Читать книгу Mariquita: A Novel - Ayscough John - Страница 11

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.

All that life had had a centre – not for herself only, but for all there. The simplicity of the life consisted, above all, in the simplicity of its object. Its routine, almost mechanically regular, was not mechanical because of its central meaning. No doubt the "work" of the nuns was education, but their work of education was service of a Master. And the Master was Himself the real object, the centre of the work, as carried on within those quiet, busy walls. Mariquita no longer formed a part, though the work was still operative in her, and had not ceased with her removal from the workers; but she was as near as ever to its centre, and was now more concerned with the ultimate object of the work than with the work.

Her memories were weakening in color and definiteness, but her possession was not decreased, her possession was the Master who possessed herself.

The simplicity that Gore had from the first noted in her, without being able to inform himself wherein it consisted – but which he venerated without knowing its source, that he knew was noble – was first that Mariquita did in fact live and move and have her being, as nominally all His creatures do, in the Master of that vanished convent life. What the prairie was to her body, surrounding it, its sole background and scene and stage of action, He was to her inward, very vivid, wholly silent life; what the prairie was to her healthy lungs, He was to her soul, its breath, "inspiration." Banal and stale as such metaphor is, in her the two lives were so unified (in this was the rarity of her "simplicity") that it was at least completely accurate.

With Mariquita that which we call the supernatural life was not occasional and spasmodic. That inspiration of Our Lord was not, as with so many, a gulp, or periodic series of gulps, but a breathing as steady and soundless as the natural breathing of her strong, sane, flawless body.

She did not, like the self-conscious pietist, listen to it. She did not, like the pathological pietist, test its pulse or temperature. The pathological pietist is still self-student, though studious of self in a new relation; still breathes her own breath at second-hand, and remains indoors within the four walls of herself.

Of herself Mariquita knew little. That God had given her, in truth, existence; that she knew. That she was, because He chose. That He had been born, and died, and lived again, for her sake, as much as for the sake of any one of all the saints, though not more than for the sake of the human being in all the world who thought least of Him: that she knew. That He loved her incomparably better than she could love herself or any other person – that she knew with a reality of knowledge greater than that with which any lover ever knows himself beloved by the lover who would give and lose everything for him. That He had already set in her another treasure, the capacity of loving Him – that also she knew with ineffable reverence and gladness, and that the power of loving Him grew in her, as the power of knowing Him grew.

But concerning herself Mariquita knew little except such things as these. She had studied neither her own capacities nor her own limitations, neither her tastes, nor her gifts. That Sarella thought her stupid, she was hardly aware, and less than half aware that Sarella was wrong. No human creature had ever told her that she was beautiful, and she had never made any guess on the subject with herself. She never wondered if she were happy, or ever unjustly disinherited of the means of happiness. Whether, in less strait thrall of circumstance, she might be of more consequence, even of more use, she never debated. She had not dreamed of being heroic; had no chafing at absence of either sphere or capacity for being brilliant. Her life was passing in a silence singularly profound among the lives of God's other human creatures, and its silence, unhumanness, oblivion (that deepest of oblivion lying beneath what has been known though forgotten) did not vex her, and was never thought of. Her duties were coarse and common; but they were those God had set in her way and sight, and she had no impatience of them, no scorn for them, but just did them. They were not more coarse or common than those He had himself found to His hand, and done, in the house at Nazareth where Joseph was master, and, after Joseph, Mary was mistress, and He, their Creator, third, to obey and serve them.

It would be greatly unjust to Mariquita to say that the monotone of her life was made golden by the bright haze in which it moved. She lived not in a dream, but in an atmosphere. She was not a dreamy person, moving through realities without consciousness of them. She saw all around her, with living interest, only she saw beyond them with interest deeper still, or rather their own significance for her was made deeper by her sense of what was beyond them, and to which they, like herself, belonged. She was very conscious of her neighbors, not only of the human neighbors, but also of the live creatures not human; and each of these had, in her reverence, a definite sacredness as coming like herself from the hand of God.

There was nothing pantheistic in this; seeing everything as God's she did not see it itself Divine, but every natural object was to her clear vision but a thread in the clear, transparent veil through which God showed Himself everywhere. When St. Francis "preached to the birds" he was in fact listening to their sermon to him; and Mariquita, in her close neighborly friendship with the small wild creatures of the prairie, was only worshipping the ineffable, kind friendliness of God, who had made, and who fed, them also. The love she gave them was only one of the myriad silent expressions of her love for Him, who loved them. They were easier and simpler to understand than her human neighbors. It was not that, for an instant, she thought them on the same plane of interest – but we must here interrupt ourselves as she was interrupted.