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 noble
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 Mass 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 Mass 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
classrooms, 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 Canal 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 pronunciation," 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!"
"But you have been thanking me all the time," he said, "ever since I
told you where I had been. Every time you laughed you thanked me."
They met Ben Sturt, who was lounging about by the gate in the homestead
fence; he had never seen Mariquita with just that light of happiness
upon her.
"Here," he said to Gore, "let me take the horse; I'll see to him."
He knew that Mariquita would not come to the stables, and he wanted Gore
to be free to stay with her to the last moment.
As he led the horse away he thought to himself: "It has really begun at
last;" and he loyally wished his friend good luck.
Within a yard or two of the door they met Don Joaquin.
"Father," she said at once, "Mr. Gore didn't go to Maxwell this time. He
went all the way to Denver--to Loretto. And see what a lot of presents
he has brought me from them!"
Gore thought she looked adorable as, like a child unused to gifts, she
showed her little treasures to the rather grim old prairie dog.
He looked less grim than usual. It suited him that she should be so
pleased.
"Well!" he said, "you're stocked now. Mr. Gore had a long ride to fetch
them."
"Oh, yes! Did you ever hear of anybody being so kind?"
Her father noted shrewdly the new expression of grateful pleasure on her
face. It seemed to him that Gore was not so incompetent as he had been
supposing, to carry on his campaign. Sarella came out and joined them.
"What a cunning little pin-cushion!" she exclaimed. "Isn't it just
sweet?" The Agnus Dei was almost the only one of Mariquita's new
treasures to which she could assign a use.
"Oh, and the necklace! Garnets relieved by those crystal blobs are just
the very fashion."
"It is a rosary," Don Joaquin explained in a rather stately tone. It
made him uneasy--it must be unlucky--to hear these frivolous eulogies
applied to "holy objects" with which personally he had never had the
familiarity that diminishes awe.
Mariquita had plenty to do indoors and did not linger. Gore went in also
to wash and tidy himself after his immensely long ride.
Sarella, who of course knew long before this where Mariquita had
received her education, and had been told whence these pious gifts came,
smiled as she turned to Don Joaquin.
"So Gore rode all the way to Denver this time," she remarked.
"It is beyond Denver. Mariquita was pleased to hear news of her old
friends."
"Oh, I daresay. Gore is not such a fool as he looks."
"I am not thinking that he looks a fool at all," said Don Joaquin, more
stately than ever.
("How Spanish!" thought Sarella, "I suppose they're _born_ solemn.")
"Indeed," she cheerfully agreed, "nor do I. He wouldn't be so handsome
if he looked silly. He's all sense. And he knows his road, short cuts
and all."
Don Joaquin disliked her mention of Gore's good looks, as she intended.
She had no idea of being snubbed by her elderly suitor.
"Mariquita," he laid down, "will think more of his good sense than of
his appearance. I have not brought her up to consider a gentleman's
looks."
Sarella laughed; she was not an easy person to "down."
"But you didn't bring _me_ up," she said, "and I can tell you that you
might have been as wise as Solomon and it wouldn't have mattered to me
if you had been ugly. I'd rather look than listen any day; and I like to
have something worth looking at."
Her very pretty eyes were turned full on her mature admirer's face, and
he did not dislike their flattery. An elderly man who has been very
handsome is not often displeased at being told he is worth looking at
still.
"So do I, Sarellita," he responded, telling himself (and her) how much
pleasure there was in looking at _her_.
Stately he could not help being, but his manner had now no stiffness;
and in the double diminutive of her name there was almost a tenderness,
a nearer approach to tenderness than she could understand. She could
understand, however, that he was more lover-like than he had ever been.
A slight flush of satisfaction (that he took for maiden shyness) was on
her face, as she looked up under her half-drooped eyelids.
"Perhaps," he said in much lower tones than he usually employed,
"perhaps Mr. Gore knows what you call his road better than I. But he
does not know better the goal he wants to reach."
("Say!" Sarella asked herself, "what's coming?")
Two of the cowboys were coming--had come in fact. They appeared at that
moment round the corner of the house, ready for supper.
"So," one of them said, with rather loud irritation, evidently
concluding a story, "my dad married her, and I have a step-ma younger
than myself--"