Produced by David Reed

RAMONA

By Helen Hunt Jackson

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.

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 corning 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