Part 3 (1/2)
answered Ramona, speaking slowly, as if collecting her various reminiscences on the subject. ”Twice I heard him. He said that my mother was no good, and that my father was bad too.” And the tears rolled down the child's cheeks.
The Senora's sense of justice stood her well in place of tenderness, now. Caressing the little orphan as she had never before done, she said, with an earnestness which sank deep into the child's mind, ”Ramona must not believe any such thing as that. Juan Can is a bad man to say it.
He never saw either your father or your mother, and so he could know nothing about them. I knew your father very well. He was not a bad man.
He was my friend, and the friend of the Senora Ortegna; and that was the reason he gave you to the Senora Ortegna, because she had no child of her own. And I think your mother had a good many.”
”Oh!” said Ramona, relieved, for the moment, at this new view of the situation,--that the gift had been not as a charity to her, but to the Senora Ortegna. ”Did the Senora Ortegna want a little daughter very much?”
”Yes, very much indeed,” said the Senora, heartily and with fervor. ”She had grieved many years because she had no child.”
Silence again for a brief s.p.a.ce, during which the little lonely heart, grappling with its vague instinct of loss and wrong, made wide thrusts into the perplexities hedging it about, and presently electrified the Senora by saying in a half-whisper, ”Why did not my father bring me to you first? Did he know you did not want any daughter?”
The Senora was dumb for a second; then recovering herself, she said: ”Your father was the Senora Ortegna's friend more than he was mine. I was only a child, then.”
”Of course you did not need any daughter when you had Felipe,” continued Ramona, pursuing her original line of inquiry and reflection without noticing the Senora's reply. ”A son is more than a daughter; but most people have both,” eying the Senora keenly, to see what response this would bring.
But the Senora was weary and uncomfortable with the talk. At the very mention of Felipe, a swift flash of consciousness of her inability to love Ramona had swept through her mind. ”Ramona,” she said firmly, ”while you are a little girl, you cannot understand any of these things.
When you are a woman, I will tell you all that I know myself about your father and your mother. It is very little. Your father died when you were only two years old. All that you have to do is to be a good child, and say your prayers, and when Father Salvierderra comes he will be pleased with you. And he will not be pleased if you ask troublesome questions. Don't ever speak to me again about this. When the proper time comes I will tell you myself.”
This was when Ramona was ten. She was now nineteen. She had never again asked the Senora a question bearing on the forbidden subject. She had been a good child and said her prayers, and Father Salvierderra had been always pleased with her, growing more and more deeply attached to her year by year. But the proper time had not yet come for the Senora to tell her anything more about her father and mother. There were few mornings on which the girl did not think, ”Perhaps it may be to-day that she will tell me.” But she would not ask. Every word of that conversation was as vivid in her mind as it had been the day it occurred; and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that during every day of the whole nine years had deepened in her heart the conviction which had prompted the child's question, ”Did he know that you did not want any daughter?”
A nature less gentle than Ramona's would have been embittered, or at least hardened, by this consciousness. But Ramona's was not. She never put it in words to herself. She accepted it, as those born deformed seem sometimes to accept the pain and isolation caused by their deformity, with an unquestioning acceptance, which is as far above resignation, as resignation is above rebellious repining.
No one would have known, from Ramona's face, manner, or habitual conduct, that she had ever experienced a sorrow or had a care. Her face was sunny, she had a joyous voice, and never was seen to pa.s.s a human being without a cheerful greeting, to highest and lowest the same. Her industry was tireless. She had had two years at school, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Los Angeles, where the Senora had placed her at much personal sacrifice, during one of the hardest times the Moreno estate had ever seen. Here she had won the affection of all the Sisters, who spoke of her habitually as the ”blessed child.” They had taught her all the dainty arts of lace-weaving, embroidery, and simple fas.h.i.+ons of painting and drawing, which they knew; not overmuch learning out of books, but enough to make her a pa.s.sionate lover of verse and romance.
For serious study or for deep thought she had no vocation. She was a simple, joyous, gentle, clinging, faithful nature, like a clear brook rippling along in the sun,--a nature as unlike as possible to the Senora's, with its mysterious depths and stormy, hidden currents.
Of these Ramona was dimly conscious, and at times had a tender, sorrowful pity for the Senora, which she dared not show, and could only express by renewed industry, and tireless endeavor to fulfil every duty possible in the house. This gentle faithfulness was not wholly lost on Senora Moreno, though its source she never suspected; and it won no new recognition from her for Ramona, no increase of love.
But there was one on whom not an act, not a look, not a smile of all this graciousness was thrown away. That one was Felipe. Daily more and more he wondered at his mother's lack of affection for Ramona. n.o.body knew so well as he how far short she stopped of loving her. Felipe knew what it meant, how it felt, to be loved by the Senora Moreno. But Felipe had learned while he was a boy that one sure way to displease his mother was to appear to be aware that she did not treat Ramona as she treated him. And long before he had become a man he had acquired the habit of keeping to himself most of the things he thought and felt about his little playmate sister,--a dangerous habit, out of which were slowly ripening bitter fruits for the Senora's gathering in later years.
IV
IT was longer even than the Senora had thought it would be, before Father Salvierderra arrived. The old man had grown feeble during the year that she had not seen him, and it was a very short day's journey that he could make now without too great fatigue. It was not only his body that had failed. He had lost heart; and the miles which would have been nothing to him, had he walked in the companions.h.i.+p of hopeful and happy thoughts, stretched out wearily as he brooded over sad memories and still sadder antic.i.p.ations,--the downfall of the Missions, the loss of their vast estates, and the growing power of the unG.o.dly in the land.
The final decision of the United States Government in regard to the Mission-lands had been a terrible blow to him. He had devoutly believed that ultimate restoration of these great estates to the Church was inevitable. In the long vigils which he always kept when at home at the Franciscan Monastery in Santa Barbara, kneeling on the stone pavement in the church, and praying ceaselessly from midnight till dawn, he had often had visions vouchsafed him of a new dispensation, in which the Mission establishments should be reinstated in all their old splendor and prosperity, and their Indian converts again numbered by tens of thousands.
Long after every one knew that this was impossible, he would narrate these visions with the faith of an old Bible seer, and declare that they must come true, and that it was a sin to despond. But as year after year he journeyed up and down the country, seeing, at Mission after Mission, the buildings crumbling into ruin, the lands all taken, sold, resold, and settled by greedy speculators; the Indian converts disappearing, driven back to their original wildernesses, the last traces of the n.o.ble work of his order being rapidly swept away, his courage faltered, his faith died out. Changes in the manners and customs of his order itself, also, were giving him deep pain. He was a Franciscan of the same type as Francis of a.s.sisi. To wear a shoe in place of a sandal, to take money in a purse for a journey, above all to lay aside the gray gown and cowl for any sort of secular garment, seemed to him wicked. To own comfortable clothes while there were others suffering for want of them--and there were always such--seemed to him a sin for which one might not undeservedly be smitten with sudden and terrible punishment. In vain the Brothers again and again supplied him with a warm cloak; he gave it away to the first beggar he met: and as for food, the refectory would have been left bare, and the whole brotherhood starving, if the supplies had not been carefully hidden and locked, so that Father Salvierderra could not give them all away. He was fast becoming that most tragic yet often sublime sight, a man who has survived, not only his own time, but the ideas and ideals of it. Earth holds no sharper loneliness: the bitterness of exile, the anguish of friendlessness at their utmost, are in it; and yet it is so much greater than they, that even they seem small part of it.
It was with thoughts such as these that Father Salvierderra drew near the home of the Senora Moreno late in the afternoon of one of those midsummer days of which Southern California has so many in spring. The almonds had bloomed and the blossoms fallen; the apricots also, and the peaches and pears; on all the orchards of these fruits had come a filmy tint of green, so light it was hardly more than a shadow on the gray.
The willows were vivid light green, and the orange groves dark and glossy like laurel. The billowy hills on either side the valley were covered with verdure and bloom,--myriads of low blossoming plants, so close to the earth that their tints lapped and overlapped on each other, and on the green of the gra.s.s, as feathers in fine plumage overlap each other and blend into a changeful color.
The countless curves, hollows, and crests of the coast-hills in Southern California heighten these chameleon effects of the spring verdure; they are like nothing in nature except the glitter of a brilliant lizard in the sun or the iridescent sheen of a peac.o.c.k's neck.
Father Salvierderra paused many times to gaze at the beautiful picture.
Flowers were always dear to the Franciscans. Saint Francis himself permitted all decorations which could be made of flowers. He cla.s.sed them with his brothers and sisters, the sun, moon, and stars,--all members of the sacred choir praising G.o.d.
It was melancholy to see how, after each one of these pauses, each fresh drinking in of the beauty of the landscape and the balmy air, the old man resumed his slow pace, with a long sigh and his eyes cast down.
The fairer this beautiful land, the sadder to know it lost to the Church,--alien hands reaping its fulness, establis.h.i.+ng new customs, new laws. All the way down the coast from Santa Barbara he had seen, at every stopping-place, new tokens of the settling up of the country,--farms opening, towns growing; the Americans pouring in, at all points, to reap the advantages of their new possessions. It was this which had made his journey heavy-hearted, and made him feel, in approaching the Senora Moreno's, as if he were coming to one of the last sure strongholds of the Catholic faith left in the country.
When he was within two miles of the house, he struck off from the highway into a narrow path that he recollected led by a short-cut through the hills, and saved nearly a third of the distance. It was more than a year since he had trod this path, and as he found it growing fainter and fainter, and more and more overgrown with the wild mustard, he said to himself, ”I think no one can have pa.s.sed through here this year.”