new missionary priests who arrived from France. His successor, the
second Archbishop, was also an Auvergnat, from Father Latour's own
college, and the clergy of northern New Mexico remained predominantly
French. When a company of new priests arrived (they never came singly)
Archbishop S---- sent them out to stay with Father Latour for a few
months, to receive instruction in Spanish, in the topography of the
diocese, in the character and traditions of the different pueblos.
Father Latour's recreation was his garden. He grew such fruit as was
hardly to be found even in the old orchards of California; cherries and
apricots, apples and quinces, and the peerless pears of France--even the
most delicate varieties. He urged the new priests to plant fruit trees
wherever they went, and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their
starchy diet. Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a
garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his
students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was
lost and saved in a garden.
He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one
hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats
over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle
thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of
Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full
of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost
pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple--the true Episcopal
colour and countless variations of it.
In the year 1885 there came to New Mexico a young Seminarian, Bernard
Ducrot, who became like a son to Father Latour. The story of the old
Archbishop's life, often told in the cloisters and class-rooms at
Montferrand, had taken hold of this boy's imagination, and he had long
waited an opportunity to come. Bernard was handsome in person and of
unusual mentality, had in himself the fineness to reverence all that was
fine in his venerable Superior. He anticipated Father Latour's every
wish, shared his reflections, cherished his reminiscences.
"Surely," the Bishop used to say to the priests, "God himself has sent
me this young man to help me through the last years."
2
THROUGHOUT the autumn of the year '88 the Bishop was in good health. He
had five French priests in his house, and he still rode abroad with them
to visit the nearer missions. On Christmas eve, he performed the
midnight Mass in the Cathedral at Santa Fé. In January he drove with
Bernard to Santa Cruz to see the resident priest, who was ill. While
they were on their way home the weather suddenly changed, and a violent
rain-storm overtook them. They were in an open buggy and were drenched
to the skin before they could reach any Mexican house for shelter.
After arriving home, Father Latour went at once to bed. During the night
he slept badly and felt feverish. He called none of his household, but
arose at the usual hour before dawn and went into the chapel for his
devotions. While he was at prayer, he was seized with a chill. He made
his way to the kitchen, and his old cook, Fructosa, alarmed at once, put
him to bed and gave him brandy. This chill left him feverish, and he
developed a distressing cough.
After keeping quietly to his bed for a few days, the Bishop called young
Bernard to him one morning and said:
"Bernard, will you ride into Santa Fé to-day and see the Archbishop for
me. Ask him whether it will be quite convenient if I return to occupy my
study in his house for a short time. _Je voudrais mourir à Santa Fé_."
"I will go at once, Father. But you should not be discouraged; one does
not die of a cold."
The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of
having lived."
From that moment on, he spoke only French to those about him, and this
sudden relaxing of his rule alarmed his household more than anything
else about his condition. When a priest had received bad news from home,
or was ill, Father Latour would converse with him in his own language;
but at other times he required that all conversation in his house should
be in Spanish or English.
Bernard returned that afternoon to say that the Archbishop would be
delighted if Father Latour would remain the rest of the winter with him.
Magdalena had already begun to air his study and put it in order, and
she would be in special attendance upon him during his visit. The
Archbishop would send his new carriage to fetch him, as Father Latour
had only an open buggy.
"Not to-day, _mon fils_," said the Bishop. "We will choose a day when I
am feeling stronger; a fair day, when we can go in my own buggy, and you
can drive me. I wish to go late in the afternoon, toward sunset."
Bernard understood. He knew that once, long ago, at that hour of the
day, a young Bishop had ridden along the Albuquerque road and seen Santa
Fé for the first time... And often, when they were driving into town
together, the Bishop had paused with Bernard on that hill-top from which
Father Vaillant had looked back on Santa Fé, when he went away to
Colorado to begin the work that had taken the rest of his life and made
him, too, a Bishop in the end.
The old town was better to look at in those days, Father Latour used to
tell Bernard with a sigh. In the old days it had an individuality, a
style of its own; a tawny adobe town with a few green trees, set in a
half-circle of carnelian-coloured hills; that and no more. But the year
1880 had begun a period of incongruous American building. Now, half the
plaza square was still adobe, and half was flimsy wooden buildings with
double porches, scroll-work and jackstraw posts and banisters painted
white. Father Latour said the wooden houses which had so distressed him
in Ohio, had followed him. All this was quite wrong for the Cathedral
he had been so many years in building,--the Cathedral that had taken
Father Vaillant's place in his life after that remarkable man went away.
Father Latour made his last entry into Santa Fé at the end of a
brilliant February afternoon; Bernard stopped the horses at the foot of
the long street to await the sunset.
Wrapped in his Indian blankets, the old Archbishop sat for a long while,
looking at the open, golden face of his Cathedral. How exactly young
Molny, his French architect, had done what he wanted! Nothing
sensational, simply honest building and good stone-cutting,--good Midi
Romanesque of the plainest. And even now, in winter, when the acacia
trees before the door were bare, how it was of the South, that church,
how it sounded the note of the South!
No one but Molny and the Bishop had ever seemed to enjoy the beautiful
site of that building,--perhaps no one ever would. But these two had
spent many an hour admiring it. The steep carnelian hills drew up so
close behind the church that the individual pine trees thinly wooding
their slopes were clearly visible. From the end of the street where the
Bishop's buggy stood, the tawny church seemed to start directly out of
those rose-coloured hills--with a purpose so strong that it was like
action. Seen from this distance, the Cathedral lay against the
pinesplashed slopes as against a curtain. When Bernard drove slowly
nearer, the backbone of the hills sank gradually, and the towers rose
clear into the blue air, while the body of the church still lay against
the mountain.
The young architect used to tell the Bishop that only in Italy, or in
the opera, did churches leap out of mountains and black pines like that.
More than once Molny had called the Bishop from his study to look at the
unfinished building when a storm was coming up; then the sky above the
mountain grew black, and the carnelian rocks became an intense lavender,
all their pine trees strokes of dark purple; the hills drew nearer, the
whole background approached like a dark threat.
"Setting," Molny used to tell Father Latour, "is accident. Either a
building is a part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there,
time will only make it stronger."
The Bishop was recalling this saying of Molny's when a voice out of the
present sounded in his ear. It was Bernard.
"A fine sunset, Father. See how red the mountains are growing; Sangre de
Cristo."
Yes, Sangre de Cristo; but no matter how scarlet the sunset, those red
hills never became vermilion, but a more and more intense rose-carnelian;
not the colour of living blood, the Bishop had often reflected, but the
colour of the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in old
churches in Rome, which liquefies upon occasion.
3
THE next morning Father Latour wakened with a grateful sense of nearness
to his Cathedral--which would also be his tomb. He felt safe under its
shadow; like a boat come back to harbour, lying under its own sea-wall.
He was in his old study; the Sisters had sent a little iron bed from the
school for him, and their finest linen and blankets. He felt a great
content at being here, where he had come as a young man and where he had
done his work. The room was little changed; the same rugs and skins on
the earth floor, the same desk with his candlesticks, the same thick,
wavy white walls that muted sound, that shut out the world and gave
repose to the spirit.
As the darkness faded into the grey of a winter morning, he listened for
the church bells,--and for another sound, that always amused him here;
the whistle of a locomotive. Yes, he had come with the buffalo, and he
had lived to see railway trains running into Santa Fé. He had
accomplished an historic period.
All his relatives at home, and his friends in New Mexico, had expected
that the old Archbishop would spend his closing years in France,
probably in Clermont, where he could occupy a chair in his old college.
That seemed the natural thing to do, and he had given it grave
consideration. He had half expected to make some such arrangement the
last time he was in Auvergne, just before his retirement from his duties
as Archbishop. But in the Old World he found himself homesick for the
New. It was a feeling he could not explain; a feeling that old age did
not weigh so heavily upon a man in New Mexico as in the Puy-de-Dôm.
He loved the towering peaks of his native mountains, the comeliness of
the villages, the cleanness of the country-side, the beautiful lines and
the cloisters of his own college. Clermont was beautiful,--but he found
himself sad there; his heart lay like a stone in his breast. There was
too much past, perhaps... When the summer wind stirred the lilacs in the
old gardens and shook down the blooms of the horsechestnuts, he
sometimes closed his eyes and thought of the high song the wind was
singing in the straight, striped pine trees up in the Navajo forests.
During the day his nostalgia wore off, and by dinner-time it was quite
gone. He enjoyed his dinner and his wine, and the company of cultivated
men, and usually retired in good spirits. It was in the early morning
that he felt the ache in his breast; it had something to do with waking
in the early morning. It seemed to him that the grey dawn lasted so long
here, the country was a long while in coming to life. The gardens and
the fields were damp, heavy-mists hung in the valley and obscured the
mountains; hours went by before the sun could disperse those vapours and
warm and purify the villages.
In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began
to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first
consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the
windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sagebrush and sweet clover; a
wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry "To-day,
to-day," like a child's.
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble
women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those
light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy
again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new
countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear
harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open
range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had
quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of
plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing,
utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of
the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long
after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to
him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something
soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the
pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the
bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the
blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
4
FATHER LATOUR arranged an order for his last days; if routine was
necessary to him in health, it was even more so in sickness. Early in
the morning Bernard came with hot water, shaved him, and helped him to
bathe. They had brought nothing in from the country with them but
clothing and linen, and the silver toilet articles the Olivares had
given the Bishop so long ago; these thirty years he had washed his hands
in that hammered basin. Morning prayers over, Magdalena came with his
breakfast, and he sat in his easy-chair while she made his bed and
arranged his room. Then he was ready to see visitors. The Archbishop
came in for a few moments, when he was at home; the Mother Superior, the
American doctor. Bernard read aloud to him the rest of the morning; St.
Augustine, or the letters of Madame de Sevigné, or his favourite
Pascal.
Sometimes, in the morning hours, he dictated to his young disciple
certain facts about the old missions in the diocese; facts which he had
come upon by chance and feared would be forgotten. He wished he could do
this systematically, but he had not the strength. Those truths and
fancies relating to a bygone time would probably be lost; the old
legends and customs and superstitions were already dying out. He wished
now that long ago he had had the leisure to write them down, that he
could have arrested their flight by throwing about them the light and
elastic mesh of the French tongue.
He had, indeed, for years, directed the thoughts of the young priests
whom he instructed to the fortitude and devotion of those first
missionaries, the Spanish friars; declaring that his own life, when he
first came to New Mexico, was one of ease and comfort compared with
theirs. If he had used to be abroad for weeks together on short rations,
sleeping in the open, unable to keep his body clean, at least he had the
sense of being in a friendly world, where by every man's fireside a
welcome awaited him.
But the Spanish Fathers who came up to Zuñi, then went north to the
Navajos, west to the Hopis, east to all the pueblos scattered between
Albuquerque and Taos, they came into a hostile country, carrying little
provisionment but their breviary and crucifix. When their mules were
stolen by Indians, as often happened, they proceeded on foot, without a
change of raiment, without food or water. A European could scarcely
imagine such hardships. The old countries were worn to the shape of
human life, made into an investiture, a sort of second body, for man.
There the wild herbs and the wild fruits and the forest fungi were
edible. The streams were sweet water, the trees afforded shade and
shelter. But in the alkali deserts the water holes were poisonous, and
the vegetation offered nothing to a starving man. Everything was dry,
prickly, sharp; Spanish bayonet, juniper, greasewood, cactus; the
lizard, the rattlesnake,--and man made cruel by a cruel life. Those
early missionaries threw themselves naked upon the hard heart of a
country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants. They
thirsted in its deserts, starved among its rocks, climbed up and down
its terrible canyons on stone-bruised feet, broke long fasts by unclean
and repugnant food. Surely these endured _Hunger_, _Thirst_, _Cold_,
_Nakedness_, of a kind beyond any conception St. Paul and his brethren
could have had. Whatever the early Christians suffered, it all happened
in that safe little Mediterranean world, amid the old manners, the old
landmarks. If they endured martyrdom, they died among their brethren,
their relics were piously preserved, their names lived in the mouths of
holy men.
Riding with his Auvergnats to the old missions that had been scenes of
martyrdom, the Bishop used to remind them that no man could know what
triumphs of faith had happened there, where one white man met torture
and death alone among so many infidels, or what visions and revelations
God may have granted to soften that brutal end.
When, as a young man, Father Latour first went down into Old Mexico, to
claim his See at the hands of the Bishop of Durango, he had met on his
journey priests from the missions of Sonora and Lower California, who
related many stories of the blessed experiences of the early Franciscan
missionaries. Their way through the wilderness had blossomed with little
miracles, it seemed. At one time, when the renowned Father Junípero
Serra, and his two companions, were in danger of their lives from trying
to cross a river at a treacherous point, a mysterious stranger appeared
out of the rocks on the opposite shore, and calling to them in Spanish,
told them to follow him to a point farther up the stream, where they
forded in safety. When they begged to know his name, he evaded them and
disappeared. At another time, they were traversing a great plain, and
were famished for water and almost spent; a young horseman overtook them
and gave them three ripe pomegranates, then galloped away. This fruit
not only quenched their thirst, but revived and strengthened them as
much as the most nourishing food could have done, and they completed
their journey like fresh men.
One night in his travels through Durango, Father Latour was entertained
at a great country estate where the resident chaplain happened to be a
priest from one of the western missions; and he told a story of this
same Father Junípero which had come down in his own monastery from the
old times.
Father Junípero, he said, with a single companion, had once arrived at
his monastery on foot, without provisions. The Brothers had welcomed the
two in astonishment, believing it impossible that men could have crossed
so great a stretch of desert in this naked fashion. The Superior
questioned them as to whence they had come, and said the mission should
not have allowed them to set off without a guide and without food. He
marvelled how they could have got through alive. But Father Junípero
replied that they had fared very well, and had been most agreeably
entertained by a poor Mexican family on the way. At this a muleteer, who
was bringing in wood for the Brothers, began to laugh, and said there
was no house for twelve leagues, nor anyone at all living in the sandy
waste through which they had come; and the Brothers confirmed him in
this.
Then Father Junípero and his companion related fully their adventure.
They had set out with bread and water for one day. But on the second day
they had been travelling since dawn across a cactus desert and had begun
to lose heart when, near sunset, they espied in the distance three great
cottonwood trees, very tall in the declining light. Toward these they
hastened. As they approached the trees, which were large and green and
were shedding cotton freely, they observed an ass tied to a dead trunk
which stuck up out of the sand. Looking about for the owner of the ass,
they came upon a little Mexican house with an oven by the door and
strings of red peppers hanging on the wall. When they called aloud, a
venerable Mexican, clad in sheepskins, came out and greeted them kindly,
asking them to stay the night. Going in with him, they observed that all
was neat and comely, and the wife, a young woman of beautiful
countenance, was stirring porridge by the fire. Her child, scarcely more
than an infant and with no garment but his little shirt, was on the
floor beside her, playing with a pet lamb.
They found these people gentle, pious, and well-spoken. The husband said
they were shepherds. The priests sat at their table and shared their
supper, and afterward read the evening prayers. They had wished to
question the host about the country, and about his mode of life and
where he found pasture for his flock, but they were overcome by a great
and sweet weariness, and taking each a sheepskin provided him, they lay
down upon the floor and sank into deep sleep. When they awoke in the
morning they found all as before, and food set upon the table, but the
family were absent, even to the pet lamb,--having gone, the Fathers
supposed, to care for their flock.
When the Brothers at the monastery heard this account they were amazed,
declaring that there were indeed three cottonwood trees growing together
in the desert, a well-known landmark; but that if a settler had come, he
must have come very lately. So Father Junípero and Father Andrea, his
companion, with some of the Brothers and the scoffing muleteer, went
back into the wilderness to prove the matter. The three tall trees they
found, shedding their cotton, and the dead trunk to which the ass had
been tied. But the ass was not there, nor any house, nor the oven by the
door. Then the two Fathers sank down upon their knees in that blessed
spot and kissed the earth, for they perceived what Family it was that
had entertained them there.
Father Junípero confessed to the Brothers how from the moment he
entered the house he had been strangely drawn to the child, and desired
to take him in his arms, but that he kept near his mother. When the
priest was reading the evening prayers the child sat upon the floor
against his mother's knee, with the lamb in his lap, and the Father
found it hard to keep his eyes upon his breviary. After prayers, when he
bade his hosts good-night, he did indeed stoop over the little boy in
blessing; and the child had lifted his hand, and with his tiny finger
made the cross upon Father Junípero's forehead.
This story of Father Junípero's Holy Family made a strong impression
upon the Bishop, when it was told him by the fireside of that great
hacienda where he was a guest for the night. He had such an affection
for that story, indeed, that he had allowed himself to repeat it on but
two occasions; once to the nuns of Mother Philomène's convent in Riom,
and once at a dinner given by Cardinal Mazzucchi, in Rome. There is
always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to
simplicity--the queen making hay among the country girls--but how much
more endearing was the belief that They, after so many centuries of
history and glory, should return to play Their first parts, in the
persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the
poorest of the poor,--in a wilderness at the end of the world, where the
angels could scarcely find Them!
5
AFTER his _déjeuner_ the old Archbishop made a pretence of sleeping. He
requested not to be disturbed until dinner-time, and those long hours of
solitude were precious to him. His bed was at the dark end of the room,
where the shadows were restful to his eyes; on fair days the other end
was full of sunlight, on grey days the light of the fire flickered along
the wavy white walls. Lying so still that the bed-clothes over his body
scarcely moved, with his hands resting delicately on the sheet beside
him or upon his breast, the Bishop was living over his life. When he was
otherwise motionless, the thumb of his right hand would sometimes gently
touch a ring on his forefinger, an amethyst with an inscription cut upon
it, _Auspice Maria_,--Father Vaillant's signet-ring; and then he was
almost certainly thinking of Joseph; of their life together here, in this
room ... in Ohio beside the Great Lakes ... as young men in Paris ... as
boys at Montferrand. There were many passages in their missionary
life that he loved to recall; and how often and how fondly he recalled
the beginning of it!
They were both young men in their twenties, curates to older priests,
when there came to Clermont a Bishop from Ohio, a native of Auvergne,
looking for volunteers for his missions in the West. Father Jean and
Father Joseph heard him lecture at the Seminary, and talked with him in
private. Before he left for the North, they had pledged themselves to
meet him in Paris at a given date, to spend some weeks of preparation at
the College for Foreign Missions in the rue du Bac, and then to sail
with him from Cherbourg.