CHAPTER XVII.

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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 JosÉ. 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—"


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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