Part 33

"Twenty years, and always looked like that and not married to him? Sweet Mother of God!" she cried in the quaintest tone imaginable, sinking back in her chair. "Had I known him as many weeks I had either married him or killed myself!"

"Nobody takes love so seriously as that!" laughed Blanch.

"Ah! you have never loved him!" she said, after a short silence.

"Why do you suppose I am here?" returned Blanch.

"Then how could you have lived near him all these years without marrying him?"

"It was a mistake, I admit," answered Blanch good-humoredly. "But you must understand that we don't regard love in quite the same light as you do. We don't make a great fuss about it and talk of killing ourselves, and that sort of thing. We get married when we find it convenient."

"Ah, yes, I know," answered Chiquita, "but I'm sure you can never be as much to him as I can. What have you endured, what have you suffered to make you feel and realize the full significance of love?"

"Do you imagine," asked Blanch in surprise, "that there is any less of the woman in me because I have been spared the things which you perhaps have been forced to endure, or that one must first suffer before one is capable of loving?"

"No, I don't think that, for love is a thing like sleep, it comes upon us unawares. But it seems to me I am better fitted for him than you are; that my love, tempered by my life's experience, must be fuller and deeper and richer than that which you have to offer him. What," she continued, "do you really know of life? Not the social side of it, of which your life has been so full, but life as it really is? Were you born under the open heavens? Have you slept on the hard, cold ground, exposed to the weather, or nearly perished of hunger and thirst? Could you feed and clothe yourself from the naked earth without the assistance of others? Have you seen men, women and children starve, or ruthlessly struck down by your side, or nursed them through some terrible scourge like the smallpox?

"All your life you have been protected and cared for, while all my life I have been obliged to face the reality of things, forced to work, to procure the simple necessities of life. I have carried wood and water, cooked, and fed and clothed myself and others with the materials provided by my own hands. And yet, when I look back upon my life, I would not surrender one hour of the true happiness the day's work brought with it could I thereby have escaped the suffering and bitterness it often entailed. Barren though my life may appear from your point of view, I know it to be infinitely rich in comparison to yours, for, as I have said, you have never known what life really means--never experienced its hardships, never beheld the bright face of danger, nor tasted the joys of the great free life in the open, the simple daily life devoid of the cares of civilized men, without which the life of a man can never be complete, be he what he may.

"'Where the foot rests, that is home,' is a saying among my people; a truth, that so far as my experience goes, has never been gainsaid."

In spite of themselves and the fact that they could not wholly comprehend the weight and significance of her words, they were fascinated by her discourse, emphasized and illustrated as it was by the dramatic intensity of her gestures and expression.

"Señorita," said Blanch at last, breaking the silence that ensued, "I believe you are still at heart the savage, or better, the nomad you were when you lived in the wilderness."

"When I lived in the Garden of Eden, in God's world, not man's, is what you mean," she replied.

"Do you never have a desire to return to it?" asked Bessie.

"The old days can never be effaced," answered Chiquita. "My thoughts continually revert to them when, as a little girl, I used to set meat and drink before my father and his guests as they sat in a circle about the fire in the center of his lodge or in our house and smoked the long red clay pipes, or, after the crops were harvested, roamed through the land during the hunting season; sometimes afoot, at other times in canoes or on horseback. There are times when such an insatiable longing for the old life seizes me that I become almost unmanageable. I long to throw myself down in the open--lie close in the embrace of Mother Earth, and breathe the smoke of the camp-fire. My unrest is like that of the birds when the spell of the spring and the autumn comes upon them and the migratory instinct seizes them, or like that of the great herds of reindeer in the North which travel each year to the sea to drink of its salty waters, and which, if prevented, die."

"Do you know," said Bessie to Blanch a little later, when they were alone in their room, "she's fascinating when she talks like that."

"Ah! that's just where the danger lies," answered Blanch. "Think of what might happen if she starts talking like that to Jack--it's just what he's waiting to hear."

Juan must have fallen asleep. As he lay stretched upon the bench, he was awakened suddenly by the sound of vehement, passionate words.

Peering cautiously through the bushes, he beheld Chiquita and Don Felipe standing facing one another in the same spot where the three women had been but a short time before. He was not near enough to overhear the conversation, but judging from the vehemence of their gestures and high-pitched voices, he rightly conjectured that their meeting was anything but an amicable one.

On seeing Chiquita with Blanch and Bessie, Don Felipe had discreetly refrained from joining them as he had promised; he would make his apologies to them in the evening. The opportunity for which he had been waiting since his return had come--he must see Chiquita alone. So he withdrew to a far corner of the garden, where he could observe the women without being seen, and when Blanch and Bessie returned to the house, he intercepted her. Although she had hourly expected to meet him ever since she had been apprised of his return, his appearance was so sudden she was taken unawares. She had reseated herself after Blanch and Bessie left and sat leaning with one elbow on the table and her head resting in her hand, lost in thought. She did not hear his approach from behind, but at the first sound of his voice she started to her feet, turning like a flash and facing him. Her movement was so sudden and unexpected that he too was taken aback.

"You evidently did not expect to see me this afternoon," he began with some hesitancy.

"I did not," she replied coldly. "I should have thought," she continued, looking him full in the eyes, "that the manhood in you would have forever prevented your return." Felipe winced under her words. A dark flush of anger suffused his face, and his lips quivered in an effort to frame the hot words he was about to utter in reply, but he checked himself.

"One is sometimes forced to follow the bidding of an instinct or desire even against one's will," he said, controlling himself with difficulty. She drew her glove on her right hand without replying and took a step in the direction of the patio, as though to depart.

"Chiquita!" he exclaimed, stepping quickly in front of her and barring her way, "I have tried my best to remain away, but in spite of myself, I've been drawn irresistibly back to you--I could not help it. Besides," he added, "you must realize what it costs me."

"Better had you spared yourself the humiliation, Don Felipe," she answered.

"Listen, Chiquita, to what I have to say!"

"Spare yourself the pain, Don Felipe Ramirez. Nothing you can say can alter my attitude toward you," she interrupted.