Vaillant went into the adjoining room to put on his cassock and stole,
and in his absence Conçeption Gonzales covered a small table by the bed
with one of her own white napkins and placed upon it two wax candles,
and a cup of water for the ministrant's hands. Father Vaillant came back
in his vestments, with his pyx and basin of holy water, and began
sprinkling the bed and the watchers, repeating the antiphon, _Asperges
me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor_. The women stole away, leaving their
lights upon the floor. Father Lucero made his confession, renouncing his
heresy and expressing contrition, after which he received the Sacrament.
The ceremony calmed the tormented man, and he lay quiet with his hands
folded on his breast. The women returned and sat murmuring prayers as
before. The rain drove against the window panes, the wind made a hollow
sound as it sucked down through the deep arroyo. Some of the watchers
were drooping from weariness, but not one showed any wish to go home.
Watching beside a death-bed was not a hardship for them, but a
privilege,--in the case of a dying priest it was a distinction.
In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social
importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs
ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul
made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness
through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. Among the watchers there
was always the hope that the dying man might reveal something of what he
alone could see; that his countenance, if not his lips, would speak, and
on his features would fall some light or shadow from beyond. The "Last
Words" of great men, Napoleon, Lord Byron, were still printed in
gift-books, and the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were
listened for and treasured by their neighbours and kinsfolk. These
sayings, no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance and
pondered by those who must one day go the same road.
The stillness of the death chamber was suddenly broken when Trinidad
Lucero knelt down before the crucifix on the wall to pray. His uncle,
though all thought him asleep, began to struggle and cry out, "A thief!
Help, help!" Trinidad retired quickly, but after that the old man lay
with one eye open, and no one dared go near the crucifix.
About an hour before day-break the Padre's breathing became so painful
that two of the men got behind him and lifted his pillows. The women
whispered that his face was changing, and they brought their candles
nearer, kneeling close beside his bed. His eyes were alive and had
perception in them. He rolled his head to one side and lay looking
intently down into the candlelight, without blinking, while his
features sharpened. Several times his lips twitched back over his teeth.
The watchers held their breath, feeling sure that he would speak before
he passed,--and he did. After a facial spasm that was like a sardonic
smile, and a clicking of breath in his mouth, their Padre spoke like a
horse for the last time:
"_Comete tu cola, Martinez, comete tu cola_!" (Eat your tail, Martinez,
eat your tail!) Almost at once he died in a convulsion.
After day-break Trinidad went forth declaring (and the Mexican women
confirmed him) that at the moment of death Father Lucero had looked into
the other world and beheld Padre Martinez in torment. As long as the
Christians who were about that death-bed lived, the story was whispered
in Arroyo Hondo.
When the floor of the priest's house was taken up, according to his last
instructions, people came from as far as Taos and Santa Cruz and Mora to
see the buckskin bags of gold and silver coin that were buried beneath
it. Spanish coins, French, American, English, some of them very old.
When it was at length conveyed to a Government mint and examined, it was
valued at nearly twenty thousand dollars in American money. A great sum
for one old priest to have scraped together in a country parish down at
the bottom of a ditch.
BOOK SIX
_DOÑA ISABELLA_
1
DON ANTONIO
BISHOP LATOUR had one very keen worldly ambition; to build in Santa Fé
a cathedral which would be worthy of a setting naturally beautiful. As
he cherished this wish and meditated upon it, he came to feel that such
a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a
physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the
scene. Early in his administration he began setting aside something from
his meagre resources for a cathedral fund. In this he was assisted by
certain of the rich Mexican _rancheros_, but by no one so much as by Don
Antonio Olivares.
Antonio Olivares was the most intelligent and prosperous member of a
large family of brothers and cousins, and he was for that time and place
a man of wide experience, a man of the world. He had spent the greater
part of his life in New Orleans and El Paso del Norte, but he returned
to live in Santa Fé several years after Bishop Latour took up his
duties there. He brought with him his American wife and a wagon train of
furniture, and settled down to spend his declining years in the old
ranch house just east of the town where he was born and had grown up. He
was then a man of sixty. In early manhood he had lost his first wife;
after he went to New Orleans he had married a second time, a Kentucky
girl who had grown up among her relatives in Louisiana. She was pretty
and accomplished, had been educated at a French convent, and had done
much to Europeanize her husband. The refinement of his dress and
manners, and his lavish style of living, provoked half-contemptuous envy
among his brothers and their friends.
Olivares's wife, Doña Isabella, was a devout Catholic, and at their
house the French priests were always welcome and were most cordially
entertained. The Señora Olivares had made a pleasant place of the
rambling adobe building, with its great courtyard and gateway, carved
joists and beams, fine herring-bone ceilings and snug fire-places. She
was a gracious hostess, and though no longer very young, she was still
attractive to the eye; a slight woman, spirited, quick in movement, with
a delicate blonde complexion which she had successfully guarded in
trying climates, and fair hair--a little silvered, and perhaps worn in
too many puffs and ringlets for the sharpening outline of her face. She
spoke French well, Spanish lamely, played the harp, and sang agreeably.
Certainly it was a great piece of luck for Father Latour and Father
Vaillant, who lived so much among peons and Indians and rough
frontiersmen, to be able to converse in their own tongue now and then
with a cultivated woman; to sit by that hospitable fireside, in rooms
enriched by old mirrors and engravings and upholstered chairs, where the
windows had clean curtains, and the sideboard and cupboards were stocked
with plate and Belgian glass. It was refreshing to spend an evening with
a couple who were interested in what was going on in the outside world,
to eat a good dinner and drink good wine, and listen to music. Father
Joseph, that man of inconsistencies, had a pleasing tenor voice, true
though not strong. Madame Olivares liked to sing old French songs with
him. She was a trifle vain, it must be owned, and when she sang at all,
insisted upon singing in three languages, never forgetting her husband's
favourites, "La Paloma" and "La Golandrina," and "My Nelly Was A Lady."
The negro melodies of Stephen Foster had already travelled to the
frontier, going along the river highways, not in print, but passed on
from one humble singer to another.
Don Antonio was a large man, heavy, full at the belt, a trifle bald, and
very slow of speech. But his eyes were lively, and the yellow spark in
them was often most perceptible when he was quite silent. It was
interesting to observe him after dinner, settled in one of his big
chairs from New Orleans, a cigar between his long golden-brown fingers,
watching his wife at her harp.
There was gossip about the lady in Santa Fé, of course, since she had
retained her beautiful complexion and her husband's devoted regard for
so many years. The Americans and the Olivares brothers said she dressed
much too youthfully, which was perhaps true, and that she had lovers in
New Orleans and El Paso del Norte. Her nephews-in-law went so far as to
declare that she was enamoured of the Mexican boy the Olivares had
brought up from San Antonio to play the banjo for them,--they both loved
music, and this boy, Pablo, was a magician with his instrument. All
sorts of stories went out from the kitchen; that Doña Isabella had a
whole chamber full of dresses so grand that she never wore them here at
all; that she took gold from her husband's pockets and hid it under the
floor of her room; that she gave him love potions and herb-teas to
increase his ardour. This gossip did not mean that her servants were
disloyal, but rather that they were proud of their mistress.
Olivares, who read the newspapers, though they were weeks old when he
got them, who liked cigars better than cigarettes, and French wine
better than whisky, had little in common with his younger brothers. Next
to his old friend Manuel Chavez, the two French priests were the men in
Santa Fé whose company he most enjoyed, and he let them see it. He was
a man who cherished his friends. He liked to call at the Bishop's house
to advise him about the care of his young orchard, or to leave a bottle
of home-made cherry brandy for Father Joseph. It was Olivares who
presented Father Latour with the silver hand-basin and pitcher and
toilet accessories which gave him so much satisfaction all the rest of
his life. There were good silversmiths among the Mexicans of Santa Fé,
and Don Antonio had his own toilet-set copied in hammered silver for his
friend. Doña Isabella once remarked that her husband always gave Father
Vaillant something good for the palate, and Father Latour something good
for the eye.
This couple had one child, a daughter, the Señorita Inez, born long ago
and still unmarried. Indeed, it was generally understood that she would
never marry. Though she had not taken the veil, her life was that of a
nun. She was very plain and had none of her mother's social graces, but
she had a beautiful contralto voice. She sang in the Cathedral choir in
New Orleans, and taught singing in a convent there. She came to visit
her parents only once after they settled in Santa Fé, and she was a
somewhat sombre figure in that convivial household. Doña Isabella
seemed devotedly attached to her, but afraid of displeasing her. While
Inez was there, her mother dressed very plainly, pinned back the little
curls that hung over her right ear, and the two women went to church
together all day long.
Antonio Olivares was deeply interested in the Bishop's dream of a
cathedral. For one thing, he saw that Father Latour had set his heart on
building one, and Olivares was the sort of man who liked to help a
friend accomplish the desire of his heart. Furthermore, he had a deep
affection for his native town, he had travelled and seen fine churches,
and he wished there might some day be one in Santa Fé. Many a night he
and Father Latour talked of it by the fire; discussed the site, the
design, the building stone, the cost and the grave difficulties of
raising money. It was the Bishop's hope to begin work upon the building
in 1860, ten years after his appointment to the Bishopric. One night, at
a long-remembered New Year's party in his house, Olivares announced in
the presence of his guests that before the new year was gone he meant to
give to the Cathedral fund a sum sufficient to enable Father Latour to
carry out his purpose.
That supper party at the Olivares' was memorable because of this pledge,
and because it marked a parting of old friends. Doña Isabella was
entertaining the officers at the Post, two of whom had received orders
to leave Santa Fé. The popular Commandant was called back to
Washington, the young lieutenant of cavalry, an Irish Catholic, lately
married and very dear to Father Latour, was to be sent farther west.
(Before the next New Year's Day came round he was killed in Indian
warfare on the plains of Arizona.)
But that night the future troubled nobody; the house was full of light
and music, the air warm with that simple hospitality of the frontier,
where people dwell in exile, far from their kindred, where they lead
rough lives and seldom meet together for pleasure. Kit Carson, who
greatly admired Madame Olivares, had come the two days' journey from
Taos to be present that night, and brought along his gentle half-breed
daughter, lately home from a convent school in St. Louis. On this
occasion he wore a handsome buckskin coat, embroidered in silver, with
brown velvet cuffs and collar. The officers from the Fort were in dress
uniform, the host as usual wore a broadcloth frock-coat. His wife was in
a hoop-skirt, a French dress from New Orleans, all covered with little
garlands of pink satin roses. The military ladies came out to the
Olivares place in an army wagon, to keep their satin shoes from the mud.
The Bishop had put on his violet vest, which he seldom wore, and Father
Vaillant had donned a fresh new cassock, made by the loving hands of his
sister Philomène, in Riom.
Father Latour had used to feel a little ashamed that Joseph kept his
sister and her nuns so busy making cassocks and vestments for him; but
the last time he was in France he came to see all this in another light.
When he was visiting Mother Philomène's convent, one of the younger
Sisters had confided to him what an inspiration it was to them, living
in retirement, to work for the far-away missions. She told him also how
precious to them were Father Vaillant's long letters, letters in which
he told his sister of the country, the Indians, the pious Mexican women,
the Spanish martyrs of old. These letters, she said, Mother Philomène
read aloud in the evening. The nun took Father Latour to a window that
jutted out and looked up the narrow street to where the wall turned at
an angle, cutting off further view. "Look," she said, "after the Mother
has read us one of those letters from her brother, I come and stand in
this alcove and look up our little street with its one lamp, and just
beyond the turn there, is New Mexico; all that he has written us of
those red deserts and blue mountains, the great plains and the herds of
bison, and the canyons more profound than our deepest mountain gorges. I
can feel that I am there, my heart beats faster, and it seems but a
moment until the retiring-bell cuts short my dreams." The Bishop went
away believing that it was good for these Sisters to work for Father
Joseph.
To-night, when Madame Olivares was complimenting Father Vaillant on the
sheen of his poplin and velvet, for some reason Father Latour recalled
that moment with the nun in her alcove window, her white face, her
burning eyes, and sighed.
After supper was over and the toasts had been drunk, the boy Pablo was
called in to play for the company while the gentlemen smoked. The banjo
always remained a foreign instrument to Father Latour; he found it more
than a little savage. When this strange yellow boy played it, there was
softness and languor in the wire strings--but there was also a kind
of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these
men had felt and followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar
smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican _rancheros_ and the
priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of
the banjo player, and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost
all form and became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of
sand-storm.
Observing them thus in repose, in the act of reflection, Father Latour
was thinking how each of these men not only had a story, but seemed to
have become his story. Those anxious, far-seeing blue eyes of Carson's,
to whom could they belong but to a scout and trail-breaker? Don Manuel
Chavez, the handsomest man of the company, very elegant in velvet and
broadcloth, with delicately cut, disdainful features,--one had only to
see him cross the room, or to sit next him at dinner, to feel the
electric quality under his cold reserve; the fierceness of some
embitterment, the passion for danger.
Chavez boasted his descent from two Castilian knights who freed the city
of Chavez from the Moors in 1160. He had estates in the Pecos and in the
San Mateo mountains, and a house in Santa Fé, where he hid himself
behind his beautiful trees and gardens. He loved the natural beauties of
his country with a passion, and he hated the Americans who were blind to
them. He was jealous of Carson's fame as an Indian-fighter, declaring
that he had seen more Indian warfare before he was twenty than Carson
would ever see. He was easily Carson's rival as a pistol shot. With the
bow and arrow he had no rival; he had never been beaten. No Indian had
ever been known to shoot an arrow as far as Chavez. Every year parties
of Indians came up to the Villa to shoot with him for wagers. His house
and stables were full of trophies. He took a cool pleasure in stripping
the Indians of their horses or silver or blankets, or whatever they had
put up on their man. He was proud of his skill with Indian weapons; he
had acquired it in a hard school.
When he was a lad of sixteen Manuel Chavez had gone out with a party of
Mexican youths to hunt Navajos. In those days, before the American
occupation, "hunting Navajos" needed no pretext, it was a form of sport.
A company of Mexicans would ride west to the Navajo country, raid a few
sheep camps, and come home bringing flocks and ponies and a bunch of
prisoners, for every one of whom they received a large bounty from the
Mexican Government. It was with such a raiding party that the boy Chavez
went out for spoil and adventure.
Finding no Indians abroad, the young Mexicans pushed on farther than
they had intended. They did not know that it was the season when all the
roving Navajo bands gather at the Canyon de Chelly for their religious
ceremonies, and they rode on impetuously until they came out upon the
rim of that mysterious and terrifying canyon itself, then swarming with
Indians. They were immediately surrounded, and retreat was impossible.
They fought on the naked sandstone ledges that overhang that gulf. Don
José Chavez, Manuel's older brother, was captain of the party, and was
one of the first to fall. The company of fifty were slaughtered to a
man. Manuel was the fifty-first, and he survived. With seven arrow
wounds, and one shaft clear through his body, he was left for dead in a
pile of corpses.
That night, while the Navajos were celebrating their victory, the boy
crawled along the rocks until he had high boulders between him and the
enemy, and then started eastward on foot. It was summer, and the heat of
that red sandstone country is intense. His wounds were on fire. But he
had the superb vitality of early youth. He walked for two days and
nights without finding a drop of water, covering a distance of sixty odd
miles, across the plain, across the mountain, until he came to the
famous spring on the other side, where Fort Defiance was afterward
built. There he drank and bathed his wounds and slept. He had had no
food since the morning before the fight; near the spring he found some
large cactus plants, and slicing away the spines with his hunting-knife,
he filled his stomach with the juicy pulp.
From here, still without meeting a human creature, he stumbled on until
he reached the San Mateo mountain, north of Laguna. In a mountain valley
he came upon a camp of Mexican shepherds, and fell unconscious. The
shepherds made a litter of saplings and their sheepskin coats and
carried him into the village of Cebolleta, where he lay delirious for
many days. Years afterward, when Chavez came into his inheritance, he
bought that beautiful valley in the San Mateo mountain where he had sunk
unconscious under two noble oak trees. He built a house between those
twin oaks, and made a fine estate there.
Never reconciled to American rule, Chavez lived in seclusion when he was
in Santa Fé. At the first rumour of an Indian outbreak, near or far, he
rode off to add a few more scalps to his record. He distrusted the new
Bishop because of his friendliness toward Indians and Yankees. Besides,
Chavez was a Martinez man. He had come here to-night only in compliment
to Señora Olivares; he hated to spend an evening among American
uniforms.
When the banjo player was exhausted, Father Joseph said that as for him,
he would like a little drawing-room music, and he led Madame Olivares to
her harp. She was very charming at her instrument; the pose suited her
tip-tilted canary head, and her little foot and white arms.
This was the last time the Bishop heard her sing "La Paloma" for her
admiring husband, whose eyes smiled at her even when his heavy face
seemed asleep.
Olivares died on Septuagesima Sunday--fell over by his own fire-place
when he was lighting the candles after supper, and the banjo boy was
sent running for the Bishop. Before midnight two of the Olivares
brothers, half drunk with brandy and excitement, galloped out of Santa
Fé, on the road to Albuquerque, to employ an American lawyer.
2
THE LADY
ANTONIO OLIVARES'S funeral was the most solemn and magnificent ever seen
in Santa Fé, but Father Vaillant was not there. He was off on a long
missionary journey to the south, and did not reach home until Madame
Olivares had been a widow for some weeks. He had scarcely got off his
riding-boots when he was called into Father Latour's study to see her
lawyer.
Olivares had entrusted the management of his affairs to a young Irish
Catholic, Boyd O'Reilly, who had come out from Boston to practise law in
the new Territory. There were no steel safes in Santa Fé at that time,
but O'Reilly had kept Olivares's will in his strong-box. The document
was brief and clear: Antonio's estate amounted to about two hundred
thousand dollars in American money (a considerable fortune in those
days). The income therefrom was to be enjoyed by "my wife, Isabella
Olivares, and her daughter, Inez Olivares," during their lives, and
after their decease his property was to go to the Church, to the Society
for the Propagation of the Faith. The codicil, in favour of the
Cathedral fund, had, unfortunately, never been added to the will.
The young lawyer explained to Father Vaillant that the Olivares brothers
had retained the leading legal firm of Albuquerque and were contesting
the will. Their point of attack was that Señorita Inez was too old to
be the daughter of the Señora Olivares. Don Antonio had been a
promiscuous lover in his young days, and his brothers held that Inez was
the offspring of some temporary attachment, and had been adopted by
Doña Isabella. O'Reilly had sent to New Orleans for an attested copy of
the marriage record of the Olivares couple, and the birth certificate of
Señorita Inez. But in Kentucky, where the Señora was born, no birth
records were kept; there was no document to prove the age of Isabella
Olivares, and she could not be persuaded to admit her true age. It was
generally believed in Santa Fé that she was still in her early forties,
in which case she would not have been more than six or eight years old
at the date when Inez was born. In reality the lady was past fifty, but
when O'Reilly had tried to persuade her to admit this in court, she
simply refused to listen to him. He begged the Bishop and the Vicar to
use their influence with her to this end.
Father Latour shrank from interfering in so delicate a matter, but
Father Vaillant saw at once that it was their plain duty to protect the
two women and, at the same time, secure the rights of the Propaganda.
Without more ado he threw on his old cloak over his cassock, and the
three men set off through the red mud to the Olivares hacienda in the
hills east of the town.
Father Joseph had not been to the Olivares' house since the night of the
New Year's party, and he sighed as he approached the place, already
transformed by neglect. The big gate was propped open by a pole because
the iron hook was gone, the courtyard was littered with rags and meat
bones which the dogs had carried there and no one had taken away. The
big parrot cage, hanging in the _portale_, was filthy, and the birds
were squalling. When O'Reilly rang the bell at the outer gate, Pablo,
the banjo player, came running out with tousled hair and a dirty shirt
to admit the visitors. He took them into the long living-room, which was
empty and cold, the fire-place dark, the hearth unswept. Chairs and
window-sills were deep in red dust, the glass panes dirty, and streaked
as if by tear-drops. On the writing-table were empty bottles and sticky
glasses and cigar ends. In one corner stood the harp in its green cover.