The Turquoise

Fülszöveg

In this life story I have tried to keep the background and incidental history accurate. I am deeply grateful to librarians in Santa Fe and New York City, and appreciative of the many fine source books on the period.
All the main characters are fictional except—perhaps—Fey.
One summer day, the year before she died, Mary Austin and I drove from Santa Fe to my father's ranch. As we left Mary's beautiful home on the Camino del Monte Sol, we both looked at the guardian peak behind it. The little mountain held for her a mystical significance. We talked of that, and then she said, quite casually, 'Once there lived a woman on that slope of Atalaya . . .' There was little more, a few sentences mentioning New York and strange contrast, only the hint of a forgotten legend.
I, too, forgot it, during many later visits to Santa Fe.
Then one day that rhythmical sentence came back, 'Once there lived a woman on the slope of Atalaya . . I went again to Santa Fe to find the story. I did not find... Tovább

Fülszöveg

In this life story I have tried to keep the background and incidental history accurate. I am deeply grateful to librarians in Santa Fe and New York City, and appreciative of the many fine source books on the period.
All the main characters are fictional except—perhaps—Fey.
One summer day, the year before she died, Mary Austin and I drove from Santa Fe to my father's ranch. As we left Mary's beautiful home on the Camino del Monte Sol, we both looked at the guardian peak behind it. The little mountain held for her a mystical significance. We talked of that, and then she said, quite casually, 'Once there lived a woman on that slope of Atalaya . . .' There was little more, a few sentences mentioning New York and strange contrast, only the hint of a forgotten legend.
I, too, forgot it, during many later visits to Santa Fe.
Then one day that rhythmical sentence came back, 'Once there lived a woman on the slope of Atalaya . . I went again to Santa Fe to find the story. I did not find it in the museum or historical libraries or town records, no trace of it in the memory of the 'Anglos.'
But at last, in a crumbling adobe near the Chapel of San Miguel, I found an old Spanish-American, and he remembered a little. 'It must be, Senora, that you mean "La Santa." It was so long ago. I was young then.'
So here is the story. I do not know, but I believe it may have been something like this • . •
A. S.
5
Santa Fe Cameron was named for the town of her birth, because her Scottish father and a distressed little New Mexican priest could agree on no other name.
This was on the twenty-third of January, 1850, while a bitter wind blew snow down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and darkened by contrast the adobe walls of the New Mexican capital.
In a bare two-room casita on lower San Francisco Street, the Scot, who was doctor as well as husband, stood beside the priest staring down at the woolen pallet where Conchita Valdez Cameron had given birth to the baby three hours ago. Conchita was dying. Her dark eyes were fixed on her husband's face in unquestioning love while her already cold hand clutched the crucifix on her breast. The beautiful ivory pallor, her Spanish inheritance, had dulled to a bluish-gray as the life of her eighteen-year-old body flowed away in hemorrhages that Andrew Cameron for all his skill was powerless to staunch.
The padre had administered the last rites; his concern was now with the feeble infant, prematurely born. It showed every sign of soon following its mother and must be baptized quickly.
'What name shall it be, doctor?' whispered Padre Miguel to the grim man by the bed, 'María de la Concepción like her mother? or Juana—Catalina?' He paused seeing the haggard misery in the other man's face tighten to resistance. 'Come, my son,' he said with gentle urgency, looking at the baby and thinking that the actual name hardly mattered, 'this is the feast day of San Ildefonso, shall we give her that name?'
Except for the hissing of the pinón logs in the high Indian fireplace there was silence in the small room, which was white-
7 Vissza