their purpose, so they resolved to reveal it to no one; to make no
adieux, but to steal away disguised in civilian's clothes. They
comforted each other by recalling that St. Francis Xavier, when he set
forth as missionary to India, had stolen away like this; had "_passed
the dwelling of his parents without saluting them_," as they had learned
at school; terrible words to a French boy.
Father Vaillant's position was especially painful; his father was a
stern, silent man, long a widower, who loved his children with a jealous
passion and had no life but in their lives. Joseph was the eldest child.
The period between his resolve and its execution was a period of anguish
for him. As the date set for their departure drew near, he grew thinner
and paler than ever.
By agreement the two friends were to meet at dawn in a certain field
outside Riom on the fateful day, and there await the _diligence_ for
Paris. Jean Latour, having made his decision and pledged himself, knew
no wavering. On the appointed morning he stole out of his sister's house
and took his way through the sleeping town to that mountain field,
tip-tilted by reason of its steepness, just beginning to show a cold
green in the heavy light of a cloudy day-break. There he found his
comrade in a miserable plight. Joseph had been abroad in the fields all
night, wandering up and down, finding his purpose and losing it. His
face was swollen with weeping. He shook with a chill, his voice was
beyond his control.
"What shall I do, Jean? Help me!" he cried. "I cannot break my father's
heart, and I cannot break the vow I have made to Heaven. I had rather
die than do either. Ah, if I could but die of this misery, here, now!"
How clearly the old Archbishop could recall the scene; those two young
men in the fields in the grey morning, disguised as if they were
criminals, escaping by stealth from their homes. He had not known how to
comfort his friend; it seemed to him that Joseph was suffering more than
flesh could bear, that he was actually being torn in two by conflicting
desires. While they were pacing up and down, arm-in-arm, they heard a
hollow sound; the _diligence_ rumbling down the mountain gorge. Joseph
stood still and buried his face in his hands. The postilion's horn
sounded.
"_Allons_!" said Jean lightly. "_L'invitation du voyage_! You will
accompany me to Paris. Once we are there, if your father is not
reconciled, we will get Bishop F---- to absolve you from your promise,
and you can return to Riom. It is very simple."
He ran to the road-side and waved to the driver; the coach stopped. In a
moment they were off, and before long Joseph had fallen asleep in his
seat from sheer exhaustion. But he always said that if Jean Latour had
not supported him in that hour of torment, he would have been a parish
priest in the Puy de Dôm for the rest of his life.
Of the two young priests who set forth from Riom that morning in early
spring, Jean Latour had seemed the one so much more likely to succeed in
a missionary's life. He, indeed, had a sound mind in a sound body.
During the weeks they spent at the College of Foreign Missions in the
rue du Bac, the authorities had been very doubtful of Joseph's fitness
for the hardships of the mission field. Yet in the long test of years it
was that frail body that had endured more and accomplished more.
Father Latour often said that his diocese changed little except in
boundaries. The Mexicans were always Mexicans, the Indians were always
Indians. Santa Fé was a quiet backwater, with no natural wealth, no
importance commercially. But Father Vaillant had been plunged into the
midst of a great industrial expansion, where guile and trickery and
honourable ambition all struggled together; a territory that developed
by leaps and bounds and then experienced ruinous reverses. Every year,
even after he was crippled, he travelled thousands of miles by stage and
in his carriage, among the mountain towns that were now rich, now poor
and deserted; Boulder, Gold Hill, Caribou, Cache-à-la-Poudre, Spanish
Bar, South Park, up the Arkansas to Cache Creek and California Gulch.
And Father Vaillant had not been content to be a mere missionary priest.
He became a promoter. He saw a great future for the Church in Colorado.
While he was still so poor that he could not have a rectory of ordinary
comfort to live in, he began buying up great tracts of land for the
Church. He was able to buy a great deal of land for very little money,
but that little had to be borrowed from banks at a ruinous rate of
interest. He borrowed money to build schools and convents, and the
interest on his debts ate him up. He made long begging trips through
Ohio and Pennsylvania and Canada to raise money to pay this interest,
which grew like a rolling snowball. He formed a land company, went
abroad and floated bonds in France to raise money, and dishonest brokers
brought reproach upon his name.
When he was nearly seventy, with one leg four inches shorter than the
other, Father Vaillant, then first Bishop of Colorado, was summoned to
Rome to explain his complicated finance before the Papal court,--and he
had very hard work to satisfy the Cardinals.
When a dispatch was flashed into Santa Fé announcing Bishop Vaillant's
death, Father Latour at once took the new railroad for Denver. But he
could scarcely believe the telegram. He recalled the old nickname,
Trompe-la-Mort, and remembered how many times before he had hurried
across mountains and deserts, not daring to hope he would find his
friend alive.
Curiously, Father Latour could never feel that he had actually been
present at Father Joseph's funeral--or rather, he could not believe that
Father Joseph was there. The shrivelled little old man in the coffin,
scarcely larger than a monkey--that had nothing to do with Father
Vaillant. He could see Joseph as clearly as he could see Bernard, but
always as he was when they first came to New Mexico. It was not
sentiment; that was the picture of Father Joseph his memory produced for
him, and it did not produce any other. The funeral itself, he liked to
remember--as a recognition. It was held under canvas, in the open air;
there was not a building in Denver--in the whole Far West, for that
matter,--big enough for his _Blanchet's_ funeral. For two days before,
the populations of villages and mining camps had been streaming down the
mountains; they slept in wagons and tents and barns; they made a throng
like a National Convention in the convent square. And a strange thing
happened at that funeral:
Father Revardy, the French priest who had gone from Santa Fé to
Colorado with Father Vaillant more than twenty years before, and had
been with him ever since as his curate and Vicar, had been sent to
France on business for his Bishop. While there, he was told by his
physician that he had a fatal malady, and he at once took ship and
hurried homeward, to make his report to Bishop Vaillant and to die in
the harness. When he got as far as Chicago, he had an acute seizure and
was taken to a Catholic hospital, where he lay very ill. One morning a
nurse happened to leave a newspaper near his bed; glancing at it, Father
Revardy saw an announcement of the death of the Bishop of Colorado. When
the Sister returned, she found her patient dressed. He convinced her
that he must be driven to the railway station at once. On reaching
Denver he entered a carriage and asked to be taken to the Bishop's
funeral. He arrived there when the services were nearly half over, and
no one ever forgot the sight of this dying man, supported by the
cab-driver and two priests, making his way through the crowd and
dropping upon his knees beside the bier. A chair was brought for him,
and for the rest of the ceremony he sat with his forehead resting
against the edge of the coffin. When Bishop Vaillant was carried away to
his tomb, Father Revardy was taken to the hospital, where he died a few
days later. It was one more instance of the extraordinary personal
devotion that Father Joseph had so often aroused and retained so long,
in red men and yellow men and white.
6
DURING those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little
about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care
of itself. But he had an intellectual curiosity about dying; about the
changes that took place in a man's beliefs and scale of values. More and
more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego
itself. This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his
religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a
human creature. And he noticed that he judged conduct differently now;
his own and that of others. The mistakes of his life seemed unimportant;
accidents that had occurred _en route_, like the shipwreck in Galveston
harbour, or the runaway in which he was hurt when he was first on his
way to New Mexico in search of his Bishopric.
He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his
memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the
Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy
City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the
building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with calendared
time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle
of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or
outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all
comprehensible.
Sometimes, when Magdalena or Bernard came in and asked him a question,
it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He
could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only
extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his
life--some part of which they knew nothing.
When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there
was not much present left; Father Joseph dead, the Olivares both dead,
Kit Carson dead, only the minor characters of his life remained in
present time. One morning, several weeks after the Bishop came back to
Santa Fé, one of the strong people of the old deep days of life did
appear, not in memory but in the flesh, in the shallow light of the
present; Eusabio the Navajo. Out on the Colorado Chiquito he had heard
the word, passed on from one trading post to another, that the old
Archbishop was failing, and the Indian came to Santa Fé. He, too, was
an old man now. Once again their fine hands clasped. The Bishop brushed
a drop of moisture from his eye.
"I have wished for this meeting, my friend. I had thought of asking you
to come, but it is a long way."
The old Navajo smiled. "Not long now, any more. I come on the cars,
Padre. I get on the cars at Gallup, and the same day I am here. You
remember when we come together once to Santa Fé from my country? How
long it take us? Two weeks, pretty near. Men travel faster now, but I do
not know if they go to better things."
"We must not try to know the future, Eusabio. It is better not. And
Manuelito?"
"Manuelito is well; he still leads his people."
Eusabio did not stay long, but he said he would come again to-morrow, as
he had business in Santa Fé that would keep him for some days. He had
no business there; but when he looked at Father Latour he said to
himself, "It will not be long."
After he was gone, the Bishop turned to Bernard; "My son, I have lived
to see two great wrongs righted; I have seen the end of black slavery,
and I have seen the Navajos restored to their own country."
For many years Father Latour used to wonder if there would ever be an
end to the Indian wars while there was one Navajo or Apache left alive.
Too many traders and manufacturers made a rich profit out of that
warfare; a political machine and immense capital were employed to keep
it going.
7
THE Bishop's middle years in New Mexico had been clouded by the
persecution of the Navajos and their expulsion from their own country.
Through his friendship with Eusabio he had become interested in the
Navajos soon after he first came to his new diocese, and he admired
them; they stirred his imagination. Though this nomad people were much
slower to adopt white man's ways than the homestaying Indians who dwelt
in pueblos, and were much more indifferent to missionaries and the white
man's religion, Father Latour felt a superior strength in them. There
was purpose and conviction behind their inscrutable reserve; something
active and quick, something with an edge. The expulsion of the Navajos
from their country, which had been theirs no man knew how long, had
seemed to him an injustice that cried to Heaven. Never could he forget
that terrible winter when they were being hunted down and driven by
thousands from their own reservation to the Bosque Redondo, three
hundred miles away on the Pecos River. Hundreds of them, men, women, and
children, perished from hunger and cold on the way; their sheep and
horses died from exhaustion crossing the mountains. None ever went
willingly; they were driven by starvation and the bayonet; captured in
isolated bands, and brutally deported.
It was his own misguided friend, Kit Carson, who finally subdued the
last unconquered remnant of that people; who followed them into the
depths of the Canyon de Chelly, whither they had fled from their grazing
plains and pine forests to make their last stand. They were shepherds,
with no property but their live-stock, encumbered by their women and
children, poorly armed and with scanty ammunition. But this canyon had
always before proved impenetrable to white troops. The Navajos believed
it could not be taken. They believed that their old gods dwelt in the
fastnesses of that canyon; like their Shiprock, it was an inviolate
place, the very heart and centre of their life.
Carson followed them down into the hidden world between those towering
walls of red sandstone, spoiled their stores, destroyed their
deep-sheltered corn-fields, cut down the terraced peach orchards so dear
to them. When they saw all that was sacred to them laid waste, the
Navajos lost heart. They did not surrender; they simply ceased to fight,
and were taken. Carson was a soldier under orders, and he did a
soldier's brutal work. But the bravest of the Navajo chiefs he did not
capture. Even after the crushing defeat of his people in the Canyon de
Chelly, Manuelito was still at large. It was then that Eusabio came to
Santa Fé to ask Bishop Latour to meet Manuelito at Zuñi. As a priest,
the Bishop knew that it was indiscreet to consent to a meeting with this
outlawed chief; but he was a man, too, and a lover of justice. The
request came to him in such a way that he could not refuse it. He went
with Eusabio.
Though the Government was offering a heavy reward for his person, living
or dead, Manuelito rode off his own reservation down into Zuñi in broad
daylight, attended by some dozen followers, all on wretched,
half-starved horses. He had been in hiding out in Eusabio's country on
the Colorado Chiquito.
It was Manuelito's hope that the Bishop would go to Washington and plead
his people's cause before they were utterly destroyed. They asked
nothing of the Government, he told Father Latour, but their religion,
and their own land where they had lived from immemorial times. Their
country, he explained, was a part of their religion; the two were
inseparable. The Canyon de Chelly the Padre knew; in that canyon his
people had lived when they were a small weak tribe; it had nourished and
protected them; it was their mother. Moreover, their gods dwelt
there--in those inaccessible white houses set in caverns up in the face
of the cliffs, which were older than the white man's world, and which no
living man had ever entered. Their gods were there, just as the Padre's
God was in his church.
And north of the Canyon de Chelly was the Shiprock, a slender crag
rising to a dizzy height, all alone out on a flat desert. Seen at a
distance of fifty miles or so, that crag presents the figure of a
one-masted fishing-boat under full sail, and the white man named it
accordingly. But the Indian has another name; he believes that rock was
once a ship of the air. Ages ago, Manuelito told the Bishop, that crag
had moved through the air, bearing upon its summit the parents of the
Navajo race from the place in the far north where all peoples were
made,--and wherever it sank to earth was to be their land. It sank in a
desert country, where it was hard for men to live. But they had found
the Canyon de Chelly, where there was shelter and unfailing water. That
canyon and the Shiprock were like kind parents to his people, places
more sacred to them than churches, more sacred than any place is to the
white man. How, then, could they go three hundred miles away and live in
a strange land?
Moreover, the Bosque Redondo was down on the Pecos, far east of the Rio
Grande. Manuelito drew a map in the sand, and explained to the Bishop
how, from the very beginning, it had been enjoined that his people must
never cross the Rio Grande on the east, or the Rio San Juan on the
north, or the Rio Colorado on the west; if they did, the tribe would
perish. If a great priest, like Father Latour, were to go to Washington
and explain these things, perhaps the Government would listen.
Father Latour tried to tell the Indian that in a Protestant country the
one thing a Roman priest could not do was to interfere in matters of
Government. Manuelito listened respectfully, but the Bishop saw that he
did not believe him. When he had finished, the Navajo rose and said:
"You are the friend of Cristobal, who hunts my people and drives them
over the mountains to the Bosque Redondo. Tell your friend that he will
never take me alive. He can come and kill me when he pleases. Two years
ago I could not count my flocks; now I have thirty sheep and a few
starving horses. My children are eating roots, and I do not care for my
life. But my mother and my gods are in the West, and I will never cross
the Rio Grande."
He never did cross it. He lived in hiding until the return of his exiled
people. For an unforeseen thing happened:
The Bosque Redondo proved an utterly unsuitable country for the Navajos.
It could have been farmed by irrigation, but they were nomad shepherds,
not farmers. There was no pasture for their flocks. There was no
firewood; they dug mesquite roots and dried them for fuel. It was an
alkaline country, and hundreds of Indians died from bad water. At last
the Government at Washington admitted its mistake--which governments
seldom do. After five years of exile, the remnant of the Navajo people
were permitted to go back to their sacred places.
In 1875 the Bishop took his French architect on a pack trip into Arizona
to show him something of the country before he returned to France, and
he had the pleasure of seeing the Navajo horsemen riding free over their
great plains again. The two Frenchmen went as far as the Canyon de
Chelly to behold the strange cliff ruins; once more crops were growing
down at the bottom of the world between the towering sandstone walls;
sheep were grazing under the magnificent cottonwoods and drinking at the
streams of sweet water; it was like an Indian Garden of Eden.
Now, when he was an old man and ill, scenes from those bygone times,
dark and bright, flashed back to the Bishop: the terrible faces of the
Navajos waiting at the place on the Rio Grande where they were being
ferried across into exile; the long streams of survivors going back to
their own country, driving their scanty flocks, carrying their old men
and their children. Memories, too, of that time he had spent with
Eusabio on the Little Colorado, in the early spring, when the lambing
season was not yet over,--dark horsemen riding across the sands with
orphan lambs in their arms--a young Navajo woman, giving a lamb her
breast until a ewe was found for it.
"Bernard," the old Bishop would murmur, "God has been very good to let
me live to see a happy issue to those old wrongs. I do not believe, as I
once did, that the Indian will perish. I believe that God will preserve
him."
8
THE American doctor was consulting with Archbishop S---- and the Mother
Superior. "It is his heart that is the trouble now. I have been giving
him small doses to stimulate it, but they no longer have any effect. I
scarcely dare increase them; it might be fatal at once. But that is why
you see such a change in him."
The change was that the old man did not want food, and that he slept, or
seemed to sleep, nearly all the time. On the last day of his life his
condition was pretty generally known. The Cathedral was full of people
all day long, praying for him; nuns and old women, young men and girls,
coming and going. The sick man had received the Viaticum early in the
morning. Some of the Tesuque Indians, who had been his country
neighbours, came into Santa Fé and sat all day in the Archbishop's
courtyard listening for news of him; with them was Eusabio the Navajo.
Fructosa and Tranquilino, his old servants, were with the supplicants in
the Cathedral.
The Mother Superior and Magdalena and Bernard attended the sick man.
There was little to do but to watch and pray, so peaceful and painless
was his repose. Sometimes it was sleep, they knew from his relaxed
features; then his face would assume personality, consciousness, even
though his eyes did not open.
Toward the close of day, in the short twilight after the candles were
lighted, the old Bishop seemed to become restless, moved a little, and
began to murmur; it was in the French tongue, but Bernard, though he
caught some words, could make nothing of them. He knelt beside the bed:
"What is it, Father? I am here."
He continued to murmur, to move his hands a little, and Magdalena
thought he was trying to ask for something, or to tell them something.
But in reality the Bishop was not there at all; he was standing in a
tip-tilted green field among his native mountains, and he was trying to
give consolation to a young man who was being torn in two before his eyes
by the desire to go and the necessity to stay. He was trying to forge a
new Will in that devout and exhausted priest; and the time was short,
for the _diligence_ for Paris was already rumbling down the mountain
gorge.
When the Cathedral bell tolled just after dark, the Mexican population
of Santa Fé fell upon their knees, and all American Catholics as well.
Many others who did not kneel prayed in their hearts. Eusabio and the
Tesuque boys went quietly away to tell their people; and the next
morning the old Archbishop lay before the high altar in the church he
had built.