As the marriage could not take place without delay, Don Joaquin did not
wish it to be unreservedly announced; the general inhabitants of the
range might guess what they chose, but they were not at present to be
informed.
"Mariquita may tell Gore," he explained to Sarella, "that is a family
matter."
"And I am sure she will not tell him unless you order her to," said
Sarella; "she does not think of him in that light."
"What light?" demanded Don Joaquin irritably.
"As one of the family," Sarella replied, without any irritation at all.
Her placidity of temper was likely to be one of her most convenient
endowments.
"I shall give her to understand," said Don Joaquin, "that there is no
restriction on her informing Mr. Gore."
Sarella shrugged her pretty shoulders and made no comment.
Mariquita took her father's intimation as an order and obeyed, though
surprised that he should not, if he desired Mr. Gore to know of his
approaching marriage, tell him himself. Possibly, she thought, her
father was a little shy about such a subject.
Mr. Gore received her announcement quite coolly, without any
manifestation of surprise. It had not, as Don Joaquin had hoped it
might, the least effect of hurrying his own steps.
"Am I," he inquired, "supposed to show that I have been told?"
"Oh, I think so."
So that night when they were alone, after the others had gone to their
rooms, Gore congratulated his host.
"Thank you! You see," said Don Joaquin, assuming a tone of pathos that
sat most queerly on him, "as time goes on, I should be very lonely."
He shook his head sadly, and Gore endeavored to look duly sympathetic.
"Sarella," the older man proceeded, "could not stop here--if she were
not my wife--after Mariquita had left us."
Gore, who perfectly understood Mariquita's father and his diplomacy,
would not indulge him by asking if his daughter were, then, likely to
leave him.
So Don Joaquin sighed and had to go on.
"Yes! It would be very lonely for me, dependent as I am for society on
Mariquita."
Here Gore, with some inward amusement, could not refrain from accusing
his possible father-in-law of some hypocrisy; for he was sure the
elderly gentleman would miss his daughter as little as any father could
miss his child.
"Certainly," he said aloud, "it is hard to think how the range would get
on without her."
No doubt, her absence would be hard to fill in the matter of usefulness,
and Gore was inclined to doubt whether Sarella would even wish to fill
it. He was pretty sure that that young woman would refuse to work as her
cousin had worked.
"It _must_ get on without her," Don Joaquin agreed, not without doubt,
"when her time comes for moving to a home of her own."
Still Gore refused to "rise."
"We must be prepared for that," Mariquita's father went on, refilling
his pipe. "She is grown up. It is natural she should be thinking of her
own future--"
Gore suddenly felt angry with him, instead of being merely amused. To
him it appeared a profanation of the very idea of Mariquita, to speak of
her as indulging in surmises and calculations concerning her own
matrimonial chances.
"It would not," he said, "be unnatural--but I am sure her mind is given
to no such thoughts."
Don Joaquin slightly elevated his eyebrows.
"I do not know," he said coldly, "how you can answer for what her mind
is given to. I, at any rate, must have such thoughts on her account. I
am not English. English parents may, perhaps, leave all such things to
chance. We, of my people, are not so. To us it seems the most important
of his duties for a father to trust to no chances, but arrange and
provide for his daughter's settlement in life."
Here the old fellow paused, and having shot his bolt, pretended it had
been a mere parenthesis in answer to an implied criticism.
"But," he continued, "I have wandered from what I was really explaining.
I was telling that soon I should, in the natural course of things, be
left here alone, as regards home companionship, unless I myself tried to
find a mate, so I tried and I have succeeded."
Here he bowed with great majesty and some complacence, as if he might
have added, "Though you, in your raw youthfulness and conceit, may have
thought me too old a suitor to win a lovely bride."
Gore responded by the heartiest felicitations. "Sir," he added after a
brief pause, "since it seems to me that you wish it, I will explain my
own position. I can well afford to marry. And I would wish very much to
marry. But there is only one lady whom I have ever met, whom I have now,
or ever, felt that I would greatly desire to win for my wife."
So far Don Joaquin had listened with an absolutely expressionless
countenance of polite attention, though he had never been more
interested.
"The lady," Gore continued, "is your daughter."
(Here that lady's father relaxed the aloofness of his manner, and
permitted himself a look of benign, though not eager, approval.)
"It may be," the young man went on, "that you have perceived my
wishes...."
(Don Joaquin would express neither negation nor assent.)
"Anyway, you know them now. But your daughter does not know them. To
thrust the knowledge of them prematurely upon her would, I am sure, make
the chance of her responding to them very much less hopeful. Therefore I
have been slow and cautious in endeavoring to gain even a special
footing of friendship with her; I have, lately, gained a little. I
cannot flatter myself that it is more than a little; between us there
is on her side only the mere dawn of friendship. That being so, I should
have been unwilling to speak to yourself--lest it should seem like
assuming that she had any sort of interest in me beyond what I have
explained. I speak now because you clearly expect that I should. Well, I
have spoken. But I am so greatly in eager earnest about this that I ask
you plainly to allow me to endeavor to proceed with what, I think, you
almost resent as a timidity of caution. It is my only chance."
Don Joaquin did not see that at all. If he were to inform Mariquita that
Mr. Gore wished to become her husband and he, her father, wished her to
become Mr. Gore's wife, he could not bring himself to picture such
disobedience as any refusal on her part would amount to.
"Our way," he said, "is more direct than your fanciful English way; it
regards not a young girl's fanciful delays, and timid uncertainty, but
her solid welfare, and therefore her solid happiness. In reality it gets
over her maiden modesty in the best way--by wise authority. She does not
have to tell herself baldly, 'I have become in love with this young
man,' but 'My parents have found this young man worthy to undertake the
charge of my life and my happiness, and I submit to their experience and
wisdom.' Then duty will teach her love; a safer teacher than fancy."
"I hope, sir," said Gore, "that you do not yourself propose that
method."
"And if I did?"
"I would, though more earnestly desirous to win your daughter than I am
desirous of anything in this life, tell you that I refuse to win her in
that way. It never would win her."
"'Win her'! She is all duty--"
"Excuse me! No duty would command her to become my wife if she could
only do so with repugnance. If you told her it was her duty I should
tell her it was no such thing."
Don Joaquin was amazed at such crass stupidity. He flung his open hands
upwards with angry protest. He was even suspicious. Did the young man
really _want_ to marry his daughter? It was much more evident that he
was in earnest now, than it had been to Don Joaquin that he was in
earnest before.
The elderly half-breed had not the least idea of blaming his own crude
diplomacy; on the contrary, he had been pluming himself on its success.
For some time he had desired to obtain from Gore a definite expression
of his wish to marry Mariquita, and he had obtained it. That it had been
speedily followed by this further pronouncement, incomprehensible to the
girl's father, was not _his_ fault, but was due entirely to the
Englishman's peculiarities, peculiarities that to Don Joaquin seemed
perverse and almost suspicious.
"If you were a Spaniard," he said stiffly, "you would be grateful to me
for being willing to influence my daughter in your favor."
Gore knew that he must be disturbed, as it was his rule to speak of
himself not as a Spaniard, but as an American.
"I am grateful to you, sir, for being willing to let me hope to win your
daughter for my wife--most grateful."
"You do not appear grateful to me for my willingness to simplify
matters."
"They cannot be simplified--nor hurried. If your daughter can be brought
to think favorably of me as one who earnestly desires to have the great,
great honor and privilege of being the guardian of her life and its
happiness, it must be gradually and by very gentle approaches. I hope
that she already likes me, but I am sure she does not yet love me."
"Before she has been asked to be your wife! Love you! Certainly not. She
will love her husband, for that will be her duty."
Gore did not feel at all like laughing; his future father-in-law's
peculiarities seemed as perverse to him as his own did to Don Joaquin.
He dreaded their operation; it seemed only too possible that Don Joaquin
would be led to interference by them, and such interference he feared
extremely; nor could he endure the idea of Mariquita's being dragooned
by her father.
"If," he declared stoutly, "you thrust prematurely upon your daughter
the idea of me as her husband, you will make her detest the thought of
me, and I never _shall_ be her husband."
Don Joaquin was offended.
"I am not used to do anything prematurely," he said grimly. "And it may
be that I understand my daughter, who is of my own race, better than you
who are not of her race."
"It may be. But I am not certain that it is so. Sir, since you have
twice alluded to that question of race, you must not be surprised or
displeased if I remind you that she is as much of my race as of your
own. Half Spanish she is, but half of English blood."
Don Joaquin _was_ displeased, but all the same, he did feel that there
might be something in Gore's argument. He had always thought of
Mariquita as Spanish like himself; but he had never been unconscious
that she was unlike himself--it might possibly be by reason of her
half-English descent.
"The lady," Gore went on, "whom you yourself are marrying, would perhaps
understand me better than you appear to do."
This reference to Sarella did not greatly conciliate her betrothed. He
did not wish her to be occupied in understanding any young man. All the
same, he was slightly flattered at Gore's having, apparently, a
confidence in her judgment. Moreover, he knew that it was so late that
this discussion could not be protracted much longer, and he was not
willing to say anything like an admission that he had receded (which he
had not) from his own opinion.
"Her judgment," he said, "is good. And she has a maternal interest in
Mariquita. I will tell her what you have said."
Gore went to bed smiling to himself at the idea of Sarella's maternal
interest. She did not strike him as a motherly young lady.