When dreams come true

by Ritter Brown

As for Bessie, the gentle hand of sleep soon closed her eyes, and she slept the sleep of a tired child. With Blanch it was otherwise.

How could she sleep with the face of Chiquita constantly before her and the pangs of jealousy gnawing at her heart? How stupid to have imagined her to be one of those bovine women with large liquid eyes who, figuratively speaking, pass the major portion of their lives standing knee-deep in a pond, gazing stolidly out upon the world; a fat brown wench upon whose hip a man might confidently expect to hang his hat by the time she has attained the age of forty.

Nothing could have been farther from the mark. She might have known that Jack could not have been caught with so thin a bait. All night long she tossed on her pillow, or silently rose to gaze at the stars from the window.

"Oh, if she only were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But he would pay for this!

Their rooms overlooked the patio, and from behind an angle of a screen she could look straight across it into the garden beyond as she lay in bed. The bright shafts of the morning sun sifted down through the branches of the trees and lay in patches of gold on the grass and flowers beneath and flooded the patio with light. Above the tops of the trees and one corner of the low roof, the clear, pale blue skyline was just visible. Butterflies and humming-birds darted in and out among the fragrant white clematis and honeysuckle and passion vines that hung from the arcades surrounding the court, or hovered over the fountain and basin of gold fish in its center, edged with grasses and ferns. The notes of the golden oriole and cooing of pigeons and wood-doves mingling with the silvery jingle of an occasional vaquero's spurs, came from the garden beyond.

How peaceful it was! After all, why was the place so unusual, so different from the rest of the world? But forget where one was, and the scene might have been one in Algiers or Egypt, or in a town in Spain or Northern Italy. And why, she asked herself, as her thoughts reverted to Chiquita, was this Indian woman so very different from themselves?

Dress her as they were dressed, and place her in the proper surroundings, and she would easily pass for a Gypsy or a Spaniard. Was there any reason to believe that the queens of Sheba and Semiramis with their tawny skins were any less fair than she, Blanch Lennox, with her rosy, soft white complexion? Or Chiquita a shade darker than Cleopatra, the witch of the Nile, whose beauty caused the downfall of Antony and with it the waning power and splendor of ancient Egypt?

Was her lineage superior to Chiquita's, the descendant of a long line of rulers whose ancestry stretched back into the dim, remote past as ancient as the hills, the record of whose lives and deeds stood inscribed on the ruined temples and palaces scattered throughout the land where they once dwelt at a time when her European ancestors roamed the wilderness half naked and clad in the skins of wild beasts?

White men of eminence had married Indians and their descendants were proud of their lineage. True, Chiquita was an exception just as she towered above most women of her race. And who were they, that they should criticize—vaunt their superiority in the face of the universal scheme of things? Were they really any better? The same passions, longings and aspirations that swayed them, swayed the Red man as well.

Their daily lives were different—their aspirations were directed in different channels, that was all. What was true civilization and culture, any way? Who had ever succeeded in defining them? The so-called civilized world might prattle of culture. Its ideas compared with those of mankind as a whole were purely relative and of a local origin and color, and could not be gauged by a uniform standard of ethics. What pleases the one fails to attract the other. The man in power who talks of culture may be taken seriously by those of his own race who stand by and applaud his words, but remove him from his home surroundings and place him on a footing of equality with those of a different race and environment and his arguments fail to convince.