Part 21

Though Chinita saw him at his old place on the morrow, she understood that an eternal farewell had been made to their old relations and their old life. All that remained of them was contained in the package of trinkets he had brought her,—the coral beads, the few irregular pearls, the many-hued reboso, and the ribbons she had prized and which in his simplicity he had thought she would regret. Indeed, she had recognized them with a thrill of delight; nothing half so bright or costly had been offered her in the new life she had imagined would be so rich and brilliant. Yet she clung to it as hers of right, the more firmly after turning over and over, again and again, the dainty swaddling clothes, which she had never seen before, but which she knew Pedro had yielded to her as the sole possessions with which she had come to him,—possessions useless in themselves, but invaluable to her as proofs that she came from no plebeian stock. She wondered if her mother had arrayed her in them to cast her out,—and though she was of no gentle mould, her mind revolted from the thought. Then, had her father disowned her; or had an enemy filched her from her cradle, and unwilling to be guilty of her blood, left her in the first hands he had encountered? She ran over in her mind all the tales she had heard of mysterious disappearances,—and they were not a few,—but none would fit the case; and surely a hue-and-cry would have been made at the abduction of a rich man’s infant.

Chinita wrapped up the clothes and hid them away in impatient despair. Once she thought of taking them to Doña Isabel; but what would be gained by that? That her protectress knew the secret of her birth she was convinced, not by any course of reasoning, but by the simple fact that she had assumed the charge of her as her right. The girl did not know how baseless are apt to be the caprices of a great lady.

The days passed wearily to the eager child. They would have been intolerable—for she was always alone or with Doña Isabel, who gave her no certain status as equal or inferior, and with whom she was feverishly defiant, or seized with sudden tremors of awe or actual fear—but that she knew Don Rafael had gone to bring his family home. She longed to pour her secret thoughts into the ears of Chata, to show the infant clothes and hear her comments and suggestions. It appeared to her that Chata would certainly penetrate the gloom, and in her sweet simplicity throw some light upon the mystery which enveloped her. Besides, the wilful girl exulted in the anticipation of dazzling the eyes of Rosario and Doña Rita by her connection with Doña Isabel. She was shrewd enough to see it had greatly increased her importance in the estimation of the servants and employees. Even Don Rafael, before he went away, had seized an opportunity to ask her whether she was content, and afterward had never failed to bow to her with grave politeness when they met.

Once a strange thought had been set in the child’s mind: it returned and vexed her again and again. Doña Feliz had come into the room when in an unusual mood of devotion Chinita had knelt to pray before the image of the Virgin, before which, though she did not know it, had been poured forth so many bitter cries. Feliz started as she saw her, and Chinita rose to her feet.

“Do not rise,” said Doña Feliz; “learn, child, to pray. Many amens must perforce reach Heaven; it is well to begin thy task young.”

“What task?” Chinita queried. “I shall have something more to do than to pray all my life. That is for saints and nuns; and even Pedro would not take me for a saint.”

“But thou couldst still be a nun,” said Doña Feliz, with a peculiar smile; “and why shouldst thou not be?”

“Why not?” ejaculated Chinita. “Because I will not!” Then seized with a sudden terror, she cried, “Is that why Doña Isabel has taken me from Pedro? Is it to shut me up to pray for her and the wicked brother she loved so much? Selsa told me she had set her own daughter to free his soul from purgatory, and is not that enough? I’ll not do it. My knees ache when I kneel; I yawn, I fall asleep. I cannot bear to be forever in one place. It is to go away, to see strange sights, to wear silk and lace every day, as the _niña_ Herlinda must have done,—see, here are some of her dresses still,—it is for this, and because I was born for such things, that I stay with Doña Isabel; it is not to pray. I care not to pray, nor sing hymns, nor dress saints. I will go to her and tell her so!”

Doña Feliz caught the arm of the excited child. “I am your friend,” she said. “Speak not a word of what I have said. Perhaps it was a foolish thought; but many more beautiful than you have entered convents, and perhaps have been happy.”

“Is the Señorita Herlinda happy?” asked Chinita, her excitement calmed by the thought of another. “Selsa told me once,—it was the night Antonita saw the ghost of the American, when she came back from the mountain,—Selsa told me a witch had laid a spell upon her the day he was murdered,—a witch who loved the foreigner; and that the _niña_ Herlinda drooped and withered and would have died, but that a fever carried away the evil woman before she could read her into her grave.”

“The witch!” ejaculated Doña Feliz, mystified. This was a superstition of which she had heard nothing. “Who was the witch?”

“How can I tell?” answered Chinita. “Chata knows more of her than I. It is to her old Selsa told her tales; she is never cross to Chata. But after the American was killed I know the witch used to read and read and read strange words to the poor _niña_, and she grew paler and paler, and more and more sad.”

“And the witch died?” queried Feliz, thinking of Mademoiselle La Croix.

“Yes, in a good hour,” answered Chinita, energetically. “But I forgot; you must know it all, Doña Feliz. Tell me,”—with her old gossiping habit,—“tell me, did the Señorita love the American? Was it for him she pined away; or because she was bewitched; or was it because the Señora would not let her marry the Señor Gonzales, but would send her to the convent to pray for the wicked Don Leon?“

“_Quien sabe?_ Who knows?” answered Doña Feliz, in the non-committal phrase a Mexican finds so convenient. “It is not for us to chatter of the Señorita Herlinda. Peace be with her! and have a care how you mention her name to Doña Isabel.” Her brow contracted as she thought how many conjectures, how much gossip of which she had known nothing, had been busy with events she had believed quite passed from remembrance.

XXVI.

Ashley Ward had been, an involuntary though perhaps not entirely an unwilling guest, at Tres Hermanos a month or more before it dawned upon him that he was not a perfectly welcome one. Throughout his illness, which had been prolonged by the peculiar nursing and diet to which he had been for the first time in his life subjected, he had, though left almost entirely to the care of Selsa, been provided with luxuries and delicacies that even his imperfect knowledge of the country and situation enabled him to know were rare and costly, and most difficult to obtain. Doña Isabel Garcia was like a princess in her quiet dignity and in her gifts; and like a princess too, he grew to think, in the punctiliousness with which, every day, she sent to inquire after his health, and the infrequency with which she entered to express a hope that he lacked nothing. She never touched his hand, seldom indeed turned her eyes upon him when she spoke, and never smiled; and when she left him he inwardly raged, and vowed he would leave the hacienda on the morrow, even though he should die from the exertion. But his wound was slow in healing; the fever had sapped his strength; he was alone, and no opportunity of securing escort presented itself. He was virtually a prisoner. And besides, after these periods of vexation he would fall into a fit of musing, which would end in the resolve never to leave Tres Hermanos until certain doubts were set at rest, which from day to day grew more and more perplexing.

The nurse, Selsa, was more communicative than the Indian peasant woman is apt to be. She had been employed constantly in and about the great house in positions of some trust, and had lost that awe of superiors, which held the mere common people dumb. In a sense, indeed, she felt herself one of the family, privileged to use gentle insistence with the sick, even against their aristocratic wills, and to be present, though eyes and ears were to be as blind and deaf as the walls around her, while matters of family polity were at least hinted at, if not openly discussed. She had in fact been to the house of Garcia “the confidential servant,” without which no Mexican household is complete,—one of those peculiar beings who however false, cruel, deceitful, and thievish with the world in general is silent as the grave, devoted even unto death, true as the lode-star, to the person or family which she serves.

There was something in the personality of this wrinkled crone, growing out of these relations, which early impressed the young American; and gradually he grew to feel that he was face to face with an oracle, had he but the magic to unseal her lips, as the witch-like Chinita had had to change her air of vexed though friendly equality into unobtrusive yet unmistakable deference. Other servants who came and went spoke with some envy and spite of the sudden elevation of the gatekeeper’s foster-child. But Selsa, sitting in the doorway of the sick man’s room, combing out her long black locks,—for that, though she never succeeded in smoothing them, was her favorite occupation,—would glance askance at Ward and say,—

“Be silent! the Señora knows what she does. Go now! she has a heart like any other Christian. What was to become of the girl, now that Pedro will be leaving for the wars? Would you have Don ’Guardo think we are barbarians here, who would leave the innocents to be devoured like lambs by the coyotes?”

Don ’Guardo was the name Selsa had evolved from Ward, which she had perhaps believed to be the foreign contraction of Eduardo; and as Ashley, with boyish enthusiasm easily acquiring the limited vocabulary of those around him, began to relieve the monotony of his convalescence by listening to their conversations, and asking some idle questions, he found himself answering to the convenient appellation and alluding to himself by it, until it became as familiar to his ears as his own baptismal name, and certainly conveyed far more friendliness to him than the formal Señor Ward, which Don Rafael and his mother rendered with infinite stumbling over the unattainable W.

There was a subdued excitement throughout the hacienda upon the day that Don ’Guardo first appeared at the great gateway. Pedro was sitting there in the dull, dejected manner suggestive of loss, or waiting, or both; and it was only when Florencia, with an exclamation, twitched his sleeve that he looked up.

“_Maria Sanctissima!_” he stammered, staggering to his feet. Ashley stood in the dim light in the rear of the deep vestibule, with his hand on Pepé’s shoulder,—for the boy had been called to attend him,—but with a sudden faintness he had paused to rest against the stone wall hung with serpents. Ashley was a handsome youth, but in Pedro’s eyes a thousand times more startling than the most hideous snake or savage beast. So had he seen John Ashley stand a hundred times or more, not pale and trembling, but full of life and joy. Was this his sad ghost, come with reproachful eyes to haunt him?

“It is the Señor American,” said Florencia. “My life! how pale he looks! Go, go, Pepito! bring him hither before the carriage of my Señora drives in; here it is at the very gate.”

Pedro instantly recovered his usual stoicism. “Wait, Señor!” he said, “you are well placed where you are. The carriage can pass and not throw an atom of dust on you.” And at that moment the feet of the horses and the rattle of wheels were heard on the stone paving, and the hacienda carriage was driven rapidly into the courtyard. As it passed, Ashley caught a glimpse of Doña Isabel—how pale and statuesque!—and beside her a creature radiant in triumph, who nodded to Pedro as she passed; her smile seeming to say, “Behold me!” Hers was not an ignoble pride, but the wild exultation of an eaglet that had been chained to earth, and for the first time had tried its wings in the empyrean. That morning Doña Isabel had said, “Chinita, thou shalt go with me;” and though the lady’s brows had risen a little when with unconscious audacity the girl had taken the seat beside her, and not that opposite, where Doña Feliz was wont to sit, she said nothing. “The child is pale,” she thought, “and needs the air; there is no one to heed that she sits beside me.”

It would be hard to tell what were the thoughts of Chinita; they were a sudden delirium after the intense quiet of the semi-imprisonment, which she had borne with stoical fortitude for the sake of a dimly seen future of power. In this enforced quiet, day by day, her ambitions were shaping themselves; the dominant passion of her being was seeking a point from which she might have advantage over all the narrow field within the range of her mental vision. As yet her aspirations knew no name; they were mere vague, impatient longings, or rather impatient spurning of the old ignoble conditions of life. To ride in a carriage was an intoxication to her, because the low-born peasant went afoot. She chafed in a very thraldom of inaction because the high-born toiled not. She loved the rustle of a gaudy silk, while her hand shrank from the contact of the stiff and rustling fabric, because such attire was only for the rich and great. As undefined as had been the joy with which she had heard she was a Garcia, was still the delight of each fresh conquest that she made. No eager _virtuoso_ groping in the dark among undescribed treasures could be more ignorant yet more wildly anticipative of the glories the daylight should discover than she of what the future should reveal.

From where Don ’Guardo and his attendant stood, they could see Doña Isabel and Chinita as they descended from the carriage. Doña Isabel, without glancing around, ascended the stairs to her own apartment. Chinita followed a step or two behind, then turned and paused. Her quick eye scanned the little group that had gathered in the court. Ashley Ward himself was startled by the change that had passed over her since he had seen her last. What had been elfish in her wild abandonment of bearing had become a subtle grace of manner, which gave piquancy to a hauteur that counterfeited the dignity of inherent nobleness. “The gypsy has borrowed the air of a queen!” was the thought of the American. He felt Pepé quiver beneath his hand, and looking at him saw a sullen fire in his dark, slumberous eyes, though his lips were white and his dusky face ashen as if a chill had seized him. The girl had overlooked him and all the plebeian crowd, and her eyes rested in a triumphant challenge on Ashley. She smiled, and a ray of sunlight darted down and reddened the crisp and straggling tendrils of her hair. The smile or the sunlight dazzled him; he leaned heavier on Pepé’s shoulder. She reminded him of a Medusa idealized, of incarnate passion surrounded by the halo of radiant youth.

Ashley was roused by a sudden movement of Pepé, who had for the moment forgotten his station, and impetuously thrown himself upon a bench in an attitude of impotent grief and rage; then he sprang to his feet, and again placed his shoulder under Ashley’s hand. Once more he was the mere stock and stick; but Ashley had discovered in him the soul and heart of a man.

“Poor fool!” he thought, with a sort of anger mingled with his pity; “here is a touch of the tragic in this little comedy, which the wily little peasant is inspired to play so daintily. She appears to have bewitched me with the rest; I can’t keep the thought of her, or rather of her words, out of my head,—and yet I have only a word to build a whole fabric of theory upon.”

These thoughts had passed through his mind in an instant,—the instant in which Chinita had lightly run up the stone steps after Doña Isabel, and in which Ashley and Pepé had reached the broad gateway of the hacienda. Ashley sank upon the stone bench where Pedro was wont to sit, and Pepé leaned sullenly against the rough wall. Both looked in silence over the village, across the fields, the narrow line of cottonwood trees and yellow mud which marked the bed of a torrent in the rainy season and a waste of desolation in the long drought, and onward still to the gray and barren mountains whose distant peaks of purple pierced the deep blue of the cloudless sky. The scene to Pepé was as old as his years, too familiar to distract for a moment his tortured mind; but Ashley beheld it in a sort of rapture. Perhaps any glimpse of the outer world would have charmed him after his unwonted imprisonment; but the fertility of the valley, this gem set in the broad expanse of bare and sterile Mexico, was a revelation to him of that wonderful productiveness and beauty which in his journeyings he had often heard of but had never encountered, until at last he had believed that the horrors of war, in its years of duration, had swept over the land and blasted it. But here was one spot at least that had escaped,—such a spot as he had pictured for months, and sought in vain.

For a time he gazed upon it in simple admiration, then at first almost unconsciously began to look about him for certain landmarks. Yes, here at his back was the great pile of buildings; here on the sandy slope in front, the village of adobe thatched with knife-grass; there along the line of the watercourse, the few straggling huts of the miners and laborers; there away to the right, the low walls of the reduction-works with its tall brick chimney, and in its rear the gaping cleft of the mountain which marked the entrance to the mine. All now was silent and deserted; yet for a moment he seemed to look upon it with other eyes, and to see the trains of laden mules filing in and out of the wide gateways, and to trace the black smoke rising in a column to the cloudless sky. “This must be the place!” he inwardly exclaimed; and drawing from his breast-pocket a flat case of papers, he selected from them a torn and yellow letter, and read it slowly over, ever and anon raising his eyes to identify some point in the description, which a hand as young, more firm, more resolute than his own, had in an hour of leisure so accurately written years before. The date of the missive was gone, and with it the name of this new place in which the writer seemed to have found an earthly paradise,—“not wanting,” as he said at the close of the letter, “an Eve to be at once the gem of this perfect setting, and the inaccessible star to which poor mortals may raise longing eyes, but may never hope to win.”

Ashley smiled as he read the words. Who could this divinity have been? But for other letters that had been put into his hands he would have thought the paragraph mere bathos, boyish gush, and sentiment; but it was a prelude to what might prove a strange and fateful series of events. Somewhere here his cousin had years ago lived and loved and been done to death; and his mission was to trace the sequence of these events, and to learn whether or no with John Ashley had passed away all possible influence upon the fortunes of his own life.

Until within a few months such questions had never occurred to him. The John Ashley whom he had dimly remembered had been murdered years before; and so had ended an adventurous career, which had been his own choice, or perhaps his evil destiny. To Ward, as to others, that had been the sum and substance of the tragedy which had thrown a gloom for a time over all the family, and had stricken a proud mother to the heart. She had suffered years in silence, the name of her wayward son never passing her lips; her young daughter had grown up with no knowledge of her brother but his name. It was she who after the mother’s death had found these letters, and entreated her cousin to seek the fatal spot of John Ashley’s death,—surely there must be somewhere records that would give the exact location,—and to make inquiries for the wife, and for the possible child, of whom he wrote in his last short letter, full of passionate appeal to his mother in behalf of the young creature who for him had forfeited the confidence, perhaps the love, of her own. “Herlinda! Herlinda! Herlinda!” was the burden of the letter. “The name rings in my ears,” Mary Ashley had said. “How could my mother have been deaf to it? She thought of those people as barbarous, false, cruel, treacherous. But what matters that to me, if there is among them one who has my brother’s blood, or one who loved him?”

“The marriage laws of those countries are strange,” Ward had ventured to say. “Perhaps your mother feared complications which could but bring disgrace and misery.”

“I do not fear them,” said Mary Ashley, proudly. “It is a wild country for a woman to go to, but if you will not investigate this matter, I will brave any inconvenience, any danger, to do so. I cannot live with this tantalizing fear in my heart.”

The idea that tormented Mary seemed at best that of a mere possibility to Ashley,—the possibility of an event which, as the mother had seen, might if proved bring far more pain than joy, especially at this late date; yet it worked upon his mind gradually, as it had upon Mary’s suddenly,—perhaps the more surely because he personally profited by the supposition that his cousin had died unwed. By his aunt’s will he had been left the share in her property that John would have inherited, on condition that neither he nor any legitimate heir should appear to claim it.

People shrugged their shoulders and smiled pityingly. “Poor soul, had she then doubted her son’s death?”

The news had reached Mrs. Ashley in an irregular way; the war had supervened, and particulars had been few and far from exact. But later, through some business house, inquiries had been made and some few books and almost worthless articles of clothing had been obtained from an alcalde, who swore they had been the dead man’s sole effects. Certainly the proofs had been irregular but sufficient. What could one expect from such a lawless set of uncivilized renegades, who knew nothing of civil or international law, and were bent on the sole task of exterminating one another? They smiled at the condition in the will, and pitied the poor woman who could thus hope against hope. Ashley Ward himself, the orphan nephew whom his aunt had loved with a jealous devotion, which at times wearied him by its suspicions and exactions, at first smiled also. But when Mary brought to him the fragments of three old letters to read, just as his mind was filled with plans for a career which the possession of ample wealth and leisure seemed to justify, and which in poverty he could never have dared aspire to, he grew thoughtful, moody at times,—then suddenly his own impetuous, generous self again.

“I will go to Mexico, Mary,” he said, “and bring you word of your brother’s life there. No doubts shall shake their spectre fingers at me in my prosperity, nor torment your loving and anxious soul.”

“Good, true cousin!” was all she answered. She perhaps did not realize what effect upon the prospects of Ashley the results of this journey might possibly have; they dawned upon her little by little as the days went by and no news came of him.