Part 29

Sooner than was usual, even in that land of early movement, Don Alonzo warned him it was growing late. It was not too late or early for Rosario to wave her little brown hand from her mother’s window in token of adieu. Ashley did not see it, but he for whom it was intended did. So with more foreboding and reluctance than he could have imagined possible but a few hours before, Ashley once more rode forth from Tres Hermanos,—this time with a definite object, from which he felt there could be no turning back, no possible end but his own death or the downfall of a man to whom but yesterday he had been utterly indifferent, but who to-day was inseparable from all his thoughts, his passions, his purposes,—Ramirez the _revolucionario_, the declared murderer of John Ashley, the declared father of the young girl who seemed the very incarnation of honor and sensibility, of tenderness and purity.

XXXIII.

The departure of Ashley Ward from Tres Hermanos was not so entirely disregarded as he had supposed. It was not Rosario only, who left her chamber at daybreak. Scarcely had she disappeared in the gloom of Doña Isabel’s apartments on her way to the favorite balcony, when her father stepped out upon the corridor, starting as his eyes fell upon Doña Feliz, who, seemingly with the spirit of unrest that pervaded the household, at the same moment emerged from her room. With a muttered salutation each abandoned the original intention of exchanging a farewell word with the departing guest; and arresting their steps at the balustrade, they leaned over and listened intently to the sounds of the early exit. The light was still so uncertain that though Don Rafael noticed, he did not wonder at, the gray tinge upon his mother’s face; it seemed only in harmony with the prevailing darkness.

The rains of the past season had been insufficient, and a murky though almost inpalpable mist, felt rather than seen, brooded over the silent landscape. It was scarcely oppressive enough to affect the young men who rode forth stirring the sluggish air, nor the eager horses lifting their heads to fill their lungs with the breath of morning, and expelling it again with a force that agitated the stillness with a sound like a blow upon water; yet it weighed inexpressibly both upon the body and mind of Don Rafael. As he had come to the corridor with a certainty in his mind that he should meet his mother, he had purposed to question her as to the actual occurrences of the day before, for the connection of Chata with the return of Ashley Ward remained entirely unexplained. That his mother was satisfied that it was not a mere vulgar _rendezvous_ into which she had been tempted, he was assured by her manner toward both the young man and the recreant girl; indeed, it appeared that she had scarcely noticed an incident which in that place, and at the age of Chata, was sufficient to array against a young girl the suspicions of the most trusting and generous of matrons. Yet Don Rafael could imagine no possible inducement but the voice of a lover that could have called her forth alone from the great house,—for that Chata had gone alone, he knew as well as did his keen-eyed daughter Rosario.

The last gray figure had long since disappeared from the outer court, into which they looked as into a distant and narrow vista; the clank of the horses’ hoofs upon the paving had changed to the thud upon the roadway, then ceased altogether to be heard; and Don Rafael turning his eyes upon his mother’s face, had opened his lips to question her,—when with a thrill of surprise, which became terror even before the momentary utterance was repeated, he heard her laugh that strange, unmirthful, hollow laugh that indicates a mind diseased, while she said whisperingly,—

“He is gone. Yes! yes! I unbarred the door, and Pedro picked the lock so cleverly and noiselessly that the very watchman asleep across the threshold did not hear him. Ah, I knew Gregorio would be quiet enough by daylight; but Leon was awake, wide awake. For all your tears, Isabel, he would not have gone but for me; he swore he would kill Don Gregorio for the blow he gave him. Why did you say you loved at last as a woman should the husband who was your brother’s foe to death, and that you sent him freedom that he might seek a death more worthy of his villany than by the sword of an outraged father, or the executioner’s bullet? They were bitter words, and you knew they were false,—for even with your child lying dead through his persecution, you loved him still. And when he would not stir because of your taunts, but swore he would meet his fate and shame the callous heart whose love had been as weak as her sacrifice was forced and incomplete, what was there for you to do but to throw yourself on your knees before him, and entreat him for his mother’s sake to be gone? Even then he would have stayed but for me. ‘What!’ I cried, ‘to shame your sister, you will give another victory to the husband of Dolores?’

“Ah, it is not tears that conquer such a man as Leon! In a moment he had sprung to his feet; he had thrust Isabel aside, and me too,—yes, that was nothing. Pedro held his horse, but Leon glared at him as he sprang into the saddle. ‘But for you, I should have given the last blow at midnight,’ he cried. ‘It shall be thine some day, when thy master’s account has been closed!’ and with that he was gone. Yes, he is gone. Not a sound of the horse as he gallops! Gone, and none too soon! the morning is come,”—and she uttered again that sound called a laugh.

“Mother, what hast thou?” cried Don Rafael, clasping her arm, and noticing for the first time the deep hollows beneath her brilliant eyes, and the wide circles that made more appalling their unnatural glare. “Mother, thou art dreaming! thy hand burns, and thy temples. Maria Sanctissima! dost thou not know me?”

“Know thee?—yes. Why, thou art Rafael,” she answered, letting her eyes drop for a moment on his scared and anxious face. “Why should I not know thee? Had ever woman a better son? Yes, yes, he is safe; let Don Gregorio wake when he will, Leon is away. Ah, at the last he was not so cruel,—eh, Isabel? Why should you moan and wring your hands because he vowed never again but by his death should his name shame you? Ah! Ah! Ah! well, they say he died, shot and hanged to a tree as a miscreant should be. Do you believe it, Isabel? Yet why not? God of my soul! is it only the son of Pancho Vallé that can be pitiless? Only—” so she muttered on, in a low monotonous voice, pacing the corridor with an uncertain step, varying from the halting motion of one about to fall, to the impetuous haste with which she fancied herself urging again the unwilling flight of the sullen and revengeful youth, whom she too, with the perversity of woman’s heart, had loved as sincerely as she had condemned.

Don Rafael followed her in a perturbation of surprise and terror, which drove from his mind all other thoughts save those that his remembrance of former plague-stricken seasons forced upon his mind. Fever was in the air, and his mother was the first victim! The rainy season, which in most years cleared the black watercourses and the village itself of the accumulations of nine dry and almost torrid months, had failed to do its accustomed work. No rushing torrents had cleared the watercourses; but instead of proving the friend of humanity water had become its enemy, by mingling scantily with the foul elements that had gathered during the long period of drouth, and which exhaled the subtle miasma which even the pure air of that elevated region was powerless to render innoxious. Don Rafael absolutely wrung his hands before the evil he foresaw, and which neither experience nor intelligence had led him to combat with any sanitary precautions. That the fever should from time to time decimate the _hacienda_ appeared to his mind one of the inevitable calamities of life, no more to be avoided than the spring floods or the blasting lightning or the outburst of volcanic fires. But had all these forces combined assailed him at once, his consternation could not have been greater than to witness in his mother the delirium which testified to the dreaded typhoid. As has been intimated, his love for his mother was of no common order; without being weak in judgment or irresolute in character, he had been accustomed to share with her his every thought, and their sentiments and aims were ever in such perfect accord that a dissentient word had never arisen between them.

As Don Rafael followed his mother in her erratic and excited movements, scarcely conscious of what he did, or of anything except that with each moment her talk grew more distracted, while her thoughts were persistently fixed upon the events and woes and passions of by-gone years, a door at the end of the corridor was timidly pushed open, and Chata’s face peeped anxiously out. Had Don Rafael’s thoughts been free, he would have wondered that the girl was fully dressed at such an early hour; but he did not even heed the explanation she hurriedly gave as she advanced to meet him.

“I would not have left my grandmother alone, but she forbade me to come,” she said. “Oh, I could not sleep. I thought the morning would never dawn. I went to her with the first light, but she would not listen to me. She bade me leave her; and I thought it was because she was angry, but it was this! Oh, Father, is it a sickness? See, she does not know me? _Mama grande_, it is I; it is your Chata.”

“Be silent!” exclaimed Don Rafael, the more sharply because of his extreme alarm. “Fly, Chata! fly to thy mother, thy sister! Call old Selsa, any one who has sense and knows what remedies to bring. Why do you stare? Do you think my mother is mad? It is the fever. It is not for nothing that the rains have been delayed so long. Pitying Saints, as I rode by the ditches last week they were black as pitch and foul as a vulture’s quarry. Run! I will lead her to her room. Ay, ay, Mother, thou art strong, and not so old yet,”—and with the tenderness of a child and the devotion of a lover the son guided the steps of the delirious yet gentle woman, who, half-conscious of her state, half-resentful of care, suffered herself to be led into the chamber she had quitted in apparent health but a brief quarter of an hour before.

Apparent health only, for she had passed an utterly sleepless night, strangely excited by the events of the day, yet unable to fix her mind upon them. Chata, upon her return to the hacienda, had sought her own chamber; and in the press of other thoughts Doña Feliz had failed to follow and to question her upon the strange escapade, which the whole character and bearing of the young girl combined to render utterly inexplicable,—for she had no data by which to connect it with the appearance of Ramirez at the cemetery, and she absolved Ashley Ward from any pre-arrangement with the young girl as completely as though they had been found a thousand miles asunder. As was natural, suspicions of some precocious love, of which some one of the many volatile and dashing youth that had lately gathered at the hacienda was the object, haunted the mind of Doña Feliz; but she rejected them with disdain, promising herself upon the early morning to demand the truth, not doubting she should learn it. Even while awake to the importance of the incident, and inwardly debating it, she was conscious that the remembrance of it, as well as of Ashley and his strange participation in the life-drama in which she had enacted so forced and painful a part, constantly strove to elude her, and was recalled with an effort that with every hour grew greater and less effective; while all the events and actors of long ago passed in endless review before her,—Doña Isabel in her matronly girlhood, soothing and bribing with tender words and lavish gifts her wilful half-brother; Don Gregorio; the dying Norberto; the scowling and furious abductor; then Herlinda and John Ashley. The pale procession, spectral yet real, voiceless yet each repeating with irresistible eloquence the tale of his love, his guilt or anguish, passed before her, thrusting aside, as often as they re-appeared, the forms of those who at this new and critical point had appeared upon the scene.

As the night passed, she was perfectly aware of this tantalizing inability to command her thoughts; and as again and again she set herself to follow the probable course and effect of Ashley Ward’s intervention in the fate of the man who to her seemed gifted with demoniacal powers for evil, and an absolute invulnerability to human vengeance, or as she began in mind to question Chata, the persons both of the young man and the girl seemed to fade from before her, and the voices that should have replied, were those which had been familiar years before,—oftenest that of Herlinda in wild repetition of her unhappy love, and agonized entreaties for the babe she was but to embrace and forever relinquish. Through it all Doña Feliz had retained the thought of Ashley’s departure; and with some vague thought that the sight of him would calm her fevered brain, she instinctively strove to accomplish the resolve with which she had begun the night. And thus her last conscious act before the positive delirium of the fever seized her, had been to look, with the half-fearful gaze of one who invokes yet dreads the vengeance of heaven, upon him who seemed to her morbid and superstitious mind fraught with a mission to avenge and right the innocent,—both the living and the dead.

Don Rafael, in consternation, had recognized at once the serious character of his mother’s illness. As he called aloud for help, and Chata with white and affrighted face hastened to obey his command, Rosario, followed by her mother in some confusion, appeared from the farther corridor. Too much bewildered and alarmed to wonder at seeing his daughter also dressed and abroad at such an hour, her father exclaimed in impatience at the voluble reproaches of Doña Rita, who, pushing Rosario from the side of Doña Feliz, bade her cease from such tempting of Providence, affirming that for her own sins she (Doña Rita) must have been burdened with the plague of so reckless a child, and praying her in the name of the Holy Babe to fly from infection lest she should break her mother’s heart by her premature decease. To all of which Rosario submitted with a sobbing declaration that she was already faint and ill, whereupon Doña Rita hastily retreated to her own room, dragging Rosario with her; and in spite of his hurriedly formed resolution to the contrary, Don Rafael was forced to confide his mother to the care of Chata and of the servants, who, subservient to the slightest wish even of this inexperienced girl, were however absolutely useless without the guiding presence of a superior.

XXXIV.

The hilltops were flooded with sunshine when the party from Tres Hermanos reached them; the atmosphere was so clear, that looking back over the broad valley, spread with fields of maize and beans, and the half-tropical luxuriance of fruit and flower, Ashley could distinguish every break and fret on the massive front of the great house, and recognized with a feeling almost of awe the tall, slender figure standing upon the centre balcony. She waved her hand in token of God-speed. Strange, inscrutable woman! She had bidden him go forth as the minister of fate, she had furnished him with servants, horses, money, arms,—yet had spoken no word. Ashley felt as though he were an enchanted knight in an enchanted land!

The traveller bade adieu to Don Alonzo in sight of his cousin’s grave; then, followed by his two servants, rode rapidly onward in the direction taken the day before by the troops and Doña Isabel, by Ramirez and Reyes,—indifferent which he first should encounter, confident that sooner or later the full significance of the impulse that had led him upon his Quixotic journey to Mexico would be revealed. The little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand had grown so great as to overshadow his earth and heavens. He rode on as in a dream. The day passed, the night came, and the party was still alone. The guide had mistaken the way. That night they encamped but a league from the village of Las Passas. Ashley slept neither better nor worse for that; there was no voice to tell him it could be more to him or his than a score of other villages which lay in the recesses of these wild mountains. The next day he left it to the right, and set his face toward El Toro.

Meanwhile the march of the troops had been as rapid as the nature of the country, broken by deep ravines and at first offering a tortuous ascent to the table-lands, would allow. To Chinita, though the slow movement of the carriage was irksome and irritating, and the clouds of dust that rose from beneath the tread of the horses obscured the sights which in their novelty delighted and filled her with exultation of a new and expanding life, the hours passed as though winged by enchantment. In the joyous clamor of the camp followers and the scarcely less restrained hilarity of the troops, in the tramp of the horses, the clanking of arms, there was a subtile music that aroused all the energies of her adventurous spirit, and imbued her with an animation which like a flame within a crystal vase seemed visibly to fill and surround her whole being with strength and beauty.

Had the country passed over been as dull and uninteresting as it was in fact wild and picturesque, the effect of movement and change would have been still the same to her; for hers was a mind to be affected by the various phases of humanity rather than of inanimate nature. The landscape in truth offered to her view little of novelty, for in her childhood she had wandered where she listed, and her lithe young limbs had been as untiring as her curiosity. The succeeding cañons and hills, the slopes and cactus-planted valleys, were but counterparts of those which she had explored on every side of the plain on which Tres Hermanos stood. With ready tact she avoided recalling her unwatched, untended childhood to the mind of Doña Isabel, who received with a distaste which seemed of the nature of regretful shame any allusion to the life from which the girl who now called her _Tia_ (aunt) had been rescued.

The use of this appellation had been brought about by Ruiz, in his evident uncertainty as to how the apparent relationship between his patroness and her _protégée_ should be defined. He had tentatively alluded to Doña Isabel as the godmother of Chinita, a designation which some conscientious scruple led her to reject. The word _Tia_ is used by Mexicans as a term of respect toward an elder as often as in actual acknowledgment of relationship; and when with some daring Chinita one day applied it to Doña Isabel, in answering some remark of the young captain, the lady allowed it to pass unchallenged; and gradually “_mi Tia_ Isabel” took the place of the formal “Señora,” which hitherto had helped to keep their intercourse as reserved and cold as when Chinita still stood at the gate at Pedro’s side, and Doña Isabel had furtively glanced at her glowing beauty, and felt the hand of remorse pressing upon her heart.

The haughty lady felt it still; and that it was which made her lenient to a score of faults in this young girl that in her own children would have been deemed almost unpardonable. She did not admit that she loved her,—it is doubtful if she really did,—yet she strove by all the arts of which the long repression of her nature made her capable to win the heart of the girl, who she saw with suspicious intuition beheld in her one who had wronged her, and was even now withholding her birthright. Doña Isabel bestowed rich presents, but never a caress; perhaps Chinita would have spurned the last as lightly as she received the first. Ruiz, admitted to a certain intimacy by the necessities of the time, was impressed by the entire absence of any sense of obligation with which the young girl took her place with Doña Isabel, as if she had never known one more humble, while there was something in the cold and stately manner of Doña Isabel which seemed to shrink before the imperious force of character of her young companion.

It was at their first halt that Doña Isabel had, with unexpected hospitality, sent to invite Ruiz to share their midday meal; and, evidently with some effort, at the same time she bade the servant extend the invitation to the young American. Ruiz presented himself with due acknowledgments, but Ashley was nowhere to be found: he and his servant Pepé had disappeared from the ranks. No one remembered having seen them since they ascended the face of the hill of the graveyard; doubtless, it was surmised, the young man had grown weary, and had unceremoniously returned to Tres Hermanos.

Doña Isabel’s face clouded. Upon the next day she had hoped to part company with her unwelcome guest forever; and now,—part of her purpose in leaving the hacienda was already frustrated. Ruiz was scarcely less disquieted; a glance at Chinita’s triumphant countenance confirmed his apprehensions. Pepé, at least, had not returned to the hacienda, he was assured. The officer had had it in his mind to have the servant strictly watched; but it had not occurred to him that upon the first day he would attempt to evade him and fulfil Chinita’s wild project of summoning Ramirez. He inwardly cursed his own folly and the duplicity of Ashley, whom he hitherto had not for a moment supposed in sympathy with the plot. He and the young American had even laughed at it together as the foolish dream of an imaginative girl. Now to the suspicious officer’s apprehensions was added a burning jealousy. For Chinita’s sake the American had doubtless made her cause his own; and with such an ally, Ruiz reflected, it was not impossible that he might see himself confronted by the man who he knew well never forgave a slight, never left unrevenged an injury.

The manner of Ruiz was so grave and abstracted that day, that Doña Isabel was inclined to credit him with far more depth and earnestness than as the reputed suitor of Rosario, or the airy and flippant recreant follower of the notorious Ramirez, she had attributed to him. Ruiz had the art of involuntarily suiting his demeanor and conversation to those in whose company he was thrown. There was no conscious hypocrisy in this, for the desire to please was natural to him, and often served him in good stead in the absence of genuine feeling, and even under the sting of wounded self-love held him silent, and masked his resentment. Many a time in his life-long intercourse with Ramirez had he chafed under the General’s haughty patronage and made no sign; and it was only when he found himself thwarted in what was for the moment his strongest passion, that he began to question the designs of the chieftain to whom he owed all the fortune which birth or talents combine to make possible to other men.

Ruiz was the son of Tio Reyes, a life-long follower of Ramirez, for whom the chieftain had been sponsor, and toward whom he had with minute conscientiousness directed every worldly advantage which his means and position rendered possible. To Ramirez, Ruiz—who was known by the name of his mother (a not uncommon custom where her family renders the cognomen more honorable than that of the father)—owed the chance which had made him a soldier of fortune instead of a laborer in the village where his brothers and sisters plodded and toiled, in absolute ignorance of the father who had forsaken them.