Mariquita Part 10

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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 n.o.ble 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 Ma.s.s 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 Ma.s.s 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 cla.s.srooms, 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 p.r.o.nunciation," 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 Jose. 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!"