XVIII.
Although Chinita had divined aright when she declared that the carriage she had seen in the distance could be no other than that of Doña Isabel, and the sounds which penetrated from the court announced the arrival of her outrider, she was wrong in supposing that the lady herself would be speedily at hand. There was a long delay in which Doña Feliz had time to recover outwardly from the agitation into which she was thrown, and accustom herself to this verification of her foresight, when upon hearing of the marriage of Carmen she had felt a conviction that Doña Isabel in her loneliness and the unaccustomed lack of interests around her would be irresistibly attracted to the home she had virtually forsworn.
Don Rafael having listened eagerly to the courier’s account of the meeting with Ramirez’s band, left him to give fuller details to the anxious villagers who gathered around,—many of whom had sons or husbands at that part of the hacienda lands known as the ranchito del Refugio,—and rushed up to Doña Feliz with the news, then down again to the court to mount a horse which had been instantly saddled, and followed by a clerk and servants galloped away to give meet welcome to the lady who had just entered upon her own domains.
Calling the maids, Doña Feliz caused the long-disused beds to be spread with fresh linen, and completed the preparations for this vaguely yet confidently expected arrival. “She had felt it in the air,” she said to herself, for she knew nothing of any theory of second sight, nor had ever reasoned, on the other hand, that even the most trivial circumstances of life must work toward some given result, which they instinctively foreshadow to the observant, as the bodily eye makes out the reflection of a material object in a dimmed and besmirched mirror. She bestirred herself as if in a dream, her mind full of Doña Isabel andthe past. Yet like an undercurrent beneath the flood of her thoughts flowed the idea of the new element that Doña Isabel was bringing with her. “Aforeigner!” she muttered, as if she could scarce believe her words. “Can it be possible that the hand once stung can dally again with the scorpion? Ah, no! necessity wears the guise of heresy, but it is not possible that Doña Isabel can forget.”
She glanced around her; Chinita had disappeared. Doña Feliz saw her no more until the long-delayed carriage rolled into the court, when she descended to greet her mistress.
The long summer’s day had almost waned, and so dark was the court that torches of pitch-pine had been stuck into rude sconces against the pillars, and the face of Doña Isabel looked wan and ghastly in the lurid and flickering glare. She could not descend from the carriage until the wounded youth had been lifted out. Doña Feliz had never seen but one man so fair. She started as her eyes fell upon the yellow masses of hair that lay disordered upon his brow, but pointed to a chamber which a woman ran to open, and into which the stranger was carried: while Doña Isabel, cramped and stiff, leaned upon the arm of Don Rafael, and stepped to the ground. As she did so she would have fallen but for two strong young hands which caught hers, and as she involuntarily held them and steadied herself she turned her eyes upon the face which was level with her own. Her eyes opened widely, and with an exclamation of actual horror she threw Chinita from her with a sudden and violent struggle, and passed proudly though tremblingly across the court.
Don Rafael and Doña Feliz followed, too astounded to make one movement to assist their lady’s ascent of the stairs; but when they reached the corridor and heard the door of the bed-chamber heavily closed, they turned toward each other, their faces pale in the twilight. “Her thoughts are serpents to lash her,” murmured Doña Feliz; adding with a sort of national pride, “The Castillian woman may choose to ignore, but she can never forget or forgive.”
Don Rafael shrugged his shoulders. How much with some races a shrug may signify! His then was one of dogged resolution. “It is well,” it seemed to say; andhe muttered, “As the mistress leads, the servant must follow,” while his mother, shaking her head doubtfully, pointed to the court below.
Chinita had rushed furiously away from the carriage and the group of men, who after the first silence of surprise had broken into but half-suppressed laughter, which was soon lost in the babel of greetings that the disappearance of Doña Isabel gave an opportunity for exchanging, and scarcely knowing in her blind rage where she went, had thrown herself upon one of the stone seats that bordered the fountain, and with her small clinched fist was beating the rugged stone. Pedro stood near her, his face as indignant as her own, vainly endeavoring with a voice that shook with anger to soothe her wounded pride, while with one hand he strove to lead her away. She spoke not a word. Suddenly, as the young face of the girl was lifted to the light, Feliz clasped her hands together, and leaned eagerly forward. She motioned to Don Rafael,—she would not break the spell by speech; but unheeding her he left the corridor and walked away, and presently Pedro was obliged to hasten to his duties at the doorway, and the girl and the woman were left alone in the enclosure. Doña Feliz leaned motionless over the railing. Chinita, still beating the stone with her fist, sat upon the edge of the fountain. With her native instinct of propriety, to meet Doña Isabel she had put on her second best skirt—not the green one—and all her necklaces circled her throat. Her hair was closely braided, but curled wilfully round her brow and the nape of her neck. She pulled at it abstractedly in a manner she had when excited. Her face was turned aside, but to Doña Feliz there was something strangely familiar in her attitude,—something which suggested other personalities, but of whom; which recalled the past, but how?
While Chinita still sat there, Doña Isabel came out of her chamber and crossed to the side of Feliz. Her face quivered as her eyes fell on the child, and she laid her nervous white hand upon Feliz’s arm. The two women looked at each other, but said not a word; the eyes of the one were full of reproach, those of the other of defiant distrust. When they turned them upon the court again, the girl had moved noiselessly away. Her passion ofanger was spent, and with the instinct of the Indian strain in her mixed blood, she had gone to hide herself away in some sheltered corner and brood sullenly upon her wrongs.
As she passed through the many courts, reaching at last that upon which the church opened, she was so absorbed that she did not notice she was closely followed by a man who had been very near when Doña Isabel had repulsed her, and who with a few apparently careless questions had possessed himself of all there was to know of Chinita’s history.
“Look you!” said one, “did not Pedro say that a man as black as the devil dropped her into his hands? Who knows but she is the fiend’s own child? Vaya, she struck me over the face with talons like a cat’s only last week.”
“And well thou deservedst it,” cried the boy called Pepé. But he was laughed down by a shrill majority, for Doña Isabel’s unaccountable repulse of her had turned the tide of public opinion strongly against the foundling; and the woman toward whom Tio Reyes—for he it was—now turned for additional particulars, rightly judging that in such matters female memories would prove most explicit, crossed herself as she opined “that the fox knows much, but more he who traps him, and that Pedro who had found the girl could best tell whence she came,”—a saying which elicited many nods and exclamations of approval, for Pedro had never been believed quite honest in the matter. A wild story that he had received the babe from the hands of a beautiful and pallid spectre which had once been seen to speak with him in the corridor, and that this was the ghost of some lovely woman he had murdered in those early days when he and Don Leon were comrades in many a wild adventure, had passed into a sort of legend, which if not entirely accepted, certainly was not utterly disbelieved by any one.
“Go thy way! She is the devil’s own brat,” cried the wife of the man Chinita had once attacked.
“Ay, to be sure!” cried another; “was it not to be remembered how she had struggled and screamed when the good Father Francisco baptized her, and had sputtered and spat out the salt which the good priest had put inher mouth like a very cat. And little good had it done her, for she had never been called by a Christian name.”
“Tut! tut!” said the new-comer, “what need of a name has such a pretty maid as that, or of a father or mother either? Though ye women have no mercy, she’ll laugh at you all yet. The lads will not be blind, eh Pancho?”
“That they will not!” cried the lad Pepé, throwing a meaning glance at Pancho as if daring him to take up the cudgels in behalf of his old playfellow. “What care I who she is? She’s not the first who came into the world by a crooked road; and must all the women hint that it began at the Devil’s door because they can’t trace it back? Ay, they know enough ways to the same place.”
“Well said, young friend!” cried Tio Reyes with a hearty slap on the boy’s shoulder. “But, hist! here comes Pedro—with an ill look too in his eye. Ah! I thought so,” as the men suddenly became noisily busy with the unsaddling of their horses, and the women slipped away to their household occupations. “Tio Pedro is not a man to be trifled with. But, ah, there goes the girl!” and in a moment of confusion he adroitly left the court without being seen, and as has been said followed her steps till, as she crouched behind one of the buttresses of the church, he halted behind another and looked at her keenly, impatient with the uncertain light, eager to approach her before it darkened, yet waiting stoically until she was settled in a sullen crouching attitude, probably for that vigil of silence and hunger in which a ranchero’s anger usually expends itself, or crystallizes into a revengeful memory.
After some minutes, during which the girl neither sobbed nor moved, he suddenly bent over and touched her on the shoulder. She was accustomed to such intrusions, and shook herself sullenly, not even looking up when an unknown voice accosted her. “Hist, thou! I have something for thee.”
“I want nothing, not manna from Heaven even.”
“’T will prove better than that.”
“Then keep it thyself. Thou’rt a stranger. I take neither a blow from a woman nor a gift from a man.”
“Ah!” said the man, coming a little nearer and layinga hand lightly on her shoulder, “if thou wilt have no gift, shall Itellthee something?”
The girl shrugged her shoulder uneasily under his hand. “I am not a baby to care for tales,” she said contemptuously; yet the man noticed she turned her head slightly toward him.
“Thou art one of a thousand!” he ejaculated admiringly. “Hey now, proud one, suppose I should tell thee who thou art,—what wouldst thou give Tio Reyes for that?”
“Bah!” said the girl, “I have never thought about it.” Yet she was conscious that her heart began to beat wildly and her voice sounded faint in her ears. A little picture formed itself before her eyes, of Pepé and Marta and Ranulfo and a score of others, waifs of humanity, and she herself on a height looking down upon them. She had never consciously separated herself from them,—she had never even wished that she, like them, had at least a mother; but presently she was conscious of a new feeling. Yet she laughed as she said, “I was born then like other children,—I had a mother?”
“That had you; but I am not going to sing all that’s in the book,niña. The wise man talks little and the prudent woman asks few questions, and thus fewer lies are spoken.”
“But thou art not my father?” queried Chinita, insolently, yielding to a sudden apprehension that seized her, and turning full upon the stranger.
“God deliver me!” answered he; “badly fared the owl that nourished the young eaglet.”
“Tell me who I am!” cried Chinita, in a sudden passion of eagerness clutching the man’s arm.
“Tut! tut! tut! that is not my business; and as you will not hear my pretty little tale,”—for Chinita thrust him violently aside,—“I will give you but one word of warning and be gone: the old hind pushes at the young fawn, but they both make venison.”
Chinita was accustomed to the obscure phraseology and symbolical meanings of the thousand proverbs used by her country people, and she instantly caught the idea the speaker sought to convey; but its very audacity held her silent for some moments. It was only after she had gazedat him long and searchingly that she could stammer, “Doña Isabel—and I—Chinita—the same—of one blood!”
The man nodded, but put his finger upon his lip. He feared perhaps some wild outburst of surprise or exultation; but instead she said in an awed whisper, “Is she then my mother?”
Tio Reyes leaned against the church and burst into irrepressible though silent laughter. “What next will the girl dream of?” he ejaculated at length, and laughed again.
“What, am I then such a fool?” asked Chinita, coolly, though with inward rage. “Look you, if you had told me yes, I would not have believed you any more than I believed when Señor Enrique said that she had the young American killed who died so many years ago. Bah! one thing is as foolish as the other,” and she turned away disdainfully.
“What!” exclaimed the man, eagerly, “do they say that? Humph! Well, things as strange as that have happened in her day.”
“But that is a lie,” cried Chinita, excitedly; “it was only because Doña Isabel would not interfere to save his son from being shot as murderer andladronthat Enrique said so. He went away himself the day after, and he it was who led Calvo to the rancho del Refugio. But what has that to do with us?” and now first, perhaps because there had been time for the matter to take shape in her mind, she showed an eager and excited curiosity. “Tell me who I am; you surely have more to tell me than that I was born Garcia!”
The man stared, then cried, “And is not that enough? Why, for a word thou canst be as good as Doña Isabel’s daughter. With that face of thine she dare not refuse thee anything.”
Chinita looked at him as if she would have torn his secret from him. Strange to say, not a suspicion that he was jesting with her entered her mind. Even as she stood there almost in rags, she felt instinctively that she was far removed from him. The one thought that she was a Garcia, one of the family whom she looked upon as the incarnation of wealth and power, overpowered every other emotion, even that of curiosity. She was vexed,baffled that he said no more, yet felt as though she had known all, and had but for a moment forgotten. She even turned away from him with a momentary impulse to rush into the presence of Doña Isabel and assail her with the cry, “Look at me! Why did you thrust me away? I too am a Garcia!”
“Stay!” cried Tio Reyes, as she started from his side. Her wild thoughts had flashed by so rapidly that, quick though he was to read the countenance, he had caught scarce an inkling of what had passed through her mind, and was certain only of the half-dazed dislike with which she looked at him. It irritated and disappointed him.
“What, girl!” he said, “is not this news worth so much as a ‘thank you’? Is it nothing to you whether you are the dust of the roadway or a jewel of the mine? Well, I lied to you. Ah! ah! what know I who you are? It was my joke! Tio Reyes always likes a jest with a pretty girl.”
“But this is no jest,” said Chinita, quick to perceive that the man was already half repentant of his words; “you can better put the ocean into a well, than shut up the truth when it is once out. Ah, I did not need you to tell me I was no beggar’s brat, picked up by chance on the plain. I have heard them say that Pedro has rich clothes which I was wrapped in. He has always laughed at me when I have asked about them, but all the same he shall show them to you this very night.”
“Chut!” interrupted the man, “what should I know of swaddling clothes? ’T is just a maid’s folly to think of such trifles. They would not prove thee a Garcia, any more than the lack of them belies it, or my mere word insures it!”
“That which puzzles me is,” said Chinita, gravely, turning her head on one side and looking at him keenly by the dim light, “why you have told me this. Have you been sent with a message from—from those who left me here?”
“No, by my faith,” said the man, laughing; “and why do I laugh, think you? Why, you are the first one who ever asked Tio Reyes for a reason. Does anybody who knows me say, ‘Why did you take Don Fulano with all his dollars safe through the mountains, and then allowthat poor devil De Tal, who had not so much as a four-penny piece, to be shot down like a dog by the wayside?’ No, even the village idiot knows Tio Reyes has reasons too great to be tossed from one to another like a ball; and yet you ask me why I have told you the secret I have kept for years, and perhaps expect an answer! No, no! that plum is not ripe enough to fall at the first puff of wind.”
“I will tell you one thing, though you tell me nothing,” said Chinita, shrewdly, after a pause: “It is not from love to Doña Isabel that you have told me this, nor for love of me either. What good have you done me by telling me I am a Garcia? Why, if I had had the sense of a parrot, I might have known it before.” It seemed to her in her excitement as if, indeed, she had always known it.
“A word to the wise is enough,” said the man, mysteriously. “Keep your knowledge to yourself, but use it to your advantage. You were sent like a package to Doña Isabel years ago, but stopped by a clumsy messenger. She finds you in her path now; let her find something alive under the shabby coverings. God puts many a sweet nut in a rough shell, many a poison in despised weeds!”
“Oh!” cried Chinita, with a wicked little laugh, though even at that moment the chords of kinship thrilled, “I am but a weed to Doña Isabel, eh? Shall I go to her and say, ‘Here is a Garcia to be trodden down’?”
She said this with so superb an air of derision that the man who unconsciously all his life had been an inimitable actor in his way, muttered a deepcarambaof enthusiastic admiration.
“I would by all the saints I could stay here to see how you will goad and sting my grand Señora,” he said vindictively. “Ay, remember you are a Garcia, with a hundred old scores to pay off. I have put the cards in your hands,—patience, and shuffle them well!”
“Patience, and shuffle your cards,”—those cards simply the knowledge that she was a Garcia, with presumably the wrongs of parents to avenge. The thoughts were not very clear in her mind, but the instincts of resentment of insult and of filial devotion were those which amid so much that is ungenerous, evil, and fierce, ever pervade thebreast of the Mexican. She turned again to ask almost imploringly, “My father—my mother—who were they?” when she found she was alone. The stranger had extorted no promise of secrecy, offered no bribe; it was as if he had put a weapon in her hand, knowing that its very preciousness and subtlety would prevent her from revealing whence she had received it, and would indicate the use to which it was to be turned.
Chinita leaned against the buttress and pondered. Strangely enough, she did not for a moment think to seek the man and demand further explanation. As she felt he had divined her character, so she divined his. He had said all he would say. After all, it was enough. At the end of an hour she left that spot, which she never saw after without a thrill of the heart, and walked straight to the doorway where Pedro sat. He was eating his supper mechanically, with a disturbed countenance, which cleared when he saw her.
“They aretamales de chile, daughter,” he said, pushing toward her the platter, upon which lay some morsels of corn-pastry and pepper-sauce, wrapped in corn-leaves. “Eat, thou must be hungry.”
Pedro sighed, for perplexity and vexation had destroyed his own appetite, and thought enviously, as Chinita’s white teeth closed on the soft pastry, which was yellow in comparison, “It is a good thing nothing but unrequited love keeps the young from supping,—and that only for a time.”
The gate-keeper watched Chinita narrowly as she was eating and drinking atole from the rough earthen jar. There was some change in her he could not understand, quite different from the passion in which he had last seen her, or the languor which would naturally succeed it. She did not talk, and something kept him from referring to the scene in the courtyard; he felt that she would resent it. Two or three times she bent over him and touched his hand caressingly; yet he was not encouraged to smooth her tangled hair, or offer any of those awkward proofs of affection which she was wont to receive and laugh at or return as the humor seized her; neither did he remind her that it was getting late, but at last rose and took from his girdle the key of the postern.
“Put it back, Pedro!” she said in her softest voice. “I shall never sleep in the hut with Florencia and the children again; yet be not afraid, I will not go to the corridor either. There is room and to spare in yon great house.” She nodded toward the inner court, muttered a good-night, and before Pedro could recover from his surprise sufficiently to speak, swiftly crossed the patio and disappeared.
Pedro looked after her stupefied. He realized that a great gulf had opened between them; that figuratively speaking, his foster-child had left him forever. He looked like one who, holding a pet bird loosely in his hand, had beheld it suddenly escape him, and soar across a wide and bridgeless chasm. Would it dash itself into atoms against the opposite cliffs, or perchance reach a safe haven? Such was the essence of the thoughts for which Pedro framed no words. “God is great,” he muttered at length, “and knows what He does;” adding with a sort of heathen and dogged obstinacy, “but Pedro still is here; Pedro does not forgetniña!” He looked up as if to some invisible auditor, crossed himself, then wearily threw himself upon his pallet; but weary as he was, the strong young subject of his cares was sunk in deep and dreamless sleep long before he closed his eyes.