The breath of Easter was in the air. It was hard, even in that last penitential week, to renounce the seductive wooings of those first April days. In the little Episcopal chapel, or in the venerable Mission, we acknowledged each evening our infirmities; but with all our abnegation, there was for some of us an heterodox satisfaction in hastening away from our prayers.
We wanted to exult, rather than to bemoan "our manifold sins and wickedness."
We were not sufficiently impressed with our depravity to smell brimstone, when the air was richly purified with the scent of orange blossoms and millions of newborn roses.
Doubtless our lenten orthodoxy would have developed more strongly in the cutting blast of a Manitoba blizzard. We would have felt more contrite, drawn by the persuasive chastisements of a sweet spring cyclone. But in such days as the ones which followed each other like glad birds in a flock, it was difficult to assume a despondency adequate to the penitential demand.
The Gold of Ophir rose and Mariposilla were now blooming together. The old house was bright, outside and in, with light and glory.
From the veranda and the crest of the roof, long sprays of dazzling bloom swept voluptuously to the sky. In the blushing hearts of myriads of buds and blossoms, the sun whispered each day his rapturous secrets.
Wonderful from its first hour of triumph until its last pale, dilapidated petals have fallen to the ground—a moral to its transient magnificence—this rose is tragic.
It seems always the glorious prototype of Mariposilla, who ever stole its fickle lights and shades. As I watched, through those eventful weeks, the marvelous unfolding of bud to flower and child to maiden, I was never able to separate them in my thoughts. Their analogy was captivating.
I have already said that I learned instinctively to watch for the girl's mood in the complexion of the rose. When the edges of its petals burned with fire, I knew that Mariposilla, too, glowed with hope and ecstasy. When the fog smote sullenly the golden heart of the Ophir, I felt without looking that the girl, too, was pale, tortured with jealousy, and indefinite forebodings. Thus for me there will always remain the fancy that between this rose and the Spanish child there existed a kinship—a subtile sympathy, that each unconsciously felt when the other was near.
Looking back over those happy days, they seem fraught with no ordinary conditions. Unconsciously all took part in the several acts of a realistic drama.