returned from a visit to Cripple Creek. He had found the slopes under
Pike's Peak dotted with camps, the gorges black with placer miners;
thousands of people were living in tents and shacks, Cherry Creek was
full of saloons and gambling-rooms; and among all the wanderers and
wastrels were many honest men, hundreds of good Catholics, and not one
priest. The young men were adrift in a lawless society without spiritual
guidance. The old men died from exposure and mountain pneumonia, with no
one to give them the last rites of the Church.
This new and populous community must, for the present, the Kansas Bishop
wrote, be accounted under Father Latour's jurisdiction. His great
diocese, already enlarged by thousands of square miles to the south and
west, must now, on the north, take in the still undefined but suddenly
important region of the Colorado Rockies. The Bishop of Leavenworth
begged him to send a priest there as soon as possible,--an able one, by
all means, not only devoted, but resourceful and intelligent, one who
would be at his ease with all sorts of men. He must take his bedding and
camp outfit, medicines and provisions, and clothing for the severe
winter. At Camp Denver there was nothing to be bought but tobacco and
whisky. There were no women there, and no cook stoves. The miners lived
on half-baked dough and alcohol. They did not even keep the mountain
water pure, and so died of fever. All the living conditions were
abominable.
In the evening, after dinner, Father Latour read this letter aloud to
Father Vaillant in his study. When he had finished, he put down the
closely written pages.
"You have been complaining of inactivity, Father Joseph; here is your
opportunity."
Father Joseph, who had been growing more and more restless during the
reading of the letter, said merely: "So now I must begin speaking
English again! I can start to-morrow if you wish it."
The Bishop shook his head. "Not so fast. There will be no hospitable
Mexicans to receive you at the end of this journey. You must take your
living with you. We will have a wagon built for you, and choose your
outfit carefully. Tranquilino's brother, Sabino, will be your driver.
This, I fear, will be the hardest mission you have ever undertaken."
The two priests talked until a late hour. There was Arizona to be
considered; somebody must be found to continue Father Vaillant's work
there. Of all the countries he knew, that desert and its yellow people
were the dearest to him. But it was the discipline of his life to break
ties; to say farewell and move on into the unknown.
Before he went to bed that night Father Joseph greased his boots and
trimmed the calloused spots on his feet with an old razor. At the
Mexican village of Chimayo, over toward the Truchas mountains, the good
people were especially devoted to a little equestrian image of Santiago
in their church, and they made him a new pair of boots every few months,
insisting that he went abroad at night and wore out his shoes, even on
horseback. When Father Joseph stayed there, he used to tell them he
wished that, in addition to the consecration of the hands, God had
provided some special blessing for the missionary's feet.
He recalled affectionately an incident which concerned this Santiago of
Chimayo. Some years ago Father Joseph was asked to go to the _calabozo_
at Santa Fé to see a murderer from Chimayo. The prisoner proved to be a
boy of twenty, very gentle in face and manner. His name was Ramon
Armajillo. He had been passionately fond of cock-fighting, and it was
his undoing. He had bred a rooster that never lost a battle, but had
slit the necks of cocks in all the little towns about. At last Ramon
brought the bird to Santa Fé to match him with a famous cock there, and
half a dozen Chimayo boys came along and put up everything they had on
Ramon's rooster. The betting was heavy on both sides, and the gate
receipts also were to go to the winner. After a somewhat doubtful
beginning, Ramon's cock neatly ripped the jugular vein of his opponent;
but the owner of the defeated bird, before anyone could stop him,
reached into the ring and wrung the victor's neck. Before he had dropped
the limp bunch of feathers from his hand, Ramon's knife was in his
heart. It all happened in a flash--some of the witnesses even insisted
that the death of the man and the death of the cock were simultaneous.
All agreed that there was not time for a man to catch his breath between
the whirl of the wrist and the gleam of the knife. Unfortunately the
American judge was a very stupid man, who disliked Mexicans and hoped to
wipe out cock-fighting. He accepted as evidence statements made by the
murdered man's friends to the effect that Ramon had repeatedly
threatened his life.
When Father Vaillant went to see the boy in his cell a few days before
his execution, he found him making a pair of tiny buckskin boots, as if
for a doll, and Ramon told him they were for the little Santiago in the
church at home. His family would come up to Santa Fé for the hanging,
and they would take the boots back to Chimayo, and perhaps the little
saint would say a good word for him.
Rubbing oil into his boots by candlelight, Father Vaillant sighed. The
criminals with whom he would have to do in Colorado would hardly be of
that type, he told himself.
3
AUSPICE MARIA!
THE construction of Father Vaillant's wagon took a month. It must be a
wagon of very unusual design, capable of carrying a great deal, yet
light enough and narrow enough to wind through the mountain gorges
beyond Pueblo,--where there were no roads at all except the rocky
ravines cut out by streams that flowed full in the spring but would be
dry now in the autumn. While his wagon was building, Father Joseph was
carefully selecting his stores, and the furnishings for a small chapel
which he meant to construct of saplings or canvas immediately upon his
arrival at Camp Denver. Moreover, there were his valises full of medals,
crosses, rosaries, coloured pictures and religious pamphlets. For
himself, he required no books but his breviary and the ordinary of the
Mass.
In the Bishop's courtyard he sorted and re-sorted his cargo, always
finding a more necessary article for which a less necessary had to be
discarded. Fructosa and Magdalena were frequently called upon to help
him, and when a box was finally closed, Fructosa had it put away in the
woodshed. She had noticed the Bishop's brows contract slightly when he
came upon these trunks and chests in his hallway and dining-room. All
the bedding and clothing was packed in great sacks of dressed calfskin,
which Sabino procured from old Mexican settlers. These were already
going out of fashion, but in the early days they were the poor man's
trunk.
Bishop Latour also was very busy at this time, training a new priest
from Clermont; riding about with him among the distant parishes and
trying to give him an understanding of the people. As a Bishop, he could
only approve Father Vaillant's eagerness to be gone, and the enthusiasm
with which he turned to hardships of a new kind. But as a man, he was a
little hurt that his old comrade should leave him without one regret. He
seemed to know, as if it had been revealed to him, that this was a final
break; that their lives would part here, and that they would never work
together again. The bustle of preparation in his own house was painful
to him, and he was glad to be abroad among the parishes.
One day when the Bishop had just returned from Albuquerque, Father
Vaillant came in to luncheon in high spirits. He had been out for a
drive in his new wagon, and declared that it was satisfactory at last.
Sabino was ready, and he thought they would start the day after
to-morrow. He diagrammed his route on the table-cloth, and went over the
catalogue of his equipment. The Bishop was tired and scarcely touched
his food, but Father Joseph ate generously, as he was apt to do when
fired by a new project.
After Fructosa had brought the coffee, he leaned back in his chair and
turned to his friend with a beaming face. "I often think, Jean, how you
were an unconscious agent in the hands of Providence when you recalled
me from Tucson. I seemed to be doing the most important work of my life
there, and you recalled me for no reason at all, apparently. You did not
know why, and I did not know why. We were both acting in the dark. But
Heaven knew what was happening at Cripple Creek, and moved us like
chessmen on the board. When the call came, I was here to answer it--by a
miracle, indeed."
Father Latour put down his silver coffee-cup. "Miracles are all very
well, Joseph, but I see none here. I sent for you because I felt the
need of your companionship. I used my authority as a Bishop to gratify
my personal wish. That was selfish, if you will, but surely natural
enough. We are countrymen, and are bound by early memories. And that two
friends, having come together, should part and go their separate
ways--that is natural, too. No, I don't think we need any miracle to
explain all this."
Father Vaillant had been wholly absorbed in his preparations for saving
souls in the gold camps--blind to everything else. Now it came over him
in a flash, how the Bishop had held himself aloof from his activities;
it was a very hard thing for Father Latour to let him go; the loneliness
of his position had begun to weigh upon him.
Yes, he reflected, as he went quietly to his own room, there was a great
difference in their natures. Wherever he went, he soon made friends that
took the place of country and family. But Jean, who was at ease in any
society and always the flower of courtesy, could not form new ties. It
had always been so. He was like that even as a boy; gracious to
everyone, but known to a very few. To man's wisdom it would have seemed
that a priest with Father Latour's exceptional qualities would have been
better placed in some part of the world where scholarship, a handsome
person, and delicate perceptions all have their effect; and that a man
of much rougher type would have served God well enough as the first
Bishop of New Mexico. Doubtless Bishop Latour's successors would be men
of a different fibre. But God had his reasons, Father Joseph devoutly
believed. Perhaps it pleased Him to grace the beginning of a new era and
a vast new diocese by a fine personality. And perhaps, after all,
something would remain through the years to come; some ideal, or memory,
or legend.
The next afternoon, his wagon loaded and standing ready in the
courtyard, Father Vaillant was seated at the Bishop's desk, writing
letters to France; a short one to Marius, a long one to his beloved
Philomène, telling her of his plunge into the unknown and begging her
prayers for his success in the world of gold-crazed men. He wrote
rapidly and jerkily, moving his lips as well as his fingers. When the
Bishop entered the study, he rose and stood holding the written pages in
his hand.
"I did not mean to interrupt you, Joseph, but do you intend to take
Contento with you to Colorado?"
Father Joseph blinked. "Why, certainly. I had intended to ride him.
However, if you have need for him here----"
"Oh, no. Not at all. But if you take Contento, I will ask you to take
Angelica as well. They have a great affection for each other; why
separate them indefinitely? One could not explain to them. They have
worked long together."
Father Vaillant made no reply. He stood looking intently at the pages of
his letter. The Bishop saw a drop of water splash down upon the violet
script and spread. He turned quickly and went out through the arched
doorway.
At sunrise next morning Father Vaillant set out, Sabino driving the
wagon, his oldest boy riding Angelica, and Father Joseph himself riding
Contento. They took the old road to the north-east, through the sharp
red sand-hills spotted with juniper, and the Bishop accompanied them as
far as the loop where the road wound out on the top of one of those
conical hills, giving the departing traveller his last glimpse of Santa
Fé. There Father Joseph drew rein and looked back at the town lying
rosy in the morning light, the mountain behind it, and the hills close
about it like two encircling arms.
"_Auspice, Maria_!" he murmured as he turned his back on these familiar
things.
The Bishop rode home to his solitude. He was forty-seven years old, and
he had been a missionary in the New World for twenty years--ten of them
in New Mexico. If he were a parish priest at home, there would be
nephews coming to him for help in their Latin or a bit of pocket-money;
nieces to run into his garden and bring their sewing and keep an eye on
his housekeeping. All the way home he indulged in such reflections as
any bachelor nearing fifty might have.
But when he entered his study, he seemed to come back to reality, to the
sense of a Presence awaiting him. The curtain of the arched doorway had
scarcely fallen behind him when that feeling of personal loneliness was
gone, and a sense of loss was replaced by a sense of restoration. He sat
down before his desk, deep in reflection. It was just this solitariness
of love in which a priest's life could be like his Master's. It was not
a solitude of atrophy, of negation, but of perpetual flowering. A life
need not be cold, or devoid of grace in the worldly sense, if it were
filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother,
girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: _le rêve suprême de la chair_.
The nursery tale could not vie with Her in simplicity, the wisest
theologians could not match Her in profundity.
Here in his own church in Santa Fé there was one of these nursery
Virgins, a little wooden figure, very old and very dear to the people.
De Vargas, when he recaptured the city for Spain two hundred years ago,
had vowed a yearly procession in her honour, and it was still one of the
most solemn events of the Christian year in Santa Fé. She was a little
wooden figure, about three feet high, very stately in bearing, with a
beautiful though rather severe Spanish face. She had a rich wardrobe; a
chest full of robes and laces, and gold and silver diadems. The women
loved to sew for her and the silversmiths to make her chains and
brooches. Father Latour had delighted her wardrobe keepers when he told
them he did not believe the Queen of England or the Empress of France
had so many costumes. She was their doll and their queen, something to
fondle and something to adore, as Mary's Son must have been to Her.
These poor Mexicans, he reflected, were not the first to pour out their
love in this simple fashion. Raphael and Titian had made costumes for
Her in their time, and the great masters had made music for Her, and the
great architects had built cathedrals for Her. Long before Her years on
earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the
pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who
should yet be a woman.
Bishop Latour's premonition was right: Father Vaillant never returned to
share his work in New Mexico. Come back he did, to visit his old
friends, whenever his busy life permitted. But his destiny was fulfilled
in the cold, steely Colorado Rockies, which he never loved as he did the
blue mountains of the South. He came back to Santa Fé to recuperate
from the illnesses and accidents which consistently punctuated his way;
came with the Papal Emissary when Bishop Latour was made Archbishop; but
his working life was spent among bleak mountains and comfortless mining
camps, looking after lost sheep.
Creede, Durango, Silver City, Central City, over the Continental Divide
into Utah,--his strange Episcopal carriage was known throughout that
rugged granite world.
It was a covered carriage, on springs, and long enough for him to lie
down in at night,--Father Joseph was a very short man. At the back was a
luggage box, which could be made into an altar when he celebrated Mass
in the open, under a pine tree. He used to say that the mountain
torrents were the first road builders, and that wherever they found a
way, he could find one. He wore out driver after driver, and his coach
was repaired so often and so extensively that long before he abandoned
it there was none of the original structure left.
Broken tongues and singletrees, smashed wheels and splintered axles he
considered trifling matters. Twice the old carriage itself slipped off
the mountain road and rolled down the gorge, with the priest inside.
From the first accident of this kind, Father Vaillant escaped with
nothing worse than a sprain, and he wrote Bishop Latour that he
attributed his preservation to the Archangel Raphael, whose office he
had said with unusual fervour that morning. The second time he rolled
down a ravine, near Central City, his thigh-bone was broken just below
the joint. It knitted in time, but he was lamed for life, and could
never ride horseback again.
Before this accident befell him, however, he had one long visit among
his friends in Santa Fé and Albuquerque, a renewal of old ties that was
like an Indian summer in his life. When he left Denver, he told his
congregation there that he was going to the Mexicans to beg for money.
The church in Denver was under a roof, but the windows had been boarded
up for months because nobody would buy glass for them. In his Denver
congregation there were men who owned mines and saw-mills and
flourishing businesses, but they needed all their money to push these
enterprises. Down among the Mexicans, who owned nothing but a mud house
and a burro, he could always raise money. If they had anything at all,
they gave.
He called this trip frankly a begging expedition, and he went in his
carriage to bring back whatever he could gather. When he got as far as
Taos, his Irish driver mutinied. Not another mile over these roads, he
said. He knew his own territory, but here he refused to risk his neck
and the Padre's. There was then no wagon road from Taos to Santa Fé. It
was nearly a fortnight before Father Vaillant found a man who would
undertake to get him through the mountains. At last an old driver,
schooled on the wagon trains, volunteered; and with the help of ax and
pick and shovel, he brought the Episcopal carriage safely to Santa Fé
and into the Bishop's courtyard.
Once again among his own people, as he still called them, Father Joseph
opened his campaign, and the poor Mexicans began taking dollars out of
their shirts and boots (favourite places for carrying money) to pay for
windows in the Denver church. His petitions did not stop with
windows--indeed, they only began there. He told the sympathetic women of
Santa Fé and Albuquerque about all the stupid, unnecessary discomforts
of his life in Denver, discomforts that amounted to improprieties. It
was a part of the Wild West attitude to despise the decencies of life.
He told them how glad he was to sleep in good Mexican beds once more. In
Denver he lay on a mattress stuffed with straw; a French priest who was
visiting him had pulled out a long stem of hay that stuck through the
thin ticking, and called it an American feather. His dining-table was
made of planks covered with oilcloth. He had no linen at all, neither
sheets nor serviettes, and he used his wornout shirts for face towels.
The Mexican women could scarcely bear to hear of such things. Nobody in
Colorado planted gardens, Father Vaillant related; nobody would stick a
shovel into the earth for anything less than gold. There was no butter,
no milk, no eggs, no fruit. He lived on dough and cured hog meat.
Within a few weeks after his arrival, six featherbeds were sent to the
Bishop's house for Father Vaillant; dozens of linen sheets, embroidered
pillowcases and table-cloths and napkins; strings of chili and boxes of
beans and dried fruit. The little settlement of Chimayo sent a roll of
their finest blankets.
As these gifts arrived, Father Joseph put them in the woodhouse, knowing
well that the Bishop was always embarrassed by his readiness to receive
presents. But one morning Father Latour had occasion to go into the
woodhouse, and he saw for himself.
"Father Joseph," he remonstrated, "you will never be able to take all
these things back to Denver. Why, you would need an ox-cart to carry
them!"
"Very well," replied Father Joseph, "then God will send me an ox-cart."
And He did, with a driver to take the cart as far as Pueblo.
On the morning of his departure for home, when his carriage was ready,
the cart covered with tarpaulins and the oxen yoked, Father Vaillant,
who had been hurrying everyone since the first streak of light, suddenly
became deliberate. He went into the Bishop's study and sat down, talking
to him of unimportant matters, lingering as if there were something
still undone.
"Well, we are getting older, Jean," he said abruptly, after a short
silence.
The Bishop smiled. "Ah, yes. We are not young men any more. One of these
departures will be the last."
Father Vaillant nodded. "Whenever God wills. I am ready." He rose and
began to pace the floor, addressing his friend without looking at him.
"But it has not been so bad, Jean? We have done the things we used to
plan to do, long ago, when we were Seminarians,--at least some of them.
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to
a man. No worldly success can take the place of that."
"_Blanchet_," said the Bishop rising, "you are a better man than I. You
have been a great harvester of souls, without pride and without
shame--and I am always a little cold--_un pédant_, as you used to say.
If hereafter we have stars in our crowns, yours will be a constellation.
Give me your blessing."
He knelt, and Father Vaillant, having blessed him, knelt and was blessed
in turn. They embraced each other for the past--for the future.
BOOK NINE
_DEATH COMES FOR THE
ARCHBISHOP_
1
WHEN that devout nun, Mother Superior Philomène, died at a great age in
her native Riom, among her papers were found several letters from
Archbishop Latour, one dated December 1888, only a few months before his
death. "Since your brother was called to his reward," he wrote, "I feel
nearer to him than before. For many years Duty separated us, but death
has brought us together. The time is not far distant when I shall join
him. Meanwhile, I am enjoying to the full that period of reflection
which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action."
This period of reflection the Archbishop spent on his little country
estate, some four miles north of Santa Fé. Long before his retirement
from the cares of the diocese, Father Latour bought those few acres in
the red sand-hills near the Tesuque pueblo, and set out an orchard which
would be bearing when the time came for him to rest. He chose this place
in the red hills spotted with juniper against the advice of his friends,
because he believed it to be admirably suited for the growing of fruit.
Once when he was riding out to visit the Tesuque mission, he had
followed a stream and come upon this spot, where he found a little
Mexican house and a garden shaded by an apricot tree of such great size
as he had never seen before. It had two trunks, each of them thicker
than a man's body, and though evidently very old, it was full of fruit.
The apricots were large, beautifully coloured, and of superb flavour.
Since this tree grew against the hill-side, the Archbishop concluded that
the exposure there must be excellent for fruit. He surmised that the
heat of the sun, reflected from the rocky hill-slope up into the tree,
gave the fruit an even temperature, warmth from two sides, such as
brings the wall peaches to perfection in France.
The old Mexican who lived there said the tree must be two hundred years
old; it had been just like this when his grandfather was a boy, and had
always borne luscious apricots like these. The old man would be glad to
sell the place and move into Santa Fé, the Bishop found, and he bought
it a few weeks later. In the spring he set out his orchard and a few
rows of acacia trees. Some years afterward he built a little adobe
house, with a chapel, high up on the hill-side overlooking the orchard.
Thither he used to go for rest and at seasons of special devotion. After
his retirement, he went there to live, though he always kept his study
unchanged in the house of the new Archbishop.