XXXII.
“José Ramirez is my father!”
Had her words been a thunderbolt hurled at Ashley’s feet, they could not have astounded him more. The daughter of Ramirez!
“I do not believe it! I cannot believe it!” he exclaimed, with no thought for courteous words. “Oh, that is a tale for a jealous lover! but I am not one. Anything, anything rather than that, Señorita, would serve to explain the reason of your presence here!”
“Why have I spoken?” cried the young girl with tears. “Why have I broken my promise, and only to be disbelieved and scorned? O, Señor, I know not what it was in you that wrung the words from me! Did he not command me to be silent till he gave me leave to speak? He is my father, yet I have disobeyed his first command. In the letter the woman brought me, two days after he left El Toro, and in which he commanded me to meet him here upon this day, he enjoined secrecy again and again; and yet I forgot. Miserable girl that I am!”
Ashley had lived among Mexicans long enough to learn something of their ideas of filial duty. No matter how vile, how cruel, how debased the parent may be, the duty of the child is perfect obedience and respect; the petted infant in its most wilful moments ceases its passionate cries to kiss the father’s hand; the young man deprives himself, his wife and children, to minister to his aged parents; he who cannot or will not work, esteems it a pious act to become a bandit upon the highway rather than that his father or mother shall look to him for food or even for luxuries in vain,—and thus he comprehended the remorse of this conscience-stricken child, as the conviction rushed over him that her belief might indeed be true. There was that in the contour of her face which resembled that of Ramirez more markedly than the meregeneral type that in her babyhood had given her that resemblance to Rosario, which daily grew less, and indeed had never been apparent to Ashley; though in her face he had traced resemblances which had puzzled and bewildered him, and which as he gazed upon her now became still more confusing.
As they had been conversing, Ashley and Chata had gradually drawn near to the door, where the light fell full upon the agitated girl. Yes, in the square brows, the heavily fringed lids resting upon the olive cheeks,—too broad beneath the eyes for beauty, but singularly delicate about the mouth and chin,—so far she resembled Ramirez; or was it but a common Aztec type? The mouth itself, sensitive, refined,—which should have parted but for laughter,—quivered with emotion, and the large gray eyes she lifted to Ashley’s were singularly grave and earnest. Where had he seen such a mouth, such eyes? The contrasts and combinations in the face confused him. Never had he seen its counterpart, yet fancy might under other circumstances have led him upon wild theories. That face familiar, yet strange, had haunted him since he had first seen it. Vainly he had sought in his memory for some picture, some dream, with which to connect it. Now, though he had seen Ramirez, though Chata declared herself his child, the same feeling of uncertainty, of tantalizing familiarity yet strangeness, remained; the association of one with the other did not even momentarily satisfy him. He was not conscious that the face appealed to his imagination rather than to his memory, or that it had always awakened an interest different from that with which he had looked upon others. Certainly its beauty had not delighted him; even as he looked at her now, the witching, glowing, ever-changing countenance of Chinita rose before him. “Strange! strange!” he murmured. “What can be the mystery that from the first has seemed to hover around you, to separate you from the rest?”
“Ah, yes!” she said humbly. “I have realized that myself. Oh, for a long, long time I have felt as a stranger among them all,—they so good, so true; and I—O God, who am I? Ah, I used to pity Chinita, but they have given her her proper place. It must have been aworthy one, or Doña Isabel would not have made her her child. But when they separate me from Don Rafael what shall I be?”
“Do not think of it. He—this Ramirez—is gone, perhaps never to return,” said Ashley, soothingly. “And if not, why should you go with him? Appeal to Don Rafael, to Doña Feliz.”
“Doña Rita has told me already that would be worse than useless,” replied Chata. “Don Rafael and Doña Feliz have already interfered in his plans for me; to thwart him further would be to make him their deadly enemy. Oh, you know not, Señor, what men like Don José Ramirez will do; and yet he is my father!”
Her voice failed in an agony of terror and shame. Ashley’s words died on his lips. Here was a grief he could hardly understand, against which he could offer no advice to one whose education and mind were so different from his own. What could he say to her to lessen the burden of her grief? Surely not, as he would have done to Chinita, that she should strive to content herself in a destiny which would raise her from an obscure station to wealth,—for the revolutionary chieftain, he supposed, had never-failing resources,—and to a certain dignity, as the daughter of a popular hero. He could have imagined Chinita as glorying in such a position, and Rosario as reigning with a thousand airs and graces in the miniature court around her; but here was a child, a very child, shrinking from the possible contact with cruel and conscience-hardened adventurers, and stricken to the heart by the thought of losing the heritage of an honest name.
Presently Chata spoke again, as though to speak to this stranger in whom she had involuntarily confided was, in spite of her self-reproach, to lay her long repression, her doubts and fears, before a shrine. Almost incoherently, in the rapid utterance of overwhelming excitement, she poured forth the story of the interview of Ramirez and Doña Rita which she had overheard in the garden at El Toro. In her earnestness she did not even omit the project which had been discussed for uniting her future with that of Ruiz. Ashley’s teeth became set and his lips pressed each other as he listened. Here indeed was confirmation of the villain’s claim; and yet—and yet—
“It cannot be!” he interrupted. “I cannot believe it. You say yourself, your very being recoils from him—ah, it must be for some deep cause you hate him so! And I too—I hate him. Did I not tell you I have a long arrear of wrong to settle, and—”
“You!” she ejaculated wonderingly. “What wrong can he have done to you? Was it he who robbed and wounded you?”
“No, no!” he answered. “Those were but the chances of travel. There is something far greater than that; but while you believe him to be your father, I will not talk to you of avenging myself. I should be a brute indeed to add a feather’s weight to your trouble. Do not think of that again; but believe me, there is some mystery neither of us understands. The truth may be far from what you think it. I will demand it of Don Rafael, of Doña Feliz—they must know.”
She was looking at him wonderingly, almost in awe, with those large, clear, gray eyes, which seemed to have in them the reflection of a purer, calmer sky than the intense and fiery one beneath which she was born. As he looked at her, her very dress seemed a disguise, so entirely did she seem disassociated from the scenes in which he found her.
“Ah,” she said hopelessly, clasping her hands, “you do not know my people as I do. I have not asked Don Rafael or Doña Feliz to tell me the secret of my birth. They have concealed it for some weighty reason, and until the time comes when they judge it right for me to know, I might plead with them in vain. By going to them I should but lose their love, and become the object of their suspicion and doubt. Oh, I could not endure that, I would not endure it! Doña Rita is changed, is cold, distrustful; and why should I by useless haste bring their anger upon her? No, no, Señor, I beg, I entreat you, say nothing to Don Rafael. Let me be in peace as long as I may. My father has not come to-day; perhaps he has forgotten me!”
“You reason wildly,” said Ashley. “I cannot understand these strange duplicities; yet I know it is quite true I should gain nothing by direct questioning. What have I ever gained? No, it is to Doña Isabel I will go, and to Ramirez himself. But promise me, Chata,” he addedearnestly, “promise me, by all you hold most sacred, never to leave the hacienda to meet him or any messenger of his. Promise for your own sake, and I swear I will leave no measure untried to free you from this strange bondage.”
He had expressed himself with difficulty throughout, but she caught his meaning eagerly. “Oh, if I dared to promise!” she murmured. “But it is the duty of the child to obey. Besides, he would tell me the truth; even this very day I thought I should have known the wretched story,—oh, I am sure it is a wretched one! Well, I have a respite,—a little respite. Go, Señor; you have been kind,—be kind still by being silent. I must go; the sun will soon set. Ah, unfortunate that I am, the men will be coming in from the fields, the women will be at their doors,—how shall I ever return without being seen?”
Here was indeed a difficulty. The strictly nurtured girl had never in her life been outside the precincts of the village alone; that she then should be, and with a young man, would occasion endless gossip. The two involuntary culprits looked at each other with blank faces,—Ashley in absolute dismay, for he had heard of the strict requirements of Mexican customs and etiquette, and knew to what cruel innuendo this young girl had exposed herself. He realized then for the first time how great her courage had been in venturing forth in obedience to the command of Ramirez.
“Chata, Chata! for God’s sake,” he cried, “go at once! I will remain. Your mad freak will be pardoned this time, when they see you are alone.”
“Alone!” she echoed, a crimson flush suffusing her face as she fully realized the significance of his words, and saw that with a sudden faintness he leaned against the wall, spent with excitement and fatigue.
“Yes, yes,” he said wearily, “none will know I am here. The night will soon pass; in the morning I will wander in to one of the huts. They will fancy I was lost on the mountain. None will think—you will be safe.”
“Iamsafe,” said the girl with sudden resolution. “Would a woman of your own country leave you to hunger and shiver through all the night in a desolate placelike this? Ah,” she added with a long-drawn breath and a tremor, “even ghosts are here.”
Ashley smiled. “I do not fear them,” he said. “I fear but for you. Go! go at once! And yet before you go, promise!—promise me never to run these risks again; never in any place to meet Ramirez!”
In his earnestness he clasped her hand and gazed eagerly into her limpid eyes. “I promise, yes, I promise,” she said hurriedly. “But I will not leave you,—weak, fasting, fainting!”
She looked up at him with the angelic pity in her face that innocent children feel before they have learned distrust. Ashley read the perfect trust, the perfect guilelessness, of her tender nature. Rather, he thought, would he die than cast a cloud upon her name; and what, after all, would matter the privations of a few hours? That he must not be seen in the neighborhood for some time after her unusual wanderings was a foregone conclusion. How should he combat her resolution? Truly, this gentle girl had deep springs of action within her. For duty and right she could be a very heroine.
As these thoughts passed through his mind, a sudden breeze stole through the open gate and reached the lobby; there was a faint smell of cactus flowers, and a rustle of the dry grass. The effect was weird and ghostly. A shadow fell between them. Had the sun plunged down beneath the western hills? They glanced up and started apart,—Doña Feliz was before them.
The ordinarily grave and self-possessed woman was for a moment the most agitated of the three. She gasped for breath. She had been walking fast, but it was not that alone which caused the earth apparently to reel beneath her. She had found Chata, whose disappearance from the hacienda she had discovered at the moment when a cry had run through the house that the horse of the young American had returned riderless; that the youth had doubtless met an evil fate. She had found them both,—and together!
She pressed her hands over her eyes as though to shut out some horrid vision; a moan broke from her lips,—then she caught Chata in her arms and glared at Ashley with concentrated anguish and fury. Had one guiltythought possessed him, or had he meditated a doubtful act, her glance would have covered him with confusion. As it was, he read in her expressive face and gesture a volume of deep and terrible significance, far different from that which an anxious duenna ordinarily casts upon the imagined trifler with the affections of her charge. Nothing of that assumption of virtuous indignation, yet of flattered satisfaction, which in the midst of remonstrance gives indication of a certain sympathy and inclination to condone the offence in consideration of its cause, was apparent. Doña Feliz evidently had in her mind no lover’s venial follies. This meeting was to her a tragedy,—the very culmination of woes.
Ashley read something of this in her expression and gesture, and hastened to reassure her, by giving a partial account of the reasons of his return. The anxious guardian of innocence would perhaps have thought his turning aside at the instance of Pepé to view his cousin’s grave, his lingering there, the departure of the servant, the flight of his horse, all a fabrication, but for the meeting with his cousin’s murderer, which the young man recounted with startling brevity and force, unconsciously regaining in the recital much of the excitement and deep indignation which had thrilled him at the time of the encounter, and which had gradually subsided amid the new complications that Chata’s words had opened before him.
Involuntarily Ashley refrained from any allusion to the fact that the young girl had ventured forth to meet this man Ramirez; and acute though she was, it did not suggest itself to Doña Feliz, who seemed lost in wonder at the almost miraculous chance which after so many years had brought into contact the secret murderer and him whose mission it seemed to avenge the innocent blood. In his recital, Ashley had not mentioned the name of the self-confessed assassin. Doña Feliz did not ask it,—perhaps she inferred that it remained unknown to him,—yet Ashley was certain his identity was no problem to her. Had she guessed the secret all these years? Had she screened the guilty and fostered the innocent, at the same time?
Deep as was her interest in his tale, full as was her acceptance of the fact that the meeting of Ashley Wardand Chata was purely accidental, Doña Feliz did not exhibit a tithe of that horror and dismay which was depicted upon the countenance of Chata, who listened breathlessly,—her lips apart, her hair pushed back, her startled eyes opened wide. Ashley would gladly have recalled his words as he looked at her. Every particle of color had faded from her face.
In her absorption in Ashley’s words, Doña Feliz had ceased to regard or even remember the young girl, who suddenly recalled herself to that lady’s mind.
“Doña Feliz,” she murmured in an agonized and pleading voice, “when my mother forsook me, why did you not suffer me to die? Oh why, why did I live to hear such horrors, to know such wretchedness as this?”
As if in a frenzy, before either thought to stop her, or found words with which to answer or recall her, she ran out from the lobby,—her small figure passing unimpeded through the cactus-guarded gateway,—and fled across the plain toward the hacienda. She was young and strong,—excitement lent wings to her feet. Doña Feliz and Ashley standing together in the gateway looked at each other in amazement. The girl continued her flight until she reached the outskirts of the village. There a horseman stopped her. Even at that distance they recognized Don Rafael, and saw that Chata clung to him passionately when he dismounted.
“She is safe!” murmured Doña Feliz. “Rafael will know how to account for her presence with him.”
“Yes,” thought Ashley; “these Mexicans fortunately know how to coin a plausible tale as well for a good cause as for a bad one.”
They saw that Don Rafael, placing Chata on his horse before him, had turned in the direction of the hacienda, and was signalling to the vaqueros lingering in uncertainty at the gate.
“They will be here in a few moments, Señor,” said Doña Feliz, calmly. “We must lock the gates and conceal the keys. You must be found outside of, not within, these walls.”
Ashley assented, and within a few moments, and in silence, their necessary task was accomplished. Doña Feliz then led the way toward the village, walking rapidlyas though impelled by the agitation of her thoughts or a desire to escape question. Ashley kept pace with her with some effort, though the chill which had come with the grayness of evening over the landscape revived and strengthened him. The breeze was whistling in the tall corn in the fields as they passed them; the cattle were lowing in the yards; the distant sound of horses’ feet was beginning to be heard; the riders like gray columns were seen approaching. Ashley laid his hand upon the arm of Doña Feliz. She turned and looked at him. His face was to her a volume of reproach and question. Her voice broke forth in a great sob.
“Ashley! Ashley!” she exclaimed, “do you not comprehend that a vow stronger than death controls me? Ask me nothing, but follow the indications which the good God—Fate—Providence—has given you. The time may come—for strange things are happening in our land—when I may be free once more. Now I may only watch and wait and pray. Ah! what hard tasks for a woman such as I am! But I have vowed; I cannot retract!”
“You are wrong!” cried Ashley. “How strange that a woman of so much intelligence, of a conscience so pure, can suffer herself to be led by the spurious customs and traditions that pride and priestcraft together have fastened upon her people! But your very reticence, Doña Feliz, confirms my beliefs. I will go as you recommend, as my own judgment urged me, to follow the clew I have so unexpectedly obtained. Do not think that a vulgar and wolfish desire for vengeance alone actuates me; but justice must be done. Even for Chata’s sake, this man must not be suffered to continue his course unchecked.” He would have added more, but Gabriel and Pancho, the vaqueros, came galloping up with vivas and cries of welcome.
“Praised be our Holy Mother, and all the saints!” exclaimed one. “Don Rafael told us you were safe. Who would have thought the Señora and the niña Chatita would have found you no farther away than deaf and blind Refugio’s? Ay, Doña Feliz, without seeking, finds more than will a dozen unlucky ones, though they have spectacles and lanterns to aid them. In the name of reason, Don ’Guardo, how happened your nag to throw you andgallop back thus? He is manageable enough with any of us—” and there was a suspicion of irony in the solicitude of the horseman, which did not escape Ashley as he answered,—
“To-morrow you shall have the whole tale. These roads of yours are no place for a man to linger on alone. But for the present, remember I have a wound not too well healed, and am more anxious for supper than for recounting adventures.”
“Ah! ah! he was stopped on the road by banditti,—and has escaped.” The vaqueros regarded Ashley with vastly increased respect. Their numbers were augmented as they neared the hacienda; and when the party reached the gates, wild rumors of Ashley’s prowess were already flying from mouth to mouth.
Ashley did not present an imposing figure as he passed in between the crowds of admiring women; but he served to turn their thoughts from the unprecedented appearance of Chata, which was but unsatisfactorily explained by Don Rafael’s ready fiction that she and Doña Feliz had been piously visiting at the hut of old Refugio, and that upon the arrival of Ashley there, the young girl had hastened to meet her father, and give him news of the American’s safety.
“Doña Feliz is even too careful of her grandchildren,” said some of the more liberal. “What harm would have come to the maiden from a walk of a few minutes, or a few words spoken, with an honorable young man such as he seems to be? Now, if it were Don Alonzo, or that gay young Captain Ruiz, for example!”
Rosario, who had been leaning over the balcony as Ashley arrived, heard something of what was said, and smiled. She was not at all ready to believe that Chata’s walk had extended only as far as the hut of blind Refugio; and that it had not been made in company with Doña Feliz she was quite certain. But she had no time just then to interest herself in Chata’s affairs,—her own were far too engrossing; for the new clerk whom Carmen, at Doña Isabel’s request, had sent from Guanapila, evidently was much more intent upon studying the charms of Rosario than his new duties, and in seeking favor in her eyes than in those of the administrador himself. The new clerk was DonAlonzo, and Don Alonzo was a handsome fellow, with the face of an angel, Doña Rita said,—a contrast indeed to that little brown monkey Captain Ruiz; and Rosario smiled coyly, and did not gainsay her.
The next morning at an unusually early hour this same Don Alonzo tapped on Ashley’s door. “Pardon, Señor,” he said, “but the horses and servants are ready, and I have orders myself to accompany you beyond the boundaries of Tres Hermanos.”
The announcement was not a surprise. Ashley had arranged his departure with Don Rafael upon the preceding evening. He dressed hastily, and while partaking of his cup of chocolate, glanced often around him, in expectation of the appearance of Don Rafael or his mother; but in vain. The American could no longer hope to learn at a parting moment what each had chosen to withhold. Irrationally, and against all likelihood, he ventured to hope that Chata might steal forth for a farewell word. He laughed at himself afterward for the thought, saying that the air of intrigue had begun to affect his own brain.
Sooner than was usual, even in that land of early movement, Don Alonzo warned him it was growing late. It was not too late or early for Rosario to wave her little brown hand from her mother’s window in token of adieu. Ashley did not see it, but he for whom it was intended did. So with more foreboding and reluctance than he could have imagined possible but a few hours before, Ashley once more rode forth from Tres Hermanos,—this time with a definite object, from which he felt there could be no turning back, no possible end but his own death or the downfall of a man to whom but yesterday he had been utterly indifferent, but who to-day was inseparable from all his thoughts, his passions, his purposes,—Ramirez therevolucionario, the declared murderer of John Ashley, the declared father of the young girl who seemed the very incarnation of honor and sensibility, of tenderness and purity.