d caballero
should have been the victim of not one, but even many, erotic episodes,
did not strike the holy father as being peculiar; but that he should
have been brought by a solitary unfortunate attachment to despair
and renunciation of the world appeared to him marvelous. He was not
unfamiliar with the remorse of certain gallants for peccadillos with
other men's wives; but this Americano's self-abasement for the sins
of his own wife--as he foolishly claimed her to be--whom he hated and
despised, struck Father Esteban as a miracle open to suspicion. Was
there anything else in these somewhat commonplace details of vulgar and
low intrigue than what he had told the priest? Were all these Americano
husbands as sensitive and as gloomily self-sacrificing and expiating?
It did not appear so from the manners and customs of the others,--from
those easy matrons whose complacent husbands had abandoned them to the
long companionship of youthful cavaliers on adventurous voyages; from
those audacious virgins, who had the freedom of married women. Surely,
this was not a pious and sensitive race, passionately devoted to their
domestic affections! The young stranger must be either deceiving him--or
an exception to his countrymen!

And if he was that exception--what then? An idea which had sprung up in
Father Esteban's fancy that morning now took possession of it with the
tenacity of a growth on fertile virgin soil. The good Father had been
devoted to the conversion of the heathen with the fervor of a one-ideaed
man. But his successes had been among the Indians--a guileless, harmless
race, who too often confounded the practical benefits of civilization
with the abstract benefits of the Church, and their instruction had
been simple and coercive. There had been no necessity for argument
or controversy; the worthy priest's skill in polemical warfare and
disputation had never been brought into play; the Comandante and Alcalde
were as punctiliously orthodox as himself, and the small traders and
artisans were hopelessly docile and submissive. The march of science,
which had been stopped by the local fogs of Todos Santos some fifty
years, had not disturbed the simple Aesculapius of the province with
heterodox theories: he still purged and bled like Sangrado, and met the
priest at the deathbed of his victims with a pious satisfaction that had
no trace of skeptical contention. In fact, the gentle Mission of Todos
Santos had hitherto presented n