Essential Novelists - Bret Harte. Bret Harte

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      Nearly an hour elapsed. During that interval the sound of Victor's voice, raised in passionate recital, might have been heard by the occupants of the larger room but that they were completely involved in their own smoky atmosphere, and were perhaps politely oblivious of the stranger's business. They chatted, compared notes, and examined legal documents with the excited and pleased curiosity of men to whom business and the present importance of its results was a novelty. At a few minutes before nine Don Pedro reappeared with Victor. I grieve to say that either from the reaction of the intense excitement of the morning, from the active sympathy of his friend, or from the equally soothing anodyne of aguardiente, he was somewhat incoherent, interjectional, and effusive. The effect of excessive stimulation on passionate natures like Victor's is to render them either maudlin or affectionate. Mr. Ramirez was both. He demanded with tears in his eyes to be led to the ladies. He would seek in the company of Manuela, the stout female before introduced to the reader, that sympathy which an injured, deceived, and confiding nature like his own so deeply craved.

      On the staircase he ran against a stranger, precise, dignified, accurately clothed and fitted—the "Señor Perkins" just released from his slavery, a very different person from the one accidentally disclosed to him an hour before, on his probable way to the gaming table, and his habitual enjoyment on the evening of the day. In his maudlin condition, Victor would have fain exchanged views with him in regard to the general deceitfulness of the fair, and the misfortunes that attend a sincere passion, but Don Pedro hurried him below into the parlour, and out of the reach of the serenely contemptuous observation of the Señor Perkins's eye. Once in the parlour, and in the presence of the coquettish Manuela, who was still closely shawled, as if yet uncertain and doubtful in regard to the propriety of her garments above the waist, Victor, after a few vague remarks upon the general inability of the sex to understand a nature so profoundly deep and so wildly passionate as his own, eventually succumbed in a large black haircloth arm-chair, and became helplessly and hopelessly comatose.

      "We must find a bed here for him to-night," said the sympathising, but practical Manuela; "he is not fit, poor imbecile, to be sent to his hotel. Mother of God! what is this?"

      In lifting him out of the chair into which he had subsided with a fatal tendency to slide to the floor, unless held by main force, something had fallen from his breast pocket, and Manuela had picked it up. It was the bowie-knife he had purchased that morning.

      "Ah!" said Manuela, "desperate little brigand: he has been among the Americanos! Look, my uncle!"

      Don Pedro took the weapon quietly from the brown hands of Manuela and examined it coolly.

      "It is new, my niece," he responded, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "The gloss is still upon its blade. We will take him to bed."

      CHAPTER III. THE CHARMING MRS. SEPULVIDA.

      If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honoured pueblo and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of summer seemed to symbolise that aristocratic conservatism which repelled all innovation, and was its distinguishing mark. The stranger who rode into the pueblo, in his own conveyance,—for the instincts of San Antonio refused to sanction the introduction of a stage-coach or diligence that might bring into the town irresponsible and vagabond travellers,—read in the faces of the idle, lounging peons the fact that the great rancheros who occupied the outlying grants had refused to sell their lands, long before he entered the one short walled street and open plaza, and found that he was in a town where there was no hotel or tavern, and that he was dependent entirely upon the hospitality of some courteous resident for a meal or a night's lodging.

      As he drew rein in the courtyard of the first large adobe dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the verandah of the long low Fonda, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed adobe walls, as barren and guiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear-trees, twisted, gnarled, and knotted with the rheumatism of age; there was the unchanged strip of narrow white beach, and beyond, the sea—vast, illimitable, and always the same. The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were something remote, unreal and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines, and the white walls, and dismounted bronze cannon of the Presidio, that looked blankly and hopelessly seaward.

      For all this, the pueblo of San Antonio was the cynosure of the covetous American eye. Its vast leagues of fertile soil, its countless herds of cattle, the semi-tropical luxuriance of its vegetation, the salubrity of its climate, and the existence of miraculous mineral springs, were at once a temptation and an exasperation to greedy speculators of San Francisco. Happily for San Antonio, its square leagues were held by only a few of the wealthiest native gentry. The ranchos of the "Bear," of the "Holy Fisherman," of the "Blessed Trinity," comprised all of the outlying lands, and their titles were patented and secured to their native owners in the earlier days of the American occupation, while their comparative remoteness from the populous centres had protected them from the advances of foreign cupidity. But one American had ever entered upon the possession and enjoyment of this Californian Arcadia, and that was the widow of Don José Sepulvida. Eighteen months ago the excellent Sepulvida had died at the age of eighty-four, and left his charming young American wife the sole mistress of his vast estate. Attractive, of a pleasant, social temperament, that the Donna Maria should eventually bestow her hand and the estate upon some loser Americano, who would bring ruin in the hollow disguise of "improvements" to the established and conservative life of San Antonio, was an event to be expected, feared, and, if possible, estopped by fasting and prayer.

      When the Donna Maria returned from a month's visit to San Francisco after her year's widowhood, alone, and to all appearances as yet unattached, it is said that a Te Deum was sung at the Mission church. The possible defection of the widow became still more important to San Antonio, when it was remembered that the largest estate in the valley, the "Rancho of the Holy Trinity," was held by another member of this deceitful sex—the alleged natural half-breed daughter of a deceased Governor—but happily preserved from the possible fate of the widow by religious preoccupation and the habits of a recluse. That the irony of Providence should leave the fate and future of San Antonio so largely dependent upon the results of levity, and the caprice of a susceptible sex, gave a sombre tinge to the gossip of the little pueblo—if the grave, decorous discussion of Señores and Señoras could deserve that name. Nevertheless it was believed by the more devout that a miraculous interposition would eventually save San Antonio from the Americanos and destruction, and it was alleged that the patron saint, himself accomplished in the art of resisting a peculiar form of temptation, would not scruple to oppose personally any undue weakness of vanity or the flesh in helpless widowhood. Yet, even the most devout and trustful believers, as they slyly slipped aside veil or manta, to peep furtively at the Donna Maria entering chapel, in the heathenish abominations of a Parisian dress and bonnet, and a face rosy with self-consciousness and innocent satisfaction, felt their hearts sink within them, and turned their eyes in mute supplication to the gaunt, austere patron saint pictured on the chancel wall above them, who, clutching a skull and crucifix as if for support, seemed to glare upon the pretty stranger with some trepidation and a possible doubt of his being able to resist the newer temptation.

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