A WOMAN'S REMINISCENCE OF MATAMOROS
Is the summer of 1865 we had been obliged to leave our home in Mallorca, for change of air and rest for my husband and children, whose health had suffered from repeated attacks of Mediterranean fever, and we were staying at Montpellier (Hérault), when I saw for the first and last time the subject of this memoir.
Before his arrest at Barcelona we had been interested in him, and all through the weary months of his imprisonment his letters had been read, translated, and circulated by us, and had called forth appreciative sympathy and energetic assistance from friends in many places.
The motives for that sympathy and the need for that assistance are fully set forth in other chapters of this book. I only allude to them now in order to make a kind of confession as regards my own feeling towards Matamoros, whom I had so far only known in his semi-public character. Personally, then, I was inclined to think that he had been too much talked about and be praised. The inflated and exaggerated style of Spanish correspondence, so far from impressing me with a true sense of what he had done and suffered, had reacted upon my mind, till I undervalued both, and when I knew that he was coming from Pau to spend a day or two with us, I anticipated little more than a confirmation of my fears that the vulgar fame of a patronized ex-victim must have destroyed the glory of his martyrdom and that self-consciousness, which is self-conceit, could hardly have failed to mingle with and damage the simplicity of his heroism.
But my recollections of the short hours of our personal acquaintance go to prove that I was quite at fault.
He had passed through the long grief and pain of his imprisonment unembittered, through the ordeal of European notoriety undisturbed, and through the crucible of coterie admiration unspoiled.
Surely this is much to the glory of the grace of Him who, Himself lowly and humble of heart, kept His servant from faults all the more insidious and dangerous, because they do not always look like sins, and because they are often encouraged and fostered by the injudicious affection of Christians themselves.
I first saw Manuel Matamoros one evening, early in December, 1865, at the Hotel Nevet, at Montpellier.
Our sitting-room was on the first floor, and my little daughter's nursery was on the second. By some mistake of the servants, he had been directed to the upper floor, when he had asked for our rooms.
My children were in various stages of preparation for bed, when we heard a sound at the door and saw standing at it a figure which looked almost gigantic in the dim evening light, with coal-black hair and beard, and bright, amused, kindly eyes, gazing down at the pretty group of half-dressed babies.
My first glance at him seemed to sweep away clouds, and to reveal the man as he really was. I jumped up from the ground where I had been sitting, and said, "Is it Manuel?" To which he answered with a handclasp like that of a friend, and I hurried with him down to the room where my husband was waiting, and where the two friends were soon locked in one an-other's arms.
I wish I had at the time made some notes of the long conversations which took place between these two, both so earnestly desiring to ascertain the best means of spreading, in the land which was dear to both, the knowledge of the love of God. But I did not do so, and though some of the trifling occurrences of those days are very vivid and clear in my memory, I dare not write down here what I believe to be my recollections of things said then. So much has happened, I have seen and heard so much of Spain since, that I could not be assured of my own accuracy the peaks of distant mountains seem merged into each other when the evening sun shines on them, and the sense of the leagues which separate the nearer from the farther ranges is lost in the vague blue mist which rises from the plain at their feet.
We dined at the table d'hôte that day. Manuel was in very good spirits, and I remember our noticing that at the long table, where we were the only foreigners, the proverbial characteristics of the different nationalities seemed for the moment changed. The vivacious, loquacious French people were dining in silence and with gravity, while the somber Spaniard and the reserved and cold-blooded English people chatted and laughed over the meal like three children.
Manuel's manner was very frank, genial, kindly and simple. He was quite ready to receive any suggestion, advice, or criticism concerning his work or himself. The impression made on the first evening and which lasted and grew was—"He is quite unspoiled." We attended a Sunday evening service which M. le Pasteur Recollin held in a room, hollowed out of the rock, beneath a part of the town, and which he loved to call "The Catacombs of Montpellier." Schools and week-day services were held here, and after the service on this especial evening, a few friends were invited to remain, and Manuel gave a slight sketch of what he had done, and what he hoped to do. M. Recollin's judicious questioning drew out most lucid and interesting details, and Manuel felt how much he had been helped "to say his catechism," as he called the account he had given us.
The little audience was thoroughly delighted and sympathetic, and full of brotherly feeling.
Next day, a much larger meeting was held in the house of one of the rich families of Montpellier, whose name is on many a page of Southern French History.
The external contrast between this gathering and that in the "catacombs" was very great, but it was chiefly in externals, and the welcome to the servant of Christ, for His Master's sake, was equally cordial in either place.
Manuel himself was far "too great a man," as a great American has said, "to know how he dined or how he dressed," and was perfectly at his ease in his simple well-bred way, with people of every class and rank of society.
The easy courtesy and stately simplicity which characterize the manners of his countrymen lost nothing of their grace and charm in his person, and the refinement which accompanies Christian grace, and which sorrow and suffering bring forth in elect natures, thus trained and molded, distinguished and ennobled him, supplying defects of education, and correcting errors of early training.
He spoke long, earnestly and ardently to the crowd of cultivated and critical hearers, and carried them all with him by the faith and fire with which he told his story. He spoke in French, with facility and fluency, though not quite correctly. Not eloquently, except so far as every Spaniard is eloquent, but with so much personal feeling, coupled with such self-forgetting modesty, that I think the effect produced was greater than might have been made by a more finished orator.
At the close the audience manifested much kind and sympathetic feeling, congratulating, applauding, and encouraging him.
He received all the homage with quiet dignity and gratitude, laughed a little, when it was all over, at some point-blank praises which were more direct than tasteful, and ended with—"If they will only help our Mission!"
On the fourth morning he left us. The diligence started early, but we breakfasted together, and commended him to the love and care of the Father who had brought him out of prison and was leading him onward by a way that we knew not to his heavenly home.
My personal recollections of him end here. They are very pleasant ones in every way. The handsome, intelligent, meridional face; the cordial, affectionate manner, tempered by a kind of wistful deference which was very touching and attractive; the heroic simplicity and modesty; the transparent innocence, and the unshaken endurance and resolution of his life were all legible in his words and ways.
The games he played with my little children; the imitations of cats, birds, and dogs with which he delighted them; the stories he told them of his tame canaries and the mice he used to feed in his prison, are well remembered still by them, but cannot be described or repeated here. He left us, blessing us and them, and I saw him no more.