Part 42
There was a moment of profound silence. Even the sultry air seemed waiting, as though for the thunderclap that follows the lightning flash.
“Ah, Leon Vallé! you know now who accuses you,” cried the woman. “Oh, is not this a sweet revenge, to curse you by the lips of your own child,—the child you robbed me of? What! you thought _that_ your child!” she pointed with ineffable contempt to Chata, who in the overwhelming excitement of the moment clung to the pallid and trembling Herlinda. “Bah! what is she to the beautiful being I bore you,—into whose soul was infused the idolatrous love that had been wrested from my heart, the love that had been my ruin? Ah, such love dies hard! It lived again in her,—it lived in her heart for _you_. Because of it I dared not claim her, though I knew her the moment my eyes fell upon her,—yes, as you know her now. In whom but in our child could be reproduced this wonderful wealth of hair you used to call the siren’s dower? In whom but in our child could reappear your own face, glorified, masked, by woman’s softness? Ah, Doña Isabel and this Pedro were deceived; they thought it was the beauty of Herlinda that they saw. But I knew it to be yours. Ah, in all these weeks I have taught your child how to hate you; I have plucked out that root of love; I have made more real the fancied wrongs of which she has accused you. Trifles! trifles! trifles all!—the murder of a supposed father, the torture of an old man, the death of a base lover,—yes, that Ruiz to whom from her birth you destined her. But I,—I cry to you give back my innocence! give back my ruined life! give back my father, who by your act was killed as surely as though your hand had struck the blow! give me the young years of my daughter’s life, those she squandered a beggar at your sister’s gate! Ah, you cannot, you cannot! But I,—I can avenge my wrongs and hers.”
Quick as a flash the infuriate woman levelled a pistol. Quick as an answering flash Chinita threw herself before her and sprang to her father’s breast. A second shot following so quickly on the first that they seemed as one, a cry of agony, a scream of madness, the cries of women, the hoarse voices of men, made the garden a pandemonium of hideous sounds. The desperate woman, whose bullet had touched its mark harmlessly to Ramirez through the slender form of Chinita, fled madly. Ramirez, scarce conscious whether the blood which streamed over him was that of his daughter or his own, bore the wounded girl through the throng that pressed him, wildly calling upon his child,—alas, alas! his but for the brief span during which her warm young blood should leap from the deadly puncture in her breast!
Herlinda, the first to regain self-control even amid the intense revulsion of feeling through which she had almost instantaneously passed, tore into shreds some portion of her garments and strove to stanch the wound; but in vain. Chinita, with a smile which succeeded her first wild cry and stare of horror, motioned her away. She pressed her own fingers on the wound, raising her head from the arm of Ramirez to say, “I saved you, I saved you! just as I used to think I would do. Ah, I could not hate you,—no, no! though I tried. And she could not root out my love,—it lives here still.” She pressed her hand still tighter on the wound. “My father! my father!”
The face of the hardened man contracted in agony. He turned toward Doña Isabel and Herlinda with a heartrending cry. “You are avenged,—both, both, avenged! O my God! You never can have known such agony as this. Oh wretched man that I am, to see the sum of all my crimes cancelled by this terrible reprisal!”
The hand of the dying girl fell from its place. Chata knelt and placed her own with desperate energy against the fatal wound. Chinita smiled and faintly kissed her. “My dream has come true,” she said. “Ah, when they pity me you will say, ‘She always longed to die for him.’ Tell them it was best that I should die, I loved him so. Death wipes out every wrong. He is my father!”
Ramirez groaned. Great drops of sweat stood on his brow. He strove still to support her; but Gonzales on the one side and Ashley on the other bore her weight.
By this time the garden was full of people. A man forced his way through the throng.
“Reyes! Reyes!” cried Ramirez, “Villain, did you not as I commanded give my child to Isabel, my sister; or was yours the accursed hand that brought her to this pass?”
Reyes gazed at the dying girl in horror. A suspicion of the misapprehension under which Ramirez had acted, and which had confirmed Ruiz in his treachery, had haunted him for days, since in a remote village he had met the administrador of Tres Hermanos and heard from him the tale of the carrying away of Chata. He had hastened toward Las Parras with Don Rafael and his mother, bent on warning Ramirez and confessing the wild carelessness with which he had disposed of the child who had been confided to him, and who he had supposed until his meeting with Chinita had indirectly reached the person to whom she was destined. It had not been possible for him—a man in whom the paternal instinct had never dwelt—to imagine it the one virtue in the callous, fierce, and unscrupulous Ramirez. But with this bleeding, dying figure in his arms Ramirez seemed transformed. Reyes fell on his knees.
“Ah, had you but told me the whole truth!” sighed the dying girl. “A Garcia you said! Ah, I should have been prouder to be _his_ daughter than a thousand times Garcia!”
She turned her head, and her eyes fell on Ashley’s face and rested there. A soft, strange illumination animated her own, as though from some inward light just kindled. “Adios! Adios!” she murmured. “Ah, you were noble, generous! yet you thought I did not feel, that I did not understand. Ah, could I live, you should see! But this is best; you will never need trouble now for Chinita. No, no, no! do not grieve— Ah, that might make me weak! I would not—find it—hard—to die.”
She looked at him long and fixedly,—perhaps to her as to Ashley a secret as sacred as it was precious, was then revealed. A blueness crept around her mouth, a glaze over her beautiful eyes. “No wonder that she loved the American!” she whispered at length,—dreamily, as though her mind wandered to the past. The words sank like lead in Ashley’s heart, to be forgotten never, never!
After a moment the lips of the dying girl moved in prayer. The priest, who had from time to time endeavored to control an emotion which seemed a personal rather than a merely sympathetic grief, bent over her, and all present fell on their knees. Chinita whispered in his ear a few words, and received absolution with a smile of perfect peace. Then began the solemn litany for the departing soul; Chinita was evidently sinking rapidly.
Pedro had fallen on his knees before her, in grief too deep for words. Pepé from behind him gazed into her glazing eyes with stoical despair. Suddenly she smiled, and laying her arm over Pedro’s shoulder, extended her blood-stained hand, looking at Pepé with the pretty, winning, disdainful smile of old, and said faintly, though proudly, “I am the daughter of the Señor General. Lead me, Pepé,—lead me. I am tired!”
And thus with her arm around him who had been so blindly faithful, and with her hand in that of the peasant youth who through life had been her adoring slave, with one long sigh, which left her lips smiling as it passed, Chinita fell asleep,—resting forever from the passion and turmoil of life.
“Peace, peace, peace!” reiterated the solemn voice of the priest, in assurance, in warning, in invocation. It penetrated hearts to which the very word had seemed a mockery. The hardest, the most reprobate, the haughtiest, the most sorrowful, repeated it with a sob. Ramirez on his knees, crushed to the earth, heard it as the cry of a despairing angel. Where for him could peace be found?
XLVII.
When Pedro Gomez rose from his knees he held in his hand a little square reliquary of faded blue. The string from which it had hung had been pierced by the fatal bullet, and it had dropped unheeded from Chinita’s neck.
Reverent hands bore the corpse into the desolate house; while Ramirez, or Leon Vallé,—for by his true name he was ever after called,—rising at the entreaty of his sister, stood like one bereft of sense or movement. Suddenly he laid his hand upon the gatekeeper’s arm and muttered hoarsely, “Kill me Pedro! See, I have no sword. If thou wilt not for vengeance, do it for love. You loved her,—for her sake end my misery!”
Pedro laid the reliquary in his hand. “If it should not be true?” he said doggedly of the faded silk. “Oh, was it for this I bore so many years the mocking silence of Doña Feliz and my mistress? No, no! it cannot be. Open this. ’Twas on her bosom when she came into my hands. The niña Herlinda promised me a token. It will be found there,—there in the blessed reliquary. Fool that I was to think it had nothing to declare to me. Ah, how your hands shake! Well, ’tis but a moment’s work.”
The gatekeeper ripped the sewed edges with his dagger’s point quickly, desperately, as though he were profaning a sacred thing,—then blankly looked at the worthless trifles on his palm. Just a tiny curl of brown and gold, and the eye-tooth of some animal, a fancied charm against infantile diseases, both wrapped in a paper scrawled with a faintly-written prayer.
Pedro was convinced. Till then he had clung to the belief that had given to his clownish life the elements of heroism, of love and sacrifice. Chinita the beautiful, the beloved, was dead—dead; but to his soul there came a bereavement far more terrible than that of death. He raised his glazing eyes appealingly, hopelessly. Ah, there was Doña Feliz,—she whom all these years he had accused as the hard, unpitying witness of the degradation of Herlinda’s child! and of her Doña Isabel with sobs was entreating brokenly in God’s name some news of the charge she had received years before. Pedro listened with a jealous eagerness, which the involuntary cry of Chata, interrupting for a moment the answering voice of Doña Feliz, made intolerable. “Mother of God!” he cried at length, “it was Doña Feliz then who guarded Herlinda’s child!”
“O false, cruel Feliz! why did you deceive me?” cried Doña Isabel. “Why did you suffer me to believe the gatekeeper’s foundling was of my own flesh and blood? Ah, God, so she was! It was the beauty of my mother that deceived me; it was repeated in the offspring of Leon, as it could never be in that of the American. Ah, it was for that I loved Chinita with such passionate tenderness and remorse! Oh, why did you suffer it? Why give me no warning? And now Chinita is dead, and my daughter cries to me for her child, and I cannot answer her.”
“Did I not warn you at this gate?” responded Doña Feliz, “that the day would come when you would bitterly repent the words you uttered; when you bade me take and hide the babe even from your knowledge,—never to mention her whether living or dead, that to you it might be as though she had never existed? Have I not obeyed your mandate? Ay, even when my heart bled because I saw the agony, the delusion under which you labored, I have suffered with you, but I have been faithful.”
Doña Isabel bent her head in speechless woe. For her there might not be even the poor consolation of reproach. Yet she murmured, “In pity, where is Herlinda’s child?”
“She is here. Thank God she is here!” replied Doña Feliz,—“this girl whom you have believed to be the daughter of my son. Weeks ago your brother, Leon Vallé, reft her from us, believing her his own. Only by revealing the secret we had sworn to keep could Rafael have saved her. Ah, God knows! Perhaps at the last moment, when hastening from the strong room she threw herself into the power of the ravisher that she might save her foster-father from death, then perhaps his will might have failed; but he was speechless. I have been ill; yes, near to death,”—her haggard face, her sunken eyes, her wasted figure attested that,—“yet we sought her far and near. Until last night we had no tidings. A rough soldier listened in the inn to the tale we everywhere proclaimed. He came to me secretly; ‘Señora,’ he said, ‘the girl you seek is perhaps in the house of Doña Carmen. Ramirez himself is deceived.’ This was the first stage of our route to Guanapila. We need go no farther; for standing there, Herlinda, with Carmen, is your child.”
Doña Feliz broke into sobs, sinking weak as a child into the arms of Don Rafael. “The struggle is over,” she said to him; “our task is accomplished, the long dissimulation is ended!”
Herlinda and Chata had not needed the conclusion of the brief words of Doña Feliz; they had clasped each other in a rapturous embrace. But the sobs of the distressed lady recalled them from their joy, and hastening to her side they poured out in fervent gratitude such words as seemed to repay to her sensitive heart its long years of devotion as truly as though each word had been a priceless jewel.
“Ah!” said Doña Feliz, “all, all is nothing to merit the happiness of this hour. It is the poor Pedro, he whose matchless devotion mocked my poor work, who is worthy of such words as these. Ah, my heart bled for him, but I could not, dared not speak.”
“Oh foolish unreasoning girl that I was so to bind you!” cried Herlinda. She turned to speak to Pedro, but he was nowhere to be seen. There was a movement among the villagers, who, repulsed from the windows of the house by the soldiers, began to disperse, when the voice of the priest stopped them.
“Listen, friends,” he said. “This has been a dread and fearful hour, an hour to try the souls of men. I am old, yet never have I known such anguish as this day has brought to me. Some sixteen years ago, a stranger in this land, ignorant of its language and customs, I came to this village with a young American whom I met. He was a handsome youth and won my heart,—a warm, Irish heart that often led me contrary to my judgment. The American told me that here his love was staying. I laughed at him for fixing his heart upon some brown-skinned, dark-eyed peasant girl. He did not contradict me, but bade me be ready in the early morning to wed him to the lovely object of his youthful passion. I remonstrated, yet was glad to serve him. Though no priest lived here, the little church was open; the people were glad of the opportunity to hear Mass. Just before it began, John Ashley and Herlinda Garcia were married. As she for a moment loosened the reboso she wore to make the necessary responses, I caught a glimpse of a face that led me to suspect it was no simple peasant who stood before me. Yet it was only in after years, when the requirements of the law and the customs unalterable as law among the different castes existing in your land became known to me, that I remembered with disquiet the marriage I had celebrated here. I was a missionary among the tribes of Northern Indians, doing good work. I strove to assure myself that, irregular as I knew the marriage to be,—contracted in secret, unknown to and probably against the consent of the young girl’s parents, in a language unintelligible to the few witnesses,—the parties were probably living in amity, satisfied, as surely God and man might be, with a marriage which only the quibbles of the law made disputable. Yet I could not be at ease; a voice seemed calling me hither. Alas, alas! I came but to witness the consummation of the tragedy begun years, years ago,—a tragedy, the direct outcome of my fatal error. But I will atone. I will go—would to God in penance it might be upon my knees—to the Holy Father in Rome, and pray him to ratify the marriage. Doña Herlinda Garcia, pure in name as in deed, shall give a spotless name to the child of her virtuous love!”
The old monk ceased; tremblingly he wiped away his tears. “Pardon, pardon!” he murmured to Herlinda. “Oh my daughter, how you have suffered! But daughter, the certificate I gave,—had you not the paper? That, however subject to cavil, would have declared your purity.”
“Ah, a paper!” cried Herlinda. “I have thought of it a thousand times. It was in English. I thought it was a blessed prayer, though John told me to treasure it as my life; that was why I sewed it in the reliquary I placed about my baby’s neck.”
With a cry Chata drew forth the tiny bag, almost the counterpart of that poor Chinita had worn, and the sight of which had confirmed the mistake of Pedro,—on such slight things hangs fate! She thought of how often she and Chinita had compared them when children, laughingly proposing to exchange or open them, yet ever shrinking from tampering with them in superstitious awe. Pedro, who had returned, snatched it from her hand,—the act irresistible. As he opened it with his dagger’s point, a filigree earring fell into his palm. He groaned and turned away.
Herlinda caught from his hand a tattered paper. “Read, read!” she cried to Ashley. “See that he was noble, true as you have said! He was my husband!”
The proof attested by the signature of the long dead Mademoiselle La Croix, and that of the living priest, was of the simplest, the most efficient, and all these years had been preserved by the piety or superstition of the child to whom it had been confided, and who, had she but known it, had so vital an interest in its discovery. Chata gazed at the paper in blank amaze. Around her were men and women giving thanks to God and his saints. At the knees of Herlinda was her uncle Leon Vallé and Doña Isabel her mother.
Ashley Ward was the first to break the spell. He took Herlinda’s hand. “Remember, here is a man who never doubted you,” he said.
“And here one who would have died for you!” said Gonzales.
In a single phrase each had expressed the loyalty of the nation he represented,—Ashley, that of faith in man’s honor and woman’s chastity; Gonzales, the tenacious love that distrust might change to jealous madness, but which it could never destroy.
Within a few hours a sad and solemn funeral cortege set forth from Las Parras, bearing all that was mortal of the beautiful Chinita. Not far from the limits of the town Ashley and Gonzales came upon a startling and awful sight,—a woman lay dead upon the road, her garments sodden, her beautiful hair defiled by the mud of the highway. She had fallen face downward. As though some evil omen warned him, Leon Vallé hastening from the rear anticipated them in raising the corpse.
It was that of the maddened Dolores. It had needed no weapon to reach her heart; despair and agony had summoned to her destruction the swift and fatal malady that had killed her father. Those who saw her, he who pressed her wildly to his breast and bade her live, accusing himself not her, called it a broken heart. As her child had said, “Death wipes out every wrong.” Only remorse, pity, love survive.
They buried them both—the two of that sad name Dolores—in the hacienda church. But one lies in a nameless grave, and the other is marked by one that recalls a vision of a beautiful girl, to whom a happier destiny should have brought the joys of life, and whose proud spirit should have conquered its cares; yet its perplexities, its conflicting passions, had made the pilgrimage so hard, so set with thorns, that she had been content—yes, thankful—to end it there: “CHINITA.”
In so short a life the unfortunate girl could not have wandered far from heaven; yet for years there was one on earth who spent upon each day long hours of prayer and fasting at the tomb of her brother’s child,—to the memory and the name of Chinita uniting that of Leon, and embracing both in the undying love which looked beyond the grave for its perfection and its reward. At evening would come one older, but more peaceful than the mourner, to lead her home; and hand in hand, the two would pass out into the soft and tranquil air. Thus Doña Isabel and Feliz renewed with tears the friendship of their youth; and thus—ended the ambitions, the passions, the impetuous pride, sources of such strange and grievous perplexities—they await together in peaceful gloom the light of a perfect day.
XLVIII.
It was thus that Ashley Ward and his bride beheld them in after years,—years during which he had returned to the United States to take part in that great conflict which had been raging there while he had been gaining experience in the irregular and inglorious strife in which his zeal for liberty had been stimulated by private aims. The purity of his patriotism was unstained, however, by any less glorious motive; and during the last two years of the Civil War for the Union there was none who fought more valiantly than he, nor one who laid down his sword with a more just renown, to dedicate himself to the profession which in the lack of fortune was both his choice and a positive need.
That Ward should renounce the fortune of John Ashley was an actual grief to Herlinda and to Chata herself, but he would have it so; and even Mary Ashley was pleased it should be, although, as she said, her niece was already most absurdly wealthy in right of the Garcias for a girl of such retired and humble tastes,—one whose only extravagance was in her charities. Mary Ashley found in the love of Chata—she soon abandoned the attempt to call her by the stately name of Florentina—a recompense for the scrupulous conscientiousness which had led her to seek the supposed wife and possible child of her brother.
It was not until after the Pope had ratified her marriage that Herlinda Ashley visited the home of her husband’s family. After that she returned at intervals while Chata was being educated as her aunt desired. During that time Gonzales, from whose hand Herlinda had received the Papal edict, was fighting anew the battles of freedom on his native soil; and by his side, doing gallant deeds unstained by crime, was Leon Vallé. But when the short-lived empire of Maximilian was overthrown, when Herlinda crowned the long fidelity of Gonzales by following the rare example given by a few released nuns and became the wife of the Liberal soldier, the silent yet resolute man who had been his constant companion in arms disappeared, and with him Pedro Gomez.
No one but Rosario, who as the wife of Don Alonzo took the lead among the young and idle wives of the hacienda employés, asked any questions concerning the disappearance of Leon Vallé. Doña Rita looked wise, and Don Rafael smiled at her, for she knew nothing, and could conjecture nothing that might bring evil. Rafael was the same indulgent, easy husband he had ever been. It did not occur to either that a more perfect confidence might have been observed between them,—they had followed custom; what more could be needful?
Chata and her mother sometimes talked of Vallé with wondering pity; but they saw that Doña Isabel was content,—his fate was not a mystery to her. Perhaps he was wandering in foreign countries. At least, after he had gained the new, fresh fame which honored the name of Leon Vallé, he was no more seen in Mexico. There was but one thought that troubled the heart of Chata. She could not, even for Chinita’s sake, forgive the murderer of her father.