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"I did what I had to do, Colonel Carmichael," she said. "Come, mother, we must go home." John Stafford sat at his table by the open door which looked on to the garden. The room behind him was bare of all graceful or even tasteful ornament a few native weapons, captured probably during small frontier wars, hung on the wall, but nothing else relieved its blank, whitewashed monotony.
The big barnlike place, lately cleaned and whitewashed, looked painfully empty. In one of the stalls the hay purchased for our recently acquired Jersey cow gave off a pleasant odor. Over in one corner, in a neat, clean, orderly array, were Schmetz's tools. A little farther on was our chicken feed, in covered barrels.
The bare walls were whitewashed. The Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith did not err, at all events, in the heathen indiscretion of a too free hospitality. The visitors to this room were barely beneath the roof. The door had in one of its panels the usual grating and shutter.
The hacienda of Don Juan Briones, nestling in a wooded cleft of the foot-hills, was hidden, as Father Pedro had wisely reflected, from the straying feet of travelers along the dusty highway to San Jose. As Francisco, emerging from the canada, put spurs to his mule at the sight of the whitewashed walls, Antonio grunted.
Before me, in the midst of fields of corn and buckwheat, was the Bories estate. Its old arched porch, the only one in the neighborhood that was whitewashed, looked like one of those entry-ways that are so common in African villages. This estate, I had been told, belonged to the St. Hermangarde children, who were destined to become my future comrades.
It had fallen into a state of ruinous neglect, relieved only by the misuse proceeding from successive generations of soldiers, for whom its charming chambers served as barrack-room. Whitewashed, mutilated, dishonoured, the castle of Blois may be said to have escaped simply with its life. This is the history of Amboise as well, and is to a certain extent the history of Chambord.
The carpenters laid new floors and mended broken windows; the plasterers filled the chinks and covered the walls of what was to be their chamber; but the girls themselves scrubbed and whitewashed, papered and painted, cleaned away rubbish from without and from within, and settled their various affairs with an energy and good-will which left them neither time nor inclination for repining.
Back of and inland from this row on the edge of the cliff, and scattered widely in open space, are a large store stocked with everything on earth, the Somali quarters of low whitewashed buildings, the cattle corrals, the stables, wild animal cages, granaries, blacksmith and carpenter shops, wagon sheds and the like.
The furniture was massive, of oak richly carved, and belonging to another age. Great massive oak beams crossed the rather lofty whitewashed ceiling. Here the squat Seigneur de Gavrillac was restlessly pacing when Andre-Louis was introduced. He was already informed, as he announced at once, of what had taken place at the Breton arme.
An Arab boy answered her knock, said that the Father was in and led her at once to a small, plainly-furnished room, with whitewashed walls, and a window opening on to an enclosure at the back, where several large palm trees reared their tufted heads above the smoothly-raked sand. In a moment the priest came in, smiling with pleasure and holding out his hands in welcome.
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