But Gaston was too much elated with the enjoyment of each new day to understand. The shafts of another's pain might scarcely pierce the bright armor of his gayety. He mistook the priest's exclamation for anxiety about his own happy soul.
“Stay here under your care?” he said. “It would do me no good, padre. Temptation sticks closer to me than a brother!” and he gave that laugh of his which disarmed severer judges than his host. “By next week I should have introduced some sin or other into your beautiful Garden of Ignorance here. It will be much safer for your flock if I go and join the other serpents at San Francisco.”
Soon after breakfast the padre had his two mules saddled, and he and his guest set forth down the hills together to the shore. And beneath the spell and confidence of pleasant, slow riding, and the loveliness of everything, the young man talked freely of himself.
“And, seriously,” said he, “if I missed nothing else at Santa Ysabel, I should long to hear the birds. At home our gardens are full of them, and one smells the jasmine, and they sing and sing! When our ship from the Isthmus put into San Diego, I decided to go on by land and see California. Then, after the first days, I began to miss something. All that beauty seemed empty, in a way. And suddenly I found it was the birds. For these little scampering quail are nothing. There seems a sort of death in the air where no birds ever sing.”
“You will not find any birds at San Francisco,” said the padre.
“I shall find life!” exclaimed Gaston. “And my fortune at the mines, I hope. I am not a bad fellow, father. You can easily guess all the things that I do. I have never, to my knowledge, harmed any one. I did not even try to kill my adversary in an affair of honor. I gave him a mere flesh wound, and by this time he must be quite recovered. He was my friend. But as he came between me—”
Gaston stopped; and the padre, looking keenly at him, saw the violence that he had noticed in church pass like a flame over the young man's handsome face.
“There's nothing dishonorable,” said Gaston, answering the priest's look.
“I have not thought so, my son.”
“I did what every gentleman would do,” said Gaston.