It was in vain they told her Doña Maria had a pious plan to blow down the stonework—the most magnificent monument of such Indian labor ever erected in that part of Mexico which is now United States,—and to build on its site an adobe chapel of her own design. Raquel Estevan de Arteaga listened quietly to all the plans, but shook her head.
"It is sacrilege; it shall not be," she repeated. "Since gold is the god of the English people, we will give them gold."
"But you forget, beloved," put in Rafael. "Doña Maria is Catholic—is Spanish—is—"
"Rafael," said his bride, quietly, "will you listen a little? Then it will be no need to speak of those things again—we will both understand. The padre comes a stranger to San Juan as I do, but he comes from a strange land, and cares not anything for these different races. But I have all the names of those people from your mother, that I know whom to avoid in this life—and in the next."
"My mother was one of the old Spanish people; they were slow. Times change."
"Yes, times did change when men like Alvarado were pushed aside and a quadroon ruled the politics and the Mission property. Thus California paved the way for American rule. In politics and business men must meet unpleasant people often, but it is not ever necessary for the ladies of any family to do so; and, Rafael, here before your padre, two things I must say. The heretics I have promised never to meet except as God sends them in our path. As for the Spanish ladies you mention, if you do not know that there is not a woman of noble Spanish blood in the length of this valley, then you shut your eyes very tight when you might see. The daughters of Don Juan Alvara have one Spanish strain in them; the others are mixed people of Mexican, Indian, and negro, and few of them care to remember their grandmothers. When you bring into my house Spanish ladies of good breeding, I shall be glad to make them welcome, but I do not care for the substitutes. The Indios by the river are of more interest, for they need to be taught."
This conversation had been repeated by Padre Andros to Doña Maria over a game of malilla and a glass of the new American drink called whiskey,—a gift from the army officers, and enjoyed very much by the ladies of San Juan; it suggested a drink made of chilis, because of the appetizing burn it gave the throat.
Padre Andros was frightened when he saw the effect of his recital. Doña Maria was not so stout as most of the women of the mixed races; but as he saw the dark color mount luridly to her face, and her eyes look almost bloodshot with sudden fury, he set down the glass of whiskey to cross himself, and dropped an ace in his perturbation.
"For the love of God! señora," he exclaimed; and then it was Angela entered the room and found her cousin's wife ill with a fury she durst express only in prayers and maledictions against this girl brought to San Juan by Doña Luisa to ruin them all!
Only fragments of the cause of her fury reached Angela, despite all her sudden sympathetic interest in the wife of her cousin, to whom she had heretofore been rather indifferent. But she pieced the fragments together, and as she told them to Bryton he could, with his own knowledge of the early racial mixtures in the land, get a very fair idea of the situation. The girl from Mexico had dared open the closet of a forgotten skeleton.