Part 23

“Life of my soul!” cried Chinita. “How I have longed for you! Did you not see me perched in the niche of the wall? Ay, how Doña Isabel would frown if she knew!”

“I saw only the tall, fair man,” answered Chata in a low voice. She was pale and trembled: “I thought first it was the ghost of the American. Oh God, what a shock!”

Chinita laughed merrily. “What! a coward still, and with the old stories we used to tell still first in your mind? Ah, I have tales to tell now will be worth your hearing.” She bent low and added in a whisper, “Have they not told you? I have the place of the Señorita Herlinda now! I have her room. I think sometimes she must be dead, and I have risen in her stead. Do I look like a ghost, Chata?”

“Hush, hush!” entreated Chata. “Oh Chinita, I wish I never had gone away. Oh, how shall I live now? How can I bear it?”

At that moment Doña Feliz approached, and evading her proffered embrace the young girl bent her head on the arm of the woman and burst into tears. Chinita stood confounded; the light and joyousness died out of her face; a certain half-savage look of inquiry came over it. She turned abruptly to the young officer,—

“What have they done to her?” she demanded.

“Chinita,” said a cold, impassive voice, “this gentleman is a stranger to you. It is not seemly that you stand here questioning him;” and with an imperious wave of her hand, Doña Isabel seemed actually to force the two apart.

Almost unconsciously the young man drew back, bowing low, and Chinita turned to the staircase; yet as she obeyed the movement of Doña Isabel’s hand a furious rage possessed her. As she stepped upon the first stair, some demon prompted her to wind her arm around Chata’s neck and raise her tear-stained face.

“I am going to the Señorita Herlinda’s room,” she said. “I am there in her place; and—” here she stopped, laughed, and threw a glance over her shoulder—“there is the American!”

Her last words had been prompted by a glimpse of Ashley Ward as he crossed the court. He caught the appellation, and bowed and smiled. Chinita ran up the stairs, and Doña Isabel stood rigid with a face like death. Her eyes were resting however on Chata’s countenance.

The young girl had shrunk within Doña Feliz’s protecting arm. Had Doña Isabel turned her eyes upon the woman’s defiant yet apprehensive face, it might have been a revelation to her; but she looked at Don Rafael.

“Your daughter has a strange face and strange ways for a ranchero’s daughter,” she said, with an attempt at irony; but it failed. Her face worked painfully as she added, “She reminds me of those I would forget. We have strange fancies as we grow old.”

A laugh sounded from the window above. She started and looked up, then dropped her head again and turned slowly away.

Chata gazed after her awestruck, though she knew not why. Her manner was so different from that of the proud and haughty dame she had pictured. Don Rafael looked from Doña Isabel to his mother. Both these women, it seemed to him, had grown wonderfully aged since they had met, but a month or so before. There was a subtile antagonism between them—these two who loved each other, as only such deep intense natures can—which tore and harried them far more than actual hate could have done.

“What hast thou, my life?” Doña Feliz whispered to Chata. “Art thou not happy? Have strange tales been told thee?” and she looked keenly at her daughter-in-law, who had smiled and courtesied in vain as Doña Isabel went by.

“My mother,” said Doña Rita in her softest voice, “the child is weary; she must rest. Heed not this silly child, Don Fernando. Thank Heaven, Rosario is not so fanciful!”

But Don Fernando was not thinking of Rosario, or of Chata either for that matter, but of how he had slunk away from his chief to prosecute a love-affair that he had believed no power could make less than a matter of life or death to him; and how in a moment it had become lighter than air. The boyish perversity with which he had determined, even at the risk of offending his patron, to continue his courtship of Rosario Sanchez, trusting to fate or her father’s generosity to make marriage with her possible, faded from his mind like a dream, and with it her image; and in its place rose the arch mocking face of the “little saint of the Wall.” Proved she angel or demon, he felt that she was henceforth the genius of his destiny. He was a vain and profligate adventurer; but all the same the arrow had found his heart, not as a thousand times before to inflict a passing scratch, but to bury itself in its inmost core.

All had taken place in a few short moments. While the horses were being unharnessed and led away; while the villagers were still crowding around the carriage, and Doña Rita’s baskets and packages were being lifted out; while a few words of greeting were exchanged,—emotions and passions had sprung into being that were to make the seemingly prosaic household a very vortex of conflicting elements.

The young American, who thought himself but a looker-on, was also not unmoved. Like Doña Isabel, he said within himself, “That young girl has a strange face and strange ways for the daughter of a Mexican. And yet what know I of Mexicans or their ways? This is a strange atmosphere, and fills my brain with strange fancies. Perhaps out of them all I shall evolve some reality. May the Fates grant me again such a chance as I had to-day of speaking to the wild gypsy Chinita! Nothing has happened here, I can well believe, that she cannot tell me of. But after the escapade of to-day, she will hardly escape the vigilance of her duenna again. Ah, here comes the young soldier—too travel-stained to be as dashing as is his custom, no doubt. He looks a gay bird with sadly bedraggled feathers.”

Pepé apparently approved of him as little, as he passed by to the room assigned him. The peasant did not cease from lounging against the wall or bare his head as an inferior should.

“Insolent barbarian!” muttered Don Fernando, in a revival of his usual contempt for the peasantry, as the swarthy young fellow scowled at him, he neither guessed nor cared why. What could such a vagabond have to do with the Señora Garcia’s _protégée_? He would serve when the time came, to make one, in the independent troop he, Fernando, would raise: such worms as he were only fit to serve men. There were wild rumors afloat of the wonderful fortune of that phœnix Benito Juarez. What if he, Ruiz, should join his standard? There was a strange fire and exultation in the young man’s veins. He had been tied to a resistless fate long enough,—he would break his trammels, and by one daring act free himself forever from control, from tutelage, from Ramirez.

XXVIII.

“Señor Don Rafael!” cried a hoarse voice at break of day. “Rise, your grace! for strange things have happened while we have slept! Ay, Señor, if the demon himself has not carried away Pedro the gatekeeper, who can tell us how he has gone?”

“Gone!” echoed the voice of Don Rafael from within.

“Gone, Señor, and left not even so much as his shadow; yet the doors are locked, and not even in the postern is there so much as a crack, nor the key in the lock. The muleteers, who were to be upon the road at cock-crow, have waited until both they and their beasts are cramped with standing, and all to no purpose.”

“Is this true?” exclaimed Don Rafael, presently appearing with a _serape_ thrown over his shoulders, and shivering in the morning air. “Ay, man, thou hast a tongue like a woman’s. And Pedro, thou sayest, is gone?”

The man drew one hand sharply across the other, as who should say, “vanished!” though his lips ejaculated, “Gone, Señor; and who is to open the door now that it is shut? And who could shut the door upon Pedro but Satan himself?”

“Who, indeed?” said Don Rafael, gravely. “Think you so bulky a fellow could creep through the keyhole of the postern and take the key with him? By good fortune, he brought me the key of the great door as usual, and here it is. If the Devil hath carried away one gatekeeper on his shoulders, it is but fair he should send me another; and thou, Felipe, shall be the man.”

Felipe stared a moment; then with a transient change of expression which might be of intelligence, or simply a vague smile at his own good fortune, extended his hand for the keys; and suddenly mute with the weight of his unexpected promotion trudged down the stone stairs, across the silent inner court and the outer one, where by this time the household servants were exchanging exclamations of wonder and alarm with the impatient muleteers. Felipe unlocked the wide doors, threw them open with a clang, sank into Pedro’s place upon the stone bench, and thereafter reigned in his stead.

The wonder of Pedro’s disappearance grew greater and ever greater, until the boy Pepé said sulkily he had been played a shabby trick. Had not he said to Pedro the night before, when the Señor Don Rafael had told them that the General Vicente Gonzales was in El Toro, that for a word he himself would go to him there; and doubtless Pedro had stolen away alone, like the surly fox that he was. But the saints be praised, the road was open to one man as well as another.

“Hush!” said one in a warning tone; “though Pedro may have a fancy for a cleft head or broken bones, must we all cry for the same? Go to thou Pepé! thou art scarce old enough to leave the shade of thy mother’s reboso. Did I not see thee sucking thy thumb but last Saint John’s day?”

There was a roar of laughter, and though Pepé raged, no one heeded his wrath; the talk was all of Pedro. That he had gone to be a soldier was universally believed; that Don Rafael, and not the Devil, had aided his going was not for a moment thought of. The women crossed themselves, and the men spat on the floor emphatically,—yet there had been more mysteries than that in the life of Pedro.

Florencia, who was distraught at her uncle’s disappearance, and tore her hair and bewailed herself as a bereaved niece should, found her way to Chinita to pour out her griefs and fears; although since the change in the young girl’s position they had by common consent ignored their former relations,—Florencia, because of the wide social gulf fixed between the great house and the hovels around it; Chinita, from pure indifference. She was too full of her new life to think of the old, or of the persons connected with it.

It was so early that she was still not fully dressed, and the chocolate wherewith to break her fast stood untouched upon the table, when the sound of some one sobbing at the door brought a tone of sorrow into thoughts which had simply been vexed before.

Chinita had risen in an ill humor. Doña Rita and Rosario, and even Chata herself, had failed to show any surprise at her position. True, Don Rafael had warned them of it; but at least something more than a kindly indifference might have greeted her,—if only a glance of envy from Rosario. What wonderful things had they all seen, that they had no thoughts to spare for her? Bah! Rosario had neither eyes nor thoughts for any one but the young officer with the red neck-tie. Well, they should see! But what of Doña Rita,—and Chata too? Why, Chinita hardly knew her. Was she also thinking but of herself, like the others? That was a change in Chata, and one that ill-suited her.

Chinita had slept badly for thinking of these things; and truth to tell, when her mind was ill at ease the softness of the bed troubled her. She had dreamed of snakes, of three snakes who had lifted their heads out of water to hiss at her. Here was the first one. Certainly she had not dreamed of snakes for nothing. Well, to be sure, here was Florencia, whom she had almost forgotten, come with some trouble! She felt a little flutter of gratification, and unconsciously assumed the air of a _patrona_, as she said,—

“Ah, is it then Florencia? And what ails thee; and how can I help thee? What, has Tomasito broken the newest water-jar, or by better fortune his neck? Or has Terecita choked herself with a dry bean?”

“God has not desired to do me such favors,” returned Florencia, piously and with a flood of tears. “No, rather than my children should become little angels, he prefers that they shall be friendless upon the earth. _Ay de mi!_ what is a father, what is a husband (and you know the very driveller of a man I have), what is any one to an uncle who was a gatekeeper of Tres Hermanos?—a veritable treasure of silver, a spring of refreshing! Was there ever a time Florencia asked a shilling of Pedro in vain?”

At another time Chinita would have laughed at this pious exaggeration; now it filled her with inexpressible alarm.

“What! is my god-father dead?” she cried, wringing her hands and for the moment relapsing into the demonstrative gestures and cries of her plebeian training. “_Ay Dios_, Florencia, it cannot be! Answer me, stupid one! Is thy mouth as full as thy eyes that thou canst not answer?”

“Is chocolate served to the poor at day-break?” cried Florencia in an injured tone, and with a glance at the dainty breakfast; and then at an impatient word from Chinita she explained how Pedro had departed in the night, though the hacienda doors were locked upon the inside, and conjectured that if he had not been spirited away by the Devil, he had gone to join the Liberal General Gonzales,—there could be no other alternative. She had heard Señor Don Rafael talking to him till late in the night of how Gonzales had beaten the General Ramirez at El Toro, and was still there trying to strengthen his forces, while those of the Clergy had disappeared, no one knew where, but surely to gather men and means to recover the lost position.

Chinita’s eyes flashed. She knew nothing of politics, but she thrilled at the name of Ramirez. She laughed scornfully that Pedro should throw his puny strength into the force against him. Still she said, “God keep him;” and jested away Florencia’s fears.

“Bah! What should happen to my god-father?” she said. “And thou knowest thou wilt want for nothing. Hark thou! there is nothing to cry for that thy uncle is gone. Has he not often told us of the dollars he made in the wars?”

“I fear me he is likely rather to receive hard blows than hard dollars now,” answered Florencia, disconsolately,—an expression of expectancy, however, relieving her doleful countenance, as she added, “Ah, Chinita of my soul, thou wert ever the kerchief to wipe away my tears.”

Chinita laughed. “Thou used to say I was a prickly pear to draw tears, rather than a kerchief to dry them,” she presently said, pushing her chocolate toward Florencia, and thrusting into her hand the little twists of bread.

“There, take them; I would a thousand times rather have a thick cake and a drink of white gruel. One is not always in the humor for sweets;” and she tugged viciously at the hair she tried vainly to smooth,—she was always at feud with it because it was not longer. But at last she confined it in two short tresses, tying each with a red ribbon; and then suddenly dropping on her knees before Florencia, placed her hands palm downward upon the floor, and looking up in the woman’s face with a laugh exclaimed, as a tinge of red deepened the olive of her complexion, “And what of the American, Florencia? Is he like him thou sayest the Señorita Herlinda loved?”

“Ave Maria Purissima!” cried the startled woman. “The saints forbid that I should say such a thing of a Garcia, and she dedicated to the Madonna!” But recovering herself, “Certainly this American is like the other. Is not one cactus like another that grows on the same mountain? Should a white-blooded American be like a cavalier of blue-blood, or like an Indian of the villages? Yet both, one and the other, are we not Mexicans?” and she uttered the words as one might say, “Are we not gods?”

“That is very true,” commented Chinita, gravely; “and yet they are not frights, these Americans. Why should not the Señorita Herlinda have loved one if it pleased her? Listen, Florencia; I will tell thee a dream I had one night. When one’s bed is too soft, one dreams dreams.”

Florencia looked at the girl with an admiring glance. How amiable she could be, this Chinita, when she chose. “Little puss! little puss!” she murmured, giving her the pet name Pedro had used, when in her kittenish moods one had never known whether she would scratch or fondle one with soft purrings, begun and ended in a moment. “Little puss! thou wert ever good to thy Florencia.”

“Thou art a flatterer!” ejaculated Chinita, half-inclined to withhold her confidence, yet longing for a listener. “Ay, Florencia, thou knowest not what it is to sit for hours in the gloom within four walls. Ah, what thoughts come into one’s head! When I ran about the village, the wind blew the thoughts about as it did my hair; but now my brains are like cobwebs, and when a thought touches them it clings like dust, and so they grow thicker and heavier until my very skull aches;” and she pressed her head with her hands, and heaved a deep sigh.

“But to think is not to dream,” said Florencia, in some disappointment, for she had a child’s love for the marvellous, and did not understand Chinita’s abstractions,—unstudied and simple though they were.

“But dreams come from thoughts,” answered Chinita; “and what should I think of here but of mysteries,—such as why the Señora should keep me with her, though she loves me not; why she walks the floor and counts her beads, and when she forgets I am in the room murmurs over and over the name of Herlinda; why she looks before her sometimes, as you used to tell me the woman looked who saw the ghost of the American,—and that is always when she chances to meet this Don ’Guardo whom she will not speak of, or suffer Doña Feliz to invite to our table, though he stays here so long. And after I have asked so many things, I set myself to the answer. Oh, you would wonder at what I say to myself of all these things,—and then sometimes come dreams to tell me I am right.”

Florencia looked at the door vaguely,—she was thinking perhaps she had better go.

“Yes, yes,” continued Chinita, as if to herself, “I am growing perhaps like the owl,—I, who in the broad sunlight saw nothing, have discovered many things here in the dark. Well, well, Florencia, one thought came to me on a vexed night when I could not sleep. I had been talking to Doña Feliz that day. I know not why, but I am with Doña Feliz like the young fox my god-father tamed,—when I touched him with my hand he was pleased, yet he bristled and longed to bite. Good! we had talked that day. Yes,—it was of the nuns, and she said the Señora might desire I should be one; and I was angry, and said I would not be shut up to pray as the Señorita Herlinda had been; and then Doña Feliz bade me be silent and ponder what she had said. And after she went away it was not of myself I thought, but of the Señorita Herlinda; and in the midst of my thoughts I saw the American pass the court, and Doña Isabel, who was near, turned herself away, as if an adder had darted upon her.”

Florencia looked up with a mute inquiry or fascination in her gaze. Chinita, in a sort of monotone, followed the thread of her thoughts.

“When I went to sleep at last, I dreamed that I, though still Chinita, was Herlinda, and that the American who was lying wounded in the room below came up the stairs, and tapped lightly at my window. I stepped softly and looked out at him through the grating. Ah, it was this Don ’Guardo, yet so different, as a man is different from his reflection in a glass; and I did not wonder to see him there. I put my hand out and touched him, and was happy. And as I stood at the bars,—I myself, and yet the _niña_ Herlinda,—the man of my dream said, as a husband says to his wife, ‘Open, my life;’ and when I opened the door he led in by the hand a little child,—I knew it to be his child, though it had not blue eyes nor the yellow hair. Well, I stood there, and stood there, and strove to speak and could not; and the vision of the man and of the child faded, and the thought that I was still Herlinda faded too, and the dream was ended.”

She ceased speaking, and looked at Florencia with a vague yet searching gaze.

“By my faith, a strange dream!” murmured Florencia, disquieted. “You should have lighted a blessed candle when you woke, and passed it before you three times, saying an _Ave_ each time. Santa Inez! I would rather see the ghost of the American than dream such a dream!”

“Coward! it frightened me not,” continued the girl. “And I did not seem to wake, though I knew that I, Chinita, lay in the bed, and that my head sank deep in the soft pillow, and that I could not or would not raise it; and the meaning of the dream crept into my mind, as the light creeps into a dark room. Yes, I felt as I used to when I saw the little green blades shoot up in the spring, and I could think how the corn would grow, and the leaves would wave, and the maize would lie in the silk and the yellow sheath; and so I had thought of what I had heard,—of the love of Herlinda for the American, and what might have come of it.”

“Hush!” interrupted Florencia with a scared look. “You said you dreamed of a child. Did you see its face?”

“No,” answered Chinita, slowly. “But what need that I should see it?”

The two had risen as if by one impulse, and looked into each other’s eyes. The woman was awed as much by the penetration and daring of the young girl’s mind as by the thought that for the first time arose within her.

She cast her thoughts back. She had been young when the American was murdered, when the Señorita Herlinda had left the hacienda never to return, when the child had been found at the gate; yet she wondered that she had been so blind to what now appeared so plain, and that all alike—the wise and simple, the old and young—had been so utterly dazzled by the glamor that surrounded the family of Garcia that no suspicion of dishonor might attach to its women, or of cowardice to its men. Surely none other than Herlinda Garcia would have escaped the lynx-eyed Selsa, or a score of other scandal-loving women! Curiously enough, while a feeling of detraction for the nun, whom she had long been used to canonize in her thoughts, stole into her mind, a sensation of traditional reverence for the Garcia arose for the young girl before her. Florencia’s ideas of morality were perhaps vague on all points; they certainly did not reach that of aspersion of the innocent fruit of another’s fault.

“Ay, _niña_,” the woman said at last with a gasp, “it is not every one who drinks red wine that is happy. Thanks to God, the peasant woman who carries a burden in her arms too soon needs only to suckle it under her scarf, like any mother, and needs not to close upon herself the doors of a convent. Santa Maria! who would have thought such things of the _niña_ Herlinda?”