He was as good as his word. How he managed, Chonita never knew, but
not a half-hour after dinner she found herself alone in the canon with
him, seated among the huge stones cataclysms had hurled there.
"Why have you brought me here?" she asked.
"To talk with you."
"But this would be severely censured."
"Do you care?"
"No."
She looked at him with a curious feeling she had had before; there
was something inside of his head that she wanted to get at,--something
that baffled and teased and allured her. She wanted to understand him,
and she was oppressed by the weight of her ignorance; she had no key
to unlock a man like that. With one of her swift impulses she told him
of what she was thinking.
He smiled, his eyes lighting. "I am more than willing you should
know all that you would be curious about," he said. "Ask me a hundred
questions; I will answer them."
She meditated a moment. She never had taken sufficient interest in a
man before to desire to fathom him, and the arts of the Californian
belle were not those of the tactfully and impartially interested woman
of to-day. She did not know how to begin.
"What have you read?" she asked, at length.
He gave her some account of his library,--a large one,--and mentioned
many books of many nations, of which she had never heard.
"You have read all those books?"
"There are many long winter nights and days in the redwood forests of
the northern coast."
"That does not tell me much,--what you have read. I feel that it is
but one of the many items which went to the making up of you. You have
traveled everywhere, no? Was it like living over again the books of
travel?"
"Not in the least. Each man travels for himself."
"Madame de Staël said that traveling was sad. Is it so?"
"To the lover of history it is like food without salt: imagination has
painted an historical city with the panorama of a great time; it has
been to us a stage for great events. We find it a stage with familiar
paraphernalia, and actors as commonplace as ourselves."
"It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?"
"Infinitely, though less expanding."
"Then is anything worth while except reading?
"Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active
occupied life necessary for its achievement."
She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to
him. "Are you ambitious?" she asked.
"For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the
looting of hell in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of
ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a
draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on
Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if 'from
hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot
and rot,' still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition
flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and
more satisfactory. The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the
stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of
compelled applause,--they fill the blanks."
"Tell me," she said, imperiously, "what do you want?"
"Shall I tell you? I never have spoken of it to a living soul but
Alvarado. Shall I tell it to a woman,--and an Iturbi y Moncada? Could
the folly of man further go?"
"If I am a woman I am an Iturbi y Moncada, and if I am an Iturbi y
Moncada I have the honor of its generations in my veins."
"Very good. I believe you would not betray me, even in the interest of
your house. Would you?"
"No."
"And I love to talk to you, to tell you what I would tell no other.
Listen, then. An envoy goes to Mexico next week with letters from
Alvarado, desiring that I be the next governor of the Californias, and
containing the assurance that the Departmental Junta will endorse
me. I shall follow next month to see Santa Ana personally; I know him
well, and he was a friend of my father's. I wish to be invested with
peculiar powers; that is to say, I wish California to be practically
overlooked while I am governor and I wish it understood that I shall
be governor as long as I please. Alvarado will hold no office under
the Americans, and is as ready to retire now as a few years later. Of
course my predilection for the Americans must be carefully concealed
both from the Mexican government and the mass of the people here:
Santa Ana and Alvarado know what is bound to come; the Mexicans,
generally, retain enough interest in the Californias to wish to keep
them. I shall be the last governor of the Department, and I shall
employ that period to amalgamate the native population so closely that
they will make a strong contingent in the new order of things and
be completely under my domination. I shall establish a college with
American professors, so that our youth will be taught to think, and to
think in English. Alvarado has done something for education, but not
enough; he has not enforced it, and the methods are very primitive.
I intend to be virtually dictator. With as little delay as possible
I shall establish a newspaper,--a powerful weapon in the hands of a
ruler, as well as a factor of development. Then I shall organize a
superior court for the punishment of capital crimes. Not that I do not
recognize the right of a man to kill if his reasons satisfy himself,
but there can be no subservience to authority in a country where
murder is practically licensed. American immigration will be more than
encouraged, and it shall be distinctly understood by the Americans
that I encourage it. Everything, of course, will be done to promote
good-will between the Californians and the new-comers. Then, when the
United States make up their mind to take possession of us, I shall
waste no blood, but hand over a country worthy of capture. In the
meantime it will have been carefully drilled into the Californian mind
that American occupation will be for their ultimate good, and that I
shall go to Washington to protect their interests. There will then be
no foolish insurrections. Do you care to hear more?"
Her face was flushed, her chest was rising rapidly.
"I hardly know what to think,--how I feel. You interest me so much as
you talk that I wish you to succeed: I picture your success. And yet
it maddens me to hear you talk of the Americans in that way,--also
to know that your house will be greater than ours,--that we will be
forgotten. But--yes, tell me all. What will you do then?"
"I shall have California, in the first place, scratched for the gold
that I believe lies somewhere within her. When that great resource
_is_ located and developed I shall publish in every American newspaper
the extraordinary agricultural advantages of the country. In a word,
my object is to make California a great State and its name synonymous
with my own. As I told you before, for fame as fame I care nothing;
I do not care if I am forgotten on my death-bed; but with my blood
biting my veins I must have action while living. Shall I say that
I have a worthier motive in wishing to aid in the development of
civilization? But why worthier? Merely a higher form of selfishness.
The best and the worst of motives are prompted by the same instinct."
"I would advise you," she said, slowly, "never to marry. Your wife
would be very unhappy."
"But no one has greater scorn than you for the man who spends his life
with his lips at the chalice of the poppy."
"True, I had forgotten them." She rose abruptly. "Let us go back," she
said. "It is better not to stay too long."
As they walked down the canon she looked at him furtively. The men of
her race were almost all tall and finely-proportioned, but they did
not suggest strength as this man did. And his face,--it was so
grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew
near, fascinated. It had no beauty at all--according to Californian
standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect,
refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human
race for a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute
audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine
outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and
a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that
mystified and magnetized her.
"I know you a little better," she said, "just a little,--enough to
make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I
did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and
you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive
about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see
or grasp."
"It is merely the barrier of sex. A man can know a woman fairly well,
because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and
conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man's life is so
complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies
so far outside of woman's sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand
magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would
need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made
her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out
of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain
restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship."
"But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in
the man always beyond her grasp,--that something which she could be
nothing to. She would be more jealous of that independence of her in
man than of another woman."
"That was pure insight," he said. "You could not know that."
"No," she said, "I had not thought of it before."
I had made a martyr of myself on a three-cornered stone at the
entrance of the canon, waiting to dueña them out. "Never will I do
this again!" I exclaimed, with that virtue born of discomfort, as they
came in sight.
"My dearest Eustaquia," said Diego, kissing my hand gallantly, "thou
hast given me pleasure so often, most charming and clever of women,
thou hast but added one new art to thy overflowing store."
We mounted almost immediately upon returning, and I was alone with
Chonita for a moment. "Do you realize that you are playing with fire?"
I said, warningly. "Estenega is a dangerous man; the most successful
man with women I have ever known."
"I do not deny his power," she said. "But I am safe, for the many
reasons thou knowest of. And, being safe, why should I deny myself the
pleasure of talking to him? I shall never meet his like again. Let me
live for a little while."
"Ay, but do not live too hard! It hurts down into the core and
marrow."