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CHAPTER XIV

Jack sounded Mr. Gore's praises loudly in Mariquita's ears, and she heard them gladly. She thought well of her fellow-creatures, and it was always pleasant to her to hear them commended.

Jack also bragged a little of his diplomacy, bidding his daughter note how Miss Mariquita had been pleased by his praise of her sweetheart.

"Miss Mariquita has not got even a sweetheart," Ginger declared, "and maybe never will. It isn't the way of her. She was just as proud when you said a good word for Ben Sturt."

"Ben Sturt! What's he to the young mistress?"

"Just nothing at all – not in that way. Nor yet Mr. Gore isn't. And the more's the pity. But she's good-hearted. She likes to hear good of folk – as much as some likes to hear ill of anybody, no matter who."

Jack was a little discouraged – but not effectually.

Mr. Gore was much too slow, he thought. Why should Miss Mariquita be thinking of him unless he "let on" how much he was thinking of her?

"Did you ever lie under an apple-tree when the blossom was on it?" he asked Gore one day.

"I daresay I have."

"And expected to have your mouth full of apples when there was only blossom on it?"

Jack forced so much meaning into his ugly old face that Gore could discern the allegorical intent. He was very amused.

"There'd never be much chance of apples," he said carelessly, "if the tree was shaken till the blossom fell off. The wind spoils more blossom than the frost does."

Jack was not the only one who thought Gore slow in his wooing; the cowboys thought so too, though they did not, like Jack, find any fault with him for his slowness. In general they would have been more critical of rapidity and apparent success. Ben Sturt had learned to like him cordially, and wished him success, but Ben was of opinion that more haste would have been worse speed. He thought that Gore deserved Mariquita if anyone could, but was sure that even Gore would have to wait long and be very patient and careful. To Ben Mariquita seemed almost like one belonging to another world, certainly living on a plane above his comprehension, where ordinary love-making would be, somehow, unfitting and hopeless. It had always met with her father's cool approbation that Mariquita kept herself aloof from the young men about the place. But she was not wanting in interest for them. They were her neighbors, and she, who had so much interest for all her little dumb neighbors of the prairie, had a much higher interest in these bigger, but not much less dumb, neighbors of the homestead. They were more than a mere group to her. Each individual in the group was, she knew, as dear to God as herself, had been created by God for the same purpose as herself, and for the soul of each, Christ upon the Cross had been in as bitter labor as for the soul of any one of the saints. She was the last creature on earth to regard as of mere casual interest to herself those in whom God's interest was so deep, and close, and unfailing.

Perhaps they were rough; it might be that of the great things of which Mariquita herself thought so habitually, they thought little and seldom: but she did not think them bad. She thought more of them than they guessed, and liked them better than they imagined. She would have wished to serve and help them, and was not indolent, but humble concerning herself, and shy. She worked for them, more perhaps than her father thought necessary; in that way she could serve them. But she could not preach to them, nor exhort them. She would have shrunk instinctively, not from the danger of ridicule, but from the danger that the ridicule might fall on religion itself, and not merely on her. She would have dreaded the risk of misrepresenting religion to them, of giving them ideas of God such as would repel them from Him. She knew that speech was not easy to her, eloquent speech was no gift of hers; she did not believe herself to have any readiness of expressing what she felt and knew, and did not credit herself with great knowledge. She did not really put them down as being entirely ignorant of what she did know.

The idea of a woman's preaching would have shocked Mariquita, to her it would have seemed "out of place." She was a humble girl, with a diffidence not universal among those who are themselves trying to serve God, some of whom are apt to be slow at understanding that others may be as near Him as themselves, though behaving differently, and holding a different fashion of speech.

God who had made them must know more about them, she felt, than she could. She did not think she understood them very well, but God had made the men and knew them as well as He knew the women. She was, with all her ignorance and her limited opportunities of observation and understanding, able to see much goodness among these neighbors of hers; He must be able to see much more.

In reality Mariquita did more for them than she had any idea of. They understood that in her was something higher than their understanding; that her goodness was real they did understand. It never shocked them as the "goodness" of some good people would by a first instinct have shocked them, by its uncharity, its self-conscious superiority, its selfishness, its complacence, its eagerness to assume the Divine prerogative of judgment and of punishment. They were, perhaps unconsciously, proud of her, who was so plainly never proud of herself. They knew that she was kind. They had penetration enough to be aware that if she held her own way, in some external aloofness, it was not out of cold indifference, or self-centred pride, not even out of a prudish shrinking from their roughness. They became less rough. Their behavior in her sight and hearing was not without effect upon their behavior in her absence. She taught them a reverence for woman that may only have begun in respect for herself. Almost all of them cared enough for her approval to try and become more capable of deserving it. Some of them, God who taught them knows how, became conscious of her lonely absorption in prayer, and the prairie became less empty to them. Probably none of them remained ignorant that to the girl God was life and breath, happiness and health, master and companion: the explanation of herself and of her beauty. They did not understand it all, but they saw more than they understood.

The loveliness of each flower preached to Mariquita; sometimes she would sit upon the ground, her heart beating, holding in her hand one of those tiny weeds that millions of eyes can overlook without perceiving they are beautiful, insignificant in size, without any blaze of color, and realize its marvel of loveliness with a singular exultation; she would note the exquisite perfection of its minute parts – that each tiny spray was a string of stars, white, or tenderest azure, or mauve, gold-centred, a microscopic installation hidden all its life on the prairie-floor, as if falling from heaven it had grown smaller and smaller as it neared the earth. Her heart beat, I say, as she looked, and the light shining in her happy eyes was exultation at the unimaginable loveliness of God, who had imagined this minutest creature, and thought it worth while to conceive this and every other lovely thing for the house even of His children's exile and probation, their waiting-room on the upward road. So it preached to her the Uncreated Beauty, and the unbeginning, Eternal Love. As unconscious as was the little flower of its fragrance, its loveliness and its message, Mariquita, who could never have preached, was giving her message too.

Her rough neighbors saw her near them and (perhaps without knowing that they knew it) knew that that which made her rare and exquisite was of Divine origin. She never hinted covert exhortation in her talk. If she spoke to any of them they could listen without dread of some shrewdly folded rebuke. Yet they could not get away from the fact that she was herself a perpetual reminder of noble purpose.

CHAPTER XV

What the cowboys had come, with varying degrees of slowness or celerity, to feel by intuitions little instructed by experience or reasoning, Gore had to arrive at by more deliberate study.

He was more civilized and less instinctive. He knew many more people, and had experience, wanting to them, of many women of fine and high character. What made the rarity of Mariquita's instinct did not inform him, and he had to observe and surmise.

He saw no books in the house, and did not perceive how Mariquita could read; she must, in the way of information and knowledge such as most educated girls possess be, as it were, disinherited. Yet he did not feel that she was ignorant. It is more ignorant to have adopted false knowledge than to be uninformed.

Every day added to Gore's sense of the girl's rarity and nobility. He admired her more and more, the reverence of his admiration increasing with its growth. Nor was his appreciation blind, or blinded. He surmised a certain lack in her – the absence of humor, and he was, at any rate, so far correct that Mariquita was without the habit of humor. Long after this time, she was thought by her companions to have a delightful radiant cheerfulness like mirth. But when Gore first knew her, what occasion had she had for indulgence in the habit of humor?

Her father's house was not gay, and he would have thought gaiety in it out of place. Loud laughter might resound in the cowboys' quarters, but Don Joaquin would have much disapproved any curiosity in his daughter as to its cause. He seldom laughed himself and never wished to make anyone else laugh. His Spanish blood and his Indian blood almost equally tended to make him regard laughter and merriment as a slur on dignity.

Some of those who have attempted the elusive feat of analyzing the causes and origin of humor lay down that it lies in a perception of the incongruous, the less fit. I should be sorry to think that a complete account of the matter. No doubt it describes the occasion of much of our laughter, though not, I refuse to believe, of all.

That sense of humor implies little charity, and a good deal of conscious superiority. It makes us laugh at accidents not agreeable to those who suffer them, at uncouthness, ignorances, solecisms, inferiorities, follies, blunders, stupidities, unconsciously displayed weaknesses and faults. It is the sort of humor that sets us laughing at a smartly dressed person fallen into a filthy drain, at a man who does not know how to eat decently, at mispronunciation of names, and misapplication or oblivion of aspirates, at greediness not veiled by politeness, at a man singing who doesn't know how. Now Mariquita had no conceit and was steeped in charity in big and little things. In that sort of humor she would have been lacking, for she would have thought too kindly of its butt to be able to enjoy his misfortune. And, as has been already said, she had no habit of the thing.

Gore, in accusing her of lack of humor, felt that the accusation was a heavy one. It was not quite unjust: we have partly explained Mariquita's deficiency without entirely denying it, or pretending it was an attraction. No doubt, she would have been a greater laugher if she had been more ill-natured, had had wider opportunities of perceiving the absurdity of her contemporaries.

As for those queer and quaint quips of circumstance that make the oddity of daily life for some of us, few of them had enlivened Mariquita. The chief occasion of general gathering was round the table, where hunger and haste were the most obvious characteristics of the meeting. Till Gore came, there had been little conversation. It was not Mariquita's fault that she had been used neither to see or hear much that was entertaining. Perhaps the facility of being amused is an acquired taste; and even so, the faculty of humor is almost of necessity dormant where scarcely anything offers for it to work or feed upon.

CHAPTER XVI

The projected visit to Maxwell did not immediately take place. Don Joaquin was seldom hasty in action, having a chronic, habitual esteem for deliberation and deliberateness too.

Sarella would have been impatient had she not been sufficiently unwell to shrink for the moment from the idea of a very long ride. For the mere pleasure of riding she would never have mounted a horse; she would only ride when there was no other means of arriving at some object or place not otherwise attainable.

Gore, however, was again absent on the second Saturday after his first visit to Maxwell. And on this occasion his place was vacant at breakfast. Nor did he return till Monday afternoon.

On that afternoon Mariquita had walked out some distance across the prairie. Not in the direction of the Maxwell trail, but quite in the opposite direction. Her way brought her to what they called Saul Bluff – a very low, broken ridge, sparsely overgrown with small rather shabby trees. It would scarcely have hidden the chimneys of a cottage had there been any cottage on its farther side; but there was none anywhere near it. For many miles there was no building in any direction, except "Don Jo's," as, to its owner's annoyance, his homestead was called.

When Mariquita had reached the top of the bluff she took advantage of the slight elevation on which she stood, to look round upon the great spread of country stretching to the low horizon on every side. It was, like most days here, a day of wind and sun. The air was utterly pure and scentless; the scent was not fir-scent, and the scattered, windy trees gave no smell. She saw a chipmunk and laughed, as the sight of that queer little creature, and its odd mixture of shyness and effrontery always made her laugh.

It was even singularly clear, and the foothills of the Rockies were just visible. The trail, which ran over the bluff a little to her left, was full in sight below her, but so little used as to be slight enough. A mile farther on it crossed the river, and was too faint to be seen beyond. The river was five miles behind her as well as a mile in front, for it made a big loop, north, and then, west-about, southward.

She sat down and for a long time was rapt in her own thoughts, which were not, at first, of any human person. Perhaps she would not herself have said that she was praying. But all prayer does not consist in begging favors even for others. Its essence does not lie in request, but in the lifting of self, heart and mind, to God. The love of a child to its father need not necessarily find its sole exercise and expression in demand. Her thought and love flew up to her Father and rested, immeasurably happy. The real joys of her life were in that presence. The sense of His love, not merely for herself, was the higher bliss it gave her: not merely for herself, I say, for it spread as wide as all humanity, and her own share in it was as little as a star in the milky way, in the whole glory, what it is for all the saints in heaven and on earth, for all sinners, for His great Mother, and, most immeasurable of all, the infinite perfection of His love for Himself, of Father and Son for the Holy Spirit, of Son and Spirit for the Eternal Father, of Spirit and Father for the Son. This stretched far beyond the reach of her vision, but she looked as far as her human sight could reach, as one looks on that much of the mystic ocean that eye can hold. Not separable from this joy in the Divine Love was her joy in the Divine Beauty, of which all created beauty sang, whether it were that of the smallest flower or that of Christ's Mother herself. The wind's clean breath whispered of it; the vast loveliness of the enormous dome above her, and the limitless expanse of not less lovely earth on which that dome rested, witnessed to the Infinite Beauty that had imagined and made them.

But sooner or later Mariquita must share, for in that the silent tenderness of her nature showed itself: she could not be content to have her great happiness to herself, to enjoy alone. So, presently, in her prayer she came, as always, to gathering round her all whom she knew and all whom she did not know. As she would have wished them to think in their prayer of her, so must she have them also in the Divine Presence with her, lift their names up to God, even their names which, unknown to her, He knew as well as He knew her own.

Her living father and her dead mother, the old school-friends and the nuns, the old priest at Loretto, and a certain crooked old gardener that had been there (crooked in body, in face, and in temper), Sarella, and Mr. Gore, and all the cowboys – all these Mariquita gathered into the loving arms of her memory, and presented them at their Father's feet. Her way in this was her own way, and unlike perhaps that of others. She had no idea of bringing them to God's memory, as if His tenderness needed any reminder from her, for always she heard Him saying: "Can you teach Me pity and love?" She did not think it depended on her that good should come to them from Him. Were she to be lazy or forgetful, He would never let them suffer through her neglect. They were immeasurably more His than they could be hers. But she could not be at His feet and not in her loving mind see them there beside her, and she knew He chose that at His feet she should not forget them. She could not dictate to Him what He was to give them, in what fashion He should bless and help them. He knew exactly. Her surmises must be ignorant.

Therefore Mariquita's prayer was more wordless than common, less phrased; but its intensity was more uncommon. Nor could it be limited to those – a handful out of all His children – whom she knew or had ever known. There were all the rest – everywhere: those who knew how to serve Him, and were doing it, as she had never learned to serve; those who had never heard His name, and those who knew it but shrank from it as that of an angry observer; those most hapless ones who lived by disobeying Him, even by dragging others down into the slough of disobedience; the whole world's sick, body-sick and soul-sick; those who here are mad, and will find reason only in heaven; the whole world's sorrowful ones, the luckless, those gripped in the hard clutch of penury, or the sordid clutch of debt; the blind whose first experience of beauty will be perfect beauty, the foully diseased, the deformed, the deaf and dumb whose first speech will be their joining in the songs of heaven, their first hearing that of the music of heaven … all these, and many, many others she must bring about her, or her gladness in God's nearness would be selfishness. That nearness! she felt Him much nearer than was her own raiment, nearer than was her own flesh…

CHAPTER XVII

It was long after Mariquita had come to her place upon the bluff, that the sound of a horse cantering towards it made her rise and go to the farther westward edge of the bluff to look. The horseman was quite near, below her. It was Gore, and he saw her at the same moment in which she saw him. He lifted his big, wide-brimmed hat from his head and waved it. It would never have even occurred to her to be guilty of the churlishness of turning away to go homeward. Her thoughts, almost the only thing of her own she had ever had, she was always ready to lay aside for courtesy.

He had dismounted, and was leading his horse up the rather steep slope. She stood waiting for him, a light rather than a smile upon her noble face, a light like the glow of a far horizon…

"I thought," she said, when he had come up, "that you had gone to Maxwell."

"No, I went to Denver this time," he told her, "beyond Denver a little. Where do you think I heard Mass yesterday – this morning again, too? for both of us, since you could not come."

"Not at Loretto!"

But she knew it was at Loretto. His smile told her.

"Yes, at Loretto. It was the same to me which place I went to. No, not the same, for I wanted to see the place where you had been a little girl, so that I could come back and bring you word of it."

"Ah, how kind you are!" she said, with a sort of wonder of gratefulness shining on her.

("She is far more beautiful than I ever knew," he thought.)

"Not kind at all," Gore protested. "Just to please myself! There's no great kindness in that except to myself."

"Oh, yes! for you knew how it would please me. It was wonderful that you should be so kind as to think of it."

"It gave me pleasure anyway. To be in the place where you had been so happy – "

"Ah, but I am always happy," she interrupted. "Though indeed I was happy there, and sorrowful to leave it. But I did not leave it quite behind; it came with me."

"I have a great many things to tell you. They remember you most faithfully. If my going gave me pleasure, it gave them much more. You cannot think how much they made of me for your sake; I stayed there a long time after Mass yesterday, and they made me go back in the afternoon – I was there all afternoon. And all the time we were talking of you."

"Then I think," Mariquita declared, laughing merrily, "your talk will have been monotonous."

"Oh, not monotonous at all. Are they not dear women? They showed me where you sat in chapel – and the different places where you had sat in classrooms, and in the refectory, when you first came, as a small girl of ten, and as you rose in the school."

"I did not rise very high. I was never one of the clever ones – "

"They kept that to themselves – "

"Oh, yes! They would do that. Nuns are so charitable – they would never say that any of the girls was stupid."

"No, they didn't hint that in the least. Sister Gabriel showed me a drawing of yours."

"What was it?"

"She said it was the Grand Canal at Venice. I have never been there – "

"Nor I. But I remember doing it. The water wouldn't come flat. It looked like a blue road running up-hill. Sister Gabriel was very kind, very kind indeed. She used to have hay-fever."

"So she has now. She listened for more than half-an-hour while I told her about you."

"Mr. Gore, I think you will have been inventing things to tell her," Mariquita protested, laughing again. She kept laughing, for happiness and pleasure.

"Oh, no! On the contrary, I kept forgetting things. Afterwards I remembered some of them, and told her what I had left out. Some I only remembered when it was too late, after I had come away. Sister Marie Madeleine – I hope you remember her too – she asked hundreds of questions about you."

"Oh, yes, of course I remember her. She taught me French. And I was stupid about it…"

"She was very anxious to know if you kept it up. She said you wanted only practice – and vocabulary."

"And idiom, and grammar, and pronunciation," Mariquita insisted, laughing very cheerfully. "Did you tell her there was no one to keep it up with?"

He told her of many others of the nuns – he had evidently taken trouble to bring her word of them all. And he had asked for news of the girls she had known best, and brought her news of them also. Several were married, two had entered Holy Religion.

"Sylvia Markham," he said, "you remember her? She has come back to Loretto to be a nun. She is a novice; she was clothed at Easter. Sister Mary Scholastica she is – the younger children call her Sister Elastic."

"Oh," cried Mariquita, with her happy laugh, "how funny it is – to hear you talking of Sylvia. She was harum-scarum. What a noise she used to make, too! How pretty she was!"

"Sister Elastic is just as pretty. She sent fifty messages to you. But Nellie Hurst – you remember her?"

"Certainly I do. She was champion at baseball. And she acted better than anybody. Oh, and she edited the Magazine, and she kept us all laughing. She was funny! Geraldine Barnes had a quinsy and it nearly choked her, but Nellie Hurst made her laugh so much that it burst, and she was soon well again…"

"Well, and where do you think she is now?"

"Where?" Mariquita asked almost breathlessly.

"In California. At Santa Clara, near San José. She is a Carmelite."

"A Carmelite! And she used to say she would write plays (She did write several that were acted at Loretto) and act them herself – on the stage, I mean."

It took Gore a long time to tell all his budget of news; he had hardly finished before they reached the homestead, towards which the sinking sun had long warned them to be moving. And he had presents for her, a rosary ("brought by Mother General from Rome and blessed by the Pope,") a prayerbook, a lovely Agnus Dei covered with white satin and beautifully embroidered, scapulars, a little bottle of Lourdes water, another of ordinary holy water, and a little hanging stoup to put some of it in, also a statue of Our Lady, and a small framed print of the Holy House of Loretto.

Mariquita had never owned so many things in her life.

"Oh, dear!" she said. "And I had been long thinking that I was quite forgotten there; I am ashamed. And you – how to thank you!"

"But you have been thanking me all the time," he said, "ever since I told you where I had been. Every time you laughed you thanked me."

They met Ben Sturt, who was lounging about by the gate in the homestead fence; he had never seen Mariquita with just that light of happiness upon her.

"Here," he said to Gore, "let me take the horse; I'll see to him."

He knew that Mariquita would not come to the stables, and he wanted Gore to be free to stay with her to the last moment.

As he led the horse away he thought to himself: "It has really begun at last;" and he loyally wished his friend good luck.

Within a yard or two of the door they met Don Joaquin.

"Father," she said at once, "Mr. Gore didn't go to Maxwell this time. He went all the way to Denver – to Loretto. And see what a lot of presents he has brought me from them!"

Gore thought she looked adorable as, like a child unused to gifts, she showed her little treasures to the rather grim old prairie dog.

He looked less grim than usual. It suited him that she should be so pleased.

"Well!" he said, "you're stocked now. Mr. Gore had a long ride to fetch them."

"Oh, yes! Did you ever hear of anybody being so kind?"

Her father noted shrewdly the new expression of grateful pleasure on her face. It seemed to him that Gore was not so incompetent as he had been supposing, to carry on his campaign. Sarella came out and joined them. "What a cunning little pin-cushion!" she exclaimed. "Isn't it just sweet?" The Agnus Dei was almost the only one of Mariquita's new treasures to which she could assign a use.

"Oh, and the necklace! Garnets relieved by those crystal blobs are just the very fashion."

"It is a rosary," Don Joaquin explained in a rather stately tone. It made him uneasy – it must be unlucky – to hear these frivolous eulogies applied to "holy objects" with which personally he had never had the familiarity that diminishes awe.

Mariquita had plenty to do indoors and did not linger. Gore went in also to wash and tidy himself after his immensely long ride.

Sarella, who of course knew long before this where Mariquita had received her education, and had been told whence these pious gifts came, smiled as she turned to Don Joaquin.

"So Gore rode all the way to Denver this time," she remarked.

"It is beyond Denver. Mariquita was pleased to hear news of her old friends."

"Oh, I daresay. Gore is not such a fool as he looks."

"I am not thinking that he looks a fool at all," said Don Joaquin, more stately than ever.

("How Spanish!" thought Sarella, "I suppose they're born solemn.")

"Indeed," she cheerfully agreed, "nor do I. He wouldn't be so handsome if he looked silly. He's all sense. And he knows his road, short cuts and all."

Don Joaquin disliked her mention of Gore's good looks, as she intended. She had no idea of being snubbed by her elderly suitor.

"Mariquita," he laid down, "will think more of his good sense than of his appearance. I have not brought her up to consider a gentleman's looks."

Sarella laughed; she was not an easy person to "down."

"But you didn't bring me up," she said, "and I can tell you that you might have been as wise as Solomon and it wouldn't have mattered to me if you had been ugly. I'd rather look than listen any day; and I like to have something worth looking at."

Her very pretty eyes were turned full on her mature admirer's face, and he did not dislike their flattery. An elderly man who has been very handsome is not often displeased at being told he is worth looking at still.

"So do I, Sarellita," he responded, telling himself (and her) how much pleasure there was in looking at her.

Stately he could not help being, but his manner had now no stiffness; and in the double diminutive of her name there was almost a tenderness, a nearer approach to tenderness than she could understand. She could understand, however, that he was more lover-like than he had ever been.

A slight flush of satisfaction (that he took for maiden shyness) was on her face, as she looked up under her half-drooped eyelids.

"Perhaps," he said in much lower tones than he usually employed, "perhaps Mr. Gore knows what you call his road better than I. But he does not know better the goal he wants to reach."

("Say!" Sarella asked herself, "what's coming?")

Two of the cowboys were coming – had come in fact. They appeared at that moment round the corner of the house, ready for supper.

"So," one of them said, with rather loud irritation, evidently concluding a story, "my dad married her, and I have a step-ma younger than myself – "