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It was now two days before Christmas. In a little dwelling house in Royal Street all was hurry and bustle. This was General Jackson's headquarters. Early in the afternoon, a young French officer, Major Villeré, had galloped to the door, with the word that an outpost on his father's plantation, twelve miles below New Orleans, had been surprised that morning by the British.
"My name is Gaston Villere, and it was time I should be reminded of my manners." The padre's hand waved a polite negative. "Indeed yes, padre. But your music has astonished me to pieces. If you carried such associations as Ah! the days and the nights!" he broke off. "To come down a California mountain," he resumed, "and find Paris at the bottom!
For the Spanish centuries of stately custom lived at Santa Ysabel del Mar, inviolate, feudal, remote. They were the only persons of quality present; and between themselves and the gente de razon a space intervened. Behind the Padre's chair stood an Indian to waft upon him, and another stood behind the chair of Gaston Villere.
The Padre shook his head and smiled affectionately when he thought of Gaston Villere. The youth's handsome, reckless countenance would shine out, smiling, in his memory, and he repeated Auber's old remark, "Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil, that always makes me have a weakness for rascals?" Sail away on the barkentine! Imagine taking leave of the people here of Felipe!
When he reached the shady place where once he had sat with Gaston Villere, he dismounted and again sat there, alone by the stream, for many hours. Long rides and outings had been lately so much his custom, that no one thought twice of his absence; and when he returned to the mission in the afternoon, the Indian took his mule, and he went to his seat in the garden.
He bade nothing farewell, but, turning his back upon his room and his garden, rode down the caution. The vessel lay at anchor, and some one had landed from her and was talking with other men on the shore. Seeing the priest slowly coming, this stranger approached to meet him. "You are connected with the mission here?" he inquired. "I am." "Perhaps it is with you that Gaston Villere stopped?"
"The fortunes of our two cities are one!" cried Constance, and the smiling Valcours were inwardly glad to assent, believing New Orleans doomed, and remembering their Mobile home burned for the defence of the two cities of one fortune. However, the Camp Villeré regiment had not got off, but would move at midnight.
From Camp Villeré, close below small Camp Callender, one more last regiment Creoles was to have gone that afternoon to the Jackson Railroad Station and take train to join their Creole Beauregard for the defence of their own New Orleans.
Such another library was not then in California; and though Gaston Villere, in leaving Harvard College, had shut Horace and Sophocles forever at the earliest instant possible under academic requirements, he knew the Greek and Latin names that he now saw as well as he knew those of Shakespeare, Dante, Moliere, and Cervantes.
And coming to know this," said Padre Ignazio, fixing his eyes steadily upon Gaston, "you will understand how great a privilege it is to help such people, and hour the sense of something accomplished under God should bring contentment with renunciation." "Yes," said Gaston Villere. Then, thinking of himself, "I can understand it in a man like you."
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