XXXIII.
The departure of Ashley Ward from Tres Hermanos was not so entirely disregarded as he had supposed. It was not Rosario only, who left her chamber at daybreak. Scarcely had she disappeared in the gloom of Doña Isabel’s apartments on her way to the favorite balcony, when her father stepped out upon the corridor, starting as his eyes fell upon Doña Feliz, who, seemingly with the spirit of unrest that pervaded the household, at the same moment emerged from her room. With a muttered salutation each abandoned the original intention of exchanging a farewell word with the departing guest; and arresting their steps at the balustrade, they leaned over and listened intently to the sounds of the early exit. The light was still so uncertain that though Don Rafael noticed, he did not wonder at, the gray tinge upon his mother’s face; it seemed only in harmony with the prevailing darkness.
The rains of the past season had been insufficient, and a murky though almost inpalpable mist, felt rather than seen, brooded over the silent landscape. It was scarcely oppressive enough to affect the young men who rode forth stirring the sluggish air, nor the eager horses lifting their heads to fill their lungs with the breath of morning, and expelling it again with a force that agitated the stillness with a sound like a blow upon water; yet it weighed inexpressibly both upon the body and mind of Don Rafael. As he had come to the corridor with a certainty in his mind that he should meet his mother, he had purposed to question her as to the actual occurrences of the day before, for the connection of Chata with the return of Ashley Ward remained entirely unexplained. That his mother was satisfied that it was not a mere vulgarrendezvousinto which she had been tempted, he was assured by her manner toward both the young man and the recreant girl; indeed, it appeared that she had scarcely noticed anincident which in that place, and at the age of Chata, was sufficient to array against a young girl the suspicions of the most trusting and generous of matrons. Yet Don Rafael could imagine no possible inducement but the voice of a lover that could have called her forth alone from the great house,—for that Chata had gone alone, he knew as well as did his keen-eyed daughter Rosario.
The last gray figure had long since disappeared from the outer court, into which they looked as into a distant and narrow vista; the clank of the horses’ hoofs upon the paving had changed to the thud upon the roadway, then ceased altogether to be heard; and Don Rafael turning his eyes upon his mother’s face, had opened his lips to question her,—when with a thrill of surprise, which became terror even before the momentary utterance was repeated, he heard her laugh that strange, unmirthful, hollow laugh that indicates a mind diseased, while she said whisperingly,—
“He is gone. Yes! yes! I unbarred the door, and Pedro picked the lock so cleverly and noiselessly that the very watchman asleep across the threshold did not hear him. Ah, I knew Gregorio would be quiet enough by daylight; but Leon was awake, wide awake. For all your tears, Isabel, he would not have gone but for me; he swore he would kill Don Gregorio for the blow he gave him. Why did you say you loved at last as a woman should the husband who was your brother’s foe to death, and that you sent him freedom that he might seek a death more worthy of his villany than by the sword of an outraged father, or the executioner’s bullet? They were bitter words, and you knew they were false,—for even with your child lying dead through his persecution, you loved him still. And when he would not stir because of your taunts, but swore he would meet his fate and shame the callous heart whose love had been as weak as her sacrifice was forced and incomplete, what was there for you to do but to throw yourself on your knees before him, and entreat him for his mother’s sake to be gone? Even then he would have stayed but for me. ‘What!’ I cried, ‘to shame your sister, you will give another victory to the husband of Dolores?’
“Ah, it is not tears that conquer such a man as Leon!In a moment he had sprung to his feet; he had thrust Isabel aside, and me too,—yes, that was nothing. Pedro held his horse, but Leon glared at him as he sprang into the saddle. ‘But for you, I should have given the last blow at midnight,’ he cried. ‘It shall be thine some day, when thy master’s account has been closed!’ and with that he was gone. Yes, he is gone. Not a sound of the horse as he gallops! Gone, and none too soon! the morning is come,”—and she uttered again that sound called a laugh.
“Mother, what hast thou?” cried Don Rafael, clasping her arm, and noticing for the first time the deep hollows beneath her brilliant eyes, and the wide circles that made more appalling their unnatural glare. “Mother, thou art dreaming! thy hand burns, and thy temples. Maria Sanctissima! dost thou not know me?”
“Know thee?—yes. Why, thou art Rafael,” she answered, letting her eyes drop for a moment on his scared and anxious face. “Why should I not know thee? Had ever woman a better son? Yes, yes, he is safe; let Don Gregorio wake when he will, Leon is away. Ah, at the last he was not so cruel,—eh, Isabel? Why should you moan and wring your hands because he vowed never again but by his death should his name shame you? Ah! Ah! Ah! well, they say he died, shot and hanged to a tree as a miscreant should be. Do you believe it, Isabel? Yet why not? God of my soul! is it only the son of PanchoValléValléthat can be pitiless? Only—” so she muttered on, in a low monotonous voice, pacing the corridor with an uncertain step, varying from the halting motion of one about to fall, to the impetuous haste with which she fancied herself urging again the unwilling flight of the sullen and revengeful youth, whom she too, with the perversity of woman’s heart, had loved as sincerely as she had condemned.
Don Rafael followed her in a perturbation of surprise and terror, which drove from his mind all other thoughts save those that his remembrance of former plague-stricken seasons forced upon his mind. Fever was in the air, and his mother was the first victim! The rainy season, which in most years cleared the black watercourses and the village itself of the accumulations of nine dry and almost torrid months, had failed to do its accustomed work. No rushingtorrents had cleared the watercourses; but instead of proving the friend of humanity water had become its enemy, by mingling scantily with the foul elements that had gathered during the long period of drouth, and which exhaled the subtle miasma which even the pure air of that elevated region was powerless to render innoxious. Don Rafael absolutely wrung his hands before the evil he foresaw, and which neither experience nor intelligence had led him to combat with any sanitary precautions. That the fever should from time to time decimate thehaciendaappeared to his mind one of the inevitable calamities of life, no more to be avoided than the spring floods or the blasting lightning or the outburst of volcanic fires. But had all these forces combined assailed him at once, his consternation could not have been greater than to witness in his mother the delirium which testified to the dreaded typhoid. As has been intimated, his love for his mother was of no common order; without being weak in judgment or irresolute in character, he had been accustomed to share with her his every thought, and their sentiments and aims were ever in such perfect accord that a dissentient word had never arisen between them.
As Don Rafael followed his mother in her erratic and excited movements, scarcely conscious of what he did, or of anything except that with each moment her talk grew more distracted, while her thoughts were persistently fixed upon the events and woes and passions of by-gone years, a door at the end of the corridor was timidly pushed open, and Chata’s face peeped anxiously out. Had Don Rafael’s thoughts been free, he would have wondered that the girl was fully dressed at such an early hour; but he did not even heed the explanation she hurriedly gave as she advanced to meet him.
“I would not have left my grandmother alone, but she forbade me to come,” she said. “Oh, I could not sleep. I thought the morning would never dawn. I went to her with the first light, but she would not listen to me. She bade me leave her; and I thought it was because she was angry, but it was this! Oh, Father, is it a sickness? See, she does not know me?Mama grande, it is I; it is your Chata.”
“Be silent!” exclaimed Don Rafael, the more sharply because of his extreme alarm. “Fly, Chata! fly to thy mother, thy sister! Call old Selsa, any one who has sense and knows what remedies to bring. Why do you stare? Do you think my mother is mad? It is the fever. It is not for nothing that the rains have been delayed so long. Pitying Saints, as I rode by the ditches last week they were black as pitch and foul as a vulture’s quarry. Run! I will lead her to her room. Ay, ay, Mother, thou art strong, and not so old yet,”—and with the tenderness of a child and the devotion of a lover the son guided the steps of the delirious yet gentle woman, who, half-conscious of her state, half-resentful of care, suffered herself to be led into the chamber she had quitted in apparent health but a brief quarter of an hour before.
Apparent health only, for she had passed an utterly sleepless night, strangely excited by the events of the day, yet unable to fix her mind upon them. Chata, upon her return to the hacienda, had sought her own chamber; and in the press of other thoughts Doña Feliz had failed to follow and to question her upon the strange escapade, which the whole character and bearing of the young girl combined to render utterly inexplicable,—for she had no data by which to connect it with the appearance of Ramirez at the cemetery, and she absolved Ashley Ward from any pre-arrangement with the young girl as completely as though they had been found a thousand miles asunder. As was natural, suspicions of some precocious love, of which some one of the many volatile and dashing youth that had lately gathered at the hacienda was the object, haunted the mind of Doña Feliz; but she rejected them with disdain, promising herself upon the early morning to demand the truth, not doubting she should learn it. Even while awake to the importance of the incident, and inwardly debating it, she was conscious that the remembrance of it, as well as of Ashley and his strange participation in the life-drama in which she had enacted so forced and painful a part, constantly strove to elude her, and was recalled with an effort that with every hour grew greater and less effective; while all the events and actors of long ago passed in endless review before her,—Doña Isabel in her matronly girlhood, soothing andbribing with tender words and lavish gifts her wilful half-brother; Don Gregorio; the dying Norberto; the scowling and furious abductor; then Herlinda and John Ashley. The pale procession, spectral yet real, voiceless yet each repeating with irresistible eloquence the tale of his love, his guilt or anguish, passed before her, thrusting aside, as often as they re-appeared, the forms of those who at this new and critical point had appeared upon the scene.
As the night passed, she was perfectly aware of this tantalizing inability to command her thoughts; and as again and again she set herself to follow the probable course and effect of Ashley Ward’s intervention in the fate of the man who to her seemed gifted with demoniacal powers for evil, and an absolute invulnerability to human vengeance, or as she began in mind to question Chata, the persons both of the young man and the girl seemed to fade from before her, and the voices that should have replied, were those which had been familiar years before,—oftenest that of Herlinda in wild repetition of her unhappy love, and agonized entreaties for the babe she was but to embrace and forever relinquish. Through it all Doña Feliz had retained the thought of Ashley’s departure; and with some vague thought that the sight of him would calm her fevered brain, she instinctively strove to accomplish the resolve with which she had begun the night. And thus her last conscious act before the positive delirium of the fever seized her, had been to look, with the half-fearful gaze of one who invokes yet dreads the vengeance of heaven, upon him who seemed to her morbid and superstitious mind fraught with a mission to avenge and right the innocent,—both the living and the dead.
Don Rafael, in consternation, had recognized at once the serious character of his mother’s illness. As he called aloud for help, and Chata with white and affrighted face hastened to obey his command, Rosario, followed by her mother in some confusion, appeared from the farther corridor. Too much bewildered and alarmed to wonder at seeing his daughter also dressed and abroad at such an hour, her father exclaimed in impatience at the voluble reproaches of Doña Rita, who, pushing Rosario from the side of Doña Feliz, bade her cease from such tempting of Providence, affirming that for her own sins she (DoñaRita) must have been burdened with the plague of so reckless a child, and praying her in the name of the Holy Babe to fly from infection lest she should break her mother’s heart by her premature decease. To all of which Rosario submitted with a sobbing declaration that she was already faint and ill, whereupon Doña Rita hastily retreated to her own room, dragging Rosario with her; and in spite of his hurriedly formed resolution to the contrary, Don Rafael was forced to confide his mother to the care of Chata and of the servants, who, subservient to the slightest wish even of this inexperienced girl, were however absolutely useless without the guiding presence of a superior.