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Again they laughed delightedly, and the one nearest me followed his tactics. "Celis," she said distinctly, pointing to the one in blue; "Alima" the one in rose; then, with a vivid imitation of Terry's impressive manner, she laid a firm delicate hand on her gold-green jerkin "Ellador." This was pleasant, but we got no nearer. "We can't sit here and learn the language," Terry protested.
However it came about, we all three at length achieved full understanding, and solemnly faced what was to them a step of measureless importance, a grave question as well as a great happiness; to us a strange, new joy. Of marriage as a ceremony they knew nothing. Jeff was for bringing them to our country for the religious and the civil ceremony, but neither Celis nor the others would consent.
In 1845 Juan Manso and Andrés Pico leased the Mission at a rental of $1120, the affairs having been fairly well administered by Padre Orday after its return to the control of the friars. A year later it was sold by Pio Pico, under the order of the assembly, for $14,000, to Eulogio Célis, whose title was afterwards confirmed by the courts.
Then Celis set up the little tripod again, and looked back at us, knocking it down, pointing at it, and shaking her short curls severely. "No," she said. "Bad wrong!" We were quite able to follow her.
It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is the ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together 'until death do us part," he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion. "What makes us all feel foolish," I told the girls, "is that here we have nothing to give you except, of course, our names." "Do your women have no names before they are married?"
When Chauvin came back, he found that a bear had come down from the mountains near by, torn down and partially devoured one of the deer we had killed the night before, not one hundred yards from where I lay in bed. Don Elogio de Celis, a well known citizen of Los Angeles, was camped in a canyon about a mile west of us.
The approach of flattery she dismissed with laughter, gifts and such "attentions" we could not bring to bear, pathos and complaint of cruelty stirred only a reasoning inquiry. It took Terry a long time. I doubt if she ever accepted her strange lover as fully as did Celis and Ellador theirs. He had hurt and offended her too often; there were reservations.
I liked her that day she balanced on the branch before me and named the trio. I thought of her most. Afterward I turned to her like a friend when we met for the third time, and continued the acquaintance. While Jeff's ultra-devotion rather puzzled Celis, really put off their day of happiness, while Terry and Alima quarreled and parted, re-met and re-parted, Ellador and I grew to be close friends.
But so far only Celis, her blue eyes swimming in happy tears, her heart lifted with that tide of race-motherhood which was their supreme passion, could with ineffable joy and pride announce that she was to be a mother. "The New Motherhood" they called it, and the whole country knew. There was no pleasure, no service, no honor in all the land that Celis might not have had.
Celis suddenly demanded. "Why, yes," Jeff explained. "They have their maiden names their father's names, that is." "And what becomes of them?" asked Alima. "They change them for their husbands', my dear," Terry answered her. "Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives' 'maiden names'?" "Oh, no," he laughed. "The man keeps his own and gives it to her, too."
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