For the Soul of Rafael Part 15

Still, his hand trembled as he reached for his cane. Across the plaza Indians and Mexicans were moving toward the Mission. It was early for San Juan to be astir in the street. Old Matia, who had been nurse to Miguel and Rafael, went past, not seeing the two men for the tears in her eyes. Yes--after all, there was trouble--but Dona Luisa!

In his perturbation he turned, and again held out his hand.

"Adios, senor," he repeated; "but you coming back for sure. To San Juan all people coming back some time. You go with the horses across the deserts?"

"Yes, I am going across the deserts. Adios!"

[Music: _El Corazon_.]

Yo te he de amar, te he de amar hasta muerte, Y si pudiera-- Yo te a maria despues.

CHAPTER VII

He had crossed the ranges twice and returned, but the City of the Angels had lost its old witchery.

The rose-tinted dawns, and the amethystine dusks were beautiful as ever, but to banish the memories he had once dreamed over there, he galloped alone to the harbor called "The h.e.l.l of California," and lay all one day on the beach, and stared moodily at the waves whipping the yellow sands of San Pedro.

To the south there, far beyond the prosaic stretch of grazing-lands bordered by the sea, beyond all the tame levels where the water was green or yellow in the shallows, beyond all the jutting points, veiled in the miles of mists, he could follow in his mind each curve, until the one valley of beauty would gleam like a green jewel seen from the cliffs of San Juan.

And at the foot of those cliffs there were no flat stretches of color such as make weary the eye; the water there held all the s.h.i.+mmering, bewitching, iridescence of a peac.o.c.k's feathers,--the gold and purple, the greens and the blues ever changing,--the strange touch of pink making it all glorious in certain glints of the sunlight; and at the edge of it all, the fringe of foam--a string of pearls shattered on the brown cliffs or sandy beach, and gathered up to be dashed again and again and again--the endless garniture of old Ocean's robe.

Never on any other sh.o.r.e had mere waves, running to the sand, the same witchery. Alvara had said that all men came back some day to San Juan.

What witchery was it by which its mesa and its valley and its wonderful sh.o.r.e were forever set apart from other sh.o.r.es of California? Some mystery of life brooded there from sea to mountain, suggesting so much which was left for poor humanity to solve; it was only a whispered suggestion, dim and delightful, as the music of the waves heard from the Mission plaza, or as dreamy as the high film of fog, drifting high up and tempering the sun's rays until they fell softly as a benediction on the valley between blue sea and blue summit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "NEVER ON ANY OTHER Sh.o.r.e"]

His own life stretched before him like the brown levels and yellow flatness of San Pedro; and there to the south, miles across the ranges, was the heart of the dreamland he must not enter: another man had that claim under fence. He gave voice to some self-condemnation of a sort reserved for men who go _loco_ over a woman who forgets, and after hours of brooding there alone by the sh.o.r.e, arrived at only one decision--the California of the south ranges was no longer his own. All the width of it was now narrowed to one little valley, where the poppies flamed over forgotten graves and adobe walls, and the doves circled above a ruined chancel.

He rode into town, where some kind friends mentioned that Don Rafael Arteaga and his bride were being _feted_ by the leading Spanish families of Los Angeles, and he was invited to a dinner in their honor a week hence.

"I go to Mexico--I start to-day," he answered, briefly. Ten minutes before, he had not thought of it.

"To Mexico? You cover ground fast these days, Don Keith. On the new road of iron they mean to make, you could not go so much faster than on the horses you ride; you have the good American luck in the pick of them."

"Yes, the good American luck!" said Keith Bryton, with a touch of bitterness. "May your saints send you a better!"

A man who stood near, and who much desired the invitation Bryton had refused, shrugged his shoulders as the Americano mounted his horse and rode away.

"What better luck could a man have, than a chance to meet Dona Raquel Estevan de Arteaga?" he queried of any who might care to answer. "The bishop himself shows her honor, and they say she is working for the Church against Downing, the Englishman, who holds the Mission lands under Pico's sale. Sixteen years has the Church fought for those lands in the courts; if she gets them back, she deserves the pope's blessing.

And the fool boy of an Americano rides south when he could meet her--perhaps touch her hand!"

But the fool Americano rode south and kept on riding south for many dusty days. He crossed a corner of the Yaqui country, and then across the ranges to the old mine, called the Mine of the Temple--the one of which he had told Don Juan Alvara--was it so few weeks ago? It might have been years instead of weeks, by his own feeling and att.i.tude of mind. He was riding back a different man. He evaded the few Mexicans as he neared the mine; no turn of the trail was lonely for him. Memory kept pace, and the murmur of one girl's voice spoke through the rustling leaves of the mountains.

A travelling priest, jubilant at the idea of comrades.h.i.+p, hailed him in one of the mountain pa.s.ses, and found him but a sorry companion.

"This is a country," said the padre, "where the sight of a white face is most welcome. Six months since I was sent to this parish, and few of them have I seen. Now, I ride out of my way just to talk with an American who works a mine up here. Your brother, is it? Well, he has a good name with the brown folks. A lot of pagans they are! It is not a priest they need here; it is a missionary the bishop should send to teach them their religion anew. If ever they had any, it has been lost."

But it was evidently the opinion of the padre that they had never really secured any to lose. He discoursed at some length on the failure of the Church to impress upon them the advantage of marriage. Few were the wedding fees to be obtained from the Mexicans, while the heathen Indians had some form of their own, arranged by the head of their clan, and it was a disgrace to a land held under cross and crown for two centuries--an endless shame!

Keith a.s.sented, without heeding the list of Indian iniquities. He was rather glad, after all, that Teddy had a civilized neighbor, willing to be companionable. Teddy liked people too well to exile himself from them but for the one thing--to go back north, able to cover one white throat with pearls, or two white hands with diamonds.

His greeting of his half-brother was a bit shy, though wholly glad, and the padre served to bridge over the first few awkward moments. Both men recognized the fact of a change in each since the Los Angeles days.

Teddy thought it due only to his clandestine marriage, and Keith felt guilty as he realized how little, how very little, Teddy's marriage meant to him now. While the padre was getting acquainted with the Mexican, the two brothers walked apart, and talked of the chances of the mine's success, and the failure of the backers to see the necessity of using money more freely on the enterprise.

"It's there, you know," insisted Teddy; "all this district is flooded with stories of the ore taken out of it in the first days of the Spaniards; then the Indians descended upon them, and there was a slaughter, and no Spaniard dared venture into these hills for a century."

"Yes. We put in a good many fruitless days trailing those old legends,"

a.s.sented Keith, "but only the Indian superst.i.tion tends to show that this is the real mine of that history. The rich one may not have been on this side of the mountain, since you have not yet struck the lode."

"Don't let's talk about it, if you feel that way," suggested Teddy, "I hear plenty of that from the others; and you didn't really come all the way down here to talk mines. Say, old chap, you acted like a prince over the--well, the wedding. I felt pretty nearly three inches higher when I got your letter. I--I know I acted like a kid, but Angela wanted it arranged so; and--as she about filled the whole horizon--"

"Cut out the explanation, Teddy. A man is never sure of himself until the right woman crosses his trail--or the wrong one. G.o.d knows I'm not fit for alcalde in the case. At least, you married your wife."

Teddy stared at him an instant, and then shouted with laughter.

"Married my wife? Well, rather! How else could she be my wife?"

Keith avoided the frank boyish blue eyes of Teddy, and turned away, seating himself on a great bowlder and staring across the little semicircle of the canon basin, to where gnarled century-old trees reached grotesque arms above some old stone ruins and fragments of marble. Teddy looked at him an instant, and then whistled softly.

"If it were any other man than you, Keith, I'd think--but it's too ridiculous!"

"Say it," suggested Keith.

"Well, I'd say the wrong woman had crossed _your_ trail."

"Not the wrong one."

"Good Lord! you don't mean that by any chance it is at last the right one?"

"At last--the right woman."

"And you sit there looking as solemn over it as a wooden Mexican G.o.d!

Wake up, old fellow, and tell about her."

"There is nothing to tell. She is the right woman, and I shall never see her again."

"Keith!"

"And I've come back here to tell myself so," continued Keith, doggedly; "to say it over and over, and beat it into my brain, if I have any left.

The desert didn't help me--I thought this might."

"This?"

"These hills, and--speaking of it."