When Don Joaquin returned, he was in an unusually bad temper, and it was
well that Mariquita had gone to bed. Gore was sitting up, and, though it
was long past Sarella's usual hour, she had insisted on sitting up also.
This was good-natured of her, for there was no pleasure to be
anticipated from the interview with Don Joaquin, and she disliked any
derangement of her habits. Gore had begged her to retire at her ordinary
hour, but she had flatly refused.
"I can do more with him than you can," she declared, quite truly,
"though no one will be able to stop his being as savage as a bear. I'm
sorry for Mariquita; she'll have a bad time to-morrow, and it won't end
with to-morrow."
Meanwhile she took the trouble to have ready a good supper for Don
Joaquin, and made rather a special toilette in which to help him to it.
Sarella was not in the least afraid of him, and had no great dread of a
row which concerned someone else. Don Joaquin was not, however,
particularly mollified by the becoming dress, nor by finding his
betrothed sitting up for him, as she was sitting up with Gore.
"Where's Mariquita?" he asked, as he sat down to eat.
"In bed long ago. I hope you'll like that chicken; it's done in a
special way we have, and the recipe's my patent. I haven't taught it to
Mariquita."
"Why aren't _you_ in bed?"
"Because I preferred waiting to see you safe at home," Sarella replied
with an entrancing smile.
"Was Mr. Gore anxious too?" Don Joaquin demanded sarcastically.
"It is not a quarter of an hour later than my usual time for going to
bed," Gore answered. "And I thought it better to see you; you would, I
believe, have _expected_ to see me."
"Very well. You have done as you said?"
"Yes." Gore glanced at Sarella, and Don Joaquin told her that she had
now better sit up no longer.
"_I_ think I had," she told him; "I know all about it."
"Is it all settled?" Don Joaquin asked, looking at Gore. "Have you fixed
it up?"
Gore found this abruptness and haste made his task very difficult.
He had to consider how to form his reply.
"He proposed to Mariquita," Sarella cut in, "but she refused him."
"Refused him!" Don Joaquin almost shouted.
"Unfortunately, it is so," Gore was beginning, but his host interrupted
him.
"I do not choose she should refuse," he said angrily. "I will tell her
so before you see her in the morning."
Gore was angry himself, and rose from his seat.
"No," he said; "I will not agree to that. She knows her own mind, and it
will not change. You must not persecute her on my account."
"It is not on your account. I choose to have duty and obedience from my
own daughter."
"Joaquin," said Sarella (Gore had never before heard her call him by his
Christian name), "it is no use taking it that way. Mariquita is not
undutiful, and you must know it. But she will not marry Mr. Gore--or
anybody."
"Of course she will marry," cried the poor girl's father fiercely. "That
is the duty of every girl."
Sarella slightly smiled.
"Then many girls do not do their duty," she said, in her even,
unimpassioned tones.
Her elderly _fiance_ was about to burst into another explosion, but she
would not let him.
"Many Catholic girls," she reminded him, "remain unmarried."
"To be nuns--that is different."
"It is my belief," she observed in a detached manner, as if indulging in
a mere surmise, "that Mariquita will be a nun."
"Mariquita! Has she said so?" he demanded sharply.
"Not to me," Sarella replied, quite unconcernedly.
"Nor to me," Gore explained; "nevertheless, I believe it will be so."
"That depends on _me_," the girl's father asserted with an unpleasant
mixture of annoyance and obstinacy. "I intend her to marry."
"Only a Protestant," said Sarella, with a shrewd understanding of Don
Joaquin that surprised Gore, "would marry her if she believes she has a
vocation to be a nun. I should think a Catholic man would be ashamed to
do it. He would expect a judgment on himself and his children."
Don Joaquin was as angry as ever, as savage as ever, but he was
startled. Both his companions could see this. Gore was astonished at
Sarella's speech, and at her acumen. He had wished to have this
interview with Mariquita's father to himself, but already saw that
Sarella knew how to conduct it better than he did. She had clearly been
quite willing that "the old man" (as he disrespectfully called him in
his own mind) should fly out and give way to his fiery temper at once;
the more of it went off now, the less would remain for poor Mariquita to
endure.
"If I were a Catholic man," Sarella continued cooly, "I should think it
_profane_ to make a girl marry me who had given herself to be a nun. I
expect the Lord would punish it." She paused meditatively, and then
added, "and all who joined in pushing her to it. I know _I_ wouldn't
join. I think folks have enough of their own to answer for, without
bringing judgments down on their heads for things like that. It won't
get me to heaven to help in interfering between Mariquita and her way of
getting there."
All the while she spoke, Sarella seemed to be admiring, with her head
turned on one side, the prettiness of her left wrist on which was a gold
bangle, with a crystal heart dangling from it. Don Joaquin had given her
the bangle, and himself admired the heart chiefly because it was crystal
and not of diamonds.
"Isn't it pretty?" she said, looking suddenly up and catching his eye
watching her.
"I thought you hadn't cared much for it," he answered, greatly pleased.
He had always known _she_ would have preferred a smaller heart if
crusted with diamonds.
Gore longed to laugh. She astonished and puzzled him. Her cleverness was
a revelation to him, and her good-nature, her subtlety, and her
earnestness--for he knew she had been in earnest in what she said about
not daring to interfere with other people's ways of getting to heaven.
"That old man who instructs her," he thought, "must have taught her a
lot."
Of course, on his own account, he was no more afraid of Don Joaquin than
she was. But he had been terribly afraid of the hard old man on
Mariquita's, and he was deeply grateful to Sarella.
"Sir," he said, "what she has said to you I do feel myself. I am a
Catholic--and the dearest of my sisters is a nun. I should have hated
and despised any man who had tried to spoil her life by snatching it to
himself against her will. He would have to be a wicked fellow, and
brutal, and impious. God's curse would lie on him. So it would on me if
I did that hideous thing, though God knows to-day has brought me the
great disappointment of my life. Life can never be for me what I have
been hoping it might be. Never."
Sarella, listening, and knowing that the two men were looking at each
other, smiled at her bangle, and softly shook the dangling heart to make
the crystal give as diamond-like a glitter as possible. Gore's life, she
thought, would come all right. She had done her best valorously for
Mariquita; women, in her theory, behooved to do their best for each
other against masculine tyrrany ("bossishness," she called it), but all
the time she was half-savage, herself, with the girl for not being
willing to be happy in so obviously comfortable a way as offered. It
seemed to her "wasteful" that so pretty a girl should go and be a nun;
if she had been "homely" like Sister Aquinas it would have been
different. But Sarella had learned from Sister Aquinas that these
matters were above her, and was quite content to accept them without
understanding them.
"Ever since I came here," Gore was saying, "I have lived in a dream of
what life would be--if I could join hers with mine. It was only a dream,
and I had to awake."
Don Joaquin did not understand his mind, but he was able now to see that
the young man suffered, and had received a blow that, somehow, _would_
change his life, and turn its course aside.
"Anything," Gore said, in a very low, almost thankful tone, "is better
than it would have been if I had changed my dream for a nightmare; it
would have been that, if I had to think of myself as trying to pull her
down, from her level to mine, of her as having been brought down. I
meant to do her all possible good, all my life long. How can I wish to
have done her the greatest harm? As it would have been if, out of fear
or over-persuasion, she had been brought to call herself my wife who
could be no man's wife."
("_How_ he loves her!" thought Sarella.)
("I doubt it has wrecked him a bit," thought Don Joaquin.)