Ramona

He will tell them."

This was a sore grief to Ramona. In her heart she rebelled against it, as she had never yet rebelled against an act of Alessandro"s; but she could not distress him. Was not his burden heavy enough now?

Without a word of farewell to any one, they set off in the gray dawn, before a creature was stirring in the village,--the wagon piled high; Ramona, her baby in her arms, in front; Alessandro walking. The load was heavy. Benito and Baba walked slowly. Capitan, unhappy, looking first at Ramona"s face, then at Alessandro"s, walked dispiritedly by their side.

He knew all was wrong.

As Alessandro turned the horses into a faintly marked road leading in a northeasterly direction, Ramona said with a sob, "Where does this road lead, Alessandro?"

"To San Jacinto," he said. "San Jacinto Mountain. Do not look back, Majella! Do not look back!" he cried, as he saw Ramona, with streaming eyes, gazing back towards San Pasquale. "Do not look back! It is gone!

Pray to the saints now, Majella! Pray! Pray!"

XXI

THE Senora Moreno was dying. It had been a sad two years in the Moreno house. After the first excitement following Ramona"s departure had died away, things had settled down in a surface similitude of their old routine. But nothing was really the same. No one was so happy as before.

Juan Canito was heart-broken. There had been set over him the very Mexican whose coming to the place he had dreaded. The sheep had not done well; there had been a drought; many had died of hunger,--a thing for which the new Mexican overseer was not to blame, though it pleased Juan to hold him so, and to say from morning till night that if his leg had not been broken, or if the lad Alessandro had been there, the wool-crop would have been as big as ever. Not one of the servants liked this Mexican; he had a sorry time of it, poor fellow; each man and woman on the place had or fancied some reason for being set against him; some from sympathy with Juan Can, some from idleness and general impatience; Margarita, most of all, because he was not Alessandro. Margarita, between remorse about her young mistress and pique and disappointment about Alessandro, had become a very unhappy girl; and her mother, instead of comforting or soothing her, added to her misery by continually bemoaning Ramona"s fate. The void that Ramona had left in the whole household seemed an irreparable one; nothing came to fill it; there was no forgetting; every day her name was mentioned by some one; mentioned with bated breath, fearful conjecture, compa.s.sion, and regret.

Where had she vanished? Had she indeed gone to the convent, as she said, or had she fled with Alessandro?

Margarita would have given her right hand to know. Only Juan Can felt sure. Very well Juan Can knew that n.o.body but Alessandro had the wit and the power over Baba to lure him out of that corral, "and never a rail out of its place." And the saddle, too! Ay, the smart lad! He had done the best he could for the Senorita; but, Holy Virgin! what had got into the Senorita to run off like that, with an Indian,--even Alessandro!

The fiends had bewitched her. Tirelessly Juan Can questioned every traveller, every wandering herder he saw. No one knew anything of Alessandro, beyond the fact that all the Temecula Indians had been driven out of their village, and that there was now not an Indian in the valley. There was a rumor that Alessandro and his father had both died; but no one knew anything certainly. The Temecula Indians had disappeared, that was all there was of it,--disappeared, like any wild creatures, foxes or coyotes, hunted down, driven out; the valley was rid of them. But the Senorita! She was not with these fugitives. That could not be! Heaven forbid!

"If I"d my legs, I"d go and see for myself." said Juan Can. "It would be some comfort to know even the worst. Perdition take the Senora, who drove her to it! Ay, drove her to it! That"s what I say, Luigo." In some of his most venturesome wrathy moments he would say: "There"s none of you know the truth about the Senorita but me! It"s a hard hand the Senora"s reared her with, from the first. She"s a wonderful woman, our Senora! She gets power over one."

But the Senora"s power was shaken now. More changed than all else in the changed Moreno household, was the relation between the Senora Moreno and her son Felipe. On the morning after Ramona"s disappearance, words had been spoken by each which neither would ever forget. In fact, the Senora believed that it was of them she was dying, and perhaps that was not far from the truth; the reason that forces could no longer rally in her to repel disease, lying no doubt largely in the fact that to live seemed no longer to her desirable.

Felipe had found the note Ramona had laid on his bed. Before it was yet dawn he had waked, and tossing uneasily under the light covering had heard the rustle of the paper, and knowing instinctively that it was from Ramona, had risen instantly to make sure of it. Before his mother opened her window, he had read it. He felt like one bereft of his senses as he read. Gone! Gone with Alessandro! Stolen away like a thief in the night, his dear, sweet little sister! Ah, what a cruel shame! Scales seemed to drop from Felipe"s eyes as he lay motionless, thinking of it. A shame! a cruel shame! And he and his mother were the ones who had brought it on Ramona"s head, and on the house of Moreno. Felipe felt as if he had been under a spell all along, not to have realized this.

"That"s what I told my mother!" he groaned,--"that it drove her to running away! Oh, my sweet Ramona! what will become of her? I will go after them, and bring them back;" and Felipe rose, and hastily dressing himself, ran down the veranda steps, to gain a little more time to think. He returned shortly, to meet his mother standing in the doorway, with pale, affrighted face.

"Felipe!" she cried, "Ramona is not here."

"I know it," he replied in an angry tone. "That is what I told you we should do,--drive her to running away with Alessandro!"

"With Alessandro!" interrupted the Senora.

"Yes," continued Felipe,--"with Alessandro, the Indian! Perhaps you think it is less disgrace to the names of Ortegna and Moreno to have her run away with him, than to be married to him here under our roof! I do not! Curse the day, I say, when I ever lent myself to breaking the girl"s heart! I am going after them, to fetch them back!"

If the skies had opened and rained fire, the Senora had hardly less quailed and wondered than she did at these words; but even for fire from the skies she would not surrender till she must.

"How know you that it is with Alessandro?" she said.

"Because she has written it here!" cried Felipe, defiantly holding up his little note. "She left this, her good-by to me. Bless her! She writes like a saint, to thank me for all my goodness to her,--I, who drove her to steal out of my house like a thief!"

The phrase, "my house," smote the Senora"s ear like a note from some other sphere, which indeed it was,--from the new world into which Felipe had been in an hour born. Her cheeks flushed, and she opened her lips to reply; but before she had uttered a word, Luigo came running round the corner, Juan Can hobbling after him at a miraculous pace on his crutches. "Senor Felipe! Senor Felipe! Oh, Senora!" they cried. "Thieves have been here in the night! Baba is gone,--Baba, and the Senorita"s saddle."

A malicious smile broke over the Senora"s countenance, and turning to Felipe, she said in a tone--what a tone it was! Felipe felt as if he must put his hands to his ears to shut it out; Felipe would never forget,--"As you were saying, like a thief in the night!"

With a swifter and more energetic movement than any had ever before seen Senor Felipe make, he stepped forward, saying in an undertone to his mother, "For G.o.d"s sake, mother, not a word before the men!--What is that you say, Luigo? Baba gone? We must see to our corral. I will come down, after breakfast, and look at it;" and turning his back on them, he drew his mother by a firm grasp, she could not resist, into the house.

She gazed at him in sheer, dumb wonder.

"Ay, mother," he said, "you may well look thus in wonder; I have been no man, to let my foster-sister, I care not what blood were in her veins, be driven to this pa.s.s! I will set out this day, and bring her back."

"The day you do that, then, I lie in this house dead!" retorted the Senora, at white heat. "You may rear as many Indian families as you please under the Moreno roof, I will at least have my grave!" In spite of her anger, grief convulsed her; and in another second she had burst into tears, and sunk helpless and trembling into a chair. No counterfeiting now. No pretences. The Senora Moreno"s heart broke within her, when those words pa.s.sed her lips to her adored Felipe. At the sight, Felipe flung himself on his knees before her; he kissed the aged hands as they lay trembling in her lap. "Mother mia," he cried, "you will break my heart if you speak like that! Oh, why, why do you command me to do what a man may not? I would die for you, my mother; but how can I see my sister a homeless wanderer in the wilderness?"

"I suppose the man Alessandro has something he calls a home," said the Senora, regaining herself a little. "Had they no plans? Spoke she not in her letter of what they would do?"

"Only that they would go to Father Salvierderra first," he replied.

"Ah!" The Senora reflected. At first startled, her second thought was that this would be the best possible thing which could happen. "Father Salvierderra will counsel them what to do," she said. "He could no doubt establish them in Santa Barbara in some way. My son, when you reflect, you will see the impossibility of bringing them here. Help them in any way you like, but do not bring them here." She paused. "Not until I am dead, Felipe! It will not be long."

Felipe bowed his head in his mother"s lap. She laid her hands on his hair, and stroked it with pa.s.sionate tenderness. "My Felipe!" she said.

"It was a cruel fate to rob me of you at the last!"

"Mother! mother!" he cried in anguish. "I am yours,--wholly, devotedly yours! Why do you torture me thus?"

"I will not torture you more," she said wearily, in a feeble tone. "I ask only one thing of you; let me never hear again the name of that wretched girl, who has brought all this woe on our house; let her name never be spoken on this place by man, woman, or child. Like a thief in the night! Ay, a horse-thief!"

Felipe sprang to his feet.

"Mother." he said, "Baba was Ramona"s own; I myself gave him to her as soon as he was born!"

The Senora made no reply. She had fainted. Calling the maids, in terror and sorrow Felipe bore her to her bed, and she did not leave it for many days. She seemed hovering between life and death. Felipe watched over her as a lover might; her great mournful eyes followed his every motion.

She spoke little, partly because of physical weakness, partly from despair. The Senora had got her death-blow. She would die hard. It would take long. Yet she was dying, and she knew it.

Felipe did not know it. When he saw her going about again, with a step only a little slower than before, and with a countenance not so much changed as he had feared, he thought she would be well again, after a time. And now he would go in search of Ramona. How he hoped he should find them in Santa Barbara! He must leave them there, or wherever he should find them; never again would he for a moment contemplate the possibility of bringing them home with him. But he would see them; help them, if need be. Ramona should not feel herself an outcast, so long as he lived.

When he said, agitatedly, to his mother, one night, "You are so strong now, mother, I think I will take a journey; I will not be away long,--not over a week," she understood, and with a deep sigh replied: "I am not strong; but I am as strong as I shall ever be. If the journey must be taken, it is as well done now."

How was the Senora changed!

"It must be, mother," said Felipe, "or I would not leave you. I will set off before sunrise, so I will say farewell tonight."

But in the morning, at his first step, his mother"s window opened, and there she stood, wan, speechless, looking at him. "You must go, my son?"

she asked at last.

"I must, mother!" and Felipe threw his arms around her, and kissed her again and again. "Dearest mother! Do smile! Can you not?"

"No, my son, I cannot. Farewell. The saints keep you. Farewell." And she turned, that she might not see him go.

Felipe rode away with a sad heart, but his purpose did not falter.

Following straight down the river road to the sea, he then kept up along the coast, asking here and there, cautiously, if persons answering to the description of Alessandro and Ramona had been seen. No one had seen any such persons.

When, on the night of the second day, he rode up to the Santa Barbara Mission, the first figure he saw was the venerable Father Salvierderra sitting in the corridor. As Felipe approached, the old man"s face beamed with pleasure, and he came forward totteringly, leaning on a staff in each hand. "Welcome, my son!" he said. "Are all well? You find me very feeble just now; my legs are failing me sorely this autumn."

Dismay seized on Felipe at the Father"s first words. He would not have spoken thus, had he seen Ramona. Barely replying to the greeting, Felipe exclaimed: "Father, I come seeking Ramona. Has she not been with you?"

Father Salvierderra"s face was reply to the question. "Ramona!" he cried. "Seeking Ramona! What has befallen the blessed child?"