Mariquita Part 2

At meals they sat at the same table, but during the greater part of every day he was out upon the range, and she at home, within the homestead, or near it. Yet it was also true that between them there was something not existing between either and any other person: a friends.h.i.+p mostly silent, an interest not the less real or strong because of the silence. To Gore she was a study, of profounder interest than any book he knew. To make a counter-study of him would have been alien from Mariquita's nature and character; but his presence, which she did not ponder, or consider, as he did hers, brought something into her life.

Perhaps it chiefly made her less lonely by revealing to her how lonely she had been. Of his beauty she never thought--never till the end. Of hers he thought much less as he became more and more absorbed in herself--though its fineness was always more and more clearly perceived by him.

On that first afternoon, when he had first seen her, it had instantly struck him as possessing a quality of rarity, elusive and never to be defined. Miss Jackson's almost gorgeous prettiness, her brilliant coloring, her attractive shapeliness, had been hopelessly and finally vulgarized by the contrast--as the two young women stood on the level lip of the river-course in the unsparing, unflattering light.

That Miss Jackson promptly decided that Mariquita was stupid, he had seen plainly; and he had not had the consolation of knowing that she was stupid herself. She was, he knew, wise enough in her generation, and by no means vacant of will or purpose. But she was, he saw, stupid in thinking her young hostess so. Slow, in some senses, Mariquita might be; not swift of impression, though tenacious of impression received, nor willing to be quick in jumping to shrewd (unflattering) conclusion, yet likely to stick hard to an even harsh conclusion once formed.

These, however, were slight matters. What was not slight was the sense she gave him of n.o.bility: her simplicity itself n.o.ble, her complete acquiescence in her own complete ignorance of experience--her innate, unargued conviction of the little consequence of much, often highly desired, experience.

Of the world she knew nothing, socially, geographically even. Of women her knowledge was (as soon he discovered) a mere memory, a memory of a group of nuns--for her other companions at the Convent had been children. Of men she knew only her father and his cowboys. And no one, he perceived, knew her.

But Gore did not believe her mind vacant. That rare quality could not have been in her beauty if it had been empty. Yet--there was something greater than her mind behind her face. The shape of that perception had entered instantly into his own mind; and the perception grew and deepened daily, with every time he was in her presence, with every recollection of her in absence.

Her mind might be a garden unsown. But behind her face was the light of a lamp not waiting to be lit, but already lighted (he surmised) at the first coming of conscious existence, and burning steadily ever since.

Whose hand had lighted it he did not know yet, though he knew that the lamp, s.h.i.+ning behind her face, her mere beauty, was her soul. Her father was not mistaken in his notion that the young man regarded the girl to whom he addressed so little of direct speech, with a veneration that disconcerted Don Joaquin and was condemned by him as out of place. Not that he, of course, found fault with _respect_: absence of that he would grimly have resented; but a _culte_, like Gore's, a reverence literally devout, seemed to the old half-Indian Latin, high-falutin, unreal: and Don Joaquin abhorred unrealities.

Probably the young man condemned the old as hide-bound in obtuseness of perception in reference to his daughter. As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout she may well have seemed to him. If so, some inkling of the fact would surely penetrate the old horse-raiser's inner, taciturn, but acutely watchful consciousness. His hide was by no means too thick for that. And, if so again, that perception would not enhance his appreciation of the critic.

Elderly fathers are not universally more flattered by an exalted valuation of their daughters than by an admiring estimation of themselves.

To himself, indeed, Gore was perfectly respectful. And he had to admit that the stranger learned his work well and did it well--better than the cowboys whom Don Joaquin was not given to indulge in neglect or slackness.

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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.e.x 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 ent.i.tled 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 Antinous, 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-gla.s.s 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."