“Words cannot describe the changes in the city since the bad old ’87 days: no town can have changed more in the time. My love to Bell and Father. I hope to be back in June, for a couple of months: so don’t fill the house up.”
A note added by Highworth Ridden:
“The above was written by me to my mother soon after the completion of the dam, when I revisited Santa Barbara for the first time since the troubles. I left the pier on that morning of the troubles thinking to be back in ten days: I did not return save for that time as a prisoner for more than eleven years.
“What I did not and could not write to my mother, I write now, after another eleven years. It is about Carlotta. It is difficult to set down what she was to me. ‘Calf-love,’ I suppose most people would say. Well, there is a generosity in calf-love that gives it a grace: not that mine had any grace. I saw her on only one day twenty-two years ago: I have thought of her every day since; not as a lover of course (for years past), but as a spirit apart, unlike anyone else that ever was. You who never saw her cannot understand this. She was the most exquisite thing: in life marvellous, in the unspeakable end, heroic: and always so beautiful, so gracious. All who knew her felt this: she had cruel enemies, the mad, the diseased, the godless, the savage and the greedy hated her.
“I went to the chapel of Carlotta, which H. E. built. Her tomb, with her recumbent figure, is there: it is very beautiful. Her sculptured head on the stairs leading to the Plaza is liker her. Gamarro’s painting of her is not like. Bedwyn’s pencil sketch is like. But she was like the light, no one could have painted her.
“I tried to do something for her once, and though I failed, I am prouder of that than of anything else that I have ever done. Whatever she was, she made men know that gleams come into this world from a world beyond, which is better than this.
“H. F. R.”
“When I set out from the hotel on that morning of the troubles, I took with me a scrap of the hermosita which she had broken for me. This being in my pocket-book, was stolen from me at Ribote by the Englishman who got me out of jail. The rest of the spray, being in my trunk at the hotel, was, as I supposed, lost, during the troubles, with all my kit.
“But in 1899, being at the Club in Santa Barbara, I met the then proprietor of the hotel, who said, that he had recently found some trunks and bags in a disused cellar: that these had evidently been put away during the troubles and never claimed since, and were now to be sold. I went to see them, and among them found one of my tin trunks, in which were some ruined clothes. With the clothes, in some hotel blotting-paper, I found the hermosita spray which Carlotta had given to me, and the envelope, addressed by her to Donna Emilia, which I had picked up and kept. So that I have what few have, one of the last gifts and one of the last writings of a lovely soul.
“That is all that one can say of her, that she was a lovely soul. I have met no one in the least like her. I can but thank God for her, knowing that she came from God.