XLV.
On the evening when Doña Isabel and her companions set forth from the village upon their toilsome pilgrimage to Las Parras, two women leaned against the gate-posts at the entrance to the garden where the mistress of Tres Hermanos and the mother of the administrador had parted so many years before, and looked wearily along the silent road. One would not have been surprised to hear that during all these years no other mortal had approached the place, for the air of neglect it had worn then had deepened into that of utter abandonment. It looked not merely disused, but actually shunned. The gate had fallen from its hinges and lay broken upon the rank coarse grass and weeds, which thrusting themselves between the bars filled the paths. Thick clumps of cacti and stunted uncultivated fruit and flowers, with manzanita and other common shrubs of the country, had outgrown and outrooted the feebler growths, and almost hid the low front of the solid but dismantled building, upon which the iron-ribbed shutters hung forlornly like broken armor on a battered image.
The sun and wind and rains had done their work unchecked in all these years, aided by the revolution, which had torn and scathed whatever had attracted its greedy hand and then passed on, leaving desolation to continue or repair the work of destruction. The vines, which had at first served as a graceful drapery, hung so heavily on every porch and wooden projection of the house that they had broken down the frail supports, and added to the general appearance of riot and disorder; while their matted masses offered a defiant obstruction to any adventurous comer. Yet these women had forced a way into the dark and mouldy rooms, and found a certain pleasure and security in their seemingly impenetrable and forbidding aspect.
“We have been here three days,” said the younger, who even in the declining light one might see was a meregirl, while her companion, though small, was old in face and figure,—not with the dignity of actual age, but with a sort of lithe grace and abandon, which comes from years of free and careless action. “We have been three days waiting, yet he has not come! You may be mistaken. How can you reckon upon what a man like Ramirez will do? He is not like a blind man, always led by his dog upon the same round.”
“Necessity and habit are the dogs that lead him,” said the woman with a slight laugh. “Fortune is against him; he has been beaten from every stronghold. I know this is the hole he will creep into at last.”
“And the people here, they would save him?” said Chinita, musingly. “He has ever spared them, ever protected them, that he might have a safe refuge in time of need. Here, here, but for us he would be safe?—but for us, Dolores?”
“Ah, he is not the first who does not find even nests where he hoped to find birds,” answered the woman called Dolores. “To-day he is laughing at the little troop of Liberals patrolling these hills; he will make a way between them. Yes, you will see; here, here, upon this very road, we shall see him flash by like a meteor, and then be lost. But my eyes can trace him; my hand will be able to point the way he has gone.”
The woman had unwittingly conjured up a vision that thrilled the imagination of the listener. “Oh!” she cried with a sudden gesture of repulsion and weariness, “I am sick of this mean and miserable life. Would to God I had gone to him as I vowed to do. Do not tell me he would have laughed at my rage! No, no! a man could not laugh at the girl who accused him of the murder of her father; who stood before him to remind him of all his secret and unnatural crimes! Ah, I cannot endure this silent, creepingenmityenmity. Three times already by our means he has been tracked and driven from his stronghold; once but for Pepé he would have been killed,—Ruiz himself would have killed him!”
“Fox against tiger!” cried Dolores, contemptuously. “Bah! the idiot might have known that with the smell of blood in the air, not even the shadow of the cross would save him if he fell into the hands of Ramirez;yet he rushed on his fate. And for Ramirez there waits for him a doom more just than death on the battlefield,—though you, who warned Pepé to save him, are but a faint-hearted weakling.”
“Would you have him die without knowing the revenge that followed him?” cried Chinita. “What would death alone be to such a man as he? It was you, yourself, who first urged Pepé to leave us,—not that he might kill, but if need were save, Ramirez.”
“It is true,” answered Dolores, mollified; yet she fixed upon Chinita a long and penetrating gaze, which seemed to read her very soul. “But you are a strange, strange creature,—a peasant for all your pride. He is still more a grand gentleman to stare at with fear than a murderer and robber to you.”
Chinita’s face turned white. The reproach of the woman stung her, yet she felt it was just. “Oh, if I were a man!” she presently muttered; “oh, if I were a man!”
“Yes, the way would have been short then,” said Dolores. “Just a knife-thrust, and the debt would have been paid. But the revenge of women can be a thousand times more deep, more sweet, if one has the patience to wait.”
“Patience!” exclaimed Chinita in that shrill, metallic voice that indicates a mental tension so violent and long continued that every chord of the nervous system vibrates painfully at a word. “Have I not had patience? Have I not waited at your bidding until I seem to live in a frenzy of fear lest he should escape, and never hear, never see me, never know who I am? And what have I gained? Ruiz is dead; Pepé perhaps is dead. Ah, if I had spoken! Had Ramirez known that I live, it might have saved them both!”
The woman’s answering laugh had more of scorn than mirth in it. “Be quiet, child!” she said. “You are young. You think Ramirez has a conscience, and that you would have roused it to torment him. Pshaw! I will arm you with a better weapon; a little patience—perhaps to-morrow—and you will see!”
“Mysteries! always mysteries!” exclaimed Chinita, with increased impatience. “Santa Maria!why do you not push back that black kerchief from your brows?Have you the mark of a jealous woman’s knife across your forehead? Is your hair white, or—or—” She paused, with a horrid suspicion flashing through her mind. Was this woman, with whom she had daily and nightly associated for weeks, a victim of that species of leprosy known as the “painted”? Was some dread trace of it to be seen upon that constantly covered head? Dolores with careless grace had raised and clasped her hands above the unsightly kerchief. The bared arms were clear and fair; only the deep-lined face they encircled looked old, but care, not disease, had marked it. She looked at Chinita through the growing dusk with an inscrutable expression in her almond-shaped and beautiful eyes. They were eyes that still might fascinate at will. Chinita drew a little nearer to her, and sighed deeply. There was a sense of guilt upon the girl’s mind since she had heard of the death of Ruiz; a sickening apprehension, too, for the fate of Pepé Ortiz.
Dolores read her thoughts. She dropped one hand from her head upon the young girl’s shoulder. There seemed something magnetic in the touch. Chinita, though she would rather have resisted, yielded to it,—like a nettle grasped in a strong hand. “Silly one,” said the woman soothingly, “fret not yourself for Ruiz. Ramirez knew him better than did you. He had had long years to con the lesson in. It is well for the weak defenceless creatures of the earth that these wild beasts attack and destroy one another!”
Chinita looked unconvinced. In spite of doubts, she had had a certain pride and solace in the belief that Ruiz would prove true to Ramirez,—true through his love for her. She had purposely left him ignorant of the change in her own views and feelings in regard to Ramirez that he might be free to act upon his own impulses and convictions. She knew not what she would have had him do, yet all the same he had disappointed her. She had no clews to the motives of Ruiz, other than those Dolores suggested to her, and there was an uncertainty and vagueness overhanging him which made him in her eyes a victim to his love for her, and a fresh cause for accusation of the man who seemed destined utterly to bereave and despoil her. Strangely enough, in her wildest excitement Chinitahad never formulated for herself any definite mode of action when she should see Ramirez,—as see him, accuse, defy him she would! There had been a conviction in her mind that in her the ghosts of the innocent he had slain, the shame,—which with strange perversity he had shrunk from when it menaced his family pride in the person of Herlinda Garcia,—the contempt and hatred of his wronged sister, would all rise to confront and overwhelm him. That which should follow, time, circumstance would determine; but that the wild fever of her passion would be satisfied she would not doubt. She had longed with an ever increasing excitement to find herself before Ramirez, and to pour forth her wrongs in burning words. Yet this woman Dolores, with a fascination even greater than the unconscious one that Ramirez himself had exerted over her, had withheld her from her purpose, had even led her to gain the secrets of the chieftain’s plans from his most trusted confidants,—the young girl reddened with shame and anger, yet with flattered vanity, when she remembered that the sight of her beauty had been more potent than the gold of Dolores. Chinita had not guessed that she had been purposely employed to act the part of a spy, and had resented deeply the fact that her discoveries had more than once been transmitted to Gonzales, and that her revenge was supposed to be gratified by the consequent defeat which had overcome Ramirez. Her longing was for a more dramatic, more direct revenge. Pedro and Dolores could plot and scheme for the silent overthrow of him who had wronged them; they gloried in their astuteness that made him an unsuspicious victim, while Chinita writhed under it, and only the promise that in Las Parras she should accuse Ramirez face to face had made endurable to her the life of secret intrigue and absolute disguise and constant change that she had led for weeks. The element of peril, it is true, had stimulated her adventurous spirit; but she would fain have been in the midst, not hovering a ready fugitive upon the edge of the fray.
When weeks before Chinita had, after her faintness, opened her eyes in the low, rocky cave in which Pedro lay, it had been to find him an almost unrecognizable mass of wounds and bruises, lying on a sheepskin pallet, gazing at her with wide-distended eyes, and ejaculatingin tones of dismay, mingled with incredulous delight, “What have I done? Oh God! is it possible that she has come to me,—the miserable, dying Pedro?”
“Yes, yes, Pedro, I am here!” shecried,cried,staggering to her feet. “Ah, the American thought I had forgotten thee; but thou wert in my heart all the time that he talked. Ah, though I am of other blood, it is thou that hast saved me! They would have thrust me out to die. I will cling to thee while thou livest; I will avenge thee when thou diest!”
“Hush!” muttered Pedro faintly, as she stooped and kissed his hand, bedewing it with her tears. “Ah, I shall not die, now you have come. Did I not tell you,” he asked, turning to a figure beside Chinita, “that I should live if I could know she loved me?”
“And this is the girl you have nurtured?” asked the stifled voice of a woman. She was not as tall as Chinita, and she held a candle up close to the face of the girl to look at her. Chinita was spent with fatigue; moreover there were tears on her face, and she resented the inspection, pushing away the woman’s hand rudely. Yet it was not that of a servant, nor of a woman of the lower class. Even in the excitement of the moment Chinita was conscious of wondering who and what this person was. How came she there in the cave among these fugitives?
“But for her I should have been dead already,” Pedro was saying. “She has wondrous skill and knowledge of surgery and herbs. But,” he added, in a low, apologetic voice, “she knows all. I have talked in my delirium. I could not help it. You will pardon me,—if I die you will pardon me?”
“I have nothing to pardon!” cried Chinita. “What! you think because my mother lives I would hide her name? No, no! I have endured enough for her cowardice and the shame of Doña Isabel. No, no! let me but see Ramirez,—this Leon Vallé,—and though it be before all the world, I will declare who I am. The American, Ashley Ward, says he will claim me as his cousin. Pepé must ride and tell him I am here, and we will have vengeance together for the cruel deeds of Ramirez. You shall be avenged, Pedro, you shall be avenged!”
The sick man’s eyes glistened. As she spoke, Chinita’s face had glowed with an unrelenting and cruel intensity of purpose. The woman at her side had never once removed her eyes from her. No one was noticing her; had they done so, they would have beheld an extraordinary series of changes pass over her dark but mobile face,—suspicion, delight, doubt, alarm, conviction. Suddenly she seized Chinita’s hand, and pressed it to her heart; it was beating so tumultuously that the young girl drew back startled. The woman thrust her hands under the loose folds of the black kerchief that draped her head with a sombre yet Oriental grace, then withdrawing them caught a stray lock of Chinita’s hair, and burst into a long, low, triumphant laugh.
Chinita drew herself away, alarmed and offended. Pepé had come in; and looking at her anxiously he said, “Nina, do not mind her. Esteban tells me she is a mad woman; yet she does no harm. She does not know what she talks of, and one moment denies what she has said at another. It would not be strange if she should tell you some dreadful tale, and afterward laugh, and say grief had made her mad!”
“And so it has,” cried the woman. “Ah yes, I have been mad; but that is past. Yes, yes. Life of my soul,” turning to Chinita, “how beautiful thou art! And the hair, it is a miracle! In all the world there should be no other with such hair. Thou hast had good fortune, Pedro, to bring up such a child. She is an angel. Ah, it is as if I had seen her all my life! And thou hast a spirit to match thy face,” she added turning again to Chinita. “Thou canst not brook a wrong. Well, well! we will make common cause; and some day—soon, soon we will stand together before Leon Vallé with such a tale, such a revenge, that even he will sink before it. To think that after all these years, I shall turn against him the dagger with which he has pierced me!”
“Who are you? What do you know of me?” cried Chinita, shuddering, though she understood that the weapon of which the stranger spoke was no material tool. “Why should you join with me, or I with you? No, no; when Pedro is able, we will go away, you your way, and I mine!”
“Our ways lie together!” cried the woman, excitedly. “The one without the other would fail. Oh! you think me mad, but I am not. I could tell you things,—but no, I will wait; perhaps thou hast not even heard of me. Ah! how many years is it since I disappeared from the world, that I have been forgotten?”
Pedro raised himself upon his elbow painfully, and gazed at her with a long and eager scrutiny. “I know you now,” he said, “though I never saw you but once, and then you were beautiful as the Holy Madonna on the high altar at Pueblo.”
“Yes,” she interrupted; “I am Dolores, whom Vallé loved. Ah, you think that strange, because my beauty is gone, and I am old, and like a witch, living in this murky cave! Where else should I go—I, whom he stole away and betrayed, and despoiled and forsook?”
“But you are rich,” said Pepé in wonder, and in a tone that seemed to condone the rest.
“Rich!” she said scornfully. “Rich! yes, for such needs as mine. Rich! he used to give me jewels a queen might have been proud of. He thought I wasted, lost, destroyed them, as he would have done, but I kept them,—kept them for my child. Ah, I knew she would be beautiful, would be worthy of the rarest and costliest I could give her. Ah, I would give her jewels! such jewels as would buy her love, were she as capricious, as hard, as Ramirez himself.”
Chinita drew back from her, with a certain hauteur, a certain loathing upon her face. “I have heard of you,” she said coldly. “You chose your lot. If you have wrongs, they can be nothing to mine. See”—and she pointed to Pedro—“what Ramirez has done but now; while but for his murderous knife my father would have lived, and my mother would not have been obliged to hide her disgraced head in a convent, and I should not have been left a pauper at the gate of my mother’s house.”
“There can be no wrongs greater than these?” said the woman half interrogatively, half affirmatively. “Yet listen! He stole me away from my husband; I swear I did not go willingly, though I loved him,—oh my God, how I loved him! For him I died to the world. I forsook the father who was dear to me as life. I lived a life ofinfamy, hiding in obscure villages, in mountain huts, in caves when need were. I bore him children; but they died,—all died as though there was a curse upon them. That angered him; then he grew cold, then false and cruel. One day a captive was brought into the camp for ransom,—a captive he himself had made. He sent to me to look at the man and to set a price upon his head. I went, as he told me, in gay attire, with jewels blazing on my arms and neck, a diadem upon my head. When the prisoner looked up and saw me, with the price of my shame as he thought upon me, he staggered, gasped, and fell down dead. He was my father. My senses fled, yet when another child was born they returned to me. She was strong and beautiful. I clasped my treasure; but my heart burned against her father. I swore I would leave him, that I would hide the child where he never should discover her. Fool! fool! that I was! When I woke next day, for in my weakness I slept, the babe was gone,—dead they told me; gone too the pretty clothing I had made, the little trinkets I had placed about her neck. But the blessed prayers I had bought from the holy nuns of La Piedad were not in vain! No, no! wretch, demon, that he was!”
Chinita’s heart beat suffocatingly. “What! you think the child was still living?” she said.
“I know it! I know it!” cried Dolores. “I feel it here,—here in my heart, which beats for her. And sometime, when I find that child, if I do find her, think you she will love me? Think you she will hate her father as I do? Think you she will avenge my wrongs and hers?”
“But if he loved her,” said Chinita; “if he meant to separate her from—from such a woman as you had been! Oh, I know you have suffered, that you have reason for vengeance; but—” she cried hysterically, striking her hands together, terribly moved, she knew not why. The strange woman broke into sobs, piteous to hear. Chinita clasped her hands. “But you would not have her—your child—his child—hate the man you loved?”
“Hate him!” echoed Dolores. “I would have her hate him with such hate as she would bear toward the fiends of hell. I would have her know him as you know him,—the insatiable monster who wrecked the happiness ofa sister too fond, even when most foully wronged, to seize the vengeance that was within her grasp. Ah, Doña Isabel it was who set him free to murder, to betray, to wrench the child from its maddened mother, and cast it out by the first rude and careless hand that would do his will! My God! were you his child could you have pity? Would you not feel your wrongs,—the wrongs of the mother who bore you?”
Dolores spoke with the wild excitement of one who for years had brooded on this theme. Chinita herself seemed to be struggling with some fantasy of a disordered brain. The woman actually glared upon her, as if on her reply hung her destiny. Overcome by the unexpected demand upon her sympathy,—a demand that the peculiar circumstances of her life made irresistibly impressive,—Chinita shrank with horror at the tumult of emotion which revealed to her mind the possibilities of her own passionate nature.
“Tell me no more! Ask me no more!” she cried. “Ah, if I were his daughter! But no, I am the daughter of Herlinda Garcia, and of the man he murdered in secret. Yes, I will seek Ramirez out. I—I—O God! I know not what I will do, but I will have justice! revenge! revenge!”
The girl ended with a scream, and fell down, burying her head on Pedro’s shoulder. The wounded man, his ghastly face pressed close against her twining hair, looked appealingly to the excited woman who stood over them. There was scorn, rage, intense offence upon her face; but slowly they died out, and she turned away with the weary air of one in whom some periodic excess of passion or madness had wrought its work and brought its consequent exhaustion. A half hour later she brought the girl some food, wonderfully dainty for the place and its resources, and gently fed and soothed her. Pepé and Pedro looked on wonderingly. All that had been said had passed so quickly that they had not realized that aught of consequence had happened; but in the quiescent attitude of Chinita, and the strange calm that had fallen upon the excited and erratic woman, they instinctively felt that a new phase of life had begun for them. A new spirit was in future to lead and rule them; and it dwelt in the frame ofthis half-crazed woman, who had declared herself mistress of the cave. The men thenceforth seemed led by a spell; and to the same spell Chinita gradually succumbed.
This had been the first meeting of Chinita with the woman who stood talking with her nearly two months later at the garden gate of Las Parras. They had left the cave weeks before,—Pepé and Pedro, the latter still bruised and maimed, to join the troops of Gonzales; and Chinita, unable to resist the influence of Dolores, followed rebelliously with swift and unerring movement the fortunes of Ramirez. By what arguments Pedro had been won to consent to separate from his foster-child, and to maintain silence concerning her to Ashley, can be but guessed; though certain it is that Chinita on her part reminded him of the promise he had made Herlinda to protect her child from Doña Isabel, to whose care she justly suspected Ashley Ward would strive to return her. Meanwhile Dolores adroitly fostered in the girl’s mind that hope of a peculiar and swift revenge, which was to satisfy at once the many wrongs that in those diverse lives were clamorous for justice; while an intense anticipation urged the gatekeeper to hasten without delay to join the Liberal army,—the anticipation of that event which presented to his mind such wondrous possibilities. The convents once opened, would Herlinda claim her child? Would she by some strange miracle confront Leon Vallé and her proud mother with the proof of that which Ashley Ward had in spite of adverse law and custom declared still possible,—the proof of her marriage with the American who had been slain without accusation, without the possibility of defence?
Pedro could not reason; he could but doggedly wait, and guard with silent fidelity and ferocity the charge that had been given him. That a superior intelligence, an undeclared authority potent as an armed power, had for a time wrested Chinita from him, made him only the more tenacious when once again he held her in his grasp. His foster-child while in the mountains with the woman whose life was bound in the same interests, the same mysteries, as her own, was safe from the possibilities of removal from his cognizance.
Pedro was asked no questions which he cared not toanswer, when he presented himself among the Liberal forces. Ashley, tranquil in the belief that Chinita was with Doña Carmen in Guanapila, avoided more than casual mention of her name; and Pedro jealously guarded his secret, and patiently waited the moment he superstitiously believed would come,—the moment which, when it did come, gave him the sharpest sting he had ever known in his stoical existence; when Herlinda Garcia cried in uncontrollable horror and dismay, “What! you,—youhave brought up my child? She was given toyou!”
On the journey from El Toro there was but one thought in the mind of him who had served with such blind faithfulness. For the first time a doubt tormented him. “Would the beautiful, uncontrollable idol of his heart satisfy the longing—the years of longing—of the woman who freed from her bonds was hastening to claim her daughter and acknowledge her before the world?” As the hours passed, Pedro shunned the eyes of Herlinda, though they looked upon him with a grateful affection that should have been at once an invitation to confidence and a recompense of his long fidelity. Yet with the remembrance of Chinita ever before him, the glance of Herlinda seemed that of accusation and reproof. Her words rang like a knell in his heart. He, who knew the vices and virtues of the two castes which he and the still beautiful woman represented, knew that like oil and water they were irreconcilable, and understood the full significance of that involuntary cry, “What!you,—youhave brought upmychild?”