FullReads

“I was looking for you on the wall,” he stammered.

“MADRE DE DIOS!” she retorted, with a laugh and her old audacity, “you would that I shall ALWAYS hang there, and drop upon you like a pear when you shake the tree? No!”

“You haven’t brought your guitar,” he continued, still more awkwardly, as he noticed that she held only a long black fan in her hand.

“For why? You would that I PLAY it, and when my uncle say ‘Where go Pepita? She is loss,’ someone shall say, ‘Oh! I have hear her tink-a-tink in the garden of the Americano, who lif alone.’ And then–it ess finish!”

Masterton began to feel exceedingly uncomfortable. There was something in this situation that he had not dreamed of. But with the persistency of an awkward man he went on.

“But you played on the wall the other night, and tried to accompany me.”

“But that was lass night and on the wall. I had not speak to you, you had not speak to me. You had not sent me the leetle note by your peon.” She stopped, and suddenly opening her fan before her face, so that only her mischievous eyes were visible, added: “You had not asked me then to come to hear you make lof to me, Don Esteban. That is the difference.”

The circuit preacher felt the blood rush to his face. Anger, shame, mortification, remorse, and fear alternately strove with him, but above all and through all he was conscious of a sharp, exquisite pleasure–that frightened him still more. Yet he managed to exclaim:

“No! no! You cannot think me capable of such a cowardly trick?”

The girl started, more at the unmistakable sincerity of his utterance than at the words, whose full meaning she may have only imperfectly caught.

“A treek? A treek?” she slowly and wonderingly repeated. Then suddenly, as if comprehending him, she turned her round black eyes full upon him and dropped her fan from her face.

“And WHAT for you ask me to come here then?”

“I wanted to talk with you,” he began, “on far more serious matters. I wished to–” but he stopped. He could not address this quaint child-woman staring at him in black-eyed wonder, in either the measured or the impetuous terms with which he would have exhorted a maturer responsible being. He made a step toward her; she drew back, striking at his extended hand half impatiently, half mischievously with her fan.

He flushed–and then burst out bluntly, “I want to talk with you about your soul.”

“My what?”

“Your immortal soul, unhappy girl.”

“What have you to make with that? Are you a devil?” Her eyes grew rounder, though she faced him boldly.

“I am a Minister of the Gospel,” he said, in hurried entreaty. “You must hear me for a moment. I would save your soul.”

“My immortal soul lif with the Padre at the Mission–you moost seek her there! My mortal BODY,” she added, with a mischievous smile, “say to you, ‘good a’ night, Don Esteban.'” She dropped him a little curtsy and–ran away.

“One moment, Miss Ramirez,” said Masterton, eagerly; but she had already slipped beyond his reach. He saw her little black figure passing swiftly beside the moonlit wall, saw it suddenly slide into a shadowy fissure, and vanish.

In his blank disappointment he could not bear to re-enter the house he had left so sanguinely a few moments before, but walked moodily in the garden. His discomfiture was the more complete since he felt that his defeat was owing to some mistake in his methods, and not the incorrigibility of his subject.

Was it not a spiritual weakness in him to have resented so sharply the girl’s imputation that he wished to make love to her? He should have borne it as Christians had even before now borne slander and false testimony for their faith! He might even have ACCEPTED it, and let the triumph of her conversion in the end prove his innocence. Or was his purpose incompatible with that sisterly affection he had so often preached to the women of his flock? He might have taken her hand, and called her “Sister Pepita,” even as he had called Deborah “Sister.” He recalled the fact that he had for an instant held her struggling in his arms: he remembered the thrill that the recollection had caused him, and somehow it now sent a burning blush across his face. He hurried back into the house.