Often he had thought of this resemblance, but never heard it told to him before. The courtly proprietor of San Fernando, and the other patriarchal rancheros with whom he occasionally exchanged visits across the wilderness, knew hospitality and inherited gentle manners, sending to Europe for silks and laces to give their daughters; but their eyes had not looked upon Granada, and their ears had never listened to “William Tell.”
“It is quite singular,” pursued Gaston, “how one nook in the world will suddenly remind you of another nook that may be thousands of miles away. One morning, behind the Quai Voltaire, an old yellow house with rusty balconies made me almost homesick for New Orleans.”
“The Quai Voltaire!” said the padre.
“I heard Rachel in 'Valerie' that night,” the young man went on. “Did you know that she could sing too? She sang several verses by an astonishing little Jew musician that has come up over there.”
The padre gazed down at his blithe guest. “To see somebody, somebody, once again,” he said, “is very pleasant to a hermit.”
“It cannot be more pleasant than arriving at an oasis,” returned Gaston.
They had delayed on the threshold to look at the beauty of the evening, and now the priest watched his parishioners come and go. “How can one make companions—” he began; then, checking himself, he said: “Their souls are as sacred and immortal as mine, and God helps me to help them. But in this world it is not immortal souls that we choose for companions; it is kindred tastes, intelligences, and—and so I and my books are growing old together, you see,” he added, more lightly. “You will find my volumes as behind the times as myself.”
He had fallen into talk more intimate than he wished; and while the guest was uttering something polite about the nobility of missionary work, he placed him in an easy-chair and sought aguardiente for his immediate refreshment. Since the year's beginning there had been no guest for him to bring into his rooms, or to sit beside him in the high seats at table, set apart for the gente fina.
Such another library was not then in California; and though Gaston Villere, in leaving Harvard College, had shut Horace and Sophocles forever at the earliest instant possible under academic requirements, he knew the Greek and Latin names that he now saw as well as he knew those of Shakespeare, Dante, Moliere, and Cervantes. These were here also; nor could it be precisely said of them, either, that they made a part of the young man's daily reading. As he surveyed the padre's august shelves, it was with a touch of the florid Southern gravity which his Northern education had not wholly schooled out of him that he said:
“I fear that I am no scholar, sir. But I know what writers every gentleman ought to respect.”