The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California

Pilar, from her little window just above the high wall surrounding the big adobe house set apart for the women neophytes of the Mission of Santa Ines, watched, morning and evening, for Andreo, as he came and went from the rancheria.  The old women kept the girls busy, spinning, weaving, sewing; but age nods and youth is crafty.  The tall young Indian who was renowned as the best huntsman of all the neophytes, and who supplied Padre Arroyo’s table with deer and quail, never failed to keep his ardent eyes fixed upon the grating so long as it lay within the line of his vision.  One day he went to Padre Arroyo and told him that Pilar was the prettiest girl behind the wall—­the prettiest girl in all the Californias—­and that she should be his wife.  But the kind stern old padre shook his head.

“You are both too young.  Wait another year, my son, and if thou art still in the same mind, thou shalt have her.”

Andreo dared to make no protest, but he asked permission to prepare a home for his bride.  The padre gave it willingly, and the young Indian began to make the big adobes, the bright red tiles.  At the end of a month he had built him a cabin among the willows of the rancheria, a little apart from the others:  he was in love, and association with his fellows was distasteful.  When the cabin was builded his impatience slipped from its curb, and once more he besought the priest to allow him to marry.

Padre Arroyo was sunning himself on the corridor of the mission, shivering in his heavy brown robes, for the day was cold.

“Orion,” he said sternly—­he called all his neophytes after the celebrities of earlier days, regardless of the names given them at the font—­“have I not told thee thou must wait a year?  Do not be impatient, my son.  She will keep.  Women are like apples:  when they are too young, they set the teeth on edge; when ripe and mellow, they please every sense; when they wither and turn brown, it is time to fall from the tree into a hole.  Now go and shoot a deer for Sunday:  the good padres from San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara are coming to dine with me.”

Andreo, dejected, left the padre.  As he passed Pilar’s window and saw a pair of wistful black eyes behind the grating, his heart took fire.  No one was within sight.  By a series of signs he made his lady understand that he would place a note beneath a certain adobe in the wall.

Pilar, as she went to and fro under the fruit trees in the garden, or sat on the long corridor weaving baskets, watched that adobe with fascinated eyes.  She knew that Andreo was tunnelling it, and one day a tiny hole proclaimed that his work was accomplished.  But how to get the note?  The old women’s eyes were very sharp when the girls were in front of the gratings.  Then the civilizing development of Christianity upon the heathen intellect triumphantly asserted itself.  Pilar, too, conceived a brilliant scheme.  That night the padre, who encouraged any evidence of industry, no matter how eccentric, gave her a little garden of her own—­a patch where she could raise sweet peas and Castilian roses.

“That is well, that is well, my Nausicaa,” he said, stroking her smoky braids.  “Go cut the slips and plant them where thou wilt.  I will send thee a package of sweet pea seeds.”

Pilar spent every spare hour bending over her “patch”; and the hole, at first no bigger than a pin’s point, was larger at each setting of the sun behind the mountain.  The old women, scolding on the corridor, called to her not to forget vespers.

On the third evening, kneeling on the damp ground, she drew from the little tunnel in the adobe a thin slip of wood covered with the labour of sleepless nights.  She hid it in her smock—­that first of California’s love-letters—­then ran with shaking knees and prostrated herself before the altar.  That night the moon streamed through her grating, and she deciphered the fact that Andreo had loosened eight adobes above her garden, and would await her every midnight.

Pilar sat up in bed and glanced about the room with terrified delight.  It took her but a moment to decide the question; love had kept her awake too many nights.  The neophytes were asleep; as they turned now and again, their narrow beds of hide, suspended from the ceiling, swung too gently to awaken them.  The old women snored loudly.  Pilar slipped from her bed and looked through the grating.  Andreo was there, the dignity and repose of primeval man in his bearing.  She waved her hand and pointed downward to the wall; then, throwing on the long coarse gray smock that was her only garment, crept from the room and down the stair.  The door was protected against hostile tribes by a heavy iron bar, but Pilar’s small hands were hard and strong, and in a moment she stood over the adobes which had crushed her roses and sweet peas.

As she crawled through the opening, Andreo took her hand bashfully, for they never had spoken.  “Come,” he said; “we must be far away before dawn.”

They stole past the long mission, crossing themselves as they glanced askance at the ghostly row of pillars; past the guard-house, where the sentries slept at their post; past the rancheria; then, springing upon a waiting mustang, dashed down the valley.  Pilar had never been on a horse before, and she clung in terror to Andreo, who bestrode the unsaddled beast as easily as a cloud rides the wind.  His arm held her closely, fear vanished, and she enjoyed the novel sensation.  Glancing over Andreo’s shoulder she watched the mass of brown and white buildings, the winding river, fade into the mountain.  Then they began to ascend an almost perpendicular steep.  The horse followed a narrow trail; the crowding trees and shrubs clutched the blankets and smocks of the riders; after a time trail and scene grew white:  the snow lay on the heights.

“Where do we go?” she asked.

“To Zaca Lake, on the very top of the mountain, miles above us.  No one has ever been there but myself.  Often I have shot deer and birds beside it.  They never will find us there.”

The red sun rose over the mountains of the east.  The crystal moon sank in the west.  Andreo sprang from the weary mustang and carried Pilar to the lake.

A sheet of water, round as a whirlpool but calm and silver, lay amidst the sweeping willows and pine-forested peaks.  The snow glittered beneath the trees, but a canoe was on the lake, a hut on the marge.