro then. What was he thinking of? Not of the
midsummer fete, that was certain, when he promised to stay as long as
the Senorita Ramona should need him. Alessandro had remembered nothing
except the Senorita's voice, while she was speaking to him. If he had
had a hundred engagements for the summer, he would have forgotten
them all. Now that he was reminded of the midsummer fete, it must be
confessed he was for a moment dismayed at the recollection; for that was
a time, when, as he well knew, his father could not do without his help.
There were sometimes a thousand Indians at this fete, and disorderly
whites took advantage of the occasion to sell whisky and encourage all
sorts of license and disturbance. Yes, Alessandro's clear path of duty
lay at Temecula when that fete came off. That was certain.

“I will manage to be at home then,” he said. “If I am not through here
by that time, I will at least come for the fete. That you may depend
on.”

The voting for the new captain did not take long. There was, in fact,
but one man in the band fit for the office. That was Fernando, the only
old man in the band; all the rest were young men under thirty, or boys.
Fernando had been captain for several years, but had himself begged,
two years ago, that the band would elect Alessandro in his place. He was
getting old, and he did not like to have to sit up and walk about the
first half of every night, to see that the shearers were not gambling
away all their money at cards; he preferred to roll himself up in his
blanket at sunset and sleep till dawn the next morning. But just for
these few remaining weeks he had no objection to taking the office
again. And Alessandro was right, entirely right, in remaining; they
ought all to see that, Fernando said; and his word had great weight with
the men.

The Senora Moreno, he reminded them, had always been a good friend
of theirs, and had said that so long as she had sheep to shear, the
Temecula shearers should do it; and it would be very ungrateful now if
they did not do all they could to help her in her need.

The blankets were rolled up, the saddles collected, the ponies caught
and driven up to the shed, when Ramona and Margarita were seen coming at
full speed from the house.

“Alessandro! Alessandro!” cried Ramona, out of breath, “I have only just
now heard that the men have had no dinner to-day. I am ashamed; but you
know it would not have happened except for the sickness in the house.
Everybody thought they were going away this morning. Now they must have
a good supper before they go. It is already cooking. Tell them to wait.”

Those of the men who understood the Spanish language, in which Ramona
spoke, translated it to those who did not, and there was a cordial
outburst of thanks to the Senorita from all lips. All were only too
ready to wait for the supper. Their haste to begin on the Ortega
sheep-shearing had suddenly faded from their minds. Only Alessandro
hesitated.

“It is a good six hours' ride to Ortega's,” he said to the men. “You'll
be late in, if you do not start now.”

“Supper will be ready in an hour,” said Ramona. “Please let them stay;
one hour can't make any difference.”

Alessandro smiled. “It will take nearer two, Senorita, before they are
off,” he said; “but it shall be as you wish, and many thanks to you,
Senorita, for thinking of it.”

“Oh, I did not think of it myself,” said Ramona. “It was Margarita,
here, who came and told me. She knew we would be ashamed to have the
shearers go away hungry. I am afraid they are very hungry indeed,” she
added ruefully. “It must be dreadful to go a whole day without anything
to eat; they had their breakfast soon after sunrise, did they not?”

“Yes, Senorita,” answered Alessandro, “but that is not long; one can do
without food very well for one day. I often do.”

“Often.” exclaimed Ramona; “but why should you do that?” Then suddenly
bethinking herself, she said in her heart, “Oh, what a thoughtless
question! Can it be they are so poor as that?” And to save Alessandro
from replying, she set off on a run for the house, saying, “Come, come,
Margarita, we must go and help at the supper.”

“Will the Senorita let me help, too,” asked Alessandro, wondering at his
own boldness,--“if there is anything I can do?”

“Oh, no,” she cried, “there is not. Yes, there is, too. You can help
carry the things down to the booth; for we are short of hands now, with
Juan Can in bed, and Luigo gone to Ventura for the doctor. You and some
of your men might carry all the supper over. I'll call you when we are
ready.”

The men sat down in a group and waited contentedly, smoking, chatting,
and laughing. Alessandro walked up and down between the kitchen and
the shed. He could hear the sounds of rattling dishes, jingling spoons,
frying, pouring water. Savory smells began to be wafted out. Evidently
old Marda meant to atone for the shortcoming of the noon. Juan Can, in
his bed, also heard and smelled what was going on. “May the fiends get
me,” he growled, “if that wasteful old hussy isn't getting up a feast
for those beasts of Indians! There's mutton and onions, and peppers
stewing, and potatoes, I'll be bound, and God knows what else, for
beggars that are only too thankful to get a handful of roasted wheat or
a bowl of acorn porridge at home. Well, they'll have to say they
were well feasted at the Moreno's,--that's one comfort. I wonder if
Margarita'll think I am worthy of tasting that stew! San Jose! but it
smells well! Margarita! Margarita!” he called at top of his lungs; but
Margarita did not hear. She was absorbed in her duties in the kitchen;
and having already taken Juan at sundown a bowl of the good broth which
the doctor had said was the only sort of food he must eat for two weeks,
she had dismissed him from her mind for the night. Moreover, Margarita
was absent-minded to-night. She was more than half in love with the
handsome Alessandro, who, when he had been on the ranch the year
before, had danced with her, and said many a light pleasant word to her,
evenings, as a young man may; and what ailed him now, that he seemed,
when he saw her, as if she were no more than a transparent shade,
through which he stared at the sky behind her, she did not know. Senor
Felipe's illness, she thought, and the general misery and confusion,
had perhaps put everything else out of his head; but now he was going
to stay, and it would be good fun having him there, if only Senor Felipe
got well, which he seemed likely to do. And as Margarita flew about,
here, there, and everywhere, she cast frequent glances at the tall
straight figure pacing up and down in the dusk outside.

Alessandro did not see her. He did not see anything. He was looking off
at the sunset, and listening. Ramona had said, “I will call you when we
are ready.” But she did not do as she said. She told Margarita to call.

“Run, Margarita,” she said. “All is ready now; see if Alessandro is in
sight. Call him to come and take the things.”

So it was Margarita's voice, and not Ramona's, that called “Alessandro!
Alessandro! the supper is ready.”

But it was Ramona who, when Alessandro reached the doorway, stood there
holding in her arms a huge smoking platter of the stew which had so
roused poor Juan Can's longings; and it was Ramona who said, as she gave
it into Alessandro's hands, “Take care, Alessandro, it is very full. The
gravy will run over if you are not careful. You are not used to waiting
on table;” and as she said it, she smiled full into Alessandro's
eyes,--a little flitting, gentle, friendly smile, which went near to
making him drop the platter, mutton, gravy, and all, then and there, at
her feet.

The men ate fast and greedily, and it was not, after all, much more than
an hour, when, full fed and happy, they were mounting their horses to
set off. At the last moment Alessandro drew one of them aside. “Jose,”
 he said, “whose horse is the faster, yours or Antonio's?”

“Mine,” promptly replied Jose. “Mine, by a great deal. I will run
Antonio any day he likes.”

Alessandro knew this as well before asking as after. But Alessandro was
learning a great many things in these days, among other things a little
diplomacy. He wanted a man to ride at the swiftest to Temecula and back.
He knew that Jose's pony could go like the wind. He also knew that there
was a perpetual feud of rivalry between him and Antonio, in matter of
the fleetness of their respective ponies. So, having chosen Jose for
his messenger, he went thus to work to make sure that he would urge his
horse to its utmost speed.

Whispering in Jose's ear a few words, he said, “Will you go? I will pay
you for the time, all you could earn at the shearing.”

“I will go,” said Jose, elated. “You will see me back tomorrow by
sundown.”

“Not earlier?” asked Alessandro. “I thought by noon.”

“Well, by noon be it, then,” said Jose. “The horse can do it.”

“Have great care!” said Alessandro.

“That will I,” replied Jose; and giving his horse's sides a sharp punch
with his knees, set off at full gallop westward.

“I have sent Jose with a message to Temecula,” said Alessandro, walking
up to Fernando. “He will be back here tomorrow noon, and join you at the
Ortega's the next morning.”

“Back here by noon to-morrow!” exclaimed Fernando. “Not unless he kills
his horse!”

“That was what he said,” replied Alessandro, nonchalantly.

“Easy enough, too!” cried Antonio, riding up on his little dun mare.
“I'd go in less time than that, on this mare. Jose's is no match for
her, and never was. Why did you not send me, Alessandro?”

“Is your horse really faster than Jose's?” said Alessandro. “Then I wish
I had sent you. I'll send you next time.”




VII

IT was strange to see how quickly and naturally Alessandro fitted into
his place in the household. How tangles straightened out, and rough
places became smooth, as he quietly took matters in hand. Luckily, old
Juan Can had always liked him, and felt a great sense of relief at the
news of his staying on. Not a wholly unselfish relief, perhaps, for
since his accident Juan had not been without fears that he might lose
his place altogether; there was a Mexican he knew, who had long
been scheming to get the situation, and had once openly boasted at
a fandango, where he was dancing with Anita, that as soon as that
superannuated old fool, Juan Canito, was out of the way, he meant to
be the Senora Moreno's head shepherd himself. To have seen this man in
authority on the place, would have driven Juan out of his mind.

But the gentle Alessandro, only an Indian,--and of course the Senora
would never think of putting an Indian permanently in so responsible a
position on the estate,--it was exactly as Juan would have wished; and
he fraternized with Alessandro heartily from the outset; kept him in
his room by the hour, giving him hundreds of long-winded directions and
explanations about things which, if only he had known it, Alessandro
understood far better than he did.

Alessandro's father had managed the Mission flocks and herds at San Luis
Rey for twenty years; few were as skilful as he; he himself owned nearly
as many sheep as the Senora Moreno; but this Juan did not know. Neither
did he realize that Alessandro, as Chief Pablo's son, had a position
of his own not without dignity and authority. To Juan, an Indian was
an Indian, and that was the end of it. The gentle courteousness of
Alessandro's manner, his quiet behavior, were all set down in Juan's
mind to the score of the boy's native amiability and sweetness. If Juan
had been told that the Senor Felipe himself had not been more carefully
trained in all precepts of kindliness, honorable dealing, and polite
usage, by the Senora, his mother, than had Alessandro by his father, he
would have opened his eyes wide. The standards of the two parents
were different, to be sure; but the advantage could not be shown to be
entirely on the Senora's side. There were many things that Felipe knew,
of which Alessandro was profoundly ignorant; but there were others
in which Alessandro could have taught Felipe; and when it came to the
things of the soul, and of honor, Alessandro's plane was the higher
of the two. Felipe was a fair-minded, honorable man, as men go; but
circumstances and opportunity would have a hold on him they could never
get on Alessandro. Alessandro would not lie; Felipe might. Alessandro
was by nature full of veneration and the religious instinct; Felipe had
been trained into being a good Catholic. But they were both singularly
pure-minded, open-hearted, generous-souled young men, and destined, by
the strange chance which had thus brought them into familiar relations,
to become strongly attached to each other. After the day on which
the madness of Felipe's fever had been so miraculously soothed and
controlled by Alessandro's singing, he was never again wildly delirious.
When he waked in the night from that first long sleep, he was, as Father
Salvierderra had predicted, in his right mind; knew every one, and asked
rational questions. But the over-heated and excited brain did not
for some time wholly resume normal action. At intervals he wandered,
especially when just arousing from sleep; and, strangely enough, it
was always for Alessandro that he called at these times, and it seemed
always to be music that he craved. He recollected Alessandro's having
sung to him that first night. “I was not so crazy as you all thought,”
 he said. “I knew a great many of the things I said, but I couldn't help
saying them; and I heard Ramona ask Alessandro to sing; and when he
began, I remember I thought the Virgin had reached down and put her hand
on my head and cooled it.”

On the second evening, the first after the shearers had left,
Alessandro, seeing Ramona in the veranda, went to the foot of the steps,
and said, “Senorita, would Senor Felipe like to have me play on the
violin to him tonight?”

“Why, whose violin have you got?” exclaimed Ramona, astonished.

“My own, Senorita.”

“Your own! I thought you said you did not bring it.”

“Yes, Senorita, that is true; but I sent for it last night, and it is
here.”

“Sent to Temecula and back already!” cried Ramona.

“Yes, Senorita. Our ponies are swift and strong. They can go a hundred
miles in a day, and not suffer. It was Jose brought it, and he is at the
Ortega's by this time.”

Ramona's eyes glistened. “I wish I could have thanked him,” she said.
“You should have let me know. He ought to have been paid for going.”

“I paid him, Senorita; he went for me,” said Alessandro, with a shade of
wounded pride in the tone, which Ramona should have perceived, but did
not, and went on hurting the lover's heart still more.

“But it was for us that you sent for it, Alessandro; the Senora would
rather pay the messenger herself.”

“It is paid, Senorita. It is nothing. If the Senor Felipe wishes to hear
the violin, I will play;” and Alessandro walked slowly away.

Ramona gazed after him. For the first time, she looked at him with no
thought of his being an Indian,--a thought there had surely been no need
of her having, since his skin was not a shade darker than Felipe's;
but so strong was the race feeling, that never till that moment had she
forgotten it.

“What a superb head, and what a walk!” she thought. Then, looking more
observantly, she said: “He walks as if he were offended. He did not
like my offering to pay for the messenger. He wanted to do it for dear
Felipe. I will tell Felipe, and we will give him some present when he
goes away.”

“Isn't he splendid, Senorita?” came in a light laughing tone from
Margarita's lips close to her ear, in the fond freedom of their
relation. “Isn't he splendid? And oh, Senorita, you can't think how he
dances! Last year I danced with him every night; he has wings on his
feet, for all he is so tall and big.”

There was a coquettish consciousness in the girl's tone, that was
suddenly, for some unexplained reason, exceedingly displeasing to
Ramona. Drawing herself away, she spoke to Margarita in a tone she had
never before in her life used. “It is not fitting to speak like that
about young men. The Senora would be displeased if she heard you,” she
said, and walked swiftly away leaving poor Margarita as astounded as if
she had got a box on the ear.

She looked after Ramona's retreating figure, then after Alessandro's.
She had heard them talking together just before she came up. Thoroughly
bewildered and puzzled, she stood motionless for several seconds,
reflecting; then, shaking her head, she ran away, trying to dismiss the
harsh speech from her mind. “Alessandro must have vexed the Senorita,”
 she thought, “to make her speak like that to me.” But the incident was
not so easily dismissed from Margarita's thoughts. Many times in the
day it recurred to her, still a bewilderment and a puzzle, as far from
solution as ever. It was a tiny seed, whose name she did not dream of;
but it was dropped in soil where it would grow some day,--forcing-house
soil, and a bitter seed; and when it blossomed, Ramona would have an
enemy.

All unconscious, equally of Margarita's heart and her own, Ramona
proceeded to Felipe's room. Felipe was sleeping, the Senora sitting by
his side, as she had sat for days and nights,--her dark face looking
thinner and more drawn each day; her hair looking even whiter, if that
could be; and her voice growing hollow from faintness and sorrow.

“Dear Senora,” whispered Ramona, “do go out for a few moments while he
sleeps, and let me watch,--just on the walk in front of the veranda. The
sun is still lying there, bright and warm. You will be ill if you do not
have air.”

The Senora shook her head. “My place is here,” she answered, speaking in
a dry, hard tone. Sympathy was hateful to the Senora Moreno; she wished
neither to give it nor take it. “I shall not leave him. I do not need
the air.”

Ramona had a cloth-of-gold rose in her hand. The veranda eaves were now
shaded with them, hanging down like a thick fringe of golden tassels. It
was the rose Felipe loved best. Stooping, she laid it on the bed, near
Felipe's head. “He will like to see it when he wakes,” she said.

The Senora seized it, and flung it far out in the room. “Take it away!
Flowers are poison when one is ill,” she said coldly. “Have I never told
you that?”

“No, Senora,” replied Ramona, meekly; and she glanced involuntarily at
the saucer of musk which the Senora kept on the table close to Felipe's
pillow.

“The musk is different,” said the Senora, seeing the glance. “Musk is a
medicine; it revives.”

Ramona knew, but she would have never dared to say, that Felipe hated
musk. Many times he had said to her how he hated the odor; but his
mother was so fond of it, that it must always be that the veranda and
the house would be full of it. Ramona hated it too. At times it made her
faint, with a deadly faintness. But neither she nor Felipe would have
confessed as much to the Senora; and if they had, she would have thought
it all a fancy.

“Shall I stay?” asked Ramona, gently.

“As you please,” replied the Senora. The simple presence of Ramona irked
her now with a feeling she did not pretend to analyze, and would
have been terrified at if she had. She would not have dared to say
to herself, in plain words: “Why is that girl well and strong, and my
Felipe lying here like to die! If Felipe dies, I cannot bear the sight
of her. What is she, to be preserved of the saints!”

But that, or something like it, was what she felt whenever Ramona
entered the room; still more, whenever she assisted in ministering to
Felipe. If it had been possible, the Senora would have had no hands but
her own do aught for her boy. Even tears from Ramona sometimes irritated
her. “What does she know about loving Felipe! He is nothing to her!”
 thought the Senora, strangely mistaken, strangely blind, strangely
forgetting how feeble is the tie of blood in the veins by the side of
love in the heart.

If into this fiery soul of the Senora's could have been dropped one
second's knowledge of the relative positions she and Ramona already
occupied in Felipe's heart, she would, on the spot, have either died
herself or have slain Ramona, one or the other. But no such knowledge
was possible; no such idea could have found entrance into the Senora's
mind. A revelation from Heaven of it could hardly have reached even her
ears. So impenetrable are the veils which, fortunately for us all, are
forever held by viewless hands between us and the nearest and closest of
our daily companions.

At twilight of this day Felipe was restless and feverish again. He had
dozed at intervals all day long, but had had no refreshing sleep.

“Send for Alessandro,” he said. “Let him come and sing to me.”

“He has his violin now; he can play, if you would like that better,”
 said Ramona; and she related what Alessandro had told her of the
messenger's having ridden to Temecula and back in a night and half a
day, to bring it.

“I wanted to pay the man,” she said; “I knew of course your mother would
wish to reward him. But I fancy Alessandro was offended. He answered me
shortly that it was paid, and it was nothing.”

“You couldn't have offended him more,” said Felipe. “What a pity! He is
as proud as Lucifer himself, that Alessandro. You know his father has
always been the head of their band; in fact, he has authority over
several bands; General, they call it now, since they got the title from
the Americans; they used to call it Chief., and until Father Peyri left
San Luis Rey, Pablo was in charge of all the sheep, and general steward
and paymaster. Father Peyri trusted him with everything; I've heard he
would leave boxes full of uncounted gold in Pablo's charge to pay off
the Indians. Pablo reads and writes, and is very well off; he has as
many sheep as we have, I fancy!”

“What!” exclaimed Ramona, astonished. “They all look as if they were
poor.”

“Oh, well, so they are,” replied Felipe, “compared with us; but one
reason is, they share everything with each other. Old Pablo feeds and
supports half his village, they say. So long as he has anything, he will
never see one of his Indians hungry.”

“How generous!” warmly exclaimed Ramona; “I think they are better than
we are, Felipe!”

“I think so, too,” said Felipe. “That's what I have always said. The
Indians are the most generous people in the world. Of course they have
learned it partly from us; but they were very much so when the Fathers
first came here. You ask Father Salvierderra some day. He has read
all Father Junipero's and Father Crespi's diaries, and he says it is
wonderful how the wild savages gave food to every one who came.”

“Felipe, you are talking too much,” said the Senora's voice, in the
doorway; and as she spoke she looked reproachfully at Ramona. If she
had said in words, “See how unfit you are to be trusted with Felipe. No
wonder I do not leave the room except when I must!” her meaning could
not have been plainer. Ramona felt it keenly, and not without some
misgiving that it was deserved.

“Oh, dear Felipe, has it hurt you?” she said timidly; and to the Senora,
“Indeed, Senora, he has been speaking but a very few moments, very low.”

“Go call Alessandro, Ramona, will you?” said Felipe. “Tell him to bring
his violin. I think I will go to sleep if he plays.”

A long search Ramona had for Alessandro. Everybody had seen him a few
minutes ago, but nobody knew where he was now. Kitchens, sheepfolds,
vineyards, orchards, Juan Can's bedchamber,--Ramona searched them all
in vain. At last, standing at the foot of the veranda steps, and looking
down the garden, she thought she saw figures moving under the willows by
the washing-stones.

“Can he be there?” she said. “What can he be doing there? Who is it with
him?” And she walked down the path, calling, “Alessandro! Alessandro!”

At the first sound, Alessandro sprang from the side of his companion,
and almost before the second syllables had been said, was standing face
to face with Ramona.

“Here I am, Senorita. Does Senor Felipe want me? I have my violin here.
I thought perhaps he would like to have me play to him in the twilight.”

“Yes,” replied Ramona, “he wishes to hear you. I have been looking
everywhere for you.” As she spoke, she was half unconsciously peering
beyond into the dusk, to see whose figure it was, slowly moving by the
brook.

Nothing escaped Alessandro's notice where Ramona was concerned. “It is
Margarita,” he said instantly. “Does the Senorita want her? Shall I run
and call her?”

“No,” said Ramona, again displeased, she knew not why, nor in fact knew
she was displeased; “no, I was not looking for her. What is she doing
there?”

“She is washing,” replied Alessandro, innocently.

“Washing at this time of day!” thought Ramona, severely. “A mere
pretext. I shall watch Margarita. The Senora would never allow this sort
of thing.” And as she walked back to the house by Alessandro's side,
she meditated whether or no she would herself speak to Margarita on the
subject in the morning.

Margarita, in the mean time, was also having her season of reflections
not the pleasantest. As she soused her aprons up and down in the water,
she said to herself, “I may as well finish them now I am here. How
provoking! I've no more than got a word with him, than she must come,
calling him away. And he flies as if he was shot on an arrow, at
the first word. I'd like to know what's come over the man, to be so
different. If I could ever get a good half-hour with him alone, I'd soon
find out. Oh, but his eyes go through me, through and through me! I
know he's an Indian, but what do I care for that. He's a million times
handsomer than Senor Felipe. And Juan Jose said the other day he'd make
enough better head shepherd than old Juan Can, if Senor Felipe'd only
see it; and why shouldn't he get to see it, if Alessandro's here
all summer?” And before the aprons were done, Margarita had a fine
air-castle up: herself and Alessandro married, a nice little house,
children playing in the sunshine below the artichoke-patch, she herself
still working for the Senora. “And the Senorita will perhaps marry Senor
Felipe,” she added, her thoughts moving more hesitatingly. “He worships
the ground she walks on. Anybody with quarter of a blind eye can see
that; but maybe the Senora would not let him. Anyhow, Senor Felipe is
sure to have a wife, and so and so.” It was an innocent, girlish castle,
built of sweet and natural longings, for which no maiden, high or
low, need blush; but its foundations were laid in sand, on which would
presently beat such winds and floods as poor little Margarita never
dreamed of.

The next day Margarita and Ramona both went about their day's business
with a secret purpose in their hearts. Margarita had made up her mind
that before night she would, by fair means or foul, have a good long
talk with Alessandro. “He was fond enough of me last year, I know,”
 she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night
leave-takings at that time. “It's because he is so put upon by everybody
now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about
the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to
sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his
mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make one, before this day's
sun sets. If I can once get a half-hour with him, I'm not afraid after
that; I know the way it is with men!” said the confident Margarita,
who, truth being told, it must be admitted, did indeed know a great
deal about the way it is with men, and could be safely backed, in a fair
field, with a fair start, against any girl of her age and station in
the country. So much for Margarita's purpose, at the outset of a day
destined to be an eventful one in her life.

Ramona's purpose was no less clear. She had decided, after some
reflection, that she would not speak to the Senora about Margarita's
having been under the willows with Alessandro in the previous evening,
but would watch her carefully and see whether there were any farther
signs of her attempting to have clandestine interviews with him.

This course she adopted, she thought, chiefly because of her affection
for Margarita, and her unwillingness to expose her to the Senora's
displeasure, which would be great, and terrible to bear. She was also
aware of an unwillingness to bring anything to light which would reflect
ever so lightly upon Alessandro in the Senora's estimation. “And he is
not really to blame,” thought Ramona, “if a girl follows him about and
makes free with him. She must have seen him at the willows, and gone
down there on purpose to meet him, making a pretext of the washing. For
she never in this world would have gone to wash in the dark, as he must
have known, if he were not a fool. He is not the sort of person, it
seems to me, to be fooling with maids. He seems as full of grave thought
as Father Salvierderra. If I see anything amiss in Margarita to-day, I
shall speak to her myself, kindly but firmly, and tell her to conduct
herself more discreetly.”

Then, as the other maiden's had done, Ramona's thoughts, being
concentrated on Alessandro, altered a little from their first key, and
grew softer and more imaginative; strangely enough, taking some of the
phrases, as it were, out of the other maiden's mouth.

“I never saw such eyes as Alessandro has,” she said. “I wonder any girl
should make free with him. Even I myself, when he fixes his eyes on me,
feel a constraint. There is something in them like the eyes of a saint,
so solemn, yet so mild. I am sure he is very good.”

And so the day opened; and if there were abroad in the valley that day
a demon of mischief, let loose to tangle the skeins of human affairs,
things could not have fallen out better for his purpose than they did;
for it was not yet ten o'clock of the morning, when Ramona, sitting at
her embroidery in the veranda, half hid behind the vines, saw Alessandro
going with his pruning-knife in his hand towards the artichoke-patch at
the east of the garden, and joining the almond orchard. “I wonder
what he is going to do there,” she thought. “He can't be going to cut
willows;” and her eyes followed him till he disappeared among the trees.

Ramona was not the only one who saw this. Margarita, looking from the
east window of Father Salvierderra's room, saw the same thing. “Now's
my chance!” she said; and throwing a white reboso coquettishly over her
head, she slipped around the corner of the house. She ran swiftly in the
direction in which Alessandro had gone. The sound of her steps reached
Ramona, who, lifting her eyes, took in the whole situation at a glance.
There was no possible duty, no possible message, which would take
Margarita there. Ramona's cheeks blazed with a disproportionate
indignation. But she bethought herself, “Ah, the Senora may have sent
her to call Alessandro!” She rose, went to the door of Felipe's room,
and looked in. The Senora was sitting in the chair by Felipe's bed,
with her eyes closed. Felipe was dozing. The Senora opened her eyes, and
looked inquiringly at Ramona.

“Do you know where Margarita is?” said Ramona.

“In Father Salvierderra's room, or else in the kitchen helping Marda,”
 replied the Senora, in a whisper. “I told her to help Marda with the
peppers this morning.”

Ramona nodded, returned to the veranda, and sat down to decide on
her course of action. Then she rose again, and going to Father
Salvierderra's room, looked in. The room was still in disorder.
Margarita had left her work there unfinished. The color deepened on
Ramona's cheeks. It was strange how accurately she divined each process
of the incident. “She saw him from this window,” said Ramona, “and has
run after him. It is shameful. I will go and call her back, and let her
see that I saw it all. It is high time that this was stopped.”

But once back in the veranda, Ramona halted, and seated herself in her
chair again. The idea of seeming to spy was revolting to her.

“I will wait here till she comes back,” she said, and took up her
embroidery. But she could not work. As the minutes went slowly by, she
sat with her eyes fixed on the almond orchard, where first Alessandro
and then Margarita had disappeared. At last she could bear it no longer.
It seemed to her already a very long time. It was not in reality very
long,--a half hour or so, perhaps; but it was long enough for Margarita
to have made great headway, as she thought, in her talk with Alessandro,
and for things to have reached just the worst possible crisis at which
they could have been surprised, when Ramona suddenly appeared at the
orchard gate, saying in a stern tone, “Margarita, you are wanted in the
house!” At a bad crisis, indeed, for everybody concerned. The picture
which Ramona had seen, as she reached the gate, was this: Alessandro,
standing with his back against the fence, his right hand hanging
listlessly down, with the pruning-knife in it, his left hand in the hand
of Margarita, who stood close to him, looking up in his face, with a
half-saucy, half-loving expression. What made bad matters worse, was,
that at the first sight of Ramona, Alessandro snatched his hand from
Margarita's, and tried to draw farther off from her, looking at her with
an expression which, even in her anger, Ramona could not help seeing was
one of disgust and repulsion. And if Ramona saw it, how much more did
Margarita! Saw it, as only a woman repulsed in presence of another woman
can see and feel. The whole thing was over in the twinkling of an eye;
the telling it takes double, treble the time of the happening. Before
Alessandro was fairly aware what had befallen, Ramona and Margarita
were disappearing from view under the garden trellis,--Ramona walking in
advance, stately, silent, and Margarita following, sulky, abject in her
gait, but with a raging whirlwind in her heart.

It had taken only the twinkling of an eye, but it had told Margarita the
truth. Alessandro too.

“My God.” he said, “the Senorita thought me making love to that girl.
May the fiends get her! The Senorita looked at me as if I were a dog. How
could she think a man would look at a woman after he had once seen her!
And I can never, never speak to her to tell her! Oh, this cannot be
borne!” And in his rage Alessandro threw his pruning-knife whirling
through the air so fiercely, it sank to the hilt in one of the old
olive-trees. He wished he were dead. He was minded to flee the place.
How could he ever look the Senorita in the face again!

“Perdition take that girl!” he said over and over in his helpless
despair. An ill outlook for Margarita after this; and the girl had not
deserved it.

In Margarita's heart the pain was more clearly defined. She had seen
Ramona a half-second before Alessandro had; and dreaming no special
harm, except a little confusion at being seen thus standing with
him,--for she would tell the Senorita all about it when matters had gone
a little farther,--had not let go of Alessandro's hand. But the next
second she had seen in his face a look; oh, she would never forget it,
never! That she should live to have had any man look at her like that!
At the first glimpse of the Senorita, all the blood in his body seemed
rushing into his face, and he had snatched his hand away,--for it was
Margarita herself that had taken his hand, not he hers,--had snatched
his hand away, and pushed her from him, till she had nearly fallen. All
this might have been borne, if it had been only a fear of the Senorita's
seeing them, which had made him do it. But Margarita knew a great deal
better than that. That one swift, anguished, shame-smitten, appealing,
worshipping look on Alessandro's face, as his eyes rested on Ramona, was
like a flash of light into Margarita's consciousness. Far better than
Alessandro himself, she now knew his secret. In her first rage she did
not realize either the gulf between herself and Ramona, or that between
Ramona and Alessandro. Her jealous rage was as entire as if they had
all been equals together. She lost her head altogether, and there was
embodied insolence in the tone in which she said presently, “Did the
Senorita want me?”

Turning swiftly on her, and looking her full in the eye, Ramona said:
“I saw you go to the orchard, Margarita, and I knew what you went for. I
knew that you were at the brook last night with Alessandro. All I wanted
of you was, to tell you that if I see anything more of this sort, I
shall speak to the Senora.”

“There is no harm,” muttered Margarita, sullenly. “I don't know what the
Senorita means.”

“You know very well, Margarita,” retorted Ramona. “You know that the
Senora permits nothing of the kind. Be careful, now, what you do.” And
with that the two separated, Ramona returning to the veranda and her
embroidery, and Margarita to her neglected duty of making the good
Father's bed. But each girl's heart was hot and unhappy; and Margarita's
would have been still hotter and unhappier, had she heard the words
which were being spoken on the veranda a little later.

After a few minutes of his blind rage at Margarita, himself, and fate
generally, Alessandro, recovering his senses, had ingeniously persuaded
himself that, as the Senora's; and also the Senorita's servant, for the
time being, he owed it to them to explain the situation in which he had
just been found. Just what he was to say he did not know; but no sooner
had the thought struck him, than he set off at full speed for the house,
hoping to find Ramona on the veranda, where he knew she spent all her
time when not with Senor Felipe.

When Ramona saw him coming, she lowered her eyes, and was absorbed in
her embroidery. She did not wish to look at him.

The footsteps stopped. She knew he was standing at the steps. She would
not look up. She thought if she did not, he would go away. She did not
know either the Indian or the lover nature. After a time, finding the
consciousness of the soundless presence intolerable, she looked up, and
surprised on Alessandro's face a gaze which had, in its long interval
of freedom from observation, been slowly gathering up into it all the
passion of the man's soul, as a burning-glass draws the fire of the
sun's rays. Involuntarily a low cry burst from Ramona's lips, and she
sprang to her feet.

“Ah! did I frighten the Senorita? Forgive. I have been waiting here a
long time to speak to her. I wished to say--”

Suddenly Alessandro discovered that he did not know what he wished to
say.

As suddenly, Ramona discovered that she knew all he wished to say. But
she spoke not, only looked at him searchingly.

“Senorita,” he began again, “I would never be unfaithful to my duty to
the Senora, and to you.”

“I believe you, Alessandro,” said Ramona. “It is not necessary to say
more.”

At these words a radiant joy spread over Alessandro's face. He had not
hoped for this. He felt, rather than heard, that Ramona understood him.
He felt, for the first time, a personal relation between himself and
her.

“It is well,” he said, in the brief phrase so frequent with his people.
“It is well.” And with a reverent inclination of his head, he walked
away. Margarita, still dawdling surlily over her work in Father
Salvierderra's room, heard Alessandro's voice, and running to discover
to whom he was speaking, caught these last, words. Peering from behind
a curtain, she saw the look with which he said them; saw also the
expression on Ramona's face as she listened.

Margarita clenched her hands. The seed had blossomed. Ramona had an
enemy.

“Oh, but I am glad Father Salvierderra has gone!” said the girl,
bitterly. “He'd have had this out of me, spite of everything. I haven't
got to confess for a year, maybe; and much can happen in that time.”

Much, indeed!




VIII

FELIPE gained but slowly. The relapse was indeed, as Father Salvierderra
had said, worse than the original attack. Day after day he lay with
little apparent change; no pain, but a weakness so great that it was
almost harder to bear than sharp suffering would have been. Nearly every
day Alessandro was sent for to play or sing to him. It seemed to be the
only thing that roused him from his half lethargic state. Sometimes he
would talk with Alessandro on matters relative to the estate, and show
for a few moments something like his old animation; but he was soon
tired, and would close his eyes, saying: “I will speak with you again
about this, Alessandro; I am going to sleep now. Sing.”

The Senora, seeing Felipe's enjoyment of Alessandro's presence, soon
came to have a warm feeling towards him herself; moreover, she greatly
liked his quiet reticence. There was hardly a surer road to the Senora's
favor, for man or woman, than to be chary of speech and reserved
in demeanor. She had an instinct of kinship to all that was silent,
self-contained, mysterious, in human nature. The more she observed
Alessandro, the more she trusted and approved him. Luckily for Juan Can,
he did not know how matters were working in his mistress's mind. If he
had, he would have been in a fever of apprehension, and would have got
at swords' points with Alessandro immediately. On the contrary, all
unaware of the real situation of affairs, and never quite sure that the
Mexican he dreaded might not an

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