Part 13 (2/2)

Maruja looked at them with innocent vagueness, as if the possibility were just beginning to dawn upon her.

”And Clara Wilson is just dying to see the mysterious unknown again.

Say yes, little Maruja.”

Little Maruja glanced at them with a large maternal compa.s.sion. ”We shall see.”

Mr. Prince, on his return an hour later, was unexpectedly delighted with Maruja's gracious acceptance of his invitation to dinner. He was thoroughly sensible of the significance which his neighbors had attached to the avoidance by the Saltonstall heiress of his various parties and gorgeous festivities ever since a certain act of indiscretion--now alleged to have been produced by the exaltation of wine--had placed him under ban. Whatever his feelings were towards her mother, he could not fail to appreciate fully this act of the daughter, which rehabilitated him. It was with more than his usual extravagance--shown even in a certain exaggeration of respect towards Maruja--that he welcomed the party, and made preparations for the dinner. The telegraph and mounted messengers were put into rapid requisition. The bridal suite was placed at the disposal of the young ladies for a dressing-room. The attendant genii surpa.s.sed themselves.

The evening dresses of Maruja, Amita, and the Misses Wilson, summoned by electricity from La Mision Perdida, and dispatched by the fleetest conveyances, were placed in the arms of their maids, smothered with bouquets, an hour before dinner. An operatic concert troupe, pa.s.sing through the nearest town, were diverted from their course by the slaves of the ring to discourse hidden music in the music-room during dinner.

”Bite my finger, Sweetlips,” said Miss Clara Wilson, who had a neat taste for apt quotation, to Maruja, ”that I may see if I am awake. It's the Arabian Nights all over again!”

The dinner was a marvel, even in a land of gastronomic marvels; the dessert a miracle of fruits, even in a climate that bore the products of two zones. Maruja, from her seat beside her satisfied host, looked across a bank of yellow roses at her sister and Raymond, and was timidly conscious of the eyes of young Guest, who was seated at the other end of the table, between the two Misses Wilson. With a strange haunting of his appearance on the day she first met him, she stole glances of half-frightened curiosity at him while he was eating, and was relieved to find that he used his knife and fork like the others, and that his appet.i.te was far from voracious. It was his employer who was the first to recall the experiences of his past life, with a certain enthusiasm and the air of a host anxious to contribute to the entertainment of his guests. ”You'd hardly believe, Miss Saltonstall, that that young gentleman over there walked across the Continent--and two thousand odd miles, wasn't it?--all alone, and with not much more in the way of traps than he's got on now. Tell 'em, Harry, how the Apaches nearly gobbled you up, and then let you go because they thought you as good an Injun as any one of them, and how you lived a week in the desert on two biscuits as big as that.” A chorus of entreaty and delighted antic.i.p.ation followed the suggestion. The old expression of being at bay returned for an instant to Guest's face, but, lifting his eyes, he caught a look of almost sympathetic anxiety from Maruja's, who had not spoken.

”It became necessary for me, some time ago,” said Guest, half explanatorily, to Maruja, ”to be rather explicit in the details of my journey here, and I told Mr. Prince some things which he seems to think interesting to others. That is all. To save my life on one occasion, I was obliged to show myself as good as an Indian, in his own way, and I lived among them and traveled with them for two weeks. I have been hungry, as I suppose others have on like occasions, but nothing more.”

Nevertheless, in spite of his evident reticence, he was obliged to give way to their entreaties, and, with a certain grim and uncompromising truthfulness of statement, recounted some episodes of his journey. It was none the less thrilling that he did it reluctantly, and in much the same manner as he had answered his father's questions, and as he had probably responded to the later cross-examination of Mr. Prince. He did not tell it emotionally, but rather with the dogged air of one who had been subjected to a personal grievance for which he neither asked nor expected sympathy. When he did not raise his eyes to Maruja's, he kept them fixed on his plate.

”Well,” said Prince, when a long-drawn sigh of suspended emotion among the guests testified to his powers as a caterer to their amus.e.m.e.nt, ”what do you say to some music with our coffee to follow the story?”

”It's more like a play,” said Amita to Raymond. ”What a pity Captain Carroll, who knows all about Indians, isn't here to have enjoyed it.

But I suppose Maruja, who hasn't lost a word, will tell it to him.”

”I don't think she will,” said Raymond, dryly, glancing at Maruja, who, lost in some intricate pattern of her Chinese plate, was apparently unconscious that her host was waiting her signal to withdraw.

At last she raised her head, and said, gently but audibly, to the waiting Prince,--

”It is positively a newer pattern; the old one had not that delicate straw line in the arabesque. You must have had it made for you.”

”I did,” said the gratified Prince, taking up the plate. ”What eyes you have, Miss Saltonstall. They see everything.”

”Except that I'm keeping you all waiting,” she returned, with a smile, letting the eyes in question fall with a half-parting salutation on Guest as she rose. It was the first exchange of a common instinct between them, and left them as conscious as if they had pressed hands.

The music gave an opportunity for some desultory conversation, in which Mr. Prince and his young friend received an invitation from Maruja to visit La Mision, and the party, by common consent, turned into the conservatory, where the genial host begged them each to select a flower from a few especially rare exotics. When Maruja received hers, she said, laughingly, to Prince, ”Will you think me very importunate if I ask for another?” ”Take what you like--you have only to name it,” he replied, gallantly. ”But that's just what I can't do,” responded the young girl, ”unless,” she added, turning to Guest, ”unless you can a.s.sist me. It was the plant I was examining to-day.” ”I think I can show it to you,” said Guest, with a slight increase of color, as he preceded her towards the memorable cactus near the door, ”but I doubt if it has any flower.”

Nevertheless, it had. A bright red blossom, like a spot of blood drawn by one of its thorns. He plucked it for her, and she placed it in her belt.

”You are forgiving,” he said, admiringly.

”YOU ought to know that,” she returned, looking down.

”I?--why?”

”You were rude to me twice.”

”Twice!”

”Yes--once at the Mision of La Perdida; once in the road at San Antonio.”

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