"It belongs to her, anyway," he explained.

Some lines of verse came into my memory, and with a change or two I wrote them as deep as I could with my pencil upon a small board that he smoothed for me.

"Call for the robin redbreast and the wren, Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with flowers and leaves do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call to this funeral dole The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole To rear her hillocks that shall keep her warm.

"That kind o' quaint language reminds me of a play I seen onced in Saynt Paul," said the Virginian. "About young Prince Henry."

I told him that another poet was the author.

"They are both good writers," said the Virginian. And as he was finishing the monument that we had made, young Lin McLean joined us.

He was a little ashamed of the feelings that he had shown yesterday, a little anxious to cover those feelings with brass.

"Well," he said, taking an offish, man-of-the-world tone, "all this fuss just because a woman believed in God."

"You have put it down wrong," said the Virginian; "it's just because a man didn't."

Padre Ignazio

At Santa Ysabel del Mar the season was at one of its moments when the air hangs quiet over land and sea. The old breezes had gone; the new ones were not yet risen. The flowers in the mission garden opened wide, for no wind came by day or night to shake the loose petals from their stems. Along the basking, silent, many-colored shore gathered and lingered the crisp odors of the mountains. The dust floated golden and motionless long after the rider was behind the hill, and the Pacific lay like a floor of sapphire, on which to walk beyond the setting sun into the East. One white sail shone there. Instead of an hour, it had been from dawn till afternoon in sight between the short headlands; and the padre had hoped that it might be his ship. But it had slowly passed.

Now from an arch in his garden cloisters he was watching the last of it.

Presently it was gone, and the great ocean lay empty. The padre put his glasses in his lap. For a short while he read in his breviary, but soon forgot it again. He looked at the flowers and sunny ridges, then at the huge blue triangle of sea which the opening of the hills let into sight. "Paradise," he murmured, "need not hold more beauty and peace. But I think I would exchange all my remaining years of this for one sight again of Paris or Seville. May God forgive me such a thought!"

Across the unstirred fragrance of oleanders the bell for vespers began to ring. Its tones passed over the padre as he watched the sea in his garden. They reached his parishioners in their adobe dwellings near by. The gentle circles of sound floated outward upon the smooth immense silence--over the vines and pear-trees; down the avenues of the olives; into the planted fields, whence women and children began to return; then out of the lap of the valley along the yellow uplands, where the men that rode among the cattle paused, looking down like birds at the map of their home. Then the sound widened, faint, unbroken, until it met Temptation riding towards the padre from the south, and cheered the steps of Temptation's jaded horse.

"For a day, one single day of Paris!" repeated the padre, gazing through his cloisters at the empty sea.

Once in the year the mother-world remembered him. Once in the year a barkentine came sailing with news and tokens from Spain. It was in 1685 that a galleon had begun such voyages up to the lower country from Acapulco, where she loaded the cargo that had come across Tehuantepec on mules from Vera Cruz. By 1768 she had added the new mission of San Diego to her ports. In the year that we, a thin strip of colonists away over on the Atlantic edge of the continent, declared ourselves an independent nation, that Spanish ship, in the name of Saint Francis, was unloading the centuries of her own civilization at the Golden Gate. Then, slowly, as mission after mission was planted along the soft coast wilderness, she made new stops--at Santa Barbara, for instance; and by Point San Luis for San Luis Obispo, that lay inland a little way up the gorge where it opened among the hills. Thus the world reached these places by water; while on land, through the mountains, a road came to lead to them, and also to many more that were too distant behind the hills for ships to serve--a long, lonely, rough road, punctuated with church towers and gardens. For the fathers gradually so stationed their settlements that the traveller might each morning ride out from one mission and by evening of a day's fair journey ride into the next. A long, rough road; and in its way pretty to think of now.

So there, by-and-by, was our continent, with the locomotive whistling from Savannah to Boston along its eastern edge, and on the other the scattered chimes of Spain ringing among the unpeopled mountains. Thus grew the two sorts of civilization--not equally. We know what has happened since. To-day the locomotive is whistling also from the Golden Gate to San Diego; but the old mission road goes through the mountains still, and on it the steps of vanished Spain are marked with roses, and white cloisters, and the crucifix.

But this was 1855. Only the barkentine brought the world that he loved to the padre. As for the new world which was making a rude noise to the northward, he trusted that it might keep away from Santa Ysabel, and he waited for the vessel that was overdue with its package containing his single worldly indulgence.

As the little, ancient bronze bell continued its swinging in the tower, its plaintive call reached something in the padre's memory. Without knowing, he began to sing. He took up the slow strain not quite correctly, and dropped it, and took it up again, always in cadence with the bell:

[Musical Score Appears Here]

At length he heard himself, and glancing at the belfry, smiled a little.

"It is a pretty tune," he said, "and it always made me sorry for poor Fra Diavolo. Auber himself confessed to me that he had made it sad and put the hermitage bell to go with it because he too was grieved at having to kill his villain, and wanted him to die, if possible, in a religious frame of mind. And Auber touched glasses with me and said--how well I remember it!--'Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil, that makes me always have a weakness for rascals?' I told him it was the devil. I was not a priest then. I could not be so sure with my answer now." And then Padre Ignazio repeated Auber's remark in French: "'Est-ce le bon Dieu, on est-ce bien le diable, qui me fait tonjours aimer les coquins?' I don't know! I don't know! I wonder if Auber has composed anything lately? I wonder who is singing Zerlina now?"

He cast a farewell look at the ocean, and took his steps between the monastic herbs and the oleanders to the sacristy. "At least," he said, "if we cannot carry with us into exile the friends and the places that we have loved, music will go where we go, even to such an end of the world as this. Felipe!" he called to his organist. "Can they sing the music I taught them for the Dixit Dominus to-night?"

"Yes, father, surely."

"Then we will have that. And, Felipe--" The padre crossed the chancel to the small shabby organ. "Rise, my child, and listen. Here is something you can learn. Why, see now if you cannot learn it with a single hearing."

The swarthy boy of sixteen stood watching his master's fingers, delicate and white, as they played. So of his own accord he had begun to watch them when a child of six; and the padre had taken the wild, half-scared, spellbound creature and made a musician of him.

"There, Felipe!" he said now. "Can you do it? Slower, and more softly, muchacho. It is about the death of a man, and it should go with our bell."

The boy listened. "Then the father has played it a tone too low," said he; "for our bell rings the note of sol, or something very near it, as the father must surely know." He placed the melody in the right key--an easy thing for him; but the padre was delighted.

"Ah, my Felipe," he exclaimed, "what could you and I not do if we had a better organ! Only a little better! See! above this row of keys would be a second row, and many more stops. Then we would make such music as has never been heard in California yet. But my people are so poor and so few! And some day I shall have passed from them, and it will be too late."

"Perhaps," ventured Felipe, "the Americanos--"

"They care nothing for us, Felipe. They are not of our religion--or of any religion, from what I can hear. Don't forget my Dixit Dominus."

And the padre retired once more to the sacristy, while the horse that carried Temptation came over the hill.

The hour of service drew near; and as he waited, the padre once again stepped out for a look at the ocean; but the blue triangle of water lay like a picture in its frame of land, empty as the sky. "I think, from the color, though," said he, "that a little more wind must have begun out there."

The bell rang a last short summons to prayer. Along the road from the south a young rider, leading one pack-animal, ambled into the mission and dismounted. Church was not so much in his thoughts as food and, in due time after that, a bed; but the doors stood open, and as everybody was going into them, more variety was to be gained by joining this company than by waiting outside alone until they should return from their devotions. So he seated himself at the back, and after a brief, jaunty glance at the sunburnt, shaggy congregation, made himself as comfortable as might be. He had not seen a face worth keeping his eyes open for. The simple choir and simple fold gathered for even-song, and paid him no attention on their part--a rough American bound for the mines was no longer anything but an object of aversion to them.

The padre, of course, had been instantly aware of the stranger's presence. For this is the sixth sense with vicars of every creed and heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the worshippers few and seldom varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read shrewdly the faces of those who assemble to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants, with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for their speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the intoning, he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit Dominus. He listened to the tender chorus that opens "William Tell"; and as the Latin psalm proceeded, pictures of the past rose between him and the altar. One after another came these strains which he had taken from the operas famous in their day, until at length the padre was murmuring to some music seldom long out of his heart--not the Latin verse which the choir sang, but the original French words:

"Ah, voile man envie, Voila mon seul desir: Rendez moi ma patrie, Ou laissez moi mourir."

Which may be rendered:

But one wish I implore, One wish is all my cry: Give back my native land once more, Give back, or let me die.

Then it happened that he saw the stranger in the back of the church again, and forgot his Dixit Dominus straightway. The face of the young man was no longer hidden by the slouching position he had at first taken. "I only noticed his clothes before," thought the padre.

Restlessness was plain upon the handsome brow, and in the mouth there was violence; but Padre Ignazio liked the eyes. "He is not saying any prayers," he surmised, presently. "I doubt if he has said any for a long while. And he knows my music. He is of educated people. He cannot be American. And now--yes, he has taken--I think it must be a flower, from his pocket. I shall have him to dine with me." And vespers ended with rosy clouds of eagerness drifting across the padre's brain.

But the stranger made his own beginning. As the priest came from the church, the rebellious young figure was waiting. "Your organist tells me," he said, impetuously, "that it is you who--"

"May I ask with whom I have the great pleasure of speaking?" said the padre, putting formality to the front and his pleasure out of sight.

The stranger reddened, and became aware of the padre's features, moulded by refinement and the world. "I beg your lenience," said he, with a graceful and confident utterance, as of equal to equal. "My name is Gaston Villere, and it was time I should be reminded of my manners."

The padre's hand waved a polite negative.

"Indeed yes, padre. But your music has astonished me to pieces. If you carried such associations as--Ah! the days and the nights!" he broke off. "To come down a California mountain," he resumed, "and find Paris at the bottom! 'The Huguenots,' Rossini, Herold--I was waiting for 'Il Trovatore."'

"Is that something new?" said the padre, eagerly.

The young man gave an exclamation. "The whole world is ringing with it,"

he said.

"But Santa Ysabel del Mar is a long way from the whole world," said Padre Ignazio.

"Indeed it would not appear to be so," returned young Gaston. "I think the Comedie Francaise must be round the corner."

A thrill went through the priest at the theatre's name. "And have you been long in America?" he asked.