Ramon

“ Consent to it, and you will make me the happiest of men."
"Ah, father, you do not know what you are asking," replied Louis.
"You are going to say that you do not love Mlle. Ramon, perhaps; but mutual respect and esteem are sufficient, and you can give both to Mlle. Ramon, for she deserves them. As for her father, the parsimony that shocked you so much at first, will seem less objectionable when you recollect that, after all, you are the person who will profit by it, eventually. Ramon is really a most estimable man. ”

“ He trod on a dry leaf of the old vine, as he passed through the garden, and it whispered,—
“What a chance for you, Ramon! Buy yourself a patch of land, and set to work like a man, and show Carmen you are worthy of her.”
“Work! while I have gold enough to last for ever? Not I, indeed!”
“It won’t last for ever, Ramon,” rustled out another falling leaf.
But Ramon heeded not. Some of his treasure he spent rationally enough, I must say, in having the old cottage repaired, and the old vine tended; but the bulk he squandered in excesses, and in a few years was as badly off as ever. ”

“ Why do you try to convince Esperancita that you are dying for her? Do you think that will do any good? Convince her of the contrary, and you will see how much better the result will be."
"What would you have me do?" asked Ramon anxiously.
"Do not make such a show of your devotion, man; don't be so spoony. Do not go to the house so often and gaze at her with eyes like a calf with its throat cut. Contradict her when she talks nonsense; hint that you have seen much nicer girls; give yourself a little consequence, and you will see how matters will look up." ”

“ And indeed, if people indulge a discontented disposition, every thing must go wrong with them.
Strange, that any one can find pleasure in such an ugly habit as grumbling. Ramon had been made by nature a good-looking boy; but a sour, gloomy expression soon superseded the engaging smile of youth; and as he had never a pleasant word, his society was gradually shunned by all the village. The last to give him up was Carmen, the bright little playmate of his childhood, but he wore out even her patience, and then, when he was left to himself, he grew more and more sour and morose. ”

“ Annie-Many Ponies stood before him, straight and slim and with that air of aloofness which so fired Ramon's desire for her. She lifted a hand to check him, and Ramon stopped instantly and waited. So far had her power over him grown.
"All time you tell me you heap love," she said in her crooning soft voice. "Why you not talk of priest to make us marry? You say words for love—you say no word for wife. Why you no say—"
"Esposa!" Ramon's teeth gleamed white as a wolfs in the dusk. "When the padre marry us I maybe teach you many ways to say wife!" ”

“ Raphael had never heard of inferiority complexes and the perils of yielding to them; therefore he watched the debonair Ramon with all his wistful, self-deprecatory soul in his eyes. To be like this—so elegant, so careless, so sure of one’s self!
“Here we try be the good American, Ticher,” began Ramon, easily. “To be the good American,” he explained, “one doss not fight weeth the knife or throw the stone or shoot the crap in the yard off the school.” ”

“ He had been talking to the youth of all the duties of his life and love; but Ramon was inattentive, watching for her. As they passed her window Ramon lingered, daring a word to Dolores through the iron bars. He asked her for a rose she wore. She looked at him a moment, then gave it to him, with a message. The Marquis saw her give the rose; he did not hear the message. Don Ramon did; and his face turned the color of a winter leaf. As he walked on, he crushed the rose, then threw it in the gutter. For the girl, womanlike, had told the rival first. ”

“ After a sidelong glance that gave her the hard glint of his eyes above the firm mouth, set jaw, she went on, with a little satisfied nod: “Now listen! Ramon will be easier to handle. Being Mexican, he’s sensitive as a tarantula, irritable as a scorpion, jealous as a cat. Now that she’s promised, he will look upon her as his, body and soul, and if her glance so much as strays in any one else’s direction, he’ll be ready to kill. It ought to be quite easy to provoke him to the point where he will either break the engagement or give her cause. ”

“ But first, if Ramon would wait, she wanted to confess her sins, so that she need not go into the new life bearing the sins of the old. The priest could pray away the ache that was in her heart; and then, with her heart light as air, she would be married with Ramon. It was long since she had confessed—not since the priest came to the agency when she was there, before she ran away to work in pictures for Wagalexa Conka.
Before her the glow deepened and darkened. A rabbit hopped out of a thick clump of stunted bushes, sniffed the air that blew the wrong way to warn him, and began feeding. ”

“ When we could secure the presence of Don Ramon, we learned from him the story of the surprise.
Every heart was moved to pity as the old man, in broken sentences, told us that he had been awakened by hearing his beautiful, his darling, shriek. He had sprung to his feet, half asleep, and seen two Indians tearing her from her bed in the ambulance, while calling upon him for help. ”

“ All through the afternoon she sat there with her back to the lone pine tree and her face turned toward the southeast, while the little black dog lay at her feet and slept. From the cabin Ramon watched her, stubbornly waiting until she would come down to him of her own accord. She would come—of that he was sure. She would come if he convinced her that he would not go up and coax her to come. Ramon had known many girls who were given to sulking over what he considered their imaginary wrongs, and he was very sure that he knew women better than they knew themselves. ”

“ A useless tool, a superfluous pawn he would throw away without a pang of remorse: this don Ramon knew and so did Lenora--but in Ramon that knowledge reigned supreme and went hand in hand with terror, whilst in the young girl there was all the desire to defy that knowledge and to make a supreme fight for love and happiness. ”

“ It is the older heads that must govern, always. I should have foreseen this effect, but Ramon was offended, and he said too little. Now, I admire his spirit; he is desperate; he will fight; he is no parrot to sit by and see his cage robbed. ”

“ We shall live at Dreux; Ramon's house is sufficiently large for us all. He gives his daughter no dowry; but we shall live in his home, and his influence will obtain a position for you. At the death of your father-in-law, you will inherit a snug fortune—Louis, my beloved son," concluded the old man, beseechingly, grasping the young man's hands in his, "consent to this marriage and you will make me the happiest man in the world; for I can then die without anxiety for your future." ”

“ As is the way of unreflecting men, Ramon formed no definite opinion of his life, but liked it more or less according to the mood that was in him. There were bright, cool days that fall when, lacking work to do, he took his shot-gun and a saddle horse and went for long rambles. Sometimes he would follow the river northward, stalking the flocks of teal and mallards that dozed on the sandbars in the wide, muddy stream, perhaps killing three or four fat birds. Other times he went to the foot of the mountains and hunted the blue quail and cotton tail rabbits in the arroyos of the foot-hills. ”

“ One may be stingy with a small fortune as well as with a big one, I suppose; but if this M. Ramon's wealth is to be measured by his parsimony, he must be a multi-millionaire. He is a regular old Harpagon."
"If you had been reared in luxury and abundance, I could understand the abuse you heap upon this old Harpagon, as you call him; but we have always lived in such poverty that, however parsimonious M. Ramon may be, you certainly cannot be able to see much difference between his life and ours." ”

“ They are the prettiest babies; nice young men. Ramon, with his fine color and wonderful eyes, is too handsome to live just now. But after a while he’ll grow stout and lazy from over-feeding and acquire pimples and blotches till his face looks like a scorched hide. Right now he’s so romantic he’d twang a guitar all night under Lee’s window. ”

“ Ramon took no interest in landscapes generally, but when he awoke on the last morning of his journey and found himself once more in the wide and desolate country of his birth, he was so deeply stirred and interested that he forgot all about the girl. Devotion to one particular bit of soil is a Mexican characteristic, and in Ramon it was highly developed because he had spent so much of his life close to the earth. Every summer of his boyhood he had been sent to one of the sheep ranches which belonged to the various branches of his numerous family. ”

“ Give him a ship under his feet and he would be quit of this foolish trance.
He wondered how the old man proposed to set him aboard the Valkyrie and hide him there until the harbor was astern. It was a nut to crack. He forbore to ask too many questions. They annoyed Papa Ramon. He was his own strategist. An uncannily strong finish he was making of it. The adventure was like a magic draught of the elixir of youth. It enabled him to hold decrepitude at arm’s length, for a little while to grin in the face of the old devil of death that had so often jumped out at him from the dark. ”

“ A KISS—ITS CONSEQUENCES If Gordon had happened to look behind him before riding on down into the cañon, he might have seen with the naked eye two black dots crawling like flies along the high bare flank of a mountain far behind. Under a binocular the flies would have resolved into Lee and Ramon. Further, in that clear, dry atmosphere, a good telescope would have revealed both the girl’s worried expression and Ramon’s glowing ardor. For just as the “wages of sin is death,” so the wages of flirtation—especially if the party of the second part be of Latin blood—is apt to be disaster. ”

“ Ramon loves to pose as a royal Don, but I do not think he is of noble birth. Once every year he goes to Mexico or the United States for supplies, and sometimes he coaxes others to come back with him, and be his slaves."
"And do the people love their master?" asked Madeline.
"No. They hate him, but they fear him. Not one who has ever come here has gone away again, for he dares not let them return to tell where he is hiding. Now there are seventeen men and nine women here. With you, and those he will fetch from your yacht, there will be many more ”

“ Yoh tell him come here by big rock, sweetheart?"
Annie-Many-Ponies took a minute for deliberation—which is the Indian way. Ramon, having learned patience, said no more but watched her slant-eyed.
"I tell," she promised at last, and added, "I go now." Then she slipped away. And Ramon, though he stood for several minutes by the rock smiling queerly and staring down the arroyo, caught not the slightest glimpse of her after she left him. He knew that she would deliver faithfully his message to Bill Holmes, she had given her word. ”

“ Still it is hardly to be distinguished from the real thing; it inspires the same watchful care, and causes the same doubts and torments; the touch-stone lies in unselfishness and constancy. Else it is very easy to mistake them. Ramon believed himself to be sincerely in love with Esperanza, and perhaps he was justified, for he admired her and thought of her night and day, he sought every opportunity of pleasing her, and hated his rivals mortally. ”

“ That night Ramon intoxicated himself in some tavern brawl. He had a companion [Pg 165] with him, not of his own sex; and when another officer reproached him with it, for his cousin, he swore that he would marry her, and that she had been—— Then they fought a duel, and both were wounded. ”

“ Because, admitting his blood-unison, Ramón at the same [Pg 447] time claimed a supremacy, even a godliness. He was a man, as the lowest of his peons was a man. At the same time, rising from the same pool of blood, from the same roots of manhood as they, and being, as they were, a man of the pulsing blood, he was still something more. Not in the blood nor in the spirit lay his individuality and his supremacy, his godhead. But in a star within him, an inexplicable star which rose out of the dark sea and shone between the flood and the great sky. ”

“ Towering in the grandeur of his own moral passion, and backed by that dynamic atmosphere, of public opinion which invisibly enspheres the good man pitted against the scoundrel, the broker makes the noble cower and flee before the storm of his angry contempt.
Ramon is slowly driven to desperation by his vices and their natural fruits. Caberero, malignantly resenting the denunciation and disdain of Febro, resolves to break into his vaults and rob him of his deposits. With diabolical ingenuity he entangles Ramon in the plot. ”

“ The sunset colors were just as glorious as ever and the sky was mirrored upon the water. “Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” she quoted to Larry, at the wheel, to his amusement. To him she related all the story of Ramon as far as she knew it. “How glad he will be to know about his mother and sister,” said she, “and that they are safe! And it will be wonderful for them. I believe I’ll send a telegram in the morning—or would you?”
“I’ll send one if you like, Betty—for you. But perhaps we’d better find out what Ramon wants first. ”

“ Often Ramon had followed them—across the deserts where the heat shimmered and the yellow dust hung like a great pale plume over the rippling backs of the herd, and up to the summer range in the mountains where they fed above the clouds in lush green pastures crowned with spires of rock and snow. He had shared the beans and mutton and black coffee of the herders and had gone to sleep on a pile of peltries to the evensong of the coyotes that hung on the flanks of the herd. Hunting, fishing, wandering, he had lived like a savage and found the life good. ”