now, he could not reconcile the contradictions of his nature. He simply
accepted them, and, when Joseph had been away for a long while, realized
that he loved them all. His Vicar was one of the most truly spiritual
men he had ever known, though he was so passionately attached to many of
the things of this world. Fond as he was of good eating and drinking, he
not only rigidly observed all the fasts of the Church, but he never
complained about the hardness and scantiness of the fare on his long
missionary journeys. Father Joseph's relish for good wine might have
been a fault in another man. But always frail in body, he seemed to need
some quick physical stimulant to support his sudden flights of purpose
and imagination. Time and again the Bishop had seen a good dinner, a
bottle of claret, transformed into spiritual energy under his very eyes.
From a little feast that would make other men heavy and desirous of
repose, Father Vaillant would rise up revived, and work for ten or
twelve hours with that ardour and thoroughness which accomplished such
lasting results.
The Bishop had often been embarrassed by his Vicar's persistence in
begging for the parish, for the Cathedral fund and the distant missions.
Yet for himself, Father Joseph was scarcely acquisitive to the point of
decency. He owned nothing in the world but his mule, Contento. Though he
received rich vestments from his sister in Riom, his daily apparel was
rough and shabby. The Bishop had a large and valuable library, at least,
and many comforts for his house. There were his beautiful skins and
blankets--presents from Eusabio and his other Indian friends. The
Mexican women, skilled in needlework and lace-making and hem-stitching,
presented him with fine linen for his person, his bed, and his table. He
had silver plate, given him by the Olivares and others of his rich
parishioners. But Father Vaillant was like the saints of the early
Church, literally without personal possessions.
In his youth, Joseph had wished to lead a life of seclusion and solitary
devotion; but the truth was, he could not be happy for long without
human intercourse. And he liked almost everyone. In Ohio, when they used
to travel together in stagecoaches, Father Latour had noticed that every
time a new passenger pushed his way into the already crowded stage,
Joseph would look pleased and interested, as if this were an agreeable
addition--whereas he himself felt annoyed, even if he concealed it. The
ugly conditions of life in Ohio had never troubled Joseph. The hideous
houses and churches, the ill-kept farms and gardens, the slovenly,
sordid aspect of the towns and country-side, which continually depressed
Father Latour, he seemed scarcely to perceive. One would have said he
had no feeling for comeliness or grace. Yet music was a passion with
him. In Sandusky it had been his delight to spend evening after evening
with his German choir-master, training the young people to sing Bach
oratorios.
Nothing one could say of Father Vaillant explained him. The man was much
greater than the sum of his qualities. He added a glow to whatever kind
of human society he was dropped down into. A Navajo hogan, some abjectly
poor little huddle of Mexican huts, or a company of Monsignori and
Cardinals at Rome--it was all the same.
The last time the Bishop was in Rome he had heard an amusing story from
Monsignor Mazzucchi, who had been secretary to Gregory XVI at the time
when Father Vaillant went from his Ohio mission for his first visit to
the Holy City.
Joseph had stayed in Rome for three months, living on about forty cents
a day and leaving nothing unseen. He several times asked Mazzucchi to
secure him a private audience with the Pope. The secretary liked the
missionary from Ohio; there was something abrupt and lively and naïf
about him, a kind of freshness he did not often find in the priests who
flocked to Rome. So he arranged an interview at which only the Holy
Father and Father Vaillant and Mazzucchi were present.
The missionary came in, attended by a chamberlain who carried two great
black valises full of objects to be blessed--instead of one, as was
customary. After his reception, Father Joseph began to pour out such a
vivid account of his missions and brother missionaries, that both the
Holy Father and the secretary forgot to take account of time, and the
audience lasted three times as long as such interviews were supposed to
last. Gregory XVI, that aristocratic and autocratic prelate, who stood
so consistently on the wrong side in European politics, and was the
enemy of Free Italy, had done more than any of his predecessors to
propagate the Faith in remote parts of the world. And here was a
missionary after his own heart. Father Vaillant asked for blessings for
himself, his fellow priests, his missions, his Bishop. He opened his big
valises like pedlars' packs, full of crosses, rosaries, prayer-books,
medals, breviaries, on which he begged more than the usual blessing. The
astonished chamberlain had come and gone several times, and Mazzucchi at
last reminded the Holy Father that he had other engagements. Father
Vaillant caught up his two valises himself, the chamberlain not being
there at the moment, and thus laden, was bowing himself backward out of
the presence, when the Pope rose from his chair and lifted his hand, not
in benediction but in salutation, and called out to the departing
missionary, as one man to another, "_Coraggio, Americano_!"
Bishop Latour found his Navajo house favourable for reflection, for
recalling the past and planning the future. He wrote long letters to his
brother and to old friends in France. The hogan was isolated like a
ship's cabin on the ocean, with the murmuring of great winds about it.
There was no opening except the door, always open, and the air without
had the turbid yellow light of sand-storms. All day long the sand came
in through the cracks in the walls and formed little ridges on the earth
floor. It rattled like sleet upon the dead leaves of the tree-branch
roof. This house was so frail a shelter that one seemed to be sitting in
the heart of a world made of dusty earth and moving air.
4
EUSABIO
ON the third day of his visit with Eusabio, the Bishop wrote a somewhat
formal letter of recall to his Vicar, and then went for his daily walk
in the desert. He stayed out until sunset, when the wind fell and the
air cleared, to a crystal sharpness. As he was returning, still a mile
or more up the river, he heard the deep sound of a cottonwood drum,
beaten softly. He surmised that the sound came from Eusabio's house, and
that his friend was at home.
Retracing his steps to the settlement, Father Latour found Eusabio
seated beside his doorway, singing in the Navajo language and beating
softly on one end of his long drum. Before him two very little Indian
boys, about four and five years old, were dancing to the music, on the
hard beaten ground. Two women, Eusabio's wife and sister, looked on from
the deep twilight of the hut.
The little boys did not notice the stranger's approach. They were
entirely engrossed in their occupation, their faces serious, their
chocolate-coloured eyes half closed. The Bishop stood watching the
flowing, supple movements of their arms and shoulders, the sure rhythm
of their tiny moccasined feet, no larger than cottonwood leaves, as
without a word of instruction they followed the irregular and
strangely-accented music. Eusabio himself wore an expression of
religious gravity. He sat with the drum between his knees, his broad
shoulders bent forward; a crimson _banda_ covered his forehead to hold
his black hair. The silver on his dark wrists glittered as he stroked
the drum-head with a stick or merely tapped it with his fingers. When he
finished the song he was singing, he rose and introduced the little
boys, his nephews, by their Indian names, Eagle Feather and Medicine
Mountain, after which he nodded to them in dismissal. They vanished into
the house. Eusabio handed the drum to his wife and walked away with his
guest.
"Eusabio," said the Bishop, "I want to send a letter to Father Vaillant,
at Tucson. I will send Jacinto with it, provided you can spare me one of
your people to accompany me back to Santa Fé."
"I myself will ride with you to the Villa," said Eusabio. The Navajos
still called the capital by its old name.
Accordingly, on the following morning, Jacinto was dispatched southward,
and Father Latour and Eusabio, with their pack-mule, rode to the east.
The ride back to Santa Fé was something under four hundred miles. The
weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight.
The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was
monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more
than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet,
but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of
stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills
under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth
was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far
away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the
sky, the sky!
Travelling with Eusabio was like travelling with the landscape made
human. He accepted chance and weather as the country did, with a sort of
grave enjoyment. He talked little, ate little, slept anywhere, preserved
a countenance open and warm, and like Jacinto he had unfailing good
manners. The Bishop was rather surprised that he stopped so often by the
way to gather flowers. One morning he came back with the mules, holding
a bunch of crimson flowers--long, tube-shaped bells, that hung lightly
from one side of a naked stem and trembled in the wind.
"The Indians call rainbow flower," he said, holding them up and making
the red tubes quiver. "It is early for these."
When they left the rock or tree or sand dune that had sheltered them for
the night, the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their
temporary occupation. He buried the embers of the fire and the remnants
of food, unpiled any stones he had piled together, filled up the holes
he had scooped in the sand. Since this was exactly Jacinto's procedure,
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert
himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least
to leave some mark or memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way
to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave
no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air.
It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out
against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas, were made
to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a
distance. The Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows, were made of
sand and willows. None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass
windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing
was to them ugly and unnatural--even dangerous. Moreover, these Indians
disliked novelty and change. They came and went by the old paths worn
into the rock by the feet of their fathers, used the old natural
stairway of stone to climb to their mesa towns, carried water from the
old springs, even after white men had dug wells.
In the working of silver or drilling of turquoise the Indians had
exhaustless patience; upon their blankets and belts and ceremonial robes
they lavished their skill and pains. But their conception of decoration
did not extend to the landscape. They seemed to have none of the
European's desire to "master" nature, to arrange and re-create. They
spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating
themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so
much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution
and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished
to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of
earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When
they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never
a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they
irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The
land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not
attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
As Father Latour and Eusabio approached Albuquerque, they occasionally
fell in with company; Indians going to and fro on the long winding
trails across the plain, or up into the Sandia mountains. They had all
of them the same quiet way of moving, whether their pace was swift or
slow, and the same unobtrusive demeanour: an Indian wrapped in his
bright blanket, seated upon his mule or walking beside it, moving
through the pale new-budding sage-brush, winding among the sand waves,
as if it were his business to pass unseen and unheard through a country
awakening with spring.
North of Laguna two Zuñi runners sped by them, going somewhere east on
"Indian business." They saluted Eusabio by gestures with the open palm,
but did not stop. They coursed over the sand with the fleetness of young
antelope, their bodies disappearing and reappearing among the sand
dunes, like the shadows that eagles cast in their strong, unhurried
flight.
BOOK EIGHT
_GOLD UNDER PIKE'S PEAK_
1
CATHEDRAL
FATHER VAILLANT had been in Santa Fé nearly three weeks, and as yet
nothing had been revealed to him that warranted his Bishop in calling
him back from Tucson. One morning Fructosa came into the garden to tell
him that lunch would be earlier than usual, as the Bishop was going to
ride somewhere that afternoon. Half an hour later he joined his superior
in the dining-room.
The Bishop seldom lunched alone. That was the hour when he could most
conveniently entertain a priest from one of the distant parishes, an
army officer, an American trader, a visitor from Old Mexico or
California. He had no parlour--his dining-room served that purpose. It
was long and cool, with windows only at the west end, opening into the
garden. The green jalousies let in a tempered light. Sunbeams played on
the white, rounded walls and twinkled on the glass and silver of the
sideboard. When Madame Olivares left Santa Fé to return to New Orleans
and sold her effects at auction, Father Latour bought her sideboard, and
the dining-table around which friends had so often gathered. Doña
Isabella gave him her silver coffee service and candelabra for
remembrance. They were the only ornaments of the severe and shadowy
room.
The Bishop was already at his place when Father Joseph entered.
"Fructosa has told you why we are lunching early? We will take a ride
this afternoon. I have something to show you."
"Very good. Perhaps you have noticed that I am a little restless. I
don't know when I have been two weeks out of the saddle before. When I
go to visit Contento in his stall, he looks at me reprovingly. He will
grow too fat."
The Bishop smiled, with a shade of sarcasm on his upper lip. He knew his
Joseph. "Ah, well," he said carelessly, "a little rest will not hurt
him, after coming six hundred miles from Tucson. You can take him out
this afternoon, and I will ride Angelica."
The two priests left Santa Fé a little after midday, riding west. The
Bishop did not disclose his objective, and the Vicar asked no questions.
Soon they left the wagon road and took a trail running straight south,
through an empty greasewood country sloping gradually in the direction
of the naked, blue Sandia mountains.
At about four o'clock they came out upon a ridge high over the Rio
Grande valley. The trail dropped down a long decline at this point and
wound about the foot of the Sandias into Albuquerque, some sixty miles
away. This ridge was covered with cone-shaped, rocky hills, thinly clad
with piñons, and the rock was a curious shade of green, something
between sea-green and olive. The thin, pebbly earth, which was merely
the rock pulverized by weather, had the same green tint. Father Latour
rode to an isolated hill that beetled over the western edge of the
ridge, just where the trail descended. This hill stood up high and quite
alone, boldly facing the declining sun and the blue Sandias. As they
drew close to it, Father Vaillant noticed that on the western face the
earth had been scooped away, exposing a rugged wall of rock--not green
like the surrounding hills, but yellow, a strong golden ochre, very much
like the gold of the sunlight that was now beating upon it. Picks and
crowbars lay about, and fragments of stone, freshly broken off.
"It is curious, is it not, to find one yellow hill among all these green
ones?" remarked the Bishop, stooping to pick up a piece of the stone. "I
have ridden over these hills in every direction, but this is the only
one of its kind." He stood regarding the chip of yellow rock that lay in
his palm. As he had a very special way of handling objects that were
sacred, he extended that manner to things which he considered beautiful.
After a moment of silence he looked up at the rugged wall, gleaming gold
above them. "That hill, _Blanchet_, is my Cathedral."
Father Joseph looked at his Bishop, then at the cliff, blinking.
"_Vraiment_? Is the stone hard enough? A good colour, certainly;
something like the colonnade of St. Peter's."
The Bishop smoothed the piece of rock with his thumb. "It is more like
something nearer home--I mean, nearer Clermont. When I look up at this
rock I can almost feel the Rhone behind me."
"Ah, you mean the old Palace of the Popes, at Avignon! Yes, you are
right, it is very like. At this hour, it is like this."
The Bishop sat down on a boulder, still looking up at the cliff. "It is
the stone I have always wanted, and I found it quite by chance. I was
coming back from Isleta. I had been to see old Padre Jesus when he was
dying. I had never come by this trail, but when I reached Santo Domingo
I found the road so washed by a heavy rain that I turned out and decided
to try this way home. I rode up here from the west in the late
afternoon; this hill confronted me as it confronts us now, and I knew
instantly that it was my Cathedral."
"Oh, such things are never accidents, Jean. But it will be a long while
before you can think of building."
"Not so very long, I hope. I should like to complete it before I die--if
God so wills. I wish to leave nothing to chance, or to the mercy of
American builders. I had rather keep the old adobe church we have now
than help to build one of those horrible structures they are putting up
in the Ohio cities. I want a plain church, but I want a good one. I
shall certainly never lift my hand to build a clumsy affair of red
brick, like an English coach-house. Our own Midi Romanesque is the right
style for this country."
Father Vaillant sniffed and wiped his glasses. "If you once begin
thinking about architects and styles, Jean! And if you don't get
American builders, whom will you get, pray?"
"I have an old friend in Toulouse who is a very fine architect. I talked
this matter over with him when I was last at home. He cannot come
himself; he is afraid of the long sea voyage, and not used to horseback
travel. But he has a young son, still at his studies, who is eager to
undertake the work. Indeed, his father writes me that it has become the
young man's dearest ambition to build the first Romanesque church in the
New World. He will have studied the right models; he thinks our old
churches of the Midi the most beautiful in France. When we are ready, he
will come and bring with him a couple of good French stone-cutters. They
will certainly be no more expensive than workmen from St. Louis. Now
that I have found exactly the stone I want, my Cathedral seems to me
already begun. This hill is only about fifteen miles from Santa Fé;
there is an up-grade, but it is gradual. Hauling the stone will be
easier than I could have hoped for."
"You plan far ahead," Father Vaillant looked at his friend wonderingly.
"Well, that is what a Bishop should be able to do. As for me, I see only
what is under my nose. But I had no idea you were going in for fine
building, when everything about us is so poor--and we ourselves are so
poor."
"But the Cathedral is not for us, Father Joseph. We build for the
future--better not lay a stone unless we can do that. It would be a
shame to any man coming from a Seminary that is one of the architectural
treasures of France, to make another ugly church on this continent where
there are so many already."
"You are probably right. I had never thought of it before. It never
occurred to me that we could have anything but an Ohio church here. Your
ancestors helped to build Clermont Cathedral, I remember; two building
Bishops de la Tour back in the thirteenth century. Time brings things to
pass, certainly. I had no idea you were taking all this so much to
heart."
Father Latour laughed. "Is a cathedral a thing to be taken lightly,
after all?"
"Oh, no, certainly not!" Father Vaillant moved his shoulders uneasily.
He did not himself know why he hung back in this.
The base of the hill before which they stood was already in shadow,
subdued to the tone of rich yellow clay, but the top was still melted
gold--a colour that throbbed in the last rays of the sun. The Bishop
turned away at last with a sigh of deep content. "Yes," he said slowly,
"that rock will do very well. And now we must be starting home. Every
time I come here, I like this stone better. I could hardly have hoped
that God would gratify my personal taste, my vanity, if you will, in
this way. I tell you, _Blanchet_, I would rather have found that hill of
yellow rock than have come into a fortune to spend in charity. The
Cathedral is near my heart, for many reasons. I hope you do not think me
very worldly."
As they rode home through the sage-brush silvered by moonlight, Father
Vaillant was still wondering why he had been called home from saving
souls in Arizona, and wondering why a poor missionary Bishop should care
so much about a building. He himself was eager to have the Cathedral
begun; but whether it was Midi Romanesque or Ohio German in style,
seemed to him of little consequence.
2
A LETTER FROM LEAVENWORTH
THE day after the Bishop and his Vicar rode to the yellow rock the
weekly post arrived at Santa Fé. It brought the Bishop many letters,
and he was shut in his study all morning. At lunch he told Father
Vaillant that he would require his company that evening to consider with
him a letter of great importance from the Bishop of Leavenworth.
This letter of many pages was concerned with events that were happening
in Colorado, in a part of the Rocky Mountains very little known. Though
it was only a few hundred miles north of Santa Fé, communication with
that region was so infrequent that news travelled to Santa Fé from
Europe more quickly than from Pike's Peak. Under the shadow of that peak
rich gold deposits had been discovered within the last year, but Father
Vaillant had first heard of this through a letter from France. Word of
it had reached the Atlantic coast, crossed to Europe, and come from
there back to the South-west, more quickly than it could filter down
through the few hundred miles of unexplored mountains and gorges between
Cripple Creek and Santa Fé. While Father Vaillant was at Tucson he had
received a letter from his brother Marius, in Auvergne, and was vexed
that so much of it was taken up with inquiries about the gold rush to
Colorado, of which he had never heard, while Marius gave him but little
news of the war in Italy, which seemed relatively near and much more
important.
That congested heaping up of the Rocky Mountain chain about Pike's Peak
was a blank space on the continent at this time. Even the fur trappers,
coming down from Wyoming to Taos with their pelts, avoided that humped
granite backbone. Only a few years before, Frémont had tried to
penetrate the Colorado Rockies, and his party had come half-starved into
Taos at last, having eaten most of their horses. But within twelve
months everything had changed. Wandering prospectors had found large
deposits of gold near Cripple Creek, and the mountains that were
solitary a year ago were now full of people. Wagon trains were streaming
westward across the prairies from the Missouri River.