The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories by Owen Wister (ebook reader library TXT) 📖

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