Mariquita: A Novel

He had a notion that the cowboys considered Gore too respectable – as to which their master held his judgment in suspense. In a possible son-in-law respectability, unless quite suspiciously excessive, would not be much "out of place" – not that Don Joaquin admitted more than the bare possibility, till he had fuller certainty as to the stranger's circumstances and antecedents, what he called his "conditions." Given satisfactory conditions, Mariquita's father began to be conscious that Gore as a possible son-in-law might simplify a certain course of his own.

For Sarella continued steadily to commend herself to his ideas. He held her to be beautiful in the extreme, and her prudence he secretly acclaimed as admirable. That she was penniless he was quite aware, and he had a constant, sincere affection for money; but, unless penniless, such a lovely creature could hardly have been found on the prairie, or be expected to remain there; an elderly rich husband, he considered, would have much more hold on a young and lovely wife if she were penniless.

That the young woman had expensive tastes he did not suppose, and he had great and not ungrounded confidence in his own power of repression of any taste not to his mind, should any supervene.

Don Joaquin had two reasons for surveying with conditional approval the idea of marrying Sarella – when he should have made up his mind, which he had not yet done. One was to please himself: the other was in order that he might have a son. Mariquita's sex had always been against her. Before her arrival he had decided that his child must be a boy, and her being a girl was out of place. He disliked making money for some other man's wife.

CHAPTER VII

Jack did not like Sarella, and so it was fortunate for that young person that Jack's opinion was of no sort of consequence. He had been longer on the range than anyone there except Don Joaquin, and he did much that would, if he had been a different sort of man, have entitled him to consider himself foreman. But he received smaller wages than anyone and never dreamt of being foreman. He was believed never to have had any other name but Jack, and was known never to have had but one suit of clothes, and his face and hands were much shabbier than his clothes, owing to a calendar of personal accidents. "That happened," he would say, "in the year the red bull horned my eye out," or "I mind – 'twas in the Jenoorey that my leg got smashed thro' Black Peter rollin' on me…" He had been struck in the jaw by a splinter from a tree that had itself been struck by lightning, and the scar he called his "June mark." A missing finger of his right hand he called his Xmas mark because it was on Christmas Day that the gun burst which shot it off. These, and many other scars and blemishes, would have marred the beauty of an Antinoüs, and Jack had always been ugly.

But, shabby as he was, he was marvellously clean, and Mariquita was very fond of him. His crooked body held a straight heart, loyal and kind, and a child's mind could not be cleaner. No human being suspected that Jack hated his master, whom he served faithfully and with stingily rewarded toil: and he hated him not because he was stingy to himself, but because Jack adored Mariquita, and accused her father of indifference to her. He was angry with him for leaving her alone to do all the work, and angry because nothing was ever done for her, and no thought taken of her.

When Sarella and Gore came, Jack hoped that the young man would marry Mariquita and take her away – though he would be left desolate. Thus Mariquita would be happy – and her father be punished, for Jack clearly perceived that Don Joaquin did not care for Gore, and he did not perceive that Mariquita's departure might be convenient to her father. But Jack could not see that Gore himself did much to carry out that marriage scheme. That the young man set a far higher value on Mariquita than her father had ever done, Jack did promptly understand; but he could perceive no advances and watched him with impatience.

As for Sarella, Jack was jealous of her importance: jealous that the old man made more of his wife's niece than of his own daughter; jealous that she had much less to do, and specially jealous that she had much smarter clothes. Jack could not see Sarella's beauty; had he possessed a looking-glass it might have been supposed to have dislocated his eye for beauty, but he possessed none – and he thought Mariquita as beautiful as the dawn on the prairie.

To do her justice, Sarella was civil to the battered old fellow, but he didn't want her civility, and was ungrateful for it. Yet her civility was to prove useful. Jack lived in a shed at the end of the stables, where he ate and slept, and mended his clothes sitting up in bed, and wearing (then only) a large pair of spectacles, though half a pair would have been enough. He cooked his own food, though Mariquita would have cooked it for him if he would have let her.

Sarella loved good eating, and on her coming it irritated her to see so much excellent food "made so little of." Presently she gave specimens of her own superior science, and Don Joaquin approved, as did the cowboys.

"Jack," she said to him one day, "do you ever eat anything but stew from year's end to year's end?"

"I eats bread, too, and likewise corn porridge," Jack replied coldly.

"I could tell you how to make more of your meat – I should think you'd sicken of stew everlastingly."

"There's worse than stew," he suggested.

"I don't know what's worse, then," the young lady retorted, wrinkling her very pretty nose.

"None. That's worse," said Jack, triumphantly.

"It seems to me," Sarella observed thoughtfully, "as if you're growing a bit oldish to do for yourself, and have no one to do anything for you. An elderly man wants a woman to keep him comfortable."

Jack snorted, but Sarella, undefeated, proceeded to put the case of his being ill. Who would nurse him?

"Ill! I've too much to do for sech idleness. The Boss'd stare if I laid out to get ill."

"Illness," Sarella remarked piously, "comes from Above, and may come any day. Haven't you anyone belonging to you, Jack? No sister, no niece; you never were married, I suppose, so I don't mention a daughter."

"I was married, though," Jack explained, much delighted, "and had a daughter, too."

"You quite surprise me!" cried Sarella, "quite!"

"She didn't marry me for my looks, my wife didn't," chuckled Jack. "Nor yet for my money."

"Out of esteem?" suggested Sarella.

"Can't say, I'm sure. I never heerd her mention it. Anyway, it didn't last – "

"The esteem?"

"No. The firm. She died – when Ginger was born. Since which I have remained a bachelord."

"By Ginger you mean your daughter?"

"That's what they called her. Her aunt took her, and she took the smallpox. But she didn't die of it. She's alive now."

"Married, I daresay?"

"No. Single. She's as like me as you're not," Jack explained summarily.

Sarella laughed.

"A good girl, though, I'll be bound," she hinted amiably.

"She's never mentioned the contrary – in her letters."

"Oh, she writes! I'm glad she writes."

"Thank you, Miss Sarella. She writes most Christmasses. And she wrote lately, tho' it's not Christmas."

"Not ill, I hope?"

"Ill! She's an industrious girl with plenty o' sense … but her aunt's dead, and she thinks o' taking a place in a boarding-house."

"Jack," said Sarella, after a brief but pregnant pause of consideration, "bring her up here."

Jack regarded her with a stare of undisguised amazement.

"Why not?" Sarella persisted. "It would be better for you."

"What's that to do with it?"

"And better for Miss Mariquita. It's too much for Miss Mariquita – all the work she has to do."

"That's true anyway."

"Of course it's true. Anyone can see that." (That Sarella saw it, considerably surprised Jack, and provided matter for some close consideration subsequently.)

"Look here, Jack," she went on, "I'll tell you what. You go to Mr. Xeres and say you'd like your daughter to come and work for you…"

"And he'd tell me to go and be damned."

"But you'd not go. And he wouldn't want you to go. And I'll speak to him."

Jack stared again. He hardly realized yet how much steadily growing confidence in her influence with "the Boss" Sarella felt. He made no promise to speak to him: but said "he'd sleep on it."

With that sleep came a certain ray of comprehension. Miss Sarella was not thinking entirely of him and his loneliness, nor entirely of Miss Mariquita. He believed that she really expected the Boss would marry her (as all the cowboys had believed for some weeks) and he perceived, with some involuntary admiration of her shrewdness, that she had no idea of being left, if Miss Mariquita should marry and go away, to do all the work as she had done. Once arrived at this perception of the situation, Jack went ahead confident of Sarella's quietly persistent help. He had not the least dread of rough language. He had no sensitive dread of displeasing his master. He would like to have Ginger up at the range especially as Ginger's coming would take much of the work off Miss Mariquita's hands. He even made Don Joaquin suspect that if Ginger were not allowed to come he, Jack, would go, and make a home for her down in Maxwell.

It did not suit Don Joaquin to lose Jack, and it suited him very well to listen to Sarella.

So Ginger came, and proved, as all the cowboys agreed, a good sort, though quite as ugly as her father.

CHAPTER VIII

"Mariquita," said her father one day, "does Sarella ever talk to you about religion?"

Anything like what could be called a conversation was so rare between them that the girl was surprised, and it surprised her still more that he should choose that particular subject.

"She asked me if we were Catholics."

"Of course we are Catholics. You said so?"

"I didn't say 'of course,' but I said we were. She then asked if my mother had become one – on her marriage or afterwards."

Don Joaquin heard this with evident interest, and, as Mariquita thought, with some satisfaction.

"What did you say?" he inquired.

Mariquita glanced at him as if puzzled. "I told her that my mother never became a Catholic," she answered.

"That pleased her?"

"I don't know. She did not seem pleased or displeased."

"She did not seem glad that I had not insisted that my wife should be Catholic?"

"She may have been glad – I did not see that she was."

"You did not think she would have been angry if she had heard I had insisted that my wife should be Catholic?"

"No; that did not appear to me."

So far as Mariquita's information went, it satisfied her father. Only it was a pity Sarella should know that her aunt had not adopted his own religion.

Mariquita had not probed the motive of his questions. Direct enough of impression, she was not penetrating nor astute in following the hidden working of other persons' minds.

"It is," he remarked, "a good thing Sarella came here."

"Poor thing! She had no home left – it was natural she should think of coming to her aunt."

"Yes, quite natural. And good for you also."

"I was not lonely before – "

"But if I had died?"

Mariquita had never thought of his dying; he was as strong as a tree, and she could not picture the range without him.

"I never thought of you dying. You are not old, father."

"Old, no! But suppose I had died, all the same – before Sarella came – what would you have done?"

"I never thought of it."

"No. That would have been out of place. But you could not have lived here, one girl all alone among all the men."

"No, of course."

"Now you have Sarella. It would be different."

"Oh, yes; if she wished to go on living here – "

"If she went away to live somewhere else you could go with her."

Mariquita did not see that that would be necessary, but she did not say so. She was not aware that her father was endeavoring to habituate her mind to the permanence of Sarella's connection with herself.

"Of course," he said casually, "you might marry – at any time."

"I never thought of that," the girl answered, and he saw clearly that she never had thought of it. Gore would, he perceived, not have her for the asking; might have a great deal of asking to do, and might not succeed after much asking.

It was not so clear to him that Gore himself was as well aware of that as he was.

That she had never had any thoughts of marriage pleased him, partly because he would not have liked Gore to get what he wanted, so easily, and partly because it satisfied his notion of dignity in her – his daughter. It was really his own dignity in her he was thinking of.

All the same, now that he knew she was not thinking of marrying the handsome stranger, he felt more clearly that (if Gore's "conditions" were suitable) the marriage might suit him – Don Joaquin.

"There are," he observed sententiously, "only two ways for women."

"Two ways?"

"Marriage is the usual way. If God had wanted only nuns, He would have created women only. That one sees. Whereas there are women and men – so marriage is the ordinary way for women; and if God chooses there should be more married women than nuns, it shows He doesn't want too many nuns."

The argument was new to Mariquita: she was little used to hear any abstract discussion from her father.

"You have thought of it," she said; "I have never thought of all that."

"There was no necessity. It might have been out of place. All the same it is true what I say."

"But I think it is also true that to be a nun is the best way for some women."

"Naturally. For some."

Mariquita had no sort of desire to argue with him, or anyone; arguments were, she thought, almost quarrels.

He, on his side, was again thinking of Sarella, and left the nuns alone.

"It would," he said, "be a good thing if Sarella should become Catholic. If she talks about religion you can explain to her that there can be only one that is true."

Mariquita did not understand (though everyone else did) that her father wished to marry Sarella, and, of course, she could not know that he was resolved against provoking further punishment by marrying a Protestant.

"If I can," she said, slowly, "I will try to help her to see that. She does not talk much about such things. And she is much older than I am – "

"Oh, yes; quite very much older," he agreed earnestly, though in fact Sarella appeared simply a girl to him.

"And it would not do good for me to seem interfering."

"But," he agreed with some adroitness, "though a blind person were older than you (who can see) you would show her the way?"

Mariquita was not, at any rate, so blind as to be unable to see that her father was strongly desirous that Sarella should be a Catholic. It had surprised her, as she had no recollection of his having troubled himself concerning her own mother, his beloved wife, not having been one. Of course, she was glad, thinking it meant a deeper interest in religion on his own part.

CHAPTER IX

Between Mariquita and her father there was little in common except a partial community of race; in nature and character they were entirely different. In her the Indian strain had only physical expression, and that only in the slim suppleness of her frame; she would never grow stout as do so many Spanish women.

Whereas in her father the Indian blood had effects of character. He was not merely subtle like a Latin, but had besides the craft and cunning of an Indian. Yet the cunning seemed only an intensification of the subtlety, a deeper degree of the same quality and not an added separate quality. In fact, in him, as in many with the same mixture of race, the Indian strain and the Spanish were really mingled, not merely joined in one individual.

Mariquita had, after all, only one quarter Spanish, and one Indian; whereas with him it was a quarter of half and half. She had, in actual blood, a whole half that was pure Saxon, for her mother's New England family was of pure English descent. Yet Mariquita seemed far more purely Spanish than her father; he himself could trace nothing of her mother in her, and in her character was nothing Indian but her patience.

From her mother personally she inherited nothing, but through her mother she had certain characteristics that helped to make her very incomprehensible to Don Joaquin, though he did not know it.

Gore, who studied her with far more care and interest, because to him she seemed deeply worth study, did not himself feel compelled to remember her triple strain of race. For to him she seemed splendidly, adorably simple. He was far from falling into Sarella's shallow mistake of calling that simplicity "stupidity"; to him it appeared a sublimation of purity, rarely noble and fine. That she was book-ignorant he knew, as well as that she was life-ignorant; but he did not think her intellectually narrow, even intellectually fallow. Along what roads her mind moved he could not, by mere study of her, discover; yet he was sure it did not stagnate without motion or life.

About a month after the arrival of Sarella, one Saturday night at supper, that young person observed that Mr. Gore's place was vacant.

Mariquita must equally have noted the fact, but she had said nothing.

"Isn't Mr. Gore coming to his supper?" Sarella asked her.

Don Joaquin thought this out of place. His daughter's silence on the subject had pleased him better.

"I don't know," Mariquita answered, glancing towards her father.

"No," he said; "he has ridden down to Maxwell."

Sometimes one or other of the cowboys would ride down to Maxwell, and reappear, without question or remark.

"I wonder he did not mention he was going," Sarella complained.

"Of course he mentioned it," Don Joaquin said loudly. "He would not go without asking me."

"But to us ladies," Sarella persisted, "it would have been better manners."

"That was not at all necessary," said Don Joaquin; "Mariquita would not expect it."

"I would, though. It ought to have struck him that one might have a communication for him. I should have had commissions for him."

It was evident that Sarella had ruffled Don Joaquin, and it was the first time anyone had seen him annoyed by her.

Next day, after the midday meal, Sarella followed Mariquita out of doors, and said to her, yawning and laughing.

"Don't you miss Mr. Gore?"

Mariquita answered at once and quite simply:

"Miss him? He was never here till a month ago – "

"Nor was I," Sarella interrupted pouting prettily. "But you'd miss me, now."

"Only you're not going away."

"You take it for granted I shall stop, then?" (And Sarella looked complacent.) "That I'm a fixture."

"I never thought of your going away," Mariquita answered, with a formula rather habitual to her. "Where would you go?"

"I should decide on that when I decided to go." Sarella declared oracularly. But Mariquita took it with irritating calmness.

"I don't believe you will decide to go," she said with that gravity and plainness of hers that often irritated Sarella – who liked badinage. "It would be useless."

"Suppose," Sarella suggested, pinching the younger girl's arm playfully, "suppose I were to think of getting married. Shouldn't I have to go then?"

"I never thought of that – " Mariquita was beginning, but Sarella pinched and interrupted her.

"Do you ever think of anything?" she complained sharply.

"Oh, yes, often, of many things."

"What things on earth?" (with sudden inquisitive eagerness.)

"Just my own sort of things," Mariquita answered, without saying whether "her things" were on earth at all. Sarella pouted again.

"You're not very confidential to a person."

Mariquita weighed the accusation. "Perhaps," she said quietly, "I am not much used to persons. Since I came home from the convent there was no other girl here till you came."

"So you're sorry I came!"

"No; glad. I am glad you did that. It is a home for you. And I am sure my father is glad."

"You think he likes my being here?" And Sarella listened attentively for the answer.

"Of course. You must see it."

"You think he does not dislike me? He was cross with me last night."

"He did not like you noticing Mr. Gore was away – "

"Of course I noticed it – surely, he could not be jealous of that!"

"I should not think he could be jealous," Mariquita agreed, too readily to please Sarella. "But I did not think of it. I am sure he does not dislike you. You cannot think he does."

Sarella was far from thinking it. But she had wanted Mariquita to say more, and was only partly satisfied.

"He would not like me to go away?" she suggested.

"Oh, no. The contrary."

"Not even if it were advantageous to me?"

"How advantageous?"

"If I were to be going to a home of my own? Going, for instance, to be married?"

"That would surprise him…"

Sarella was not pleased at this.

"Surprise him! Why should it surprise him that anyone should marry me?"

"There is no reason. Only, he does not imagine that there is someone. If there is someone, he would suppose you had not been willing to marry him by your coming here instead."

("Is she stupid or cautious?" Sarella asked herself. "She will say nothing.")

Mariquita was neither cautious nor stupid. She was only ignorant of Sarella's purpose, and by no means awake to her father's.

"It is terribly hot out here," Sarella grumbled, "and there is such a glare. I shall go in and study."

CHAPTER X

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.