Page:Scribner's Monthly, Volume 12 (May–October 1876).djvu/325

Rh have been digging night and day in the mere chance of recovering the buried family. Here—but Arthur remembered the sluggish, helpless retainers of Salvatierra, the dreadful fatalism which affected them on the occurrence of this mysterious catastrophe, even as shown in the man before him, their accepted guide and leader, and shuddered. Could anything be done? Could he not, with Dumphy's assistance, procure a gang of men from San Francisco? And then came the instinct of caution, always powerful with a nature like Arthur's. If these people, most concerned in the loss of their friends, their relations, accepted it so hopelessly, what right had he, a mere stranger, to interfere?

"But come, my son," said Padre Felipe, laying his large soft hand, parentally, on Arthur's shoulder. "Come, come with me to my rooms. Thanks to the Blessed Virgin I have still shelter and a roof to offer you. Ah," he added, stroking Arthur's riding-coat, and examining him critically as if he had been a large child, "what have we—what is this, eh? You are wet with this heretic fog—eh? Your hands are cold, and your cheeks hot. You have fatigue! Possibly, most possibly hunger! No! No! It is so. Come with me, come!" and drawing Arthur's passive arm through his own, he opened the vestry door, and led him across the little garden, choked with débris and plaster of the fallen tower, to a small adobe building that had been the Mission school-room. It was now hastily fitted up as Padre Felipe's own private apartment and meditative cell. A bright fire burned in the low, oven-like hearth. Around the walls hung various texts illustrating the achievement of youthful penmanship with profound religious instruction. At the extremity of the room there was a small organ. Midway and opposite the hearth was a deep embrasured window—the window at which, two weeks before, Mr. Jack Hamlin had beheld the Donna Dolores.

"She spent much of her time here, dear child, in the instruction of the young," said Father Felipe, taking a huge pinch of snuff, and applying a large red bandanna handkerchief to his eyes and nose. "It is her best monument! Thanks to her largess—and she was ever free-handed, Don Arturo, to the Church—the foundation of the Convent of our Lady of Sorrows, her own patron saint, thou see'st here. Thou knowest, possibly—most possibly as her legal adviser—that long ago, by her will, the whole of the Salvatierra estate is a benefaction to the Holy Church! eh?"

"No, I don't!" said Arthur, suddenly awakening with a glow of Protestant and heretical objection that was new to him, and eying Padre Felipe with the first glance of suspicion he had ever cast upon that venerable ecclesiastic. "No—sir, I never heard any intimation or suggestion of the kind from the late Donna Dolores. On the contrary I was engaged"

"Pardon—pardon me, my son," interrupted Father Felipe, taking another large pinch of snuff. "It is not now, scarce twenty-four hours since the dear child was translated—not in her masses and while her virgin strewments are not yet faded—that we will talk of this." (He blew his nose violently.) "No! All in good time—thou shalt see! But I have something here," he continued, turning over some letters and papers in his desk. "Something for you—possibly, most possibly more urgent. It is a telegraphic dispatch for you, to my care."

He handed a yellow envelope to Arthur. But Poinsett's eyes were suddenly fixed upon a card which lay upon Padre Felipe's table and which the Padre's search for the dispatch had disclosed. Written across its face was the name of Col. Culpepper Starbottle of Siskiyou!

"Do you know that man?" asked Poinsett, holding the dispatch unopened in his hand, and pointing to the card.

Father Felipe took another pinch of snuff.

"Possibly—most possibly! A lawyer, I think—I think! Some business of the Church property! I have forgotten. But your dispatch, Don Arturo. What says it? It does not take you from us? And you—only an hour here?"

Father Felipe paused, and, looking up, innocently, found the eyes of Arthur regarding him gravely. The two men examined each other intently. Arthur's eyes, at last, withdrew from the clear, unshrinking glance of Padre Felipe, unabashed but unsatisfied. A sudden recollection of the thousand and one scandals against the Church, and wild stories of its far-reaching influence—a swift remembrance of the specious craft and cunning charged upon the religious order of which Padre Felipe was a member—scandals that he had hitherto laughed at as idle—flashed through his mind. Conscious that he was now putting himself in a guarded attitude before the man with whom he had always been free and outspoken, Arthur, after a moment's embarrassment that was