Part 24
“Be silent!” cried Chinita, with a tardy repentance of her confidence. “How do I know that I am not the worst of evil thinkers, and a fool, a very fool? Look thou, Florencia, it is thou who shall discover the truth for me. Pedro is gone; perhaps he never knew it. The Tio Reyes must know; but where is he? Yet I _must_ know. Oh, I could bear the truth from Feliz, from Doña Isabel; but they are as silent and as sorrowful as the image of the Madre Dolores. It is thou, Florencia, who must help me. Oh, it will be but a diversion for thee. Thou shalt talk of thy Tio Pedro, and of the day I was dropped in his hand, and of the days that went before. Thou canst talk now of the murder of the American, and of the Señorita Herlinda too, and there will be no Pedro to chide thee. And see,—” as the woman began some faint objection,—“I have all the pretty things Pedro gave me, and money too; yes, more than thou wouldst think. And thou shalt never miss thy uncle; thou shalt have them all, if thou wilt but talk to the old women of things that happened here before the time of the great sickness. But, Florencia, thou must tell them nothing. Oh, if I could only run again in and out of the village huts as I used to do!”
Florencia looked at the excited girl with a nod of intelligence. “Have no fear,” she said; “it is not possible that Florencia knows not how to manage her own tongue, though no one knows better than thyself it was ever a quiet one. But it shall wag now, and not like the dog’s tail, in mere idleness.”
Chinita laughed, then glancing around her warily, drew from her bosom a small gold coin. She had evidently prepared herself for a chance meeting with Florencia.
“Take it,” she said, “and go. Thou hast been here too long already; and,” she added with the flush of red again tingeing her face, “talk and gossip when the American is near. He must be sad,—it will cheer him to hear the voices, even if he understands but little; and if by chance he speaks to thee, why! thou shalt tell me what he says.”
Florencia had experienced one great surprise that morning, and here was another; the first had awed, the second delighted her. Like all her race she had the instincts of secrecy and intrigue, and suddenly the opportunity to practise both were offered her. She looked at Chinita with a glance of infinite cunning in her soft dark eyes; but the young girl would not meet her gaze. “Go, go!” she said impatiently; “you have been here too long. The Señora is coming—or is it Doña Feliz? Go! go, I say!”
It was neither Doña Isabel nor Feliz, but only Chata, who entered with a preoccupied air, scarcely noticing the woman who passed her on the threshold. She did not speak, however, until Florencia had reluctantly passed out of hearing; and then she cried eagerly, “Chinita! Chinita! who is the stranger who stood with thee at the doorway? God bless us! I thought I saw the ghost of the American we used to talk of; and but now I met him below in the court. Who is he? What is he here for?”
“That remains to be seen,” answered Chinita, with an uneasy laugh. Her hasty confidence in Florencia troubled her, and closed her lips toward the friend for whom she had hitherto longed. “At least the stranger is no ghost; yet how can we know that the man who was murdered here so many years before was anything to him?”
“But I do know,” insisted Chata. “I had gone to the arbor, thinking thou mightest be there, to break my fast. I was standing in the centre, with my eyes turned toward this room, thinking I should see thee leave it, and thinking too of the _niña_ Herlinda,—O Chinita! she is still so beautiful,—when I heard a step behind me. It was a strange step, and I turned quickly and saw the American looking at me as if he too believed he saw a ghost. Was it not strange, Chinita? We looked at each other quite steadily for many moments, then he said,—
“‘Pardon me, you are then the daughter of the administrador? You came here yesterday?’
“I could scarcely make out his words, yet I understood what he said, and I seemed to know that he had taken me for another,—perhaps for thee, Chinita; and then again he said, ‘Pardon me! Pardon me!’ and we still continued to look at each other; and I did not think how bold I must appear until the other stranger, the young officer who loves Rosario, stepped out of the room they have given him. I heard his spurs clank on the pavement, and then I fled away to thee. But for the fright, I should not have dared to come hither, Chinita. All yesterday my grandmother kept me from thee. She said now thou art the child of Doña Isabel, and that without leave I must not go to thee.”
“Chata, thou hast a poor spirit!” exclaimed Chinita, with some severity,—though she remembered with impatient anger that Doña Isabel had kept her in the garden at her side, on pretence of showing her the strings of irregular pearls, which she should some day arrange in even strands. Doña Isabel had made no promise, but Chinita could almost see them in the future bedecking her own neck and arms. She had been beguiled, even as Chata had been commanded, to keep apart from her old playmate.
“There is a mystery in it all!” she exclaimed. “Though I am here with Doña Isabel, I know not who I am. It is intolerable! Sometimes I fear I am but her plaything, with no more right to her notice than had the fawn I found on the river bank and petted, till it died from very heartbreak because it longed so for the mountains and its kind. And so I long, Chata. Ah, thou knowest not what it is to be a nameless wretch, to be tossed from hand to hand, and have no share in the game but the dizzy whirling through the air. Pshaw! I would rather be dashed to pieces against the first wall than go through life with nothing but favor to rely on. I want a name, a place, a right. I will have them: even you, who are the daughter of the administrador, have those; and I—Well, I will not be simply _Chinita_, whom Doña Isabel makes a lady to-day, who was a child of the Madonna yesterday, and may be a beggar to-morrow.”
Chata had been leaning on the arm and pressing her head against the shoulder of Chinita. She raised it now with a sharp low cry, and turned away. Little guessed the impetuous, ambitious foundling how her words tortured and taunted the other, who longed to cry out, “I too am no one! I too am a stray, a waif, and if I know my father, know him only as a terror,—a horror.” Her promise to Doña Rita silenced her. She felt there was but one person in the world to whom she would break her promise,—the pale, sweet-faced nun of the convent of El Toro. In her passionate, bitter mood Chinita chilled and silenced her. She did not even tell her that as she hastened from the arbor the American had caught the end of her flying reboso, as if by an irresistible impulse, and cried: “I am Ashley Ward! Ashley! Ashley! remember the name!”
Remember it! it seemed to Chata as if she had always known the man as well as the name, which had ever before been to her the symbol of the dead rather than of the living. That she should have seen the Señorita Herlinda, whom she had always known to be alive, seemed more wonderful, more incredible to her mind, than that the young man should have risen before her to claim the name of the murdered foreigner. Now that he had come, she seemed all her life to have been expecting him. She did not see him again for days, but all that time the expression of his eyes haunted her. She could not fathom it. She did not guess it had been but a reflection of the surprise, yet conviction, in her own.
Chata did not again transgress the commands of Doña Feliz; nor did she remain long enough with Chinita in her first visit to be tempted into further confidence. Indeed, they parted with something like a quarrel, as they had been used to do in their childhood’s days. Rosario’s name had been mentioned, and Chinita had with some scorn commented both on her sentimental air and the indifference of her lover.
“Did he love her at El Toro?” she asked with the laugh that was so mocking. “He stood for an hour, you say, at the corner of the street waiting for a glance from her; he wrote verses by day and sang them by night beneath her window? Well, he stood from noon till night yesterday with his eyes turned upward,—one would have thought he had never gazed at anything lower than the sky; yet it was only for a glimpse of _my_ face, and a single glance from my eyes dazzled and blinded him. Thank Heaven, he dare not tune a guitar beneath my windows for fear of Doña Isabel, or I should be tormented with all the old rhymes changed from Rosario to Chinita. Ah, there are likings and likings, and this pretty soldier is one who would try them all!”
“Chinita,” cried Chata in indignation, “you are false, you are cruel! Rosario has done nothing to you that you should torment her. I understand nothing of such things as Rosario does; though I am her age, she seems to be a woman while I am still a child. But she says she loves Fernando, and for love a woman’s heart may break.”
Chata was thinking of the pale, sad nun; but Chinita threw herself into a chair and broke into a peal of laughter. It rang through the silent house, and startled Doña Isabel in the further chamber. She started nervously and clasped her hands over her ears.
“What a strange child it is.” she murmured, “Ah, I should have loved her if—” She glanced at a note she had just written. It was addressed to Vicente Gonzales, and promised him a thousand mounted soldiers.
Doña Isabel made no idle promises, and she had counted well the cost when she had thus irrevocably committed herself to the cause of the Liberals. She had watched for years the course of events, and none saw more clearly than she that the time for passiveness had gone. On every hand there must necessarily be sacrifice. “That which goes not in sighs, must in tears,” she said sententiously. “I like not the Indian Juarez, yet his policy promises deliverance from the vampire that for generations has grown strong and ever stronger, as it has drained the very life of the nation.”
The knowledge that Gonzales was in El Toro enjoying the prestige of an accidental victory, but with a force entirely insufficient to meet that which Ramirez might at any day bring against him, had been the immediate cause of her action. To reward Pedro with a service which should at once remove him from her sight and fill his mind with new and absorbing interests, were the reasons why he had been chosen to ride from rancho to rancho secretly inciting the men to join the standard, which was to be raised upon the morrow.
“Ah, this Ruiz is a poor tool!” muttered Doña Isabel, “yet for that reason may be the more readily bought. He loves the daughter of my administrador, and will do much to gain my good word. Rafael says he is a brave soldier, if a false one; and there will be those with him who will guard against treachery. He shall fulfil his empty offer to lead a thousand men to Gonzales, and claim of Rafael the reward he sighs for. Ah, there is the child’s laugh again,—I could almost fancy it in mockery of me! Ah, this of patriot is a new _rôle_ for me, and tries my nerves. Well, Chinita shall laugh while she can: if it is for long, it will prove her none of the blood of Garcia. Was there ever a happy woman among them?”
While Doña Isabel pondered thus, Chata in deep indignation had turned from her whilom friend. She had been brought up among a people who in matters of love held man excused and woman guilty in all cases of inconstancy. “Farewell!” she exclaimed, “I will come no more to you who are so cruel. Doña Isabel was right to part us; she has changed your heart as she has your fortune. Ah!” she added bitterly, “all the world is changed to me, and why not you?”
The grieved and imbittered girl went out so quickly that Chinita’s answer did not reach her. As she passed through the corridor Chata glanced down. The young officer stood there, as Chinita had described. He would catch the first glimpse of her as she left her room. Chata flushed in anger, yet tears of pity rose to her eyes. She was still a child, yet her heart foretold what might be the agony of woman’s slighted love.
Even so soon Chinita was laughing no longer; she had crouched forward and sat with her face bent almost to her knees. “What have I done?” she asked herself. “It is early morning still, and I have told a secret to a fool, and offended her I should have trusted!”
She had eaten nothing; the excitement under which she had acted suddenly expired, and she burst into sobs and tears. Doña Feliz coming in a few minutes later, found her on her knees before the little image of her patron saint, passionately vowing the gift of a silver _Christo_ in return for the boon she craved.
“Go to the corridor, my child,” said Feliz pityingly. The girl was a problem to her, which every day seemed more difficult of solution. “You look weary and ill; but console yourself,—Pedro is safe. You will see the good foster-father again, be assured.”
Chinita looked at her in astonishment. She had for the time forgotten Pedro’s very existence. Doña Feliz discerned at once that she had credited the girl with a sensibility to which she was a stranger. Five minutes later she was quite certain of it, as Chinita sat on the corridor, apparently equally unconscious of the impassioned glances of Ruiz, or those of the invisible but infuriate Rosario, drawing the threads of some dainty linen and singing,—
_Sale la Linda, Sale la fea, Sale el enano, Con su galea._
“The beauty comes out, The ugly one too; Then comes the dwarf, With a gay halloo.”
As unstudied and inconsequent as the meaningless words of the song seemed the actions of the singer, but Feliz shook her head, and met Doña Isabel with a face that was even more serious than its wont. The problem became to her mind each day more complicated. Would the result be bitterness, and that grief most dreaded by the proud heart of Doña Isabel Garcia,—the grief and bitterness of shame?
XXIX.
Florencia fulfilled her mission well,—recalling skilfully to the minds of the elder gossips the events and doubts of years agone, and those suspicions, light as air, which had once before menaced the fair name and fame of her who later had been revered as a saint under the name of Sister Veronica.
It was natural after the excitement of Pedro’s disappearance had subsided that reminiscences of events in which he had figured should, in default of some new interest, rise to the stagnant surface of hacienda life, and be re-colored and adorned with suggestions probable or improbable, and that the favorite topic should be torn to shreds in its dissection, while the motive power of its appearance should in the excitement of discussion be utterly lost sight of. Florencia herself, in the interest of tracing the sequence of events, and in hearing attributed to the characters that had figured in her girlhood traits and deeds of which she had heard little or nothing at that bygone time, almost forgot that she was talking with a purpose, and therefore perhaps had a truly unprejudiced account to give to Chinita,—when she could again see her, for Doña Isabel had become a wary duenna, and the girl had had no opportunity of learning anything that might have thrown light upon the theory she had formed of her birth and parentage.
In his insufficient knowledge of the language, Ashley Ward let much of the gossip of the women who chatted about him as they performed their daily tasks pass entirely unheeded, while he pondered upon the very subjects which with more or less directness were discussed. But one morning he caught the name of Herlinda, and thenceforth all his senses were alert. Great was his surprise when he discovered this to be the name of a daughter of Doña Isabel who had been a beautiful girl when the American was killed, and thenceforward his mind became preternaturally keen; so that he divined the meanings of words he had never heard before,—gestures, glances, the very inflection of a tone, became revelations to him.
Hitherto, without cogitating upon the matter, Ward had naturally assumed from hearing no reference to another that the newly married Carmen was the only child of Doña Isabel. Now he learned the tragical fate of Norberto and the existence of the elder and more beautiful daughter Herlinda, the cloistered nun; and she was for the time the theme of endless reminiscences and conjectures. Her winsome childhood; her early gayety and incomparable beauty; the open love of Gonzales; the suspected mutual attachment of the young American and the daring child, who with her mother’s pride had failed to inherit her mother’s strength of will; the murder of John Ashley; the time of the great sickness; the death of Mademoiselle La Croix; the effect of the shock and horror upon the mind and appearance of Herlinda; the scarcely whispered, faint, yet not wholly disproved suspicions which had floated over the name and fame of the daughter of a house too absolute in its ascendency and power to be lightly attacked; her removal from the hacienda; her strange rejection of the suit of one who had always been dear to her, and to whom her mother, in accordance with good and seemly usage, had pledged her; her renunciation of the world she had loved, and entrance to a convent, which she had held in horror,—all these circumstances were discussed from a dozen points of view.
And all he heard confirmed in Ashley’s mind the belief that the woman whom his cousin had loved was traced; that whether she had been actually a wife or no, she, Herlinda Garcia, the daughter of a woman whom it would be a mortal offence to approach upon such a subject, was the possible mother of a child which he could scarcely refuse to believe existed,—though here a new perplexity confronted him as (like the young officer, whom he regarded with a half-contemptuous amusement that should have prevented him from following any example set by so love-lorn a cavalier) he began to seek occasion for observing Chinita with an intensity that made her doubly the object of the jealous and ireful dislike of Rosario and her mother. To his alert and dispassionate mind circumstances pointed to this girl as the possible link between the families of Ashley and Garcia, though the most minute and patient observation only seemed to make absurd the supposition that American blood mingled in the fiery tide which filled her veins, colored her rich beauty, and vivified the scornful and stoical yet ambitious spirit, which as by a spell at the same moment repelled yet charmed both himself and the haughty Doña Isabel. What was the secret of the foundling’s influence? He cared not to analyze either his own mind or the irresistible fascination of Chinita; but that the girl, though not positively beautiful, and unmistakably repellent in her caustic yet stoical discontent and ambitious unrest, possessed a bewitching and bewildering grace far different from any he had ever beheld in woman, of whatever race or kindred, impressed him daily more and more deeply, while—But stubborn facts made speculation and efforts at inquiry alike futile.
As days passed on, a certain friendship sprang up between Ward and Don Rafael. They talked for hours over the political situation,—Ashley straining ear and mind to comprehend the administrador’s smooth and impressive utterances, and Don Rafael with grave politeness listening without a smile or gesture of amusement to the hesitating and often utterly incomprehensible attempts of the young American to deliver his opinions, or to make minute inquiry into reasons and events which often horrified as well as puzzled him. Don Rafael had the air of simplicity and candor which is so infinitely attractive to the stranger, and which presented so great a contrast to the lofty coldness of Doña Isabel and the grave and melancholy reticence of Feliz. Their demeanor left the baffling and depressing conviction that there was an infinity that they might reveal were but the right chord touched; while that of Don Rafael was satisfying in its cordiality, even while no response fulfilled the expectation that his fluent and kindly frankness appeared to encourage.
As soon as the state of his wound permitted, Ashley joined the administrador in his early morning rides to the fields and pastures, and learned much of the workings of a great hacienda. These rides were confined to the immediate neighborhood of the great house, and four or six armed men were invariably in attendance,—for, as Don Rafael explained with a smile, the administrador of the rich hacienda of Tres Hermanos was invested with the dignity of its possessors, his personal insignificance being absorbed in the state of those he represented; so that his person bore a fictitious value, and if seized by an enemy, either personal or political, would doubtless be held at a prince’s ransom, which the honor as well as the interest of his employers would force them to pay.
In the course of these rides they not infrequently approached the deserted reduction-works, and it was upon the first occasion that this happened that Don Rafael questioned the young American as to his relationship to the last director; and upon learning it, rehearsed with deep feeling the story of his murder, pointing out the very tree under which the bloody tragedy was enacted.
Ashley watched his countenance narrowly as he talked. His words, whose meaning might have been obscure to the foreigner, were rendered dramatic by the deep pathos of his tone and the expressive force of his gestures; even the men who rode behind drew near as his voice rose on the stillness of the air in a tale so foreign to the peace and beauty of the scene. As they skirted the low adobe wall and looked over upon the stagnant masses of mineral clay, the piles of broken ores, the adobe sheds and stables crumbling under rain and sun, Ashley was ready to credit the whispered words with which Don Rafael ended his narration; “Señor, it is said in the silent night, when the moon is at its full, phantoms of its old life revivify this deserted spot, and that its massive gates open at the call of a ghostly rider, who wears the form of that poor youth who after his last midnight ride came back feet foremost, recumbent, silent, from the tryst he had sallied forth to keep.”
“And did you know the woman?” gasped rather than demanded Ashley Ward.
“Did _I_ know the woman?” answered Don Rafael. “I know the woman? I was a stranger, and, truth to tell, no friend of Americans; a faithful husband withal, and was it likely, though he had them, this stranger would have shared secrets of a doubtful nature with me? When I said a ‘tryst’ I used it for want of a better word. What attraction should a man so refined, so engrossed in his affairs as this busy foreigner, find in the humble and rustic beauties of the village? For my part, I find it impossible to imagine such coarseness in a man so little likely to be governed by a base passion as Ashley appeared. You know your own people better than I can; what say you?”
“I say the same!” answered Ward, eagerly, with a keen glance at the sensitive dark face of the administrador. “Yet I know that my cousin loved; that he claimed to be married; that the lady—”
He paused,—some of the men were within hearing, listening like Don Rafael himself with rapt faces. That of Don Rafael lighted for a moment with an incredulous smile. “Ah, then there _was_ a woman?” he said. “That might be; but a marriage? Ah, Señor, if there had been that, all the world would have known it. You know but little of our laws if you suppose such a contract could be here secretly and legally made. If he claimed such to be the case, he was vilely deceived, or himself was—”