A Prairie Infanta

Camp life might not be bad for Mr. Keene; but that it would be good for a girl so young and sensitive to every impression as Lola, Jane doubted.

"I got to consider what's best for her," thought Jane, while Keene himself was beginning once more to sympathize with the silent misery in her face.

"I never had no idea you thought so much of Lola!" he exclaimed. "She wasn't the kind of child a stranger'd be apt to get attached to. I hope you don't think I'd do anything mean? That isn't my style! All is, I'm her father, and a father ought to have some say-so. Now aint that true, Miss Combs?"

Jane was thinking. "Would three hundred dollars help you out?" she demanded. "I've got that much. I've been saving it toward Lola's schooling next year."

"What, have you been sending her to pay-school?" Keene looked surprised, and unexpectedly his eyes began to dim. "I'd have been a better man if I'd had any luck," he said, with apparent irrelevance.

Jane made no moral observations. She did not point out that a man's virtue ought not to depend altogether on his income. She said simply, "Will that much do?"

Mr. Keene, controlling his emotion, said it would, and they parted upon the understanding that they should meet at Lynn two days later, for the transference of the fund.

Then Jane plodded wearily back to the pavilion, and mutely watched the cow-ponies rush and buck around the course. She beheld Valentino Cortés, a meteoric vision in white cotton trousers, girdled in crimson, flash by to victory amid the wild "Vivas!" of his compatriots. She saw the burros trot past in their little dog-trot of a race.

But although she essayed a pleased smile at these things, and listened with enforced attention to the speeches and the music, there were present with her foreboding and unrest. For usually the Dauntless pursued no vigorous labor in summer, but merely kept the water out of its slope and "took up" and sold to various smelters such "slack" as it had made during the winter. There would be no royalties coming in to Jane, since no coal would be mined; and presently it would be September, and no money for Lola's school.

So Jane's cares were thickening. Not only did the mine soon enter on its summer inactivity, but worse befell. The mine boss came one day to tell Jane that, because of a certain "roll" in the east entries, it was deemed inadvisable farther to work these levels.

"The coal over there makes too much slack, anyhow," said the mine boss, "so we intend hereafter to stick to the west." Whereupon, unaware of leaving doom behind him, he went cheerfully away.

Jane's horizons had always lain close about her. She had never been one to scent trouble afar off. To be content in the present, to be trustful in the future, was her unformulated creed. And now, as she mused, it came to her swiftly that she need not despair so long as she had over her head a substantial dwelling. This abode, in its mere cubhood, had afforded her financial succor. It would be queer if such an office were beyond it now. Only this time the doctor must not be approached; his reasoning before had been too searching.

Jane therefore wrote to a lawyer in Trinidad, authorizing him to obtain for her a certain amount of money. She felt assured of the outcome of this letter, but presently there came a reply which stupefied her. The lawyer wrote that there happened to be in court a suit concerning the boundaries of an old Spanish land grant, which, it was claimed, extended north of the Purgatory River, and touched upon her own and other neighboring property. The lawyer wrote that matters would probably be settled in favor of the present landholders, but that, so long as litigation pended, all titles were so clouded as to make any questions of loans untenable.

Jane felt as if a ruthless destiny were pressing her home. She looked at Lola, and her heart sank at the girl's air of springlike happiness and hope. Must these sweet hours be broken upon with a tale of impending penury?

Lola of late had seemed gentler, and the silent, stony moods were leaving her, together with her childish impulse toward sudden anger. So much Jane saw. Lola herself was sensible of a changing sway of feeling which she did not seek to understand. To read of a noble deed brought swift tears to her eyes in these days of mutation, and stirred her to emulative dreams.

She did not know what power of action lay in her; but there seemed to be some vital promise in the eager essence of spirit which spread before her such visions of beautiful enterprise. Lola did not realize how favorable to ripening character was the atmosphere in which she lived. She could not yet know how she had been impressed by the simple page of plain, undramatic kindness and generosity which Jane's life opened daily to her eyes.

One day Jane spoke to her sadly.

"Lola," she said, "I'm afraid there won't be enough money to send you away to school this year."

"But papa never denies me anything, tia."

"I know, dear."

"How funny you say that! Is – has he – lost his money, tia? You're keeping something from me!"

"Lola," said Jane, in a moved voice, "I don't know a great deal about your father's means. I can't say they're less than they were; but there's reasons – why I'm afraid you can't – go to Pueblo this coming fall. No, Lola – don't ask me any questions – I can't speak out! I've done wrong! I can't say any more!" and to Lola's surprise she hurried out of the room.

Never before had Lola witnessed in Jane such confusion and distress. The sight bewildered and troubled her so sorely as for the moment to exclude from mind the bearing upon her own future of Jane's ambiguous, faltering words. Something was surely amiss; but the girl as yet fully realized only one fact – that tia, always so steadfast and strong and cheerful, had gone hastily from the room in the agitation of one who struggled with unaccustomed tears. Lola hesitated to follow Jane. Some inward prompting withheld her.

"She is like me," mused the girl. "She would rather be alone when anything troubles her. I will wait. Maybe she will come back soon and tell me everything."

Outside it was as dry and bright as ever. The Peaks stood bald and pink against the flawless sky. Over in the Vigil yard Lola saw the smaller Vigil boys lassoing one another with a piece of clothes-line, while, dozing over her sewing, Señora Vigil herself squatted in the doorway. Propped against the house-wall, Diego Vigil sat munching a corn-cake and frugally dispersing crumbs to the magpies which hovered about him in short, blue-glancing flights.

Diego was two years old – quite old enough to doff his ragged frock for the "pantalones" which his mother was still working upon, after weeks of listless endeavor. The señora's thread was long enough to reach half-way across the yard, and it took time and patience to set a stitch. For very weariness the señora nodded over her labor, and made many little appeals to the saints that they might guide aright the tortuous course of her double cotton.

"Life is hard!" sighed the señora, pausing over a knot in her endless thread. "Ten children keep the needle hot. Ay, but this knot is a hard one! There are evil spirits about."

She laid down her work to wipe her eyes, and, observing two of her sons grappling in fraternal war at the house corner, she arose to cuff each one impartially, exclaiming, "Ea, muchachos! You fight before my very eyes, eh? Take that! and that!" Waddling reluctantly back to her sewing, she saw Lola standing in the white-pillared porch of the big adobe house beyond, and a gleam of inspiration crossed the señora's dark, fat face.

"She shall take out this knot," thought Señora Vigil. "Señorita!" she called. "Come here, I pray you! There is a tangle in my thread and all my girls are away!"

And, as Lola came across the field, she added, "I am dead of loneliness, Lolita. Ana and Benita and Ines and Marina and Alejandro are gone up the Trujillo to the wedding-party of their cousin, Judita Vasquez. To-morrow she marries the son of Juan Montoya. Hola! She does well to get so rich a one! He has twenty goats, a cow and six dogs. His house has two rooms and a shed. They will live splendid! It is to be hoped these earthly grandeurs will not turn Judita's thoughts from heaven!" The señora shook her head cheerfully. "My Ana told Judita she ought to be thankful so plain a face as hers should find favor with José Montoya. My Ana is full of loving thoughts! She never lets her friends forget what poor, sinning mortals they are!"

"Indeed, no!" agreed Lola, feelingly, while she smoothed out the thread.

"Take a stitch or two that I may be sure the cotton is really all right!" implored the señora. "Yes, truly Ana is a maid of rare charms. When she marries I shall be desolate!"

"Is there talk of that?" asked Lola, with interest. Ana was now sixteen, and was nearly as heavy as her mother, and much more sedate. In true Mexican fashion the look of youth had left her betimes, and her swarthy plumpness had early hardened and settled to a look of maturity to which future years could add little.

"There is Juan Suarez," said the señora, in a mysterious whisper, "and if I would I could mention others; for, as you know, Lolita, my Ana is very beautiful."

Lola maintained a judicious silence, and the señora continued placidly, "Though she is my child, I am bound to admit it. Her nature is a rare one, too. And when suitors throng about her she only shakes her head. She is lofty. She will not listen. 'No, caballeros,' she says, 'I have regarded your corral. It is too empty.' And one by one they go away weeping, the poor caballeros! She is cruel, my Ana, being so beautiful! Me, I own it – though my heart aches to see the caballeros shedding tears!"

Lola, finding her own face expanding irresistibly, bent lower over Diego's small trousers. The picture of Ana, standing disdainful among the sorrowing caballeros and waving off their pleas with an imperious hand, was one to bring a smile to lips of deadliest gravity. Ana, with her hands on her broad hips, short and thick as a squat brown jug with its handles akimbo, – Ana, with her great clay-colored face and tiny, glittering eyes, with her thick, pale lips and coarse, black hair, – surely none but a mother could view in Ana such charms as bedewed Señora Vigil's eyes only to think of!

"To see unhappiness is a very blade in my heart!" sighed Señora Vigil, recovering herself. "Do not make the thread short, Lolita! No, no! I shall have to thread the needle again before the week is out, if you do. Ah, yes! I wept much the day when you were lost, and Bev Gribble, the vaquero, brought you home on his horse. 'Twas long ago. And now you are grown tall and can play the piano. Shall you go on fretting your poor head with more schooling, chiquita?"

At this question Lola's mind sharply reverted to the distressing scene which had by a moment preceded her neighbor's summons. There had been in Jane's words a broken, yet oddly definite, assertion of impending poverty. She had spoken of the unlikelihood of another year in Pueblo for Lola, and the girl for the first time began to realize this fact with a sinking of the heart. Her voice had a tremor as she said hesitatingly, "I'm afraid I can't go back to Pueblo this fall."

"Not go back? The Jonas señorita goes back! Why not you? Has thy father lost money? I am thy friend, Lolita. Tell me!"

"I can't tell what I don't know, señora. I don't know if he has lost money. Tia only said that – that I mightn't go back to school. She didn't say why, but she will, no doubt."

Señora Vigil's eyes narrowed. She recalled certain rumors long afloat in town as to Jane's extravagance, and the inability of her means to such luxuries as pianos. Also, although half-consciously, the señora's inner memory dwelt upon that corner of her back yard which it had been Jane's sad fortune to take away.

The señora was not unkind or vindictive, but she had a mouse-trap sort of mind which only occasionally was open to the admittance of ideas, but which snapped fast forever upon such few notions as wandered into it. Having once accepted the belief that Jane was not averse to snatch at any good in her way, even if it belonged to another, the señora found herself still under the sway of this opinion.

"The big house of Mees Combs has cost too much!" she asserted. "Where has the money come from? From the coal? Some, perhaps, yes; but for all of the great house, ah, it cannot be! Every one has been saying there was not enough coal in her tract to pay for what she has done; and new debts press, doubtless. What could be easier than to take the money of thy father? I tell you, Lolita, that you cannot go to school because Mees Combs has had to use your money to pay them! Eh, but your father will be mad! He is not working himself to a bone that strangers should build themselves fine houses! My Pablo said a little time ago that people said your father's riches were going astray. Me, I did not listen. Now I know he spoke true." The señora's tongue wagged on in a diatribe of accusation and pity.

Lola let the sewing fall. Against her stoutest effort there prevailed a vivid remembrance of Jane's manner and statements, of Jane's self-impeachment and agitation, and, try as hard as she could to forget them, the words which Jane had used kept coming to mind. "I have done wrong!" Had not Jane said this? Had she not covered her face – could it be guiltily– and gone away?

"No," said Lola, hoarsely, half to herself, half to her hearer, "it isn't true! You make mistakes, Señora Vigil! Do you hear? You make mistakes!"

"Alas, for thy soft heart!" moaned the señora. "Thou art changed much! Me, I would not be hard on Mees Combs, though her sin is clear. Who am I to judge? Nay, even I try to forget that me she has also despoiled; that she took a corner of our back yard, and plants corn in it to this day! I am all for forgiving. But the saints are not so easy!" said the señora, unconscious of any disparagement to the saints, and referring merely to a judicial quality in them.

Lola was not listening. She had a burning wish to escape from the soft buzzing of the señora's words, which, a velvety, sting-infested swarm, whirred around her bee-like, seeking hive and home.

"Don't think I believe anything against tia!" she heard herself saying sternly, as the gate slipped from her impetuous hand and she rushed away, the quarry of emotions which no speed, however swift, could outdistance.

CHAPTER SIX

BEWILDERING SATISFACTION

Lola found herself walking up the cañon, between the rocky hills beside the dry arroyo. Summer dust whitened the road, and rose to her tread in alkaline clouds. It was warm, too, under the remorseless Colorado sun, but nothing touched Lola. She was struggling with a thing that was half anguish and half anger, and that lifted upon her a face more and more convincing in its ugliness.It seemed impossible to doubt that Jane had indeed worked the wrong of which Señora Vigil accused her – although Jane's own word, and no word of the señora's, bore this conviction to Lola's breast. Jane had faltered in the trust which she had assumed, and now, confronted with the embarrassment of facing Lola's father in a plain confession of her delinquency, she hesitated and was miserable and afraid and reluctant. Rather than state her situation she would even keep Lola from school.

Lola found herself walking up the cañon, between the rocky hills beside the dry arroyo. Summer dust whitened the road, and rose to her tread in alkaline clouds. It was warm, too, under the remorseless Colorado sun, but nothing touched Lola. She was struggling with a thing that was half anguish and half anger, and that lifted upon her a face more and more convincing in its ugliness.

It seemed impossible to doubt that Jane had indeed worked the wrong of which Señora Vigil accused her – although Jane's own word, and no word of the señora's, bore this conviction to Lola's breast. Jane had faltered in the trust which she had assumed, and now, confronted with the embarrassment of facing Lola's father in a plain confession of her delinquency, she hesitated and was miserable and afraid and reluctant. Rather than state her situation she would even keep Lola from school.

"It isn't that I care for that!" throbbed Lola. It was not the stoppage of her own course, indeed, although this was a misery, but the loss of trust in all humanity which distrust of Jane seemed to the girl to inflict upon her. If Jane were not true, none could be; and the suspicion and unrest rioted back again to the bosom which belief in Jane and the world had softened and calmed.

There was nothing to do. Lola's father could easily repair Jane's shortcoming, but not without having an explanation of the facts of the case. The facts of the case he must never know. Even in her pain and indignation, Lola never made a question of this.

"Suppose it is true!" thought the girl, suddenly overcome by a new tide of feeling. "What am I blaming her for? She would never have fixed the house or bought things for herself! She did it all for me. And although I would rather have gone to school than have the piano, am I to blame tia for not knowing this? She never thought where she was coming out. She just went on and on. And now that there is no more money, she is frightened and sorry and ashamed. She has done everything for me – even herself she has fairly made over to please me. Poor tia! Oh, ungrateful that I am to have been thinking unkindly of her!"

Suddenly all the bitterness left her, like an evil thing exorcised by the first word of pitying tenderness. Tears stole sweetly to her eyes. Peace came upon her shaken spirit. The day had been full of strange revelations; and now it showed her how good for the human heart it is to be able to pity weakness, to love, to forbear and to forgive.

In the strange peacefulness which brooded over her she walked home between the piñon-sprinkled hills, where doves were crooning and the far bleating of an upland herd echoed among the barren ridges. She reflected quietly upon meeting Jane without a hint of any shadow in her face, but in such sunniness of humor as should gladden and reassure. And Jane would never dream of the dark hour which had visited her child. She would never know that any slightest thought, unnurtured in affection, had risen to cast between them the least passing shadow; although from Lola's heart might never pass away that little, inevitable sense of loss which those know whose love survives a revelation of weakness in one believed to be strong.

As she came in sight of the hollow roof of the Dauntless she saw the doctor riding toward her.

"Hello!" he said. "What have you been doing up the cañon? Building Spanish castles?"

"Watching Spanish castles fall," said Lola, smiling. "What would you do," she went on lightly, "if you had planned something worth while, and it became impossible?"

The doctor looked down at her young, questioning face. It was grave, although she spoke gaily, and looked so mere a slip of girlhood with her brown throat and cheek and lifted black-lashed eyes.

Unexpectedly the doctor remembered when he, too, had meant to do things that should be "worth while." He thought of Berlin and Vienna and Paris, and the clinics where he had meant to acquire such skill as, aiding his zeal, should write him among the first physicians of his day. And here he was, practising among a few Mexicans and miners, tending their bruises, doling them out quinine, and taking pay of a dollar a month from every man, sick or well, enrolled on the mine books, and frequently getting nothing at all from such as were not therein enrolled. Never a volume of his had startled the world of science. Surgery was bare of his exploits. Medical annals knew him not. All he had thought to do was undone by him; and yet here he was, contented, happy and healthy in a realm of little duties. In so unpretentious a life as this he had found satisfaction; and for the first time it came upon him that thus simply and calmly satisfaction comes to the great mass of men who have nothing to do with glory or hope of glory.

"When great things become impossible, what would you do?" said Lola, tossing back her long, braided hair.

"I would do little things," said the doctor, with whimsical soberness.

An unusual equipage was turning in from the Trinidad road – an equipage on which leather and varnish shone, and harness brasses flashed, while the dust rolled pompously after it in a freakish fantasy of postilions and outriders. The driver made a great business of his long whip. The horses were sleek and brown. Altogether the vehicle had a lordly air, easily matching that of the individual sitting alone on the purple cushions – a man whose features were not very clear at the distance, although the yellowness of his beard, the glitter of his studded shirt-front, and whole consequential, expansive effect recalled to the doctor's mind an image of the past, less ornate, indeed, and affluent, but of similar aspect. He narrowed his eyes, staring townward over Lola's head, and wondering if yonder princely personage might not in very truth be Lola's father.

But the girl's eyes were bent upon the ground. She did not see the equipage or the man on the purple cushions.

"You do little things?" she said, raising her eyes gravely to the doctor's. He had always seemed to her the man who did great things. "I will try," she added, seriously.

While she talked with the doctor the world seemed to Lola a pleasant place, with a golden light on its long levels and a purple glamour on its hills. And after he had left her, she went with a light heart down the unpaved street that she had lately traversed in unseeing bitterness. The very hum of the mine cars was full of good cheer; children splashed joyously in the ditch; magpies gossiped; the blacksmith-shop rang with a merry din of steel.

Set emerald-like in the yellow circle of the prairies, the green young cottonwood grove about Jane's house shone fresh and vivid. At the white gate a carriage waited – a strange carriage which Lola scrutinized wonderingly as she approached. With delighted eyes she noted the purple cushions and the satin coats of the horses. Who could have come? Whose voice was that which issued from the house in an unbroken monologue, genial, laughing, breathless?

Suddenly, as she mounted the porch steps, a persuasion of familiarity in those light accents overcame her. Could it be that her father had come at last? That, after all her waiting, she was to see him and talk with him and sob out on his breast her appreciation of his long labors in her behalf, his kindness, unselfishness and goodness?

She forgot that she had sometimes been hurt at his silence and absence. Her childhood swam before her; she recalled the sweetness of her mother's face, and in that memory he who awaited her in Jane's sitting-room gathered a graciousness which exalted him, as if he, too, had been dead and was alive again.

The talk broke off at her impetuous entrance. Upon a chair sat a man with a round and ruddy face, with bright blue eyes and a curling spread of yellow beard. Lola hesitated. She doubted if this richly arrayed, somewhat stout man could be the slim, boyish-looking father she remembered. Then the unalterable joyousness of his glance reassured her, and she rushed forward crying, "Oh, it's you! It's you!"

She had not noticed Jane, who sat opposite, mute and relaxed, like one in whom hope and resolution flag and fail; but Jane's deep eyes followed Lola's swift motion, and her look changed a little at the girl's air of eager joy. As she saw Lola fling herself upon his breast and cling there, she winced, and her heart yearned at the sight of a love which she had somehow failed to win with all her efforts, and which now she should never win, since Lola was about to leave her forever.

The hour so long dreaded by Jane seemed surely to have come at last – the hour of her child's departure. Forth to life's best and brightest Lola would go, as was meet. Happiness illimitable awaited the girl she had cherished. It was right that this should be so; yet, alas for the vast void gray of the empty heart which Lola would leave behind!

"Well, this is a kind of surprise!" said Mr. Keene, holding his daughter away for a better sight of her radiant face. "You are taller than I expected. She's got real Spanish eyes, aint she, Miss Combs? Like her mother's. The Keenes are all sandy. I'm not sure I'd have known you, Lola."