Mariquita Part 20

"Mariquita! Has she said so?" he demanded sharply.

"Not to me," Sarella replied, quite unconcernedly.

"Nor to me," Gore explained; "nevertheless, I believe it will be so."

"That depends on _me_," the girl's father a.s.serted with an unpleasant mixture of annoyance and obstinacy. "I intend her to marry."

"Only a Protestant," said Sarella, with a shrewd understanding of Don Joaquin that surprised Gore, "would marry her if she believes she has a vocation to be a nun. I should think a Catholic man would be ashamed to do it. He would expect a judgment on himself and his children."

Don Joaquin was as angry as ever, as savage as ever, but he was startled. Both his companions could see this. Gore was astonished at Sarella's speech, and at her ac.u.men. He had wished to have this interview with Mariquita's father to himself, but already saw that Sarella knew how to conduct it better than he did. She had clearly been quite willing that "the old man" (as he disrespectfully called him in his own mind) should fly out and give way to his fiery temper at once; the more of it went off now, the less would remain for poor Mariquita to endure.

"If I were a Catholic man," Sarella continued cooly, "I should think it _profane_ to make a girl marry me who had given herself to be a nun. I expect the Lord would punish it." She paused meditatively, and then added, "and all who joined in pushing her to it. I know _I_ wouldn't join. I think folks have enough of their own to answer for, without bringing judgments down on their heads for things like that. It won't get me to heaven to help in interfering between Mariquita and her way of getting there."

All the while she spoke, Sarella seemed to be admiring, with her head turned on one side, the prettiness of her left wrist on which was a gold bangle, with a crystal heart dangling from it. Don Joaquin had given her the bangle, and himself admired the heart chiefly because it was crystal and not of diamonds.

"Isn't it pretty?" she said, looking suddenly up and catching his eye watching her.

"I thought you hadn't cared much for it," he answered, greatly pleased.

He had always known _she_ would have preferred a smaller heart if crusted with diamonds.

Gore longed to laugh. She astonished and puzzled him. Her cleverness was a revelation to him, and her good-nature, her subtlety, and her earnestness--for he knew she had been in earnest in what she said about not daring to interfere with other people's ways of getting to heaven.

"That old man who instructs her," he thought, "must have taught her a lot."

Of course, on his own account, he was no more afraid of Don Joaquin than she was. But he had been terribly afraid of the hard old man on Mariquita's, and he was deeply grateful to Sarella.

"Sir," he said, "what she has said to you I do feel myself. I am a Catholic--and the dearest of my sisters is a nun. I should have hated and despised any man who had tried to spoil her life by s.n.a.t.c.hing it to himself against her will. He would have to be a wicked fellow, and brutal, and impious. G.o.d's curse would lie on him. So it would on me if I did that hideous thing, though G.o.d knows to-day has brought me the great disappointment of my life. Life can never be for me what I have been hoping it might be. Never."

Sarella, listening, and knowing that the two men were looking at each other, smiled at her bangle, and softly shook the dangling heart to make the crystal give as diamond-like a glitter as possible. Gore's life, she thought, would come all right. She had done her best valorously for Mariquita; women, in her theory, behooved to do their best for each other against masculine tyrrany ("bossishness," she called it), but all the time she was half-savage, herself, with the girl for not being willing to be happy in so obviously comfortable a way as offered. It seemed to her "wasteful" that so pretty a girl should go and be a nun; if she had been "homely" like Sister Aquinas it would have been different. But Sarella had learned from Sister Aquinas that these matters were above her, and was quite content to accept them without understanding them.

"Ever since I came here," Gore was saying, "I have lived in a dream of what life would be--if I could join hers with mine. It was only a dream, and I had to awake."

Don Joaquin did not understand his mind, but he was able now to see that the young man suffered, and had received a blow that, somehow, _would_ change his life, and turn its course aside.

"Anything," Gore said, in a very low, almost thankful tone, "is better than it would have been if I had changed my dream for a nightmare; it would have been that, if I had to think of myself as trying to pull her down, from her level to mine, of her as having been brought down. I meant to do her all possible good, all my life long. How can I wish to have done her the greatest harm? As it would have been if, out of fear or over-persuasion, she had been brought to call herself my wife who could be no man's wife."

("_How_ he loves her!" thought Sarella.)

("I doubt it has wrecked him a bit," thought Don Joaquin.)

CHAPTER x.x.x.

Mariquita awoke early to see Sarella entering her room, and it surprised her, for her cousin was not fond of leaving her bed betimes.

"Oh, I'm going back to bed again," Sarella explained. "We were up to all hours. Of course, your father made a rumpus."

Mariquita heard this with less surprise than concern. It really grieved her to displease him.

"He has very queer old-fashioned notions," Sarella remarked, settling herself comfortably on Mariquita's bed, "and thinks it's his business to arrange all your affairs for you. Besides, you know by this time that any plan he has been hatching he expects to hatch out, and not to help him seems to him most undutiful and shocking."

"But I _can't_ help him in this plan of his," Mariquita pleaded unhappily.

"I suppose not. Well, he flared out, and I was glad you were in bed.

Gore behaved very well. It's a thousand pities you can't like him."

"But I do like him. I like him better than any man I ever knew."

"Oh, yes! Better than the cowboys or the old chaplain at Loretto.

_That's_ no good."

All this Sarella intended as medicinal; Mariquita, she thought, ought to have _some_ of the chill of the late storm. She was not ent.i.tled to immediate and complete relief from suspense. But Sarella was beginning to feel a little chill about the legs herself, and did not care to risk a cold, so she abbreviated her disciplinary remarks a little.

"I'm a good stepmother," she remarked complacently, "not at all like one in a novel. I took your part."

"Did you!" Mariquita cried gratefully; "it was very, very kind of you."

"I don't approve of men having things all their own way--whether fathers or husbands. He has been knocked under to too much. Yes, I took your part, and made him understand that if he kept the row up he'd have three of us against him."

"What did you say?"

"All sorts of things. Never mind. Perhaps Mr. Gore will tell you--only he won't. He said a lot of things too. We made your father think he would be wicked if he went on bullying you."

Of course, Mariquita did not understand how this had been effected.

"He would not do anything wicked," she said; "he is a very good man."

"He'd be a very good mule," Sarella observed coolly, considerably scandalizing Mariquita.

"You'd have found him a pretty unpleasant one, if Gore and I had left you to manage him yourself." Sarella added, entirely unmoved by her cousin's shocked look. "We managed him. He won't beat you now. But you'd better keep out of his way as much as you can for a bit. If I were you, I'd have a bad headache and stop in bed."

"But I haven't a headache. I never do have headaches."

Sarella made a queer face, and sighed, then laughed.

"Anyway, you're not to be made to marry Mr. Gore," she said.

Mariquita looked enormously relieved, and began to express her grateful sense of Sarella's good offices.

"For that matter," Sarella cut in, "neither will Mr. Gore be made to marry _you_--so if you change your mind it will be no good. He thinks it would be wicked to marry you."

Mariquita perfectly understood that Sarella was trying to make her sorry, and only gave a cheerful little laugh.

"Then," she said, "I shall certainly not ask him. It would be quite useless to ask him to do anything wicked."