The Little Gods: A Masque of the Far East

by Rowland Thomas

So Doña Mercedes, having had only a sip of the life most people lead, passed from the lost world of the convent to the lost world of the valley, with her proud, dainty ways, and a friendly, inquiring smile in her eyes for every one she met. I suppose you and I can't understand how Doña Mercedes felt; one must step directly from the convent to the world to do that. But of course her smile was friendly, for she had never known any one who was not a friend; and it was inquiring, for the world was all one great puzzle to her, and she was interested in the multitude of people she saw doing so many seemingly hard and disagreeable and useless things. Of bad things, of course, she knew nothing, except for some words in her prayers. So Doña Mercedes, young woman and little girl, looked into the world with frank, interested eyes.

And a very delightful place she found it. There was the great house, with its thick walls and heavily barred windows and big, cool, dark rooms. There was the garden, with the old familiar orange and lemon trees and tinkling fountains. There were strange, sweet, new trees as well, ylang-ylang and clove and cinnamon, and a hundred other cool, fragrant, snowy-blossomed things, and poincianas, and orchids, and great ferns, and palms. Best of all, trained up and about her windows, were real Spanish roses, big white and pink and red and yellow fellows. And at the far end of the garden was a wide-spreading old veteran of a mango, big as a small mountain, and in its shade a little summer-house for her, almost hidden in a tangle of roses. Here she used to sit through the day, embroidering or reading, or dozing. It might have seemed a dull life to you and me, but then we never knew the quiet of the convent, and the peace of it.

Besides, she looked forward always to the evening. You never knew that either, perhaps—the coolness and delight of the tropical evening coming after the long glare of the day, when through the windows steals a fresh damp air, heavy with the scent of flowers and moist earth, and one hears the strange cries of birds and insects, and sees the big, silent, fluttering bats and the fireflies that make a living fountain of every tree; and all these but passing shadows on the background of a dim, happy, sleepy world of darkness.

Most of all, Doña Mercedes was interested in the creatures who worked and played in this huge new world. First there was her father. The long evenings were never too long with him, for Don Enrique cast aside all the gravity and dignity and silence, and laughed and jested and talked and dreamed with his little girl, till the grandfather of all the lizards became disgusted at the unseemly disturbance of the established order, and retired with an indignant flip of the tail, which nearly lost him that brittle member.

Then there was good, grumbling Tia Maria, who found it hard to adjust herself to new conditions. "How can one live in a country where there are no sidewalks?" Tia Maria mourned, "and where there are monkeys and bats—ur-gh-h—and scorpions and spiders—oogh-h! Spiders big as that, child!" cried Tia Maria, pushing out a sturdy foot from under her limp black skirts.

Then there were the servants, with their eternal cheery smiles and careless ways, who first revealed to Doña Mercedes that she inherited the family temper. And the women and the little brown babies in the town, and the dull men in the fields—Mercedes wondered if it was not very hot and unpleasant to work in the fields, and so smiled most kindly at them, till they forgot their sullenness and smiled back.

There were the treacherous river and the great clumsy boats, and the fierce-looking river-men with their knives and the bright handkerchiefs about their heads. And once she met some wild men in the streets—sturdy fellows with great muscles and long black hair, stiff and rough as the mane of a horse, dressed mostly, to her frightened gaze, in shields and spears and head-axes and knives. But when she smiled timidly, they responded with wide grins, and tried to sell her little silver pipes and copper betelnut-boxes.

So Doña Mercedes moved about, learning many things concerning life, even in that far-off valley. She was destined to learn the greatest thing of all there, but that came later. I've often wished I could have seen the stately, slender child-woman in those days, with her big, inquisitive eyes—seen her just as the Captain did, when he came tearing into town to see her and nearly ran over her.

It was characteristic of Captain Manuel to come that way, forty miles in four hours, when after two slow months the news of her arrival penetrated far into the mountains, where he was happily busy hunting outlaws. It was characteristic of him to gallop full tilt down on the lady he had come to see, before he knew she was there. And it was characteristic of him also to rein his horse back on its haunches with one tug, and sweep his hat off with a gesture that would have done honor to Quixote himself, and insist on escorting the lady home, despite the uneasy grumbling of Tia Maria, and a sudden access of stateliness on Doña Mercedes' part.

Everything Captain Manuel did was characteristic, for he was a Catalan. And while no one can foretell what a Catalan may do, it is always safe to say that he will do what he pleases, and do it with all his might. And this gray-eyed, fair-haired boy with the frank, smiling face, had chosen to play at living, thus far. He was the commander of the Guardia Civil in all the southern valley, put in that unenviable post that puzzled bureaucrats might be saved from his unbounded energy. And he played with the bandits and outlaws and savages, purposely left them undisturbed that they might grow bold and troublesome, and then went out with a laugh and destroyed them, as you might a cage of rats. When the fighting was over, he would come back unwearied and amuse himself with wondrous speculations in tobacco, or stake his last peso on a stroke at billiards with Don Enrique. The most fascinating of all the playthings he had discovered in his brief life was something he was pleased to call love. He played at that with his usual wholeheartedness, till a score of girls up and down the valley were ever watching for the lithe figure on the wild black horse, and more than a score of men were breathing threats of vengeance. Whereat the Captain laughed boyishly, and invited the discontented to step out and settle it once for all with pistol or rifle or knife or spear or bolo or bare hands.