CHAPTER VI
A Lesson in Love
Was it only two months since she had come to live in the half of the Señor Epiphanio Montejo's long dobe in the Mexican village of Las Rubertas? Nan was asking herself as she sat in her doorway, watching the colors of the sunset fade behind the distant range.
It seemed to Nan that it might have been two years, or always, that she had heard the coyotes barking at the edge of Senor Epiphanio's alfalfa field and listened to the splash of falling earth as the everchanging Rio Grande ate away its banks.
Home, the censorious family, Bob, seemed very far away. Forgetfulness was in the languorous air of spring. Much and little had happened since she had become a part of the placid, picturesque village life. The war with Spain was well under way, and she had come to know Ben Evans far better than she ever had expected to know him after the disappointing episode at the Esmeraldas ranch.
Spiser had let her distinctly alone, which was not like Spiser, but she was not curious as to his reason since it was so. Mrs. Gallagher now called her chiquita occasionally, and in unguarded moments showed her affection. Nan rode daily on horseback and studied Spanish with the pompous school-master.
She felt a twinge of conscience when anxious and reproachful letters came from home in the erratic mails, and she dreaded rather than welcomed them, for they only served to remind her that some time this dreamy, unreal life must end. And when she thought of that she thought of Ben Evans.
She was waiting for him now, as he had sent word that he might be able to come, and soon her listening ear heard him greeting a Mexican in the plaza. The big sorrel he rode ambled into sight and stopped at the bars as the moon rose full and round, flooding the world with its white light.
He dropped the reins at the horse's head and came toward her eagerly. He did not let go the hand she extended, but kept it in his own as he sat down beside her.
The tinkle of many guitars now mingled with the sound of the river, and the air was sweet with the scents of spring and the incenselike odor of burning piñon. The village looked a corner of fairyland in the light of the luminous moon and the spell of the night was upon them both.
"I'm glad you could come."
"Are you—honest!"
"Honest."
"I wanted to come—I couldn't stay away to-night."
"Not even if you lost your job?" Nan had forgiven, perhaps, but not forgotten that.
"Don't!" It was a sore subject with him now.
They were silent for a time, but it was a silence as significant as words.
"I like you," he said at last, huskily, with an effort.
"Like me? Is that all?"
"A whole lot."
"I like a great many people a whole lot—Mrs. Gallagher for instance," she looked at him slyly.
"Ah—you know what I mean!"
"How should I if you don't tell me?"
He moved uneasily.
"Better than anybody!"
She considered.
"Better than Edith Blakely?"
Ben hesitated, and Nan suddenly felt more than a pang of jealousy.
"More than Edith Blakely?" The demand this time was vehement.
"More than Edith Blakely," he admitted.
After another silence Nan said innocently:
"It isn't so much to say that you like me better than anybody."
"What would I say?" he asked, surprised.
"Can't you imagine?" Her eyes danced.
He shook his head.
"You might say that you love me."
He drew back startled.
"Lord! I couldn't say that!"
She took her hand away. "Of course not, if you don't feel it."
"'Tain't that," he explained anxiously; "but that's soft. That's talkin' like a novel."
"Nonsense—say it!"
He squirmed, and Nan saw him grow red in the moonlight.
"Aw—g'wan—I couldn't say that."
"Say it, if you mean it!" she demanded, imperiously.
"You won't laugh at me?" suspiciously.
She shook her head.
Shamefacedly he stammered while the perspiration came out on his forehead:
"Love—I love you"
"More than anybody?"
"More than anybody," he repeated after her.
He did not find it so difficult again.
In the soft radiance of the enchanted night, being young and unhampered and exalted of mood, they murmured to each other something of their thoughts and feelings, each halting admission furnishing a fresh thrill.
"Tu estas mi querida!" Ben looked at her in ecstacy. "You are sweet—you are beautiful! I never saw a girl like you."
"Time to go to bed!" Mrs. Gallagher's prosaic interruption from the Montejo doorstep at the far end of the dobe came to remind them that the evening had passed.
"You will come again soon?" Nan whispered softly.
"Soon," he replied.
Nan sat with her chin in her palm watching horse and rider disappear in the moonlight. The glamour of the hour and his ardent, if awkward, love-making was still upon her, but with his going there began the persistent, disquieting voice of conscience inquiring: "Where are you drifting? When is this to end, and how? Are you in earnest, and if you are not, are you fair to Ben?"
Nan had long since come to see that she and Ben were far apart in their instincts and their standards. They seldom held the same opinions of people or things, because his reasoning was faulty and his logic askew; but she excused and palliated as she did his frequent slips in English, his omission of the small courtesies, his amazing ignorance of any world but his own.
It was a significant fact that as Nan became less and less conscious of his deficiencies, more tolerant of his shortcomings, she proportionately exalted those qualities which she excessively admired—namely, his physical courage and his recognized skill along his own line.
As she sat in the doorway the family seemed to rise before her like startled ghosts, and the small, insistent voice with its pertinent questions contributed to her uneasy feeling of wrong-doing.
"O, señorita!"
Nan turned to see a small figure in a tattered shawl standing irresolutely at the corner of the house.
"Rosario?" Any interruption was welcome at the moment.
Rosario Richards crept to her side like a beaten little dog. Rosario Richards, whose Mexican mother had married one of the hated gringos, and for whom her mother's people, with whom she lived, had no love because of her gringo blood.
Rosario, the sensitive little half-breed, who shyly brought Nan offerings of horned toads, queer lizards, and soap-root so that her hair might shine like the hair of the Señorita Perfecta Torres. She leaned her forehead against Nan's arm and began to cry softly:
"I haf so ver', ver' many troubles, señorita, that I cannot sleep!"
Nan laid her arm about her shoulders and drew her closer.
"Tell me some of them, Rosario."
"Mi madre!" she wailed softly—"if I haf not mi madre!"
"Yes, that is a trouble."
"Mi padre! If only I haf mi padre! He was kill in the street when he fight in El Paso. Mi madre she die of the smallpox."
"Yes, those are troubles. And they are not good to you, Rosario—the Fuentes—your mother's people?"
"Like the dogs, I get what is left."
"Do they whip you, Rosario?"
"Sí, sí, but it is not that."
"What, then?"
"I have no tunica—what you call dress—to wear, and to-morrow afternoon is the las' day of school."
"And that is a very important day!"
"O, sí, sí, señorita!" Rosario's eyes grew big with the importance of it. "All the people come to hear the lessons and to see us speak the piece from the platform. Every niño wear his bes' clothes.
"I have been ver' good; I work hart. I wash all the clothes. I sweep all the floor and do the dishes ver' careful, so maybe they give me the new dress for the las' day of school.
"To-night they laugh at me and say: 'The ol' dress is good enough for a gringo!' I haf learn the longest piece in the hymn-book to speak from the platform, but when the teacher call 'Rosario Richards' I must shake my head, for I will not stand up before them all in the ol' shoes of Señora Fuentes and the ol' dress."
The child threw aside her shawl to show her rags, and thrust out the woman's shoe tied on with twine. "I haf nothing but this—nada! nada!" She buried her face in her shawl.
"I had no idea that you had so very many troubles, Rosario."
"Ver', ver' many troubles, señorita."
"What color do you like best—the very best of all?"
Rosario considered.
"I lak ret—and I lof yellow!"
"Good, Rosario! So do I. Listen:" Nan began to smile as her thought grew. "If there is time to make it, you shall have the most beautiful dress in Las Rubertas for the last day of school!"
Rosario's eyes were round with astonishment, and perhaps a little doubt; of course the señorita was wonderful, but she had not seen all the beautiful dresses in Las Rubertas.
Therefore Rosario's eyes outshone the candle in her hand when they went inside and Nan brought up from the bottommost depths of her trunk such a silk dress as Las Rubertas never had dreamed. How it shimmered! How it shone! How soft it was!
"O, señorita!" breathed Rosario, and Nan laughed gleefully at her shining, astonished eyes.
"If you can help me, we'll rip it to pieces to-night."
"Oh, I can help!" declared Rosario with such earnestness that Nan laughed aloud.
Carefully, so carefully, Rosario ripped her seam by the dim candle-light, stopping only, now and then, to rub her palm in ecstacy over the glossy surface.
"It is so be-a-u-teeful, señorita! Oh, muy hermosa!" Then she would hug herself in a transport of delight.
"More be-a-u-teeful than the dress of the Señorita Perfecta that come from El Paso." Once she stopped and looked up soberly.
"They will be ver' mad at you, señorita."
"There will be no love lost," Nan declared gaily. "They do not like me, anyway."
"They no lak Americanos," agreed Rosario gravely. "They 'fraid, yes; but, too, they hate Americanos."
It was nearly midnight when Rosario crept back to her sheepskin where she lay among the snoring Fuentes, dreaming of her coming triumph.
For a person who was dressed when she lighted her cigarette and readjusted her blanket, Mrs. Gallagher showed a surprising interest in and knowledge of clothes.
She entered into the work of remodeling Nan's frock for Rosario the next morning with a zest which slightly astonished Nan until she discovered it was due as much to a desire to turn Las Rubertas, and the Fuentes in particular, with whom she had had several spirited encounters, green with envy as to give Rosario happiness.
But whatever her motive, the result was the same, since she supplied the knowledge of cutting and basting laboriously acquired at a mission school, which Nan lacked.
Rosario ran from school at recess for a final fitting, and at noon she all but swallowed her tortillas whole. The Fuentes, however, were too engrossed in arraying themselves in their own splendor to observe the excitement and haste of the despised little gringo.
While Nan brushed Rosario's thick hair and tied the long braid with a gorgeous satin bow, Mrs. Grallagher buttoned on the best shoes that the Señor Apedaca kept among his meager stock of groceries.
And when the yellow dress, soft and shimmering as cobwebs in the sun, was slipped over her head and buttoned up behind, Rosario stood speechless before the reflection she saw in the big mirror which Nan held up before her.
She had never hoped to look like that. She never had dreamed that any little gringo could look like that, and her black eyes turned to stars as she stared. She could only say chokingly, in gratitude and delight:
"Oh, ver', ver', be-a-u-teeful, señorita!"
But her crowning glory was the string of gold beads which Nan clasped about her neck. Truly, it was worth being a gringo to have this moment!
Mrs. Gallagher chuckled maliciously. She was thinking of the Fuentes's chagrin.
And when the time came it was worth ripping seams by candle-light to Nan; it was worth the loss of half a day on the shady side of the dobe to Mrs. Gallagher, merely to see Rosario, with her head proudly erect, walk down the aisle as the pompous master rang his bell for order. It was well worth the trouble if only to see the Fuentes's bulging eyes and Señorita Perfecta Torres's look of envy.
The benches of the schoolroom were crowded with visitors, but, when the school-master, self-conscious and perspiring in his best black clothes—winter-weight—seated himself in his squeaking rocking-chair and pointed directly at Rosario with his long stick, a silence fell in which the buzzing of the flies upon the window-panes could be distinctly heard.
"Rosario Richards will please recite 7 times 1 are 7," commanded the schoolmaster.
Rosario and the schoolmaster knew what the visitors did not—namely, that Rosario's class had not yet reached "7 times 1 are 7"—that that difficult table was two lessons further on.
But her unexpected splendor had not escaped him, and he knew that he would make no mistake with the families who controlled his reappointment by taking down a peg this little upstart half-breed so radiant in her borrowed finery.
More than once, too, she had argued stoutly against his pronunciation of the English which he was required by law to teach in the school; therefore something of his supreme satisfaction at this rare opportunity to humiliate her before her beloved Americana and Las Rubertas shone in his slits of eyes.
Nan caught the startled look upon Rosario's face and heard the faint titter from her classmates throughout the schoolroom in her moment of hesitation.
Perhaps Rosario heard the titter, too. At any rate her gringo blood responded royally to the challenge. Her cheeks were burning, her eyes glowing like stars as she rose to her feet, an olive-tinted little beauty in yellow silk, baited by her enemies. Slowly, very slowly, but surely, Rosario recited "7 times 1 are 7" even to 7 times 7 are 49, and 7 times 12 are 84.
It would have been wonderful even for a grown person who was not a schoolmaster, to know so much, Las Rubertas admitted to itself in deep and envious astonishment. But there was no applause on that account and she finished in silence, rewarded only by a beaming smile from Nan.
And how the little Fuentes, gorgeous in green sateen, stammered over 2 times 9, and the little Montejos sat down sniffling because 4 times 8 did not make 31.
It was a succession of triumphs for Rosario who, inspired by the presence of her adored friend la Americana, and given confidence by the knowledge that she was wearing the "mos' be-a-u-teeful tunica in Las Rubertas," outspelled and ontread them all.
But Rosario's supreme moment came when the scowling schoolmaster called upon her for her "piece" which was to be spoken from the platform, and from which divers small claimants for histrionic honors already had stumbled, weeping and disgraced, to their seats.
Rosario took care to finger her gold beads as she walked to the platform—gold beads are wonderfully stimulating upon occasions of the kind—and as she made her small curtsy she did not forget to smooth down the soft gathers of her skirt lest there be dull ones—oh, some very dull ones present who had not observed that it was changeable and sometimes shone a little pink as well as yellow in the deepest folds.
Nor did she neglect as she recited to draw her long braid of hair with the broad satin bow on the end over her shoulder, for the same most excellent reason.
It was a hymn she had learned—the longest in the hymn-book—nine verses and doleful—about death, and worms—but she caroled it like a bird—a flashing yellow-bird—with her eyes dancing and her mouth dimpling at the corners, as though death and worms were the most joyful and joyous things in all the world when one was wearing gold beads and shimmering silk.
As she stepped down from the platform with her little chin in the air, proud in the consciousness that no one else in school could say nine verses out of the hymn-book without a mistake, there was no relenting in the heavy, upturned faces of the envious parents and friends. But Rosario did not mind the sullen silence in which her new shoes squeaked beautifully, for, to the little Cinderella of Las Rubertas, Nan's radiant smile of approbation was quite reward enough.