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....