Chapter 14

His Southern temperament became thoroughly aroused, and at the conclusion of the dance, he suddenly rose from his seat and without waiting for an introduction, rushed to the stage and springing upon it, bowed low before Chiquita and seizing her hand, kissed it in view of the audience. No one knew better than he did that, in his profession, a new star had just fallen from heaven to earth. The following day he and the director of his company waited upon Chiquita and offered her any sum she might choose to name if she would consent to join the company and return to Europe with them. But they did not know what Chiquita's past had been--that she was still the Amazon as of old--that the woman who had been trained to battle in her early youth the same as the men of her people had been trained, regarded as mere pastime that which they considered one of the heights of earthly attainment. The woman who at sunrise had listened daily to the song of the Memnon, who had experienced the shock of battle, whose life lived close to nature had taught her the meaning of the ethics of the dust and instilled into her veins the rippling laughter of water and sunshine and the song of the winds, and whose every breath had been the rapturous breath of freedom, viewed life from a different standpoint than that of men debased by centuries of servitude. The world of their creation was trifling in comparison to that of God's which to her was all sufficing and enabled her to look upon their doings with the same equanimity and indulgence as that with which the parent regards the frolicsome gambols of the child.

Twenty years of almost uninterrupted practice had kept her body and limbs supple and pliant, but this Blanch did not know.

XXIII

True to his resolve, Dick rose to the exigency of the occasion by laying stubborn siege to Miss Van Ashton's heart. During the day he bombarded her with flowers and books and bonbons, and gentle but passionate missives; all of which the fair recipient as promptly hurled back into his face. At night relays of musicians serenaded her uninterruptedly until the glowing cast announced the coming of a new day. He took the whole household into his confidence, rendering it impossible for her to set foot outside her door without meeting him.

The first day she laughed at his eccentricities; on the second, she grew furious, and on the third, not having closed her eyes for two whole days and nights, she felt herself on the verge of a nervous collapse. There being no rest for any one, Colonel Van Ashton suddenly appeared before his daughter on the morning of the fourth day and gave her to understand that if the infernal nuisance did not cease instantly he would shoot the first person who entered the garden that evening after he had retired. And to back his threat, he displayed a new automatic pistol which he had purchased in the town the day before; the shopkeeper having assured him that, for a running fire, it was the most convenient and effective weapon on the market. The Colonel was in a reckless mood and seemed in imminent danger of losing in a moment the self-control which years of civilization had instilled within him. Having been literally goaded to madness, little wonder that he too was on the verge of succumbing to the customs of the land, and was beginning to feel a secret longing to shoot and swear and swagger and destroy. Knowing her father to be as good as his word, and to possess the courage of a lion when aroused, Bessie found herself forced to capitulate a day earlier than she otherwise would have, for, incensed though she was, not even a woman of her grit and spirit could possibly have held out much longer under conditions that turned night into day.

It was galling in the extreme to be compelled to surrender so soon, but there being no alternative, she was obliged to accept the humiliation with the best grace possible. Accordingly, she appeared in the garden late on the afternoon of the fourth day where she espied the object of her wrath and annoyance seated comfortably on the grass at the foot of a pear tree, and as usual--smoking. The sight of him was hardly conducive to soothe the feelings of one who inwardly was a seething volcano, and she vowed that she would pay him out to the full before she was done with him.

He seemed greatly surprised by her appearance, and hastily throwing away his cigar, rose to his feet with the intention of speaking to her, but without noticing him, she made her way to the farthest corner of the garden and seated herself in a large rustic chair that stood in the shadow of the high wall which surrounded the garden. She knew he would not be long in renewing his persecutions. And angry though she was, she could not help wondering at the novelty of the situation. She, Bessie Van Ashton, placed at the mercy of an obscure person, a rustic nobody! Like every other woman, she had dreamed of such a man as this, one that would seize and carry her off; but then the time and place were other than the present, and he resembled more closely the type of man with which she had been familiar all her life. The spirit of antagonism which he aroused was due rather to pique than to dislike, for in spite of his audacity she could not help admiring his spirit.

Her sense of injury was poignantly enhanced by the fact that she recognized herself to be the true cause of her trouble. Had she not led him on this thing might never have happened; and yet, she was neither sorry nor repentant for what she had done. Had any other man dared take the liberties he had taken with her, she would have despised him, but with him, though she was unable to explain it, things were somehow different. She was furious with him for kissing her, and yet deep down in her inner consciousness she was not so certain that she was sorry he had done so. The things he did, which would have branded any other man as a cad, were the very things the man of her dreams might have done under similar circumstances. Yet she shuddered as she daily foresaw the consequences that might ensue should she encourage him further. Flirting with a man whose high-handed, arbitrary methods dazed rather than offended her, was becoming dangerous.

Self-preservation being always our first thought, she had decided to fly, but the presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, she rightly conjectured that he had been walking in a circle, doubtless at a loss what course to pursue. The silence that ensued when he paused behind her was broken only by the sound of his labored breathing and a nervous cough, plainly betraying the embarrassment he felt on finding himself once more in her presence.

"Miss Van Ashton," he said at length, "it is extremely gratifying to know that you have at last decided to leave the oppressive walls of your inhospitable abode for the world of sunshine without, where the essence and being of all things fill one with a desire to live." Nothing he could have said at the moment could have aroused her resentment more than this idiotic speech. She had expected him to eat humble pie, to throw himself at her feet and implore forgiveness; but, no! She sprang to her feet and facing him, turned a pair of beautiful blazing eyes upon him. She was so furious she choked, and for some moments was quite unable to speak.

"I suppose," she said at last, her voice trembling with suppressed indignation, "that you take pleasure in pursuing a helpless woman like a hunted beast. It's so manly," she added scathingly, looking in vain for some sign of contrition in his face. "Why," she went on, "if a man where I live had done the hundredth part of what you have done, society would shun him as it would a pariah!"

"Or a leper," he added good humoredly, quick to recognize the disadvantage at which the loss of her temper placed her. "They must be a poor lot where you live," he continued. "I think we had better pass them by without further comment." She was suffocated--she could have bitten her tongue off!

"Have you no consideration for others' feelings--for what they might want?" she cried.

"Ah! I see, Miss Van Ashton," he answered, regarding her compassionately. "You quite overlook the true facts of the case. This is not at all a question of what you may want, but of what is best for you. I have merely been trying to tell you in my awkward way that it is not good for one to live alone." She laughed hysterically. The colossal impudence of the man took her breath away. She gasped--attempted to speak, but words failing her, turned her back upon him and began tearing into shreds the end of the silken gauze Indian scarf which she wore over her shoulders.

"Can't you think of what you want, Miss Van Ashton?" he asked gently, in the tone of one addressing a refractory child.

"No!" she screamed, without at all realizing what she was saying. To think that this man was able to play with her like a worm on the end of a pin! It was too much! "How dare you! I--I hate you!" she cried, without turning round and quite beside herself. There was no mistaking her attitude; he had gone far enough. The limit of her endurance had been reached, and he suddenly became serious. Again there was silence between them.

"Miss Van Ashton," he said, drawing himself up, "it really doesn't matter what you or the rest of the world may think of me so long as I can see you. Can you imagine what it would be like if you were never to see the sun again? What could be more absurd than to allow such a trifle as convention to come between you and me? Three feet of wretched adobe wall between me and heaven!" he burst forth. "The idea's preposterous! Why, if you shut yourself up in that miserable hovel again, I'll set fire to the place!" She knew he would.

"Can't you understand," he went on, his voice softening, "that your attitude has aroused the savage, the primeval man in me--that, had I met you here fifty or a hundred years ago, I would have picked you up and quietly carried you away? I know I've been a brute by driving you into the open like this, but that's not me, myself--the man who loves you, who would pass through fire for you, who has dreamed of you and watched and waited through the long years for your coming; and now that you have come, you surely can't blame me for what I cannot help--for loving you and telling you so in my own way?"

She tried in vain to stifle the emotion his words aroused. She had set out with the intention of wringing this avowal from him in jest, but how differently it affected her now that she heard it. She forgot her anger, everything, in fact, as she listened to the flow of his passion and longed to hear him continue. Every note of his voice thrilled her as it did on the day she first saw him. She remembered that she experienced a peculiar sensation at the time; that his appearance reminded her of the heroic type of manhood which the ancients had sought to depict in their marbles. In him she had unconsciously recognized the true spirit of the Argonaut on whose brow rests the star of empire. She did not idealize him; she simply recognized him for what he was--a man; one in whose soul the sentiment and enthusiasm of youth still sat enthroned, not smothered by the crushing process of modern civilization which was the case with the men she knew. A terror seized her as she compared the latter to him, and beheld how small they appeared beside him.

"Miss Van Ashton," he continued passionately, "you wouldn't thank me if I continued to bandy words with the woman I love, whose presence has become the sunshine of life to me. The whole world has become filled with song since you came into my life. Music and laughter have taken the place of loneliness and despair. Flowers spring from the earth where your feet rest! Don't imagine that you can ever estrange yourself from me. Wherever you are, by day or by night, waking or dreaming, I also will be there and ever whispering: 'Bessie Van Ashton, I love you--you have filled my life so completely I can't live without you!'"

Had her face been turned toward him, he would have seen that it was radiant, that her eyes shone with unusual brilliancy, that her hands trembled beneath the folds of her scarf where she had concealed them.

"Bessie, sweet--"

"Stop!" she cried, almost in a voice of terror. "I've not given you permission to speak to me, thus--to call me by name--"

"Then turn round and say you will be human once more! That you will talk and walk and ride again! If you don't, I'll begin all over again by telling you that you are the sweetest--"

"Hush!" she said softly, turning round abruptly with a gesture of protest, looking up into his face, and then down at the ground to conceal her confusion. "I think we understand one another," she said at length, and raising her eyes to his again, she held out both her hands which he seized and held in his own.

"Let us be friends again," she continued, gently withdrawing her hands from his.

"No, don't say that!" he interrupted. "We can't be that! Let it rest as it is!"

XXIV

"When you love, you love," runs a gypsy proverb.

Bessie wore the despairing look of one who clings to a last vain hope. How had it happened? Why had everything gone contrary to her expectations? Why was Mr. Yankton dragging her at the wheels of his chariot instead of she him? According to her social standards he had seen but little, and yet he had the _savoir faire_ of a man of the world. Her preconceived ideas on certain subjects were so upset that she no longer appeared to have a hold on anything; the very ground seemed to be slipping away beneath her.

Strange that one could care for the person whom one least expected to, that the most humiliating moment in one's life might be the happiest as well. If any one had suggested such a possibility to her six months previously, she would have laughed at the mere thought. How could she relinquish the life she knew for his? She fought against his influence with all her powers of resistance. And yet, what woman in her right mind would hesitate to follow the man of her choice to the sunlit valleys of our dreams? Weaker women than she had done so and been happy, while stronger ones had hesitated, as was the case with Blanch, and lived to regret it. She secretly prayed that she might be spared the torture which Blanch was suffering and the despair which must inevitably overtake her should she fail to win back the man she had let slip from her; for what, after all, could life be to one without the true comradeship of love? She began to feel and realize the ineffable sweetness of life's fullness as the days of her awakening continued, while the ache at her heart told her plainly enough that the decisive moment of her life had arrived--that she must choose between happiness and ambition. The one, rich and full though accompanied perhaps by pain and even denial at times; the other fraught with uncertainty.

She understood now the meaning of Chiquita's passionate longing for the man she loved; a thing which the worldliness of the life she had lived hitherto had taught her to be too extravagant to exist anywhere outside of books, but which was true nevertheless. Her intuition told her this in the face of all the world might say to the contrary. As she looked back over the years and thought of her friends, she realized that she like them had submerged her life in the superficial pleasures of the world; but had they filled her cup of happiness? Until now she had not felt the lack of life's crowning joy, for the reason that youth is buoyant and full of hope, and the grand passion had not yet entered into her life. These and a thousand other thoughts ran through her mind that night as she recalled Dick's words.

She could not sleep. From where she lay she could see the moonlight in the _patio_ and hear the murmur of the fountain in its center. The night seemed to beckon and whisper to her to come outside. So she arose and silently dressed herself in the dimly moonlit room without disturbing Blanch, who murmured incoherently in her sleep of the things she was thinking of. She slipped noiselessly through the low window to the _patio_ without and stealthily made her way in the shadow of the overhanging arcades to the garden beyond.

The hour was late--close on to dawn. The silvery half-moon hung low in the west accompanied by great cohorts of stars that shone with a brilliancy she had never before seen, and which seemed to be waiting with the moon to usher in the new dawn. All was silence and mystery--all earthly ties seemed severed. Under the cover of the night all things seemed equal. There were no high, no low, no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no towns, no cities, no conventions. All things that hold and bind us had slipped away into the shadows and she seemed to breathe again the primeval freshness of life.

She knew that she must decide between Dick and her family. Her father had given her plainly to understand as much, and this she knew meant the loss of her fortune--the giving up of all for him. Her father threatened, raged and fumed with the petulance of a spoiled child, his paternal displeasure taking that uncompromising form of obstinacy with which the world has long been familiar. She was amazed at herself for being able to take his displeasure with so little concern; a thing which, had it occurred at home, would have caused her to pause and reflect and probably would have been the deciding factor in her life. Her removal from the old life and the glimpses of the new had unconsciously wrought a change within her. She began to see things as they really are when shorn of their glamour. The life she hitherto had known, she realized, was purely a superficial condition, not only foreign to the realities of things, but superfluous to man himself. Never had Captain Forest appeared so sane and her father so superficial as the hour in which she grasped that truth. It is not what the world makes of you, but what you make of yourself that counts, the beauteous, seductive night kept whispering to her. Why, then, if this be true, should the world about her appear so remote? It was not the actual world--the world as it really is that she would be called upon to give up, but merely the world of that particular set of men and women in which she hitherto had moved.

The same earth rolled beneath her feet--the same stars that looked down upon her in the past still glittered in the heavens overhead--the same winds that crept through the garden and sighed among the trees, wafting the spicy, fragrant odors of the flowers into her face, were the same that had fanned her cheek in the past. All things remained practically the same, only the people were different. But could the old interests and friendships and associations compensate her for the loss of the man that had come into her life to remain for the rest of her days whether she chose to keep him or not? These new and perplexing questions she was forced to ask herself for the first time, and she knew that there could be but one answer forthcoming.

Love was knocking at the portals of her heart as it had never knocked before. It had come to her warm and living, deep and subtle and indefinable, leaving nothing to be said or desired. She saw clearly that principle, as the world conceives it, was not involved. Affection recognizes no such principle--only virtuous longing and desire which is a principle in itself--the fulfillment of creation's grandest purpose; and it rested with her to accept this truth or pass it by.

The chill of the early morning caused her to draw her wrap more closely about her shoulders. A deep sigh of relief escaped her as she glanced upwards once more for a last look at the paling stars. How satisfactory it was to know even though the knowledge pained her!

She had entered the garden a girl, she returned to the house a woman, hugging her secret close to her heart.

XXV

Success had crowned Juan Ramon's efforts. The pretty little _hacienda_ of which he had dreamed so long was no longer a vision of the future, but a reality. It was actually in his possession, purchased with a part of the money he had received from Don Felipe for his work. It now only remained for the pretty Rosita to consent to become the mistress of the place and he, Juan Ramon, would bid farewell to the old _Posada_ and the gaming-tables forever. This Juan naïvely promised himself as his thoughts dwelt upon the bright picture of domestic felicity which his imagination conjured up before him.

The attractive presence of Rosita was undoubtedly the source of this inspiration which actually led him to believe in the possibility of the sudden and complete reformation of an inveterate gambler whose desire for play was like the toper's insatiable thirst for liquor. And then, there was Captain Forest's horse. Juan had an idea regarding that animal. When everybody's attention was occupied with the festivities during the night of the _fandango_, and he had succeeded in filling José with the proper amount of _aguardiente_, he would slip quietly away with the horse and conceal him at his _hacienda_. _Caramba!_ what a horse--the like of which there was not in all Mexico! And Juan Ramon, the champion _vaquero_ of Chihuahua, was the man to ride him! And he rolled and smoked innumerable _cigarillos_ as he sauntered about the garden and corrals, or lounged in the _patio_, musing on these and many other things.

To say that Don Felipe was elated by what he had discovered but mildly describes his state of exultation. At last the woman who had ruined his life was in his power. Not for years had he experienced such delicious transports of rapture. How sweet a thing is revenge! He was like one born anew. The expression of melancholy faded from his countenance, his eyes shone with renewed luster and he smiled upon all the world. There was no more escape for her than there had been for him when she so treacherously thrust the knife into his heart. What he had discovered was different from anything his imagination had pictured in connection with her. Nothing could be more compromising, and the marvel of it was that she had been able to keep the facts concealed from the world so long. Only a woman could have done it, and only the cleverest of women at that. No wonder she had danced in public. She had reason to!

Never had he dreamed that he would live to enjoy this hour. When he first imparted his information to Blanch, she refused to believe it; but the proofs were too convincing to leave so much as the shadow of a doubt in her mind. How fortunate that he had discovered her secret at this time; just before the _fandango_. What an opportunity to confront her with the truth; force her to make a public confession of her guilt. Nothing could be more propitious for the execution of his plans; the annihilation of the woman who had wrecked his life. It was not enough that she should be exposed. She must be humiliated publicly as he had been.