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. Heraised 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“thisgirl whom you have believed to be the daughter of my son.WeeksWeeksago 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 saveher 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 Americantold 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 mylife; 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 funeralcortegecortegeset 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 garmentssodden, 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.