Part 5 (1/2)
Then, after a little, there arrived in town a vaulted box, in which the dullest fancy might conjecture a piano. Greatly indeed were heads shaken. If doom were easily invoked, Jane would hardly have lived to unpack the treasure and help to lift it up the porch steps.
”_Por Dios!_” gasped Ana Vigil. ”It must have cost fifty dollars! And for what good, senora?”
”Lola's taking music-lessons,” said Jane. ”Her and Edith May Jonas is learning a duet. I want she should be able to go right on practising.”
”Ah!” said Ana, innocently. ”She will not say your house now is 'ugly,'
will she? And you, senora, shall you get a longer dress and do your hair up, so she will not say of you like she did, 'How queer'?”
Jane looked at Ana. Surely she could not mean to be ill-tempered--Ana, with a face as broad and placid as a standing pool? No, no, Ana was too simple to wish to pain any one! Yet as Jane dwelt upon Ana's queries, it came slowly to Jane that certain changes in herself might be well.
She obeyed this wise, if late, impulse, and when Lola came home in June she had her reward. The girl cried out with surprise as she beheld on the platform at Lynn that tall figure in a soft gray gown, fas.h.i.+oned with some pretensions to the mode, but simple and dignified as befitted Jane's stature and look. There was a bonnet to match, too elderly for Jane's years, and of a Quakerish form. But this was less the cause for the general difference in Jane's aspect than the fact that her brown hair, parted smoothly on the broad, benignant brow, now had its ends tucked up in a neat knot.
”_Tia! tia!_” exclaimed Lola, herself glowing like a prairie-rose, as she dashed out of the train. ”What have you done? You are good to look at! Your hair--oh, _asombro!_”
But when the white burros of the mail wagon, wildly skimming the plains, brought them in sight of the new house, Lola's joy turned white on her cheeks, and she clutched Jane's arm.
”_Tia_--our house! It is gone--gone!”
Then was Jane's time to laugh with sheer happiness, to throw open gate and door and usher her guest into the old room where Tesuque sat and the Navajo blanket still covered the couch as of yore, and nothing was altered except that now other rooms opened brightly on all sides, and in one a piano displayed its white teeth in beaming welcome.
Lola's blank face, whereon every moment printed a new delight, was to Jane a sight hardly to be matched. The satisfaction grew also with time, as the piano awoke to such strains as Lola had mastered, and people strolled up from the village ways to listen, and, to Jane's deep gratification, to praise the musician. The Mexicans came in throngs, filling the air with a chorus of ”_Caspitas!_” and ”_Carambas!_” None of them called Lola ”_Infanta_” nowadays unless it were in a spirit of friendly pleasantry; and she herself had lost much of the air which had brought this contemptuous honor upon her childish head.
”She is Mexican--yes!” they nodded to one another, deriving much simple satisfaction from the circ.u.mstance. For was it not provocative of racial pride that one of their compatriots should be able to make tunes--actual tunes!--issue from those keys which responded to their own tentative touches merely with thin shrieks or a dull, rumbling note?
”Lolita is like she was,” remarked Alejandro Vigil to his sister on the morning of the Fourth of July, as they wandered around the common beyond the _arroyo_.
This s.p.a.ce of desert had an air of festive import, for unwonted celebrations of the day were forward. A pavilion roofed with green boughs had been built for the occasion, on the skirts of an oval course which was to be the ground of sundry feats of cowboy horsemans.h.i.+p, and of a foot-race between Piedro Cordova and the celebrated Valentino Cortes. There would be music, also, before long. Already the sound of a violin in process of tuning rang cheerfully through the open. The Declaration of Independence was to be read by the lawyer, who might be seen in the pavilion wiping his brow in antic.i.p.ation of this exciting duty. A tribe of little girls, who were to sing national airs, were even now climbing into the muslin-draped seats of the lumber-wagon allotted them.
It was to be a great day for Aguilar! People from Santa Clara and Hastings and Gulnare were arriving in all manner of equipages. Mexican vehicles made a solid stockade along the west of the track. In the upper benches of the pavilion were ranged the flower and chivalry of the town--the families of the mine boss, the liveryman, the lawyer, the schoolmaster and several visiting personages. Jane, in her gray gown, was among them; beside her sat Lola, with Edith May Jonas.
”And did you think going away to school would make her different?”
inquired Ana of her brother. ”What should it do to her, 'Andro? Make her white like Miss Jonas? _Vaya!_ Lola is only a Mexican!”
”She is not ashamed to be one, either!” cried Alejandro, accepting Ana's tacit imputation of some inferiority in their race. ”And she is white enough,” he added, regarding Lola as she sat smiling and talking, with the boughy eaves making little shadows across the rim of her broad straw hat.
”Who said she was ashamed?” asked Ana, with suspicious suavity. ”You hear words that have not been spoken. I tell you of your faults, _hermano mio_, because I love you!”
Alejandro turned off in a sulk, and, leaving Ana to her own resources, went toward the place where the ponies and burros were tethered. It was comparatively lonely here, and Alejandro began to make friends with a disconsolate burro who was bewailing his fate in a series of lamentable sounds.
”Ha, _bribon!_” he said, pinching the burro's ears. ”What is the use of wasting breath? _Sus, sus, amigo!_” The burro began to buck and Alejandro stepped back. As he did so he saw approaching him from behind the wagons a man in tattered garments, with a hat dragged over his eyes, and a great ma.s.s of furzy yellow beard.
”Here, you!” said this person. ”Oh, you're Mexican! _Ya lo veo_--”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”'I HOPED YOU'D BE ABLE TO LEND ME A HAND.'”]
”Me, I spik English all ri'!” retorted Alejandro, with dignity. ”Spik English if you want. I it onnerstan'.”