The padre, of course, had been instantly aware of the stranger's presence. For this is the sixth sense with vicars of every creed and heresy; and if the parish is lonely and the worshippers few and seldom varying, a newcomer will gleam out like a new book to be read. And a trained priest learns to read shrewdly the faces of those who assemble to worship under his guidance. But American vagrants, with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for their speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the intoning, he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit Dominus. He listened to the tender chorus that opens “William Tell”; and as the Latin psalm proceeded, pictures of the past rose between him and the altar. One after another came these strains which he had taken from the operas famous in their day, until at length the padre was murmuring to some music seldom long out of his heart—not the Latin verse which the choir sang, but the original French words:
“Ah, voile man envie,
Voila mon seul desir:
Rendez moi ma patrie,
Ou laissez moi mourir.”
Which may be rendered:
But one wish I implore,
One wish is all my cry:
Give back my native land once more,
Give back, or let me die.
Then it happened that he saw the stranger in the back of the church again, and forgot his Dixit Dominus straightway. The face of the young man was no longer hidden by the slouching position he had at first taken. “I only noticed his clothes before,” thought the padre. Restlessness was plain upon the handsome brow, and in the mouth there was violence; but Padre Ignazio liked the eyes. “He is not saying any prayers,” he surmised, presently. “I doubt if he has said any for a long while. And he knows my music. He is of educated people. He cannot be American. And now—yes, he has taken—I think it must be a flower, from his pocket. I shall have him to dine with me.” And vespers ended with rosy clouds of eagerness drifting across the padre's brain.
But the stranger made his own beginning. As the priest came from the church, the rebellious young figure was waiting. “Your organist tells me,” he said, impetuously, “that it is you who—”
“May I ask with whom I have the great pleasure of speaking?” said the padre, putting formality to the front and his pleasure out of sight.
The stranger reddened, and became aware of the padre's features, moulded by refinement and the world. “I beg your lenience,” said he, with a graceful and confident utterance, as of equal to equal. “My name is Gaston Villere, and it was time I should be reminded of my manners.”
The padre's hand waved a polite negative.
“Indeed yes, padre. But your music has astonished me to pieces. If you carried such associations as—Ah! the days and the nights!” he broke off. “To come down a California mountain,” he resumed, “and find Paris at the bottom! 'The Huguenots,' Rossini, Herold—I was waiting for 'Il Trovatore.”'