East Angels Part 6

"He will not take anything except from me," answered Garda; she gathered a rose, and stood holding it by the stem while Carlos Mateo pecked gravely at the petals. The sun was sinking, his horizontal rays shone across her bright hair; she had taken off her hat, which was hanging by its ribbon from her arm; Winthrop looked at her, at the rose-laden branches above her head, at the odd figure of the crane by her side, at the background of the wild old garden behind her. He was thinking that he would give a good deal for a picture of the scene.

But while he was thinking it, Manuel had spoken it. "Miss Garda, I would give a year out of my life for a picture of you as you are at this moment!" he said, ardently. Winthrop turned away.

He went to look at some camellias, whose glossy leaves formed a thicket at a little distance; on the other side of this thicket he discovered a c.r.a.pe-myrtle avenue, the delicate trees so choked and hustled by the ruder foliage which had grown up about them that they stood like captives in the midst of a rabble, broken-hearted and dumb; with some pus.h.i.+ng he made his way within, and followed the lost path. It brought him to a mound of tangled shrubbery which rose like a small hill at this end of the garden, decked here and there, in what seemed inaccessible places, with brilliant flowers. But the places had not been inaccessible to Torres. Winthrop met him returning from the th.o.r.n.y conflict with a magnificent stalk of blossoms which he had captured there, and was now bringing back in triumph; it was a long wand of gorgeous spurred bells, each two inches in length, crimson without, cream-color within, the lip of the flaring lower petal lined with purple, and spotted with gold.

Torres carried his prize to Garda, and offered it in silence. She thanked him prettily in Spanish, and he stood beside her, his dark face in a dull glow from pleasure.

"Perhaps it is poisonous," murmured Manuel, taking good care, however, to murmur in English.

"Oh, my dearest child! pray put it down," said Mrs. Thorne, anxiously.

"It is quite harmless," said the clergyman, "I know the family to which it belongs. It is not indigenous here; probably the original shrub was planted in the garden many years ago, and has run wild."

Garda took the stalk in her right hand, extended her left rigidly, and, stiffening her light figure in a wooden att.i.tude, looked meekly upward.

"Bravo! bravo!" said the Doctor from his well-curb, laughing, and beginning on a second orange.

She stood thus for a few instants only. But it was very well done--an exact copy of a dark, grim old picture in the little Spanish cathedral of Gracias, a St. Catherine with a stalk of lilies in her hand.

Winthrop, who had returned, was standing on the other side of the open s.p.a.ce. Apparently he had not noticed this little pantomime. Garda looked at him for a moment. Then she left her place, went across, and gravely decorated him with her stalk of blossoms, the large stem going through three of the b.u.t.ton-holes of his coat before it could hold itself firmly; the brilliant flowers extended diagonally across his breast, past his chin, and above one ear.

"Your hat will break the top buds," said Garda, surveying her handiwork.

"Please take it off."

He obeyed. "For what sacrifice am I thus adorned?" he asked.

"It's no sacrifice," answered Garda, "it's a rebellion--a rebellion against your constant objections to everything in the world!"

"But I haven't opened my lips."

"That is the very thing; you object silently--which is much worse. I'm not accustomed to people who object silently. Everybody here talks; why don't you talk?"

This little dialogue went on apart, the others could not hear it.

"I do--when you give me an opportunity," Winthrop answered.

"I'll give you one now," responded Garda; "we'll go back to the house, we'll go through the orange-walk as we came, and the others can follow as _they_ came." Without waiting for reply, she went towards the garden gate. Winthrop followed her; and then Carlos Mateo, stalking across the open s.p.a.ce, followed Winthrop. He followed him so closely that Winthrop declared he could feel his beak on his back. When they reached the house they paused; Carlos then took up his station a little apart, and stood on one leg to rest himself, watching Winthrop meanwhile with a suspicious eye.

Mrs. Thorne was crossing the level with the Rev. Mr. Moore. Following them, at a little distance, came Dr. Kirby, with his hands behind him.

Manuel and Torres, forced to be companions a second time, formed the rear-guard of the returning procession. But as it approached the house, Manuel, raising his hat to Mrs. Thorne, turned away; he went down the live-oak avenue to the river landing, where his skiff was waiting.

Manuel had his ideas, he did not care to be one of five. Torres, who also had his ideas, and many more of them than Manuel had, was not troubled by considerations of this sort; in his mind a Torres was never one of five, or one of anything, but always a Torres, and alone. Left to himself, he now took longer steps, pa.s.sed the others, and came first to the doorway where Garda was standing.

"Why do you always look so serious, Mr. Torres?" she said, in Spanish, as he came up.

"It is of small consequence how I look, while the senorita herself remains so beautiful," answered the young man, bowing ceremoniously.

"Isn't that pretty?" said Garda to Winthrop.

"Immensely so," replied that decorated personage.

"But he does not look half so serious as you look comical--with all those brilliant flowers by the side of your immovable face," she went on, breaking into a laugh.

"It is of small consequence how I look, seeing that the senorita herself placed them where they are," answered Winthrop, in tolerable if rather labored Spanish, turning with a half-smile to Torres as he borrowed his phrase.

"You did not like it? You thought it childish?" said Garda. She drew the stalk quickly from its place. She was now speaking English, and Torres watched to see the fate of his gift; she had taken the flowers with the intention of throwing them away, but noticing that the Cuban's eyes were fixed upon them, she slipped the end of the stem under her belt, letting the long brilliant spray hang down over her dark skirt.

"I am now more honored than ever," said Winthrop.

"But it is Mr. Torres whom I am honoring this time," answered the girl.

Torres, hearing his name in her English sentence, drew the heels of his polished boots together with a little click, and made another low bow.

The rest of the party now came up, and soon after, the visitors took leave; Winthrop rode back across the pine-barrens to Gracias. Dr. Kirby bore him company on his stout black horse Osceola, glad indeed to be there and off his own feet; on the way he related a large portion of that history of the Spaniards in Florida which Garda, their descendant, had interrupted at the mill.

As they left East Angels, and rode out on the barren, this descendant was being addressed impressively by her mother. "That, Garda, is my idea of a cultivated gentleman: to have had such wide opportunities, and to have improved them; to be so agreeable, and yet so kind; so quiet, and yet so evidently a man of distinction, of mark--it's a rare combination."

"Very," replied Garda, giving the crane her gloves to carry in his beak.

They were still standing in the lower doorway; Mrs. Thorne surveyed her daughter for a moment, one of her states of uncertainty seemed to have seized her. "I hope you appreciate that Mr. Winthrop is not another Manuel or Torres," she said at last, in her most amiable tone.

"Perfectly, mamma; I could never make such a mistake as that. Mr.

Winthrop inspires respect."

"He does--he does," said Mrs. Thorne, with conviction.

"I respect him already as a father," continued Garda. "Manuel and Ernesto also respect him as a father. Come, Carlos, my angel, let us go down to the landing, and see if we can call Manuel back."

CHAPTER III.

Gracias-a-Dios was a little town lying half asleep on the southern coast of the United States, under a sky of almost changeless blue.

Of almost changeless blue. Americans have long been, in a literary way, the vicarious victims, to a certain extent, of the climate of the British Isles. The low tones of the atmosphere of those islands, the s.h.i.+fting veils of fog and rain rising and falling over them, the soft gray light filtered through mist and cloud--all these have caused the blue skies and endless suns.h.i.+ne of Italy to seem divinely fair to visitors from English sh.o.r.es; and as among these visitors have come the poets and the romance writers, this fairness, embalmed in prose and verse, has taken its place in literature, has become cla.s.sic. The imaginative New World student, eager to learn, pa.s.sionately desirous to appreciate, has read these pages reverently; he knows them by heart. And when at last the longed-for day comes when he too can make his pilgrimage to these scenes of legend and story, so dominated is he, for the most part, by the spell of tradition that he does not even perceive that these long-chanted heavens are no bluer than his own; or if by chance his eye, accurate in spite of himself, notes such a possibility, he puts it from him purposely, preferring the blueness which is historic. The heavens lying over Venice and her palaces are, must be, softer than those which expand distantly over miles of prairie and forest; the hue of the sky which bends over Rome is, must be, of a deeper, richer tint than any which a New World has attained. But generally this preference of the imaginative American is not a choice so much as an unconscious faith which he has cherished from childhood, and from which he would hardly know how to dissent; he is gazing at these foreign skies through a long, enchanting vista of history, poetry, and song; he simply does not remember his own sky at all.

Only recently has he begun to remember it, only recently has he begun to discover that, in the matter of blue at least, he has been gazing through gla.s.ses adjusted to the scale of English atmosphere and English comparisons, and that, divested of these aids to vision, he can find above his own head and in his own country an azure as deep as any that the Old World can show.

When this has been discovered it remains but blue sky. The other treasure of those old lands beyond the sea--their ruins, their art, their ancient story--these he has not and can never have, and these he loves with that deep American wors.h.i.+p which must seem to those old G.o.ds like the arrival of Magi from afar, men of distant birth, sometimes of manners strange, but bringing costly gifts and bowing the knee with reverence where the dwellers in the temple itself have grown cold.

Compared with those of the British Isles, all the skies of the United States are blue. In the North, this blue is clear, strong, bright; in the South, a softness mingles with the brilliancy, and tempers it to a beauty which is not surpa.s.sed. The sky over the cotton lands of South Carolina is as soft as that of Tuscany; the blue above the silver beaches of Florida melts as languorously as that above Capri's enchanted sh.o.r.e. Gracias-a-Dios had this blue sky. Slumberous little coast hamlet as it was, it had also its characteristics.

"Gracias a Dios!" Spanish sailors had said, three hundred years before, when, after a great storm, despairing and exhausted, they discovered this little harbor on the low, dangerous coast, and were able to enter it--"Gracias a Dios!" "Thanks to G.o.d!" In the present day the name had become a sort of s.h.i.+bboleth. To say Gracias a Dios in full, with the correct Spanish p.r.o.nunciation, showed that one was of the old Spanish blood, a descendant of those families who dated from the glorious times when his Most Catholic and Imperial Majesty, King of Spain, Defender of the Church, always Victorious, always Invincible, had held sway on this far sh.o.r.e. To say Gracias without the "a Dios," but still with more or less imitation of the Spanish accent, proved that one belonged among the older residents of the next degree of importance, that is, that one's grandfather or great-grandfather had been among those English colonists who had come out to Florida during the British occupation; or else that he had been one of the planters from Georgia and the Carolinas who had moved to the province during the same period. This last p.r.o.nunciation was also adopted by those among the later-coming residents who had an interest in history, or who loved for their own sakes the melody of the devout old names given by the first explorers--names now so rapidly disappearing from bay and harbor, reef and key. But these three cla.s.ses were no longer all, there was another and more recent one, small and unimportant as yet, but destined to grow. This new cla.s.s counted within its ranks at present the captains and crews of the northern schooners that were beginning to come into that port for lumber; the agents of land-companies looking after t.i.tles and the old Spanish grants; speculators with plans in their pockets for railways, with plans in their pockets for ca.n.a.ls, with plans in their pockets (and sometimes very little else) for draining the swamps and dredging the Everglades, many of the schemes dependent upon aid from Congress, and mysteriously connected with the new negro vote. In addition there were the first projectors of health resorts, the first northern buyers of orange groves: in short, the pioneers of that busy, practical American majority which has no time for derivations, and does not care for history, and which turns its imagination (for it has imagination) towards objects more veracious than the pious old t.i.tles bestowed by an age and race that murdered, and tortured, and reddened these fair waters with blood, for sweet religion's sake. This new cla.s.s called the place Grashus--which was a horror to all the other inhabitants.

The descendants of the Spaniards, of the English colonists, of the Georgia and Carolina planters--families much thinned out now in numbers and estate, wearing for the most part old clothes, but old prides as well--lived on in their old houses in Gracias and its neighborhood, giving rather more importance perhaps to the past than to the present, but excellent people, kind neighbors, generous and devoted friends. They were also good Christians; on Sundays they all attended service in one or the other of the two churches of Gracias, the Roman Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the Episcopal church of St Philip and St. James'. These two houses of wors.h.i.+p stood side by side on the plaza, only an old garden between them. St. Philip and St. James'

had a bell; but its Spanish neighbor had four, and not only that, but a habit of ringing all four together, in a sort of quickstep, at noon on Sundays, so that the Episcopal rector, in that land of open windows, was obliged either to raise his voice to an unseemly pitch, or else to preach for some minutes in dumb-show, which latter course he generally adopted as the more decorous, mildly going back and giving the lost sentences a second time, as though they had not been spoken, when the clamor had ceased. This, however, was the only warfare between the two churches. And it might have been intended, too, merely as a friendly hint from the Angels to the Saints that the latter's sermons were too long. The Episcopal rector, the Rev. Middleton Moore, had in truth ideas somewhat behind his times: he had not yet learned that fifteen or at most twenty minutes should include the utmost length of his weekly persuasions to virtue. It had never occurred to the mind of this old-fas.h.i.+oned gentleman that congregations are now so highly improved, so cultivated and intellectual, that they require but a few moments of dispa.s.sionate reminder from the pulpit once a week, that on the whole it is better to be moral, and, likewise, that any a.s.sumption of the functions of a teacher on the part of a clergyman is now quite obsolete and even laughable--these modern axioms Middleton Moore had not yet learned; the mistaken man went on hopefully exhorting for a full three-quarters of an hour. And as his congregation were as old-fas.h.i.+oned as himself, no objection had as yet been made to this course, the simple people listening with respect to all he had to say, not only for what it was in itself, but for what he was in himself--a man without spot, one who, in an earlier age, would have gone through martyrdom with the same pure, gentle firmness with which he now addressed them from a pulpit of peace. It was in this little church of St. Philip and St. James' that Evert Winthrop had first beheld Garda Thorne.

The next day he presented a letter of introduction which his aunt, Mrs.