Part 4

Pedro, not so deeply versed in the dissimulation of the higher class as was Doña Isabel in that of the lower, looked at her a moment in utter incredulity. He learned nothing from her impassive face, but with the quickwittedness of his race divined that one of the many dark-eyed damsels who served in the house was to be considered the cause of Ashley’s midnight visits. In that light, his own breach of trust seemed more venial. Unconsciously, he shaped his story to that end, and even took to himself a sort of comfort in feigning to believe, what in his heart he knew to be an assumption—whether merely verbal or actual he knew not—of Doña Isabel.

The arguments by which he had been induced by Ashley to open the doors of the hacienda for his midnight admittance he would have dwelt on at some length, but Doña Isabel stopped him. “Tell me only of what happened last night,” she said; and in a low whisper he obeyed, shuddering as he spoke of the man whom he had admitted under the guise of a peasant, and who had rushed out to encounter the devoted American, as a madman or wild beast might rush upon its prey.

At his description, eloquent in its brevity, Doña Isabel for a moment lost her calmness; her face dropped upon her hands; her figure shrank together.

“Pedro!” she murmured, “Pedro! you knew him? You are certain?” she continued in a low, eager voice.

“Certain, Señora! Should I be likely to be mistaken? I, who have held him upon my knees a thousand times; who first taught him to ride; who saw him when—”

Doña Isabel stopped the enumeration with a gesture. She paused a moment in deep thought; then she extended her hand, and the man bent over it, not daring to touch it, but reverently, as if it were that of a queen or a saint.

“Silence, Pedro!” she said. “Silence! One word, and the law would be upon him,—though God knows there should be no law to avenge these false Americans, who respect neither authority nor hospitality, and would take our very country from us. Pedro, this deed must not bring fresh disaster; ’t was a mistake; but as you live, as I pardon you the share you bore in it, keep silence!”

The words were not an entreaty; they were a command. Doña Isabel understood too well the ascendency which as lords of the soil the Garcias held over all who had been born and bred on their estates, to take the false step of lessening it by any act of weakness. She comprehended that that very ascendency had led him to open the gates to the declared husband of Herlinda—ay! as to her lover he would have opened them. It was the _house_ of Garcia he served, as represented by the individual possessing the dominant influence of the hour. As occasion offered, he and his associates would have favored the interests of any member in affairs of love, believing the intrigue the natural pleasure of youth, and conceiving it presumption to impugn the actions of one of the seigneurial family.

Doña Isabel became, at this time, when the terrible consequences of his levity overpowered him, the controlling power, and with absolute genius in a few words, admitting nothing, explaining nothing, offering no reward, she made the conscience-stricken man the keeper of the honor of the powerful house of which he was but the veriest minion.

Within the hour, while the people still thronged the walls of the reduction-works, Doña Feliz left the great house. The few who witnessed her departure were accustomed to the peremptory commands of the Señora Doña Isabel and the instant obedience of her confidential servant, and had as little speculation in their minds as in the gaze with which they followed the carriage and its outriders,—yet murmured a few words of pity for those who, after the horror of the tragedy, would lose the sombre splendor of the rites which must necessarily follow.

Upon the next day, John Ashley, carried in procession by the entire population of men, women, and children of Tres Hermanos, excepting only the immediate family of Doña Isabel and Pedro the gate-keeper, was borne across the wide valley, up the bleak hillside, and laid in a corner of the low-walled, unkempt graveyard, among the lowly dead of the _plebe_.

Not a sound escaped Herlinda, as from the windows of her mother’s room she watched the funeral procession. She had intuitively guessed the time it would issue from the gates of the reduction-works, and her mother placed no restraint upon her movements. Through the clear atmosphere of the May day she could perfectly distinguish the form, ay the very features of her beloved, as he lay stretched upon a wide board surrounded by flowering boughs, his fair curls resting upon the greenery, his hands clasped upon his breast.

To steady their steps perhaps, rather than from any religious custom, the people sang one of those minor airs peculiar to the country, and which are at once so sad and shrill that the piercing wail reached even so far as the great house,—a weird accompaniment to the swaying of the ghostly white lengths of candles borne in scores of hands, and the pale flames of which burned colorless in the brilliant sunshine.

Strangely impressive, even to an indifferent eye, might well have been that scene; the slow march of Death and Woe across the smiling fields, blotting the clear radiance of the cloudless sky, and awesome then even to a careless ear that wail of agony. Mademoiselle La Croix burst into tears and threw herself upon the floor. Doña Isabel, deadly pale, covered her eyes with a hand as cold and white as snow. Herlinda sank upon her knees with parted lips and straining eyes to watch the form upborne before that dark and sinuous procession; but when it became lost to view amid the throng which encircled the open grave, she fell prone to the floor with such a moan as only woe itself can utter,—a moan that seemed the outburst of a maddened brain and a bursting heart.

That night instead of lamentation the sounds of festivity began to be heard, and days of revelry among the peasants followed the hours of horror and gloom which had for a brief period prevailed. In the midst of them Doña Feliz returned to the hacienda. Wherever her journey had led her it had outwardly been unimportant, and drew but little comment from the men who had attended her, and was speedily forgotten. She herself gave no description of it, nor volunteered any information as to its object or result. Even to Doña Isabel, who raised inquiring eyes to the face of her emissary as she entered her private room, she said, briefly, “No, there is no record; absolutely none.”

Doña Isabel sank back in her chair with a deep-drawn breath as if some mighty tension, both of mind and body, had suddenly relaxed. She had herself sought in vain through the papers of Ashley for proofs of the alleged marriage with Herlinda, and Feliz had scanned the public records with vigilant eyes. Part of these records had in some _pronunciamiento_ been destroyed by fire, but the book containing those of the date she sought was intact. The names of John Ashley and Herlinda Garcia did not appear therein; the marriage, if marriage there had been, was unrecorded, and as secret as it was illegal. Conscience was satisfied, and Doña Isabel was content to be passive. Why bring danger upon one still infinitely dear to her? The heart of Doña Isabel turned cold at the thought. Why rouse a scandal which could so easily be avoided? Why strive to legalize a marriage which could but bring ridicule upon herself, and shame and contempt upon Herlinda?

That day, for the first time in many, Doña Isabel could force a smile to her lip; for even for policy it had not been possible for her to smile before. She was by nature neither cold nor cruel, but she had been brought up in the midst of petty intrigues, of violent passions and narrow prejudices; and while she had scorned them, they had moulded her mind,—as the constant wearing of rock upon rock forms the hollow in the one, and rounds the jagged surface of the other. What would have been monstrous to her youth became natural to her middle age. She had suffered and striven. Was it not the common lot of woman? What more natural than that her daughter should do the same? And what more natural than that the mother should raise her who had fallen?—for fallen indeed, in spite of the ceremony of marriage, would the world think Herlinda. But why should the world know? She pitied her daughter, even as a woman pities another in travail; yet she looked to the future, she shrank from the complexities of the present; and so silently, relentlessly, shaping her course, ignoring circumstance, she, like a goddess making a law unto herself, thus unflinchingly ordered the destiny of her child. Could she herself have divined the various motives that influenced her? Nay, no more perhaps than the circumstances which will be developed in this tale may make clear the love, the woman’s purity, the high-born lady’s pride, that all combined to bid her ignore the marriage, which, though irregular, had evidently been made in good faith; and for which, in spite of open malice or secret innuendo, the power and influence of her family could have won the Pope’s sanction, and so silenced the cavillings if not the gossip of the world.

VI.

And thus in that remote hacienda—a little world in itself, with all the mingled elements of wealth and poverty, and all those subtile differences of caste and character which form society, in circles small as well as great—began a drama, which to the initiated was of deep and absorbing interest. To the common mind despair and agony can have no existence if they do not declare themselves in groans and tears, and to such Herlinda’s deep pallor and her silence revealed nothing; but there were a few who watched in solemn apprehension, feeling hers to be like the intense and sulphurous calm with which Nature awaits the coming of the tempest.

But there were indeed few who saw in her any change other than the events and anxieties of the time rendered natural. At first indeed there had been whispers in corners, and half-pitying, half-fearful shrugs and glances; but almost from the day of Ashley’s burial a new and fearful cause of public interest drew attention from Herlinda, from her pallor and her wide-eyed gaze of horror, to the consideration of a more personal anxiety.

The common people declared that from the night of the murder, death, unsatisfied with one victim, had hovered over the hacienda. The rains which should have fallen after the long dry winter, with cleansing and copious force, flooding the ravines and carrying away the accumulated impurities of months, had but moistened and stirred the infected mud of the stagnant water-courses and set loose the fevers which lingered in their depths. Years afterward the peasants dated many a widowhood and orphanage from those plague-stricken weeks. There was one death or more in every hut, and even the great house did not escape its quota of victims. One after another, members of the families of the clerks and officers succumbed,—the major-domo of the courts among the first, and then Mademoiselle La Croix, who indeed, it was afterward observed, had from the first sickened and fallen into a dejection, from which it was almost impossible she should rally. The governess was the object of the most devoted care even from the usually cold and stately Doña Isabel, while the panic-stricken Herlinda, careless of her own danger, bent over her with agonized and fruitless efforts to recall the waning life, or soothe the parting and remorseful soul.

But in all that terrible time this was the only event that seemed to touch or rouse her; for the rest, one might have thought those dreadful days but the ordinary calendar of Herlinda’s life. Indeed, it is to be supposed that they suited so well the desolation of her spirit, and that they presented so congruous a setting to her melancholy, that it became merged and absorbed as it were in her surroundings, and so was unperceived, save as the fitting humor of a time when ease and mirth would have been an insult to the general woe.

Doña Isabel had announced her intention of replacing the director of the reduction-works; but time went on, and in the general consternation produced by the epidemic nothing was done. There was much sickness at the works; many of the most experienced hands died; and one day when the clerk in charge was at the crisis of the fever, the men who were not incapacitated from illness went by common consent to the _tienda_ to stupefy themselves with fiery native brandy; and Doña Isabel, who was fearlessly passing from one poor hovel to another, aiding the village doctress and the priest in their offices, ordered the mules to be taken from the _tortas_, and the stamps to be stopped. Thus, as the masses half mixed lay upon the floors, they gradually dried and hardened; and as the great stone wheels ceased to turn in the beds of broken ores, so for years upon years they remained, and the works at Tres Hermanos gradually fell into ruin,—a fit haunt for the ghost which, as years went by, was said to haunt their shades. But this was long afterward, when the memory of the handsome and hapless youth had become almost as a myth, mingled with the thousand tales of blood which the fluctuating fortunes of years of international and civil war made as common as they were terrible.

This fertile spot until now had been singularly free from the terror and disorder that had affected the greater part of the country; and though sharing the excitement of party feeling, the actual demands of strife had never invaded it. But quick upon the typhoid, when the peasants who had been spared began to think of repairing their half-ruined hovels, many of them were summoned away with scant ceremony. Don Julian Garcia appeared at the hacienda, his uniform glittering with gold braid, buttons, and lace, the trappings of his horse more gorgeous even than his own dress. He was raising a troop to join his old commander, Santa Anna, who had returned in triumph to the land from which he had been banished, to lead the arms of his countrymen against the foreign foe, which already had begun its victorious march within the sacred borders of their country. In a word, the American War had begun, and involved all factions in one common cause, giving a rallying cry to leaders of every party, to which even the most ignorant among the people responded with intuitive and unquestioning ardor.

Don Julian was uncertain in his politics, but not in his hatreds. He heard the tale of the murder of the American with complacency; the taking off of one of the heretics seemed to him natural enough,—it was scarcely worth a second thought, certainly not a pause in his work of collecting troops. If Isabel, he commented, had writhed under wounded patriotism as he had done, the American would never have had an opportunity of finding so honorable a service in which to die. Evidently the grudge of some bold patriot, this. What would you? Mexicans were neither sticks nor stones!

Herlinda heard and trembled; a faint hope, a half-formed resolve, had wakened in her breast when she had heard of the arrival of Don Julian. He was a distant cousin, a man of some influence in the family. She remembered him as more frank and genial than others of her kindred. An impulse to break the seal of silence came over her, as she heard his voice ringing through the courts and the clank of his spurs upon the stairs; but it was checked by the first distinct utterance of his lips, which, like all that followed, was a denunciation of the perfidious, the insatiable, the licentious and heretical Americans. For the first time, to the indifference with which she had regarded the desirability of establishing her position as the acknowledged wife of Ashley was added a sensation of fear. What had been in her mind an undefined and incomplete idea of the anger and scorn which the knowledge of her daring would cause among her family connections, became now a terrifying dread as the impetuous but unrepented act assumed the proportions of treason. The words which at the first opportunity she would have spoken died upon her lips, and she became once more hopeless, impassive, unresisting, cold, waiting what time and fate should bring.

And time passed on unflinchingly, and fate was unrelenting. Carmen, after a slight attack of fever, had been sent to some relative in Guanapila, and there she still remained. Doña Isabel’s household consisted only of herself, Herlinda, and the aged priest her cousin Don Francisco de Sales, who though in his dotage still at long intervals read Mass in the chapel, baptized infants, and muttered prayers over the dying or dead, not the less sincere because he who breathed them himself stood so far within the shadow of the tomb. The old man was kindly in his senility, and spent long hours dozing in the chair of the confessional, while penitents whispered in his ear their faults and sins, for which they never failed to obtain absolution, little imagining that the placid mind of the old man, even when by chance he was awake, dwelt far more upon the scenes of his youth than the follies and wickednesses of the present. Sometimes he babbled harmlessly of days long past, even of sights and doings far from clerical; but the priestly habit was second nature, and even if he heeded the confidences reposed in him, in his weakest moments they never escaped his lips. To him Herlinda was free to go and disburden her mind, complying with the regulations of her Church, and seeking relief to her troubled soul. To him, too, Doña Isabel resorted; and these two women with their tales of woe, which as often as repeated escaped his memory, roused faintly within his heart an echo of the pain which he uneasily and confusedly remembered dwelt in the world, from which he was gliding into the peace beyond.

Sometimes at the table, or as he sat with them in the corridor,—the priest in the sunshine, they in the shade,—he looked at them with puzzled inquiry in his gaze, which changed to mild satisfaction at some caress or fond word; for this gentle old man was tenderly beloved, with a sort of superstitious reverence. Even Doña Isabel attributed a special sanctity to his blessing, looking upon him as an automaton of the Church, which without consciousness of its own would—certain springs of emotion being touched—respond with admonition or blessing, fraught with all the authority of the Supreme Power. Doña Isabel, as a devout Romanist, had ever been scrupulous in the observances of her Church, submitting to the spiritual functions of the clergy absolutely, while she detested and openly protested against their licentiousness and greed, as also their pernicious interference in worldly affairs. Therefore throughout her life, and especially during her widowhood, she had studiously avoided the more popular clergy, and had sought the oracle of duty through some clod of humanity, who, though dull, should be at least free from vices,—choosing by preference one of her own family to be the repository of her secrets and the judge of her motives and actions. Unconsciously to herself, while outwardly and even to her own conscience fulfilling the requirements of her Church, she had interpreted them by her own will, which, in justice let it be said, had often proved a wise and loyal one; in a word, Doña Isabel Garcia, with exceptional powers within her grasp, had skilfully and astutely freed herself from those trammels which might at the present crisis have forced her into a diametrically opposite course from that which she had determined to pursue, or would at least have forced her to acknowledge to her own mind the doubtful nature of deeds that she now suffered herself to look upon as meritorious. For years, unconsciously, her will had imbued the judgments of her spiritual adviser, as the Padre Francisco was called, and it was not to be supposed that she should cavil now, when with complacent alacrity he echoed yea to her yea, and nay to her nay,—and as she left him, sank back into his chair with a faint wonder at her tale, to forget it in his next slumber, or until recalled to him by the anguished outpourings of Herlinda, for whom he found no words of guidance other than those which throughout his life he had given to young maidens in distress, the commendable ones, “Do as your mother directs;” though, as he listened to her words, the tears would pour down his cheeks, and pitying phrases fall from his trembling lips. Poor Herlinda would be comforted for a moment by his simple human sympathy,—even weeping perhaps, for at such times the blessed relief of tears was given her,—yet found in her darkness no light, either human or divine.

Had Mademoiselle La Croix lived, Herlinda would doubtless have received from her the impetus to throw herself upon the pity and protection of her cousin Don Julian, which in spite of his prejudices he could scarcely have refused; for the governess, though she was at first stunned and terrified by the knowledge of the invalidity of the marriage, was no coward, and would have braved much to reinstate the girl she had through compassion—and, she had with a pang been obliged to own, through cupidity—aided to bring into a false position. But she had scarcely recovered her bewildered senses, the more bewildered by the incomprehensible calm of Doña Isabel, when she was attacked by the fever,—to which she succumbed a month before the appearance of the doughty warrior, whose blustering fierceness would not have appalled her or deterred her from urging Herlinda to lay before him the matter, whose vital importance the stunned young creature failed to comprehend.

Later it burst upon her, but it was then too late,—Don Julian had marched away with his troops. She was alone,—no help, no counsellor near. Alone? Ah, no! there were human creatures near, who could behold and suspect and shake the head. Herlinda awoke to the shame of her position, as a bird in a net, striving to fly, first learns its danger. O God! where should she fly? Were these careless, laughing women as unconscious as they seemed? Where might she hide herself from these languid, soft eyes, which suddenly might become hard and cruel with intelligence? Herlinda drew her reboso around her, and with flushing cheek traversed the shadiest corridors in her necessary passages from room to room, her eyes, large with apprehension, burning beneath her downcast lids. Every day she grew more restless, more beautiful. She walked for hours in the walled garden, which the servants never entered. They began to whisper, forgetting the gossip of months before, that the chances of war were secretly stealing the gayety and buoyancy of Herlinda’s youth, by keeping from her side the playmate of her childhood, her lover Vicente Gonzales. Feliz smiled when a garrulous servant spoke thus one day, but ten minutes later entered the room of Doña Isabel.