"It is not a place for everyone," said the priest, quietly, as he led
the way under drooping peppers. "These children are orphans of good
family. Their excellent mother died a year ago; but they are poor, and I
have promised to find them a guest to fill their bedroom. A few dollars
will be a blessing to them."
His glance, practised in such measurement, added—"And you are a
gentleman—a man to be trusted.
"The house is plain but comfortable. Francisca, like her mother, is
an admirable housekeeper," he remarked as he led his guest into the
paradise of roses.
The Professor, noting the sweet unkemptness of it, had his New England
doubts, but he had none when Francisco, bareheaded, warm, and beautiful,
came up from irrigating the oranges, "kissed the hands" of the
Professor, and turning his own supple palms outward made him a present
of the house and all in it, which at that moment included Francisca,
standing under the roses of the porch, and more beautiful even than
Francisco.
The professional ears were pricked at the soft organ-tones of speech.
If he should not decide to take the Chair, at least his time need not be
lost, he argued. That, indeed, had been his motive for seeking a Spanish
household.
When he packed his trunk in Boston a Spanish dictionary was included,
as became a professor of languages; and now as he unpacked it in the
little roof-bedroom with the red, round eyes of oranges staring levelly
in, and a drifting cascade of perfume and green and white outside, he
was well content.
Perhaps it was that foreign ancestress of his, to whom he was fond of
ascribing his bent for languages, who made this foreign corner of his
own country so instantly attractive to him.
When he went downstairs later he stepped into an open world. There were
untold windows, all wide to the air, and through the green curtains
of vines nodded the heads of many roses. Francisca, and the ancient
relative to whom the orphans gave a home, and who served as a nominal
duenna, were giving the last touches to a table laid in the corner of
the broad veranda, which ran about three sides of the house. The grassy
space it enclosed was of brave Bermuda, brown, but never-dying, and
returning green thanks for a cupful of water. The Professor's foot came
to love the touch of that thick carpet in after days.
Beyond, the orange-grove stretched to the lime-hedge, and over that the
peppers drooped their ferny branches.
Nothing in all the place was trimmed. Where the long trailing arms
of the Lady Banksia fell by their own weight, or clambered by their
own daring, there they remained. The Professor stooped under the same
trailing branch each time he passed around the veranda. A dozen times he
took out his knife impatiently to cut it, but an involuntary compunction
arrested his hand. It was so in keeping with the place—it was so in
keeping with Francisco and Francisca.
And with an incredible ease and swiftness, the Professor found himself
growing in keeping, too.
In another corner of the deep rose-covered veranda all his writing
materials quickly congregated. An Indian basket of oranges stood on
the little stand by the hammock's elbow, near the rocking-chair in
which Francisca sat daily, converting fine linen into finer lace, and
cultivating the Professor's Spanish at the same time.
Francisca "kept the house," not with semi-yearly upheavals and the
terrible cleanliness of the Professor's ancestral memories, but in
a leisurely, sweet fashion of her own, leaving much to the sun and
air, ignoring brasses and other troublous matters, perhaps, but never
failing—wise Francisca!—to put a rose in her hair, and to set hot,
savoury dishes with tropical names before her men-folk. Therefore no
man ever found a flaw in Francisca's housekeeping.
Had there been twenty men beneath her roof, each would have been
her peculiar care. Her manner to her young brother had a caressing
sweetness which a New England girl would have kept for her lover or
conscientiously forborne him—for his soul's sake.
As for Francisco, sixteen, brown, slender, wearing his peaked sombrero
with consummate grace (a gift he shared in common with every wood-cutter
and _ranchero_ of the pure blood), he was the Professor's companion
in every walk, every blood-stirring lope across the open _mesa_, every
delicious climb up the chaparral-sided hills or the ferny cañons. The
boy grew into his heart; and in return Francisco loved him as boys and
Southerners can love, with adoration.
It was only a short time after he came among them that the Professor
stopped one morning on his way out of the breakfast-room (in which they
never breakfasted!) to examine a quaint inlaid guitar, hanging by faded
ribbons against the wall.
"It is Francisco's," said Francisca. "He plays beautifully; but he has
never played since our mother died—he hung it here then."
"That is not well," said the Professor. "You should win him to play
again."
That evening, in the moonlight on the porch, Francisca laid a tender
hand upon her brother's head as he sat on the step below. Her hands
seemed made for such a purpose.
"Francisco, the Señor asks if you never mean to play your guitar again."
Francisco was silent a moment, looking at the stars.
"Perhaps," he replied. "Some day, when we are very happy again—not yet."
Then turning his head, he touched the caressing hand lightly with his
lips.
"At thy wedding—or mine—_querida_," he said, lightly, and rising
abruptly, went into the house.
"He cannot bear yet to hear her spoken of," said Francisca, following
him with moist eyes.
"I was—ahem!—very fond of my mother. She died when I was a boy," said
the Professor.
"But ours was with us only a little year ago. She sat where you sit,
and looked at us with her beautiful soft eyes.
"And you—you had not even a sister." Francisca looked at him as if she
would like to make up that deficiency of tenderness—perhaps to stroke
_his_ head, as she did Francisco's.
There was abundant leisure for the Professor's studies, for the long,
gorgeous wonderland of summer was upon them, and most people were at
Santa Catalina, or in the high Sierras, taking an exchange of paradises.
The days rounded through their delicious sequence of perfumed dawns
alive with birds, and middays of still air and shadowed lawns, to the
infinite twilights and great moons.
In the evenings—the evenings of Southern California—they sat out
under the vines, watching these enormous yellow and orange moons, and
Francisca sang Californian songs.
Thus the days passed; punctuated by a talk with the Padre, a ride, a
stroll, or some playful share in the labor of irrigating the oranges—the
one form of labor Francisco ever seemed engaged in; but these he
irrigated perpetually.
The Professor missed nothing; he desired nothing. The intoxication of
living in close touch with the sun and air, and Earth in her summer
mood, has never been half told. Every fibre of his being rejoiced in
that long summer.
The little ranch of five acres—all that remained of five hundred—was
large enough to hold his content. We do not know that the Garden of Eden
was larger. He wrote hopefully to the Faculty concerning that Chair, and
with laudable moderation to his principal correspondent in the East:
"California has a charm impossible to analyze. I wish you were here."
And then he paused, pondered, and carefully erased the last sentence,
but not so perfectly but that Miss Dysart by dint of holding it up to
the window-pane deciphered it, and sat biting her pencil gravely a space
thereafter.
To wake in the morning and know the sun would shine all day; not to be
withered by the heat or chilled by the wind, but subtly flattered and
caressed by a climate which was only another Francisca; to be wooed to
large thoughts and visions by the landscape; not to feel the press and
friction of a narrow life and arbitrary customs, and yet to be conscious
through all this space and tranquillity of the forward impetus of a
vigorous young life all about him—this sufficed. The opportunities
for usefulness were great in a place destined to detain every soul
who lingered a rash year within its borders—and to make of the next
generation natives.
In lieu of caressing the land itself, he often caressed Francisco, its
breathing type, drawing the lad to him with an arm about his slender
shoulders.
And Francisca, the other breathing type, regarded them both with that
smile of tenderness which has in it so much of the maternal. When all is
said, the wisest man remains something of a child to any woman, though
she is but an inexperienced girl, and he may have forgotten more out of
books than she will ever know.
One day Francisco, running lightly up the path and steps to where
Francisca sat filling a bowl with roses, and the Professor sat watching
her, dropped an envelope upon the table.
"This is all your mail, Señor," said Francisco, gayly.
The Professor opened, glanced, and fell into a brown study, from which
he woke to encounter Francisca's eyes over the bowl of roses.
"Is anything the matter?" asked those eyes anxiously.
"Nothing," the Professor replied to them. "An old friend of mine is
coming out unexpectedly—is on her way to Santa Barbara."
"That is pleasant for you," said Francisca, sweetly. "And the days are
cooler; she will be sure to like our country."
"She is coming to-morrow," said the Professor, rising abruptly. "I must
go at once to the hotel."
"We will send many roses to her room; and Francisco shall pick the large
Indian basket full of fruit—she will be so tired with the long journey."
"Thank you," murmured the Professor, vaguely.
He did not hear Francisca's caution to her brother: "Do not pick any of
the heliotrope, Francisco, for the heavy scent may be disagreeable to an
old lady—and only the very choicest peaches—old people must be careful
what they eat." But this was not needed for his confusion.
"How well you are looking!" exclaimed Miss Dysart, as she stepped from
the train the next morning, with a critical glance at the Professor.
"The only climate on earth," replied the Professor, laughing to hide a
shade of embarrassment; "and you—you are looking well, too."
Distinctly well, in her immaculate shirtwaist and sailor-hat, without
touch of travel or dust about her.
"Oh, all climates suit me—even our own," Miss Dysart answered, lightly.
"Only one trunk, thank you; I am a 'transient.' And so this is your
earthly paradise. Is that ferny thing a pepper-tree?"
She was so much absorbed in the landscape all through the short drive
that the Professor ended by feeling quite at his ease. At the hotel door
she dismissed him graciously.
"You may come back after lunch, if you like, and show me something of
your paradise."
"Of course," said the Professor with unnecessary alacrity.
As he walked back he had a sensation as if a cool breeze from the Back
Bay, at once bracing and chilling, had suddenly begun to blow across the
summer air. The same sensation recurred later in the day when he found
himself strolling with her under the drooping peppers to the Mission
and through the town. Had they not often planned it—ages ago?—or had
not _he_ planned it in his mind—at least it had been tacitly understood,
and—here it was.
She was looking admirably, too. The little precision of her starched
collar and cuffs, and severe hat and correct gown, were an echo of his
native city. She was the best type of the things he liked and approved
and believed in.
And her mood was the bright mood of comradeship he always enjoyed. She
faced the semi-tropical world with fresh, appreciative eyes, and her
sense of humor was like his native air re-breathed. So singly did the
place occupy her that the Professor expanded gradually and his tongue
lost its knot.
"And you regret nothing here?" said Miss Dysart at last, suddenly.
"Nothing," replied the Professor, emphatically—and stopped.
"That is what it is to have a foreign grandmother. You do not even miss
the symphony concerts—the Greek play—the Sunday afternoons."
The Professor laughed rather drearily.
"It is the same thing, I suppose, which leads the scarlet geranium to
be a climber here, and calla-lilies to grow wild, and heliotrope to run
up to the house-eaves. What a poem of a place!" she exclaimed, stopping.
"And what a beautiful creature!"
"This is—er—where I am staying," replied the Professor, all his
impediments returned. "That is Francisco—he _is_ a handsome lad; and
that is his sister, Miss Francisca, on the veranda. Pray come in and
see the roses."
Miss Dysart followed him with composure, and gave her gloved hand
cordially to Francisca.
"I have heard so much of your paradise," she said, "but I did not know
it could be so true."
A bewildered expression crossed Francisca's face as the two advanced,
but it passed, and her manner was as perfect as Miss Dysart's own. So
was Francisco's, who placed a chair, and drew a rose-branch to shield
the visitor's eyes from the sun—his own reflecting the blankness of
Francisca's. Francisca had to call him twice to pass the wine she poured
in the quaint old glasses, and which they could never conceivably be
too poor to offer a guest.
As Miss Dysart sat sipping her wine politely—she was not fond of
wine—she felt, as she looked, like one in a foreign land. The Professor,
seated discreetly behind, noted this with a smile. But Francisco and
Francisca were as much a part of the landscape as any rose in it.
The conversation turned, as conversations infallibly will, to the
transcontinental journey, with the "You remember this—you saw that" of
travellers.
Francisco and Francisca listened silently, only when Miss Dysart turned
to the latter, she said with a kind of proud humility: "Ah! I know
nothing of these things. I only know—this," with a gesture about her.
Miss Dysart and the Professor looked at her, and the value of "these
things" was differently visible in their eyes.
"How beautiful she is!" thought the Boston girl.
"How much she knows and has seen!" thought Francisca.
The Professor's thoughts are not recorded. What he said was playful,
but with an undertone which was not lost on one of his hearers. "'These
things' are not worth your rose-garden, Miss Francisca—saying nothing
of the rest of the _rancho_."
"Ah! it is nice of you to say so," replied Francisca, "but I do not
believe it—nor does Miss Dysart."
Miss Dysart kept her lids discreetly lowered.
"By the way," she said, "I have someone to thank for a portion of a
rose-garden myself. I don't suppose the hotels furnish that."
"Miss Francisca—" began the enlightened Professor.
"The Señor," interposed Francisca, quickly, "naturally wished you to
have a Californian welcome. Francisco and I carried them down for him."
This time Miss Dysart raised her lids and looked straight at the girl
before her.
"Thank you," she said, quietly.
"But if you care for roses," said Francisca, rising, "you must look at
ours in the garden. We are proud of our roses, though it is not the rose
season," she added; "for that you must come in April and May."
"Thanks!" exclaimed Miss Dysart, "but when one is used to one's roses
by the half-dozen, this will do!"
"You shall have as many as you like every day, of course," said
Francisca. "Or, perhaps," she added, quietly, "you will like to come
and gather them yourself. The garden is yours."
"'Gather ye roses while ye may!'—you are most kind. I will take this
one now, if I may," replied Miss Dysart, bending above a great white
Lyonnaise.
[Illustration: And now as he unpacked it ... he was well content.
—Page 277.]
"Just the rose I should expect you to choose," said the Professor,
cutting it for her.
"Pray, why?" inquired Miss Dysart a little sharply.
"It is such a calm, vigorous, upright rose—a kind of apotheosis of our
own New England roses. A well-bred rose; it does not straggle, nor shed
its petals untidily. It would not look out of place in Boston;—and it
has not too much color."
"You prefer these, I suppose," remarked the girl, coolly, glancing at
his hand. The Professor looked down guiltily.
"I have been gleaming after you ladies. This is your Mermet."
"Thank you!" replied Miss Dysart dryly replacing the pink bud in her
belt.
But the red rose remained in his hand.