Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Author: Willa Cather
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0200491.txt
Language: English
Date first posted: July 2002
Date most recently updated: July 2022
This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.
This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
gutenberg.net.au/licence.html
To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to gutenberg.net.au
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Author: Willa Cather
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE. AT ROME
1. THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
2. MISSIONARY JOURNEYS
3. THE MASS AT ÁCOMA
4. SNAKE ROOT
5. PADRE MARTÍNEZ
6. DOÑA ISABELLA
7. THE GREAT DIOCESE
8. GOLD UNDER PIKE'S PEAK
9. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP
"Auspice Maria!"
FATHER VAILLANT'S SIGNET-RING
PROLOGUE: AT ROME
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a
missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens
of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was
famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in
which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the
south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging
a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps
connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded
square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading
ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the
balustrade was the drop into the air, and far below the landscape
stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye
until it reached Rome itself.
It was early when the Spanish Cardinal and his guests sat down to
dinner. The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour,
and across the shining folds of country the low profile of the city
barely fretted the skyline--indistinct except for the dome of St.
Peter's, bluish grey like the flattened top of a great balloon,
just a flash of copper light on its soft metallic surface. The
Cardinal had an eccentric preference for beginning his dinner at
this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence of the sun
suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a peculiar
quality of climax--of splendid finish. It was both intense and
soft, with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura
of red in its flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminating
their mahogany trunks and blurring their dark foliage; it warmed
the bright green of the orange trees and the rose of the oleander
blooms to gold; sent congested spiral patterns quivering over the
damask and plate and crystal. The churchmen kept their rectangular
clerical caps on their heads to protect them from the sun. The
three Cardinals wore black cassocks with crimson pipings and
crimson buttons, the Bishop a long black coat over his violet vest.
They were talking business; had met, indeed, to discuss an
anticipated appeal from the Provincial Council at Baltimore for the
founding of an Apostolic Vicarate in New Mexico--a part of North
America recently annexed to the United States. This new territory
was vague to all of them, even to the missionary Bishop. The
Italian and French Cardinals spoke of it as Le Mexique, and the
Spanish host referred to it as "New Spain." Their interest in the
projected Vicarate was tepid, and had to be continually revived by
the missionary, Father Ferrand; Irish by birth, French by ancestry--
a man of wide wanderings and notable achievement in the New World,
an Odysseus of the Church. The language spoken was French--the
time had already gone by when Cardinals could conveniently discuss
contemporary matters in Latin.
The French and Italian Cardinals were men in vigorous middle life--
the Norman full-belted and ruddy, the Venetian spare and sallow and
hook-nosed. Their host, García María de Allande, was still a young
man. He was dark in colouring, but the long Spanish face, that
looked out from so many canvases in his ancestral portrait gallery,
was in the young Cardinal much modified through his English mother.
With his caffè oscuro eyes, he had a fresh, pleasant English mouth,
and an open manner.
During the latter years of the reign of Gregory XVI, de Allande had
been the most influential man at the Vatican; but since the death
of Gregory, two years ago, he had retired to his country estate.
He believed the reforms of the new Pontiff impractical and
dangerous, and had withdrawn from politics, confining his activities
to work for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith--that
organization which had been so fostered by Gregory. In his leisure
the Cardinal played tennis. As a boy, in England, he had been
passionately fond of this sport. Lawn tennis had not yet come into
fashion; it was a formidable game of indoor tennis the Cardinal
played. Amateurs of that violent sport came from Spain and France
to try their skill against him.
The missionary, Bishop Ferrand, looked much older than any of them,
old and rough--except for his clear, intensely blue eyes. His
diocese lay within the icy arms of the Great Lakes, and on his
long, lonely horseback rides among his missions the sharp winds had
bitten him well. The missionary was here for a purpose, and he
pressed his point. He ate more rapidly than the others and had
plenty of time to plead his cause,--finished each course with such
dispatch that the Frenchman remarked he would have been an ideal
dinner companion for Napoleon.
The Bishop laughed and threw out his brown hands in apology.
"Likely enough I have forgot my manners. I am preoccupied. Here
you can scarcely understand what it means that the United States
has annexed that enormous territory which was the cradle of the
Faith in the New World. The Vicarate of New Mexico will be in a
few years raised to an Episcopal See, with jurisdiction over a
country larger than Central and Western Europe, barring Russia.
The Bishop of that See will direct the beginning of momentous
things."
"Beginnings," murmured the Venetian, "there have been so many. But
nothing ever comes from over there but trouble and appeals for
money."
The missionary turned to him patiently. "Your Eminence, I beg you
to follow me. This country was evangelized in fifteen hundred, by
the Franciscan Fathers. It has been allowed to drift for nearly
three hundred years and is not yet dead. It still pitifully calls
itself a Catholic country, and tries to keep the forms of religion
without instruction. The old mission churches are in ruins. The
few priests are without guidance or discipline. They are lax in
religious observance, and some of them live in open concubinage.
If this Augean stable is not cleansed, now that the territory has
been taken over by a progressive government, it will prejudice the
interests of the Church in the whole of North America."
"But these missions are still under the jurisdiction of Mexico, are
they not?" inquired the Frenchman.
"In the See of the Bishop of Durango?" added María de Allande.
The missionary sighed. "Your Eminence, the Bishop of Durango is an
old man; and from his seat to Santa Fé is a distance of fifteen
hundred English miles. There are no wagon roads, no canals, no
navigable rivers. Trade is carried on by means of pack-mules, over
treacherous trails. The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I
do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are frequent. The
very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and
arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep,
sometimes a thousand. Up and down these stony chasms the traveller
and his mules clamber as best they can. It is impossible to go far
in any direction without crossing them. If the Bishop of Durango
should summon a disobedient priest by letter, who shall bring the
Padre to him? Who can prove that he ever received the summons?
The post is carried by hunters, fur trappers, gold seekers, whoever
happens to be moving on the trails."
The Norman Cardinal emptied his glass and wiped his lips.
"And the inhabitants, Father Ferrand? If these are the travellers,
who stays at home?"
"Some thirty Indian nations, Monsignor, each with its own customs
and language, many of them fiercely hostile to each other. And the
Mexicans, a naturally devout people. Untaught and unshepherded,
they cling to the faith of their fathers."
"I have a letter from the Bishop of Durango, recommending his Vicar
for this new post," remarked María de Allande.
"Your Eminence, it would be a great misfortune if a native priest
were appointed; they have never done well in that field. Besides,
this Vicar is old. The new Vicar must be a young man, of strong
constitution, full of zeal, and above all, intelligent. He will
have to deal with savagery and ignorance, with dissolute priests
and political intrigue. He must be a man to whom order is
necessary--as dear as life."
The Spaniard's coffee-coloured eyes showed a glint of yellow as he
glanced sidewise at his guest. "I suspect, from your exordium,
that you have a candidate--and that he is a French priest,
perhaps?"
"You guess rightly, Monsignor. I am glad to see that we have the
same opinion of French missionaries."
"Yes," said the Cardinal lightly, "they are the best missionaries.
Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits
accomplish more. They are the great organizers."
"Better than the Germans?" asked the Venetian, who had Austrian
sympathies.
"Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange! The French
missionaries have a sense of proportion and rational adjustment.
They are always trying to discover the logical relation of things.
It is a passion with them." Here the host turned to the old Bishop
again. "But your Grace, why do you neglect this Burgundy? I had
this wine brought up from my cellar especially to warm away the
chill of your twenty Canadian winters. Surely, you do not gather
vintages like this on the shores of the Great Lake Huron?"
The missionary smiled as he took up his untouched glass. "It is
superb, your Eminence, but I fear I have lost my palate for
vintages. Out there, a little whisky, or Hudson Bay Company rum,
does better for us. I must confess I enjoyed the champagne in
Paris. We had been forty days at sea, and I am a poor sailor."
"Then we must have some for you." He made a sign to his major-
domo. "You like it very cold? And your new Vicar Apostolic, what
will he drink in the country of bison and serpents à sonnettes?
And what will he eat?"
"He will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili, and he
will be glad to drink water when he can get it. He will have no
easy life, your Eminence. That country will drink up his youth and
strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every
sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom. Only last year the Indian
pueblo of San Fernandez de Taos murdered and scalped the American
Governor and some dozen other whites. The reason they did not
scalp their Padre, was that their Padre was one of the leaders of
the rebellion and himself planned the massacre. That is how things
stand in New Mexico!"
"Where is your candidate at present, Father?"
"He is a parish priest, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in my
diocese. I have watched his work for nine years. He is but
thirty-five now. He came to us directly from the Seminary."
"And his name is?"
"Jean Marie Latour."
María de Allande, leaning back in his chair, put the tips of his
long fingers together and regarded them thoughtfully.
"Of course, Father Ferrand, the Propaganda will almost certainly
appoint to this Vicarate the man whom the Council at Baltimore
recommends."
"Ah yes, your Eminence; but a word from you to the Provincial
Council, an inquiry, a suggestion--"
"Would have some weight, I admit," replied the Cardinal smiling.
"And this Latour is intelligent, you say? What a fate you are
drawing upon him! But I suppose it is no worse than a life among
the Hurons. My knowledge of your country is chiefly drawn from the
romances of Fenimore Cooper, which I read in English with great
pleasure. But has your priest a versatile intelligence? Any
intelligence in matters of art, for example?"
"And what need would he have for that, Monsignor? Besides, he is
from Auvergne."
The three Cardinals broke into laughter and refilled their glasses.
They were all becoming restive under the monotonous persistence of
the missionary.
"Listen," said the host, "and I will relate a little story, while
the Bishop does me the compliment to drink my champagne. I have a
reason for asking this question which you have answered so finally.
In my family house in Valencia I have a number of pictures by the
great Spanish painters, collected chiefly by my great-grandfather,
who was a man of perception in these things and, for his time,
rich. His collection of El Greco is, I believe, quite the best in
Spain. When my progenitor was an old man, along came one of these
missionary priests from New Spain, begging. All missionaries from
the Americas were inveterate beggars, then as now, Bishop Ferrand.
This Franciscan had considerable success, with his tales of pious
Indian converts and struggling missions. He came to visit at my
great-grandfather's house and conducted devotions in the absence of
the Chaplain. He wheedled a good sum of money out of the old man,
as well as vestments and linen and chalices--he would take
anything--and he implored my grandfather to give him a painting
from his great collection, for the ornamentation of his mission
church among the Indians. My grandfather told him to choose from
the gallery, believing the priest would covet most what he himself
could best afford to spare. But not at all; the hairy Franciscan
pounced upon one of the best in the collection; a young St. Francis
in meditation, by El Greco, and the model for the saint was one of
the very handsome Dukes of Albuquerque. My grandfather protested;
tried to persuade the fellow that some picture of the Crucifixion,
or a martyrdom, would appeal more strongly to his redskins. What
would a St. Francis, of almost feminine beauty, mean to the scalp-
takers?
"All in vain. The missionary turned upon his host with a reply
which has become a saying in our family: 'You refuse me this
picture because it is a good picture. It is too good for God, but
it is not too good for you.'
"He carried off the painting. In my grandfather's manuscript
catalogue, under the number and title of the St. Francis, is
written: Given to Fray Teodocio, for the glory of God, to enrich
his mission church at Pueblo de Cia, among the savages of New
Spain.
"It is because of this lost treasure, Father Ferrand, that I
happened to have had some personal correspondence with the Bishop
of Durango. I once wrote the facts to him fully. He replied to me
that the mission at Cia was long ago destroyed and its furnishings
scattered. Of course the painting may have been ruined in a
pillage or massacre. On the other hand, it may still be hidden
away in some crumbling sacristy or smoky wigwam. If your French
priest had a discerning eye, now, and were sent to this Vicarate,
he might keep my El Greco in mind."
The Bishop shook his head. "No, I can't promise you--I do not
know. I have noticed that he is a man of severe and refined
tastes, but he is very reserved. Down there the Indians do not
dwell in wigwams, your Eminence," he added gently.
"No matter, Father. I see your redskins through Fenimore Cooper,
and I like them so. Now let us go to the terrace for our coffee
and watch the evening come on."
The Cardinal led his guests up the narrow stairway. The long
gravelled terrace and its balustrade were blue as a lake in the
dusky air. Both sun and shadows were gone. The folds of russet
country were now violet. Waves of rose and gold throbbed up the
sky from behind the dome of the Basilica.
As the churchmen walked up and down the promenade, watching the
stars come out, their talk touched upon many matters, but they
avoided politics, as men are apt to do in dangerous times. Not a
word was spoken of the Lombard war, in which the Pope's position
was so anomalous. They talked instead of a new opera by young
Verdi, which was being sung in Venice; of the case of a Spanish
dancing-girl who had lately become a religious and was said to be
working miracles in Andalusia. In this conversation the missionary
took no part, nor could he even follow it with much interest. He
asked himself whether he had been on the frontier so long that he
had quite lost his taste for the talk of clever men. But before
they separated for the night María de Allande spoke a word in his
ear, in English.
"You are distrait, Father Ferrand. Are you wishing to unmake your
new Bishop already? It is too late. Jean Marie Latour--am I
right?"
BOOK ONE
THE VICAR APOSTOLIC
1
THE CRUCIFORM TREE
One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed
by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country
somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way, and was
trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his
sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country
in which he found himself was so featureless--or rather, that it
was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could
see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red
sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape
of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of
square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so
many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early
morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he
had stood still. He must have travelled through thirty miles of
these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks
between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see
anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he
seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened
cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks--
yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and
naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the
junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill
was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish
green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of
the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other,
elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.
The blunted pyramid, repeated so many hundred times upon his retina
and crowding down upon him in the heat, had confused the traveller,
who was sensitive to the shape of things.
"Mais, c'est fantastique!" he muttered, closing his eyes to rest
them from the intrusive omnipresence of the triangle.
When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one
juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a
thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet
high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying
branches, with a little crest of green in the centre, just above
the cleavage. Living vegetation could not present more faithfully
the form of the Cross.
The traveller dismounted, drew from his pocket a much worn book,
and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree.
Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat
and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a
priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not
that of an ordinary man,--it was built for the seat of a fine
intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his
features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular
elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin
jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth--brave,
sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the
desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward
himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he
knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.
His devotions lasted perhaps half an hour, and when he rose he
looked refreshed. He began talking to his mare in halting Spanish,
asking whether she agreed with him that it would be better to push
on, weary as she was, in hope of finding the trail. He had no
water left in his canteen, and the horses had had none since
yesterday morning. They had made a dry camp in these hills last
night. The animals were almost at the end of their endurance, but
they would not recuperate until they got water, and it seemed best
to spend their last strength in searching for it.
On a long caravan trip across Texas this man had had some
experience of thirst, as the party with which he travelled was
several times put on a meagre water ration for days together. But
he had not suffered then as he did now. Since morning he had had a
feeling of illness; the taste of fever in his mouth, and alarming
seizures of vertigo. As these conical hills pressed closer and
closer upon him, he began to wonder whether his long wayfaring from
the mountains of Auvergne were possibly to end here. He reminded
himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, "J'ai
soif!" Of all our Lord's physical sufferings, only one, "I
thirst," rose to His lips. Empowered by long training, the young
priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated
upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him
the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that
conception.
His mare stumbled, breaking his mood of contemplation. He was
sorrier for his beasts than for himself. He, supposed to be the
intelligence of the party, had got the poor animals into this
interminable desert of ovens. He was afraid he had been absent-
minded, had been pondering his problem instead of heeding the way.
His problem was how to recover a Bishopric. He was a Vicar
Apostolic, lacking a Vicarate. He was thrust out; his flock would
have none of him.
The traveller was Jean Marie Latour, consecrated Vicar Apostolic of
New Mexico and Bishop of Agathonica in partibus at Cincinnati a
year ago--and ever since then he had been trying to reach his
Vicarate. No one in Cincinnati could tell him how to get to New
Mexico--no one had ever been there. Since young Father Latour's
arrival in America, a railroad had been built through from New York
to Cincinnati; but there it ended. New Mexico lay in the middle of
a dark continent. The Ohio merchants knew of two routes only. One
was the Santa Fé trail from St. Louis, but at that time it was very
dangerous because of Comanche Indian raids. His friends advised
Father Latour to go down the river to New Orleans, thence by boat
to Galveston, across Texas to San Antonio, and to wind up into New
Mexico along the Rio Grande valley. This he had done, but with
what misadventures!
His steamer was wrecked and sunk in the Galveston harbour, and he
had lost all his worldly possessions except his books, which he
saved at the risk of his life. He crossed Texas with a traders'
caravan, and approaching San Antonio he was hurt in jumping from an
overturning wagon, and had to lie for three months in the crowded
house of a poor Irish family, waiting for his injured leg to get
strong.
It was nearly a year after he had embarked upon the Mississippi
that the young Bishop, at about the sunset hour of a summer
afternoon, at last beheld the old settlement toward which he had
been journeying so long. The wagon train had been going all day
through a greasewood plain, when late in the afternoon the
teamsters began shouting that over yonder was the Villa. Across
the level, Father Latour could distinguish low brown shapes, like
earthworks, lying at the base of wrinkled green mountains with bare
tops,--wave-like mountains, resembling billows beaten up from a
flat sea by a heavy gale; and their green was of two colours--aspen
and evergreen, not intermingled but lying in solid areas of light
and dark.
As the wagons went forward and the sun sank lower, a sweep of red
carnelian-coloured hills lying at the foot of the mountains came
into view; they curved like two arms about a depression in the
plain; and in that depression was Santa Fé, at last! A thin,
wavering adobe town . . . a green plaza . . . at one end a church
with two earthen towers that rose high above the flatness. The
long main street began at the church, the town seemed to flow from
it like a stream from a spring. The church towers, and all the low
adobe houses, were rose colour in that light,--a little darker in
tone than the amphitheatre of red hills behind; and periodically
the plumes of poplars flashed like gracious accent marks,--
inclining and recovering themselves in the wind.
The young Bishop was not alone in the exaltation of that hour;
beside him rode Father Joseph Vaillant, his boyhood friend, who had
made this long pilgrimage with him and shared his dangers. The two
rode into Santa Fé together, claiming it for the glory of God.
* * *
How, then, had Father Latour come to be here in the sand-hills,
many miles from his seat, unattended, far out of his way and with
no knowledge of how to get back to it?
On his arrival at Santa Fé, this was what had happened: The
Mexican priests there had refused to recognize his authority. They
disclaimed any knowledge of a Vicarate Apostolic, or a Bishop of
Agathonica. They said they were under the jurisdiction of the
Bishop of Durango, and had received no instructions to the
contrary. If Father Latour was to be their Bishop, where were his
credentials? A parchment and letters, he knew, had been sent to
the Bishop of Durango, but these had evidently got no farther.
There was no postal service in this part of the world; the quickest
and surest way to communicate with the Bishop of Durango was to go
to him. So, having travelled for nearly a year to reach Santa Fé,
Father Latour left it after a few weeks, and set off alone on
horseback to ride down into Old Mexico and back, a journey of full
three thousand miles.
He had been warned that there were many trails leading off the Rio
Grande road, and that a stranger might easily mistake his way. For
the first few days he had been cautious and watchful. Then he must
have grown careless and turned into some purely local trail. When
he realized that he was astray, his canteen was already empty and
his horses seemed too exhausted to retrace their steps. He had
persevered in this sandy track, which grew ever fainter, reasoning
that it must lead somewhere.
All at once Father Latour thought he felt a change in the body of
his mare. She lifted her head for the first time in a long while,
and seemed to redistribute her weight upon her legs. The pack-mule
behaved in a similar manner, and both quickened their pace. Was it
possible they scented water?
Nearly an hour went by, and then, winding between two hills that
were like all the hundreds they had passed, the two beasts whinnied
simultaneously. Below them, in the midst of that wavy ocean of
sand, was a green thread of verdure and a running stream. This
ribbon in the desert seemed no wider than a man could throw a
stone,--and it was greener than anything Latour had ever seen, even
in his own greenest corner of the Old World. But for the quivering
of the hide on his mare's neck and shoulders, he might have thought
this a vision, a delusion of thirst.
Running water, clover fields, cottonwoods, acacias, little adobe
houses with brilliant gardens, a boy driving a flock of white goats
toward the stream,--that was what the young Bishop saw.
A few moments later, when he was struggling with his horses, trying
to keep them from overdrinking, a young girl with a black shawl
over her head came running toward him. He thought he had never
seen a kindlier face. Her greeting was that of a Christian.
"Ave María Purísima, Señor. Whence do you come?"
"Blessed child," he replied in Spanish, "I am a priest who has lost
his way. I am famished for water."
"A priest?" she cried, "that is not possible! Yet I look at you,
and it is true. Such a thing has never happened to us before; it
must be in answer to my father's prayers. Run, Pedro, and tell
father and Salvatore."
2
HIDDEN WATER
An hour later, as darkness came over the sand-hills, the young
Bishop was seated at supper in the mother-house of this Mexican
settlement--which, he learned, was appropriately called Agua
Secreta, Hidden Water. At the table with him were his host, an old
man called Benito, the oldest son, and two grandsons. The old man
was a widower, and his daughter, Josepha, the girl who had run to
meet the Bishop at the stream, was his housekeeper. Their supper
was a pot of frijoles cooked with meat, bread and goat's milk,
fresh cheese and ripe apples.
From the moment he entered this room with its thick whitewashed
adobe walls, Father Latour had felt a kind of peace about it. In
its bareness and simplicity there was something comely, as there
was about the serious girl who had placed their food before them
and who now stood in the shadows against the wall, her eager eyes
fixed upon his face. He found himself very much at home with the
four dark-headed men who sat beside him in the candlelight. Their
manners were gentle, their voices low and agreeable. When he said
grace before meat, the men had knelt on the floor beside the table.
The grandfather declared that the Blessed Virgin must have led the
Bishop from his path and brought him here to baptize the children
and to sanctify the marriages. Their settlement was little known,
he said. They had no papers for their land and were afraid the
Americans might take it away from them. There was no one in their
settlement who could read or write. Salvatore, his oldest son, had
gone all the way to Albuquerque to find a wife, and had married
there. But the priest had charged him twenty pesos, and that was
half of all he had saved to buy furniture and glass windows for his
house. His brothers and cousins, discouraged by his experience,
had taken wives without the marriage sacrament.
In answer to the Bishop's questions, they told him the simple story
of their lives. They had here all they needed to make them happy.
They spun and wove from the fleece of their flocks, raised their
own corn and wheat and tobacco, dried their plums and apricots for
winter. Once a year the boys took the grain up to Albuquerque to
have it ground, and bought such luxuries as sugar and coffee. They
had bees, and when sugar was high they sweetened with honey.
Benito did not know in what year his grandfather had settled here,
coming from Chihuahua with all his goods in ox-carts. "But it was
soon after the time when the French killed their king. My
grandfather had heard talk of that before he left home, and used to
tell us boys about it when he was an old man."
"Perhaps you have guessed that I am a Frenchman," said Father
Latour.
No, they had not, but they felt sure he was not an American. José,
the elder grandson, had been watching the visitor uncertainly. He
was a handsome boy, with a triangle of black hair hanging over his
rather sullen eyes. He now spoke for the first time.
"They say at Albuquerque that now we are all Americans, but that is
not true, Padre. I will never be an American. They are infidels."
"Not all, my son. I have lived among Americans in the north for
ten years, and I found many devout Catholics."
The young man shook his head. "They destroyed our churches when
they were fighting us, and stabled their horses in them. And now
they will take our religion away from us. We want our own ways and
our own religion."
Father Latour began to tell them about his friendly relations with
Protestants in Ohio, but they had not room in their minds for two
ideas; there was one Church, and the rest of the world was infidel.
One thing they could understand; that he had here in his saddle-
bags his vestments, the altar stone, and all the equipment for
celebrating the Mass; and that to-morrow morning, after Mass, he
would hear confessions, baptize, and sanctify marriages.
After supper Father Latour took up a candle and began to examine
the holy images on the shelf over the fireplace. The wooden
figures of the saints, found in even the poorest Mexican houses,
always interested him. He had never yet seen two alike. These
over Benito's fireplace had come in the ox-carts from Chihuahua
nearly sixty years ago. They had been carved by some devout soul,
and brightly painted, though the colours had softened with time,
and they were dressed in cloth, like dolls. They were much more to
his taste than the factory-made plaster images in his mission
churches in Ohio--more like the homely stone carvings on the front
of old parish churches in Auvergne. The wooden Virgin was a
sorrowing mother indeed,--long and stiff and severe, very long from
the neck to the waist, even longer from waist to feet, like some of
the rigid mosaics of the Eastern Church. She was dressed in black,
with a white apron, and a black reboso over her head, like a
Mexican woman of the poor. At her right was St. Joseph, and at her
left a fierce little equestrian figure, a saint wearing the costume
of a Mexican ranchero, velvet trousers richly embroidered and wide
at the ankle, velvet jacket and silk shirt, and a high-crowned,
broad-brimmed Mexican sombrero. He was attached to his fat horse
by a wooden pivot driven through the saddle.
The younger grandson saw the priest's interest in this figure.
"That," he said, "is my name saint, Santiago."
"Oh, yes; Santiago. He was a missionary, like me. In our country
we call him St. Jacques, and he carries a staff and a wallet--but
here he would need a horse, surely."
The boy looked at him in surprise. "But he is the saint of horses.
Isn't he that in your country?"
The Bishop shook his head. "No. I know nothing about that. How
is he the saint of horses?"
"He blesses the mares and makes them fruitful. Even the Indians
believe that. They know that if they neglect to pray to Santiago
for a few years, the foals do not come right."
A little later, after his devotions, the young Bishop lay down in
Benito's deep feather-bed, thinking how different was this night
from his anticipation of it. He had expected to make a dry camp in
the wilderness, and to sleep under a juniper tree, like the
Prophet, tormented by thirst. But here he lay in comfort and
safety, with love for his fellow creatures flowing like peace about
his heart. If Father Vaillant were here, he would say, "A
miracle"; that the Holy Mother, to whom he had addressed himself
before the cruciform tree, had led him hither. And it was a
miracle, Father Latour knew that. But his dear Joseph must always
have the miracle very direct and spectacular, not with Nature, but
against it. He would almost be able to tell the colour of the
mantle Our Lady wore when She took the mare by the bridle back
yonder among the junipers and led her out of the pathless sand-
hills, as the angel led the ass on the Flight into Egypt.
* * *
In the late afternoon of the following day the Bishop was walking
alone along the banks of the life-giving stream, reviewing in his
mind the events of the morning. Benito and his daughter had made
an altar before the sorrowful wooden Virgin, and placed upon it
candles and flowers. Every soul in the village, except Salvatore's
sick wife, had come to the Mass. He had performed marriages and
baptisms and heard confessions and confirmed until noon. Then came
the christening feast. José had killed a kid the night before, and
immediately after her confirmation Josepha slipped away to help her
sisters-in-law roast it. When Father Latour asked her to give him
his portion without chili, the girl inquired whether it was more
pious to eat it like that. He hastened to explain that Frenchmen,
as a rule, do not like high seasoning, lest she should hereafter
deprive herself of her favourite condiment.
After the feast the sleepy children were taken home, the men
gathered in the plaza to smoke under the great cottonwood trees.
The Bishop, feeling a need of solitude, had gone forth to walk,
firmly refusing an escort. On his way he passed the earthen
thrashing-floor, where these people beat out their grain and
winnowed it in the wind, like the Children of Israel. He heard a
frantic bleating behind him, and was overtaken by Pedro with the
great flock of goats, indignant at their day's confinement, and
wild to be in the fringe of pasture along the hills. They leaped
the stream like arrows speeding from the bow, and regarded the
Bishop as they passed him with their mocking, humanly intelligent
smile. The young bucks were light and elegant in figure, with
their pointed chins and polished tilted horns. There was great
variety in their faces, but in nearly all something supercilious
and sardonic. The angoras had long silky hair of a dazzling
whiteness. As they leaped through the sunlight they brought to
mind the chapter in the Apocalypse, about the whiteness of them
that were washed in the blood of the Lamb. The young Bishop smiled
at his mixed theology. But though the goat had always been the
symbol of pagan lewdness, he told himself that their fleece had
warmed many a good Christian, and their rich milk nourished sickly
children.
About a mile above the village he came upon the water-head, a
spring overhung by the sharp-leafed variety of cottonwood called
water willow. All about it crowded the oven-shaped hills,--nothing
to hint of water until it rose miraculously out of the parched and
thirsty sea of sand. Some subterranean stream found an outlet
here, was released from darkness. The result was grass and trees
and flowers and human life; household order and hearths from which
the smoke of burning piñon logs rose like incense to Heaven.
The Bishop sat a long time by the spring, while the declining sun
poured its beautifying light over those low, rose-tinted houses and
bright gardens. The old grandfather had shown him arrow-heads and
corroded medals, and a sword hilt, evidently Spanish, that he had
found in the earth near the water-head. This spot had been a
refuge for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it.
It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country
where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess,
and later the Christian priests had planted a cross. This
settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles
of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to
remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren. The Faith
planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not
dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman. He was not
troubled about the revolt in Santa Fé, or the powerful old native
priest who led it--Father Martínez, of Taos, who had ridden over
from his parish expressly to receive the new Vicar and to drive him
away. He was rather terrifying, that old priest, with his big
head, violent Spanish face, and shoulders like a buffalo; but the
day of his tyranny was almost over.
3
THE BISHOP CHEZ LUI
It was the late afternoon of Christmas Day, and the Bishop sat at
his desk writing letters. Since his return to Santa Fé his
official correspondence had been heavy; but the closely-written
sheets over which he bent with a thoughtful smile were not to go to
Monsignori, or to Archbishops, or to the heads of religious
houses,--but to France, to Auvergne, to his own little town; to a
certain grey, winding street, paved with cobbles and shaded by tall
chestnuts on which, even to-day, some few brown leaves would be
clinging, or dropping one by one, to be caught in the cold green
ivy on the walls.
The Bishop had returned from his long horseback trip into Mexico
only nine days ago. At Durango the old Mexican prelate there had,
after some delay, delivered to him the documents that defined his
Vicarate, and Father Latour rode back the fifteen hundred miles to
Santa Fé through the sunny days of early winter. On his arrival he
found amity instead of enmity awaiting him. Father Vaillant had
already endeared himself to the people. The Mexican priest who was
in charge of the pro-cathedral had gracefully retired--gone to
visit his family in Old Mexico, and carried his effects along with
him. Father Vaillant had taken possession of the priest's house,
and with the help of carpenters and the Mexican women of the parish
had put it in order. The Yankee traders and the military
Commandant at Fort Marcy had sent generous contributions of bedding
and blankets and odd pieces of furniture.
The Episcopal residence was an old adobe house, much out of repair,
but with possibilities of comfort. Father Latour had chosen for
his study a room at one end of the wing. There he sat, as this
afternoon of Christmas Day faded into evening. It was a long room
of an agreeable shape. The thick clay walls had been finished on
the inside by the deft palms of Indian women, and had that
irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human
hand. There was a reassuring solidity and depth about those walls,
rounded at door-sills and window-sills, rounded in wide wings about
the corner fireplace. The interior had been newly whitewashed in
the Bishop's absence, and the flicker of the fire threw a rosy glow
over the wavy surfaces, never quite evenly flat, never a dead
white, for the ruddy colour of the clay underneath gave a warm tone
to the lime wash. The ceiling was made of heavy cedar beams,
overlaid by aspen saplings, all of one size, lying close together
like the ribs in corduroy and clad in their ruddy inner skins. The
earth floor was covered with thick Indian blankets; two blankets,
very old, and beautiful in design and colour, were hung on the
walls like tapestries.
On either side of the fire-place plastered recesses were let into
the wall. In one, narrow and arched, stood the Bishop's crucifix.
The other was square, with a carved wooden door, like a grill, and
within it lay a few rare and beautiful books. The rest of the
Bishop's library was on open shelves at one end of the room.
The furniture of the house Father Vaillant had bought from the
departed Mexican priest. It was heavy and somewhat clumsy, but not
unsightly. All the wood used in making tables and bedsteads was
hewn from tree boles with the ax or hatchet. Even the thick planks
on which the Bishop's theological books rested were ax-dressed.
There was not at that time a turning-lathe or a saw-mill in all
northern New Mexico. The native carpenters whittled out chair
rungs and table legs, and fitted them together with wooden pins
instead of iron nails. Wooden chests were used in place of
dressers with drawers, and sometimes these were beautifully carved,
or covered with decorated leather. The desk at which the Bishop
sat writing was an importation, a walnut "secretary" of American
make (sent down by one of the officers of the Fort at Father
Vaillant's suggestion). His silver candlesticks he had brought
from France long ago. They were given to him by a beloved aunt
when he was ordained.
The young Bishop's pen flew over the paper, leaving a trail of
fine, finished French script behind, in violet ink.
"My new study, dear brother, as I write, is full of the delicious
fragrance of the piñon logs burning in my fireplace. (We use this
kind of cedar-wood altogether for fuel, and it is highly aromatic,
yet delicate. At our meanest tasks we have a perpetual odour of
incense about us.) I wish that you, and my dear sister, could look
in upon this scene of comfort and peace. We missionaries wear a
frock-coat and wide-brimmed hat all day, you know, and look like
American traders. What a pleasure to come home at night and put on
my old cassock! I feel more like a priest then--for so much of the
day I must be a 'business man'!--and, for some reason, more like a
Frenchman. All day I am an American in speech and thought--yes, in
heart, too. The kindness of the American traders, and especially
of the military officers at the Fort, commands more than a
superficial loyalty. I mean to help the officers at their task
here. I can assist them more than they realize. The Church can do
more than the Fort to make these poor Mexicans 'good Americans.'
And it is for the people's good; there is no other way in which
they can better their condition.
"But this is not the day to write you of my duties or my purposes.
To-night we are exiles, happy ones, thinking of home. Father
Joseph has sent away our Mexican woman,--he will make a good cook
of her in time, but to-night he is preparing our Christmas dinner
himself. I had thought he would be worn out to-day, for he has
been conducting a Novena of High Masses, as is the custom here
before Christmas. After the Novena, and the midnight Mass last
night, I supposed he would be willing to rest to-day; but not a bit
of it. You know his motto, 'Rest in action.' I brought him a
bottle of olive-oil on my horse all the way from Durango (I say
'olive-oil,' because here 'oil' means something to grease the
wheels of wagons!), and he is making some sort of cooked salad. We
have no green vegetables here in winter, and no one seems ever to
have heard of that blessed plant, the lettuce. Joseph finds it
hard to do without salad-oil, he always had it in Ohio, though it
was a great extravagance. He has been in the kitchen all
afternoon. There is only an open fire-place for cooking, and an
earthen roasting-oven out in the court-yard. But he has never
failed me in anything yet; and I think I can promise you that to-
night two Frenchmen will sit down to a good dinner and drink your
health."
The Bishop laid down his pen and lit his two candles with a
splinter from the fire, then stood dusting his fingers by the deep-
set window, looking out at the pale blue darkening sky. The
evening-star hung above the amber afterglow, so soft, so brilliant
that she seemed to bathe in her own silver light. Ave Maris
Stella, the song which one of his friends at the Seminary used to
intone so beautifully; humming it softly he returned to his desk
and was just dipping his pen in the ink when the door opened, and a
voice said,
"Monseigneur est servi! Alors, Jean, veux-tu apporter les
bougies?"
The Bishop carried the candles into the dining-room, where the
table was laid and Father Vaillant was changing his cook's apron
for his cassock. Crimson from standing over an open fire, his
rugged face was even homelier than usual--though one of the first
things a stranger decided upon meeting Father Joseph was that the
Lord had made few uglier men. He was short, skinny, bow-legged
from a life on horseback, and his countenance had little to
recommend it but kindliness and vivacity. He looked old, though he
was then about forty. His skin was hardened and seamed by exposure
to weather in a bitter climate, his neck scrawny and wrinkled like
an old man's. A bold, blunt-tipped nose, positive chin, a very
large mouth,--the lips thick and succulent but never loose, never
relaxed, always stiffened by effort or working with excitement.
His hair, sunburned to the shade of dry hay, had originally been
tow-coloured; "Blanchet" ("Whitey") he was always called at the
Seminary. Even his eyes were near-sighted, and of such a pale,
watery blue as to be unimpressive. There was certainly nothing in
his outer case to suggest the fierceness and fortitude and fire of
the man, and yet even the thick-blooded Mexican half-breeds knew
his quality at once. If the Bishop returned to find Santa Fé
friendly to him, it was because everybody believed in Father
Vaillant--homely, real, persistent, with the driving power of a
dozen men in his poorly-built body.
On coming into the dining-room, Bishop Latour placed his
candlesticks over the fire-place, since there were already six upon
the table, illuminating the brown soup-pot. After they had stood
for a moment in prayer, Father Joseph lifted the cover and ladled
the soup into the plates, a dark onion soup with croutons. The
Bishop tasted it critically and smiled at his companion. After the
spoon had travelled to his lips a few times, he put it down and
leaning back in his chair remarked,
"Think of it, Blanchet; in all this vast country between the
Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean, there is probably not another
human being who could make a soup like this."
"Not unless he is a Frenchman," said Father Joseph. He had tucked
a napkin over the front of his cassock and was losing no time in
reflection.
"I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph," the Bishop
continued, "but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the
work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined
tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this
soup."
Father Joseph frowned intently at the earthen pot in the middle of
the table. His pale, near-sighted eyes had always the look of
peering into distance. "C'est ça, c'est vrai" he murmured. "But
how," he exclaimed as he filled the Bishop's plate again, "how can
a man make a proper soup without leeks, that king of vegetables?
We cannot go on eating onions for ever."
After carrying away the soupière, he brought in the roast chicken
and pommes sautées. "And salad, Jean," he continued as he began to
carve. "Are we to eat dried beans and roots for the rest of our
lives? Surely we must find time to make a garden. Ah, my garden
at Sandusky! And you could snatch me away from it! You will admit
that you never ate better lettuces in France. And my vineyard; a
natural habitat for the vine, that. I tell you, the shores of Lake
Erie will be covered with vineyards one day. I envy the man who is
drinking my wine. Ah well, that is a missionary's life; to plant
where another shall reap."
As this was Christmas Day, the two friends were speaking in their
native tongue. For years they had made it a practice to speak
English together, except upon very special occasions, and of late
they conversed in Spanish, in which they both needed to gain
fluency.
"And yet sometimes you used to chafe a little at your dear Sandusky
and its comforts," the Bishop reminded him--"to say that you would
end a home-staying parish priest, after all."
"Of course, one wants to eat one's cake and have it, as they say in
Ohio. But no farther, Jean. This is far enough. Do not drag me
any farther." Father Joseph began gently to coax the cork from a
bottle of red wine with his fingers. "This I begged for your dinner
at the hacienda where I went to baptize the baby on St. Thomas's
Day. It is not easy to separate these rich Mexicans from their
French wine. They know its worth." He poured a few drops and tried
it. "A slight taste of the cork; they do not know how to keep it
properly. However, it is quite good enough for missionaries."
"You ask me not to drag you any farther, Joseph. I wish," Bishop
Latour leaned back in his chair and locked his hands together
beneath his chin, "I wish I knew how far this is! Does anyone know
the extent of this diocese, or of this territory? The Commandant
at the Fort seems as much in the dark as I. He says I can get some
information from the scout, Kit Carson, who lives at Taos."
"Don't begin worrying about the diocese, Jean. For the present,
Santa Fé is the diocese. Establish order at home. To-morrow I
will have a reckoning with the church-wardens, who allowed that
band of drunken cowboys to come in to the midnight Mass and defile
the font. There is enough to do here. Festina lente. I have made
a resolve not to go more than three days' journey from Santa Fé for
one year."
The Bishop smiled and shook his head. "And when you were at the
Seminary, you made a resolve to lead a life of contemplation."
A light leaped into Father Joseph's homely face. "I have not yet
renounced that hope. One day you will release me, and I will
return to some religious house in France and end my days in
devotion to the Holy Mother. For the time being, it is my destiny
to serve Her in action. But this is far enough, Jean."
The Bishop again shook his head and murmured, "Who knows how far?"
The wiry little priest whose life was to be a succession of
mountain ranges, pathless deserts, yawning canyons and swollen
rivers, who was to carry the Cross into territories yet unknown and
unnamed, who would wear down mules and horses and scouts and stage-
drivers, tonight looked apprehensively at his superior and
repeated, "No more, Jean. This is far enough." Then making haste
to change the subject, he said briskly, "A bean salad was the best
I could do for you; but with onion, and just a suspicion of salt
pork, it is not so bad."
Over the compote of dried plums they fell to talking of the great
yellow ones that grew in the old Latour garden at home. Their
thoughts met in that tilted cobble street, winding down a hill,
with the uneven garden walls and tall horse-chestnuts on either
side; a lonely street after nightfall, with soft street lamps
shaped like lanterns at the darkest turnings. At the end of it was
the church where the Bishop made his first Communion, with a grove
of flat-cut plane trees in front, under which the market was held
on Tuesdays and Fridays.
While they lingered over these memories--an indulgence they seldom
permitted themselves--the two missionaries were startled by a
volley of rifle-shots and bloodcurdling yells without, and the
galloping of horses. The Bishop half rose, but Father Joseph
reassured him with a shrug.
"Do not discompose yourself. The same thing happened here on the
eve of All Souls' Day. A band of drunken cowboys, like those who
came into the church last night, go out to the pueblo and get the
Tesuque Indian boys drunk, and then they ride in to serenade the
soldiers at the Fort in this manner."
4
A BELL AND A MIRACLE
On the morning after the Bishop's return from Durango, after his
first night in his Episcopal residence, he had a pleasant awakening
from sleep. He had ridden into the court-yard after nightfall,
having changed horses at a rancho and pushed on nearly sixty miles
in order to reach home. Consequently he slept late the next
morning--did not awaken until six o'clock, when he heard the
Angelus ringing. He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to
let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half
believing that he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard
every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marvelling to hear it rung
correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an
interval between); and from a bell with beautiful tone. Full,
clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through
the air like a globe of silver. Before the nine strokes were done
Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm
trees,--Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there.
Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden,
pervasive sense of the East. Once before he had been carried out
of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened in a street
in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman
with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a
honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa--but before he could think of the name
he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and
all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent
one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now
this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than
sound could travel.
When he joined Father Vaillant at coffee, that impetuous man who
could never keep a secret asked him anxiously whether he had heard
anything.
"I thought I heard the Angelus, Father Joseph, but my reason tells
me that only a long sea voyage could bring me within sound of such
a bell."
"Not at all," said Father Joseph briskly. "I found that remarkable
bell here, in the basement of old San Miguel. They tell me it has
been here a hundred years or more. There is no church tower in the
place strong enough to hold it--it is very thick and must weigh
close upon eight hundred pounds. But I had a scaffolding built in
the churchyard, and with the help of oxen we raised it and got it
swung on cross-beams. I taught a Mexican boy to ring it properly
against your return."
"But how could it have come here? It is Spanish, I suppose?"
"Yes, the inscription is in Spanish, to St. Joseph, and the date is
1356. It must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart.
A heroic undertaking, certainly. Nobody knows where it was cast.
But they do tell a story about it: that it was pledged to St.
Joseph in the wars with the Moors, and that the people of some
besieged city brought all their plate and silver and gold ornaments
and threw them in with the baser metals. There is certainly a good
deal of silver in the bell, nothing else would account for its
tone."
Father Latour reflected. "And the silver of the Spaniards was
really Moorish, was it not? If not actually of Moorish make,
copied from their design. The Spaniards knew nothing about working
silver except as they learned it from the Moors."
"What are you doing, Jean? Trying to make my bell out an infidel?"
Father Joseph asked impatiently.
The Bishop smiled. "I am trying to account for the fact that when
I heard it this morning it struck me at once as something oriental.
A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our first bells,
and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe,
originally came from the East. He said the Templars brought the
Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a
Moslem custom."
Father Vaillant sniffed. "I noticed that scholars always manage to
dig out something belittling," he complained.
"Belittling? I should say the reverse. I am glad to think there
is Moorish silver in your bell. When we first came here, the one
good workman we found in Santa Fé was a silversmith. The Spaniards
handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught
the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors."
"I am no scholar, as you know," said Father Vaillant rising. "And
this morning we have many practical affairs to occupy us. I have
promised that you will give an audience to a good old man, a native
priest from the Indian mission at Santa Clara, who is returning
from Mexico. He has just been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our
Lady of Guadalupe and has been much edified. He would like to tell
you the story of his experience. It seems that ever since he was
ordained he has desired to visit the shrine. During your absence I
have found how particularly precious is that shrine to all
Catholics in New Mexico. They regard it as the one absolutely
authenticated appearance of the Blessed Virgin in the New World,
and a witness of Her affection for Her Church on this continent."
The Bishop went into his study, and Father Vaillant brought in
Padre Escolastico Herrera, a man of nearly seventy, who had been
forty years in the ministry, and had just accomplished the pious
desire of a lifetime. His mind was still full of the sweetness of
his late experience. He was so rapt that nothing else interested
him. He asked anxiously whether perhaps the Bishop would have more
leisure to attend to him later in the day. But Father Latour
placed a chair for him and told him to proceed.
The old man thanked him for the privilege of being seated. Leaning
forward, with his hands locked between his knees, he told the whole
story of the miraculous appearance, both because it was so dear to
his heart, and because he was sure that no "American" Bishop would
have heard of the occurrence as it was, though at Rome all the
details were well known and two Popes had sent gifts to the shrine.
On Saturday, December 9th, in the year 1531, a poor neophyte of the
monastery of St. James was hurrying down Tapeyac hill to attend
Mass in the City of Mexico. His name was Juan Diego and he was
fifty-five years old. When he was half way down the hill a light
shone in his path, and the Mother of God appeared to him as a young
woman of great beauty, clad in blue and gold. She greeted him by
name and said:
"Juan, seek out thy Bishop and bid him build a church in my honour
on the spot where I now stand. Go then, and I will bide here and
await thy return."
Brother Juan ran into the City and straight to the Bishop's palace,
where he reported the matter. The Bishop was Zumarraga, a
Spaniard. He questioned the monk severely and told him he should
have required a sign of the Lady to assure him that she was indeed
the Mother of God and not some evil spirit. He dismissed the poor
brother harshly and set an attendant to watch his actions.
Juan went forth very downcast and repaired to the house of his
uncle, Bernardino, who was sick of a fever. The two succeeding
days he spent in caring for this aged man who seemed at the point
of death. Because of the Bishop's reproof he had fallen into
doubt, and did not return to the spot where the Lady said She would
await him. On Tuesday he left the City to go back to his monastery
to fetch medicines for Bernardino, but he avoided the place where
he had seen the vision and went by another way.
Again he saw a light in his path and the Virgin appeared to him as
before, saying, "Juan, why goest thou by this way?"
Weeping, he told Her that the Bishop had distrusted his report, and
that he had been employed in caring for his uncle, who was sick
unto death. The Lady spoke to him with all comfort, telling him
that his uncle would be healed within the hour, and that he should
return to Bishop Zumarraga and bid him build a church where She had
first appeared to him. It must be called the shrine of Our Lady of
Guadalupe, after Her dear shrine of that name in Spain. When
Brother Juan replied to Her that the Bishop required a sign, She
said: "Go up on the rocks yonder, and gather roses."
Though it was December and not the season for roses, he ran up
among the rocks and found such roses as he had never seen before.
He gathered them until he had filled his tilma. The tilma was a
mantle worn only by the very poor,--a wretched garment loosely
woven of coarse vegetable fibre and sewn down the middle. When he
returned to the apparition, She bent over the flowers and took
pains to arrange them, then closed the ends of the tilma together
and said to him:
"Go now, and do not open your mantle until you open it before your
Bishop."
Juan sped into the City and gained admission to the Bishop, who was
in council with his Vicar.
"Your Grace," he said, "the Blessed Lady who appeared to me has
sent you these roses for a sign."
At this he held up one end of his tilma and let the roses fall in
profusion to the floor. To his astonishment, Bishop Zumarraga and
his Vicar instantly fell upon their knees among the flowers. On
the inside of his poor mantle was a painting of the Blessed Virgin,
in robes of blue and rose and gold, exactly as She had appeared to
him upon the hillside.
A shrine was built to contain this miraculous portrait, which since
that day has been the goal of countless pilgrimages and has
performed many miracles.
Of this picture Padre Escolastico had much to say: he affirmed that
it was of marvellous beauty, rich with gold, and the colours as
pure and delicate as the tints of early morning. Many painters had
visited the shrine and marvelled that paint could be laid at all
upon such poor and coarse material. In the ordinary way of nature,
the flimsy mantle would have fallen to pieces long ago. The Padre
modestly presented Bishop Latour and Father Joseph with little
medals he had brought from the shrine; on one side a relief of the
miraculous portrait, on the other an inscription: Non fecit
taliter omni nationi. (She hath not dealt so with any nation.)
Father Vaillant was deeply stirred by the priest's recital, and
after the old man had gone he declared to the Bishop that he meant
himself to make a pilgrimage to this shrine at the earliest
opportunity.
"What a priceless thing for the poor converts of a savage country!"
he exclaimed, wiping his glasses, which were clouded by his strong
feeling. "All these poor Catholics who have been so long without
instruction have at least the reassurance of that visitation. It
is a household word with them that their Blessed Mother revealed
Herself in their own country, to a poor convert. Doctrine is well
enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold
in our hands and love."
Father Vaillant began pacing restlessly up and down as he spoke,
and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend
that was dear to him. "Where there is great love there are always
miracles," he said at length. "One might almost say that an
apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see
you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for
you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much
upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us
from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that
for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there
about us always."
BOOK TWO
MISSIONARY JOURNEYS
1
THE WHITE MULES
In mid-March, Father Vaillant was on the road, returning from a
missionary journey to Albuquerque. He was to stop at the rancho of
a rich Mexican, Manuel Lujon, to marry his men and maid servants
who were living in concubinage, and to baptize the children. There
he would spend the night. To-morrow or the day after he would go
on to Santa Fé, halting by the way at the Indian pueblo of Santo
Domingo to hold service. There was a fine old mission church at
Santo Domingo, but the Indians were of a haughty and suspicious
disposition. He had said Mass there on his way to Albuquerque,
nearly a week ago. By dint of canvassing from house to house, and
offering medals and religious colour prints to all who came to
church, he had got together a considerable congregation. It was a
large and prosperous pueblo, set among clean sand-hills, with its
rich irrigated farm lands lying just below, in the valley of the
Rio Grande. His congregation was quiet, dignified, attentive.
They sat on the earth floor, wrapped in their best blankets, repose
in every line of their strong, stubborn backs. He harangued them
in such Spanish as he could command, and they listened with
respect. But bring their children to be baptized, they would not.
The Spaniards had treated them very badly long ago, and they had
been meditating upon their grievance for many generations. Father
Vaillant had not baptized one infant there, but he meant to stop
to-morrow and try again. Then back to his Bishop, provided he
could get his horse up La Bajada Hill.
He had bought his horse from a Yankee trader and had been woefully
deceived. One week's journey of from twenty to thirty miles a day
had shown the beast up for a wind-broken wreck. Father Vaillant's
mind was full of material cares as he approached Manuel Lujon's
place beyond Bernalillo. The rancho was like a little town, with
all its stables, corrals, and stake fences. The casa grande was
long and low, with glass windows and bright blue doors, a portale
running its full length, supported by blue posts. Under this
portale the adobe wall was hung with bridles, saddles, great boots
and spurs, guns and saddle blankets, strings of red peppers, fox
skins, and the skins of two great rattlesnakes.
When Father Vaillant rode in through the gateway, children came
running from every direction, some with no clothing but a little
shirt, and women with no shawls over their black hair came running
after the children. They all disappeared when Manuel Lujon walked
out of the great house, hat in hand, smiling and hospitable. He
was a man of thirty-five, settled in figure and somewhat full under
the chin. He greeted the priest in the name of God and put out a
hand to help him alight, but Father Vaillant sprang quickly to the
ground.
"God be with you, Manuel, and with your house. But where are those
who are to be married?"
"The men are all in the field, Padre. There is no hurry. A little
wine, a little bread, coffee, repose--and then the ceremonies."
"A little wine, very willingly, and bread, too. But not until
afterward. I meant to catch you all at dinner, but I am two hours
late because my horse is bad. Have someone bring in my saddle-
bags, and I will put on my vestments. Send out to the fields for
your men, Señor Lujon. A man can stop work to be married."
The swarthy host was dazed by this dispatch. "But one moment,
Padre. There are all the children to baptize; why not begin with
them, if I cannot persuade you to wash the dust from your sainted
brow and repose a little."
"Take me to a place where I can wash and change my clothes, and I
will be ready before you can get them here. No, I tell you, Lujon,
the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is but
Christian. I will baptize the children to-morrow morning, and
their parents will at least have been married over night."
Father Joseph was conducted to his chamber, and the older boys were
sent running off across the fields to fetch the men. Lujon and his
two daughters began constructing an altar at one end of the sala.
Two old women came to scrub the floor, and another brought chairs
and stools.
"My God, but he is ugly, the Padre!" whispered one of these to the
others. "He must be very holy. And did you see the great wart he
has on his chin? My grandmother could take that away for him if
she were alive, poor soul! Somebody ought to tell him about the
holy mud at Chimayo. That mud might dry it up. But there is
nobody left now who can take warts away."
"No, the times are not so good any more," the other agreed. "And I
doubt if all this marrying will make them any better. Of what use
is it to marry people after they have lived together and had
children? and the man is maybe thinking about another woman, like
Pablo. I saw him coming out of the brush with that oldest girl of
Trinidad's, only Sunday night."
The reappearance of the priest upon the scene cut short further
scandal. He knelt down before the improvised altar and began his
private devotions. The women tiptoed away. Señor Lujon himself
went out toward the servants' quarters to hurry the candidates for
the marriage sacrament. The women were giggling and snatching up
their best shawls. Some of the men had even gashed their hands.
The household crowded into the sala, and Father Vaillant married
couples with great dispatch.
"To-morrow morning, the baptisms," he announced. "And the mothers
see to it that the children are clean, and that there are sponsors
for all."
After he had resumed his travelling-clothes, Father Joseph asked
his host at what hour he dined, remarking that he had been fasting
since an early breakfast.
"We eat when it is ready--a little after sunset, usually. I have
had a young lamb killed for your Reverence."
Father Joseph kindled with interest. "Ah, and how will it be
cooked?"
Señor Lujon shrugged. "Cooked? Why, they put it in a pot with
chili, and some onions, I suppose."
"Ah, that is the point. I have had too much stewed mutton. Will
you permit me to go into the kitchen and cook my portion in my own
way?"
Lujon waved his hand. "My house is yours, Padre. Into the kitchen
I never go--too many women. But there it is, and the woman in
charge is named Rosa."
When the Father entered the kitchen he found a crowd of women
discussing the marriages. They quickly dispersed, leaving old Rosa
by her fire-place, where hung a kettle from which issued the savour
of cooking mutton fat, all too familiar to Father Joseph. He found
a half sheep hanging outside the door, covered with a bloody sack,
and asked Rosa to heat the oven for him, announcing that he meant
to roast the hind leg.
"But Padre, I baked before the marriages. The oven is almost cold.
It will take an hour to heat it, and it is only two hours till
supper."
"Very well. I can cook my roast in an hour."
"Cook a roast in an hour!" cried the old woman. "Mother of God,
Padre, the blood will not be dried in it!"
"Not if I can help it!" said Father Joseph fiercely. "Now hurry
with the fire, my good woman."
When the Padre carved his roast at the supper-table, the serving-
girls stood behind his chair and looked with horror at the delicate
stream of pink juice that followed the knife. Manuel Lujon took a
slice for politeness, but he did not eat it. Father Vaillant had
his gigot to himself.
All the men and boys sat down at the long table with the host, the
women and children would eat later. Father Joseph and Lujon, at
one end, had a bottle of white Bordeaux between them. It had been
brought from Mexico City on mule-back, Lujon said. They were
discussing the road back to Santa Fé, and when the missionary
remarked that he would stop at Santo Domingo, the host asked him
why he did not get a horse there. "I am afraid you will hardly get
back to Santa Fé on your own. The pueblo is famous for breeding
good horses. You might make a trade."
"No," said Father Vaillant. "Those Indians are of a sullen
disposition. If I were to have dealings with them, they would
suspect my motives. If we are to save their souls we must make it
clear that we want no profit for ourselves, as I told Father
Gallegos in Albuquerque."
Manuel Lujon laughed and glanced down the table at his men, who
were all showing their white teeth. "You said that to the Padre at
Albuquerque? You have courage. He is a rich man, Padre Gallegos.
All the same, I respect him. I have played poker with him. He is
a great gambler and takes his losses like a man. He stops at
nothing, plays like an American."
"And I," retorted Father Joseph, "I have not much respect for a
priest who either plays cards or manages to get rich."
"Then you do not play?" asked Lujon. "I am disappointed. I had
hoped we could have a game after supper. The evenings are dull
enough here. You do not even play dominoes?"
"Ah, that is another matter!" Father Joseph declared. "A game of
dominoes, there by the fire, with coffee, or some of that excellent
grape brandy you allowed me to taste, that I would find refreshing.
And tell me, Manuelito, where do you get that brandy? It is like a
French liqueur."
"It is well seasoned. It was made at Bernalillo in my grandfather's
time. They make it there still, but it is not so good now."
The next morning, after coffee, while the children were being got
ready for baptism, the host took Father Vaillant through his
corrals and stables to show him his stock. He exhibited with
peculiar pride two cream-coloured mules, stalled side by side.
With his own hand he led them out of the stable, in order to
display to advantage their handsome coats,--not bluish white, as
with white horses, but a rich, deep ivory, that in shadow changed
to fawn-colour. Their tails were clipped at the end into the shape
of bells.
"Their names," said Lujon, "are Contento and Angelica, and they are
as good as their names. It seems that God has given them
intelligence. When I talk to them, they look up at me like
Christians; they are very companionable. They are always ridden
together and have a great affection for each other."
Father Joseph took one by the halter and led it about. "Ah, but
they are rare creatures! I have never seen a mule or horse
coloured like a young fawn before." To his host's astonishment,
the wiry little priest sprang upon Contento's back with the agility
of a grasshopper. The mule, too, was astonished. He shook himself
violently, bolted toward the gate of the barnyard, and at the gate
stopped suddenly. Since this did not throw his rider, he seemed
satisfied, trotted back, and stood placidly beside Angelica.
"But you are a caballero, Father Vaillant!" Lujon exclaimed. "I
doubt if Father Gallegos would have kept his seat--though he is
something of a hunter."
"The saddle is to be my home in your country, Lujon. What an easy
gait this mule has, and what a narrow back! I notice that
especially. For a man with short legs, like me, it is a punishment
to ride eight hours a day on a wide horse. And this I must do day
after day. From here I go to Santa Fé, and, after a day in
conference with the Bishop, I start for Mora."
"For Mora?" exclaimed Lujon. "Yes, that is far, and the roads are
very bad. On your mare you will never do it. She will drop dead
under you." While he talked, the Father remained upon the mule's
back, stroking him with his hand.
"Well, I have no other. God grant that she does not drop somewhere
far from food and water. I can carry very little with me except my
vestments and the sacred vessels."
The Mexican had been growing more and more thoughtful, as if he
were considering something profound and not altogether cheerful.
Suddenly his brow cleared, and he turned to the priest with a
radiant smile, quite boyish in its simplicity. "Father Vaillant,"
he burst out in a slightly oratorical manner, "you have made my
house right with Heaven, and you charge me very little. I will do
something very nice for you; I will give you Contento for a
present, and I hope to be particularly remembered in your prayers."
Springing to the ground, Father Vaillant threw his arms about his
host. "Manuelito!" he cried, "for this darling mule I think I
could almost pray you into Heaven!"
The Mexican laughed, too, and warmly returned the embrace. Arm-in-
arm they went in to begin the baptisms.
* * *
The next morning, when Lujon went to call Father Vaillant for
breakfast, he found him in the barnyard, leading the two mules
about and smoothing their fawn-coloured flanks, but his face was
not the cheerful countenance of yesterday.
"Manuel," he said at once, "I cannot accept your present. I have
thought upon it over night, and I see that I cannot. The Bishop
works as hard as I do, and his horse is little better than mine.
You know he lost everything on his way out here, in a shipwreck at
Galveston--among the rest a fine wagon he had had built for travel
on these plains. I could not go about on a mule like this when my
Bishop rides a common hack. It would be inappropriate. I must
ride away on my old mare."
"Yes, Padre?" Manuel looked troubled and somewhat aggrieved. Why
should the Padre spoil everything? It had all been very pleasant
yesterday, and he had felt like a prince of generosity. "I doubt
if she will make La Bajada Hill," he said slowly, shaking his head.
"Look my horses over and take the one that suits you. They are all
better than yours."
"No, no," said Father Vaillant decidedly. "Having seen these
mules, I want nothing else. They are the colour of pearls, really!
I will raise the price of marriages until I can buy this pair from
you. A missionary must depend upon his mount for companionship in
his lonely life. I want a mule that can look at me like a
Christian, as you said of these."
Señor Lujon sighed and looked about his barnyard as if he were
trying to find some escape from this situation.
Father Joseph turned to him with vehemence. "If I were a rich
ranchero, like you, Manuel, I would do a splendid thing; I would
furnish the two mounts that are to carry the word of God about this
heathen country, and then I would say to myself: There go my
Bishop and my Vicario, on my beautiful cream-coloured mules."
"So be it, Padre," said Lujon with a mournful smile. "But I ought
to get a good many prayers. On my whole estate there is nothing I
prize like those two. True, they might pine if they were parted
for long. They have never been separated, and they have a great
affection for each other. Mules, as you know, have strong
affections. It is hard for me to give them up."
"You will be all the happier for that, Manuelito," Father Joseph
cried heartily. "Every time you think of these mules, you will
feel pride in your good deed."
Soon after breakfast Father Vaillant departed, riding Contento,
with Angelica trotting submissively behind, and from his gate Señor
Lujon watched them disconsolately until they disappeared. He felt
he had been worried out of his mules, and yet he bore no resentment.
He did not doubt Father Joseph's devotedness, nor his singleness of
purpose. After all, a Bishop was a Bishop, and a Vicar was a Vicar,
and it was not to their discredit that they worked like a pair of
common parish priests. He believed he would be proud of the fact
that they rode Contento and Angelica. Father Vaillant had forced
his hand, but he was rather glad of it.
2
THE LONELY ROAD TO MORA
The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the
Truchas mountains. The heavy, lead-coloured drops were driven
slantingly through the air by an icy wind from the peak. These
raindrops, Father Latour kept thinking, were the shape of tadpoles,
and they broke against his nose and cheeks, exploding with a
splash, as if they were hollow and full of air. The priests were
riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be
green, though just now they were slate-coloured. On every side lay
ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny
backbones of mountains. The sky was very low; purplish lead-
coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between
the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the
dark vapours working overhead--rather, they took on the cold green
of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and
matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two
priests were purple and spotted in that singular light.
Father Latour rode first, sitting straight upon his mule, with his
chin lowered just enough to keep the drive of rain out of his eyes.
Father Vaillant followed, unable to see much,--in weather like this
his glasses were of no use and he had taken them off. He crouched
down in the saddle, his shoulders well over Contento's neck.
Father Joseph's sister, Philomène, who was Mother Superior of a
convent in her native town in the Puy-de-Dome, often tried to
picture her brother and Bishop Latour on these long missionary
journeys of which he wrote her; she imagined the scene and saw the
two priests moving through it in their cassocks, bareheaded, like
the pictures of St. Francis Xavier with which she was familiar.
The reality was less picturesque,--but for all that, no one could
have mistaken these two men for hunters or traders. They wore
clerical collars about their necks instead of neckerchiefs, and on
the breast of his buckskin jacket the Bishop's silver cross hung by
a silver chain.
They were on their way to Mora, the third day out, and they did not
know just how far they had still to go. Since morning they had not
met a traveller or seen a human habitation. They believed they
were on the right trail, for they had seen no other. The first
night of their journey they had spent at Santa Cruz, lying in the
warm, wide valley of the Rio Grande, where the fields and gardens
were already softly coloured with early spring. But since they had
left the Española country behind them, they had contended first
with wind and sand-storms, and now with cold. The Bishop was going
to Mora to assist the Padre there in disposing of a crowd of
refugees who filled his house. A new settlement in the Conejos
valley had lately been raided by Indians; many of the inhabitants
were killed, and the survivors, who were originally from Mora, had
managed to get back there, utterly destitute.
Before the travellers had crossed the mountain meadows, the rain
turned to sleet. Their wet buckskins quickly froze, and the rattle
of icy flakes struck them and bounded off. The prospect of a night
in the open was not cheering. It was too wet to kindle a fire,
their blankets would become soaked on the ground. As they were
descending the mountain on the Mora side, the grey daylight seemed
already beginning to fail, though it was only four o'clock. Father
Latour turned in his saddle and spoke over his shoulder.
"The mules are certainly very tired, Joseph. They ought to be
fed."
"Push on," said Father Vaillant. "We will come to shelter of some
kind before night sets in." The Vicar had been praying steadfastly
while they crossed the meadows, and he felt confident that St.
Joseph would not turn a deaf ear. Before the hour was done they
did indeed come upon a wretched adobe house, so poor and mean that
they might not have seen it had it not lain close beside the trail,
on the edge of a steep ravine. The stable looked more habitable
than the house, and the priests thought perhaps they could spend
the night in it.
As they rode up to the door, a man came out, bareheaded, and they
saw to their surprise that he was not a Mexican, but an American,
of a very unprepossessing type. He spoke to them in some drawling
dialect they could scarcely understand and asked if they wanted to
stay the night. During the few words they exchanged with him
Father Latour felt a growing reluctance to remain even for a few
hours under the roof of this ugly, evil-looking fellow. He was
tall, gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in
a small, bony head. Under his close-clipped hair this repellent
head showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were
overgrown by layers of superfluous bone. With its small,
rudimentary ears, this head had a positively malignant look. The
man seemed not more than half human, but he was the only
householder on the lonely road to Mora.
The priests dismounted and asked him whether he could put their
mules under shelter and give them grain feed.
"As soon as I git my coat on I will. You kin come in."
They followed him into a room where a piñon fire blazed in the
corner, and went toward it to warm their stiffened hands. Their
host made an angry, snarling sound in the direction of the
partition, and a woman came out of the next room. She was a
Mexican.
Father Latour and Father Vaillant addressed her courteously in
Spanish, greeting her in the name of the Holy Mother, as was
customary. She did not open her lips, but stared at them blankly
for a moment, then dropped her eyes and cowered as if she were
terribly frightened. The priests looked at each other; it struck
them both that this man had been abusing her in some way. Suddenly
he turned on her.
"Clear off them cheers fur the strangers. They won't eat ye, if
they air priests."
She began distractedly snatching rags and wet socks and dirty
clothes from the chairs. Her hands were shaking so that she
dropped things. She was not old, she might have been very young,
but she was probably half-witted. There was nothing in her face
but blankness and fear.
Her husband put on his coat and boots, went to the door, and
stopped with his hand on the latch, throwing over his shoulder a
crafty, hateful glance at the bewildered woman.
"Here, you! Come right along, I'll need ye!"
She took her black shawl from a peg and followed him. Just at the
door she turned and caught the eyes of the visitors, who were
looking after her in compassion and perplexity. Instantly that
stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With
her finger she pointed them away, away!--two quick thrusts into the
air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could
convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm
quickly across her distended throat--and vanished. The doorway was
empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash
of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated
so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
Father Joseph was the first to find his tongue. "There is no doubt
of her meaning. Your pistol is loaded, Jean?"
"Yes, but I neglected to keep it dry. No matter."
They hurried out of the house. It was still light enough to see
the stable through the grey drive of rain, and they went toward it.
"Señor American," the Bishop called, "will you be good enough to
bring out our mules?"
The man came out of the stable. "What do you want?"
"Our mules. We have changed our mind. We will push on to Mora.
And here is a dollar for your trouble."
The man took a threatening attitude. As he looked from one to the
other his head played from side to side exactly like a snake's.
"What's the matter? My house ain't good enough for ye?"
"No explanation is necessary. Go into the barn and get the mules,
Father Joseph."
"You dare go into my stable, you ----- priest!"
The Bishop drew his pistol. "No profanity, Señor. We want nothing
from you but to get away from your uncivil tongue. Stand where you
are."
The man was unarmed. Father Joseph came out with the mules, which
had not been unsaddled. The poor things were each munching a
mouthful, but they needed no urging to be gone; they did not like
this place. The moment they felt their riders on their backs they
trotted quickly along the road, which dropped immediately into the
arroyo. While they were descending, Father Joseph remarked that
the man would certainly have a gun in the house, and that he had no
wish to be shot in the back.
"Nor I. But it is growing too dark for that, unless he should
follow us on horseback," said the Bishop. "Were there horses in
the stable?"
"Only a burro." Father Vaillant was relying upon the protection of
St. Joseph, whose office he had fervently said that morning. The
warning given them by that poor woman, with such scant opportunity,
seemed evidence that some protecting power was mindful of them.
By the time they had ascended the far side of the arroyo, night had
closed down and the rain was pouring harder than ever.
"I am by no means sure that we can keep in the road," said the
Bishop. "But at least I am sure we are not being followed. We
must trust to these intelligent beasts. Poor woman! He will
suspect her and abuse her, I am afraid." He kept seeing her in the
darkness as he rode on, her face in the fire-light, and her
terrible pantomime.
They reached the town of Mora a little after midnight. The Padre's
house was full of refugees, and two of them were put out of a bed
in order that the Bishop and his Vicar could get into it.
In the morning a boy came from the stable and reported that he had
found a crazy woman lying in the straw, and that she begged to see
the two Padres who owned the white mules. She was brought in, her
clothing cut to rags, her legs and face and even her hair so
plastered with mud that the priests could scarcely recognize the
woman who had saved their lives the night before.
She said she had never gone back to the house at all. When the two
priests rode away her husband had run to the house to get his gun,
and she had plunged down a washout behind the stable into the
arroyo, and had been on the way to Mora all night. She had
supposed he would overtake her and kill her, but he had not. She
reached the settlement before day-break, and crept into the stable
to warm herself among the animals and wait until the household was
awake. Kneeling before the Bishop she began to relate such
horrible things that he stopped her and turned to the native
priest.
"This is a case for the civil authorities. Is there a magistrate
here?"
There was no magistrate, but there was a retired fur trapper who
acted as notary and could take evidence. He was sent for, and in
the interval Father Latour instructed the refugee women from
Conejos to bathe this poor creature and put decent clothes on her,
and to care for the cuts and scratches on her legs.
An hour later the woman, whose name was Magdalena, calmed by food
and kindness, was ready to tell her story. The notary had brought
along his friend, St. Vrain, a Canadian trapper who understood
Spanish better than he. The woman was known to St. Vrain,
moreover, who confirmed her statement that she was born Magdalena
Valdez, at Los Ranchos de Taos, and that she was twenty-four years
old. Her husband, Buck Scales, had drifted into Taos with a party
of hunters from somewhere in Wyoming. All white men knew him for a
dog and a degenerate--but to Mexican girls, marriage with an
American meant coming up in the world. She had married him six
years ago, and had been living with him ever since in that wretched
house on the Mora trail. During that time he had robbed and
murdered four travellers who had stopped there for the night. They
were all strangers, not known in the country. She had forgot their
names, but one was a German boy who spoke very little Spanish and
little English; a nice boy with blue eyes, and she had grieved for
him more than for the others. They were all buried in the sandy
soil behind the stable. She was always afraid their bodies might
wash out in a storm. Their horses Buck had ridden off by night and
sold to Indians somewhere in the north. Magdalena had borne three
children since her marriage, and her husband had killed each of
them a few days after birth, by ways so horrible that she could not
relate it. After he killed the first baby, she ran away from him,
back to her parents at Ranchos. He came after her and made her go
home with him by threatening harm to the old people. She was
afraid to go anywhere for help, but twice before she had managed to
warn travellers away, when her husband happened to be out of the
house. This time she had found courage because, when she looked
into the faces of these two Padres, she knew they were good men,
and she thought if she ran after them they could save her. She
could not bear any more killing. She asked nothing better than to
die herself, if only she could hide near a church and a priest for
a while, to make her soul right with God.
St. Vrain and his friend got together a search-party at once. They
rode out to Scales's place and found the remains of four men buried
under the corral behind the stable, as the woman had said. Scales
himself they captured on the road from Taos, where he had gone to
look for his wife. They brought him back to Mora, but St. Vrain
rode on to Taos to fetch a magistrate.
There was no calabozo in Mora, so Scales was put into an empty
stable, under guard. This stable was soon surrounded by a crowd of
people, who loitered to hear the blood-curdling threats the
prisoner shouted against his wife. Magdalena was kept in the
Padre's house, where she lay on a mat in the corner, begging Father
Latour to take her back to Santa Fé, so that her husband could not
get at her. Though Scales was bound, the Bishop felt alarmed for
her safety. He and the American notary, who had a pistol of the
new revolver model, sat in the sala and kept watch over her all
night.
In the morning the magistrate and his party arrived from Taos. The
notary told him the facts of the case in the plaza, where everyone
could hear. The Bishop inquired whether there was any place for
Magdalena in Taos, as she could not stay on here in such a state of
terror.
A man dressed in buckskin hunting-clothes stepped out of the crowd
and asked to see Magdalena. Father Latour conducted him into the
room where she lay on her mat. The stranger went up to her,
removing his hat. He bent down and put his hand on her shoulder.
Though he was clearly an American, he spoke Spanish in the native
manner.
"Magdalena, don't you remember me?"
She looked up at him as out of a dark well; something became alive
in her deep, haunted eyes. She caught with both hands at his
fringed buckskin knees.
"Christóbal!" she wailed. "Oh, Christóbal!"
"I'll take you home with me, Magdalena, and you can stay with my
wife. You wouldn't be afraid in my house, would you?"
"No, no, Christóbal, I would not be afraid with you. I am not a
wicked woman."
He smoothed her hair. "You're a good girl, Magdalena--always were.
It will be all right. Just leave things to me."
Then he turned to the Bishop. "Señor Vicario, she can come to me.
I live near Taos. My wife is a native woman, and she'll be good to
her. That varmint won't come about my place, even if he breaks
jail. He knows me. My name is Carson."
Father Latour had looked forward to meeting the scout. He had
supposed him to be a very large man, of powerful body and
commanding presence. This Carson was not so tall as the Bishop
himself, was very slight in frame, modest in manner, and he spoke
English with a soft Southern drawl. His face was both thoughtful
and alert; anxiety had drawn a permanent ridge between his blue
eyes. Under his blond moustache his mouth had a singular
refinement. The lips were full and delicately modelled. There was
something curiously unconscious about his mouth, reflective, a
little melancholy,--and something that suggested a capacity for
tenderness. The Bishop felt a quick glow of pleasure in looking at
the man. As he stood there in his buckskin clothes one felt in him
standards, loyalties, a code which is not easily put into words but
which is instantly felt when two men who live by it come together
by chance. He took the scout's hand. "I have long wanted to meet
Kit Carson," he said, "even before I came to New Mexico. I have
been hoping you would pay me a visit at Santa Fé."
The other smiled. "I'm right shy, sir, and I'm always afraid of
being disappointed. But I guess it will be all right from now on."
This was the beginning of a long friendship.
On their ride back to Carson's ranch, Magdalena was put in Father
Vaillant's care, and the Bishop and the scout rode together.
Carson said he had become a Catholic merely as a matter of form, as
Americans usually did when they married a Mexican girl. His wife
was a good woman and very devout; but religion had seemed to him
pretty much a woman's affair until his last trip to California. He
had been sick out there, and the Fathers at one of the missions
took care of him. "I began to see things different, and thought I
might some day be a Catholic in earnest. I was brought up to think
priests were rascals, and that the nuns were bad women,--all the
stuff they talk back in Missouri. A good many of the native
priests here bear out that story. Our Padre Martínez at Taos is an
old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he's got children and
grandchildren in almost every settlement around here. And Padre
Lucero at Arroyo Hondo is a miser, takes everything a poor man's
got to give him a Christian burial."
The Bishop discussed the needs of his people at length with Carson.
He felt great confidence in his judgment. The two men were about
the same age, both a little over forty, and both had been sobered
and sharpened by wide experience. Carson had been guide in world-
renowned explorations, but he was still almost as poor as in the
days when he was a beaver trapper. He lived in a little adobe
house with his Mexican wife. The great country of desert and
mountain ranges between Santa Fé and the Pacific coast was not yet
mapped or chartered; the most reliable map of it was in Kit
Carson's brain. This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a
landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could
at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a
quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was
an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-
press could not follow him. Out of the hardships of his boyhood--
from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-
driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and
desperate characters--he had preserved a clean sense of honour and
a compassionate heart. In talking to the Bishop of poor Magdalena
he said sadly: "I used to see her in Taos when she was such a
pretty girl. Ain't it a pity?"
The degenerate murderer, Buck Scales, was hanged after a short
trial. Early in April the Bishop left Santa Fé on horseback and
rode to St. Louis, on his way to attend the Provincial Council at
Baltimore. When he returned in September, he brought back with him
five courageous nuns, Sisters of Loretto, to found a school for
girls in letterless Santa Fé. He sent at once for Magdalena and
took her into the service of the Sisters. She became housekeeper
and manager of the Sisters' kitchen. She was devoted to the nuns,
and so happy in the service of the Church that when the Bishop
visited the school he used to enter by the kitchen-garden in order
to see her serene and handsome face. For she became beautiful, as
Carson said she had been as a girl. After the blight of her
horrible youth was over, she seemed to bloom again in the household
of God.
BOOK THREE
THE MASS AT ÁCOMA
1
THE WOODEN PARROT
During the first year after his arrival in Santa Fé, the Bishop was
actually in his diocese only about four months. Six months of that
first year were consumed in attending the Plenary Council at
Baltimore, to which he had been summoned. He went on horseback
over the Santa Fé trail to St. Louis, nearly a thousand miles, then
by steamboat to Pittsburgh, across the mountains to Cumberland, and
on to Washington by the new railroad. The return journey was even
slower, as he had with him the five nuns who came to found the
school of Our Lady of Light. He reached Santa Fé late in
September.
So far, Bishop Latour had been mainly employed on business that
took him far away from his Vicarate. His great diocese was still
an unimaginable mystery to him. He was eager to be abroad in it,
to know his people; to escape for a little from the cares of
building and founding, and to go westward among the old isolated
Indian missions; Santo Domingo, breeder of horses; Isleta, whitened
with gypsum; Laguna, of wide pastures; and finally, cloud-set
Ácoma.
In the golden October weather the Bishop, with his blankets and
coffee-pot, attended by Jacinto, a young Indian from the Pecos
pueblo, whom he employed as guide, set off to visit the Indian
missions in the west. He spent a night and a day at Albuquerque,
with the genial and popular Padre Gallegos. After Santa Fé,
Albuquerque was the most important parish in the diocese; the
priest belonged to an influential Mexican family, and he and the
rancheros had run their church to suit themselves, making a very
gay affair of it. Though Padre Gallegos was ten years older than
the Bishop, he would still dance the fandango five nights running,
as if he could never have enough of it. He had many friends in the
American colony, with whom he played poker and went hunting, when
he was not dancing with the Mexicans. His cellar was well stocked
with wines from El Paso del Norte, whisky from Taos, and grape
brandy from Bernalillo. He was genuinely hospitable, and the
gambler down on his luck, the soldier sobering up, were always
welcome at his table. The Padre was adored by a rich Mexican
widow, who was hostess at his supper parties, engaged his servants
for him, made lace for the altar and napery for his table. Every
Sunday her carriage, the only closed one in Albuquerque, waited in
the plaza after Mass, and when the priest had put off his
vestments, he came out and was driven away to the lady's hacienda
for dinner.
The Bishop and Father Vaillant had thoroughly examined the case of
Father Gallegos, and meant to end this scandalous state of things
well before Christmas. But on this visit Father Latour exhibited
neither astonishment nor displeasure at anything, and Padre
Gallegos was cordial and most ceremoniously polite. When the
Bishop permitted himself to express some surprise that there was
not a confirmation class awaiting him, the Padre explained smoothly
that it was his custom to confirm infants at their baptism.
"It is all the same in a Christian community like ours. We know
they will receive religious instruction as they grow up, so we make
good Catholics of them in the beginning. Why not?"
The Padre was uneasy lest the Bishop should require his attendance
on this trip out among the missions. He had no liking for scanty
food and a bed on the rocks. So, though he had been dancing only a
few nights before, he received his Superior with one foot bandaged
up in an Indian moccasin, and complained of a severe attack of
gout. Asked when he had last celebrated Mass at Ácoma, he made no
direct reply. It used to be his custom, he said, to go there in
Passion Week, but the Ácoma Indians were unreclaimed heathen at
heart, and had no wish to be bothered with the Mass. The last time
he went out there, he was unable to get into the church at all.
The Indians pretended they had not the key; that the Governor had
it, and that he had gone on "Indian business" up into the Cebolleta
mountains.
The Bishop did not wish Padre Gallegos's company upon his journey,
was very glad not to have the embarrassment of refusing it, and he
rode away from Albuquerque after polite farewells. Yet, he
reflected, there was something very engaging about Gallegos as a
man. As a priest, he was impossible; he was too self-satisfied and
popular ever to change his ways, and he certainly could not change
his face. He did not look quite like a professional gambler, but
something smooth and twinkling in his countenance suggested an
underhanded mode of life. There was but one course: to suspend the
man from the exercise of all priestly functions, and bid the
smaller native priests take warning.
Father Vaillant had told the Bishop that he must by all means stop
a night at Isleta, as he would like the priest there--Padre Jesus
de Baca, an old white-haired man, almost blind, who had been at
Isleta many years and had won the confidence and affection of his
Indians.
When he approached this pueblo of Isleta, gleaming white across a
low plain of grey sand, Father Latour's spirits rose. It was
beautiful, that warm, rich whiteness of the church and the
clustered town, shaded by a few bright acacia trees, with their
intense blue-green like the colour of old paper window-blinds.
That tree always awakened pleasant memories, recalling a garden in
the south of France where he used to visit young cousins. As he
rode up to the church, the old priest came out to meet him, and
after his salutation stood looking at Father Latour, shading his
failing eyes with his hand.
"And can this be my Bishop? So young a man?" he exclaimed.
They went into the priest's house by way of a garden, walled in
behind the church. This enclosure was full of domesticated cactus
plants, of many varieties and great size (it seemed the Padre loved
them), and among these hung wicker cages made of willow twigs, full
of parrots. There were even parrots hopping about the sanded
paths--with one wing clipped to keep them at home. Father Jesus
explained that parrot feathers were much prized by his Indians as
ornaments for their ceremonial robes, and he had long ago found he
could please his parishioners by raising the birds.
The priest's house was white within and without, like all the
Isleta houses, and was almost as bare as an Indian dwelling. The
old man was poor, and too soft-hearted to press the pueblo people
for pesos. An Indian girl cooked his beans and cornmeal mush for
him, he required little else. The girl was not very skilful, he
said, but she was clean about her cooking. When the Bishop
remarked that everything in this pueblo, even the streets, seemed
clean, the Padre told him that near Isleta there was a hill of some
white mineral, which the Indians ground up and used as whitewash.
They had done this from time immemorial, and the village had always
been noted for its whiteness. A little talk with Father Jesus
revealed that he was simple almost to childishness, and very
superstitious. But there was a quality of golden goodness about
him. His right eye was overgrown by a cataract, and he kept his
head tilted as if he were trying to see around it. All his
movements were to the left, as if he were reaching or walking about
some obstacle in his path.
After coming to the house by way of a garden full of parrots,
Father Latour was amused to find that the sole ornament in the
Padre's poor, bare little sala was a wooden parrot, perched in a
hoop and hung from one of the roof-logs. While Father Jesus was
instructing his Indian girl in the kitchen, the Bishop took this
carving down from its perch to examine it. It was cut from a
single stick of wood, exactly the size of a living bird, body and
tail rigid and straight, the head a little turned. The wings and
tail and neck feathers were just indicated by the tool, and thinly
painted. He was surprised to feel how light it was; the surface
had the whiteness and velvety smoothness of very old wood. Though
scarcely carved at all, merely smoothed into shape, it was
strangely lifelike; a wooden pattern of parrots, as it were.
The Padre smiled when he found the Bishop with the bird in his
hand.
"I see you have found my treasure! That, your Grace, is probably
the oldest thing in the pueblo--older than the pueblo itself."
The parrot, Father Jesus said, had always been the bird of wonder
and desire to the pueblo Indians. In ancient times its feathers
were more valued than wampum and turquoises. Even before the
Spaniards came, the pueblos of northern New Mexico used to send
explorers along the dangerous and difficult trade routes down into
tropical Mexico to bring back upon their bodies a cargo of parrot
feathers. To purchase these the trader carried pouches full of
turquoises from the Cerrillos hills near Santa Fé. When, very
rarely, a trader succeeded in bringing back a live bird to his
people, it was paid divine honours, and its death threw the whole
village into the deepest gloom. Even the bones were piously
preserved. There was in Isleta a parrot skull of great antiquity.
His wooden bird he had bought from an old man who was much indebted
to him, and who was about to die without descendants. Father Jesus
had had his eye upon the bird for years. The Indian told him that
his ancestors, generations ago, had brought it with them from the
mother pueblo. The priest fondly believed that it was a portrait,
done from life, of one of those rare birds that in ancient times
were carried up alive, all the long trail from the tropics.
Father Jesus gave a good report of the Indians at Laguna and Ácoma.
He used to go to those pueblos to hold services when he was
younger, and had always found them friendly.
"At Ácoma," he said, "you can see something very holy. They have
there a portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of
Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is
dry, the Ácoma people take the picture down to their farms at
Acomita, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when
none falls in all the country, and they have crops when the Laguna
Indians have none."
2
JACINTO
Taking leave of Isleta and its priest early in the morning, Father
Latour and his guide rode all day through the dry desert plain west
of Albuquerque. It was like a country of dry ashes; no juniper, no
rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking
cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin--the only vegetation that had
any vitality. It is a vine, remarkable for its tendency, not to
spread and ramble, but to mass and mount. Its long, sharp, arrow-
shaped leaves, frosted over with prickly silver, are thrust upward
and crowded together; the whole rigid, up-thrust matted clump looks
less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards,
moving and suddenly arrested by fear.
As the morning wore on they had to make their way through a sand-
storm which quite obscured the sun. Jacinto knew the country well,
having crossed it often to go to the religious dances at Laguna,
but he rode with his head low and a purple handkerchief tied over
his mouth. Coming from a pueblo among woods and water, he had a
poor opinion of this plain. At noon he alighted and collected
enough greasewood to boil the Bishop's coffee. They knelt on
either side of the fire, the sand curling about them so that the
bread became gritty as they ate it.
The sun set red in an atmosphere murky with sand. The travellers
made a dry camp and rolled themselves in their blankets. All night
a cold wind blew over them. Father Latour was so stiff that he
arose long before daybreak. The dawn came at last, fair and clear,
and they made an early start.
About the middle of that afternoon Jacinto pointed out Laguna in
the distance, lying, apparently, in the midst of bright yellow
waves of high sand dunes--yellow as ochre. As they approached,
Father Latour found these were petrified sand dunes; long waves of
soft, gritty yellow rock, shining and bare except for a few lines
of dark jumper that grew out of the weather cracks,--little trees,
and very, very old. At the foot of this sweep of rock waves was
the blue lake, a stone basin full of water, from which the pueblo
took its name.
The kindly Padre at Isleta had sent his cook's brother off on foot
to warn the Laguna people that the new High Priest was coming, and
that he was a good man and did not want money. They were prepared,
accordingly; the church was clean and the doors were open; a small
white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind
and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked together in a
geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the
end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry. It recalled to
Father Latour the interior of a Persian chieftain's tent he had
seen in a textile exhibit at Lyons. Whether this decoration had
been done by Spanish missionaries or by Indian converts, he was
unable to find out.
The Governor told him that his people would come to Mass in the
morning, and that there were a number of children to be baptized.
He offered the Bishop the sacristy for the night, but there was a
damp, earthy smell about that chamber, and Father Latour had
already made up his mind that he would like to sleep on the rock
dunes, under the junipers.
Jacinto got firewood and good water from the Lagunas, and they made
their camp in a pleasant spot on the rocks north of the village.
As the sun dropped low, the light brought the white church and the
yellow adobe houses up into relief from the flat ledges. Behind
their camp, not far away, lay a group of great mesas. The Bishop
asked Jacinto if he knew the name of the one nearest them.
"No, I not know any name," he shook his head. "I know Indian
name," he added, as if, for once, he were thinking aloud.
"And what is the Indian name?"
"The Laguna Indians call Snow-Bird mountain." He spoke somewhat
unwillingly.
"That is very nice," said the Bishop musingly. "Yes, that is a
pretty name."
"Oh, Indians have nice names too!" Jacinto replied quickly, with a
curl of the lip. Then, as if he felt he had taken out on the
Bishop a reproach not deserved, he said in a moment: "The Laguna
people think it very funny for a big priest to be a young man. The
Governor say, how can I call him Padre when he is younger than my
sons?"
There was a note of pride in Jacinto's voice very flattering to the
Bishop. He had noticed how kind the Indian voice could be when it
was kind at all; a slight inflection made one feel that one had
received a great compliment.
"I am not very young in heart, Jacinto. How old are you, my boy?"
"Twenty-six."
"Have you a son?"
"One. Baby. Not very long born."
Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he
did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he
did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary
omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance.
In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were
superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps.
They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of
intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the
tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the
yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the
cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell
of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole
western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a
flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon
the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside
it was another star of constant light, much smaller.
Jacinto threw away the end of his cornhusk cigarette and again
spoke without being addressed.
"The ev-en-ing-star," he said in English, slowly and somewhat
sententiously, then relapsed into Spanish. "You see the little
star beside, Padre? Indians call him the guide."
The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night
closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the
solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom
questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think
it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in
which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization
into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that
behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience,
which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the
darkness. Father Latour put on his old fur-lined cloak, and
Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up
over his head and shoulders.
"Many stars," he said presently. "What you think about the stars,
Padre?"
"The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto."
The end of the Indian's cigarette grew bright and then dull again
before he spoke. "I think not," he said in the tone of one who has
considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. "I think they are
leaders--great spirits."
"Perhaps they are," said the Bishop with a sigh. "Whatever they
are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my
boy."
Kneeling on either side of the embers they repeated the prayer
together and then rolled up in their blankets. The Bishop went to
sleep thinking with satisfaction that he was beginning to have some
sort of human companionship with his Indian boy. One called the
young Indians "boys," perhaps because there was something youthful
and elastic in their bodies. Certainly about their behaviour there
was nothing boyish in the American sense, nor even in the European
sense. Jacinto was never, by any chance, naïf; he was never taken
by surprise. One felt that his training, whatever it had been, had
prepared him to meet any situation which might confront him. He
was as much at home in the Bishop's study as in his own pueblo--and
he was never too much at home anywhere. Father Latour felt he had
gone a good way toward gaining his guide's friendship, though he
did not know how.
The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop's way of meeting people;
thought he had the right tone with Padre Gallegos, the right tone
with Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians.
In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians,
always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces;
Father Vaillant's, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The
Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the
Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto
thought this remarkable.
3
THE ROCK
After early Mass the next morning Father Latour and his guide rode
off across the low plain that lies between Laguna and Ácoma. In
all his travels the Bishop had seen no country like this. From the
flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in
outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded
together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas
between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the
smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings
left,--piles of architecture that were like mountains. The sandy
soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was
splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush,--that olive-
coloured plant that grows in high waves like a tossing sea, at this
season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange
like marigolds.
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of
incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making
assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything
on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being
arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still
waiting to be made into a landscape.
Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Ácoma as his
introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at
once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a
reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from
behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there,
however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces,
ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic,
like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if
an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of
granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their
attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part
of the censer, or the foam of the wave.
Coming along the Santa Fé trail, in the vast plains of Kansas,
Father Latour had found the sky more a desert than the land; a
hard, empty blue, very monotonous to the eyes of a Frenchman. But
west of the Pecos all that changed; here there was always activity
overhead, clouds forming and moving all day long. Whether they
were dark and full of violence, or soft and white with luxurious
idleness, they powerfully affected the world beneath them. The
desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually reformed and re-
coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to
the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying
distribution of light.
Jacinto interrupted these reflections by an exclamation.
"Ácoma!" He stopped his mule.
The Bishop, following with his eye the straight, pointing Indian
hand, saw, far away, two great mesas. They were almost square in
shape, and at this distance seemed close together, though they were
really some miles apart.
"The far one"--his guide still pointed.
The Bishop's eyes were not so sharp as Jacinto's, but now, looking
down upon the top of the farther mesa from the high land on which
they halted, he saw a flat white outline on the grey surface--a
white square made up of squares. That, his guide said, was the
pueblo of Ácoma.
Riding on, they presently drew rein under the Enchanted Mesa, and
Jacinto told him that on this, too, there had once been a village,
but the stairway which had been the only access to it was broken
off by a great storm many centuries ago, and its people had
perished up there from hunger.
But how, the Bishop asked him, did men first think of living on the
top of naked rocks like these, hundreds of feet in the air, without
soil or water?
Jacinto shrugged. "A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day
and night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the
south; the Ácoma run up a rock to be safe."
All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a
periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by
violence for generations, had at last taken this leap away from the
earth, and on that rock had found the hope of all suffering and
tormented creatures--safety. They came down to the plain to hunt
and to grow their crops, but there was always a place to go back
to. If a band of Navajos were on the Ácoma's trail, there was
still one hope; if he could reach his rock--Sanctuary! On the
winding stone stairway up the cliff, a handful of men could keep
off a multitude. The rock of Ácoma had never been taken by a foe
but once,--by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a
mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing
to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of it, was
the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for
it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and
friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the
disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews
of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign
lands,--their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their
conquerors could not take from them.
Already the Bishop had observed in Indian life a strange
literalness, often shocking and disconcerting. The Ácomas, who
must share the universal human yearning for something permanent,
enduring, without shadow of change,--they had their idea in
substance. They actually lived upon their Rock; were born upon it
and died upon it. There was an element of exaggeration in anything
so simple!
As they drew near the Ácoma mesa, dark clouds began boiling up from
behind it, like ink spots spreading in a brilliant sky.
"Rain come," remarked Jacinto. "That is good. They will be well
disposed." He left the mules in a stake corral at the foot of the
mesa, took up the blankets, and hurried Father Latour into the
narrow crack in the rock where the craggy edges formed a kind of
natural stairway up the cliff. Wherever the footing was
treacherous, it was helped out by little hand-holds, ground into
the stone like smooth mittens. The mesa was absolutely naked of
vegetation, but at its foot a rank plant grew conspicuously out of
the sand; a plant with big white blossoms like Easter lilies. By
its dark blue-green leaves, large and coarse-toothed, Father Latour
recognized a species of the noxious datura. The size and
luxuriance of these nightshades astonished him. They looked like
great artificial plants, made of shining silk.
While they were ascending the rock, deafening thunder broke over
their heads, and the rain began to fall as if it were spilled from
a cloud-burst. Drawing into a deep twist of the stairway, under an
overhanging ledge, they watched the water shaken in heavy curtains
in the air before them. In a moment the seam in which they stood
was like the channel of a brook. Looking out over the great plain
spotted with mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw
the distant mountains bright with sunlight. Again he thought that
the first Creation morning might have looked like this, when the
dry land was first drawn up out of the deep, and all was confusion.
The storm was over in half an hour. By the time the Bishop and his
guide reached the last turn in the trail, and rose through the
crack, stepping out on the flat top of the rock, the noontide sun
was blazing down upon Ácoma with almost insupportable brightness.
The bare stone floor of the town and its deep-worn paths were
washed white and clean, and those depressions in the surface which
the Ácomas call their cisterns, were full of fresh rain water.
Already the women were bringing out their clothes, to begin
washing. The drinking water was carried up the stairway in earthen
jars on the heads of the women, from a secret spring below; but for
all other purposes the people depended on the rainfall held in
these cisterns.
The top of the mesa was about ten acres in extent, the Bishop
judged, and there was not a tree or a blade of green upon it; not a
handful of soil, except the churchyard, held in by an adobe wall,
where the earth for burial had been carried up in baskets from the
plain below. The white dwellings, two and three storeyed, were not
scattered, but huddled together in a close cluster, with no
protecting slope of ground or shoulder of rock, lying flat against
the flat, bright against the bright,--both the rock and the
plastered houses threw off the sun glare blindingly.
At the very edge of the mesa, overhanging the abyss so that its
retaining wall was like a part of the cliff itself, was the old
warlike church of Ácoma, with its two stone towers. Gaunt, grim,
grey, its nave rising some seventy feet to a sagging, half-ruined
roof, it was more like a fortress than a place of worship. That
spacious interior depressed the Bishop as no other mission church
had done. He held a service there before midday, and he had never
found it so hard to go through the ceremony of the Mass. Before
him, on the grey floor, in the grey light, a group of bright shawls
and blankets, some fifty or sixty silent faces; above and behind
them the grey walls. He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the
bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so
old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice
on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. Those shell-like backs
behind him might be saved by baptism and divine grace, as
undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of their
own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was
with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.
After he had laid aside his vestments, Father Latour went over the
church with Jacinto. As he examined it his wonder grew. What need
had there ever been for this great church at Ácoma? It was built
early in sixteen hundred, by Fray Juan Ramirez, a great missionary,
who laboured on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more. It was
Father Ramirez, too, who made the mule trail down the other side,--
the only path by which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is
still called "El Camino del Padre."
The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was
inclined to think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who
followed him, was not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and
that they built for their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than
according to the needs of the Indians. The magnificent site, the
natural grandeur of this stronghold, might well have turned their
heads a little. Powerful men they must have been, those Spanish
Fathers, to draft Indian labour for this great work without
military support. Every stone in that structure, every handful of
earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was carried up the
trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the great carved
beams of the roof--Father Latour looked at them with amazement. In
all the plain through which he had come he had seen no trees but a
few stunted piñons. He asked Jacinto where these huge timbers
could have been found.
"San Mateo mountain, I guess."
"But the San Mateo mountains must be forty or fifty miles away.
How could they bring such timbers?"
Jacinto shrugged. "Ácomas carry." Certainly there was no other
explanation.
Besides the church proper there was the cloister, large, thick-
walled, which must have required an enormous labour of portage from
the plain. The deep cloister corridors were cool when the rock
outside was blistering; the low arches opened on an enclosed garden
which, judging from its depth of earth, must once have been very
verdant. Pacing those shady passages, with four feet of solid,
windowless adobe shutting out everything but the green garden and
the turquoise sky above, the early missionaries might well have
forgotten the poor Ácomas, that tribe of ancient rock-turtles, and
believed themselves in some cloister hung on a spur of the
Pyrenees.
In the grey dust of the enclosed garden two thin, half-dead peach
trees still struggled with the drouth, the kind of unlikely tree
that grows up from an old root and never bears. By the wall yellow
suckers put out from an old vine stump, very thick and hard, which
must once have borne its ripe clusters.
Built upon the north-east corner of the cloister the Bishop found a
loggia--roofed, but with open sides, looking down on the white
pueblo and the tawny rock, and over the wide plain below. There he
decided he would spend the night. From this loggia he watched the
sun go down; watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep
upward. Abroad in the plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the
afterglow, one by one lost their light, like candles going out. He
was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to
homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and
his glorious history of desire and dreams. Through all the
centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the
sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in
numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Something
reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a
kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their armour.
On his homeward way the Bishop spent another night with Father
Jesus, the good priest at Isleta, who talked with him much of the
Moqui country and of those very old rock-set pueblos still farther
to the west. One story related to a long-forgotten friar at Ácoma,
and was somewhat as follows:
4
THE LEGEND OF FRAY BALTAZAR
Some time in the very early years of seventeen hundred, nearly
fifty years after the great Indian uprising in which all the
missionaries and all the Spaniards in northern New Mexico were
either driven out or murdered, after the country had been
reconquered and new missionaries had come to take the place of the
martyrs, a certain Friar Baltazar Montoya was priest at Ácoma. He
was of a tyrannical and overbearing disposition and bore a hard
hand on the natives. All the missions now in ruins were active
then, each had its resident priest, who lived for the people or
upon the people, according to his nature. Friar Baltazar was one
of the most ambitious and exacting. It was his belief that the
pueblo of Ácoma existed chiefly to support its fine church, and
that this should be the pride of the Indians as it was his. He
took the best of their corn and beans and squashes for his table,
and selected the choicest portions when they slaughtered a sheep,
chose their best hides to carpet his dwelling. Moreover, he
exacted a heavy tribute in labour. He was never done with having
earth carried up from the plain in baskets. He enlarged the
churchyard and made the deep garden in the cloister, enriching it
with dung from the corrals. Here he was able to grow a wonderful
garden, since it was watered every evening by women,--and this
despite the fact that it was not proper that a woman should ever
enter the cloister at all. Each woman owed the Padre so many ollas
of water a week from the cisterns, and they murmured not only
because of the labour, but because of the drain on their water-
supply.
Baltazar was not a lazy man, and in his first years there, before
he became stout, he made long journeys in behalf of his mission and
his garden. He went as far as Oraibi, many days' journey, to
select their best peach seeds. (The peach orchards of Oraibi were
very old, having been cultivated since the days of the earliest
Spanish expeditions, when Coronado's captains gave the Moquis peach
seeds brought from Spain.) His grape cuttings were brought from
Sonora in baskets on muleback, and he would go all the way to the
Villa (Santa Fé) for choice garden seeds, at the season when pack
trains came up the Rio Grande valley. The early churchmen did a
great business in carrying seeds about, though the Indians and
Mexicans were satisfied with beans and squashes and chili, asking
nothing more.
Friar Baltazar was from a religious house in Spain which was noted
for good living, and he himself had worked in the refectory. He
was an excellent cook and something of a carpenter, and he took a
great deal of trouble to make himself comfortable upon that rock at
the end of the world. He drafted two Indian boys into his service,
one to care for his ass and work in the garden, the other to cook
and wait upon him at table. In time, as he grew more unwieldy in
figure, he adopted a third boy and employed him as a runner to the
distant missions. This boy would go on foot all the way to the
Villa for red cloth or an iron spade or a new knife, stopping at
Bernalillo to bring home a wineskin full of grape brandy. He would
go five days' journey to the Sandia mountains to catch fish and dry
or salt them for the Padre's fast-days, or run to Zuñi, where the
Fathers raised rabbits, and bring back a pair for the spit. His
errands were seldom of an ecclesiastical nature.
It was clear that the Friar at Ácoma lived more after the flesh
than after the spirit. The difficulty of obtaining an interesting
and varied diet on a naked rock seemed only to whet his appetite
and tempt his resourcefulness. But his sensuality went no further
than his garden and table. Carnal commerce with the Indian women
would have been very easy indeed, and the Friar was at the hardy
age of ripe manhood when such temptations are peculiarly sharp.
But the missionaries had early discovered that the slightest
departure from chastity greatly weakened their influence and
authority with their Indian converts. The Indians themselves
sometimes practised continence as a penance, or as a strong
medicine with the spirits, and they were very willing that their
Padre should practise it for them. The consequences of carnal
indulgence were perhaps more serious here than in Spain, and Friar
Baltazar seems never to have given his flock an opportunity to
exult over his frailty.
He held his seat at Ácoma for nearly fifteen prosperous years,
constantly improving his church and his living-quarters, growing
new vegetables and medicinal herbs, making soap from the yucca
root. Even after he became stout, his arms were strong and
muscular, his fingers clever. He cultivated his peach trees, and
watched over his garden like a little kingdom, never allowing the
native women to grow slack in the water-supply. His first serving-
boys were released to marry, and others succeeded them, who were
even more minutely trained.
Baltazar's tyranny grew little by little, and the Ácoma people were
sometimes at the point of revolt. But they could not estimate just
how powerful the Padre's magic might be and were afraid to put it
to the test. There was no doubt that the holy picture of St.
Joseph had come to them from the King of Spain by the request of
this Padre, and that picture had been more effective in averting
drouth than all the native rain-makers had been. Properly
entreated and honoured, the painting had never failed to produce
rain. Ácoma had not lost its crops since Friar Baltazar first
brought the picture to them, though at Laguna and Zuñi there had
been drouths that compelled the people to live upon their famine
store,--an alarming extremity.
The Laguna Indians were constantly sending legations to Ácoma to
negotiate terms at which they could rent the holy picture, but
Friar Baltazar had warned them never to let it go. If such
powerful protection were withdrawn, or if the Padre should turn the
magic against them, the consequences might be disastrous to the
pueblo. Better give him his choice of grain and lambs and pottery,
and allow him his three serving-boys. So the missionary and his
converts rubbed along in seeming friendliness.
One summer the Friar, who did not make long journeys now that he
had grown large in girth, decided that he would like company,--
someone to admire his fine garden, his ingenious kitchen, his airy
loggia with its rugs and water jars, where he meditated and took
his after-dinner siesta. So he planned to give a dinner party in
the week after St. John's Day.
He sent his runner to Zuñi, Laguna, Isleta, and bade the Padres to
a feast. They came upon the day, four of them, for there were two
priests at Zuñi. The stable-boy was stationed at the foot of the
rock to take their beasts and conduct the visitors up the stairway.
At the head of the trail Baltazar received them. They were shown
over the place, and spent the morning gossiping in the cloister
walks, cool and silent, though the naked rock outside was almost
too hot for the hand to touch. The vine leaves rustled agreeably
in the breeze, and the earth about the carrot and onion tops, as it
dried from last night's watering, gave off a pleasant smell. The
guests thought their host lived very well, and they wished they had
his secret. If he was a trifle boastful of his air-bound seat, no
one could blame him.
With the dinner, Baltazar had taken extravagant pains. The
monastery in which he had learned to cook was off the main highway
to Seville; the Spanish nobles and the King himself sometimes
stopped there for entertainment. In that great kitchen, with its
multiplicity of spits, small enough to roast a lark and large
enough to roast a boar, the Friar had learned a thing or two about
sauces, and in his lonely years at Ácoma he had bettered his
instruction by a natural aptitude for the art. The poverty of
materials had proved an incentive rather than a discouragement.
Certainly the visiting missionaries had never sat down to food like
that which rejoiced them to-day in the cool refectory, the blinds
open just enough to admit a streak of throbbing desert far below
them. Their host was telling them pompously that he would have a
fountain in the cloister close when they came again. He had to
check his hungry guests in their zeal for the relishes and the
soup, warning them to save their mettle for what was to come. The
roast was to be a wild turkey, superbly done--but that, alas, was
never tasted. The course which preceded it was the host's especial
care, and here he had trusted nothing to his cook; hare jardinière
(his carrots and onions were tender and well flavoured), with a
sauce which he had been perfecting for many years. This entrée was
brought from the kitchen in a large earthen dish--but not large
enough, for with its luxury of sauce and floating carrots it filled
the platter to the brim. The stable-boy was serving to-day, as the
cook could not leave his spits, and he had been neat, brisk, and
efficient. The Friar was pleased with him, and was wondering
whether he could not find some little medal of bronze or silver-
gilt to reward him for his pains.
When the hare in its sauce came on, the priest from Isleta chanced
to be telling a funny story at which the company were laughing
uproariously. The serving-boy, who knew a little Spanish, was
apparently trying to get the point of the recital which made the
Padres so merry. At any rate, he became distracted, and as he
passed behind the senior priest of Zuñi, he tipped his full platter
and spilled a stream of rich brown gravy over the good man's head
and shoulders. Baltazar was quick-tempered, and he had been
drinking freely of the fiery grape brandy. He caught up the empty
pewter mug at his right and threw it at the clumsy lad with a
malediction. It struck the boy on the side of the head. He
dropped the platter, staggered a few steps, and fell down. He did
not get up, nor did he move. The Padre from Zuñi was skilled in
medicine. Wiping the sauce from his eyes, he bent over the boy and
examined him.
"Muerto," he whispered. With that he plucked his junior priest by
the sleeve, and the two bolted across the garden without another
word and made for the head of the stairway. In a moment the Padres
of Laguna and Isleta unceremoniously followed their example. With
remarkable speed the four guests got them down from the rock,
saddled their mules, and urged them across the plain.
Baltazar was left alone with the consequences of his haste.
Unfortunately the cook, astonished at the prolonged silence, had
looked in at the door just as the last pair of brown gowns were
vanishing across the cloister. He saw his comrade lying upon the
floor, and silently disappeared from the premises by an exit known
only to himself.
When Friar Baltazar went into the kitchen he found it solitary, the
turkey still dripping on the spit. Certainly he had no appetite
for the roast. He felt, indeed, very remorseful and uncomfortable,
also indignant with his departed guests. For a moment he
entertained the idea of following them; but a temporary flight
would only weaken his position, and a permanent evacuation was not
to be thought of. His garden was at its prime, his peaches were
just coming ripe, and his vines hung heavy with green clusters.
Mechanically he took the turkey from the spit, not because he felt
any inclination for food, but from an instinct of compassion, quite
as if the bird could suffer from being burned to a crisp. This
done, he repaired to his loggia and sat down to read his breviary,
which he had neglected for several days, having been so occupied in
the refectory. He had begrudged no pains to that sauce which had
been his undoing.
The airy loggia, where he customarily took his afternoon repose,
was like a birdcage hung in the breeze. Through its open archways
he looked down on the huddled pueblo, and out over the great mesa-
strewn plain far below. He was unable to fix his mind upon his
office. The pueblo down there was much too quiet. At this hour
there should be a few women washing pots or rags, a few children
playing by the cisterns and chasing the turkeys. But to-day the
rock top baked in the fire of the sun in utter silence, not one
human being was visible--yes, one, though he had not been there a
moment ago. At the head of the stone stairway, there was a patch
of lustrous black, just above the rocks; an Indian's hair. They
had set a guard at the trail head.
Now the Padre began to feel alarmed, to wish he had gone down that
stairway with the others, while there was yet time. He wished
he were anywhere in the world but on this rock. There was old
Father Ramirez's donkey path; but if the Indians were watching one
road, they would watch the other. The spot of black hair never
stirred; and there were but those two ways down to the plain, only
those. . . . Whichever way one turned, three hundred and fifty feet
of naked cliff, without one tree or shrub a man could cling to.
As the sun sank lower and lower, there began a deep, singing murmur
of male voices from the pueblo below him, not a chant, but the
rhythmical intonation of Indian oratory when a serious matter is
under discussion. Frightful stories of the torture of the
missionaries in the great rebellion of 1680 flashed into Friar
Baltazar's mind; how one Franciscan had his eyes torn out, another
had been burned, and the old Padre at Jamez had been stripped naked
and driven on all fours about the plaza all night, with drunken
Indians straddling his back, until he rolled over dead from
exhaustion.
Moonrise from the loggia was an impressive sight, even to this
Brother who was not over-impressionable. But tonight he wished he
could keep the moon from coming up through the floor of the
desert,--the moon was the clock which began things in the pueblo.
He watched with horror for that golden rim against the deep blue
velvet of the night.
The moon came, and at its coming the Ácoma people issued from their
doors. A company of men walked silently across the rock to the
cloister. They came up the ladder and appeared in the loggia. The
Friar asked them gruffly what they wanted, but they made no reply.
Not once speaking to him or to each other, they bound his feet
together and tied his arms to his sides.
The Ácoma people told afterwards that he did not supplicate or
struggle; had he done so, they might have dealt more cruelly with
him. But he knew his Indians, and that when once they had
collectively made up their pueblo mind . . . Moreover, he was a
proud old Spaniard, and had a certain fortitude lodged in his well-
nourished body. He was accustomed to command, not to entreat, and
he retained the respect of his Indian vassals to the end.
They carried him down the ladder and through the cloister and
across the rock to the most precipitous cliff--the one over which
the Ácoma women flung broken pots and such refuse as the turkeys
would not eat. There the people were assembled. They cut his
bonds, and taking him by the hands and feet, swung him out over the
rock-edge and back a few times. He was heavy, and perhaps they
thought this dangerous sport. No sound but hissing breath came
through his teeth. The four executioners took him up again from
the brink where they had laid him, and, after a few feints, dropped
him in mid-air.
So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they
had liked very well. But everything has its day. The execution
was not followed by any sacrilege to the church or defiling of holy
vessels, but merely by a division of the Padre's stores and
household goods. The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the
garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the
cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the
peach trees, and the green grapes shrivelling on the vines.
When the next priest came, years afterward, he found no ill will
awaiting him. He was a native Mexican, of unpretentious tastes,
who was well satisfied with beans and jerked meat, and let the
pueblo turkey flock scratch in the hot dust that had once been
Baltazar's garden. The old peach stumps kept sending up pale
sprouts for many years.
BOOK FOUR
SNAKE ROOT
1
THE NIGHT AT PECOS
A month after the Bishop's visit to Albuquerque and Ácoma, the
genial Father Gallegos was formally suspended, and Father Vaillant
himself took charge of the parish. At first there was bitter
feeling; the rich rancheros and the merry ladies of Albuquerque
were very hostile to the French priest. He began his reforms at
once. Everything was changed. The holy-days, which had been
occasions of revelry under Padre Gallegos, were now days of austere
devotion. The fickle Mexican population soon found as much
diversion in being devout as they had once found in being
scandalous. Father Vaillant wrote to his sister Philomène, in
France, that the temper of his parish was like that of a boys'
school; under one master the lads try to excel one another in
mischief and disobedience, under another they vie with each other
in acts of loyalty. The Novena preceding Christmas, which had long
been celebrated by dances and hilarious merrymaking, was this year
a great revival of religious zeal.
Though Father Vaillant had all the duties of a parish priest at
Albuquerque, he was still Vicar General, and in February the Bishop
dispatched him on urgent business to Las Vegas. He did not return
on the day that he was expected, and when several days passed with
no word from him, Father Latour began to feel some anxiety.
One morning at day-break a very sick Indian boy rode into the
Bishop's courtyard on Father Joseph's white mule, Contento,
bringing bad news. The Padre, he said, had stopped at his village
in the Pecos mountains where black measles had broken out, to give
the sacrament to the dying, and had fallen ill of the sickness.
The boy himself had been well when he started for Santa Fé, but had
become sick on the way.
The Bishop had the messenger put into the wood-house, an isolated
building at the end of the garden, where the Sisters of Loretto
could tend him. He instructed the Mother Superior to pack a bag
with such medicines and comforts for the sick as he could carry,
and told Fructosa, his cook, to put up for him the provisions he
usually took on horseback journeys. When his man brought a pack-
mule and his own mule, Angelica, to the door, Father Latour,
already in his rough riding-breeches and buck-skin jacket, looked
at the handsome beast and shook his head.
"No, leave her with Contento. The new army mule is heavier, and
will do for this journey."
The Bishop rode out of Santa Fé two hours after the Indian
messenger rode in. He was going direct to the pueblo of Pecos,
where he would pick up Jacinto. It was late in the afternoon when
he reached the pueblo, lying low on its red rock ledges, half-
surrounded by a crown of fir-clad mountains, and facing a sea of
junipers and cedars. The Bishop had meant to get fresh horses at
Pecos and push on through the mountains, but Jacinto and the older
Indians who gathered about the horseman strongly advised him to
spend the night there and start in the early morning. The sun was
shining brilliantly in a blue sky, but in the west, behind the
mountain, lay a great stationary black cloud, opaque and motionless
as a ledge of rock. The old men looked at it and shook their
heads.
"Very big wind," said the governor gravely.
Unwillingly the Bishop dismounted and gave his mules to Jacinto; it
seemed to him that he was wasting time. There was still an hour
before nightfall, and he spent that hour pacing up and down the
crust of bare rock between the village and the ruin of the old
mission church. The sun was sinking, a red ball which threw a
copper glow over the pine-covered ridge of mountains, and edged
that inky, ominous cloud with molten silver. The great red earth
walls of the mission, red as brick-dust, yawned gloomily before
him,--part of the roof had fallen in, and the rest would soon go.
At this moment Father Joseph was lying dangerously ill in the dirt
and discomfort of an Indian village in winter. Why, the Bishop was
asking himself, had he ever brought his friend to this life of
hardship and danger? Father Vaillant had been frail from
childhood, though he had the endurance resulting from exhaustless
enthusiasm. The Brothers at Montferrand were not given to coddling
boys, but every year they used to send this one away for a rest in
the high Volvic mountains, because his vitality ran down under the
confinement of college life. Twice, while he and Father Latour
were missionaries in Ohio, Joseph had been at death's door; once so
ill with cholera that the newspapers had printed his name in the
death list. On that occasion their Ohio Bishop had christened him
Trompe-la-Mort. Yes, Father Latour told himself, Blanchet had
outwitted death so often, there was always the chance he would do
it again.
Walking about the walls of the ruin, the Bishop discovered that the
sacristy was dry and clean, and he decided to spend the night
there, wrapped in his blankets, on one of the earthen benches that
ran about the inner walls. While he was examining this room, the
wind began to howl about the old church, and darkness fell quickly.
From the low doorways of the pueblo ruddy fire-light was gleaming--
singularly grateful to the eye. Waiting for him on the rocks, he
recognized the slight figure of Jacinto, his blanket drawn close
about his head, his shoulders bowed to the wind.
The young Indian said that supper was ready, and the Bishop
followed him to his particular lair in those rows of little houses
all alike and all built together. There was a ladder before
Jacinto's door which led up to a second storey, but that was the
dwelling of another family; the roof of Jacinto's house made a
veranda for the family above him. The Bishop bent his head under
the low doorway and stepped down; the floor of the room was a long
step below the door-sill--the Indian way of preventing drafts. The
room into which he descended was long and narrow, smoothly
whitewashed, and clean, to the eye, at least, because of its very
bareness. There was nothing on the walls but a few fox pelts and
strings of gourds and red peppers. The richly coloured blankets of
which Jacinto was very proud were folded in piles on the earth
settle,--it was there he and his wife slept, near the fireplace.
The earth of that settle became warm during the day and held its
heat until morning, like the Russian peasants' stove-bed. Over the
fire a pot of beans and dried meat was simmering. The burning
piñon logs filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke. Clara,
Jacinto's wife, smiled at the priest as he entered. She ladled out
the stew, and the Bishop and Jacinto sat down on the floor beside
the fire, each with his bowl. Between them Clara put a basin full
of hot corn-bread baked with squash seeds,--an Indian delicacy
comparable to raisin bread among the whites. The Bishop said a
blessing and broke the bread with his hands. While the two men
ate, the young woman watched them and stirred a tiny cradle of
deerskin which hung by thongs from the roof poles. Jacinto, when
questioned, said sadly that the baby was ailing. Father Latour did
not ask to see it; it would be swathed in layers of wrappings, he
knew; even its face and head would be covered against drafts.
Indian babies were never bathed in winter, and it was useless to
suggest treatment for the sick ones. On that subject the Indian
ear was closed to advice.
It was a pity, too, that he could do nothing for Jacinto's baby.
Cradles were not many in the pueblo of Pecos. The tribe was dying
out; infant mortality was heavy, and the young couples did not
reproduce freely,--the life-force seemed low. Smallpox and measles
had taken heavy toll here time and again.
Of course there were other explanations, credited by many good
people in Santa Fé. Pecos had more than its share of dark
legends,--perhaps that was because it had been too tempting to
white men, and had had more than its share of history. It was said
that this people had from time immemorial kept a ceremonial fire
burning in some cave in the mountain, a fire that had never been
allowed to go out, and had never been revealed to white men. The
story was that the service of this fire sapped the strength of the
young men appointed to serve it,--always the best of the tribe.
Father Latour thought this hardly probable. Why should it be very
arduous, in a mountain full of timber, to feed a fire so small that
its whereabouts had been concealed for centuries?
There was also the snake story, reported by the early explorers,
both Spanish and American, and believed ever since: that this tribe
was peculiarly addicted to snake worship, that they kept
rattlesnakes concealed in their houses, and somewhere in the
mountain guarded an enormous serpent which they brought to the
pueblo for certain feasts. It was said that they sacrificed young
babies to the great snake, and thus diminished their numbers.
It seemed much more likely that the contagious diseases brought by
white men were the real cause of the shrinkage of the tribe. Among
the Indians, measles, scarlatina and whooping-cough were as deadly
as typhus or cholera. Certainly, the tribe was decreasing every
year. Jacinto's house was at one end of the living pueblo; behind
it were long rock ridges of dead pueblo,--empty houses ruined by
weather and now scarcely more than piles of earth and stone. The
population of the living streets was less than one hundred adults.*
This was all that was left of the rich and populous Cicuyè of
Coronado's expedition. Then, by his report, there were six
thousand souls in the Indian town. They had rich fields irrigated
from the Pecos River. The streams were full of fish, the mountain
was full of game. The pueblo, indeed, seemed to lie upon the knees
of these verdant mountains, like a favoured child. Out yonder, on
the juniper-spotted plateau in front of the village, the Spaniards
had camped, exacting a heavy tribute of corn and furs and cotton
garments from their hapless hosts. It was from here, the story
went, that they set forth in the spring on their ill-fated search
for the seven golden cities of Quivera, taking with them slaves and
concubines ravished from the Pecos people.
* In actual fact, the dying pueblo of Pecos was abandoned some
years before the American occupation of New Mexico.
As Father Latour sat by the fire and listened to the wind sweeping
down from the mountains and howling over the plateau, he thought of
these things; and he could not help wondering whether Jacinto,
sitting silent by the same fire, was thinking of them, too. The
wind, he knew, was blowing out of the inky cloud bank that lay
behind the mountain at sunset; but it might well be blowing out of
a remote, black past. The only human voice raised against it was
the feeble wailing of the sick child in the cradle. Clara ate
noiselessly in a corner, Jacinto looked into the fire.
The Bishop read his breviary by the fire-light for an hour. Then,
warmed to the bone and assured that his roll of blankets was warmed
through, he rose to go. Jacinto followed with the blankets and one
of his own buffalo robes. They went along a line of red doorways
and across the bare rock to the gaunt ruin, whose lateral walls,
with their buttresses, still braved the storm and let in the
starlight.
2
STONE LIPS
It was not difficult for the Bishop to waken early. After midnight
his body became more and more chilled and cramped. He said his
prayers before he rolled out of his blankets, remembering Father
Vaillant's maxim that if you said your prayers first, you would
find plenty of time for other things afterward.
Going through the silent pueblo to Jacinto's door, the Bishop woke
him and asked him to make a fire. While the Indian went to get the
mules ready, Father Latour got his coffee-pot and tin cup out of
his saddle-bags, and a round loaf of Mexican bread. With bread and
black coffee, he could travel day after day. Jacinto was for
starting without breakfast, but Father Latour made him sit down and
share his loaf. Bread is never too plenty in Indian households.
Clara was still lying on the settle with her baby.
At four o'clock they were on the road, Jacinto riding the mule that
carried the blankets. He knew the trails through his own mountains
well enough to follow them in the dark. Toward noon the Bishop
suggested a halt to rest the mules, but his guide looked at the sky
and shook his head. The sun was nowhere to be seen, the air was
thick and grey and smelled of snow. Very soon the snow began to
fall--lightly at first, but all the while becoming heavier. The
vista of pine trees ahead of them grew shorter and shorter through
the vast powdering of descending flakes. A little after mid-day a
burst of wind sent the snow whirling in coils about the two
travellers, and a great storm broke. The wind was like a hurricane
at sea, and the air became blind with snow. The Bishop could
scarcely see his guide--saw only parts of him, now a head, now a
shoulder, now only the black rump of his mule. Pine trees by the
way stood out for a moment, then disappeared absolutely in the
whirlpool of snow. Trail and landmarks, the mountain itself, were
obliterated.
Jacinto sprang from his mule and unstrapped the roll of blankets.
Throwing the saddle-bags to the Bishop, he shouted, "Come, I know a
place. Be quick, Padre."
The Bishop protested they could not leave the mules. Jacinto said
the mules must take their chance.
For Father Latour the next hour was a test of endurance. He was
blind and breathless, panting through his open mouth. He clambered
over half-visible rocks, fell over prostrate trees, sank into deep
holes and struggled out, always following the red blankets on the
shoulders of the Indian boy, which stuck out when the boy himself
was lost to sight.
Suddenly the snow seemed thinner. The guide stopped short. They
were standing, the Bishop made out, under an overhanging wall of
rock which made a barrier against the storm. Jacinto dropped the
blankets from his shoulder and seemed to be preparing to climb the
cliff. Looking up, the Bishop saw a peculiar formation in the
rocks; two rounded ledges, one directly over the other, with a
mouth-like opening between. They suggested two great stone lips,
slightly parted and thrust outward. Up to this mouth Jacinto
climbed quickly by footholds well known to him. Having mounted, he
lay down on the lower lip, and helped the Bishop to clamber up. He
told Father Latour to wait for him on this projection while he
brought up the baggage.
A few moments later the Bishop slid after Jacinto and the blankets,
through the orifice, into the throat of the cave. Within stood a
wooden ladder, like that used in kivas, and down this he easily
made his way to the floor.
He found himself in a lofty cavern, shaped somewhat like a Gothic
chapel, of vague outline,--the only light within was that which
came through the narrow aperture between the stone lips. Great as
was his need of shelter, the Bishop, on his way down the ladder,
was struck by a reluctance, an extreme distaste for the place. The
air in the cave was glacial, penetrated to the very bones, and he
detected at once a fetid odour, not very strong but highly
disagreeable. Some twenty feet or so above his head the open mouth
let in grey daylight like a high transom.
While he stood gazing about, trying to reckon the size of the cave,
his guide was intensely preoccupied in making a careful examination
of the floor and walls. At the foot of the ladder lay a heap of
half-burned logs. There had been a fire there, and it had been
extinguished with fresh earth,--a pile of dust covered what had
been the heart of the fire. Against the cavern wall was a heap of
piñon faggots, neatly piled. After he had made a minute
examination of the floor, the guide began cautiously to move this
pile of wood, taking the sticks up one by one, and putting them in
another spot. The Bishop supposed he would make a fire at once,
but he seemed in no haste to do so. Indeed, when he had moved the
wood he sat down upon the floor and fell into reflection. Father
Latour urged him to build a fire without further delay.
"Padre," said the Indian boy, "I do not know if it was right to
bring you here. This place is used by my people for ceremonies and
is known only to us. When you go out from here, you must forget."
"I will forget, certainly. But unless we can have a fire, we had
better go back into the storm. I feel ill here already."
Jacinto unrolled the blankets and threw the dryest one about the
shivering priest. Then he bent over the pile of ashes and charred
wood, but what he did was to select a number of small stones that
had been used to fence in the burning embers. These he gathered in
his sarape and carried to the rear wall of the cavern, where, a
little above his head, there seemed to be a hole. It was about as
large as a very big watermelon, of an irregular oval shape.
Holes of that shape are common in the black volcanic cliffs of the
Pajarito Plateau, where they occur in great numbers. This one was
solitary, dark, and seemed to lead into another cavern. Though it
lay higher than Jacinto's head, it was not beyond easy reach of his
arms, and to the Bishop's astonishment he began deftly and
noiselessly to place the stones he had collected within the mouth
of this orifice, fitting them together until he had entirely closed
it. He then cut wedges from the piñon faggots and inserted them
into the cracks between the stones. Finally, he took a handful of
the earth that had been used to smother the dead fire, and mixed it
with the wet snow that had blown in between the stone lips. With
this thick mud he plastered over his masonry, and smoothed it with
his palm. The whole operation did not take a quarter of an hour.
Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire.
The odour so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the
fragrance of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank
air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the
dizzy noise in Father Latour's head persisted. At first he thought
it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and
changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he
perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like
a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time
he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian
boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He
took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him
along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof
grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto
knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in
china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out
with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a
few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.
Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while,
despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was
listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard
was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a
resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep
as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness
under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but
the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
"It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.
"Si, Padre." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out
of the seam, and plastered it up again.
When they returned to the fire, the patch of daylight up between
the two lips had grown much paler. The Bishop saw it die with
regret. He took from his saddlebags his coffee-pot and a loaf of
bread and a goat cheese. Jacinto climbed up to the lower ledge of
the entrance, shook a pine tree, and filled the coffee-pot and one
of the blankets with fresh snow. While his guide was thus engaged,
the Bishop took a swallow of old Taos whisky from his pocket flask.
He never liked to drink spirits in the presence of an Indian.
Jacinto declared that he thought himself lucky to get bread and
black coffee. As he handed the Bishop back his tin cup after
drinking its contents, he rubbed his hand over his wide sash with a
smile of pleasure that showed all his white teeth.
"We had good luck to be near here," he said. "When we leave the
mules, I think I can find my way here, but I am not sure. I have
not been here very many times. You was scare, Padre?"
The Bishop reflected. "You hardly gave me time to be scared, boy.
Were you?"
The Indian shrugged his shoulders. "I think not to return to
pueblo," he admitted.
Father Latour read his breviary long by the light of the fire.
Since early morning his mind had been on other than spiritual
things. At last he felt that he could sleep. He made Jacinto
repeat a Pater Noster with him, as he always did on their night
camps, rolled himself in his blankets, and stretched out, feet to
the fire. He had it in his mind, however, to waken in the night
and study a little the curious hole his guide had so carefully
closed. After he put on the mud, Jacinto had never looked in the
direction of that hole again, and Father Latour, observing Indian
good manners, had tried not to glance toward it.
He did waken, and the fire was still giving off a rich glow of
light in that lofty Gothic chamber. But there against the wall
was his guide, standing on some invisible foothold, his arms
outstretched against the rock, his body flattened against it, his
ear over that patch of fresh mud, listening; listening with
supersensual ear, it seemed, and he looked to be supported against
the rock by the intensity of his solicitude. The Bishop closed his
eyes without making a sound and wondered why he had supposed he
could catch his guide asleep.
The next morning they crawled out through the stone lips, and
dropped into a gleaming white world. The snow-clad mountains were
red in the rising sun. The Bishop stood looking down over ridge
after ridge of wintry fir trees with the tender morning breaking
over them, all their branches laden with soft, rose-coloured clouds
of virgin snow.
Jacinto said it would not be worth while to look for the mules.
When the snow melted, he would recover the saddles and bridles.
They floundered on foot some eight miles to a squatter's cabin,
rented horses, and completed their journey by starlight. When they
reached Father Vaillant, he was sitting up in a bed of buffalo
skins, his fever broken, already on the way to recovery. Another
good friend had reached him before the Bishop. Kit Carson, on a
deer hunt in the mountains with two Taos Indians, had heard that
this village was stricken and that the Vicario was there. He
hurried to the rescue, and got into the pueblo with a pack of
venison meat just before the storm broke. As soon as Father
Vaillant could sit in the saddle, Carson and the Bishop took him
back to Santa Fé, breaking the journey into four days because of
his enfeebled state.
The Bishop kept his word, and never spoke of Jacinto's cave to
anyone, but he did not cease from wondering about it. It flashed
into his mind from time to time, and always with a shudder of
repugnance quite unjustified by anything he had experienced there.
It had been a hospitable shelter to him in his extremity. Yet
afterward he remembered the storm itself, even his exhaustion, with
a tingling sense of pleasure. But the cave, which had probably
saved his life, he remembered with horror. No tales of wonder, he
told himself, would ever tempt him into a cavern hereafter.
At home again, in his own house, he still felt a certain curiosity
about this ceremonial cave, and Jacinto's puzzling behaviour. It
seemed almost to lend a colour of probability to some of those
unpleasant stories about the Pecos religion. He was already
convinced that neither the white men nor the Mexicans in Santa Fé
understood anything about Indian beliefs or the workings of the
Indian mind.
Kit Carson had told him that the proprietor of the trading post
between Glorieta Pass and the Pecos pueblo had grown up a neighbour
to these Indians, and knew as much about them as anybody. His
parents had kept the trading post before him, and his mother was
the first white woman in that neighborhood. The trader's name was
Zeb Orchard; he lived alone in the mountains, selling salt and
sugar and whisky and tobacco to red men and white. Carson said
that he was honest and truthful, a good friend to the Indians, and
had at one time wanted to marry a Pecos girl, but his old mother,
who was very proud of being "white," would not hear to it, and so
he had remained a single man and a recluse.
Father Latour made a point of stopping for the night with this
trader on one of his missionary journeys, in order to question him
about the Pecos customs and ceremonies.
Orchard said that the legend about the undying fire was
unquestionably true; but it was kept burning, not in the mountain,
but in their own pueblo. It was a smothered fire in a clay oven,
and had been burning in one of the kivas ever since the pueblo was
founded, centuries ago. About the snake stories, he was not
certain. He had seen rattlesnakes around the pueblo, to be sure,
but there were rattlers everywhere. A Pecos boy had been bitten on
the ankle some years ago, and had come to him for whisky; he
swelled up and was very sick, like any other boy.
The Bishop asked Orchard if he thought it probable that the Indians
kept a great serpent in concealment somewhere, as was commonly
reported.
"They do keep some sort of varmint out in the mountain, that they
bring in for their religious ceremonies," the trader said. "But I
don't know if it's a snake or not. No white man knows anything
about Indian religion, Padre."
As they talked further, Orchard admitted that when he was a boy he
had been very curious about these snake stories himself, and once,
at their festival time, he had spied on the Pecos men, though that
was not a very safe thing to do. He had lain in ambush for two
nights on the mountain, and he saw a party of Indians bringing in a
chest by torch-light. It was about the size of a woman's trunk,
and it was heavy enough to bend the young aspen poles on which it
was hung. "If I'd seen white men bringing in a chest after dark,"
he observed, "I could have made a guess at what was in it; money,
or whisky, or fire-arms. But seeing it was Indians, I can't say.
It might have been only queer-shaped rocks their ancestors had
taken a notion to. The things they value most are worth nothing to
us. They've got their own superstitions, and their minds will go
round and round in the same old ruts till Judgment Day."
Father Latour remarked that their veneration for old customs was a
quality he liked in the Indians, and that it played a great part in
his own religion.
The trader told him he might make good Catholics among the Indians,
but he would never separate them from their own beliefs. "Their
priests have their own kind of mysteries. I don't know how much of
it is real and how much is made up. I remember something that
happened when I was a little fellow. One night a Pecos girl, with
her baby in her arms, ran into the kitchen here and begged my
mother to hide her until after the festival, for she'd seen signs
between the caciques, and was sure they were going to feed her baby
to the snake. Whether it was true or not, she certainly believed
it, poor thing, and Mother let her stay. It made a great
impression on me at the time."
BOOK FIVE
PADRE MARTÍNEZ
1
THE OLD ORDER
Bishop Latour, with Jacinto, was riding through the mountains on
his first official visit to Taos--after Albuquerque, the largest
and richest parish in his diocese. Both the priest and people
there were hostile to Americans and jealous of interference. Any
European, except a Spaniard, was regarded as a gringo. The Bishop
had let the parish alone, giving their animosity plenty of time to
cool. With Carson's help he had informed himself fully about
conditions there, and about the powerful old priest, Antonio José
Martínez, who was ruler in temporal as well as in spiritual
affairs. Indeed, before Father Latour's entrance upon the scene,
Martínez had been dictator to all the parishes in northern New
Mexico, and the native priests at Santa Fé were all of them under
his thumb.
It was common talk that Padre Martínez had instigated the revolt of
the Taos Indians five years ago, when Bent, the American Governor,
and a dozen other white men were murdered and scalped. Seven of
the Taos Indians had been tried before a military court and hanged
for the murder, but no attempt had been made to call the plotting
priest to account. Indeed, Padre Martínez had managed to profit
considerably by the affair.
The Indians who were sentenced to death had sent for their Padre
and begged him to get them out of the trouble he had got them into.
Martínez promised to save their lives if they would deed him their
lands, near the pueblo. This they did, and after the conveyance
was properly executed the Padre troubled himself no more about the
matter, but went to pay a visit at his native town of Abiquiu. In
his absence the seven Indians were hanged on the appointed day.
Martínez now cultivated their fertile farms, which made him quite
the richest man in the parish.
Father Latour had had polite correspondence with Martínez, but had
met him only once, on that memorable occasion when the Padre had
ridden up from Taos to strengthen the Santa Fé clergy in their
refusal to recognize the new Bishop. But he could see him as if
that were only yesterday,--the priest of Taos was not a man one
would easily forget. One could not have passed him on the street
without feeling his great physical force and his imperious will.
Not much taller than the Bishop in reality, he gave the impression
of being an enormous man. His broad high shoulders were like a
bull buffalo's, his big head was set defiantly on a thick neck, and
the full-cheeked, richly coloured, egg-shaped Spanish face--how
vividly the Bishop remembered that face! It was so unusual that he
would be glad to see it again; a high, narrow forehead, brilliant
yellow eyes set deep in strong arches, and full, florid cheeks,--
not blank areas of smooth flesh, as in Anglo-Saxon faces, but full
of muscular activity, as quick to change with feeling as any of his
features. His mouth was the very assertion of violent, uncurbed
passions and tyrannical self-will; the full lips thrust out and
taut, like the flesh of animals distended by fear or desire.
Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was
almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure was to him
already like something picturesque and impressive, but really
impotent, left over from the past.
The Bishop and Jacinto left the mountains behind them, the trail
dropped to a plain covered by clumps of very old sage-brush, with
trunks as thick as a man's leg. Jacinto pointed out a cloud of
dust moving rapidly toward them,--a cavalcade of a hundred men or
more, Indians and Mexicans, come out to welcome their Bishop with
shouting and musketry.
As the horsemen approached, Padre Martínez himself was easily
distinguishable--in buckskin breeches, high boots and silver spurs,
a wide Mexican hat on his head, and a great black cape wound about
his shoulders like a shepherd's plaid. He rode up to the Bishop
and reining in his black gelding, uncovered his head in a broad
salutation, while his escort surrounded the churchmen and fired
their muskets into the air.
The two priests rode side by side into Los Ranchos de Taos, a
little town of yellow walls and winding streets and green orchards.
The inhabitants were all gathered in the square before the church.
When the Bishop dismounted to enter the church, the women threw
their shawls on the dusty pathway for him to walk upon, and as he
passed through the kneeling congregation, men and women snatched
for his hand to kiss the Episcopal ring. In his own country all
this would have been highly distasteful to Jean Marie Latour.
Here, these demonstrations seemed a part of the high colour that
was in landscape and gardens, in the flaming cactus and the gaudily
decorated altars,--in the agonized Christs and dolorous Virgins and
the very human figures of the saints. He had already learned that
with this people religion was necessarily theatrical.
From Los Ranchos the party rode quickly across the grey plain into
Taos itself, to the priest's house, opposite the church, where a
great throng had collected. As the people sank on their knees, one
boy, a gawky lad of ten or twelve, remained standing, his mouth
open and his hat on his head. Padre Martínez reached over the
heads of several kneeling women, snatched off the boy's cap, and
cuffed him soundly about the ears. When Father Latour murmured in
protest, the native priest said boldly:
"He is my own son, Bishop, and it is time I taught him manners."
So this was to be the tune, the Bishop reflected. His well-
schooled countenance did not change a shadow as he received this
challenge, and he passed on into the Padre's house. They went at
once into Martínez's study, where they found a young man lying on
the floor, fast asleep. He was a very large young man, very stout,
lying on his back with his head pillowed on a book, and as he
breathed his bulk rose and fell amazingly. He wore a Franciscan's
brown gown, and his hair was clipped short. At sight of the
sleeper, Padre Martínez broke into a laugh and gave him a no very
gentle kick in the ribs. The fellow got to his feet in great
confusion, escaping through a door into the patio.
"You there," the Padre called after him, "only young men who work
hard at night want to sleep in the day! You must have been
studying by candle-light. I'll give you an examination in
theology!" This was greeted by a titter of feminine laughter from
the windows across the court, where the fugitive took refuge behind
a washing hung out to dry. He bent his tall, full figure and
disappeared between a pair of wet sheets.
"That was my student, Trinidad," said Martínez, "a nephew of my old
friend Father Lucero, at Arroyo Hondo. He's a monk, but we want
him to take orders. We sent him to the Seminary in Durango, but he
was either too homesick or too stupid to learn anything, so I'm
teaching him here. We shall make a priest of him one day."
Father Latour was told to consider the house his own, but he had no
wish to. The disorder was almost more than his fastidious taste
could bear. The Padre's study table was sprinkled with snuff, and
piled so high with books that they almost hid the crucifix hanging
behind it. Books were heaped on chairs and tables all over the
house,--and the books and the floors were deep in the dust of
spring sand-storms. Father Martínez's boots and hats lay about in
corners, his coats and cassocks were hung on pegs and draped over
pieces of furniture. Yet the place seemed over-run by serving-
women, young and old,--and by large yellow cats with full soft fur,
of a special breed, apparently. They slept in the window-sills,
lay on the well-curb in the patio; the boldest came, directly, to
the supper-table, where their master fed them carelessly from his
plate.
When they sat down to supper, the host introduced to the Bishop the
tall, stout young man with the protruding front, who had been
asleep on the floor. He said again that Trinidad Lucero was
studying with him, and was supposed to be his secretary,--adding
that he spent most of his time hanging about the kitchen and
hindering the girls at their work.
These remarks were made in the young man's presence, but did not
embarrass him at all. His whole attention was fixed upon the
mutton stew, which he began to devour with undue haste as soon as
his plate was put before him. The Bishop observed later that
Trinidad was treated very much like a poor relation or a servant.
He was sent on errands, was told without ceremony to fetch the
Padre's boots, to bring wood for the fire, to saddle his horse.
Father Latour disliked his personality so much that he could
scarcely look at him. His fat face was irritatingly stupid, and
had the grey, oily look of soft cheeses. The corners of his mouth
were deep folds in plumpness, like the creases in a baby's legs,
and the steel rim of his spectacles, where it crossed his nose, was
embedded in soft flesh. He said not one word during supper, but
ate as if he were afraid of never seeing food again. When his
attention left his plate for a moment, it was fixed in the same
greedy way upon the girl who served the table--and who seemed to
regard him with careless contempt. The student gave the impression
of being always stupefied by one form of sensual disturbance or
another.
Padre Martínez, with a napkin tied round his neck to protect his
cassock, ate and drank generously. The Bishop found the food poor
enough, despite the many cooks, though the wine, which came from El
Paso del Norte, was very fair.
During supper, his host asked the Bishop flatly if he considered
celibacy an essential condition of the priest's vocation.
Father Latour replied merely that this question had been thrashed
out many centuries ago and decided once for all.
"Nothing is decided once for all," Martínez declared fiercely.
"Celibacy may be all very well for the French clergy, but not for
ours. St. Augustine himself says it is better not to go against
nature. I find every evidence that in his old age he regretted
having practised continence."
The Bishop said he would be interested to see the passages from
which he drew such conclusions, observing that he knew the writings
of St. Augustine fairly well.
"I have the telling passages all written down somewhere. I will
find them before you go. You have probably read them with a sealed
mind. Celibate priests lose their perceptions. No priest can
experience repentance and forgiveness of sin unless he himself
falls into sin. Since concupiscence is the most common form of
temptation, it is better for him to know something about it. The
soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by
mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of
grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic."
"This is a subject upon which we must confer later, and at some
length," said the Bishop quietly. "I shall reform these practices
throughout my diocese as rapidly as possible. I hope it will be
but a short time until there is not a priest left who does not keep
all the vows he took when he bound himself to the service of the
altar."
The swarthy Padre laughed, and threw off the big cat which had
mounted to his shoulder. "It will keep you busy, Bishop. Nature
has got the start of you here. But for all that, our native
priests are more devout than your French Jesuits. We have a living
Church here, not a dead arm of the European Church. Our religion
grew out of the soil, and has its own roots. We pay a filial
respect to the person of the Holy Father, but Rome has no authority
here. We do not require aid from the Propaganda, and we resent its
interference. The Church the Franciscan Fathers planted here was
cut off; this is the second growth, and is indigenous. Our people
are the most devout left in the world. If you blast their faith by
European formalities, they will become infidels and profligates."
To this eloquence the Bishop returned blandly that he had not come
to deprive the people of their religion, but that he would be
compelled to deprive some of the priests of their parishes if they
did not change their way of life.
Father Martínez filled his glass and replied with perfect good
humour. "You cannot deprive me of mine, Bishop. Try it! I will
organize my own church. You can have your French priest of Taos,
and I will have the people!"
With this the Padre left the table and stood warming his back at
the fire, his cassock pulled up about his waist to expose his
trousers to the blaze. "You are a young man, my Bishop," he went
on, rolling his big head back and looking up at the well-smoked
roof poles. "And you know nothing about Indians or Mexicans. If
you try to introduce European civilization here and change our old
ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us
say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an
early death for you. I advise you to study our native traditions
before you begin your reforms. You are among barbarous people, my
Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by
your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce
French fashions here."
At this moment the student, Trinidad, got up quietly, and after an
obsequious bow to the Bishop, went with soft, escaping tread toward
the kitchen. When his brown skirt had disappeared through the
door, Father Latour turned sharply to his host.
"Martínez, I consider it very unseemly to talk in this loose
fashion before young men, especially a young man who is studying
for the priesthood. Furthermore, I cannot see why a young man of
this calibre should be encouraged to take orders. He will never
hold a parish in my diocese."
Padre Martínez laughed and showed his long, yellow teeth. Laughing
did not become him; his teeth were too large--distinctly vulgar.
"Oh, Trinidad will go to Arroyo Hondo as curate to his uncle, who
is growing old. He's a very devout fellow, Trinidad. You ought to
see him in Passion Week. He goes up to Abiquiu and becomes another
man; carries the heaviest crosses to the highest mountains, and
takes more scourging than anyone. He comes back here with his back
so full of cactus spines that the girls have to pick him like a
chicken."
Father Latour was tired, and went to his room soon after supper.
The bed, upon examination, seemed clean and comfortable, but he
felt uncertain of its surroundings. He did not like the air of
this house. After he retired, the clatter of dish-washing and the
giggling of women across the patio kept him awake a long while; and
when that ceased, Father Martínez began snoring in some chamber
near by. He must have left his door open into the patio, for the
adobe partitions were thick enough to smother sound otherwise. The
Padre snored like an enraged bull, until the Bishop decided to go
forth and find his door and close it. He arose, lit his candle,
and opened his own door in half-hearted resolution. As the night
wind blew into the room, a little dark shadow fluttered from the
wall across the floor; a mouse, perhaps. But no, it was a bunch of
woman's hair that had been indolently tossed into a corner when
some slovenly female toilet was made in this room. This discovery
annoyed the Bishop exceedingly.
High Mass was at eleven the next morning, the parish priest
officiating and the Bishop in the Episcopal chair. He was well
pleased with the church of Taos. The building was clean and in
good repair, the congregation large and devout. The delicate lace,
snowy linen, and burnished brass on the altar told of a devoted
Altar Guild. The boys who served at the altar wore rich smocks of
hand-made lace over their scarlet cassocks. The Bishop had never
heard the Mass more impressively sung than by Father Martínez. The
man had a beautiful baritone voice, and he drew from some deep well
of emotional power. Nothing in the service was slighted, every
phrase and gesture had its full value. At the moment of the
Elevation the dark priest seemed to give his whole force, his
swarthy body and all its blood, to that lifting-up. Rightly
guided, the Bishop reflected, this Mexican might have been a great
man. He had an altogether compelling personality, a disturbing,
mysterious, magnetic power.
After the confirmation service, Father Martínez had horses brought
round and took the Bishop out to see his farms and live-stock. He
took him all over his ranches down in the rich bottom lands between
Taos and the Indian pueblo which, as Father Latour knew, had come
into his possession from the seven Indians who were hanged.
Martínez referred carelessly to the Bent massacre as they rode
along. He boasted that there had never been trouble afoot in New
Mexico that wasn't started in Taos.
They stopped just west of the pueblo a little before sunset,--a
pueblo very different from all the others the Bishop had visited;
two large communal houses, shaped like pyramids, gold-coloured in
the afternoon light, with the purple mountain lying just behind
them. Gold-coloured men in white burnouses came out on the
stairlike flights of roofs, and stood still as statues, apparently
watching the changing light on the mountain. There was a religious
silence over the place; no sound at all but the bleating of goats
coming home through clouds of golden dust.
These two houses, the Padre told him, had been continuously
occupied by this tribe for more than a thousand years. Coronado's
men found them there, and described them as a superior kind of
Indian, handsome and dignified in bearing, dressed in deerskin
coats and trousers like those of Europeans.
Though the mountain was timbered, its lines were so sharp that it
had the sculptured look of naked mountains like the Sandias. The
general growth on its sides was evergreen, but the canyons and
ravines were wooded with aspens, so that the shape of every
depression was painted on the mountain-side, light green against
the dark, like symbols; serpentine, crescent, half-circles. This
mountain and its ravines had been the seat of old religious
ceremonies, honeycombed with noiseless Indian life, the repository
of Indian secrets, for many centuries, the Padre remarked.
"And some place in there, you may be sure, they keep Popé's estufa,
but no white man will ever see it. I mean the estufa where Popé
sealed himself up for four years and never saw the light of day,
when he was planning the revolt of 1680. I suppose you know all
about that outbreak, Bishop Latour?"
"Something, of course, from the Martyrology. But I did not know
that it originated in Taos."
"Haven't I just told you that all the trouble there ever was in New
Mexico originated in Taos?" boasted the Padre. "Popé was born a
San Juan Indian, but so was Napoleon a Corsican. He operated from
Taos."
Padre Martínez knew his country, a country which had no written
histories. He gave the Bishop much the best account he had heard
of the great Indian revolt of 1680, which added such a long chapter
to the Martyrology of the New World, when all the Spaniards were
killed or driven out, and there was not one European left alive
north of El Paso del Norte.
That night after supper, as his host sat taking snuff, Father
Latour questioned him closely and learned something about the story
of his life.
Martínez was born directly under that solitary blue mountain on the
sky-line west of Taos, shaped like a pyramid with the apex sliced
off, in Abiquiu. It was one of the oldest Mexican settlements in
the territory, surrounded by canyons so deep and ranges so rugged
that it was practically cut off from intercourse with the outside
world. Being so solitary, its people were sombre in temperament,
fierce and fanatical in religion, celebrated the Passion Week by
cross-bearings and bloody scourgings.
Antonio José Martínez grew up there, without learning to read or
write, married at twenty, and lost his wife and child when he was
twenty-three. After his marriage he had learned to read from the
parish priest, and when he became a widower he decided to study for
the priesthood. Taking his clothes and the little money he got
from the sale of his household goods, he started on horseback for
Durango, in Old Mexico. There he entered the Seminary and began a
life of laborious study.
The Bishop could imagine what it meant for a young man who had not
learned to read until long after adolescence, to undergo a severe
academic training. He found Martínez deeply versed, not only in
the Church Fathers, but in the Latin and Spanish classics. After
six years at the Seminary, Martínez had returned to his native
Abiquiu as priest of the parish church there. He was passionately
attached to that old village under the pyramidal mountain. All the
while he had been in Taos, half a lifetime now, he made periodic
pilgrimages on horseback back to Abiquiu, as if the flavour of his
own yellow earth were medicine to his soul. Naturally he hated the
Americans. The American occupation meant the end of men like
himself. He was a man of the old order, a son of Abiquiu, and his
day was over.
On his departure from Taos, the Bishop went out of his way to make
a call at Kit Carson's ranch house. Carson, he knew, was away
buying sheep, but Father Latour wished to see the Señora Carson to
thank her again for her kindness to poor Magdalena, and to tell her
of the woman's happy and devoted life with the Sisters in their
school at Santa Fé.
The Señora received him with that quiet but unabashed hospitality
which is a common grace in Mexican households. She was a tall
woman, slender, with drooping shoulders and lustrous black eyes and
hair. Though she could not read, both her face and conversation
were intelligent. To the Bishop's thinking, she was handsome; her
countenance showed that discipline of life which he admired. She
had a cheerful disposition, too, and a pleasant sense of humour.
It was possible to talk confidentially to her. She said she hoped
he had been comfortable in Padre Martínez's house, with an
inflection which told that she much doubted it, and she laughed a
little when he confessed that he had been annoyed by the presence
of Trinidad Lucero.
"Some people say he is Father Lucero's son," she said with a shrug.
"But I do not think so. More likely one of Padre Martínez's. Did
you hear what happened to him at Abiquiu last year, in Passion
Week? He tried to be like the Saviour, and had himself crucified.
Oh, not with nails! He was tied upon a cross with ropes, to hang
there all night; they do that sometimes at Abiquiu, it is a very
old-fashioned place. But he is so heavy that after he had hung
there a few hours, the cross fell over with him, and he was very
much humiliated. Then he had himself tied to a post and said he
would bear as many stripes as our Saviour--six thousand, as was
revealed to St. Bridget. But before they had given him a hundred,
he fainted. They scourged him with cactus whips, and his back was
so poisoned that he was sick up there for a long while. This year
they sent word that they did not want him at Abiquiu, so he had to
keep Holy Week here, and everybody laughed at him."
Father Latour asked the Señora to tell him frankly whether she
thought he could put a stop to the extravagances of the Penitential
Brotherhood. She smiled and shook her head. "I often say to my
husband, I hope you will not try to do that. It would only set the
people against you. The old people have need of their old customs;
and the young ones will go with the times."
As the Bishop was taking his leave, she put into his saddle-bags a
beautiful piece of lace-work for Magdalena. "She will not be
likely to use it for herself, but she will be glad to have it to
give to the Sisters. That brutal man left her nothing. After he
was hung, there was nothing to sell but his gun and one burro.
That was why he was going to take the risk of killing two Padres
for their mules--and for spite against religion, maybe! Magdalena
said he had often threatened to kill the priest at Mora."
At Santa Fé the Bishop found Father Vaillant awaiting him. They
had not seen each other since Easter, and there were many things to
be discussed. The vigour and zeal of Bishop Latour's administration
had already been recognized at Rome, and he had lately received a
letter from Cardinal Fransoni, Prefect of the Propaganda, announcing
that the vicarate of Santa Fé had been formally raised to a diocese.
By the same long-delayed post came an invitation from the Cardinal,
urgently requesting Father Latour's presence at important
conferences at the Vatican during the following year. Though all
these matters must be taken up in their turn between the Bishop and
his Vicar-General, Father Joseph had undoubtedly come up from
Albuquerque at this particular time because of a lively curiosity to
hear how the Bishop had been received in Taos.
Seated in the study in their old cassocks, with the candles lighted
on the table between them, they spent a long evening.
"For the present," Father Latour remarked, "I shall do nothing to
change the curious situation at Taos. It is not expedient to
interfere. The church is strong, the people are devout. No matter
what the conduct of the priest has been, he has built up a strong
organization, and his people are devotedly loyal to him."
"But can he be disciplined, do you think?"
"Oh, there is no question of discipline! He has been a little
potentate too long. His people would assuredly support him against
a French Bishop. For the present I shall be blind to what I do not
like there."
"But Jean," Father Joseph broke out in agitation, "the man's life
is an open scandal, one hears of it everywhere. Only a few weeks
ago I was told a pitiful story of a Mexican girl carried off in one
of the Indian raids on the Costella valley. She was a child of
eight when she was carried away, and was fifteen when she was found
and ransomed. During all that time the pious girl had preserved
her virginity by a succession of miracles. She had a medal from
the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe tied round her neck, and she
said such prayers as she had been taught. Her chastity was
threatened many times, but always some unexpected event averted the
catastrophe. After she was found and sent back to some relatives
living in Arroyo Hondo, she was so devout that she wished to become
a religious. She was debauched by this Martínez, and he married
her to one of his peons. She is now living on one of his farms."
"Yes, Christóbal told me that story," said the Bishop with a shrug.
"But Padre Martínez is getting too old to play the part of Don Juan
much longer. I do not wish to lose the parish of Taos in order to
punish its priest, my friend. I have no priest strong enough to
put in his place. You are the only man who could meet the
situation there, and you are at Albuquerque. A year from now I
shall be in Rome, and there I hope to get a Spanish missionary who
will take over the parish of Taos. Only a Spaniard would be
welcomed there, I think."
"You are doubtless right," said Father Joseph. "I am often too
hasty in my judgments. I may do very badly for you while you are
in Europe. For I suppose I am to leave my dear Albuquerque, and
come to Santa Fé while you are gone?"
"Assuredly. They will love you all the more for lacking you
awhile. I hope to bring some more hardy Auvergnats back with me,
young men from our own Seminary, and I am afraid I must put one of
them in Albuquerque. You have been there long enough. You have
done all that is necessary. I need you here, Father Joseph. As it
is now, one of us must ride seventy miles whenever we wish to
converse about anything."
Father Vaillant sighed. "Ah, I supposed it would come! You will
snatch me from Albuquerque as you did from Sandusky. When I went
there everybody was my enemy, now everybody is my friend; therefore
it is time to go." Father Vaillant took off his glasses, folded
them, and put them in their case, which act always announced his
determination to retire. "So a year from now you will be in Rome.
Well, I had rather be among my people in Albuquerque, that I can
say honestly. But Clermont--there I envy you. I should like to
see my own mountains again. At least you will see all my family
and bring me word of them, and you can bring me the vestments that
my dear sister Philomène and her nuns have been making for me these
three years. I shall be very glad to have them." He rose, and
took up one of the candles. "And when you leave Clermont, Jean,
put a few chestnuts in your pocket for me!"
2
THE MISER
In February Bishop Latour once more set out on horseback over the
Santa Fé trail, this time with Rome as his objective. He was
absent for nearly a year, and when he returned he brought with him
four young priests from his own Seminary of Montferrand, and a
Spanish priest, Father Taladrid, whom he had found in Rome, and who
was at once sent to Taos. At the Bishop's suggestion, Padre
Martínez formally resigned his parish, with the understanding that
he was still to celebrate Mass upon solemn occasions. Not only did
he avail himself of this privilege, but he continued to perform all
marriages and burial services and to dictate the lives of the
parishioners. Very soon he and Father Taladrid were at open war.
When the Bishop, unable to compose their differences, supported the
new priest, Father Martínez and his friend Father Lucero, of Arroyo
Hondo, mutinied; flatly refused to submit, and organized a church
of their own. This, they declared, was the old Holy Catholic
Church of Mexico, while the Bishop's church was an American
institution. In both towns the greater part of the population went
over to the schismatic church, though some pious Mexicans, in great
perplexity, attended Mass at both. Father Martínez printed a long
and eloquent Proclamation (which very few of his parishioners could
read) giving an historical justification for his schism, and
denying the obligation of celibacy for the priesthood. As both he
and Father Lucero were well on in years, this particular clause
could be of little benefit to anyone in their new organization
except Trinidad. After the two old priests went off into schism,
one of their first solemn acts was to elevate Father Lucero's
nephew to the priesthood, and he acted as curate to them both,
swinging back and forth between Taos and Arroyo Hondo.
The schismatic church at least accomplished the rejuvenation of the
two rebellious priests at its head, and far and wide revived men's
interest in them,--though they had always furnished their people
with plenty to talk about. Ever since they were young men with
adjoining parishes, they had been friends, cronies, rivals,
sometimes bitter enemies. But their quarrels could never keep them
apart for long.
Old Marino Lucero had not one trait in common with Martínez, except
the love of authority. He had been a miser from his youth, and
lived down in the sunken world of Arroyo Hondo in the barest
poverty, though he was supposed to be very rich. He used to boast
that his house was as poor as a burro's stable. His bed, his
crucifix, and his bean-pot were his furniture. He kept no live-
stock but one poor mule, on which he rode over to Taos to quarrel
with his friend Martínez, or to get a solid dinner when he was
hungry. In his casa every day was Friday--unless one of his
neighbour women cooked a chicken and brought it in to him out of
pure compassion. For his people liked him. He was grasping, but
not oppressive, and he wrung more pesos out of Arroyo Seco and
Questa than out of his own arroyo. Thrift is such a rare quality
among Mexicans that they find it very amusing; his people loved to
tell how he never bought anything, but picked up old brooms after
housewives had thrown them away, and that he wore Padre Martínez's
garments after the Padre would have them no longer, though they
were so much too big for him. One of the priests' fiercest
quarrels had come about because Martínez gave some of his old
clothes to a monk from Mexico who was studying at his house, and
who had not wherewithal to cover himself as winter came on.
The two priests had always talked shamelessly about each other.
All Martínez's best stories were about Lucero, and all Lucero's
were about Martínez.
"You see how it is," Padre Lucero would say to the young men at a
wedding party, "my way is better than old José Martínez's. His
nose and chin are getting to be close neighbours now, and a
petticoat is not much good to him any more. But I can still rise
upright at the sight of a dollar. With a new piece of money in my
hand I am happier than ever; and what can he do with a pretty girl
but regret?"
Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger
and sweeter in old age. He had the lust for money as Martínez had
for women, and they had never been rivals in the pursuit of their
pleasures. After Trinidad was ordained and went to stay with his
uncle, Father Lucero complained that he had formed gross habits
living with Martínez, and was eating him out of house and home.
Father Martínez told with delight how Trinidad sponged upon the
parish at Arroyo Hondo, and went about poking his nose into one
bean-pot after another.
When the Bishop could no longer remain deaf to the rebellion, he
sent Father Vaillant over to Taos to publish the warning for three
weeks and exhort the two priests to renounce their heresy. On the
fourth Sunday Father Joseph, who complained that he was always sent
"à fouetter les chats," solemnly read the letter in which the
Bishop stripped Father Martínez of the rights and privileges of the
priesthood. On the afternoon of the same day, he rode over to
Arroyo Hondo, eighteen miles away, and read a similar letter of
excommunication against Father Lucero.
Father Martínez continued at the head of his schismatic church
until, after a short illness, he died and was buried in schism, by
Father Lucero. Soon after this, Father Lucero himself fell into a
decline. But even after he was ailing he performed a feat which
became one of the legends of the countryside,--killed a robber in a
midnight scuffle.
A wandering teamster who had been discharged from a wagon train for
theft, was picking up a living over in Taos and there heard the
stories about Father Lucero's hidden riches. He came to Arroyo
Hondo to rob the old man. Father Lucero was a light sleeper, and
hearing stealthy sounds in the middle of the night, he reached for
the carving-knife he kept hidden under his mattress and sprang upon
the intruder. They began fighting in the dark, and though the
thief was a young man and armed, the old priest stabbed him to
death and then, covered with blood, ran out to arouse the town.
The neighbours found the Padre's chamber like a slaughter-house,
his victim lying dead beside the hole he had dug. They were amazed
at what the old man had been able to do.
But from the shock of that night Father Lucero never recovered. He
wasted away so rapidly that his people had the horse doctor come
from Taos to look at him. This veterinary was a Yankee who had
been successful in treating men as well as horses, but he said he
could do nothing for Father Lucero; he believed he had an internal
tumour or a cancer.
Padre Lucero died repentant, and Father Vaillant, who had
pronounced his excommunication, was the one to reconcile him to the
Church. The Vicar was in Taos on business for the Bishop, staying
with Kit Carson and the Señora. They were all sitting at supper
one evening during a heavy rain-storm, when a horseman rode up to
the portale. Carson went out to receive him. The visitor he
brought in with him was Trinidad Lucero, who took off his rubber
coat and stood in a full-skirted cassock of Arroyo Hondo make, a
crucifix about his neck, seeming to fill the room with his size and
importance. After bowing ceremoniously to the Señora, he addressed
himself to Father Vaillant in his best English, speaking slowly in
his thick felty voice.
"I am the only nephew of Padre Lucero. My uncle is verra seek and
soon to die. She has vomit the blood." He dropped his eyes.
"Speak to me in your own language, man!" cried Father Joseph. "I
can at least do more with Spanish than you can with English. Now
tell me what you have to say of your uncle's condition."
Trinidad gave some account of his uncle's illness, repeating
solemnly the phrase, "She has vomit the blood," which he seemed to
find impressive. The sick man wished to see Father Vaillant, and
begged that he would come to him and give him the Sacrament.
Carson urged the Vicar to wait until morning, as the road down into
"the Hondo" would be badly washed by rain and dangerous to go over
in the dark. But Father Vaillant said if the road were bad he
could go down on foot. Excusing himself to the Señora Carson, he
went to his room to put on his riding-clothes and get his
saddlebags. Trinidad, upon invitation, sat down at the empty place
and made the most of his opportunity. The host saddled Father
Vaillant's mule, and the Vicar rode away, with Trinidad for guide.
Not that he needed a guide to Arroyo Hondo, it was a place
especially dear to him, and he was always glad to find a pretext
for going there. How often he had ridden over there on fine days
in summer, or in early spring, before the green was out, when the
whole country was pink and blue and yellow, like a coloured map.
One approached over a sage-brush plain that appeared to run level
and unbroken to the base of the distant mountains; then without
warning, one suddenly found oneself upon the brink of a precipice,
of a chasm in the earth over two hundred feet deep, the sides sheer
cliffs, but cliffs of earth, not rock. Drawing rein at the edge,
one looked down into a sunken world of green fields and gardens,
with a pink adobe town, at the bottom of this great ditch. The men
and mules walking about down there, or plowing the fields, looked
like the figures of a child's Noah's ark. Down the middle of the
arroyo, through the sunken fields and pastures, flowed a rushing
stream which came from the high mountains. Its original source was
so high, indeed, that by merely laying a closed wooden trough up
the face of the cliff, the Mexicans conveyed the water some
hundreds of feet to an open ditch at the top of the precipice.
Father Vaillant had often stopped to watch the imprisoned water
leaping out into the light like a thing alive, just where the steep
trail down into the Hondo began. The water thus diverted was but a
tiny thread of the full creek; the main stream ran down the arroyo
over a white rock bottom, with green willows and deep hay grass and
brilliant wild flowers on its banks. Evening primroses, the
fireweed, and butterfly weed grew to a tropical size and brilliance
there among the sedges.
But this was the first time Father Vaillant had ever gone down into
the Hondo after dark, and at the edge of the cliff he decided not
to put Contento to so cruel a test. "He can do it," he said to
Trinidad, "but I will not make him." He dismounted and went on
foot down the steep winding trail.
They reached Father Lucero's house before midnight. Half the
population of the town seemed to be in attendance, and the place
was lit up as if for a festival. The sick man's chamber was full
of Mexican women, sitting about on the floor, wrapped in their
black shawls, saying their prayers with lighted candles before
them. One could scarcely step for the candles.
Father Vaillant beckoned to a woman he knew well, Conçeptión
Gonzales, and asked her what was the meaning of this. She
whispered that the dying Padre would have it so. His sight was
growing dim, and he kept calling for more lights. All his life,
Conçeptión sighed, he had been so saving of candles, and had mostly
done with a pine splinter in the evenings.
In the corner, on the bed, Father Lucero was groaning and tossing,
one man rubbing his feet, and another wringing cloths out of hot
water and putting them on his stomach to dull the pain. Señora
Gonzales whispered that the sick man had been gnawing the sheets
for pain; she had brought over her best ones, and they were chewed
to lacework across the top.
Father Vaillant approached the bed-side, "Get away from the bed a
little, my good women. Arrange yourselves along the wall, your
candles blind me."
But as they began rising and lifting their candlesticks from the
floor, the sick man called, "No, no, do not take away the lights!
Some thief will come, and I will have nothing left."
The women shrugged, looked reproachfully at Father Vaillant, and
sat down again.
Padre Lucero was wasted to the bones. His cheeks were sunken, his
hooked nose was clay-coloured and waxy, his eyes were wild with
fever. They burned up at Father Joseph,--great, black, glittering,
distrustful eyes. On this night of his departure the old man
looked more Spaniard than Mexican. He clutched Father Joseph's
hand with a grip surprisingly strong, and gave the man who was
rubbing his feet a vigorous kick in the chest.
"Have done with my feet there, and take away these wet rags. Now
that the Vicar has come, I have something to say, and I want you
all to hear." Father Lucero's voice had always been thin and high
in pitch, his parishioners used to say it was like a horse talking.
"Señor Vicario, you remember Padre Martínez? You ought to, for you
served him as badly as you did me. Now listen:"
Father Lucero related that Martínez, before his death, had
entrusted to him a certain sum of money to be spent in masses for
the repose of his soul, these to be offered at his native church in
Abiquiu. Lucero had not used the money as he promised, but had
buried it under the dirt floor of this room, just below the large
crucifix that hung on the wall yonder.
At this point Father Vaillant again signalled to the women to
withdraw, but as they took up their candles, Father Lucero sat up
in his night-shirt and cried, "Stay as you are! Are you going to
run away and leave me with a stranger? I trust him no more than I
do you! Oh, why did God not make some way for a man to protect his
own after death? Alive, I can do it with my knife, old as I am.
But after--?"
The Señora Gonzales soothed Father Lucero, persuaded him to lie
back upon his pillows and tell them what he wanted them to do. He
explained that this money which he had taken in trust from Martínez
was to be sent to Abiquiu and used as the Padre had wished. Under
the crucifix, and under the floor beneath the bed on which he was
lying, they would find his own savings. One third of his hoard was
for Trinidad. The rest was to be spent in masses for his soul, and
they were to be celebrated in the old church of San Miguel in Santa
Fé.
Father Vaillant assured him that all his wishes should be
scrupulously carried out, and now it was time for him to dismiss
the cares of this world and prepare his mind to receive the
Sacrament.
"All in good time. But a man does not let go of this world so
easily. Where is Conçeptión Gonzales? Come here, my daughter.
See to it that the money is taken up from under the floor while I
am still in this chamber, before my body is cold, that it is
counted in the presence of all these women, and the sum set down in
writing." At this point, the old man started, as with a new hope.
"And Christóbal, he is the man! Christóbal Carson must be here to
count it and set it down. He is a just man. Trinidad, you fool,
why did you not bring Christóbal?"
Father Vaillant was scandalized. "Unless you compose yourself,
Father Lucero, and fix your thoughts upon Heaven, I shall refuse to
administer the Sacrament. In your present state of mind, it would
be a sacrilege."
The old man folded his hands and closed his eyes in assent. Father
Vaillant went into the adjoining room to put on his cassock and
stole, and in his absence Conçeptión Gonzales covered a small table
by the bed with one of her own white napkins and placed upon it two
wax candles, and a cup of water for the ministrant's hands. Father
Vaillant came back in his vestments, with his pyx and basin of holy
water, and began sprinkling the bed and the watchers, repeating the
antiphon, Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor. The women
stole away, leaving their lights upon the floor. Father Lucero
made his confession, renouncing his heresy and expressing
contrition, after which he received the Sacrament.
The ceremony calmed the tormented man, and he lay quiet with his
hands folded on his breast. The women returned and sat murmuring
prayers as before. The rain drove against the window panes, the
wind made a hollow sound as it sucked down through the deep arroyo.
Some of the watchers were drooping from weariness, but not one
showed any wish to go home. Watching beside a death-bed was not a
hardship for them, but a privilege,--in the case of a dying priest
it was a distinction.
In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn
social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain
bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a
moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing
in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable
scene. Among the watchers there was always the hope that the dying
man might reveal something of what he alone could see; that his
countenance, if not his lips, would speak, and on his features
would fall some light or shadow from beyond. The "Last Words" of
great men, Napoleon, Lord Byron, were still printed in gift-books,
and the dying murmurs of every common man and woman were listened
for and treasured by their neighbours and kinsfolk. These sayings,
no matter how unimportant, were given oracular significance and
pondered by those who must one day go the same road.
The stillness of the death chamber was suddenly broken when
Trinidad Lucero knelt down before the crucifix on the wall to pray.
His uncle, though all thought him asleep, began to struggle and cry
out, "A thief! Help, help!" Trinidad retired quickly, but after
that the old man lay with one eye open, and no one dared go near
the crucifix.
About an hour before day-break the Padre's breathing became so
painful that two of the men got behind him and lifted his pillows.
The women whispered that his face was changing, and they brought
their candles nearer, kneeling close beside his bed. His eyes were
alive and had perception in them. He rolled his head to one side
and lay looking intently down into the candlelight, without
blinking, while his features sharpened. Several times his lips
twitched back over his teeth. The watchers held their breath,
feeling sure that he would speak before he passed,--and he did.
After a facial spasm that was like a sardonic smile, and a clicking
of breath in his mouth, their Padre spoke like a horse for the last
time:
"Comete tu cola, Martínez, comete tu cola!" (Eat your tail,
Martínez, eat your tail!) Almost at once he died in a convulsion.
After day-break Trinidad went forth declaring (and the Mexican
women confirmed him) that at the moment of death Father Lucero had
looked into the other world and beheld Padre Martínez in torment.
As long as the Christians who were about that death-bed lived, the
story was whispered in Arroyo Hondo.
When the floor of the priest's house was taken up, according to his
last instructions, people came from as far as Taos and Santa Cruz
and Mora to see the buckskin bags of gold and silver coin that were
buried beneath it. Spanish coins, French, American, English, some
of them very old. When it was at length conveyed to a Government
mint and examined, it was valued at nearly twenty thousand dollars
in American money. A great sum for one old priest to have scraped
together in a country parish down at the bottom of a ditch.
BOOK SIX
DOÑA ISABELLA
1
DON ANTONIO
Bishop Latour had one very keen worldly ambition; to build in Santa
Fé a cathedral which would be worthy of a setting naturally
beautiful. As he cherished this wish and meditated upon it, he
came to feel that such a building might be a continuation of
himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations
after he had passed from the scene. Early in his administration he
began setting aside something from his meagre resources for a
cathedral fund. In this he was assisted by certain of the rich
Mexican rancheros, but by no one so much as by Don Antonio
Olivares.
Antonio Olivares was the most intelligent and prosperous member of
a large family of brothers and cousins, and he was for that time
and place a man of wide experience, a man of the world. He had
spent the greater part of his life in New Orleans and El Paso del
Norte, but he returned to live in Santa Fé several years after
Bishop Latour took up his duties there. He brought with him his
American wife and a wagon train of furniture, and settled down to
spend his declining years in the old ranch house just east of the
town where he was born and had grown up. He was then a man of
sixty. In early manhood he had lost his first wife; after he went
to New Orleans he had married a second time, a Kentucky girl who
had grown up among her relatives in Louisiana. She was pretty and
accomplished, had been educated at a French convent, and had done
much to Europeanize her husband. The refinement of his dress and
manners, and his lavish style of living, provoked half-contemptuous
envy among his brothers and their friends.
Olivares's wife, Doña Isabella, was a devout Catholic, and at their
house the French priests were always welcome and were most
cordially entertained. The Señora Olivares had made a pleasant
place of the rambling adobe building, with its great court-yard and
gateway, carved joists and beams, fine herring-bone ceilings and
snug fire-places. She was a gracious hostess, and though no longer
very young, she was still attractive to the eye; a slight woman,
spirited, quick in movement, with a delicate blonde complexion
which she had successfully guarded in trying climates, and fair
hair--a little silvered, and perhaps worn in too many puffs and
ringlets for the sharpening outline of her face. She spoke French
well, Spanish lamely, played the harp, and sang agreeably.
Certainly it was a great piece of luck for Father Latour and Father
Vaillant, who lived so much among peons and Indians and rough
frontiersmen, to be able to converse in their own tongue now and
then with a cultivated woman; to sit by that hospitable fireside,
in rooms enriched by old mirrors and engravings and upholstered
chairs, where the windows had clean curtains, and the sideboard and
cupboards were stocked with plate and Belgian glass. It was
refreshing to spend an evening with a couple who were interested in
what was going on in the outside world, to eat a good dinner and
drink good wine, and listen to music. Father Joseph, that man of
inconsistencies, had a pleasing tenor voice, true though not
strong. Madame Olivares liked to sing old French songs with him.
She was a trifle vain, it must be owned, and when she sang at all,
insisted upon singing in three languages, never forgetting her
husband's favourites, "La Paloma" and "La Golondrina," and "My
Nelly Was A Lady." The Negro melodies of Stephen Foster had
already travelled to the frontier, going along the river highways,
not in print, but passed on from one humble singer to another.
Don Antonio was a large man, heavy, full at the belt, a trifle
bald, and very slow of speech. But his eyes were lively, and the
yellow spark in them was often most perceptible when he was quite
silent. It was interesting to observe him after dinner, settled in
one of his big chairs from New Orleans, a cigar between his long
golden-brown fingers, watching his wife at her harp.
There was gossip about the lady in Santa Fé, of course, since she
had retained her beautiful complexion and her husband's devoted
regard for so many years. The Americans and the Olivares brothers
said she dressed much too youthfully, which was perhaps true, and
that she had lovers in New Orleans and El Paso del Norte. Her
nephews-in-law went so far as to declare that she was enamoured of
the Mexican boy the Olivares had brought up from San Antonio to
play the banjo for them,--they both loved music, and this boy,
Pablo, was a magician with his instrument. All sorts of stories
went out from the kitchen; that Doña Isabella had a whole chamber
full of dresses so grand that she never wore them here at all; that
she took gold from her husband's pockets and hid it under the floor
of her room; that she gave him love potions and herb-teas to
increase his ardour. This gossip did not mean that her servants
were disloyal, but rather that they were proud of their mistress.
Olivares, who read the newspapers, though they were weeks old when
he got them, who liked cigars better than cigarettes, and French
wine better than whisky, had little in common with his younger
brothers. Next to his old friend Manuel Chavez, the two French
priests were the men in Santa Fé whose company he most enjoyed, and
he let them see it. He was a man who cherished his friends. He
liked to call at the Bishop's house to advise him about the care of
his young orchard, or to leave a bottle of home-made cherry brandy
for Father Joseph. It was Olivares who presented Father Latour
with the silver hand-basin and pitcher and toilet accessories which
gave him so much satisfaction all the rest of his life. There were
good silversmiths among the Mexicans of Santa Fé, and Don Antonio
had his own toilet-set copied in hammered silver for his friend.
Doña Isabella once remarked that her husband always gave Father
Vaillant something good for the palate, and Father Latour something
good for the eye.
This couple had one child, a daughter, the Señorita Inez, born long
ago and still unmarried. Indeed, it was generally understood that
she would never marry. Though she had not taken the veil, her life
was that of a nun. She was very plain and had none of her mother's
social graces, but she had a beautiful contralto voice. She sang
in the Cathedral choir in New Orleans, and taught singing in a
convent there. She came to visit her parents only once after they
settled in Santa Fé, and she was a somewhat sombre figure in that
convivial household. Doña Isabella seemed devotedly attached to
her, but afraid of displeasing her. While Inez was there, her
mother dressed very plainly, pinned back the little curls that hung
over her right ear, and the two women went to church together all
day long.
Antonio Olivares was deeply interested in the Bishop's dream of a
cathedral. For one thing, he saw that Father Latour had set his
heart on building one, and Olivares was the sort of man who liked
to help a friend accomplish the desire of his heart. Furthermore,
he had a deep affection for his native town, he had travelled and
seen fine churches, and he wished there might some day be one in
Santa Fé. Many a night he and Father Latour talked of it by the
fire; discussed the site, the design, the building stone, the cost
and the grave difficulties of raising money. It was the Bishop's
hope to begin work upon the building in 1860, ten years after his
appointment to the Bishopric. One night, at a long-remembered New
Year's party in his house, Olivares announced in the presence of
his guests that before the new year was gone he meant to give to
the Cathedral fund a sum sufficient to enable Father Latour to
carry out his purpose.
That supper party at the Olivares' was memorable because of this
pledge, and because it marked a parting of old friends. Doña
Isabella was entertaining the officers at the Post, two of whom had
received orders to leave Santa Fé. The popular Commandant was
called back to Washington, the young lieutenant of cavalry, an
Irish Catholic, lately married and very dear to Father Latour, was
to be sent farther west. (Before the next New Year's Day came
round he was killed in Indian warfare on the plains of Arizona.)
But that night the future troubled nobody; the house was full of
light and music, the air warm with that simple hospitality of the
frontier, where people dwell in exile, far from their kindred,
where they lead rough lives and seldom meet together for pleasure.
Kit Carson, who greatly admired Madame Olivares, had come the two
days' journey from Taos to be present that night, and brought along
his gentle half-breed daughter, lately home from a convent school
in St. Louis. On this occasion he wore a handsome buckskin coat,
embroidered in silver, with brown velvet cuffs and collar. The
officers from the Fort were in dress uniform, the host as usual
wore a broadcloth frock-coat. His wife was in a hoop-skirt, a
French dress from New Orleans, all covered with little garlands of
pink satin roses. The military ladies came out to the Olivares
place in an army wagon, to keep their satin shoes from the mud.
The Bishop had put on his violet vest, which he seldom wore, and
Father Vaillant had donned a fresh new cassock, made by the loving
hands of his sister Philomène, in Riom.
Father Latour had used to feel a little ashamed that Joseph kept
his sister and her nuns so busy making cassocks and vestments for
him; but the last time he was in France he came to see all this in
another light. When he was visiting Mother Philomène's convent,
one of the younger Sisters had confided to him what an inspiration
it was to them, living in retirement, to work for the faraway
missions. She told him also how precious to them were Father
Vaillant's long letters, letters in which he told his sister of the
country, the Indians, the pious Mexican women, the Spanish martyrs
of old. These letters, she said, Mother Philomène read aloud in
the evening. The nun took Father Latour to a window that jutted
out and looked up the narrow street to where the wall turned at an
angle, cutting off further view. "Look," she said, "after the
Mother has read us one of those letters from her brother, I come
and stand in this alcove and look up our little street with its one
lamp, and just beyond the turn there, is New Mexico; all that he
has written us of those red deserts and blue mountains, the great
plains and the herds of bison, and the canyons more profound than
our deepest mountain gorges. I can feel that I am there, my heart
beats faster, and it seems but a moment until the retiring-bell
cuts short my dreams." The Bishop went away believing that it was
good for these Sisters to work for Father Joseph.
To-night, when Madame Olivares was complimenting Father Vaillant on
the sheen of his poplin and velvet, for some reason Father Latour
recalled that moment with the nun in her alcove window, her white
face, her burning eyes, and sighed.
After supper was over and the toasts had been drunk, the boy Pablo
was called in to play for the company while the gentlemen smoked.
The banjo always remained a foreign instrument to Father Latour; he
found it more than a little savage. When this strange yellow boy
played it, there was softness and languor in the wire strings--but
there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of
wild countries which all these men had felt and followed in one way
or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the
soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently
watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of the banjo player,
and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost all form and
became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of sand-
storm.
Observing them thus in repose, in the act of reflection, Father
Latour was thinking how each of these men not only had a story, but
seemed to have become his story. Those anxious, far-seeing blue
eyes of Carson's, to whom could they belong but to a scout and
trail-breaker? Don Manuel Chavez, the handsomest man of the
company, very elegant in velvet and broadcloth, with delicately
cut, disdainful features,--one had only to see him cross the room,
or to sit next him at dinner, to feel the electric quality under
his cold reserve; the fierceness of some embitterment, the passion
for danger.
Chavez boasted his descent from two Castilian knights who freed the
city of Chavez from the Moors in 1160. He had estates in the Pecos
and in the San Mateo mountains, and a house in Santa Fé, where he
hid himself behind his beautiful trees and gardens. He loved the
natural beauties of his country with a passion, and he hated the
Americans who were blind to them. He was jealous of Carson's fame
as an Indian-fighter, declaring that he had seen more Indian
warfare before he was twenty than Carson would ever see. He was
easily Carson's rival as a pistol shot. With the bow and arrow he
had no rival; he had never been beaten. No Indian had ever been
known to shoot an arrow as far as Chavez. Every year parties of
Indians came up to the Villa to shoot with him for wagers. His
house and stables were full of trophies. He took a cool pleasure
in stripping the Indians of their horses or silver or blankets, or
whatever they had put up on their man. He was proud of his skill
with Indian weapons; he had acquired it in a hard school.
When he was a lad of sixteen Manuel Chavez had gone out with a
party of Mexican youths to hunt Navajos. In those days, before the
American occupation, "hunting Navajos" needed no pretext, it was a
form of sport. A company of Mexicans would ride west to the Navajo
country, raid a few sheep camps, and come home bringing flocks and
ponies and a bunch of prisoners, for every one of whom they
received a large bounty from the Mexican Government. It was with
such a raiding party that the boy Chavez went out for spoil and
adventure.
Finding no Indians abroad, the young Mexicans pushed on farther
than they had intended. They did not know that it was the season
when all the roving Navajo bands gather at the Canyon de Chelly for
their religious ceremonies, and they rode on impetuously until they
came out upon the rim of that mysterious and terrifying canyon
itself, then swarming with Indians. They were immediately
surrounded, and retreat was impossible. They fought on the naked
sandstone ledges that overhang that gulf. Don José Chavez,
Manuel's older brother, was captain of the party, and was one of
the first to fall. The company of fifty were slaughtered to a man.
Manuel was the fifty-first, and he survived. With seven arrow
wounds, and one shaft clear through his body, he was left for dead
in a pile of corpses.
That night, while the Navajos were celebrating their victory, the
boy crawled along the rocks until he had high boulders between him
and the enemy, and then started eastward on foot. It was summer,
and the heat of that red sandstone country is intense. His wounds
were on fire. But he had the superb vitality of early youth. He
walked for two days and nights without finding a drop of water,
covering a distance of sixty odd miles, across the plain, across
the mountain, until he came to the famous spring on the other side,
where Fort Defiance was afterward built. There he drank and bathed
his wounds and slept. He had had no food since the morning before
the fight; near the spring he found some large cactus plants, and
slicing away the spines with his hunting-knife, he filled his
stomach with the juicy pulp.
From here, still without meeting a human creature, he stumbled on
until he reached the San Mateo mountain, north of Laguna. In a
mountain valley he came upon a camp of Mexican shepherds, and fell
unconscious. The shepherds made a litter of saplings and their
sheepskin coats and carried him into the village of Cebolleta,
where he lay delirious for many days. Years afterward, when Chavez
came into his inheritance, he bought that beautiful valley in the
San Mateo mountain where he had sunk unconscious under two noble
oak trees. He build a house between those twin oaks, and made a
fine estate there.
Never reconciled to American rule, Chavez lived in seclusion when
he was in Santa Fé. At the first rumour of an Indian outbreak,
near or far, he rode off to add a few more scalps to his record.
He distrusted the new Bishop because of his friendliness toward
Indians and Yankees. Besides, Chavez was a Martínez man. He had
come here to-night only in compliment to Señora Olivares; he hated
to spend an evening among American uniforms.
When the banjo player was exhausted, Father Joseph said that as for
him, he would like a little drawing-room music, and he led Madame
Olivares to her harp. She was very charming at her instrument; the
pose suited her tip-tilted canary head, and her little foot and
white arms.
This was the last time the Bishop heard her sing "La Paloma" for
her admiring husband, whose eyes smiled at her even when his heavy
face seemed asleep.
Olivares died on Septuagesima Sunday--fell over by his own fire-
place when he was lighting the candles after supper, and the banjo
boy was sent running for the Bishop. Before midnight two of the
Olivares brothers, half drunk with brandy and excitement, galloped
out of Santa Fé, on the road to Albuquerque, to employ an American
lawyer.
2
THE LADY
Antonio Olivares's funeral was the most solemn and magnificent ever
seen in Santa Fé, but Father Vaillant was not there. He was off on
a long missionary journey to the south, and did not reach home
until Madame Olivares had been a widow for some weeks. He had
scarcely got off his riding-boots when he was called into Father
Latour's study to see her lawyer.
Olivares had entrusted the management of his affairs to a young
Irish Catholic, Boyd O'Reilly, who had come out from Boston to
practise law in the new Territory. There were no steel safes in
Santa Fé at that time, but O'Reilly had kept Olivares's will in his
strong-box. The document was brief and clear: Antonio's estate
amounted to about two hundred thousand dollars in American money
(a considerable fortune in those days). The income therefrom was to
be enjoyed by "my wife, Isabella Olivares, and her daughter, Inez
Olivares," during their lives, and after their decease his property
was to go to the Church, to the Society for the Propagation of the
Faith. The codicil, in favour of the Cathedral fund, had,
unfortunately, never been added to the will.
The young lawyer explained to Father Vaillant that the Olivares
brothers had retained the leading legal firm of Albuquerque and
were contesting the will. Their point of attack was that Señorita
Inez was too old to be the daughter of the Señora Olivares. Don
Antonio had been a promiscuous lover in his young days, and his
brothers held that Inez was the offspring of some temporary
attachment, and had been adopted by Doña Isabella. O'Reilly had
sent to New Orleans for an attested copy of the marriage record of
the Olivares couple, and the birth certificate of Señorita Inez.
But in Kentucky, where the Señora was born, no birth records were
kept; there was no document to prove the age of Isabella Olivares,
and she could not be persuaded to admit her true age. It was
generally believed in Santa Fé that she was still in her early
forties, in which case she would not have been more than six or
eight years old at the date when Inez was born. In reality the
lady was past fifty, but when O'Reilly had tried to persuade her to
admit this in court, she simply refused to listen to him. He
begged the Bishop and the Vicar to use their influence with her to
this end.
Father Latour shrank from interfering in so delicate a matter, but
Father Vaillant saw at once that it was their plain duty to protect
the two women and, at the same time, secure the rights of the
Propaganda. Without more ado he threw on his old cloak over his
cassock, and the three men set off through the red mud to the
Olivares' hacienda in the hills east of the town.
Father Joseph had not been to the Olivares' house since the night
of the New Year's party, and he sighed as he approached the place,
already transformed by neglect. The big gate was propped open by a
pole because the iron hook was gone, the court-yard was littered
with rags and meat bones which the dogs had carried there and no
one had taken away. The big parrot cage, hanging in the portale,
was filthy, and the birds were squalling. When O'Reilly rang the
bell at the outer gate, Pablo, the banjo player, came running out
with tousled hair and a dirty shirt to admit the visitors. He took
them into the long living-room, which was empty and cold, the fire-
place dark, the hearth unswept. Chairs and window-sills were deep
in red dust, the glass panes dirty, and streaked as if by tear-
drops. On the writing-table were empty bottles and sticky glasses
and cigar ends. In one corner stood the harp in its green cover.
Pablo asked the Fathers to be seated. His mistress was staying in
bed, he said, and the cook had burnt her hand, and the other maids
were lazy. He brought wood and laid a fire.
After some time, Doña Isabella entered, dressed in heavy mourning,
her face very white against the black, and her eyes red. The curls
about her neck and ears were pale, too--quite ashen.
After Father Vaillant had greeted her and spoken consoling words,
the young lawyer began once more gently to explain to her the
difficulties that confronted them, and what they must do to defeat
the action of the Olivares family. She sat submissively, touching
her eyes and nose with her little lace handkerchief, and clearly
not even trying to understand a word of what he said to her.
Father Joseph soon lost patience and himself approached the widow.
"You understand, my child," he began briskly, "that your husband's
brothers are determined to disregard his wishes, to defraud you and
your daughter, and, eventually, the Church. This is no time for
childish vanity. To prevent this outrage to your husband's memory,
you must satisfy the court that you are old enough to be the mother
of Mademoiselle Inez. You must resolutely declare your true age;
fifty-three, is it not?"
Doña Isabella became pallid with fright. She shrank into one end
of the deep sofa, but her blue eyes focused and gathered light, as
she became intensely, rigidly animated in her corner,--her back
against the wall, as it were.
"Fifty-three!" she cried in a voice of horrified amazement. "Why,
I never heard of anything so outrageous! I was forty-two my last
birthday. It was in December, the fourth of December. If Antonio
were here, he would tell you! And he wouldn't let you scold me and
talk about business to me, either, Father Joseph. He never let
anybody talk about business to me!" She hid her face in her little
handkerchief and began to cry.
Father Latour checked his impetuous Vicar, and sat down on the sofa
beside Madame Olivares, feeling very sorry for her and speaking
very gently. "Forty-two to your friends, dear Madame Olivares, and
to the world. In heart and face you are younger than that. But to
the Law and the Church there must be a literal reckoning. A formal
statement in court will not make you any older to your friends; it
will not add one line to your face. A woman, you know, is as old
as she looks."
"That's very sweet of you to say, Bishop Latour," the lady
quavered, looking up at him with tear-bright eyes. "But I never
could hold up my head again. Let the Olivares have that old money.
I don't want it."
Father Vaillant sprang up and glared down at her as if he could put
common sense into her drooping head by the mere intensity of his
gaze. "Four hundred thousand pesos, Señora Isabella!" he cried.
"Ease and comfort for you and your daughter all the rest of your
lives. Would you make your daughter a beggar? The Olivares will
take everything."
"I can't help it about Inez," she pleaded. "Inez means to go into
the convent anyway. And I don't care about the money. Ah, mon
père, je voudrais mieux être jeune et mendiante, que n'être que
vieille et riche, certes, oui!"
Father Joseph caught her icy cold hand. "And have you a right to
defraud the Church of what is left to it in your trust? Have you
thought of the consequences to yourself of such a betrayal?"
Father Latour glanced sternly at his Vicar. "Assez," he said
quietly. He took the little hand Father Joseph had released and
bent over it, kissing it respectfully. "We must not press this any
further. We must leave this to Madame Olivares and her own
conscience. I believe, my daughter, you will come to realize that
this sacrifice of your vanity would be for your soul's peace.
Looking merely at the temporal aspect of the case, you would find
poverty hard to bear. You would have to live upon the Olivares's
charity, would you not? I do not wish to see this come about. I
have a selfish interest; I wish you to be always your charming self
and to make a little poésie in life for us here. We have not much
of that."
Madame Olivares stopped crying. She raised her head and sat drying
her eyes. Suddenly she took hold of one of the buttons on the
Bishop's cassock and began twisting it with nervous fingers.
"Father," she said timidly, "what is the youngest I could possibly
be, to be Inez's mother?"
The Bishop could not pronounce the verdict; he hesitated, flushed,
then passed it on to O'Reilly with an open gesture of his fine
white hand.
"Fifty-two, Señora Olivares," said the young man respectfully. "If
I can get you to admit that, and stick to it, I feel sure we will
win our case."
"Very well, Mr. O'Reilly." She bowed her head. As her visitors
rose, she sat looking down at the dust-covered rugs. "Before
everybody!" she murmured, as if to herself.
When they were tramping home, Father Joseph said that, as for him,
he would rather combat the superstitions of a whole Indian pueblo
than the vanity of one white woman.
"And I would rather do almost anything than go through such a scene
again," said the Bishop with a frown. "I don't think I ever
assisted at anything so cruel."
Boyd O'Reilly defeated the Olivares brothers and won his case. The
Bishop would not go to the court hearing, but Father Vaillant was
there, standing in the malodorous crowd (there were no chairs in
the court room), and his knees shook under him when the young
lawyer, with the fierceness born of fright, poked his finger at his
client and said:
"Señora Olivares, you are fifty-two years of age, are you not?"
Madame Olivares was swathed in mourning, her face a streak of
shadowed white between folds of black veil.
"Yes, sir." The crape barely let it through.
The night after the verdict was pronounced, Manuel Chavez, with
several of Antonio's old friends, called upon the widow to
congratulate her. Word of their intention had gone about the town
and put others in the mood to call at a house that had been closed
to visitors for so long. A considerable company gathered there
that evening, including some of the military people, and several
hereditary enemies of the Olivares brothers.
The cook, stimulated by the sight of the long sala full of people
once more, hastily improvised a supper. Pablo put on a white shirt
and a velvet jacket, and began to carry up from the cellar his late
master's best whisky and sherry, and quarts of champagne. (The
Mexicans are very fond of sparkling wines. Only a few years before
this, an American trader who had got into serious political trouble
with the Mexican military authorities in Santa Fé, regained their
confidence and friendship by presenting them with a large wagon
shipment of champagne--three thousand, three hundred and ninety-two
bottles, indeed!)
This hospitable mood came upon the house suddenly, nothing had been
prepared beforehand. The wine glasses were full of dust, but Pablo
wiped them out with the shirt he had just taken off, and without
instructions from anyone he began gliding about with a tray full of
glasses, which he afterward refilled many times, taking his station
at the sideboard. Even Doña Isabella drank a little champagne;
when she had sipped one glass with the young Georgia captain, she
could not refuse to take another with their nearest neighbour,
Ferdinand Sanchez, always a true friend to her husband. Everyone
was gay, the servants and the guests, everything sparkled like a
garden after a shower.
Father Latour and Father Vaillant, having heard nothing of this
spontaneous gathering of friends, set off at eight o'clock to make
a call upon the brave widow. When they entered the court-yard,
they were astonished to hear music within, and to see light
streaming from the long row of windows behind the portale. Without
stopping to knock, they opened the door into the sala. Many
candles were burning. Señors were standing about in long frock-
coats buttoned over full figures. O'Reilly and a group of officers
from the Fort surrounded the sideboard, where Pablo, with a white
napkin wrapped showily about his wrist, was pouring champagne.
From the other end of the room sounded the high tinkle of the harp,
and Doña Isabella's voice:
"Listen to the mocking-bird,
Listen to the mocking-bird!"
The priests waited in the doorway until the song was finished, then
went forward to pay their respects to the hostess. She was wearing
the unrelieved white that grief permitted, and the yellow curls
were bobbing as of old--three behind her right ear, one over either
temple, and a little row across the back of her neck. As she saw
the two black figures approaching, she dropped her arms from the
harp, took her satin toe from the pedal, and rose, holding out a
hand to each. Her eyes were bright, and her face beamed with
affection for her spiritual fathers. But her greeting was a
playful reproach, uttered loud enough to be heard above the murmur
of conversing groups:
"I never shall forgive you, Father Joseph, nor you either, Bishop
Latour, for that awful lie you made me tell in court about my age!"
The two churchmen bowed amid laughter and applause.
BOOK SEVEN
THE GREAT DIOCESE
1
THE MONTH OF MARY
The Bishop's work was sometimes assisted, often impeded, by
external events.
By the Gadsden Purchase, executed three years after Father Latour
came to Santa Fé, the United States took over from Mexico a great
territory which now forms southern New Mexico and Arizona. The
authorities at Rome notified Father Latour that this new territory
was to be annexed to his diocese, but that as the national boundary
lines often cut parishes in two, the boundaries of Church
jurisdiction must be settled by conference with the Mexican Bishops
of Chihuahua and Sonora. Such conferences would necessitate a
journey of nearly four thousand miles. As Father Vaillant
remarked, at Rome they did not seem to realize that it was no easy
matter for two missionaries on horseback to keep up with the march
of history.
The question hung fire for some years, the subject of voluminous
correspondence. At last, in 1858, Father Vaillant was sent to
arrange the debated boundaries with the Mexican Bishops. He
started in the autumn and spent the whole winter on the road, going
from El Paso del Norte west to Tucson, on to Santa Magdalena and
Guaymas, a seaport town on the Gulf of California, and did some
seafaring on the Pacific before he turned homeward.
On his return trip he was stricken with malarial fever, resulting
from exposure and bad water, and lay seriously ill in a cactus
desert in Arizona. Word of his illness came to Santa Fé by an
Indian runner, and Father Latour and Jacinto rode across New Mexico
and half of Arizona, found Father Vaillant, and brought him back by
easy stages.
He was ill in the Bishop's house for two months. This was the
first spring that he and Father Latour had both been there at the
same time, to enjoy the garden they had laid out soon after they
first came to Santa Fé.
It was the month of Mary and the month of May. Father Vaillant was
lying on an army cot, covered with blankets, under the grape arbour
in the garden, watching the Bishop and his gardener at work in the
vegetable plots. The apple trees were in blossom, the cherry
blooms had gone by. The air and the earth interpenetrated in the
warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the
sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with
earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of blue
sky in it.
This garden had been laid out six years ago, when the Bishop
brought his fruit trees (then dry switches) up from St. Louis in
wagons, along with the blessed Sisters of Loretto, who came to
found the Academy of Our Lady of Light. The school was now well
established, reckoned a benefit to the community by Protestants as
well as Catholics, and the trees were bearing. Cuttings from them
were already yielding fruit in many Mexican gardens. While the
Bishop was away on that first trip to Baltimore, Father Joseph had,
in addition to his many official duties, found time to instruct
their Mexican housekeeper, Fructosa, in cookery. Later Bishop
Latour took in hand Fructosa's husband, Tranquilino, and trained
him as a gardener. They had boldly planned for the future; the
ground behind the church, between the Bishop's house and the
Academy, they laid out as a spacious orchard and kitchen-garden.
Ever since then the Bishop had worked on it, planting and pruning.
It was his only recreation.
A line of young poplars linked the Episcopal courtyard with the
school. On the south, against the earth wall, was the one row of
trees they had found growing there when they first came,--old, old
tamarisks, with twisted trunks. They had been so neglected, left
to fight for life in such hard, sun-baked, burro-trodden ground,
that their trunks had the hardness of cypress. They looked,
indeed, like very old posts, well seasoned and polished by time,
miraculously endowed with the power to burst into delicate foliage
and flowers, to cover themselves with long brooms of lavender-pink
blossom.
Father Joseph had come to love the tamarisk above all trees. It
had been the companion of his wanderings. All along his way
through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, wherever he had come
upon a Mexican homestead, out of the sun-baked earth, against the
sun-baked adobe walls, the tamarisk waved its feathery plumes of
bluish green. The family burro was tied to its trunk, the chickens
scratched under it, the dogs slept in its shade, the washing was
hung on its branches. Father Latour had often remarked that this
tree seemed especially designed in shape and colour for the adobe
village. The sprays of bloom which adorn it are merely another
shade of the red earth walls, and its fibrous trunk is full of gold
and lavender tints. Father Joseph respected the Bishop's eye for
such things, but himself he loved it merely because it was the tree
of the people, and was like one of the family in every Mexican
household.
This was a very happy season for Father Vaillant. For years he had
not been able properly to observe this month which in his boyhood
he had selected to be the holy month of the year for him, dedicated
to the contemplation of his Gracious Patroness. In his former
missionary life, on the Great Lakes, he used always to go into
retreat at this season. But here there was no time for such
things. Last year, in May, he had been on his way to the Hopi
Indians, riding thirty miles a day; marrying, baptizing, confessing
as he went, making camp in the sand-hills at night. His devotions
had been constantly interrupted by practical considerations.
But this year, because of his illness, the month of Mary he had
been able to give to Mary; to Her he had consecrated his waking
hours. At night he sank to sleep with the sense of Her protection.
In the morning when he awoke, before he had opened his eyes, he was
conscious of a special sweetness in the air,--Mary, and the month
of May. Alma Mater redemptoris! Once more he had been able to
worship with the ardour of a young religious, for whom religion is
pure personal devotion, unalloyed by expediency and the benumbing
cares of a missionary's work. Once again this had been his month;
his Patroness had given it to him, the season that had always meant
so much in his religious life.
He smiled to remember a time long ago, when he was a young curate
in Cendre, in the Puy-de-Dôme; how he had planned a season of
special devotion to the Blessed Virgin for May, and how the old
priest to whom he was assistant had blasted his hopes by cold
disapproval. The old man had come through the Terror, had been
trained in the austerity of those days of the persecution of the
clergy, and he was not untouched by Jansenism. Young Father Joseph
bore his rebuke with meekness, and went sadly to his own chamber.
There he took his rosary and spent the entire day in prayer. "Not
according to my desires, but if it is for thy glory, grant me this
boon, O Mary, my hope" In the evening of that same day the old
pastor sent for him, and unsolicited granted him the request he had
so sternly denied in the morning. How joyfully Father Joseph had
written all this to his sister Philomène, then a pupil with the
nuns of the Visitation in their native Riom, begging her to make
him a quantity of artificial flowers for his May altar. How richly
she had responded!--and she rejoiced no less than he that his May
devotions were so largely attended, especially by the young people
of the parish, in whom a notable increase of piety was manifest.
Father Vaillant's had been a close-knit family--losing their mother
while they were yet children had brought the brothers and sisters
the closer together--and with this sister, Philomène, he had shared
all his hopes and desires and his deepest religious life.
Ever since then, all the most important events in his own history
had occurred in the blessed month when this sinful and sullied
world puts on white as if to commemorate the Annunciation, and
becomes, for a little, lovely enough to be in truth the Bride of
Christ. It was in May that he had been given grace to perform the
hardest act of his life; to leave his country, to part from his
dear sister and his father (under what sad circumstances!), and to
start for the New World to take up a missionary's labours. That
parting was not a parting, but an escape--a running away, a
betrayal of family trust for the sake of a higher trust. He could
smile at it now, but at the time it had been terrible enough. The
Bishop, thinning carrots yonder, would remember. It was because of
what Father Latour had been to him in that hour, indeed, that
Father Joseph was here in a garden in Santa Fé. He would never
have left his dear Sandusky when the newly appointed Bishop asked
him to share his hardships, had he not said to himself: "Ah, now
it is he who is torn by perplexity! I will be to him now what he
was to me that day when we stood by the road-side, waiting for the
diligence to Paris, and my purpose broke, and,--he saved me."
That time came back upon Father Vaillant now so keenly that he
wiped a little moisture from his eyes,--(he was quickly moved,
after the way of sick people) and he cleared his glasses and
called:
"Father Latour, it is time for you to rest your back. You have
been stooping over a great while."
The Bishop came and sat down in a wheelbarrow that stood at the
edge of the arbour.
"I have been thinking that I shall no longer pray for your speedy
recovery, Joseph. The only way I can keep my Vicar within call is
to have him sick."
Father Joseph smiled.
"You are not in Santa Fé a great deal yourself, my Bishop."
"Well, I shall be here this summer, and I hope to keep you with me.
This year I want you to see my lotus flowers. Tranquilino will let
the water into my lake this afternoon." The lake was a little pond
in the middle of the garden, into which Tranquilino, clever with
water, like all Mexicans, had piped a stream from the Santa Fé
creek flowing near at hand. "Last summer, while you were away,"
the Bishop continued, "we had more than a hundred lotus blossoms
floating on that little lake. And all from five bulbs that I put
into my valise in Rome."
"When do they blossom?"
"They begin in June, but they are at their best in July."
"Then you must hurry them up a little. For with my Bishop's
permission, I shall be gone in July."
"So soon? And why?"
Father Vaillant moved uneasily under his blankets. "To hunt for
lost Catholics, Jean! Utterly lost Catholics, down in your new
territory, towards Tucson. There are hundreds of poor families
down there who have never seen a priest. I want to go from house
to house this time, to every little settlement. They are full of
devotion and faith, and it has nothing to feed upon but the most
mistaken superstitions. They remember their prayers all wrong.
They cannot read, and since there is no one to instruct them, how
can they get right? They are like seeds, full of germination but
with no moisture. A mere contact is enough to make them a living
part of the Church. The more I work with the Mexicans, the more I
believe it was people like them our Saviour bore in mind when He
said, Unless ye become as little children. He was thinking of
people who are not clever in the things of this world, whose minds
are not upon gain and worldly advancement. These poor Christians
are not thrifty like our country people at home; they have no
veneration for property, no sense of material values. I stop a
few hours in a village, I administer the sacraments and hear
confessions, I leave in every house some little token, a rosary or
a religious picture, and I go away feeling that I have conferred
immeasurable happiness, and have released faithful souls that were
shut away from God by neglect.
"Down near Tucson a Pima Indian convert once asked me to go off
into the desert with him, as he had something to show me. He took
me into a place so wild that a man less accustomed to these things
might have mistrusted and feared for his life. We descended into a
terrifying canyon of black rock, and there in the depths of a cave,
he showed me a golden chalice, vestments and cruets, all the
paraphernalia for celebrating Mass. His ancestors had hidden these
sacred objects there when the mission was sacked by Apaches, he did
not know how many generations ago. The secret had been handed down
in his family, and I was the first priest who had ever come to
restore to God his own. To me, that is the situation in a parable.
The Faith, in that wild frontier, is like a buried treasure; they
guard it, but they do not know how to use it to their soul's
salvation. A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to
set free those souls in bondage. I confess I am covetous of that
mission. I desire to be the man who restores these lost children
to God. It will be the greatest happiness of my life."
The Bishop did not reply at once to this appeal. At last he said
gravely, "You must realize that I have need of you here, Father
Joseph. My duties are too many for one man."
"But you do not need me so much as they do!" Father Joseph threw
off his coverings and sat up in his cassock, putting his feet to
the ground. "Any one of our good French priests from Montferrand
can serve you here. It is work that can be done by intelligence.
But down there it is work for the heart, for a particular sympathy,
and none of our new priests understand those poor natures as I do.
I have almost become a Mexican! I have learned to like chili
colorado and mutton fat. Their foolish ways no longer offend me,
their very faults are dear to me. I am THEIR MAN!"
"Ah, no doubt, no doubt! But I must insist upon your lying down
for the present."
Father Vaillant, flushed and excited, dropped back upon his
pillows, and the Bishop took a short turn through the garden,--to
the row of tamarisk trees and back. He walked slowly, with even,
unhesitating pace, with that slender, unrigid erectness, and the
fine carriage of head, which always made him seem master of the
situation. No one would have guessed that a sharp struggle was
going on within him. Father Joseph's impassioned request had
spoiled a cherished plan, and brought Father Latour a bitter
personal disappointment. There was but one thing to do,--and
before he reached the tamarisks he had done it. He broke off a
spray of the dry lilac-coloured flowers to punctuate and seal, as
it were, his renunciation. He returned with the same easy,
deliberate tread, and stood smiling beside the army cot.
"Your feeling must be your guide in this matter, Joseph. I shall
put no obstacles in your way. A certain care for your health I
must insist upon, but when you are quite well, you must follow the
duty that calls loudest."
They were both silent for a few moments. Father Joseph closed his
eyes against the sunlight, and Father Latour stood lost in thought,
drawing the plume of tamarisk blossom absently through his
delicate, rather nervous fingers. His hands had a curious
authority, but not the calmness so often seen in the hands of
priests; they seemed always to be investigating and making firm
decisions.
The two friends were roused from their reflections by a frantic
beating of wings. A bright flock of pigeons swept over their heads
to the far end of the garden, where a woman was just emerging from
the gate that led into the school grounds; Magdalena, who came
every day to feed the doves and to gather flowers. The Sisters had
given her charge of the altar decoration of the school chapel for
this month, and she came for the Bishop's apple blossoms and
daffodils. She advanced in a whirlwind of gleaming wings, and
Tranquilino dropped his spade and stood watching her. At one
moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that
they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and
disappeared as salt dissolves in water. The next moment they
flashed around black and silver against the sun. They settled upon
Magdalena's arms and shoulders, ate from her hand. When she put a
crust of bread between her lips, two doves hung in the air before
her face, stirring their wings and pecking at the morsel. A
handsome woman she had grown to be, with her comely figure and the
deep claret colour under the golden brown of her cheeks.
"Who would think, to look at her now, that we took her from a place
where every vileness of cruelty and lust was practised!" murmured
Father Vaillant. "Not since the days of early Christianity has the
Church been able to do what it can here."
"She is but twenty-seven or -eight years old. I wonder whether she
ought not to marry again," said the Bishop thoughtfully. "Though
she seems so contented, I have sometimes surprised a tragic shadow
in her eyes. Do you remember the terrible look in her eyes when we
first saw her?"
"Can I ever forget it! But her very body has changed. She was
then a shapeless, cringing creature. I thought her half-witted.
No, no! She has had enough of the storms of this world. Here she
is safe and happy." Father Vaillant sat up and called to her.
"Magdalena, Magdalena, my child, come here and talk to us for a
little. Two men grow lonely when they see nobody but each other."
2
DECEMBER NIGHT
Father Vaillant had been absent in Arizona since midsummer, and it
was now December. Bishop Latour had been going through one of
those periods of coldness and doubt which, from his boyhood, had
occasionally settled down upon his spirit and made him feel an
alien, wherever he was. He attended to his correspondence, went on
his rounds among the parish priests, held services at missions that
were without pastors, superintended the building of the addition to
the Sisters' school: but his heart was not in these things.
One night about three weeks before Christmas he was lying in his
bed, unable to sleep, with the sense of failure clutching at his
heart. His prayers were empty words and brought him no
refreshment. His soul had become a barren field. He had nothing
within himself to give his priests or his people. His work seemed
superficial, a house built upon the sands. His great diocese was
still a heathen country. The Indians travelled their old road of
fear and darkness, battling with evil omens and ancient shadows.
The Mexicans were children who played with their religion.
As the night wore on, the bed on which the Bishop lay became a bed
of thorns; he could bear it no longer. Getting up in the dark, he
looked out of the window and was surprised to find that it was
snowing, that the ground was already lightly covered. The full
moon, hidden by veils of cloud, threw a pale phosphorescent
luminousness over the heavens, and the towers of the church stood
up black against this silvery fleece. Father Latour felt a longing
to go into the church to pray; but instead he lay down again under
his blankets. Then, realizing that it was the cold of the church
he shrank from, and despising himself, he rose again, dressed
quickly, and went out into the court, throwing on over his cassock
that faithful old cloak that was the twin of Father Vaillant's.
They had bought the cloth for those coats in Paris, long ago, when
they were young men staying at the Seminary for Foreign Missions in
the rue du Bac, preparing for their first voyage to the New World.
The cloth had been made up into caped riding-cloaks by a German
tailor in Ohio, and lined with fox fur. Years afterward, when
Father Latour was about to start on his long journey in search of
his Bishopric, that same tailor had made the cloaks over and
relined them with squirrel skins, as more appropriate for a mild
climate. These memories and many others went through the Bishop's
mind as he wrapped the trusty garment about him and crossed the
court to the sacristy, with the big iron key in his hand.
The court was white with snow, and the shadows of walls and
buildings stood out sharply in the faint light from the moon
muffled in vapour. In the deep doorway of the sacristy he saw a
crouching figure--a woman, he made out, and she was weeping
bitterly. He raised her up and took her inside. As soon as he had
lit a candle, he recognized her, and could have guessed her errand.
It was an old Mexican woman, called Sada, who was slave in an
American family. They were Protestants, very hostile to the Roman
Church, and they did not allow her to go to Mass or to receive the
visits of a priest. She was carefully watched at home,--but in
winter, when the heated rooms of the house were desirable to the
family, she was put to sleep in a woodshed. To-night, unable to
sleep for the cold, she had gathered courage for this heroic
action, had slipped out through the stable door and come running up
an alley-way to the House of God to pray. Finding the front doors
of the church fastened, she had made her way into the Bishop's
garden and come round to the sacristy, only to find that, too, shut
against her.
The Bishop stood holding the candle and watching her face while she
spoke her few words; a dark brown peon face, worn thin and sharp by
life and sorrow. It seemed to him that he had never seen pure
goodness shine out of a human countenance as it did from hers.
He saw that she had no stockings under her shoes,--the cast-off
rawhides of her master,--and beneath her frayed black shawl was
only a thin calico dress, covered with patches. Her teeth struck
together as she stood trying to control her shivering. With one
movement of his free hand the Bishop took the furred cloak from his
shoulders and put it about her. This frightened her. She cowered
under it, murmuring, "Ah, no, no, Padre!"
"You must obey your Padre, my daughter. Draw that cloak about you,
and we will go into the church to pray."
The church was utterly black except for the red spark of the
sanctuary lamp before the high altar. Taking her hand, and holding
the candle before him, he led her across the choir to the Lady
Chapel. There he began to light the tapers before the Virgin. Old
Sada fell on her knees and kissed the floor. She kissed the feet
of the Holy Mother, the pedestal on which they stood, crying all
the while. But from the working of her face, from the beautiful
tremors which passed over it, he knew they were tears of ecstasy.
"Nineteen years, Father; nineteen years since I have seen the holy
things of the altar!"
"All that is passed, Sada. You have remembered the holy things in
your heart. We will pray together."
The Bishop knelt beside her, and they began, O Holy Mary, Queen of
Virgins. . . .
More than once Father Vaillant had spoken to the Bishop of this
aged captive. There had been much whispering among the devout
women of the parish about her pitiful case. The Smiths, with whom
she lived, were Georgia people, who had at one time lived in El
Paso del Norte, and they had taken her back to their native State
with them. Not long ago some disgrace had come upon this family in
Georgia, they had been forced to sell all their Negro slaves and
flee the State. The Mexican woman they could not sell because they
had no legal title to her, her position was irregular. Now that
they were back in a Mexican country, the Smiths were afraid their
charwoman might escape from them and find asylum among her own
people, so they kept strict watch upon her. They did not allow her
to go outside their own patio, not even to accompany her mistress
to market.
Two women of the Altar Guild had been so bold as to go into the
patio to talk with Sada when she was washing clothes, but they had
been rudely driven away by the mistress of the house. Mrs. Smith
had come running out into the court, half dressed, and told them
that if they had business at her casa they were to come in by the
front door, and not sneak in through the stable to frighten a poor
silly creature. When they said they had come to ask Sada to go to
Mass with them, she told them she had got the poor creature out of
the clutches of the priests once, and would see to it that she did
not fall into them again.
Even after that rebuff a very pious neighbour woman had tried to
say a word to Sada through the alley door of the stable, where she
was unloading wood off the burro. But the old servant had put her
finger to her lips and motioned the visitor away, glancing back
over her shoulder the while with such an expression of terror that
the intruder hastened off, surmising that Sada would be harshly
used if she were caught speaking to anyone. The good woman went
immediately to Father Vaillant with this story, and he had
consulted the Bishop, declaring that something ought to be done to
secure the consolations of religion for the bond-woman. But the
Bishop replied that the time was not yet; for the present it was
inexpedient to antagonize these people. The Smiths were the
leaders of a small group of low-caste Protestants who took every
occasion to make trouble for the Catholics. They hung about the
door of the church on festival days with mockery and loud laughter,
spoke insolently to the nuns in the street, stood jeering and
blaspheming when the procession went by on Corpus Christi Sunday.
There were five sons in the Smith family, fellows of low habits and
evil tongues. Even the two younger boys, still children, showed a
vicious disposition. Tranquilino had repeatedly driven these two
boys out of the Bishop's garden, where they came with their lewd
companions to rob the young pear trees or to speak filth against
the priests.
When they rose from their knees, Father Latour told Sada he was
glad to know that she remembered her prayers so well.
"Ah, Padre, every night I say my Rosary to my Holy Mother, no
matter where I sleep!" declared the old creature passionately,
looking up into his face and pressing her knotted hands against her
breast.
When he asked if she had her beads with her, she was confused. She
kept them tied with a cord around her waist, under her clothes, as
the only place she could hide them safely.
He spoke soothingly to her. "Remember this, Sada; in the year to
come, and during the Novena before Christmas, I will not forget to
pray for you whenever I offer the Blessed Sacrifice of the Mass.
Be at rest in your heart, for I will remember you in my silent
supplications before the altar as I do my own sisters and my
nieces."
Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted
him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as
on that pale December night. He was able to feel, kneeling beside
her, the preciousness of the things of the altar to her who was
without possessions; the tapers, the image of the Virgin, the
figures of the saints, the Cross that took away indignity from
suffering and made pain and poverty a means of fellowship with
Christ. Kneeling beside the much enduring bond-woman, he
experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young
manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that
there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones
on earth. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the
world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's
tenderness. Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can
suffer.
Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the
Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity
that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from;
that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying
soldier or the martyr on the rack. The beautiful concept of Mary
pierced the priest's heart like a sword.
"O Sacred Heart of Mary!" she murmured by his side, and he felt how
that name was food and raiment, friend and mother to her. He
received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her
eyes, knew that his poverty was as bleak as hers. When the Kingdom
of Heaven had first come into the world, into a cruel world of
torture and slaves and masters, He who brought it had said, "And
whosoever is least among you, the same shall be first in the
Kingdom of Heaven." This church was Sada's house, and he was a
servant in it.
The Bishop heard the old woman's confession. He blessed her and
put both hands upon her head. When he took her down the nave to
let her out of the church, Sada made to lift his cloak from her
shoulders. He restrained her, telling her she must keep it for
her own, and sleep in it at night. But she slipped out of it
hurriedly; such a thought seemed to terrify her. "No, no, Father.
If they were to find it on me!" More than that, she did not accuse
her oppressors. But as she put it off, she stroked the old garment
and patted it as if it were a living thing that had been kind to
her.
Happily Father Latour bethought him of a little silver medal, with
a figure of the Virgin, he had in his pocket. He gave it to her,
telling her that it had been blessed by the Holy Father himself.
Now she would have a treasure to hide and guard, to adore while her
watchers slept. Ah, he thought, for one who cannot read--or think--
the Image, the physical form of Love!
He fitted the great key into its lock, the door swung slowly back
on its wooden hinges. The peace without seemed all one with the
peace in his own soul. The snow had stopped, the gauzy clouds that
had ribbed the arch of heaven were now all sunk into one soft white
fog bank over the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The full moon shone
high in the blue vault, majestic, lonely, benign. The Bishop stood
in the doorway of his church, lost in thought, looking at the line
of black footprints his departing visitor had left in the wet scurf
of snow.
3
SPRING IN THE NAVAJO COUNTRY
Father Vaillant was away in Arizona all winter. When the first
hint of spring was in the air, the Bishop and Jacinto set out on a
long ride across New Mexico, to the Painted Desert and the Hopi
villages. After they left Oraibi, the Bishop rode several days to
the south, to visit a Navajo friend who had lately lost his only
son, and who had paid the Bishop the compliment of sending word of
the boy's death to him at Santa Fé.
Father Latour had known Eusabio a long while, had met him soon
after he first came to his new diocese. The Navajo was in Santa Fé
at that time, assisting the military officers to quiet an outbreak
of the never-ending quarrel between his people and the Hopis. Ever
since then the Bishop and the Indian chief had entertained an
increasing regard for each other. Eusabio brought his son all the
way to Santa Fé to have the Bishop baptize him,--that one beloved
son who had died during this last winter.
Though he was ten years younger than Father Latour, Eusabio was one
of the most influential men among the Navajo people, and one of the
richest in sheep and horses. In Santa Fé and Albuquerque he was
respected for his intelligence and authority, and admired for his
fine presence. He was extremely tall, even for a Navajo, with a
face like a Roman general's of Republican times. He always dressed
very elegantly in velvet and buckskin rich with bead and quill
embroidery, belted with silver, and wore a blanket of the finest
wool and design. His arms, under the loose sleeves of his shirt,
were covered with silver bracelets, and on his breast hung very old
necklaces of wampum and turquoise and coral--Mediterranean coral,
that had been left in the Navajo country by Coronado's captains
when they passed through it on their way to discover the Hopi
villages and the Grand Canyon.
Eusabio lived, with his relatives and dependents, in a group of
hogans on the Colorado Chiquito; to the west and south and north
his kinsmen herded his great flocks.
Father Latour and Jacinto arrived at the cluster of booth-like
cabins during a high sandstorm, which circled about them and their
mules like snow in a blizzard and all but obliterated the
landscape. The Navajo came out of his house and took possession of
Angelica by her bridle-bit. At first he did not open his lips,
merely stood holding Father Latour's very fine white hand in his
very fine dark one, and looked into his face with a message of
sorrow and resignation in his deep-set, eagle eyes. A wave of
feeling passed over his bronze features as he said slowly:
"My friend has come."
That was all, but it was everything; welcome, confidence,
appreciation.
For his lodging the Bishop was given a solitary hogan, a little
apart from the settlement. Eusabio quickly furnished it with his
best skins and blankets, and told his guest that he must tarry a
few days there and recover from his fatigue. His mules were tired,
the Indian said, the Padre himself looked weary, and the way to
Santa Fé was long.
The Bishop thanked him and said he would stay three days; that he
had need for reflection. His mind had been taken up with practical
matters ever since he left home. This seemed a spot where a man
might get his thoughts together. The river, a considerable stream
at this time of the year, wound among mounds and dunes of loose
sand which whirled through the air all day in the boisterous spring
winds. The sand banked up against the hogan the Bishop occupied,
and filtered through chinks in the walls, which were made of
saplings plastered with clay.
Beside the river was a grove of tall, naked cottonwoods--trees of
great antiquity and enormous size--so large that they seemed to
belong to a bygone age. They grew far apart, and their strange
twisted shapes must have come about from the ceaseless winds that
bent them to the east and scoured them with sand, and from the fact
that they lived with very little water,--the river was nearly dry
here for most of the year. The trees rose out of the ground at a
slant, and forty or fifty feet above the earth all these white, dry
trunks changed their direction, grew back over their base line.
Some split into great forks which arched down almost to the ground;
some did not fork at all, but the main trunk dipped downward in a
strong curve, as if drawn by a bow-string; and some terminated in a
thick coruscation of growth, like a crooked palm tree. They were
all living trees, yet they seemed to be of old, dead, dry wood, and
had very scant foliage. High up in the forks, or at the end of a
preposterous length of twisted bough, would burst a faint bouquet
of delicate green leaves--out of all keeping with the great lengths
of seasoned white trunk and branches. The grove looked like a
winter wood of giant trees, with clusters of mistletoe growing
among the bare boughs.
Navajo hospitality is not intrusive. Eusabio made the Bishop
understand that he was glad to have him there, and let him alone.
Father Latour lived for three days in an almost perpetual sand-
storm--cut off from even this remote little Indian camp by moving
walls and tapestries of sand. He either sat in his house and
listened to the wind, or walked abroad under those aged, wind-
distorted trees, muffled in an Indian blanket, which he kept drawn
up over his mouth and nose. Since his arrival he had undertaken to
decide whether he would be justified in recalling Father Vaillant
from Tucson. The Vicar's occasional letters, brought by
travellers, showed that he was highly content where he was,
restoring the old mission church of St. Xavier del Bac, which he
declared to be the most beautiful church on the continent, though
it had been neglected for more than two hundred years.
Since Father Vaillant went away the Bishop's burdens had grown
heavier and heavier. The new priests from Auvergne were all good
men, faithful and untiring in carrying out his wishes; but they
were still strangers to the country, timid about making decisions,
and referred every difficulty to their Bishop. Father Latour
needed his Vicar, who had so much tact with the natives, so much
sympathy with all their short-comings. When they were together, he
was always curbing Father Vaillant's hopeful rashness--but left
alone, he greatly missed that very quality. And he missed Father
Vaillant's companionship--why not admit it?
Although Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant were born in
neighbouring parishes in the Puy-de-Dôme, as children they had not
known each other. The Latours were an old family of scholars and
professional men, while the Vaillants were people of a much humbler
station in the provincial world. Besides, little Joseph had been
away from home much of the time, up on the farm in the Volvic
mountains with his grandfather, where the air was especially pure,
and the country quiet salutary for a child of nervous temperament.
The two boys had not come together until they were Seminarians at
Montferrand, in Clermont.
When Jean Marie was in his second year at the Seminary, he was
standing on the recreation ground one day at the opening of the
term, looking with curiosity at the new students. In the group, he
noticed one of peculiarly unpromising appearance; a boy of nineteen
who was undersized, very pale, homely in feature, with a wart on
his chin and tow-coloured hair that made him look like a German.
This boy seemed to feel his glance, and came up at once, as if he
had been called. He was apparently quite unconscious of his
homeliness, was not at all shy, but intensely interested in his new
surroundings. He asked Jean Latour his name, where he came from,
and his father's occupation. Then he said with great simplicity:
"My father is a baker, the best in Riom. In fact, he's a
remarkable baker."
Young Latour was amused, but expressed polite appreciation of this
confidence. The queer lad went on to tell him about his brother
and his aunt, and his clever little sister, Philomène. He asked
how long Latour had been at the Seminary.
"Have you always intended to take orders? So have I, but I very
nearly went into the army instead."
The year previous, after the surrender of Algiers, there had been
a military review at Clermont, a great display of uniforms and
military bands, and stirring speeches about the glory of French
arms. Young Joseph Vaillant had lost his head in the excitement,
and had signed up for a volunteer without consulting his father.
He gave Latour a vivid account of his patriotic emotions, of his
father's displeasure, and his own subsequent remorse. His mother
had wished him to become a priest. She died when he was thirteen,
and ever since then he had meant to carry out her wish and to
dedicate his life to the service of the Divine Mother. But that
one day, among the bands and the uniforms, he had forgotten
everything but his desire to serve France.
Suddenly young Vaillant broke off, saying that he must write a
letter before the hour was over, and tucking up his gown he ran
away at full speed. Latour stood looking after him, resolved that
he would take this new boy under his protection. There was
something about the baker's son that had given their meeting the
colour of an adventure; he meant to repeat it. In that first
encounter, he chose the lively, ugly boy for his friend. It was
instantaneous. Latour himself was much cooler and more critical
in temper; hard to please, and often a little grey in mood.
During their Seminary years he had easily surpassed his friend in
scholarship, but he always realized that Joseph excelled him in the
fervour of his faith. After they became missionaries, Joseph had
learned to speak English, and later, Spanish, more readily than he.
To be sure, he spoke both languages very incorrectly at first, but
he had no vanity about grammar or refinement of phrase. To
communicate with peons, he was quite willing to speak like a peon.
Though the Bishop had worked with Father Joseph for twenty-five
years 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 stage-coaches, 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 of 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 upgrade, 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 Southwest, more quickly than it could filter down through the
few hundred miles of unexplored mountains and gorges between Cherry
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
mules. But within twelve months everything had changed. Wandering
prospectors had found large deposits of gold along Cherry 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.
The Bishop of Leavenworth wrote Father Latour that he himself had
just returned from a visit to Colorado. 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, Denver
City 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 tomorrow 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 Ramón 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 Ramón 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 Ramón'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, Ramón'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,
Ramón'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 Ramón 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 Ramón 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.
In the Bishop's court-yard 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 wood-shed. 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 on Cherry 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
court-yard, 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 northeast, 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 court-yard.
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 worn-out 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 feather-beds were sent to
the Bishop's house for Father Vaillant; dozens of linen sheets,
embroidered pillow-cases 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.
In his retirement Father Latour's principal work was the training
of the 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, scrollwork
and jack-straw 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 pine-splashed 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-Dôme.
He loved the towering peaks of his native mountains, the comeliness
of the villages, the cleanness of the country-side, the beautiful
lines and 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 horse-chestnuts, 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 sage-brush 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.
Both the young priests knew that their families would strongly
oppose 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 daybreak. 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-Dôme 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 or 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 home-staying 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 Cristóbal, 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.
THE END
Project Gutenberg Australia