The Little Gods: A Masque of the Far East

by Rowland Thomas

For he was always calm and dignified and silent, as only a gentleman of Castile can be. Not taciturn or insolent, or overbearing, but merely closed in himself. He treated all men—all white men, of course I mean, for natives do not count—with quiet courtesy, and made neither enemies nor friends. Even the guests who shared the hospitality of the great house at Echague knew very little of their host.

It was a house, that place at Echague, built four-square and heavy as a fort, of great blocks of sandstone, and back of it was a huge walled garden. Of course Don Enrique had other houses, three of them, at Ilagan and Aparri and Manila. But he was as much a man of the open as any of his world-searching forebears, and he loved far-off Echague better than all the rest. Here, when the shipping was over and the last barangayan lay loaded to the water's edge above the rapids at Alcala, waiting for the first gentle lift of the rains to carry her safe down to Aparri, Don Enrique would retire with a band of chosen companions to hunt and game hard and long. Few men were invited a second time, or wished to be, for with all his courtesy Don Enrique was an exacting host in the hunting season. Long before dawn, the hounds would be belling in the patio, the great tiled courtyard, and the sleepy guest, turning on his pillow for another nap, would hear a mighty splashing from the room of his host, and the vicious squeals of the fiery little stallions in the stables, and the clink of bits and stirrups and spears. And before the unhappy sportsman could quite fall asleep, there would come a peal of trumpets in the haunting reveille and boys pounding at each door: "Ready, Señor. Ready. Your coffee is ready." And so they were up and away in a mad rush over hill and valley in the gloom, anything but attractive to a man who had a decent regard for his neck.

And when they returned, Don Enrique would come riding at the head of the long line, grave and composed as ever, while the huntsmen were loaded down with a beautiful great buck or a boar, killed by a single thrust of which any matador in Madrid need not have been ashamed. Then, after the huge hunt breakfast, would come the welcome torpor of the siesta, and in the evening a mighty game, malilla or monte or billiards, for Don Enrique played as he worked and rode, with a carelessness of consequences not at all pleasant to a man with a decent regard for his purse.

So, one by one, the guests sailed away down the mysterious river, and left Don Enrique alone in the great house at Echague, to be master of all he surveyed. And there he moved about his lost world, and was capped and bowed down to, and had his courteous, imperious way, until I think he began to feel that he was really a very great man indeed. And perhaps he was, as great as any other.

But solitary grandeur has its drawbacks, even to as grave and great a man as Don Enrique; and as the summers came treading on each other's heels with their burden of endless days, Don Enrique, sipping his Rioja in solitary state in the great dining-room, where the sweetness of orange-blossoms stole in through the wide windows, began to dream dreams of a companion who should sit always with him of an evening across the big, gleaming table, or come close beside him and share his thoughts. No, Don Enrique was not thinking of a wife; he had had a wife, and "lost" her, as he told the world. But there was his "little girl," Mercedes, back in a great gray convent in Madrid. His little girl, he called her in the letters he sent back every month, for she lived in his memory as the shy little maid he had given to a sweet-voiced Mother Superior, so many years before. It was for her he had been working all these years and piling up these princely possessions, and a look of almost womanish tenderness would come over his proud, grave face when he thought of her. This thought of her had sustained him in all the loneliness, and he had always dreamed of her coming as the crowning touch to his life. "Sometime," said Don Enrique often to the lizards darting across the table in the evening, as lizards will, "sometime she shall come to us." And somehow sometime always lingered in the future.

But at last, one evening when the odor of the blossoms hung very heavy in the damp, still air, and the thunder was muttering in the pass far back of Santa Lucia, Don Enrique stopped his sipping to look very hard at the great-grandfather of all the lizards, a tremendous old fellow almost five inches long. And the lizard returned the stare with his bright, beady eyes.

"Por Diós, my big friend," said Don Enrique to the lizard, at last, "she shall come to us at once." And if you realize what a very great man Don Enrique was, you will understand that when he began to make companions of the lizards, even the biggest and most respectable of them, it was quite time that he sent for Doña Mercedes.

Letters came and went, and in the Christmas season Don Enrique found himself in Manila waiting for the good old Ysla de Panay to bring his little girl to him. Many longing hearts have followed those old ships of the Spanish Mail in the days that are gone. For all this was long ago. Not long as you count, perhaps, but I have seen Doña Mercedes' eyes, and they told me that it happened long, long ago, when the world was very young indeed.

But the old ship did not bring Don Enrique his little girl, after all. I wish you might have seen the Doña Mercedes who did come. Your heart would have beaten as fast, I hope, as that of the spruce young lieutenant who almost let her fall as he was helping her into the launch, and retired quite as full of confusion and blushes and speechlessness as if he had never worn shoulder-straps and a smart small-sword, and been aide-de-camp to his Excellency the Gobernador-General. For Doña Mercedes was tall and slight, with all the stateliness of her house, and her head was poised like a queen's on her slender neck, and her little, high-arched feet seemed scarce to touch the deck. Yet it was not the proud lady who made the young lieutenant's hand unsteady—he lived and moved among proud ladies,—it was the eyes of the young girl. For Doña Mercedes still looked out on the world from the shelter of her convent window, with such a gentle, timid, inquiring smile in the depths of her great dark eyes that she was far more dangerous to the peace and happiness of his Majesty's forces than all the natives of the Philippines, with Cuba thrown in besides.

When Don Enrique saw the eyes of the stately lady who had come to him in place of his little girl, he was comforted, for so the little maid whom he gave to the Mother Superior had looked at him. And Tia Maria had good report to make.