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
lassitude. 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 grass 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 space 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 passing 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 circumstance, 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 noble--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." Banal 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.
With Mariquita that which we call the supernatural life was not
occasional and spasmodic. That inspiration of Our Lord was not, as with
so many, a gulp, or periodic series of gulps, but a breathing as steady
and soundless as the natural breathing of her strong, sane, flawless
body.
She did not, like the self-conscious pietist, listen to it. She did not,
like the pathological pietist, test its pulse or temperature. The
pathological pietist is still self-student, though studious of self in a
new relation; still breathes her own breath at second-hand, and remains
indoors within the four walls of herself.
Of herself Mariquita knew little. That God had given her, in truth,
existence; that she knew. That _she_ was, because He chose. That He had
been born, and died, and lived again, for her sake, as much as for the
sake of any one of all the saints, though not more than for the sake of
the human being in all the world who thought least of Him: that she
knew. That He loved her incomparably better than she could love herself
or any other person--that she knew with a reality of knowledge greater
than that with which any lover ever knows himself beloved by the lover
who would give and lose everything for him. That He had already set in
her another treasure, the capacity of loving Him--that also she knew
with ineffable reverence and gladness, and that the power of loving Him
grew in her, as the power of knowing Him grew.
But concerning herself Mariquita knew little except such things as
these. She had studied neither her own capacities nor her own
limitations, neither her tastes, nor her gifts. That Sarella thought
her stupid, she was hardly aware, and less than half aware that Sarella
was wrong. No human creature had ever told her that she was beautiful,
and she had never made any guess on the subject with herself. She never
wondered if she were happy, or ever unjustly disinherited of the means
of happiness. Whether, in less strait thrall of circumstance, she might
be of more consequence, even of more use, she never debated. She had not
dreamed of being heroic; had no chafing at absence of either sphere or
capacity for being brilliant. Her life was passing in a silence
singularly profound among the lives of God's other human creatures, and
its silence, unhumanness, oblivion (that deepest of oblivion lying
beneath what _has_ been known though forgotten) did not vex her, and was
never thought of. Her duties were coarse and common; but they were those
God had set in her way and sight, and she had no impatience of them, no
scorn for them, but just did them. They were not more coarse or common
than those He had himself found to His hand, and done, in the house at
Nazareth where Joseph was master, and, after Joseph, Mary was mistress,
and He, their Creator, third, to obey and serve them.
It would be greatly unjust to Mariquita to say that the monotone of her
life was made golden by the bright haze in which it moved. She lived not
in a dream, but in an atmosphere. She was not a dreamy person, moving
through realities without consciousness of them. She saw all around her,
with living interest, only she saw beyond them with interest deeper
still, or rather their own significance for her was made deeper by her
sense of what was beyond them, and to which they, like herself,
belonged. She was very conscious of her neighbors, not only of the human
neighbors, but also of the live creatures not human; and each of these
had, in her reverence, a definite sacredness as coming like herself from
the hand of God.
There was nothing pantheistic in this; seeing everything as God's she
did not see it itself Divine, but every natural object was to her clear
vision but a thread in the clear, transparent veil through which God
showed Himself everywhere. When St. Francis "preached to the birds" he
was in fact listening to their sermon to him; and Mariquita, in her
close neighborly friendship with the small wild creatures of the
prairie, was only worshipping the ineffable, kind friendliness of God,
who had made, and who fed, them also. The love she gave them was only
one of the myriad silent expressions of her love for Him, who loved
them. They were easier and simpler to understand than her human
neighbors. It was not that, for an instant, she thought them on the same
plane of interest--but we must here interrupt ourselves as she was
interrupted.