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.
CHAPTER XI.
Mariquita had been alone a long time when Gore, riding home, came suddenly upon her.
She was sitting where a clump of trees cast now a shadow, and it was only in coming round them that he saw her when already very near her. The ground was soft there, and his horse's hoofs had made scarcely any sound.
She turned her head, and he saluted her, at the same moment slipping from the saddle.
"I thought you were far away," she said.