The Road to Monterey/Chapter 5
DON ROBERTO, the magistrate's son, had been two years in Mexico City wearing off his rusticity, taking on the polish of a gentleman. On his arrival home the widespread connections of Don Abrahan's house became apparent to the Yankee sailor.
Festivities in celebration of the heir's return extended over a period of two weeks, during which time the friends and relatives of the family arrived from great distances, even by ship from Monterey. Don Abrahan's two married daughters came from the region of Capistrano; there was laughter of children under the grave encinas.
Daughters were not accounted very highly, in the houses of California gentry in those times, until married safely and set about the business of increasing the ranks of the dons. Prior to that felicitous event they were held to be rather a liability than an asset. These two ladies, on account of their prolific contribution to the cause of gentility in this respect, were highly esteemed by Don Abrahan. Both were married to men of substance. Their arrival in the latest model of Yankee coaches was equal to a royal visitation, with such ceremony of outriding to meet them, such trooping of horsemen on matters which seemed to begin in nothing and end in dust.
Musicians were quartered in the mansion for the period of the festivities; there was the sound of harp and violin far into the night. Carcasses of beeves were spread on spits over deep channels of coals; white bread, viands of the mighty of that land, were set out each evening when the laborers returned from the fields. It was a season of generosity for those under the hand of Don Abrahan, transcending any event of the kind within the recollection of the oldest peon.
On the last day of this celebration Don Abrahan feasted his guests on cabeza de toro, which is to say bull's head, a dish not unknown to Californians who are descendants of the dons of that period, even in this unromantic day. On this climax of the celebration of Don Roberto's return, four bulls' heads were served, a magnificence of entertainment unequaled, attesting to the love Don Abrahan bore for his only son.
The manner of preparing cabeza de toro grew out of expediency in the beginning, perhaps; in the end it had become a thing almost reverential, equal to a sacrificial rite. The head was taken, just as separated from the body, horns, hair, ears, eyes, and all, and singed as carefully as might be over a blaze of light brushwood. No water ever touched the head in process of preparation. Water would have been a profanation of ancient customs; perhaps one drop would have spoiled the dish.
When the head was duly singed of such hair as burned readily, the mouth and nostrils were crammed with seasoning that gladdened the palate of the don, in such manner as garlic, strong pepper-pods, spices of the orient, and sage. Thus charged, the dainty thing was put into a large stone oven heaped over with earth, in which a wood fire had burned a long time, heating it to the temperature required.
A stone was set to close this oven, earth was heaped around it to seal it against the loss of one little savory whiff of vapor, and the cabeza was left to cook without the further interference of man. Hours afterwards the oven was unsealed, the sweet roast was withdrawn, cooked to such tenderness that the flesh shredded from the bones. Ah! that was a dish for a gentleman of so barbaric magnificence as the Spanish don. Cabeza de toro! There is romance in the name.
Henderson bore a curious part in these festivities. His good sense had shown him, on the night of his talk with Don Felipe, that it would be impossible to escape from Don Abrahan's tyranny by running away. Simon had been delegated to make this plainer to him than the mayordomo's reasoning. The sailor had done well to pretend that gratitude rose in him and bound his feet in the service of the great patron. Don Felipe had spoken his good word, as he promised; Henderson was restored in Don Abrahan's patriarchal regard, at least to all outward appearances.
That this show of gentle patronage was only a form, Henderson was certain, even before the son of the family returned from Mexico. Don Abrahan did not like Americans. He held them in contempt as a lower order of humanity, an aggressive, rough-handed order, to be certain. Once Henderson had heard Don Abrahan say, the patron not being aware of his ward's progress in the Spanish tongue, that Americans were heavy-stamping ruffians who must be excluded from that pastoral land.
Don Roberto had taken a sort of humorous fancy to the American, as toward some strange, or perhaps fantastic, creature from a distant land. Almost immediately on his arrival he selected Henderson as his personal attendant, elevating him, if advancement this peculiar preferment could be called, from a life of drudgery and long hours in the storehouse and fields to one of comparative luxury and ease.
Henderson was fitted out with a wardrobe that would have gladdened many of his late sailing mates, clothing of no less distinction than off-cast articles of Don Roberto's own. The tailor that Don Roberto kept as part of his personal entourage adjusted these garments to Henderson's body, little alteration being necessary, the young men being almost of exact height and general build. Velvet and silk garments: these were, jackets braided in silver and gilt, pantaloons of gray, green, black, and fawn velvet, large at the bottom to cover the foot in the stirrup, strapped beneath the instep to prevent them crawling up the caballero's leg when he rode.
The duty of personal attendant on Don Roberto was not heavy, outside the irksome waiting with the horses while he played the bear beneath some lady's window, or sat with another in company with her mother or duenna, or danced the night out on nimble, leaping, tireless legs. Dressed in his fine garments, Henderson made a handsome figure, a servant, indeed, who drew and held longer the glances of many a fair one met upon the road than the master who rode two rods ahead.
Always behind the master the man rode, a distance between them so great there could be no mistaking them for friends and comrades. This distance, in fact, was the one distinguishing mark of their relation in the case of Don Roberto and his man, as has been the case between master and man in other lands before and since that day.
During the two weeks of the festivities Don Roberto had ridden far and near between his home and the ranches of his neighbors, paying' his respects to old and young, smirking and bowing, easing himself of the vacuous insincerities which smother the little of genuineness in the polite speech of the Mexican hijo de familia. Henderson's duty was to dismount in the courtyard or at the gate where his master visited, receive Don Roberto's reins as he threw them imperiously, without so much as a glance in his varlet's direction. There he must stand, let it be minutes or hours, hot sun of noonday or chill wind of midnight, until Don Roberto appeared.
Don Roberto did not speak English. He let it be known that the sound of it was distasteful to him, a discordant grinding of coarse consonants not fit for either the ear of God or man. Spanish was the one language worthy the ear of a caballero; but since Henderson made such lame going at it, they would speak French between them, seeing that the yanqui had been given some of the advantages of gentlemen of more enlightened lands to the extent of tutelage in that next most godly tongue.
The fact that Henderson would have been a gentleman in his own land, counted by his station in society, no other qualification being necessary in Don Roberto's world, gave the young Mexican added pleasure in his attendant. That pleasure came from his power to abase one whom he knew, in the core of such manhood and courage as nature had given him, to be a better man than himself.
Manhood seemed scarcely to have hardened upon Don Roberto yet, although he was a year or two older than Henderson. There was the softness of boyishness in his face, the petulance of adolescence in his lips. Only his eyes seemed mature. These were dark and heavy-lidded, languorously oriental, as his father's were. When he rode, or sat alone in a meditative way that seemed his inheritance, he held his lids half shut; yellowish-tinted lids, thick, with a velvet softness in their appearance, like the petals of some rank, gross rose. When he talked, especially with women, his eyes were more expressive than his tongue. They dilated and glowed, contracted and glistened; seemed to retreat and to leap, to laugh and draw near, lending a charm of marvelous animation to his face.
The closing day of Don Abrahan's celebration had come in a happy climax of cabeza de toro, as has been said. At midday the ovens had been opened, the savory bulls' heads withdrawn and served on long tables under the oak trees. The custom of this feast was immutable in this observance. All laws of tradition would have been transgressed in offering the cabeza de toro under a roof.
The guests, numbering more than a hundred, counting old and young, gathered at these tables with appetites which seemed to Henderson never satisfied, in spite of the long season of feasting that had gone before, gorging themselves to the very eyes. Large-waisted mamas became dull as sated toads after this last and greatest stuffing event. On the long veranda, supported by flying arches like a cloister of Franciscan friars, they dozed in arm-chairs, their ordinarily sharp vigil over their daughters relaxed.
But their generally tall and lank husbands, vinous of blood, worn down to sinew and hard muscle by continual life in the saddle, were as wide awake as customarily. They sat at card games under the trees, or talked in close and confidential groups. That day many a match was arranged for sons and daughters among the heads of illustrious families in that land.
There were mamas sufficient, not under the lethargy of much bull's head and wine, to keep decorum according to the standards of Spanish tradition among the young men and women. These young ones were dancing in Don Abrahan's great, cool hall. Henderson's not altogether enviable office during this diversion was to stand by holding his young master's cape, hat and cigarettes. No other caballero had a valet to attend him in such close relation as Roberto. This distinction alone would have been one affording great pleasure to the vain, shallow young man. The fact that Henderson was a foreigner, of a race at once proud and barbarous, added much to the pride and happiness that Don Roberto gathered from his servile estate.
It was the custom of the young gallants, on the completion of a dance, to conduct their partners at once back to the jealous custody of mamas, aunts, or other duennas who sat severely along the wall. There was no strolling off together, even in the sunlight of day. A girl who would have ventured out of her duenna's eyes in company with a man, would have lost her good name forever. Between dances the young men went out to smoke brief, tiny cigarettes, walking up and down the deep porticoes in the eyes of the palpitating beauties whom they lately had relinquished from their arms in the furious dance.
Henderson's duty was to proceed with respectful dignity, as became a gentleman reduced from his own estate attendant on one whose authority and magnificence he never could hope to equal, throw the bright satin cape around Don Roberto's shoulders, present his flat Spanish hat, proffer his cigarettes with downcast eyes. All this done, according to previous instructions, he took his stand at the door to relieve the young caballero of his trappings when he came again to join the dance.
Alert, muscular, his head held high, a glimmer of something that was nearer amusement than contempt in his lively blue eyes, Henderson drew many a glance, many a wondering, warm sympathetic look from the fair ones who danced that afternoon across Don Abrahan's polished floor. There was no man in the company as handsome in the manly strength that the female eye so quickly and surely appraises.
Don Roberto had ordered Henderson's long, unruly hair shorn short. His shapely head was revealed to added advantage by this sacrifice, the short hair glistening like the scales of a new-caught perch when he crossed the slant sunbeams falling through the windows upon the great hall floor. The barber had spared him a foretop which betrayed its crinkled unruliness under the pomade that smoothed it, to the secret admiration of many a pair of young eyes. For it was known that this was a gentleman, an inferior one, certainly, who had fallen through pride and misfortune to this low estate.
A lagging spirit came over the dancers as dusk began to settle on the hills. The overfed mamas began to stir out of their heaviness to seek more cabeza de toro, now cold on the lantern-lit tables, but delicious to the palate when spread with thick sauce of chili peppers and tomato. The young ones, with appetite that needed no sauce after their hours of dancing, attended them, followed by their languishing cavaliers.
Don Roberto carried a few close friends off to the stable to see a new horse about which he had been making arrogant boasts all day. He graciously permitted Henderson a spell of relief to regale himself at the servants' end of the long table, where there was bull's body in abundance, but not a morsel of the noble head.
Henderson lacked the peculiar, not to say amazing, capacity for eating enjoyed by these happy people, who reminded him not so much of so many coyotes as sacks of grain, which a man only had to shake down to get a little more into, even when it seemed impossible to add another kernel. He made his way along the table, the humor of his singular situation somewhat dulled.
It was becoming a serious business, this standing about in spectacular prominence waiting the nod of Roberto. He felt that he could not endure much more of it. Come what might, he was in the spirit for taking a flying chance at liberty, making his way to Monterey, even San Francisco, and finding a ship that would carry him home.
Don Felipe was among the guests, the equal of any of them, it appeared. His black pepperings of whiskered barnacles were more apparent than ordinarily, groomed up as he was in his finery. No amount of shaving could reduce their prominence. It seemed as if they must be exceptionally fertile spots in which his beard took prolific root, as the holly and sage thrived in little communities of green luxuriance where the soil was deep on the hills.
Don Felipe turned his back as Henderson drew near. Whatever had passed between them once on the level of man to man could not be renewed in that company, his action plainly said. Henderson was moved by a reckless desire to approach the mayordomo with familiar address, but put the temptation of humiliating the little man, who was not so bad in his way as he might have been, behind him, and made his way to the servants' end of the table.
There were many among his late companions in the fields who now looked on Henderson as a strong reflection of Don Roberto, such being the virtue of even the cast-off garments of the great. These were deferential to a degree little short of embarrassing as Henderson now came among them. They made way for him, offered him wine, suggesting choice cuts of meat from the fire-blackened hunks which weighted down the bare oak planks.
Yet there were others who, envying his preferment after the manner of the mean in all society, held high heads and passed disparaging remarks. Simon was among these. He stood by the table, legs spread, a cup of wine to his mouth. He broke off his drinking as Henderson passed, wiped his great mustache with the back of his hand, turning eyes red with his long carousal to look after the Yankee in contempt.
"It is the vapor of Don Roberto's body that blows past," he said, with immeasurable disdain.
Henderson made a pretense of taking a bite and a sup among the older men who were neither afraid nor ashamed of him, who had lived too long in drudgery to envy with bitterness one who seemed rising above it. Then he left them, with as little notice as possible, withdrawing to have a few minutes to himself.
Under the slant of the hill, near the gate letting in from the harbor road where the olives grew, there was a bench built around the bole of an ancient live-oak, whose limbs extended far, whose foliage made dusk of noonday, darkness of moonlight. There, in its restful shadow, withdrawn from the noise of the closing celebration, Henderson sat down to ponder his situation once more.
It was coming to the point when he must clear himself of the contempt of these provincial people by asserting his manhood in no uncertain terms. When Don Felipe had spoken of the impossibility of escape from that country by one under peonage, Henderson had not been entirely convinced. True, the mayordomo's picture of the thousand hands that would reach out to restore a man to his master, for the reward impelling the deed; the more direct and personal emphasis that Simon had added in his own picturesque manner; the charge of ingratitude laid to him by Don Abrahan himself—all this had worked to the deferment of Henderson's intention. But to deferment only, not the abandonment for a moment. There was a means of escape for a man of the right temper. The time was approaching near when he intended to prove this in the face of their hostility and contempt of the Yankee breed.
How did his account with Don Abrahan and his petulant, overbearing, shallow son stand by now? he wondered. Certainly, not a dollar less than at the beginning. There was no telling what they had charged up against him for this abandoned finery, but if the sum stood in proportion te the jeans and brogans, it would be sufficient to bind him a peon all the rest of his life.
He had been on Don Abrahan's ranch almost five months now. Putting his services at twenty dollars a month—surely he was worth as much as Simon—the original debt, outrageous as it was, had been paid long since. As for gratitude, that was a fabrication of his own. There could be no debt of gratitude to a man who had acted as Don Abrahan had that day at the harbor, planning in his deliberate craftiness to profit by the reward for the sailor's return or, failing in that, to add another slave to his plantation. There was nothing owing Don Abrahan on that score.
Henderson's conception of the inland geography of that country was vague. He only knew that it was a land of weary distances, guarded well, as Don Felipe had said, by mountains and deserts on the east, the sea on the west. Baja California, at the south, was a land of torment, he had been told by sailors who had been cast away on its shores. To the north there were leagues of dark forest, he knew from sighting them from the ship. Of the social and political conditions he knew no more than a sailor had opportunity of learning, which was very limited, indeed. This slight knowledge he had not been given any opportunity to enlarge during his enforced service with Don Abrahan. He had not talked with any of the Americans in the pueblo Los Angeles on his visits there in Don Roberto's company. A child of today knows more of California than Gabriel Henderson, graduate of a venerable New England university, knew in that summer time of the year 1846.
There had been talk of war breaking out between the United States and Mexico long before Henderson deserted his ship. News came so slowly, over such great distances to that sequestered land, that war might already have been declared, might even then be going forward, in which case he would be in double peril when his day came to leave Don Abrahan's ranch. Don Felipe would know; it would be worth while to play the sycophant to Don Felipe to find out.
The moon stood full at the head of San Gabriel valley; the leaves of the olives turned and flashed in its strong beam like little fish in the sunlit sea. But beneath the gray old oak all was somber and unseen. It was as if it held its hand over this fugitive from a distant land, offering him the temptation of security to slip away from his bondage into the vast white freedom of the sleeping plain.
Henderson stood, this thought making his heart go faster, his breath quickened in a desire that was more than half a sudden resolution. A quick passage of the olive lane to the turn of the road, where the moon would reveal him for a moment as he crossed; a scramble up the shoulder of the hill, where the path worn by Liseta's goats was white like a scar; over that first range but a little way, into the valley that he had seen from the summit. From there, picking his way between hiding and foraging to keep himself alive, on to Monterey.
How far to the north the bay and town of Monterey lay he did not know. Computing by the sailing time of the ship, it must be nearly five hundred miles. It would take a hunted man weeks to make the journey. It was an appalling obstacle between him and the bare hope, the gambling chance, of freedom.
There were many Americans in and around Monterey. Chance it that war had not begun, there was some sort of United States agent, consul, or what he might be, in the place; Henderson had seen his flag flying from a tall pole before his place. The road to freedom from this slavery which would have no end but of his own making, lay toward Monterey. A man might
"Why are you masquerading here? Who are you?"
Henderson started; his muscles jumped. It was a woman's voice, soft and low; the words were English without a taint of foreign accent. But there was nobody in sight as he turned quickly to encounter the speaker, nobody behind the thick trunk of the tree.
It was incredible that anybody could have come, spoken and vanished in a breath, neither the sound of the approach nor the retreat heard by him. But there was nobody under the tree. His eyes, accustomed to the gloom of the deep shadow, would have found the speaker if she were there.
"Who are you?" Henderson demanded in vexed surprise, doubt, even, that he had heard a voice at all. "Where the devil are you, any way?"
"Here," the voice answered, coming to him on a little laugh.
Above him it seemed, in the tree. He peered into the foliage of the oak and saw her there, sitting on a limb a little above his head. Her dark dress was one with the shadows; he could not tell whether she was a guest, or some impertinent intruder.
"I think you'd better come down," he suggested, diverted by her unconventional prank, let her be whom she might prove.
"No, I just came up here this minute," she returned. He saw her lean toward him as she spoke, her voice scarcely'more than a whisper. "I got up here," she hurried on to explain, "while you were standing over there by the gate looking at the hill. If you're waiting for somebody, I'll run away."
"No need," he said, putting out his hand in appeal to stop the suggested flight. "There's nobody in this land for me to be waiting, or who would wait for me."
"You're lonely, poor boy!" she said, sympathy in her tone that thrilled him. Then quickly, as if the words had broken from her and must be retrieved: "Of course not; a man never is lonely. But what are you doing here, out of your station, carrying Don Roberto's cloak and hat?"
"I am a servant in the house of Don Abrahan," Henderson replied.
"Oh, I know," impatiently, "but what are you truly?"
"A sailor who ran away from his ship, a silly fellow who jumped from one hard master and ultimate freedom, to a soft-spoken one and prospects extremely doubtful. Will you do me the kindness to come down and let me see your face? Surely I must not have seen you among the guests. Your English speech is not the kind that comes out of a Spanish mouth."
She made no movement to comply with his request, earnestly and respectfully, almost entreatingly, made. From the rustling of the leaves around her, he was certain that she shook her head.
"I climbed up here to be safe, in case they missed me and came hunting for me," she said. "Men cannot be trusted alone with women in this country. If they found me here talking with you, I'd be under a cloud all the days of my life."
"Damn them!" said Henderson, the sailor in him leaping ahead of the conventional man.
"I have, many a time," she said, in sober earnestness.
"You're not one of them, these lotus-eaters?"
"Yes, one of them. Perhaps only half would be better to say. My father was a Yankee, a Boston ship captain. His name was Isaac Sprague. It isn't fair to ask more than one is willing to tell, so I tell you this. Now, who are you, and what are you masquerading here to find out?"
"I have told you, Miss Sprague. My name is Gabriel Henderson"
"I know that."
"And I am a foolish chap who didn't know any better than to get into debt to the benevolent Don Abrahan. He says I shall not leave this place until the last penny is cleared. At the rate I'm going, that will never happen in the course of my natural life."
"I know all of that. But I don't believe you'd stay, I don't believe Don Abrahan and all the powers he can command, could keep you here a minute longer than you wanted to stay."
"I am afraid I'm neither so brave nor so resourceful as you seem to do me the honor of believing," Henderson told her.
He wondered if her desire to know about him, to penetrate the mystery that she had clothed him with in her own romantic imagination, could be entirely her own, unprompted by some dictator who stood out of sight.
"I must go back," she said, rustling in the tree as if she were coming down. "I left my aunt asleep in a corner of the porch; she will be frantic if she wakes and does not see me near. Please walk away and look at the hill again, and I will come down."
"Give me your hand; let me help you, Miss Sprague. Make me happy by standing in the moonlight just one moment, so I may see and remember your face."
"You're talking like a native," she said, between disappointment and scorn. "I ran away from them. I risked everything, just for a minute's speech with a natural man. Yov're letting the insincerities of our tinkling little language get hold of your tongue, Mr. Gabriel Henderson."
"I would like to see your face," he pleaded, downcast and reproved.
"If you'll not go and look at the hill, I must stay in the tree," she said. "You'd only be disappointed if you saw the face I'd have to show in the bright moonlight, Mr. Henderson. I am the red-haired beauty with freckles, hovered over by a large lady in green. You couldn't have missed seeing me; I was as prominent as a worm on a leaf. The lady is my aunt; she is Don Abrahan's cousin, and I—I am to marry his devoted son. So there, you know it all. Go away and look at the hill."
"Somebody is coming," he warned her, his words quick, cautious.
"God help me! I am lost!"
Henderson saw her standing on the great branch, unsteady as if she might fall in the tremor of her fright.
"Climb higher; hide among the leaves," he directed her.
He began walking back and forth, his head bent, in the manner of a sorrowful man who unburdens himself to his own heart.
Don Roberto and a companion, laughing in the merriment of their confidences, strolled in the moonlight not a rod beyond the fringe of the great tree's shadow. In the leaves overhead Henderson heard the rustling of the girl's movement to conceal herself, and a little gasp when something came falling among the close-knit small branches, and struck the ground softly a little distance from where he stood.
Don Roberto and his companion were approaching along the broad roadway that ran down beneath the old encina to the gate; there was no time to search for the thing she had let fall. Henderson could not see anything against the intensified darkness of the bare ground. Some trifle, he supposed, that a branch had wrested from her. He hoped Don Roberto and his friend would pass.
"Ha, it is our friend, Don Gabriel,' Roberto said, applying the name of honor to his valet in slurring levity.
"Keeping a tryst for a lady," the one who walked with him laughed. He stooped, his foot striking something in the dark. "And by my life, here is her shoe! Don Roberto, we have broken a romance; we have frightened her away."