IV

It was long before Rezanov slept that night. The usual chill had come

in from the Pacific as the sun went down, and the distinguished visitor

had intimated to his hosts that he should like to exercise on shore

until ready for his detested quarters; but Arguello dared not, in the

absence of his father, invite the foreigner even to sleep in the house

so lavishly offered in the morning; although he had sent such an

abundance of provisions to the ship that the poor sailors were deep in

sleep, gorged like boa-constrictors; and he could safely promise that

while the Juno remained in port her larder should never be empty. He

shared the evening bowl of punch in the cabin, then went his way

lamenting that he could not take his new friends with him.

Rezanov paced the little deck of the Juno to keep his blood in stir.

There was no moon. The islands and promontories on the great sheet of

water were black save for the occasional glow of an Indian camp-fire.

There was not a sound but the lapping of the waves, the roar of distant

breakers. The great silver stars and the little green stars looked

down upon a solitude that was almost primeval, yet mysteriously

disturbed by the restless currents in the brain of a man who had little

in common with primal forces.

Rezanov was uneasy on more scores than one. He was annoyed and

mortified at the discovery--made over the punch bowl--that the girl he

had taken to be twenty was but sixteen. It was by no means his first

experience of the quick maturity of southern women--but sixteen! He

had never wasted a moment on a chit before, and although he was a man

of imagination, and notwithstanding her intelligence and dignity, he

could not reconcile properties so conflicting with any sort of feminine

ideal.

And the pressing half of his mission he had confided to her! No man

knew better than he the value of a tactful and witty woman in the

political dilemmas of life; more than one had given him devoted

service, nor ever yet had he made a mistake. After several hours spent

in the society of this clever, politic, dissatisfied girl he had come

to the conclusion that he could trust her, and had told her of the

lamentable condition of the creatures in the employ of the

Russian-American Company; of their chronic state of semi-starvation, of

the scurvy that made them apathetic of brain and body, and eventually

would exterminate them unless he could establish reciprocal trade

relations with California and obtain regular supplies of farinaceous

food; acknowledged that he had brought a cargo of Russian and Boston

goods necessary to the well-being of the Missions and Presidios, and

that he would not return to the wretched people of Sitka, at least,

without a generous exchange of breadstuffs, dried meats, peas, beans,

barley and tallow. Not only had he no longer the courage to witness

their misery, but his fortune and his career were at stake. His entire

capital was invested in the Company he had founded, and he had failed

in his embassy to Japan--to the keen mortification of the Tsar and the

jubilation of his enemies. If he left the Emperor's northeastern

dominions unreclaimed and failed to rescue the Company from its

precarious condition, he hardly should care to return to St. Petersburg.

Dona Concha had listened to this eloquent harangue--they sat alone at

one end of the long sala while Luis at the other toiled over letters to

the Governor and his father advising them of the formidable honor of

the Russian's visit--in exactly the temper he would have chosen. Her

fine eyes had melted and run over at the moving tale of the sufferings

of the servants of the Company--until his own had softened in response

and he had impulsively kissed her hand; they had dilated and flashed as

he spoke of his personal apprehensions; and when he had given her a

practical explanation of his reasons for coming to California she had

given him advice as practical in return.

He must withhold from her father and the Governor the fact of his

pressing need; they were high officials with an inflexible sense of

duty, and did all they could to enforce the law against trading with

foreigners. He was to maintain the fiction of belting the globe, but

admit that he had indulged in a dream of commercial relations--for a

benefit strictly mutual--between neighbors as close as the Spanish and

Russians in America. This would interest them--what would not, on the

edge of the world?--and they would agree to lay the matter, reinforced

by a strong personal plea, before the Viceroy of Mexico; who in turn

would send it to the Cabinet and King at Madrid. Meanwhile, he was to

confide in the priests at the Mission. Not only would their sympathies

be enlisted, but they did much trading under the very nose of the

government. Not for personal gain--they were vowed to a life of

poverty; but for their Indian converts; and as there were twelve

hundred at the Mission of San Francisco, they would wink at many things

condemnable in the abstract. He had engaged to visit them on the

morrow, and he must take presents to tempt their impersonal cupidity,

and invite them to inspect the rest of his wares--which the Governor

would be informed his Excellency had been forced to buy with the Juno

from the Yankee skipper, D'Wolf, and would rid himself of did

opportunity offer.

Rezanov had never received sounder advice, and had promptly accepted

it. Now, as he reflected that it had been given by a girl of sixteen,

he was divided between admiration of her precocity and fear lest she

prove to be too young to keep a secret. Moreover, there were other

considerations.

Rezanov, although in his earlier years he had so far sacrificed his

interests and played into the hands of his enemies, in avoiding the too

embarrassing partiality of Catherine the Great, had nevertheless held a

high place at court by right of birth, and been a man of the world

always; rarely absent from St. Petersburg during the last and least

susceptible part of the imperial courtesan's life, the brief reign of

Paul, and the two years between the accession of Alexander and the

sailing of the Nadeshda. Moreover, there was hardly another court of

importance in Europe with which he was not familiar, and few men had

had a more complete experience of life. And the life of a courtier, a

diplomat, a traveller, noble, wealthy, agreeable to women by divine

right, with active enemies and a horde of flatterers, in daily contact

with the meaner and more disingenuous corners of human nature, is not

conducive to a broad optimism and a sweet and immutable Christianity.

Rezanov inevitably was more or less cynical and blase', and too long

versed in the ways of courts and courtiers to retain more than a

whimsical tolerance of the naked truth and an appreciation of its

excellence as a diplomatic manoeuvre. Nevertheless, he was by nature

too impetuous ever to become under any provocation a dishonest man, and

too normally a gentleman to deviate from a certain personal code of

honor. He might come to California with fair words and a very definite

intention of annexing it to Russia at the first opportunity, but he was

incapable of abusing the hospitality of the Arguellos by making love to

their sixteen-year-old daughter. Had she been of the years he had

assumed, he would have had less scruple in embarking upon a flirtation,

both for the pastime and the use he might make of her. A Spanish

beauty of twenty, still unmarried, would be more than his match. But a

child, however precocious, inevitably would fall in love with the first

uncommon stranger she met; and Rezanov, less vain than most men of his

kind, and with a fundamental humanity that was the chief cause in his

efforts to improve the condition of his wretched promuschleniki, had no

taste for the role of heart-breaker.

But the girl had proved her timeliness; would, if trustworthy, be of

further use in inclining her father and the Governor toward such of his

designs as he had any intentions of revealing; and, weighing carefully

his conversations with her, he was disposed to believe that she would

screen and abet him through vanity and love of intrigue. After the

dinner, in the seclusion of the sala, he had taken pains to explore for

the causes of her mental maturity. Concha had told him of Don Jose

Arguello's ambition that his children in their youth should have the

education he had been forced to acquire in his manhood; he had taught

them himself, and notwithstanding his piety and the disapproval of the

priests, had permitted them to read the histories, travels, and

biographies he received once a year from the City of Mexico. Rezanov

had met Madame de Stael and other bas bleus, and given them no more of

his society than politeness demanded, but although astonished at the

amount of information this young girl had assimilated, he found nothing

in her manner of wearing her intellectual crown to offend his

fastidious taste. She was wholly artless in her love of books and of

discussing them; and nothing in their contents had disturbed the

sweetest innocence he had ever met. Of the little arts of coquetry she

was mistress by inheritance and much provocation, but her unawakened

inner life breathed the simplicity and purity of the elemental roses

that hovered about her in his thoughts. Her very unsusceptibility made

the game more dangerous; if it piqued him--and he aspired to be no more

than human--he either should have to marry her, or nurse a sore spot in

his conscience for the rest of his life; and for neither alternative

had he the least relish.

He dismissed the subject at last with an impatient shrug. Perhaps he

was a conceited ass, as his English friends would say; perhaps the

Governor would be more amenable than she had represented. No man could

forecast events. It was enough to be forearmed.

But his thoughts swung to a theme as little disburdening. His needs,

as he had confided to Concha, were very pressing. The dry or frozen

fish, the sea dogs, the fat of whales, upon which the employees of the

Company were forced to subsist in the least hospitable of climes, had

ravaged them with scorbutic diseases until their numbers were so

reduced by death and desertion that there was danger of depopulation

and the consequent bankruptcy of the Company. Since June of the

preceding year until his departure from New Archangel in the previous

month, he had been actively engaged in inspection of the Company's

holdings from Kamchatka to Sitka: reforming abuses, establishing

schools and libraries, conceiving measures to protect the fur-bearing

animals from reckless slaughter both by the promuschleniki and

marauding foreigners; punishing and banishing the worst offenders

against the Company's laws; encouraging the faithful, and sharing

hardships with them that sent memories of former luxuries and pleasures

scurrying off to the realms of fantasy. But his rule would be

incomplete and his efforts end in failure if the miserable Russians and

natives in the employ of the Company were not vitalized by proper food

and cheered with the hope of its permanence.

In Santiago's story of the Russian visitor's achievements and status

there was the common mingling of truth and fiction the exalted never

fail to inspire. Rezanov, although he had accomplished great ends

against greater odds, was too little of a courtier at heart ever to

have been a prime favorite in St. Petersburg until the accession of a

ruler with whom he had something in common. A dissolute woman and a

crack-brained despot were the last to appreciate an original and

independent mind, and the seclusion of Alexander had been so complete

during the lifetime of his father that Rezanov barely had known him by

sight. But the Tsarovitz, enthusiastic for reform and a passionate

admirer of enterprise, knew of Rezanov, and no sooner did he mount his

gory throne than he confirmed the Chamberlain in his enterprise, and

two years later made him a Privy Counsellor, invested him with the

order of St. Ann, and chose him for the critical embassy to the verdant

realm with the blind and gateless walls.

Rezanov had conquered so far in life even less by address than by the

demonstration of abilities very singular in a man of his birth and

education. When he met Shelikov, during the Siberian merchant-trader's

visit to St. Petersburg in 1788, he was a young man with little

interest in life outside of its pleasures, and a patrimony that enabled

him to command them to no great extent and barely to maintain the

dignity of his rank. Shelikov's plan to obtain a monopoly of the fur

trade in the islands and territories added by his Company to Russia,

possibly throughout the entire possession, thus preventing the

destruction of sables, seals, otters, and foxes by small traders and

foreigners, interested him at once; or possibly he was merely

fascinated at first by the shrewd and dauntless representative of a

class with which he had never before come in contact. The accidental

acquaintance ripened into intimacy, Rezanov became a partner in the

Shelikov-Golikov Company, and married the daughter of his new friend.

After the death of his father-in-law, in 1795, his ambitions and

business abilities, now fully awake, prompted him to obtain for himself

and his partners rights analogous to those granted by England to the

East India Company. Shelikov had won little more than half the power

and privileges he had solicited of Catherine, although he had

amalgamated the two leading companies, drawn in several others, and

built ships and factories and forts to protect them. And if the

regnant merchants made large fortunes, the enterprise in general

suffered from the rivalries between the various companies, and above

all from lack of imperial support.

Rezanov, his plans made, brought to bear all the considerable influence

he was able to command, called upon all his resources of brain and

address, and brought Catherine to the point of consenting to sign the

charter he needed. Before it was ready for the imperial signature she

died. Rezanov was forced to begin again with her ill-balanced and

intractable son. Natalie Shelikov, his famous mother-in-law, the old

shareholders of the Company, and the many new ones that had subscribed

to Rezanov's ambitious project, gave themselves up to despair. For a

time the outlook was dark. The personal enemies of Rezanov and the

bitter and persistent opponents of the companies threw themselves

eagerly into the scale with tales of brutality of the merchants and the

threatened extirpation of the fur-bearing animals. Paul announced his

attention to abolish all the companies and close the colonies to

traders big and little.

But the enemy had a very subtle antagonist in Rezanov. Apparently

dismissing the subject, he applied himself to gaining a personal

ascendancy over the erratic but impressionable Tsar. No one in the

opposing camp could compare with him in that fine balance of charm and

brain which was his peculiar gift, or in the adroit manipulation of a

mind propelled mainly by vanity. He studied Paul's moods and

character, discovered that after some senseless act of oppression he

suffered from a corresponding remorse, and was susceptible to any plan

that would increase his power and add lustre to his name. The

commercial and historic advantages of prosperous northeastern

possessions were artfully instilled. At the opportune moment Rezanov

laid before him a scheme, mature in every detail, for a great company

that would add to the wealth of Russia, and convince Europe of the

sound commercial sense and immortal wisdom of its sovereign. Without

more ado he obtained his charter.

This momentous instrument granted to the "Russian-American Company

under our Highest Protection," "full privileges, for a period of twenty

years on the coast of northwestern America, beginning from latitude 55

degrees north, and including the chain of islands extending from

Kamchatka northward, and southward to Japan; the exclusive right to all

enterprises, whether hunting, trading, or building, and to new

discoveries; with strict prohibition from profiting from any of these

pursuits, not only to all parties who might engage in them on their own

responsibility, but also to those who formerly had ships and

establishments there, except those who have united with the new

Company." All private traders who refused to join the Company were to

be allowed to sell their property and depart in peace.

Thus was formed the first of the Trusts in America; and the United

States never has had so formidable a menace to her territorial

greatness as this Russian nobleman who paced that night the wretched

deck of the little ship he had bought from one of her skippers.

Perturbed in mind at his recent failures and immediate prospects, he

was no less determined to take California from the Spaniards either by

absorption or force.

On his way from New Archangel to San Francisco he had met with his

second failure since leaving St. Petersburg. It was his intention to

move the Sitkan colony down to the mouth of the Columbia River; not

only pressed by the need of a more beneficent soil, but as a first

insidious advance upon San Francisco Bay. Upon this trip it would be

enough to make a survey of the ground and bury a copper plate

inscribed: "Possession of the Russian Empire." The Juno had

encountered terrific storms. After three desperate attempts to reach

the mouth of the river, Rezanov had been forced to relinquish the

enterprise for the moment and hasten with his diseased and almost

useless crew to the nearest port. It was true that the attempt could

be made again later, but Rezanov, sanguine of temperament, was

correspondingly depressed by failure and disposed to regard it as an

ill-omen.

An ambassador inspired by heaven could have accomplished no more with

the Japanese at that mediaeval stage of their development than he had

done, and the most indomitable of men cannot yet control the winds of

heaven; but sovereigns are rarely governed by logic, and frequently by

the favorite at hand. The privilege of writing personally to the Tsar,

in his case, meant more and less than appeared on the surface. It was

a measure to keep the reports of the Company out of the hands of the

Admiralty College, its bitterest enemy, and always jealous of the Civil

Service. Nevertheless, Rezanov knew that he had no immediate reason to

apprehend the loss of Alexander's friendship and esteem; and if he

placed the Company, in which all the imperial family had bought shares,

on a sounder basis than ever before, and doubled its earnings by

insuring the health of its employees, he would meet, when in St.

Petersburg again, with practically no opposition to his highest

ambitions. These ambitions he deliberately kept in a fluid state for

the present. Whether he should aspire to great authority in the

government, or choose to rule with the absolute powers of the Tsar

himself these already vast possessions on the Pacific--to be extended

indefinitely--would be decided by events. All his inherited and

cultivated instincts yearned for the brilliant and complex

civilizations of Europe, but the new world had taken a firm hold upon

his humaner and appealed more insidiously to his despotic. Moreover,

Europe, torn up by that human earthquake, Napoleon Bonaparte, must lose

the greater half of its sweetness and savor. All that, however, could

be determined upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn.

But meanwhile he must succeed with these Californians, or they might

prove, toy soldiers as they were, more perilous to his fortunes than

enemies at court. He could not afford another failure; and news of

this attempt and an exposition of all that depended upon it were

already on the road to the capital of Russia.

He had known, of course, of the law that forbade the Spanish colonies

to trade with foreign ships, but he had relied partly upon the use he

could make of the orders given by the Spanish King at the request of

the Tsar regarding the expedition under Krusenstern, partly upon his

own wit and address. But although the royal order had insured him

immediate hospitality and saved him many wearisome formalities, he had

already discovered that the Spanish on the far rim of their empire had

lost nothing of their connate suspicion. Rather, their isolation made

them the more wary. Although they little appreciated the richness and

variousness of California's soil, and not at all this wonderful bay

that would accommodate the combined navies of the world, pocketing

several, the pious zeal of the clergy in behalf of the Indians, and the

general policy of Spain to hold all of the western hemisphere that

disintegrating forces would permit, made her as tenacious of this vast

territory she had so sparsely populated as had she been aware that its

foundations were of gold, conceived that its climate and soil were a

more enduring source of wealth than ever she would command again. If

Rezanov was not gifted with the prospector's sense for ores--although

he had taken note of Arguello's casual reference to a vein of silver

and lead in the Monterey hills--no man ever more thoroughly appreciated

the visible resources of California than he. Baranhov, chief-manager

of the Company, had talked with American and British skippers for

twenty years, and every item he had accumulated Rezanov had extracted.

To-day he had drawn further information from Concha and her brothers;

and their artless descriptions as well as this incomparable bay had

filled him with enthusiasm. What a gift to Russia! What an

achievement to his immortal credit! The fog rolled in from the Pacific

in great white waves and stealthily enfolded him, obliterated the sea

and the land. But he did not see it. Apprehension left him. Once

more he fell to dreaming. In the course of a few years the Company

would attract a large population to the mouth of the Columbia River, be

strong enough to make use of any favorable turn in European politics

and sweep down upon California. The geographical position of Mexico,

the arid and desolate, herbless and waterless wastes intervening, would

prohibit her sending any considerable assistance overland; and, all

powerful at court by that time, he would take care that the Russian

navy inspired Spain with a distaste for remote Pacific waters. He had

long since recovered from the disappointment induced by the orders

compelling him to remain in the colonies. The great Company he had

heretofore regarded merely as a source of income and a means of

advancing his ambitions, he now loved as his child. Even during the

marches over frozen swamps and mountains, during the terrible winter in

Sitka when he had become familiar with illness and even with hunger,

his ardor had grown, as well as his determination to force Russia into

the front rank of Commercial Europe. The United States he barely

considered. He respected the new country for the independent spirit

and military genius that had routed so powerful a nation as Great

Britain, but he thought of her only as a new and tentative civilization

on the far shores of the Atlantic. After some experience of travel in

Siberia, and knowing the immensity and primeval conditions of

north-western America, he did not think it probable that the little

cluster of states, barely able to walk alone, would indulge in dreams

of expansion for many years to come. He had heard of the projected

expedition of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the Columbia,

but--perhaps he was too Russian--he did not take any adventure

seriously that had not a mighty nation at its back. And as it was

almost the half of a century from that night before the American flag

flew over the Custom House of Monterey, there is reason to believe that

Russian aggression under the leadership of so energetic and resourceful

a spirit as Nicolai Petrovich de Rezanov was in a fair way to make

history first in the New Albion of Drake and the California of the

incompetent Spaniard.

V

The Russians were to call at the house of the Commandante on their way

to the Mission, and Concha herself made the chocolate with which they

were to be detained for another hour. It was another sparkling

morning, one of the few that came between winter and summer, summer and

winter, and made even this bleak peninsula a land of enchantment before

the cold winds took the sand hills up by their foundations and drove

them down to Yerba Buena, submerging the battery and every green thing

by the way; or the great fogs rolled down from the tule lands of the

north and in from the sea, making the shivering San Franciscan forget

that not ten miles away the sun was as prodigal as youth. For a few

weeks San Francisco had her springtime, when the days were warm and the

air of a wonderful lightness and brightness, the atmosphere so clear

that the flowers might be seen on the islands, when man walked with

wings on his feet and a song in his heart; when the past was done with,

the future mattered not, the present with its ever changing hues on bay

and hill, its cool electrical breezes stirring imagination and pulse,

was all in all.

And it was in San Francisco's springtime that Concha Arguello made

chocolate for the Russian to whom she was to give a niche in the

history of her land; and sang at her task. She whirled the molinillo

in each cup as it was filled, whipping the fragrant liquid to froth;

pausing only to scold when her servant stained one of the dainty

saucers or cups. Poor Rosa did not sing, although the spring attuned

her broken spirit to a gentler melancholy than when the winds howled

and the fog was cold in her marrow. She had been sentenced by the last

Governor, the wise Borica, to eight years of domestic servitude in the

house of Don Jose Arguello for abetting her lover in the murder of his

wife. Concha, thoughtless in many things, did what she could to

exorcise the terror and despair that stared from the eyes of the Indian

and puzzled her deeply. Rosa adored her young mistress and exulted

even when Concha's voice rose in wrath; for was not she noticed by the

loveliest senorita in all the Californias, while others, envious and

spiteful to a poor girl no worse than themselves, were ignored?

Concha's cheeks were as pink as the Castilian roses that grew even

before the kitchen door and were quivering at the moment under the

impassioned carolling of a choir of larks. Her black eyes were full of

dancing lights, like the imprisoned sun-flecks under the rose bush, and

never had indolent Spanish hands moved so quickly.

"Mira! Mira!" she cried to the luckless Rosa. "That is the third time

thou hast spilt the chocolate. Thy hands are of wood when they should

be of air. A soft bit of linen to clean them, not that coarse rag.

Dios de mi alma! I shall send for Malia."

"For the love of Mary, senorita, have pity!" wailed Rosa.

"There--see--thanks to the Virgin I have poured three cups without

spilling a drop. And this rag is of soft linen. Look, Dona Concha, is

it not true?"

"Bueno; take care thou leavest not one drop on a saucer and I will

forgive thee--do not kiss my hand now, foolish one! How can I whirl

the molinillo? Be always good and I will burn a candle for thee every

time I go to the Mission. The Russians go to the Mission this morning.

Hast thou seen the Russians, Rosa?"

"I have seen them, senorita. Did I not serve at table yesterday?"

"True; I had forgotten. What didst thou think of them?"

"What matters it to such great folk what a poor Indian girl thinks of

them? They are very fair, which may be the fashion in their country;

but I am not accustomed to it; and I like not beards."

"His excellency wore no beard--he who sat on my mother's right and

opposite to me."

"He is very grand, senorita; more grand than the Governor, who after

all has red hair and is old. He is even grander than Don Jose, whom

may the saints preserve; or than the padres at the mission. Perhaps he

is a king, like our King and natural lord in spain. (El rey nuestro y

senor natural.) Is he a king, senorita?"

"No, but he should be. Rosa, thou mayest have my red cloak that came

from Mexico--last year. I have a new one and that is too small. I had

intended to give it to Ana Paula, but thou art a good girl and should

have a gay mantle for Sunday, like the other girls. I have also a red

ribbon for thy hair--"

Rosa spilt half the contents of the chocolate pot on the floor and

Concha gave her a sound box on the ear. However, she did not dismiss

her, a sentence for which the trembling girl prepared herself.

"Make more--quickly!" cried the lady of caprice. "They come. I hear

them. But this is enough for the first. Make the rest and beat with

the molinillo as I have done, and Malia will bring all to the corridor."

She ran to her room and her mirror. Both were small, the room little

more luxurious than the cell of a nun. But the roses hung over the

window, the birds had built in the eaves, and over the wall the sun

shone in. In one corner was an altar and a crucifix. If the walls

were rough and white, they were spotless as the hands that shook out

and then twisted high the fine dusky masses of hair. When a fold had

been drawn over either ear, in the modest fashion of the California

maid and wife, and the tall shell comb had fastened the rest, Concha

instead of finishing the headdress with her long Spanish pins, divested

the stems of two half-blown roses of their thorns and thrust them

obliquely through the knot. Her dress was of simple white linen made

with a very full skirt and little round jacket, but embroidered by her

own deft fingers with the color she loved best. She patted her frock,

rolled down her sleeves, and went out to the "corridor" to stand

demurely behind her mother as the Russians, escorted by Father Ramon

Abella, rode into the square.

Rezanov had intended merely to pay a call of ceremony upon the

hospitable Arguellos, but after he had dismounted and kissed the hands

of the smiling senora and her beautiful daughter he was nothing loath

to linger over a cup of chocolate.

It was served out there in the shade of the vines. Rezanov and Concha

sat on the railing, and the man stared over his cup at the girl with

the roses touching her cheeks and ruffling her hair.

"Do you like chocolate, senor?" asked Concha, who was not in the

intellectual mood of yesterday. "I made it myself--I and my poor Rosa."

"It is the most delectable foam I have ever tasted. I am interested to

know that it has the solid foundation of a name. What is the matter

with your Rosa?"

"She is an unfortunate. Her lover killed his wife, and it is said that

she is not innocent herself. The lover serves in chains for eight

years, and she is with us that we may make her repent and keep her from

further sin. She is unhappy and will marry the man when his punishment

is over. I am very sorry for her."

"Fancy you living close to a woman like that! I find it detestable."

"Why?--if I can do her good--and make her happy, sometimes?"

"Does she ever talk about her life--before she came here?"

"Oh, no; she is far too sad. Once only, when I told her I would pray

for her in the Mission Church, she asked me to burn a candle that her

lover might serve his sentence more quickly and come out and marry her.

Will you light one for her to-day, senor?"

"With the greatest pleasure; if you really want your maid to marry a

man who no doubt will murder her for the sake of some other woman."

"Oh, surely not! He loves her. I know that many men love more than

once, but when they are punished like that, they must remember."

"Is it true that you are only sixteen? Is that an impertinent

question? I cannot help it. Those years are so few, and so much

wisdom has gone into that little head."

"Sixteen is quite old." Concha drew herself up with an air of offended

dignity. "Elena Castro, who lives on the other side, is but eighteen

and she has three little ones. The Virgin brought them in the night

and left them in the big rosebush you see before the door--one at a

time, of course. Only the old nurse knew; the Virgin whispered it

while she was saying a prayer for Elena; and early in the morning she

came and found the dear little baby and put it in Elena's arms. I am

the godmother of the first--Conchitita. In Santa Barbara, where we

lived for some years, Anita Amanda Carillo, the friend of Ana Paula, is

married, although she is but twelve and sits on the floor all day and

plays with her dolls. She prays every night to the Virgin to bring her

a real baby, but she is not old enough to take care of it and must

wait. Twelve is too young to marry." Concha shook her head. Her eyes

were wise, and Rezanov noted anew that her mouth alone was as young as

her years. "My father would not permit such a thing. I am glad he is

not anxious we should marry soon. I should love to have the babies,

though; they are so sweet to play with and make little dresses for.

But my mother says the Virgin does not bring the little ones to good

girls--poor Rosa had one but it died--until their parents find them a

husband first. I have never wanted a husband--" Concha darted a swift

glance over her shoulder, but Santiago was in the clutches of the

learned doctor and wishing that he knew no Latin; "so I go every day

and play with Elena's babies, which is well enough."

Rezanov listened to this innocent revelation with the utmost gravity,

but for the first time in many years he was conscious of a novel

fascination in a sex to which he had paid no niggard's tribute. In his

world the married woman reigned; it was doubtful if he had ever had ten

minutes' conversation with a young girl before, never with one whose

face and form were as arresting as her crystal purity. He was

fascinated, but more than ever on his guard. As he rode over the sand

hills to the Mission she clung fast to his thoughts and he speculated

upon the woman hidden away in the depths of that lovely shell like the

deep color within the tight Castilian buds that opened so slowly. He

recalled the personalities of the young officers that surrounded her.

They were charming fellows, gay, kindly, honest; but he felt sure that

not one of them was fit to hold the cup of life to the exquisite young

lips of Concha Arguello. The very thought disposed him to twist their

necks.