To marry a girl who is like a wooden saint in a church may be a victory; it may be even romantic when she is half a nun; but it is not comforting to a husband who expects only a wife, a home.
Then across his thoughts came the blue eyes and yellow hair of the woman he had said a reluctant good-bye to in Los Angeles. There was a woman who would have met all his friends half-way, would have promoted his interests, instead of closing doors and refusing to entertain any but the slow old Spanish, who were letting all the money slip out of their hands. In a few years their names would be forgotten in the new world of commerce building, through the Americanos in Los Angeles,--the Americanos whom his wife disdained, but whom the clever little woman of the blue eyes would have won to his interests in so many ways that her influence would have weighed down all the gold of the Estevan heiress, who did not know how to use it. It is only a trick of fate that the money always goes to the wrong people.
So he thought, and smoked, and looked at Raquel Estevan de Arteaga, and wondered by what man[oe]uvre or stratagem he could break down her prejudices; he wondered, also, how a woman with such eyes and such lips could be so cold. He supposed it was inherited from the nun, her mother.
Rafael had never heard the story of the love, and revenge, and widowhood of that nun. One or two of the older people of San Juan had heard of it at the time of Estevan's death, but none knew how true it was. It seemed too much a bit out of the dark ages of the Indian records to be true of the debonair Felipe, who had ridden and fought to the admiration of all Californian Mexico, who had found women wherever he rode, and had made love as a caballero's duty. It seemed scarcely credible that he, of all men, should have met death in that way on the far southern mountain; and the older men crossed themselves and tried to forget it, and the younger ones never heard of it.
Rafael, smoking on the veranda and watching the serene face of his wife, and ascribing her coldness to the chill of convent walls, understood her no more than had Felipe Estevan understood the nun who had stepped down from her saint's niche for him; and old Polonia, sitting in the shadow, watched them both, and in her dull brain was also a query: Would he ever discover that she was not cold? And would he find out in the same way? Both God and the devil would be needed to help them all on that day, for California was not the hill of the temple, where the Indian still ruled!