The Spinners Book of Fiction | Page 8

We all saw it--I was visiting the
Pachecos in the Presidio of Santa Barbara. She grew so thin. Her eyes
were never still. We knew. And then!--how many times she climbed to
the fortress--it was on that high bluff beside the channel--and stared out
to sea--when 1808 and the Spring had come--for hours together:
Rezánov was to return by way of Mexico. Then, when I went back to
San Francisco soon after, she went with me, and again she would watch
the sea from the summit of Lone Mountain, as we call it now. In spite
of her reason she hoped, I suppose; for that is the way of women. Or
perhaps she only longed for the word from Sitka that would tell her the
worst and have done with it. Who knows? She never said, and we dared
not speak of it. She was always very sweet, our Concha, but there never
was a time when you could take a liberty with her.
[Illustration: "SHE WAS ALWAYS VERY SWEET OUR CONCHA,
BUT THERE NEVER WAS A TIME WHEN YOU COULD TAKE A
LIBERTY WITH HER." FROM A PAINTING BY LILLIE V.
O'RYAN.]
"No ship came, but something else did--an earthquake! Ay yi, what an
earthquake that was! Not a temblor but a terremoto. The whole Presidio

came down. I do not know now how we saved all the babies, but we
always flew to the open with a baby under each arm the moment an
earthquake began, and in the first seconds even this was not so bad. The
wall about the Presidio was fourteen feet high and seven feet thick and
there were solid trunks of trees crossed inside the adobe. It looked like
a heap of dirt, nothing more. Luis was riding up from the Battery of
Yerba Buena and his horse was flung down and he saw the sand-dunes
heaving toward him like waves in a storm and shiver like quicksilver.
And there was a roar as if the earth had dropped and the sea gone after.
Ay California! And to think that when Luis wrote a bitter letter to
Governor Arillaga in Monterey, the old Mexican wrote back that he
had felt earthquakes himself and sent him a box of dates for consolation!
Well--we slept on the ground for two months and cooked out-of-doors,
for we would not go even into the Mission--which had not
suffered--until the earthquakes were over; and if the worst comes first
there are plenty after--and, somehow, harder to bear. Perhaps to Concha
that terrible time was a God-send, for she thought no more of Rezánov
for a while. If the earthquake does not swallow your body it swallows
your little self. You are a flea. Just that and nothing more.
"But after a time all was quiet again; the houses were rebuilt and
Concha went back to Santa Barbara. By that time she knew that
Rezánov would never come, although it was several years before she
had a word. Such stories have been told that she did not know of his
death for thirty years! Did not Baránhov, Chief-manager of the
Russian-Alaskan Company up there at Sitka, send Koskov--that name
was so like!--to Bodega Bay in 1812, and would he fail to send such
news with him? Was not Dr. Langsdorff's book published in 1814? Did
not Kotzbue, who was on his excellency's staff during the embassy to
Japan, come to us in 1816, and did we not talk with him every day for a
month? Did not Rezánov's death spoil all Russia's plans in this part of
the world--perhaps, who knows? alter the course of her history? It is
likely we were long without hearing the talk of the North! Such
nonsense! Yes, she knew it soon enough, but as that good Padre Abella
once said to us, she had the making of the saint and the martyr in her,
and even when she could hope no more she did not die, nor marry some
one else, nor wither up and spit at the world. Long before the news

came, indeed, she carried out a plan she had conceived, so Padre Abella
told us, even while Rezánov was yet here. There were no convents in
California in those days--you may know what a stranded handful we
were--but she joined the Tertiary or Third Order of Franciscans, and
wore always the grey habit, the girdle, and the cross. She went among
the Indians christianizing them, remaining a long while at Soledad, a
bleak and cheerless place, where she was also a great solace to the
wives of the soldiers and settlers, whose children she taught. The
Indians called her 'La Beata,' and by that name she was known in all
California until she took the veil, and that was more than forty