"To the lover of history it is like food without salt: imagination has painted an historical city with the panorama of a great time; it has been to us a stage for great events. We find it a stage with familiar paraphernalia, and actors as commonplace as ourselves."
"It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?"
"Infinitely, though less expanding."
"Then is anything worth while except reading?
"Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active occupied life necessary for its achievement."
She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to him. "Are you ambitious?" she asked.
"For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the looting of h.e.l.l in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot," still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and more satisfactory. The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of compelled applause,--they fill the blanks."
"Tell me," she said, imperiously, "what do you want?"
"Shall I tell you? I never have spoken of it to a living soul but Alvarado. Shall I tell it to a woman,--and an Iturbi y Moncada? Could the folly of man further go?"
"If I am a woman I am an Iturbi y Moncada, and if I am an Iturbi y Moncada I have the honor of its generations in my veins."
"Very good. I believe you would not betray me, even in the interest of your house. Would you?"
"No."
"And I love to talk to you, to tell you what I would tell no other.
Listen, then. An envoy goes to Mexico next week with letters from Alvarado, desiring that I be the next governor of the Californias, and containing the a.s.surance that the Departmental Junta will endorse me. I shall follow next month to see Santa Ana personally; I know him well, and he was a friend of my father"s. I wish to be invested with peculiar powers; that is to say, I wish California to be practically overlooked while I am governor and I wish it understood that I shall be governor as long as I please. Alvarado will hold no office under the Americans, and is as ready to retire now as a few years later. Of course my predilection for the Americans must be carefully concealed both from the Mexican government and the ma.s.s of the people here: Santa Ana and Alvarado know what is bound to come; the Mexicans, generally, retain enough interest in the Californias to wish to keep them. I shall be the last governor of the Department, and I shall employ that period to amalgamate the native population so closely that they will make a strong contingent in the new order of things and be completely under my domination. I shall establish a college with American professors, so that our youth will be taught to think, and to think in English. Alvarado has done something for education, but not enough; he has not enforced it, and the methods are very primitive.
I intend to be virtually dictator. With as little delay as possible I shall establish a newspaper,--a powerful weapon in the hands of a ruler, as well as a factor of development. Then I shall organize a superior court for the punishment of capital crimes. Not that I do not recognize the right of a man to kill if his reasons satisfy himself, but there can be no subservience to authority in a country where murder is practically licensed. American immigration will be more than encouraged, and it shall be distinctly understood by the Americans that I encourage it. Everything, of course, will be done to promote good-will between the Californians and the new-comers. Then, when the United States make up their mind to take possession of us, I shall waste no blood, but hand over a country worthy of capture. In the meantime it will have been carefully drilled into the Californian mind that American occupation will be for their ultimate good, and that I shall go to Washington to protect their interests. There will then be no foolish insurrections. Do you care to hear more?"
Her face was flushed, her chest was rising rapidly.
"I hardly know what to think,--how I feel. You interest me so much as you talk that I wish you to succeed: I picture your success. And yet it maddens me to hear you talk of the Americans in that way,--also to know that your house will be greater than ours,--that we will be forgotten. But--yes, tell me all. What will you do then?"
"I shall have California, in the first place, scratched for the gold that I believe lies somewhere within her. When that great resource _is_ located and developed I shall publish in every American newspaper the extraordinary agricultural advantages of the country. In a word, my object is to make California a great State and its name synonymous with my own. As I told you before, for fame as fame I care nothing; I do not care if I am forgotten on my death-bed; but with my blood biting my veins I must have action while living. Shall I say that I have a worthier motive in wishing to aid in the development of civilization? But why worthier? Merely a higher form of selfishness.
The best and the worst of motives are prompted by the same instinct."
"I would advise you," she said, slowly, "never to marry. Your wife would be very unhappy."
"But no one has greater scorn than you for the man who spends his life with his lips at the chalice of the poppy."
"True, I had forgotten them." She rose abruptly. "Let us go back," she said. "It is better not to stay too long."
As they walked down the canon she looked at him furtively. The men of her race were almost all tall and finely-proportioned, but they did not suggest strength as this man did. And his face,--it was so grimly determined at times that she shrank from it, then drew near, fascinated. It had no beauty at all--according to Californian standards; she could not know that it represented all that intellect, refinement and civilization, generally, would do for the human race for a century to come,--but it had a subtle power, an absolute audacity, an almost contemptuous fearlessness in its bold, fine outline, a dominating intelligence in the keen deeply-set eyes, and a hint of weakness, where and what she could not determine, that mystified and magnetized her.
"I know you a little better," she said, "just a little,--enough to make my curiosity ache and jump. At the same time, I know now what I did not before,--that I might climb and mine and study and watch, and you would always be beyond me. There is something subtle and evasive about you--something I seem to be close to always, yet never can see or grasp."
"It is merely the barrier of s.e.x. A man can know a woman fairly well, because her life, consequently the interests which mould her mind and conceive her thoughts, are more or less simple. A man"s life is so complex, his nature so inevitably the sum and work of it of it lies so far outside of woman"s sphere, his mind spiked with a thousand magnets, each pointing to a different possibility,--that she would need divine wisdom to comprehend him in his entirety, even if he made her a diagram of every cell in his brain,--which he never would, out of consideration for both her and his own vanity. But within certain restrictions there can be a magnificent sense of comradeship."
"But a woman, I think, would never be happy with that something in the man always beyond her grasp,--that something which she could be nothing to. She would be more jealous of that independence of her in man than of another woman."
"That was pure insight," he said. "You could not know that."
"No," she said, "I had not thought of it before."
I had made a martyr of myself on a three-cornered stone at the entrance of the canon, waiting to duena them out. "Never will I do this again!" I exclaimed, with that virtue born of discomfort, as they came in sight.
"My dearest Eustaquia," said Diego, kissing my hand gallantly, "thou hast given me pleasure so often, most charming and clever of women, thou hast but added one new art to thy overflowing store."
We mounted almost immediately upon returning, and I was alone with Chonita for a moment. "Do you realize that you are playing with fire?"
I said, warningly. "Estenega is a dangerous man; the most successful man with women I have ever known."
"I do not deny his power," she said. "But I am safe, for the many reasons thou knowest of. And, being safe, why should I deny myself the pleasure of talking to him? I shall never meet his like again. Let me live for a little while."
"Ay, but do not live too hard! It hurts down into the core and marrow."
XX.
While we were eating supper, a dozen Indian girls were gathered about a table in one of the large rooms behind the house, busily engaged in blowing out the contents of several hundred eggs and filling the hollowed sh.e.l.ls with cologne, flour, tinsel, bright sc.r.a.ps of paper.
Each egg-was then sealed with white wax, and ready for the cascaron frolic of the evening.
We had been dancing, singing, and talking for an hour after rosario, when the eggs were brought in. In an instant every girl"s hair was unbound, a wild dive was made for the great trays, and eggs flew in every direction. Dancing was forgotten. The girls and men chased each other about the room, the air was filled with perfume and glittering particles, the latter looking very pretty on black floating hair.
Etiquette demanded that only one egg should be thrown by the same hand at a time, but quick turns of supple wrists followed each other very rapidly. To really accomplish a feat the egg must crash on the back of the head, and each occupied in attack was easy prey.
Chonita was like a child. Two priests were of our party, and she made a target of their shaven crowns, shrieking with delight. They vowed revenge, and chased her all over the house; but not an egg had broken on that golden mane. She was surrounded at one time by caballeros, but she whirled and doubled so swiftly that every cascaron flew afield.
The pelting grew faster and more furious; every room was invaded; we chased each other up and down the corridors. The people in the court had their cascarones also, and the noise must have been heard at the Mission. Don Guillermo hobbled about delightedly, covered with tinsel and flour. Estenega had tried a dozen times to hit Chonita, but as if by instinct she faced him each time before the egg could leave his hand. Finally he pursued her down the corridor to her library, where I, fortunately, happened to be resting, and both threw themselves into chairs, breathless.
"Let us stay here," he said. "We have had enough of this."
"Very well," she said. She bent her head to lift a book which had fallen from a shelf, and felt the soft blow of the cascaron.
"At last!" said Estenega, contentedly. "I was determined to conquer, if I waited until morning."
Chonita looked vexed for a moment,--she did not like to be vanquished,--then shrugged her shoulders and leaned back in her chair.
The little room was plainly furnished. Shelves covered three sides, and the window-seat and the table were littered with books. There were no curtains, no ornaments; but Chonita"s hair, billowing to the floor, her slender voluptuous form, her white skin and green irradiating eyes, the candlelight half revealing, half concealing, made a picture requiring no background. I caught the expression of Estenega"s face, and determined to remain if he murdered me.
Peals of laughter, joyous shrieks, screams of mock terror, floated in to us. I broke a silence which was growing awkward:
"How happy they are! Creatures of air and sunshine! Life in this Arcadia is an idyl."
"They are not happy," said Estenega, contemptuously; "they are gay.
They are light of heart through absence of material cares and endless sources of enjoyment, which in turn have bred a careless order of mind. But did each pause long enough to look into his own heart, would he not find a stone somewhere in its depths?--perhaps a skull graven on the stone,--who knows?"
"Oh, Diego!" I exclaimed, impatiently, "this is a party, not a funeral."
"Then is no one happy?" asked Chonita, wistfully.