Chapter 14

Father Salvierderra! The name smote the Senora like a spear-thrust, There could be no stronger evidence of the abnormal excitement under which she had been laboring for the last twenty-four hours, than the fact that she had not once, during all this time, thought to ask herself what Father Salvierderra would say, or might command, in this crisis. Her religion and the long habit of its outward bonds had alike gone from her in her sudden wrath against Ramona. It was with a real terror that she became conscious of this.

“Father Salvierderra?” she stammered; “he has nothing to do with it.”

But Ramona saw the change in the Senora's face, at the word, and followed up her advantage. “Father Salvierderra has to do with everything,” she said boldly. “He knows Alessandro, He will not forbid me to marry him, and if he did--” Ramona stopped. She also was smitten with a sudden terror at the vista opening before her,--of a disobedience to Father Salvierderra.

“And if he did,” repeated the Senora, eyeing Ramona keenly, “would you disobey him?”

“Yes,” said Ramona.

“I will tell Father Salvierderra what you say,” retorted the Senora, sarcastically, “that he may spare himself the humiliation of laying any commands on you, to be thus disobeyed.”

Ramona's lip quivered, and her eyes filled with the tears which no other of the Senora's taunts had been strong enough to bring. Dearly she loved the old monk; had loved him since her earliest recollection. His displeasure would be far more dreadful to her than the Senora's. His would give her grief; the Senora's, at utmost, only terror.

Clasping her hands, she said, “Oh, Senora, have mercy! Do not say that to the Father!”

“It is my duty to tell the Father everything that happens in my family,” answered the Senora, chillingly. “He will agree with me, that if you persist in this disobedience you will deserve the severest punishment. I shall tell him all;” and she began putting the trays back in the box.

“You will not tell him as it really is, Senora,” persisted Ramona. “I will tell him myself.”

“You shall not see him! I will take care of that!” cried the Senora, so vindictively that Ramona shuddered.

“I will give you one more chance,” said the Senora, pausing in the act of folding up one of the damask gowns. “Will you obey me? Will you promise to have nothing more to do with this Indian?”

“Never, Senora,” replied Ramona; “never!”

“Then the consequences be on your own head,” cried the Senora. “Go to your room! And, hark! I forbid you to speak of all this to Senor Felipe. Do you hear?”

Ramona bowed her head. “I hear,” she said; and gliding out of the room, closed the door behind her, and instead of going to her room, sped like a hunted creature down the veranda steps, across the garden, calling in a low tone, “Felipe! Felipe! Where are you, Felipe?”

XII

THE little sheepfold, or corral, was beyond the artichoke-patch, on that southern slope whose sunshine had proved so disastrous a temptation to Margarita in the matter of drying the altar-cloth. It was almost like a terrace, this long slope; and the sheepfold, being near the bottom, was wholly out of sight of the house. This was the reason Felipe had selected it as the safest spot for his talk with Alessandro.

When Ramona reached the end of the trellised walk in the garden, she halted and looked to the right and left. No one was in sight. As she entered the Senora's room an hour before, she had caught a glimpse of some one, she felt almost positive it was Felipe, turning off in the path to the left, leading down to the sheepfold. She stood irresolute for a moment, gazing earnestly down this path. “If the saints would only tell me where he is!” she said aloud. She trembled as she stood there, fearing each second to hear the Senora's voice calling her. But fortune was favoring Ramona, for once; even as the words passed her lips, she saw Felipe coming slowly up the bank. She flew to meet him. “Oh, Felipe, Felipe!” she began.

“Yes, dear, I know it all,” interrupted Felipe; “Alessandro has told me.”

“She forbade me to speak to you, Felipe,” said Ramona, “but I could not bear it. What are we to do? Where is Alessandro?”

“My mother forbade you to speak to me!” cried Felipe, in a tone of terror. “Oh, Ramona, why did you disobey her? If she sees us talking, she will be even more displeased. Fly back to your room. Leave it all to me. I will do all that I can.”

“But, Felipe,” began Ramona, wringing her hands in distress.

“I know! I know!” said Felipe; “but you must not make my mother any more angry. I don't know what she will do till I talk with her. Do go back to your room! Did she not tell you to stay there?”

“Yes,” sobbed Ramona, “but I cannot. Oh, Felipe, I am so afraid! Do help us! Do you think you can? You won't let her shut me up in the convent, will you, Felipe? Where is Alessandro? Why can't I go away with him this minute? Where is he? Dear Felipe, let me go now.”

Felipe's face was horror-stricken. “Shut you in the convent!” he gasped. “Did she say that? Ramona, dear, fly back to your room. Let me talk to her. Fly, I implore you. I can't do anything for you if she sees me talking with you now;” and he turned away, and walked swiftly down the terrace.

Ramona felt as if she were indeed alone in the world. How could she go back into that house! Slowly she walked up the garden-path again, meditating a hundred wild plans of escape. Where, where was Alessandro? Why did he not appear for her rescue? Her heart failed her; and when she entered her room, she sank on the floor in a paroxysm of hopeless weeping. If she had known that Alessandro was already a good half-hour's journey on his way to Temecula, galloping farther and farther away from her each moment, she would have despaired indeed.

This was what Felipe, after hearing the whole story, had counselled him to do. Alessandro had given him so vivid a description of the Senora's face and tone, when she had ordered him out of her sight, that Felipe was alarmed. He had never seen his mother angry like that. He could not conceive why her wrath should have been so severe. The longer he talked with Alessandro, the more he felt that it would be wiser for him to be out of sight till the first force of her anger had been spent. “I will say that I sent you,” said Felipe, “so she cannot feel that you have committed any offence in going. Come back in four days, and by that time it will be all settled what you shall do.”

It went hard with Alessandro to go without seeing Ramona; but it did not need Felipe's exclamation of surprise, to convince him that it would be foolhardy to attempt it. His own judgment had told him that it would be out of the question.

“But you will tell her all, Senor Felipe? You will tell her that it is for her sake I go?” the poor fellow said piteously, gazing into Felipe's eyes as if he would read his inmost soul.

“I will, indeed, Alessandro; I will,” replied Felipe; and he held his hand out to Alessandro, as to a friend and equal. “You may trust me to do all I can do for Ramona and for you.”

“God bless you, Senor Felipe,” answered Alessandro, gravely, a slight trembling of his voice alone showing how deeply he was moved.

“He's a noble fellow,” said Felipe to himself, as he watched Alessandro leap on his horse, which had been tethered near the corral all night,--“a noble fellow! There isn't a man among all my friends who would have been manlier or franker than he has been in this whole business. I don't in the least wonder that Ramona loves him. He's a noble fellow! But what is to be done! What is to be done!”

Felipe was sorely perplexed. No sharp crisis of disagreement had ever arisen between him and his mother, but he felt that one was coming now. He was unaware of the extent of his influence over her. He doubted whether he could move her very far. The threat of shutting Ramona up in the convent terrified him more than he liked to admit to himself. Had she power to do that? Felipe did not know. She must believe that she had, or she would not have made the threat. Felipe's whole soul revolted at the cruel injustice of the idea.

“As if it were a sin for the poor girl to love Alessandro!” he said. “I'd help her to run away with him, if worse comes to worst. What can make my mother feel so!” And Felipe paced back and forth till the sun was high, and the sharp glare and heat reminded him that he must seek shelter; then he threw himself down under the willows. He dreaded to go into the house. His instinctive shrinking from the disagreeable, his disposition to put off till another time, held him back, hour by hour. The longer he thought the situation over, the less he knew how to broach the subject to his mother; the more uncertain he felt whether it would be wise for him to broach it at all. Suddenly he heard his name called. It was Margarita, who had been sent to call him to dinner. “Good heavens! dinner already!” he cried, springing to his feet.

“Yes, Senor,” replied Margarita, eyeing him observantly. She had seen him talking with Alessandro, had seen Alessandro galloping away down the river road. She had also gathered much from the Senora's look, and Ramona's, as they passed the dining-room door together soon after breakfast. Margarita could have given a tolerably connected account of all that had happened within the last twenty-four hours to the chief actors in this tragedy which had so suddenly begun in the Moreno household. Not supposed to know anything, she yet knew nearly all; and her every pulse was beating high with excited conjecture and wonder as to what would come next.

Dinner was a silent and constrained meal,--Ramona absent, the fiction of her illness still kept up; Felipe embarrassed, and unlike himself; the Senora silent, full of angry perplexity. At her first glance in Felipe's face, she thought to herself, “Ramona has spoken to him. When and how did she do it?” For it had been only a few moments after Ramona had left her presence, that she herself had followed, and, seeing the girl in her own room, had locked the door as before, and had spent the rest of the morning on the veranda within hands' reach of Ramona's window. How, when, and where had she contrived to communicate with Felipe? The longer the Senora studied over this, the angrier and more baffled she felt; to be outwitted was even worse to her than to be disobeyed. Under her very eyes, as it were, something evidently had happened, not only against her will, but which she could not explain. Her anger even rippled out towards Felipe, and was fed by the recollection of Ramona's unwise retort, “Felipe would not let you!” What had Felipe done or said to make the girl so sure that he would be on her side and Alessandro's? Was it come to this, that she, the Senora Moreno, was to be defied in her own house by children and servants!

It was with a tone of severe displeasure that she said to Felipe, as she rose from the dinner-table, “My son, I would like to have some conversation with you in my room, if you are at leisure.”

“Certainly, mother,” said Felipe, a load rolling off his mind at her having thus taken the initiative, for which he lacked courage; and walking swiftly towards her, he attempted to put his arm around her waist, as it was his affectionate habit frequently to do. She repulsed him gently, but bethinking herself, passed her hand through his arm, and leaning on it heavily as she walked, said: “This is the most fitting way, my son. I must lean more and more heavily on you each year now. Age is telling on me fast. Do you not find me greatly changed, Felipe, in the last year?”

“No, madre mia,” replied Felipe, “indeed I do not. I see not that you have changed in the last ten years.” And he was honest in this. His eyes did not note the changes so clear to others, and for the best of reasons. The face he saw was one no one else ever beheld; it was kindled by emotion, transfigured by love, whenever it was turned towards him.

The Senora sighed deeply as she answered: “That must be because you so love me, Felipe. I myself see the changes even day by day. Troubles tell on me as they did not when I was younger. Even within the last twenty-four hours I seem to myself to have aged frightfully;” and she looked keenly at Felipe as she seated herself in the arm-chair where poor Ramona had swooned a few hours before. Felipe remained standing before her, gazing, with a tender expression, upon her features, but saying nothing.

“I see that Ramona has told you all!” she continued, her voice hardening as she spoke. What a fortunate wording of her sentence!

“No, mother; it was not Ramona, it was Alessandro, who told me this morning, early,” Felipe answered hastily, hurrying on, to draw the conversation as far away from Ramona as possible. “He came and spoke to me last night after I was in bed; but I told him to wait till morning, and then I would hear all he had to say.”

“Ah!” said the Senora, relieved. Then, as Felipe remained silent, she asked, “And what did he say?”

“He told me all that had happened.”

“All!” said the Senora, sneeringly. “Do you suppose that he told you all?”

“He said that you had bidden him begone out of your sight,” said Felipe, “and that he supposed he must go. So I told him to go at once. I thought you would prefer not to see him again.”

“Ah!” said the Senora again, startled, gratified that Felipe had so promptly seconded her action, but sorry that Alessandro had gone. “Ah, I did not know whether you would think it best to discharge him at once or not; I told him he must answer to you. I did not know but you might devise some measures by which he could be retained on the estate.”

Felipe stared. Could he believe his ears? This did not sound like the relentless displeasure he had expected. Could Ramona have been dreaming? In his astonishment, he did not weigh his mother's words carefully; he did not carry his conjecture far enough; he did not stop to make sure that retaining Alessandro on the estate might not of necessity bode any good to Ramona; but with his usual impetuous ardor, sanguine, at the first glimpse of hope, that all was well, he exclaimed joyfully, “Ah, dear mother, if that could only be done, all would be well;” and, never noting the expression of his mother's face, nor pausing to take breath, he poured out all he thought and felt on the subject.

“That is just what I have been hoping for ever since I saw that he and Ramona were growing so fond of each other. He is a splendid fellow, and the best hand we have ever had on the place. All the men like him; he would make a capital overseer; and if we put him in charge of the whole estate, there would not be any objection to his marrying Ramona. That would give them a good living here with us.”

“Enough!” cried the Senora, in a voice which fell on Felipe's ears like a voice from some other world,--so hollow, so strange. He stopped speaking, and uttered an ejaculation of amazement. At the first words he had uttered, the Senora had fixed her eyes on the floor,--a habit of hers when she wished to listen with close attention. Lifting her eyes now, fixing them full on Felipe, she regarded him with a look which not all his filial reverence could bear without resentment. It was nearly as scornful as that with which she had regarded Ramona. Felipe colored.

“Why do you look at me like that, mother?” he exclaimed. “What have I done?”

The Senora waved her hand imperiously. “Enough!” she reiterated. “Do not say any more. I wish to think for a few moments;” and she fixed her eyes on the floor again.

Felipe studied her countenance. A more nearly rebellious feeling than he had supposed himself capable of slowly arose in his heart. Now he for the first time perceived what terror his mother must inspire in a girl like Ramona.

“Poor little one!” he thought. “If my mother looked at her as she did at me just now, I wonder she did not die.”

A great storm was going on in the Senora's bosom. Wrath against Ramona was uppermost in it. In addition to all else, the girl had now been the cause, or at least the occasion, of Felipe's having, for the first time in his whole life, angered her beyond her control.

“As if I had not suffered enough by reason of that creature,” she thought bitterly to herself, “without her coming between me and Felipe!”

But nothing could long come between the Senora and Felipe. Like a fresh lava-stream flowing down close on the track of its predecessor, came the rush of the mother's passionate love for her son close on the passionate anger at his words.

When she lifted her eyes they were full of tears, which it smote Felipe to see. As she gazed at him, they rolled down her cheeks, and she said in trembling tones: “Forgive me, my child; I had not thought anything could make me thus angry with you. That shameless creature is costing us too dear. She must leave the house.”

Felipe's heart gave a bound; Ramona had not been mistaken, then. A bitter shame seized him at his mother's cruelty. But her tears made him tender; and it was in a gentle, even pleading voice that he replied: “I do not see, mother, why you call Ramona shameless. There is nothing wrong in her loving Alessandro.”

“I found her in his arms!” exclaimed the Senora.

“I know,” said Felipe; “Alessandro told me that he had just at that instant told her he loved her, and she had said she loved him, and would marry him, just as you came up.”

“Humph!” retorted the Senora; “do you think that Indian would have dared to speak a word of love to the Senorita Ramona Ortegna, if she had not conducted herself shamelessly? I wonder that he concerned himself to speak about marriage to her at all.”

“Oh, mother! mother!” was all that Felipe could say to this. He was aghast. He saw now, in a flash, the whole picture as it lay in his mother's mind, and his heart sank within him. “Mother!” he repeated, in a tone which spoke volumes.

“Ay,” she continued, “that is what I say. I see no reason why he hesitated to take her, as he would take any Indian squaw, with small ceremony of marrying.”

“Alessandro would not take any woman that way any quicker than I would, mother,” said Felipe courageously; “you do him injustice.” He longed to add, “And Ramona too,” but he feared to make bad matters worse by pleading for her at present.

“No, I do not,” said the Senora; “I do Alessandro full justice. I think very few men would have behaved as well as he has under the same temptation. I do not hold him in the least responsible for all that has happened. It is all Ramona's fault.”

Felipe's patience gave way. He had not known, till now, how very closely this pure and gentle girl, whom he had loved as a sister in his boyhood, and had come near loving as a lover in his manhood, had twined herself around his heart. He could not remain silent another moment, and hear her thus wickedly accused.

“Mother!” he exclaimed, in a tone which made the Senora look up at him in sudden astonishment. “Mother, I cannot help it if I make you very angry; I must speak; I can't bear to hear you say such things of Ramona. I have seen for a long time that Alessandro loved the very ground under her feet; and Ramona would not have been a woman if she had not seen it too! She has seen it, and has felt it, and has come to love him with all her soul, just as I hope some woman will love me one of these days. If I am ever loved as well as she loves Alessandro, I shall be lucky. I think they ought to be married; and I think we ought to take Alessandro on to the estate, so that they can live here. I don't see anything disgraceful in it, nor anything wrong, nor anything but what was perfectly natural. You know, mother, it isn't as if Ramona really belonged to our family; you know she is half Indian.” A scornful ejaculation from his mother interrupted him here; but Felipe hurried on, partly because he was borne out of himself at last by impetuous feeling, partly that he dreaded to stop, because if he did, his mother would speak; and already he felt a terror of what her next words might be. “I have often thought about Ramona's future, mother. You know a great many men would not want to marry her, just because she is half Indian. You, yourself, would never have given your consent to my marrying her, if I had wanted to.” Again an exclamation from the Senora, this time more of horror than of scorn. But Felipe pressed on. “No, of course you would not, I always knew that; except for that, I might have loved her myself, for a sweeter girl never drew breath in this God's earth.” Felipe was reckless now; having entered on this war, he would wage it with every weapon that lay within his reach; if one did not tell, another might. “You have never loved her. I don't know that you have ever even liked her; I don't think you have. I know, as a little boy, I always used to see how much kinder you were to me than to her, and I never could understand it. And you are unjust to her now. I've been watching her all summer; I've seen her and Alessandro together continually. You know yourself, mother, he has been with us on the veranda, day after day, just as if he were one of the family. I've watched them by the hour, when I lay there so sick; I thought you must have seen it too. I don't believe Alessandro has ever looked or said or done a thing I wouldn't have done in his place; and I don't believe Ramona has ever looked, said, or done a thing I would not be willing to have my own sister do!” Here Felipe paused. He had made his charge; like a young impetuous general, massing all his forces at the onset; he had no reserves. It is not the way to take Gibraltars.

When he paused, literally breathless, he had spoken so fast,--and even yet Felipe was not quite strong, so sadly had the fever undermined his constitution,--the Senora looked at him interrogatively, and said in a now composed tone: “You do not believe that Ramona has done anything that you would not be willing to have your own sister do? Would you be willing that your own sister should marry Alessandro?”

Clever Senora Moreno! During the few moments that Felipe had been speaking, she had perceived certain things which it would be beyond her power to do; certain others that it would be impolitic to try to do. Nothing could possibly compensate her for antagonizing Felipe. Nothing could so deeply wound her, as to have him in a resentful mood towards her; or so weaken her real control of him, as to have him feel that she arbitrarily overruled his preference or his purpose. In presence of her imperious will, even her wrath capitulated and surrendered. There would be no hot words between her and her son. He should believe that he determined the policy of the Moreno house, even in this desperate crisis.

Felipe did not answer. A better thrust was never seen on any field than the Senora's question. She repeated it, still more deliberately, in her wonted gentle voice. The Senora was herself again, as she had not been for a moment since she came upon Alessandro and Ramona at the brook. How just and reasonable the question sounded, as she repeated it slowly, with an expression in her eyes, of poising and weighing matters. “Would you be willing that your own sister should marry Alessandro?”

Felipe was embarrassed. He saw whither he was being led. He could give but one answer to this question. “No, mother,” he said, “I should not; but--”

“Never mind buts,” interrupted his mother; “we have not got to those yet;” and she smiled on Felipe,--an affectionate smile, but it somehow gave him a feeling of dread. “Of course I knew you could make but one answer to my question. If you had a sister, you would rather see her dead than married to any one of these Indians.”

Felipe opened his lips eagerly, to speak. “Not so,” he said.