by Wister, Owen
So there, by-and-by, was our continent, with the locomotive whistling from Savannah to Boston along its eastern edge, and on the other the scattered chimes of Spain ringing among the unpeopled mountains. Thus grew the two sorts of civilization—not equally. We know what has happened since. To-day the locomotive is whistling also from the Golden Gate to San Diego; but the old mission road goes through the mountains still, and on it the steps of vanished Spain are marked with roses, and white cloisters, and the crucifix.
But this was 1855. Only the barkentine brought the world that he loved to the padre. As for the new world which was making a rude noise to the northward, he trusted that it might keep away from Santa Ysabel, and he waited for the vessel that was overdue with its package containing his single worldly indulgence.
As the little, ancient bronze bell continued its swinging in the tower, its plaintive call reached something in the padre's memory. Without knowing, he began to sing. He took up the slow strain not quite correctly, and dropped it, and took it up again, always in cadence with the bell:
[Musical Score Appears Here]
At length he heard himself, and glancing at the belfry, smiled a little. "It is a pretty tune," he said, "and it always made me sorry for poor Fra Diavolo. Auber himself confessed to me that he had made it sad and put the hermitage bell to go with it because he too was grieved at having to kill his villain, and wanted him to die, if possible, in a religious frame of mind. And Auber touched glasses with me and said—how well I remember it!—'Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil, that makes me always have a weakness for rascals?' I told him it was the devil. I was not a priest then. I could not be so sure with my answer now." And then Padre Ignazio repeated Auber's remark in French: "'Est-ce le bon Dieu, on est-ce bien le diable, qui me fait tonjours aimer les coquins?' I don't know! I don't know! I wonder if Auber has composed anything lately? I wonder who is singing Zerlina now?"
He cast a farewell look at the ocean, and took his steps between the monastic herbs and the oleanders to the sacristy. "At least," he said, "if we cannot carry with us into exile the friends and the places that we have loved, music will go where we go, even to such an end of the world as this. Felipe!" he called to his organist. "Can they sing the music I taught them for the Dixit Dominus to-night?"
"Yes, father, surely."
"Then we will have that. And, Felipe—" The padre crossed the chancel to the small shabby organ. "Rise, my child, and listen. Here is something you can learn. Why, see now if you cannot learn it with a single hearing."
The swarthy boy of sixteen stood watching his master's fingers, delicate and white, as they played. So of his own accord he had begun to watch them when a child of six; and the padre had taken the wild, half-scared, spellbound creature and made a musician of him.
"There, Felipe!" he said now. "Can you do it? Slower, and more softly, muchacho. It is about the death of a man, and it should go with our bell."
The boy listened. "Then the father has played it a tone too low," said he; "for our bell rings the note of sol, or something very near it, as the father must surely know." He placed the melody in the right key—an easy thing for him; but the padre was delighted.
"Ah, my Felipe," he exclaimed, "what could you and I not do if we had a better organ! Only a little better! See! above this row of keys would be a second row, and many more stops. Then we would make such music as has never been heard in California yet. But my people are so poor and so few! And some day I shall have passed from them, and it will be too late."
"Perhaps," ventured Felipe, "the Americanos—"
"They care nothing for us, Felipe. They are not of our religion—or of any religion, from what I can hear. Don't forget my Dixit Dominus." And the padre retired once more to the sacristy, while the horse that carried Temptation came over the hill.
The hour of service drew near; and as he waited, the padre once again stepped out for a look at the ocean; but the blue triangle of water lay like a picture in its frame of land, empty as the sky. "I think, from the color, though," said he, "that a little more wind must have begun out there."
The bell rang a last short summons to prayer. Along the road from the south a young rider, leading one pack-animal, ambled into the mission and dismounted. Church was not so much in his thoughts as food and, in due time after that, a bed; but the doors stood open, and as everybody was going into them, more variety was to be gained by joining this company than by waiting outside alone until they should return from their devotions. So he seated himself at the back, and after a brief, jaunty glance at the sunburnt, shaggy congregation, made himself as comfortable as might be. He had not seen a face worth keeping his eyes open for. The simple choir and simple fold gathered for even-song, and paid him no attention on their part—a rough American bound for the mines was no longer anything but an object of aversion to them.
The padre, of course, had been instantly aware of the stranger's presence. For this is the sixth sense with vicars of every creed and heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the worshippers few and seldom varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read shrewdly the faces of those who assemble to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants, with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for their speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the intoning, he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit Dominus. He listened to the tender chorus that opens "William Tell"; and as the Latin psalm proceeded, pictures of the past rose between him and the altar. One after another came these strains which he had taken from the operas famous in their day, until at length the padre was murmuring to some music seldom long out of his heart—not the Latin verse which the choir sang, but the original French words:
"Ah, voile man envie,
Voila mon seul desir:
Rendez moi ma patrie,
Ou laissez moi mourir."
Which may be rendered:
But one wish I implore,
One wish is all my cry:
Give back my native land once more,
Give back, or let me die.
Then it happened that he saw the stranger in the back of the church again, and forgot his Dixit Dominus straightway. The face of the young man was no longer hidden by the slouching position he had at first taken. "I only noticed his clothes before," thought the padre. Restlessness was plain upon the handsome brow, and in the mouth there was violence; but Padre Ignazio liked the eyes. "He is not saying any prayers," he surmised, presently. "I doubt if he has said any for a long while. And he knows my music. He is of educated people. He cannot be American. And now—yes, he has taken—I think it must be a flower, from his pocket. I shall have him to dine with me." And vespers ended with rosy clouds of eagerness drifting across the padre's brain.
But the stranger made his own beginning. As the priest came from the church, the rebellious young figure was waiting. "Your organist tells me," he said, impetuously, "that it is you who—"
"May I ask with whom I have the great pleasure of speaking?" said the padre, putting formality to the front and his pleasure out of sight.
The stranger reddened, and became aware of the padre's features, moulded by refinement and the world. "I beg your lenience," said he, with a graceful and confident utterance, as of equal to equal. "My name is Gaston Villere, and it was time I should be reminded of my manners."
The padre's hand waved a polite negative.
"Indeed yes, padre. But your music has astonished me to pieces. If you carried such associations as—Ah! the days and the nights!" he broke off. "To come down a California mountain," he resumed, "and find Paris at the bottom! 'The Huguenots,' Rossini, Herold—I was waiting for 'Il Trovatore."'
"Is that something new?" said the padre, eagerly.
The young man gave an exclamation. "The whole world is
ringing with it," he said.
"But Santa Ysabel del Mar is a long way from the whole world," said Padre Ignazio.
"Indeed it would not appear to be so," returned young Gaston. "I think the Comedie Francaise must be round the corner."
A thrill went through the priest at the theatre's name. "And have you been long in America?" he asked.
"Why, always—except two years of foreign travel after college."
"An American!" said the surprised padre, with perhaps a flavor of disappointment in his voice. "But no Americans who have yet come this way have been—have been"—he veiled the too blunt expression of his thought—"have been familiar with 'The Huguenots,'" he finished, making a slight bow.
Villere took his under-meaning. "I come from New Orleans," he returned. "And in New Orleans there live many of us who can recognize a—who can recognize good music wherever we meet it." And he made a slight bow in his turn.
The padre laughed outright with pleasure, and laid his hand upon the young man's arm. "You have no intention of going away tomorrow, I trust?" said he.
"With your leave," answered Gaston, "I will have such an intention no longer."
It was with the air and gait of mutual understanding that the two now walked on together towards the padre's door. The guest was twenty-five, the host sixty.
"And have you been in America long?" inquired Gaston.
"Twenty years."
"And at Santa Ysabel how long?"
"Twenty years."
"I should have thought," said Gaston, looking lightly at the empty mountains, "that now and again you might have wished to travel."
"Were I your age," murmured Padre Ignazio, "it might be so."
The evening had now ripened to the long after-glow of sunset. The sea was the purple of grapes, and wine colored hues flowed among the high shoulders of the mountains.
"I have seen a sight like this," said Gaston, "between Granada and Malaga."
"So you know Spain!" said the padre.
Often he had thought of this resemblance, but never heard it told to him before. The courtly proprietor of San Fernando, and the other patriarchal rancheros with whom he occasionally exchanged visits across the wilderness, knew hospitality and inherited gentle manners, sending to Europe for silks and laces to give their daughters; but their eyes had not looked upon Granada, and their ears had never listened to "William Tell."
"It is quite singular," pursued Gaston, "how one nook in the world will suddenly remind you of another nook that may be thousands of miles away. One morning, behind the Quai Voltaire, an old yellow house with rusty balconies made me almost homesick for New Orleans."
"The Quai Voltaire!" said the padre.
"I heard Rachel in 'Valerie' that night," the young man went on. "Did you know that she could sing too? She sang several verses by an astonishing little Jew musician that has come up over there."
The padre gazed down at his blithe guest. "To see somebody, somebody, once again," he said, "is very pleasant to a hermit."
"It cannot be more pleasant than arriving at an oasis," returned Gaston.
They had delayed on the threshold to look at the beauty of the evening, and now the priest watched his parishioners come and go. "How can one make companions—" he began; then, checking himself, he said: "Their souls are as sacred and immortal as mine, and God helps me to help them. But in this world it is not immortal souls that we choose for companions; it is kindred tastes, intelligences, and—and so I and my books are growing old together, you see," he added, more lightly. "You will find my volumes as behind the times as myself."
He had fallen into talk more intimate than he wished; and while the guest was uttering something polite about the nobility of missionary work, he placed him in an easy-chair and sought aguardiente for his immediate refreshment. Since the year's beginning there had been no guest for him to bring into his rooms, or to sit beside him in the high seats at table, set apart for the gente fina.
Such another library was not then in California; and though Gaston Villere, in leaving Harvard College, had shut Horace and Sophocles forever at the earliest instant possible under academic requirements, he knew the Greek and Latin names that he now saw as well as he knew those of Shakespeare, Dante, Moliere, and Cervantes. These were here also; nor could it be precisely said of them, either, that they made a part of the young man's daily reading. As he surveyed the padre's august shelves, it was with a touch of the florid Southern gravity which his Northern education had not wholly schooled out of him that he said:
"I fear that I am no scholar, sir. But I know what writers every gentleman ought to respect."
The subtle padre bowed gravely to this compliment.
It was when his eyes caught sight of the music that the young man felt again at ease, and his vivacity returned to him. Leaving his chair, he began enthusiastically to examine the tall piles that filled one side of the room. The volumes lay richly everywhere, making a pleasant disorder; and as perfume comes out of a flower, memories of singers and chandeliers rose bright from the printed names. "Norma," "Tancredi," "Don Pasquale," "La Vestale"—dim lights in the fashions of to-day—sparkled upon the exploring Gaston, conjuring the radiant halls of Europe before him. "'The Barber of Seville!'" he presently exclaimed. "And I happened to hear it in Seville."
But Seville's name brought over the padre a new rush of home thoughts. "Is not Andalusia beautiful?" he said. "Did you see it in April, when the flowers come?"
"Yes," said Gaston, among the music. "I was at Cordova then."
"Ah, Cordova!" murmured the padre.
"'Semiramide!'" cried Gaston, lighting upon that opera. "That was a week! I should like to live it over, every day and night of it!"
"Did you reach Malaga from Marseilles or Gibraltar?" said the padre, wistfully.
"From Marseilles. Down from Paris through the Rhone Valley, you know."
"Then you saw Provence! And did you go, perhaps, from Avignon to Nismes by the Pont du Gard? There is a place I have made here—a little, little place—with olive-trees. And now they have grown, and it looks something like that country, if you stand in a particular position. I will take you there to-morrow. I think you will understand what I mean."
"Another resemblance!" said the volatile and happy Gaston. "We both seem to have an eye for them. But, believe me, padre, I could never stay here planting olives. I should go back and see the original ones—and then I'd hasten up to Paris." And, with a volume of Meyerbeer open in his hand, Gaston hummed: "'Robert, Robert, toi que j'aime.' Why, padre, I think that your library contains none of the masses and all of the operas in the world!"
"I will make you a little confession," said Padre Ignazio, "and then you shall give me a little absolution."
"With a penance," said Gaston. "You must play over some of these things to me."
"I suppose that I could not permit myself this indulgence," began the padre, pointing to his operas; "and teach these to my choir, if the people had any worldly associations with the music. But I have reasoned that the music cannot do them harm—"
The ringing of a bell here interrupted him. "In fifteen minutes," he said, "our poor meal will be ready for you." The good padre was not quite sincere when he spoke of a poor meal. While getting the aguardiente for his guest he had given orders, and he knew how well such orders could be carried out. He lived alone, and generally supped simply enough, but not even the ample table at San Fernando could surpass his own on occasions. And this was for him an occasion indeed!
"Your half-breeds will think I am one of themselves," said Gaston, showing his dusty clothes. "I am not fit to be seated with you." He, too, was not more sincere than his host. In his pack, which an Indian had brought from his horse, he carried some garments of civilization. And presently, after fresh water and not a little painstaking with brush and scarf, there came back to the padre a young guest whose elegance and bearing and ease of the great world were to the exiled priest as sweet as was his traveled conversation.
/> They repaired to the hall and took their seats at the head of the long table. For the stately Spanish centuries of custom lived at Santa Ysabel del Mar, inviolate, feudal, remote.
They were the only persons of quality present; and between themselves and the gente de razon a space intervened. Behind the padre's chair stood an Indian to wait upon him, and another stood behind the chair of Gaston Villere. Each of these servants wore one single white garment, and offered the many dishes to the gente fina and refilled their glasses. At the lower end of the table a general attendant waited upon the mesclados—the half-breeds. There was meat with spices, and roasted quail, with various cakes and other preparations of grain; also the black fresh olives, and grapes, with several sorts of figs and plums, and preserved fruits, and white and red wine—the white fifty years old. Beneath the quiet shining of candles, fresh-cut flowers leaned from vessels of old Mexican and Spanish make.
There at one end of this feast sat the wild, pastoral, gaudy company, speaking little over their food; and there at the other the pale padre, questioning his visitor about Rachel. The mere name of a street would bring memories crowding to his lips; and when his guest would tell him of a new play, he was ready with old quotations from the same author. Alfred de Vigny they had, and Victor Hugo, whom the padre disliked. Long after the dulce, or sweet dish, when it was the custom for the vaqueros and the rest of the retainers to rise and leave the gente fina to themselves, the host sat on in the empty hall, fondly telling the guest of his bygone Paris, and fondly learning of the Paris that was to-day. And thus the two lingered, exchanging their fervors, while the candles waned, and the long-haired Indians stood silent behind the chairs.
"But we must go to my piano," the host exclaimed. For at length they had come to a lusty difference of opinion. The padre, with ears critically deaf, and with smiling, unconvinced eyes, was shaking his head, while young Gaston sang "Trovatore" at him, and beat upon the table with a fork.
