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.