Mariquita Part 5

"Miss him? He was never here till a month ago--"

"Nor was I," Sarella interrupted pouting prettily. "But you'd miss me, now."

"Only you're not going away."

"You take it for granted I shall stop, then?" (And Sarella looked complacent.) "That I'm a fixture."

"I never thought of your going away," Mariquita answered, with a formula rather habitual to her. "Where would you go?"

"I should decide on that when I decided to go." Sarella declared oracularly. But Mariquita took it with irritating calmness.

"I don't believe you will decide to go," she said with that gravity and plainness of hers that often irritated Sarella--who liked _badinage_.

"It would be useless."

"Suppose," Sarella suggested, pinching the younger girl's arm playfully, "suppose I were to think of getting married. Shouldn't I have to go then?"

"I never thought of that--" Mariquita was beginning, but Sarella pinched and interrupted her.

"Do you _ever_ think of anything?" she complained sharply.

"Oh, yes, often, of many things."

"What things on earth?" (with sudden inquisitive eagerness.)

"Just my own sort of things," Mariquita answered, without saying whether "her things" were on earth at all. Sarella pouted again.

"You're not very confidential to a person."

Mariquita weighed the accusation. "Perhaps," she said quietly, "I am not much used to persons. Since I came home from the convent there was no other girl here till you came."

"So you're sorry I came!"

"No; glad. I am glad you did that. It is a home for you. And I am sure my father is glad."

"You think he likes my being here?" And Sarella listened attentively for the answer.

"Of course. You must see it."

"You think he does not dislike me? He was cross with me last night."

"He did not like you noticing Mr. Gore was away--"

"Of course I noticed it--surely, he could not be jealous of that!"

"I should not think he could be jealous," Mariquita agreed, too readily to please Sarella. "But I did not think of it. I am sure he does not dislike you. You cannot think he does."

Sarella was far from thinking it. But she had wanted Mariquita to say more, and was only partly satisfied.

"_He_ would not like me to go away?" she suggested.

"Oh, no. The contrary."

"Not even if it were advantageous to me?"

"How advantageous?"

"If I were to be going to a home of my own? Going, for instance, to be married?"

"That would surprise him...."

Sarella was not pleased at this.

"Surprise him! Why should it surprise him that anyone should marry me?"

"There is no reason. Only, he does not imagine that there _is_ someone.

If there is someone, he would suppose you had not been willing to marry him by your coming here instead."

("Is she stupid or cautious?" Sarella asked herself. "She will say nothing.")

Mariquita was neither cautious nor stupid. She was only ignorant of Sarella's purpose, and by no means awake to her father's.

"It is terribly hot out here," Sarella grumbled, "and there is such a glare. I shall go in and study."

CHAPTER X.

Mariquita did not go in too. She did not find it hot, nor did the glare trouble her. The air was full of life and vigor, and she had no sense of la.s.situde. There was, indeed, a breeze from the far-off Rockies, and to her it seemed cool enough, though the sun was so nearly directly overhead that her figure cast only a very stunted shadow of herself. In the long gra.s.s the breeze made a slight rustle, but there was no other sound.

Mariquita did not want to be indoors; outside, here on the tilted prairie, she was alone and not lonely. The tilt of the vast s.p.a.ce around her showed chiefly in this--that eastward the horizon was visibly lower than at the western rim of the prairie. The prairie was not really flat; between her and both horizons there lay undulations, those between her and the western rising into _mesas_, which, with a haze so light as only to tell in the great distance, hid the distant barrier of the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills even were beyond the frontiers of this State.

She knew well where they were, though, and knew almost exactly beyond which point of the far horizon lay Loretto Heights, beyond Denver, and the Convent.

Somehow the coming of these two new units to the range-life had pushed the Convent farther away still. But Mariquita's thoughts never rested in the mere memories hanging like a slowly fading arras around that long-concluded convent life. What it had given her was more than the memories and was hers still.

As to the mere memories, she knew that with slow but increasing pace they were receding from her, till on time's horizon they would end in a haze, golden but vague and formless. Voices once clearly recalled were losing tone; faces, whose features had once risen before the eye of memory with little less distinctness than that with which she had seen them when physically present, arose now blurred like faces pa.s.sing a fog. Even their individuality, depending less on feature than expression, was no longer easily recoverable.

She had been used to remember this and that nun by her very footsteps; now the nuns moved, a mere group in one costume, soundlessly, with no footstep at all.

Of this gradual loss of what had been almost her only private possession she made no inward wishful complaint; Mariquita was not morbid, nor melancholy. The operation of a natural law of life could not fill her with the poet's rebellious outcry. To all law indeed she yielded without protest, whether it implied submission without inward revolt to the mere shackles of circ.u.mstance, or submission to her father's dominance; for it was not in her fashion of mind to form hypothesis--such hypothesis, for instance, as that of her father calling upon her to take some course opposed to conscience. Though her gaze was turned towards the point of the horizon under which the Convent and its intimates were, it was not simply to dream of them that she yielded herself.

All that life had had a centre--not for herself only, but for all there.

The simplicity of the life consisted, above all, in the simplicity of its object. Its routine, almost mechanically regular, was not mechanical because of its central meaning. No doubt the "work" of the nuns was education, but their work of education was service of a Master. And the Master was Himself the real object, the centre of the work, as carried on within those quiet, busy walls. Mariquita no longer formed a part, though the work was still operative in her, and had not ceased with her removal from the workers; but she was as near as ever to its centre, and was now more concerned with the ultimate object of the work than with the work.

Her memories were weakening in color and definiteness, but her possession was not decreased, her possession was the Master who possessed herself.

The simplicity that Gore had from the first noted in her, without being able to inform himself wherein it consisted--but which he venerated without knowing its source, that he knew was n.o.ble--was first that Mariquita did in fact live and move and have her being, as nominally all His creatures do, in the Master of that vanished convent life. What the prairie was to her body, surrounding it, its sole background and scene and stage of action, He was to her inward, very vivid, wholly silent life; what the prairie was to her healthy lungs, He was to her soul, its breath, "inspiration." Ba.n.a.l and stale as such metaphor is, in her the two lives were so unified (in this was the rarity of her "simplicity") that it was at least completely accurate.