The Doomswoman: An Historical Romance of Old California

Before going to Mexico, Estenega remained for some weeks at his ranchos in the North, overlooking the slaughtering of his cattle, an important yearly event, for the trade in hides and tallow with foreign shippers was the chief source of the Californian’s income.  He also was associated with the Russians at Fort Ross and Bodega in the fur-trade.  But he was far from being satisfied with these desultory gains.  They sufficed his private wants, but with the great schemes he had in mind he needed gold by the bushel.  How to obtain it was a problem which sat on the throne of his mind side by side with Chonita Iturbi y Moncada.  He had reason to believe that gold lay under California; but where?  He determined that upon his return from Mexico he would take measures to discover, although he objected to the methods which alone could be employed.  But, like all born rulers of men, he had an impatient scorn for means with a great end in view.  There was no intermediate way of making the money.  It would be a hundred years before the country would be populous enough to give his vast ranchos a reasonable value; and, although he had twenty thousand head of cattle, the market for their disposal was limited, and barter was the principle of trade, rather than coin.

Toward the end of the month he hurried to Monterey to catch a bark about to sail for Mexico.  The important preliminaries of the future he had planned could no longer be delayed; the treacherous revengeful nature of Reinaldo might at any moment awake from the spell in which he had locked it; had a ship sailed before, he would have left his commercial interests with his mayor-domo and gone to the seat of government at once.

He arrived in Monterey one evening after hard riding.  The city was singularly quiet.  It was the hour when the indefatigable dancers of that gay town should have flitted past the open windows of the salas, when the air should have been vocal with the flute and guitar, song and light laughter.  But the city might have been a living tomb.  The white rayless houses were heavy and silent as sepulchers.  He rode slowly down Alvarado Street, and saw the advancing glow of a cigar.  When the cigar was abreast of him he recognized Mr. Larkin.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

“Small-pox,” replied the consul, succinctly.  “Better get on board at once.  And steer clear of the lower quarter.  Your vaquero arrived yesterday, and I instructed him to put your baggage in the custom-house.  He dropped it and fled to the country.”

Estenega thanked him and proceeded on his way.  He made a circuit to avoid the lower quarter, but saw that it was not abandoned; lights moved here and there.  “Poor creatures!” he thought, “they are probably dying like poisoned rats.”

On the side of the hill by the road was a solitary hut.  He was obliged to pass it.  A candle burned beyond the open window, and he set his lips and turned his head; not from fear of contagion, however.  And his eyes were drawn to the window in spite of his resolute will.  He looked once, and looked again, then checked his horse.  On the bed lay a girl in the middle stages of the disease, her eyes glittering with delirium, her black hair matted and wet.  She was evidently alone.  Estenega spurred his horse and galloped around to the back of the hut.  In the kitchen, the only other room, huddled an old crone, brown and gnarled like an old apple.  She was sleeping; by her side was a bottle of aguardiente.  Estenega called loudly to her.

“Susana!”

The creature stirred, but did not open her eyes.  He called twice again, and awakened her.  She stared through the open door, her lower jaw falling, showing the yellow stumps.

“Who is?”

“Is Anita alone with you?”

“Ay, yi!  Don Diego!  Yes, yes.  All run from the house like rats from a ship that burns.  Ay, yi!  Ay, yi! and she so pretty before!  A-y, y-i!—­” Her head fell forward; she relapsed into stupor.

Estenega rode around to the window again.  The girl was sitting on the edge of the bed, mechanically pulling the long matted strands of her hair.

“Water! water!” she cried, faintly.  “Ay, Mary!” She strove to rise, but fell back, clutching at the bedclothing.

Estenega rode to a deserted hut near by, concealed his saddle in a corner under a heap of rubbish, and turned his horse loose.  He returned to the hut where the sick girl lay, and entered the room.  She recognized him in spite of her fever.

“Don Diego!  Is it you?—­you?” she said, half raising herself.  “Ay, Mary! is it the delirium?”

“It is I,” he said.  “I will take care of you.  Do you want water?”

“Ay, water.  Ay, thou wert always kind, even though thy love did last so little a while.”

He brought the water and did what he could to relieve her sufferings:  like all the rancheros, he had some knowledge of medicine.  He held the old crone under the pump, gave her an emetic, broke her bottle, and ordered her to help him care for the girl.  Between awe of him and promise of gold, she gave him some assistance.

Estenega watched the vessel sail the next morning, and battled with the impulse to leap from the window, hire a boat, and overtake it.  The delay of a month might mean the death of his hopes.  For all he knew, the bark carried the letters of his undoing; Reinaldo himself might be on it.  He set his lips with an expression of bitter contempt—­the expression directed at his own impotence in the hands of Circumstance,—­and went to the bedside of the girl.  She was hopelessly ill; even medical skill, were there such a thing in the country, could not save her; but he could not leave to die like a dog a woman who had been his mistress, even if only the fancy of a week, as this poor girl had been.  She had loved him, and never annoyed him; they had maintained friendly relations, and he had helped her whenever she had appealed to him.  But in this hour of her extremity she had further rights, and he recognized them.  He had cut her hair close to her head, and she looked more comfortable, although an unpleasant sight.  As he regarded her, he thought of Chonita, and the tide of love rose in him as it had not before.  In the beginning he had been hardly more than infatuated with her originality and her curious beauty; at Santa Barbara her sweetness and kinship had stolen into him and the momentous fusion of passion and spiritual love had given new birth to a torpid soul and stirred and shaken his manhood as lust had never done; now in her absence and exaltation above common mortals he reverenced her as an ideal.  Even in the bitterness of the knowledge that months must elapse before he could see her again, the tenderness she had drawn to herself from the serious depths of his nature throbbed throughout him, and made him more than gentle to the poor creature whose ignorance could not have comprehended the least of what he felt for Chonita.

She died within three days.  The good priest, who stood to his post and made each of his afflicted poor a brief daily visit, prayed by her as she fell into stupor, but she was incapable of receiving extreme unction.  Estenega was alone with her when she died, but the priest returned a few moments later.

“Don Thomas Larkin wishes me to say to you, Don Diego Estenega,” said the Father, “that he would be glad to have you stay with him until the next vessel arrives.  As two members of his family have the disease, he has nothing to fear from you.  I will care for the body.”

Estenega handed him money for the burial, and looked at him speculatively.  The priest must have heard the girl’s confessions, and he wondered why he did not improve the opportunity to reprove a man whose indifference to the Church was a matter of indignant comment among the clergy.  The priest appeared to divine his thoughts, for he said: 

“Thou hast done more than thy duty, Don Diego.  And to the frailties of men I think the good God is merciful.  He made them.  Go in peace.”

Estenega accepted Mr. Larkin’s invitation, but, in spite of the genial society of the consul, he spent in his house the most wretched three weeks of his life.  He dared not leave Monterey until he had passed the time of incubation, having no desire to spread the disease; he dared not write to Chonita, for the same reason.  What must she think?  She supposed him to have sailed, of course, but he had promised to write her from Monterey, and again from San Diego.  And the uncertainty regarding his Mexican affairs was intolerable to a man of his active mind and supertense nervous system.  His only comfort lay in Mr. Larkin’s assurance that the national bark Joven Guipuzcoana was due within the month and would return at once.  Early in the fourth week the assurance was fulfilled, and by the time he was ready to sail again his danger from contagion was over.  But he embarked without writing to Chonita.

The voyage lasted a month, tedious and monotonous, more trying than his retardation on land, for there at least he could recover some serenity by violent exercise.  He divided his time between pacing the deck, when the weather permitted, and writing to Chonita:  long, intimate, possessing letters, which would reveal her to herself as nothing else, short of his own dominant contact, could do.  At San Blas he posted his letters and welcomed the rough journey overland to the capital; but under a calm exterior he was possessed of the spirit of disquiet.  As so often happens, however, his fears proved to have been vagaries of a morbid state of mind and of that habit of thought which would associate with every cause an effect of similar magnitude.  Santa Ana welcomed him with friendly enthusiasm, and was ready to listen to his plans.  That wily and astute politician, who was always abreast of progress and never in its lead, recognized in Estenega the coming man, and, knowing that the seizure of the Californias by the United States was only a question of time, was keenly willing to make an ally of the man who he foresaw would control them as long as he chose, both at home and in Washington.  For the matter of that, he recognized the impotence of Mexico to interfere, beyond bluster, with plans any resolute Californian might choose to pursue; but it was important to Estenega’s purpose that the governorship should be assured to him by the central government, and the eyes of the Mexican Congress directed elsewhere.  He knew the value of the moral effect which its apparent sanction would have upon rebellious Southerners.

“I am at your service,” said Santa Ana; “and the governorship is yours.  But take heed that no rumor of your ultimate intentions reaches the ears of Congress until you are firmly established.  If it opposed you relentlessly—­and it keeps its teeth on California like a dog on a bone bigger than himself—­I should have to yield; I have too much at stake myself.  I will look out that any communications from enemies, including Iturbi y Moncada, are opened first by me.”

Estenega wrote to Chonita again by the ship that left during his brief stay in the capital, and it was his intention to go directly to Santa Barbara upon arriving in California.  But when he landed in Monterey—­disinfected and careless as of old—­he learned that she was about to start, perhaps already had done so, for Fort Ross, to pay a visit to the Rotscheffs.  The news gave him pleasure; it had been his wish to say what he had yet to say in his own forests.

And then the plan which had been stirring restlessly in his mind for many months took imperative shape:  he determined that if there was gold in California he would wring the secret out of its keeper, by gentle means or violent, and that within the next twenty-four hours.