Selected Stories of Bret Harte, Bret Harte [read aloud books .TXT] 📗

instrument in the Mission garden beyond his own, and remembered his contiguity to the church with a stir of defiance. But he was relieved, nevertheless. His pent-up emotion had found vent, and without the nervous excitement that had followed his old exaltation. That night he slept better. He had found the Lord again—with Psalmody!

The next evening he chanced upon a softer hymn of the same simplicity, but with a vein of human tenderness in its aspirations, which his more hopeful mood gently rendered. At the conclusion of the first verse he was, however, distinctly conscious of being followed by the same twanging sound he had heard on the previous night, and which even his untutored ear could recognize as an attempt to accompany him. But before he had finished the second verse the unknown player, after an ingenious but ineffectual essay to grasp the right chord, abandoned it with an impatient and almost pettish flourish, and a loud bang upon the sounding-board of the unseen instrument. Masterton finished it alone.

With his curiosity excited, however, he tried to discover the locality of the hidden player. The sound evidently came from the Mission garden; but in his ignorance of the language he could not even interrogate his Indian housekeeper. On the third night, however, his hymn was uninterrupted by any sound from the former musician. A sense of disappointment, he knew not why, came over him. The kindly overture of the unseen player had been a relief to his loneliness. Yet he had barely concluded the hymn when the familiar sound again struck his ears. But this time the musician played boldly, confidently, and with a singular skill on the instrument.

The brilliant prelude over, to his entire surprise and some confusion, a soprano voice, high, childish, but infinitely quaint and fascinating, was mischievously uplifted. But alas! even to his ears, ignorant of the language, it was very clearly a song of levity and wantonness, of freedom and license, of coquetry and incitement! Yet such was its fascination that he fancied it was reclaimed by the delightful childlike and innocent expression of the singer.

Enough that this tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered man arose and, overcome by a curiosity almost as childlike, slipped into the garden and glided with an Indian softness of tread toward the voice. The moon shone full upon the ruined Mission wall tipped with clusters of dark foliage. Half hiding, half mingling with one of them—an indistinct bulk of light-colored huddled fleeces like an extravagant bird's nest—hung the unknown musician. So intent was the performer's preoccupation that Masterton actually reached the base of the wall immediately below the figure without attracting its attention. But his foot slipped on the crumbling debris with a snapping of dry twigs. There was a quick little cry from above. He had barely time to recover his position before the singer, impulsively leaning over the parapet, had lost hers, and fell outward. But Masterton was tall, alert, and self-possessed, and threw out his long arms. The next moment they were full of soft flounces, a struggling figure was against his breast, and a woman's frightened little hands around his neck. But he had broken her fall, and almost instantly, yet with infinite gentleness, he released her unharmed, with hardly her crisp flounces crumpled, in an upright position against the wall. Even her guitar, still hanging from her shoulder by a yellow ribbon, had bounded elastic and resounding against the wall, but lay intact at her satin-slippered feet. She caught it up with another quick little cry, but this time more of sauciness than fear, and drew her little hand across its strings, half defiantly.

“I hope you are not hurt?” said the circuit preacher, gravely.

She broke into a laugh so silvery that he thought it no extravagance to liken it to the moonbeams that played over her made audible. She was lithe, yet plump; barred with black and yellow and small-waisted like a pretty wasp. Her complexion in that light was a sheen of pearl satin that made her eyes blacker and her little mouth redder than any other color could. She was small, but, remembering the fourteen-year-old wife of the shopkeeper, he felt that, for all her childish voice and features, she was a grown woman, and a sudden shyness took hold of him.

But she looked pertly in his face, stood her guitar upright before her, and put her hands behind her back as she leaned saucily against the wall and shrugged her shoulders.

“It was the fault of you,” she said, in a broken English that seemed as much infantine as foreign. “What for you not remain to yourself in your own CASA? So it come. You creep so—in the dark—and shake my wall, and I fall. And she,” pointing to the guitar, “is a'most broke! And for all thees I have only make to you a serenade. Ingrate!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Masterton quickly, “but I was curious. I thought I might help you, and—”

“Make yourself another cat on the wall, eh? No; one is enough, thank you!”

A frown lowered on Masterton's brow. “You don't understand me,” he said, bluntly. “I did not know WHO was here.”

“Ah, BUENO! Then it is Pepita Ramirez, you see,” she said, tapping her bodice with one little finger, “all the same; the niece from Manuel Garcia, who keeps the Mission garden and lif there. And you?”

“My name is Masterton.”

“How mooch?”

“Masterton,” he repeated.

She tried to pronounce it once or twice desperately, and then shook her little head so violently that a yellow rose fastened over her ear fell to the ground. But she did not heed it, nor the fact that Masterton had picked it up.

“Ah, I cannot!” she said, poutingly. “It is as deefeecult to make go as my guitar with your serenade.”

“Can you not say 'Stephen Masterton'?” he asked, more gently, with a returning and forgiving sense of her childishness.

“Es-stefen? Ah, ESTEBAN! Yes; Don Esteban! BUENO! Then, Don Esteban, what for you sink so melank-olly one night, and one night so fierce? The melank-olly, he ees not so bad; but the fierce—ah! he is weeked! Ess it how the Americano make always his serenade?”

Masterton's brow again darkened. And his hymn of exultation had been mistaken by these people—by this—this wanton child!

“It was no serenade,” he replied, curtly; “it was in the praise of the Lord!”

“Of how mooch?”

“Of the Lord of Hosts—of the Almighty in Heaven.” He lifted his long arms reverently on high.

“Oh!” she said, with a frightened look, slightly edging away from the wall. At a secure distance she stopped. “Then you are a soldier, Don Esteban?”

“No!”

“Then what for you sink 'I am a soldier of the Lord,' and you will make die 'in His army'? Oh, yes; you have said.” She gathered up her guitar tightly under her arm, shook her small finger at him gravely, and said, “You are a hoombog, Don Esteban; good a' night,” and began to glide away.

“One moment, Miss—Miss Ramirez,” called Masterton. “I—that is you—you have—forgotten your rose,” he added, feebly, holding up the flower. She halted.

“Ah, yes; he have