Padre Ignacio
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Owen Wister >> Padre Ignacio
PADRE IGNACIO
Or The Song of Temptation
BY OWEN WISTER
I
At Santa Ysabel del Mar the season was at one of those moments when the
air rests quiet over land and sea. The old breezes were gone; the new
ones were not yet risen. The flowers in the mission garden opened wide;
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 hung golden and motionless long
after the rider was behind the hill, and the Pacific lay like a floor of
sapphire, whereon 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 the ship his homesick heart awaited. But it had slowly
passed. From an arch in his garden cloisters he was now 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 in
the guise of a youth, riding toward 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, from
Spain, tokens and home-tidings came to him, sent by certain beloved
friends of his youth. A barkentine brought him these messages. Whenever
thus the mother-world remembered him, it was like the touch of a warm
hand, a dear and tender caress; a distant life, by him long left behind,
seemed to be drawing the exile homeward from these alien shores. As the
time for his letters and packets drew near, the eyes of Padre Ignacio
would be often fixed wistfully upon the harbor, watching for the
barkentine. Sometimes, as to-day, he mistook other sails for hers, but
hers he mistook never. That Pacific Ocean, which, for all its hues and
jeweled mists, he could not learn to love, had, since long before his
day, been furrowed by the keels of Spain. Traders, and adventurers, and
men of God had passed along this coast, planting their colonies and
cloisters; but it was not his ocean. In the year that we, a thin strip of
patriots away over on the Atlantic edge of the continent, declared
ourselves an independent nation, a Spanish ship, in the name of Saint
Francis, was unloading the centuries of her own civilization at the
Golden Gate. San Diego had come earlier. Then, slowly, as mission after
mission was built along the soft coast wilderness, new ports were
established--at Santa Barbara, and by Point San Luis for San Luis Obispo,
which lay inland a little way up the gorge where it opened among the
hills. Thus the world reached these missions by water; while on land,
through the mountains, a road led to them, and also to many more that
were too distant behind the hills for ships to serve--a rough road, long
and lonely, punctuated with church towers and gardens. For the Fathers
gradually so stationed their settlements that the traveler might each
morning ride out from one mission and by evening of a day's fair journey
ride into the next. A lonely, rough, dangerous road, but lovely, too,
with a name like music--El Camino Real. Like music also were the names of
the missions--San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Rey de Francia, San Miguel,
Santa Ynes--their very list is a song.
So there, by-and-by, was our continent, with the locomotive whistling
from Savannah to Boston along its eastern edge, and on the western the
scattered chimes of Spain ringing among the unpeopIed 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 still the old mission-road goes through the
mountains, and along it the footsteps of vanished Spain are marked with
roses, and broken cloisters, and the crucifix.
But this was 1855. Only the barkentine brought to Padre Ignacio the signs
from the world that he once had known and loved so dearly. As for the new
world 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 luxury.
As the little, ancient bronze bell continued swinging in the tower, its
plaintive call reached something in the Padre's memory. Softly, absently,
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, if possible, to die 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 Ignacio repeated Auber's remark in French: "'Est-ce le bon
Dieu, oui est-ce bien le diable, qui veut tonjours que j'aime 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, the jasmines and the oleanders to the sacristy. "At
least," he said, "if we cannot carry with us into exile the friends and
the places we have loved, music will go whither we go, even to an end of
the world such 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 from a single
hearing."
The swarthy boy of sixteen stood watching his master's fingers, delicate
and white, as they played. Thus, 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 mio. 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; and 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 yet been heard in California. 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."
The Padre retired once more to the sacristy, while the horse that brought
Temptation came over the hill.
The hour of service drew near; and as the Padre waited he 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, bare 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 a pack-animal, ambled into the mission and
dismounted. Church was not so much in his thoughts as food and, after due
digestion, a bed; but the doors stood open, and, as everybody was passing
within 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 in a corner near the entrance, and after a brief,
jaunty glance at the sunburned, 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, paid
him no attention--a rough American bound for the mines was but an object
of aversion to them.
The Padre, of course, had been instantly aware of the stranger's
presence. To be aware of unaccustomed presences is the sixth sense with
vicars of every creed and heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the
worshipers few and seldom varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new
book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read keenly 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 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 he had taken from 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 his eye fell again upon the stranger near the door,
and he skaightway forgot his Dixit Dominus. The face of the young man was
no longer hidden by the slouching position he had at first taken. "I
only noticed his clothes at first," thought the Padre. Restlessness was
plain upon the handsome brow, and violence was in the mouth; but Padre
Ignacio 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.
II
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's face reddened beneath its sun-beaten bronze, and he became
aware of the Padre's pale features, molded 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 amazed me. If you carried such
associations as--Ah! the days and the nights!"--he broke off. "To come
down a California mountain and find Paris at the bottom! The Huguenots,
Rossini, Herold--I was waiting for Il Trovatore."
"Is that something new?" inquired the Padre, eagerly.
The young man gave an exclamation. "The whole world is ringing with it!"
he cried.
"But Santa YsabeI del Mar is a long way from the whole world," murmured
Padre Ignacio.
"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 theater's name. "And have you
been long in America?" he asked.
"Why, always--except two years of foreign travel after college."
"An American!" exclaimed the surprised Padre, with perhaps a tone of
disappointment in his voice. "But no Americans who are yet come this way
have been--have been"--he veiled the too-blunt expression of his
thought--"have been familiar with The Huguenots," he finished, making a
slight bow.
Villere took his under-meaning. "I come from New Orleans," he returned,
"and in New Orleans there live many of us who can recognize a--who can
recognize good music wherever we hear it." And he made a slight bow in
his turn.
The Padre laughed outright with pleasure and laid his hand upon the young
man's arm. "You have no intention of going away to-morrow, I trust?"
"With your leave," answered Gaston, "I will have such an intention no
longer."
It was with the air and gait of mutual understanding that the two now
walked on together toward the Padre's door. The guest was twenty-five,
the host sixty.
"And have you been in America long?" inquired Gaston.
"Twenty years."
"And at Santa Ysabel how long?"
"Twenty years."
"I should have thought," said Gaston, looking lightly at the desert and
unpeopIed mountains, "that now and again you might have wished to
travel."
"Were I your age," murmured Padre Ignacio, "it might be so."
The evening had now ripened to the long after-glow of sunset. The sea was
the purple of grapes, and wine-colored hues flowed among the high
shoulders of the mountains.
"I have seen a sight like this," said Gaston, "between Granada and
Malaga."
"So you know Spain!" said the Padre.
Often he had thought of this resemblance, but never till now met any one
to share his thought. The courtly proprietor of San Fernando and the
other patriarchal rancheros with whom he occasionally exchanged visits
across the wilderness knew hospitality and inherited gentle manners,
sending to Europe for silks and laces to give their daughters; but their
eyes had not looked upon Granada, and their ears had never listened to
William Tell.
"It is quite singular," pursued Gaston, "how one nook in the world will
suddenly remind you of another nook that may be thousands of miles away.
One morning, behind the Quai Voltaire, an old, yellow house with rusty
balconies made me almost homesick for New Orleans."
"The Quai Voltaire!" said the Padre.
"I heard Rachel in Valerie that night," the young man went on. "Did you
know that she could sing, too. She sang several verses by an astonishing
little Jew violon-cellist that is come up over there."
The Padre gazed down at his blithe guest. "To see somebody, somebody,
once again, is very pleasant to a hermit!"
"It cannot be more pleasant than arriving at an oasis," returned Gaston.
They had delayed on the threshold to look at the beauty of the evening,
and now the priest watched his parishioners come and go. "How can one
make companions--" he began; then, checking himself, he said: "Their
souls are as sacred and immortal as mine, and God helps me to help them.
But in this world it is not immortal souls that we choose for companions;
it is kindred tastes, intelligences, and--and so I and my books are
growing old together, you see," he added, more lightly. "You will find my
volumes as behind the times as myself."
He had fallen into talk more intimate than he wished; and while the guest
was uttering something polite about the nobility of missionary work, he
placed him in an easy-chair and sought aguardiente for his immediate
refreshment. Since the year's beginning there had been no guest for him
to bring into his rooms, or to sit beside him in the high seats at table,
set apart for the gente fina.
Such another library was not then in California; and though Gaston
Villere, in leaving Harvard College, had shut Horace and Sophocles for
ever at the earliest instant possible under academic requirements, he
knew the Greek and Latin names that he now saw as well as he knew those
of Shakspere, Dante, Moliere, and Cervantes. These were here also; but it
could not be precisely said of them, either, that they made a part of the
young man's daily reading. As he surveyed the Padre's august shelves, it
was with a touch of the histrionic Southern gravity which his Northern
education had not wholly schooled out of him that he said:
"I fear I am no scholar, sir. But I know what writers every gentleman
ought to respect."
The polished Padre bowed gravely to this compliment.
It was when his eyes caught sight of the music that the young man felt
again at ease, and his vivacity returned to him. Leaving his chair, he
began enthusiastically to examine the tall piles that filled one side of
the room. The volumes lay piled and scattered everywhere, making a
pleasant disorder; and, as perfume comes from a flower, memories of
singers and chandeliers rose bright from the printed names. Norma,
Tancredi, Don Pasquale, La Vestale, dim lights in the fashions of to-day,
sparkled upon the exploring Gaston, conjuring the radiant halls of Europe
before him. "The Barber of Seville!" he presently exclaimed. "And I
happened to hear it in Seville."
But Seville's name brought over the Padre a new rush of home thoughts.
"Is not Andalusia beautiful?" he said. "Did you see it in April, when the
flowers come?"
"Yes," said Gaston, among the music. "I was at Cordova then."
"Ah, Cordova!" murmured the Padre.
"Semiramide!" cried Gaston, lighting upon that opera. "That was a week!"
I should like to live it over, every day and night of it!"
"Did you reach Malaga from Marseilles or Gibraltar?" asked the Padre,
wistfully.
"From Marseilles. Down from Paris through the Rhone Valley, you know."
"Then you saw Provence! And did you go, perhaps, from Avignon to Nismes
by the Pont du Gard? There is a place I have made here--a little, little
place--with olive-trees. And now they have grown, and it looks something
like that country, if you stand in a particular position. I will take you
there to-morrow. I think you will understand what I mean."
"Another resemblance!" said the volatile and happy Gaston. "We both seem
to have an eye for them. But, believe me, Padre, I could never stay here
planting olives. I should go back and see the original ones--and then I'd
hasten on to Paris."
And, with a volume of Meyerbeer open in his hand, Gaston hummed:
"'Robert, Robert, toi que j'aime.' Why, Padre, I think that your library
contains none of the masses and all of the operas in the world!"
"I will make you a little confession," said Padre Ignacio, "and then you
shall give me a little absolution."
"For a penance," said Gaston, "you must play over some of these things to
me."
"I suppose I could not permit myself this luxury," began the Padre,
pointing to his operas, "and teach these to my choir, if the people had
any worldly associations with the music. But I have reasoned that the
music cannot do them harm--"
The ringing of a bell here interrupted him. "In fifteen minutes," he
said, "our poor meal will be ready for you." The good Padre was not quite
sincere when he spoke of a "poor meal." While getting the aguardiente for
his guest he had given orders, and he knew how well such orders would be
carried out. He lived alone, and generally supped simply enough, but not
even the ample table at San Fernando could surpass his own on occasions.
And this was for him indeed an occasion!
"Your half-breeds will think I am one of themselves," said Gaston,
showing his dusty clothes. "I am not fit to be seated with you." But he
did not mean this any more than his host had meant his remark about the
food. In his pack, which an Indian had brought from his horse, he carried
some garments of civilization. And presently, after fresh water and not a
little painstaking with brush and scarf, there came back to the Padre a
young guest whose elegance and bearing and ease of the great world were
to the exiled priest as sweet as was his traveled conversation.
They repaired to the hall and took their seats at the head of the long
table. For the Spanish centuries of stately custom lived at Santa YsabeI
del Mar, inviolate, feudal, remote.
They were the only persons of quality present; and between themselves and
the gente de razon a space intervened. Behind the Padre's chair stood an
Indian to waft upon him, and another stood behind the chair of Gaston
Villere. Each of these servants wore one single white garment, and
offered the many dishes to the gente fina and refilled their glasses. At
the lower end of the table a general attendant wafted upon mesclados--the
half-breeds. There was meat with spices, and roasted quail, with various
cakes and other preparations of grain; also the brown fresh olives and
grapes, with several sorts of figs and plums, and preserved fruits, and
white and red wine--the white fifty years old. Beneath the quiet shining
of candles, fresh-cut flowers leaned from vessels of old Mexican and
Spanish make.
There at one end of this feast sat the wild, pastoral, gaudy company,
speaking little over their food; and there at the other the pale Padre,
questioning his visitor about Rachel. The mere name of a street would
bring memories crowding to his lips; and when his guest told him of a new
play he was ready with old quotations from the same author. Alfred de
Vigny they spoke of, and Victor Hugo, whom the Padre disliked. Long after
the dulce, or sweet dish, when it was the custom for the vaqueros and the
rest of the retainers to rise and leave the gente fina to themselves, the
host sat on in the empty hail, fondly talking to his guest of his bygone
Paris and fondly learning of the later Paris that the guest had seen. And
thus the two lingered, exchanging their enthusiasms, while the candles
waned, and the long-haired Indians stood silent behind the chairs.
"But we must go to my piano," the host exclaimed. For at length they had
come to a lusty difference of opinion. The Padre, with ears critically
deaf, and with smiling, unconvinced eyes, was shaking his head, while
young Gaston sang Trovatore at him, and beat upon the table with a fork.
"Come and convert me, then," said Padre Ignacio, and he led the way.
"Donizetti I have always admitted. There, at least, is refinement. If the
world has taken to this Verdi, with his street-band music--But there,
now! Sit down and convert me. Only don't crush my poor little Erard with
Verdi's hoofs. I brought it when I came. It is behind the times, too.
And, oh, my dear boy, our organ is still worse. So old, so old! To get a
proper one I would sacrifice even this piano of mine in a moment--only
the tinkling thing is not worth a sou to anybody except its master. But
there! Are you quite comfortable?" And having seen to his guest's needs,
and placed spirits and cigars and an ash-tray within his reach, the Padre
sat himself comfortably in his chair to hear and expose the false
doctrine of Il Trovatore.
By midnight all of the opera that Gaston could recall had been played and
sung twice. The convert sat in his chair no longer, but stood singing by
the piano. The potent swing and flow of rhythms, the torrid, copious
inspiration of the South, mastered him. "Verdi has grown," he cried.
"Verdi is become a giant." And he swayed to the beat of the melodies, and
waved an enthusiastic arm. He demanded every note. Why did not Gaston
remember it all? But if the barkentine would arrive and bring the whole
music, then they would have it right! And he made Gaston teach him what
words he knew. "'Non ti scorder,'" he sang--"'non ti scordar di me.' That
is genius. But one sees how the world moves when one is out of it. 'A
nostri monti ritorneremo'; home to our mountains. Ah, yes, there is
genius again." And the exile sighed and his spirit voyaged to distant
places, while Gaston continued brilliantly with the music of the final
scene.