The pale dawn, creeping over the hills behind which the sun was still
hidden, revealing to the accustomed sight of Doña Feliz a narrow,
irregular street of adobe hovels; a tiny church with a square tower,
where the swallows were sleepily chirping; around and behind, stray
trees and patches of gardens; upon the waste of sand, where cacti and
dusty sagebrush grew, up to the hills where the pines began, a road of
yellow sand, winding like a sinuous serpent over all; two or three early
loiterers, with eyes turned toward the diligence, which thus early was
making its way from the night’s resting place toward the distant
city,—such was the scene upon which the trusted servant and friend of
the Garcias looked on a morning early in November. She was standing in
the low gateway that gave entrance to a garden overgrown with weeds and
vines. These vines spread from the fig and orange trees, and half
covered the ruinous walls of a house which had once, where the
surroundings were so humble, ranked as an elegant mansion, and which
indeed had served in years gone by as a temporary retreat, small but
attractive, for such of the family of Garcia as desired a few days’
retirement from their accustomed pursuits. Here the ladies had wandered
amid the flowers, and sat under the arbors where the purple grapes
clustered, and honeysuckle and jessamine mingled their rich odors; and
the gentlemen had smoked their cigarettes in luxurious ease, or sallied
forth to shoot the golden plover in its season, or hunt the deer amid
the surrounding hills. This had in fact been a _quinta_, or pleasure
resort, but since the days of revolutions and bandits it had been
utterly abandoned to the rats and owls, or to the nominal care of the
ragged brood who huddled together in the half-ruinous kitchen; and here
the romance of Herlinda’s life had been enacted.
When Doña Isabel Garcia had desired to send her daughter from the
hacienda of Tres Hermanos, in order to remove her from the neighborhood
of Ashley and give her the benefit of change, she had at first been
sadly perplexed where to send her. Should she go to her relatives in the
city, it was possible that her dejected mien and unguarded words might
give them a suspicion of the truth,—and Doña Isabel detested gossip,
particularly family gossip; besides, she looked upon Herlinda’s marriage
with Vicente Gonzales as certain, and dreaded lest the faintest rumor of
the young girl’s attachment should reach his ears, and awaken in him the
slumbering demon of jealousy,—which, though it might rouse the young
soldier as a lover to fresh ardor only, might incite him later as her
husband to a tyranny which the mind of Herlinda was ill disposed to
bear. In this dilemma the house at Las Parras had occurred to her. Once
in her own girlhood she had visited the place, and she remembered it as
a most charming sylvan retreat; and although she knew it to be situated
in the outskirts of a small hamlet scarce worthy of the name of village,
and that it had been abandoned for years, its isolation and abandonment
at that juncture precisely constituted its attractions; and thither,
under the care of Don Rafael the administrador and of Mademoiselle La
Croix, Herlinda had been sent. Precautions had been taken to baffle the
inquiries of Ashley as to their route and destination, which, as has
been said, an accident revealed to him just when his mind was most
strongly excited by the mystery which his disposition and training, as
well as his love, led him passionately to resent. Hither, too, when a
new and still more important need had risen, Herlinda had been brought.
Doña Isabel had been unaffectedly shocked, when, after a tortuous
journey by diligence in order to evade conjecture as to their
destination, they had at nightfall arrived at this deserted mansion, and
had passed through the narrow door-way set in the high stone-wall that
surrounded the garden, and had looked upon its tangled masses of half
tropic vegetation, and entered the ruin, to find that only three or four
small rooms opening upon the vineyard were habitable. But in these few
rooms they and their secret were safe,—safe as if buried in the caves of
the earth. Herlinda looked around her for familiar faces, but all she
saw were strange to her. Doña Isabel had guarded against recognition of
Herlinda, and even her own identity was disguised. To the women and the
old man who performed the work of the kitchen and went the necessary
errands, but who were rigidly excluded from the private rooms, she was
known only as a friend of Doña Isabel Garcia,—one Doña Carlota, whose
family name awoke no interest or inquiry.
After satisfying her hungry anxiety to catch a glimpse of the servants,
and finding them strangers, Herlinda made no further effort to encounter
them. She was very ill after arrival, and it is doubtful whether the
attendants—dull, apathetic creatures—ever saw her face plainly from the
day she entered the house until that of which we speak, when Doña Feliz
stood in the low doorway in the garden wall, and looked toward the
diligence which appeared indistinctly, a moving monster in the distance.
She glanced back occasionally, half impatiently, half sorrowfully, to
the house. Through the open door of it presently glided Doña Isabel. Her
head was bent, her olive cheeks were deadly pale, and she shivered as
with cold as she stepped out into the dusk of early morning,—or rather
late night, for it was an hour when not a creature around the place was
stirring, not even the birds; a wide-eyed cat stared at her as she
passed down the narrow walk, and she shrank even from its gaze. She held
something under her black reboso, which upon reaching Feliz she passed
to her with averted eyes.
“Take it,” she said; “Herlinda is asleep. We trust you, Feliz. I in my
shame, she in her despair, we give this child to you, never to ask it of
you again, never to know whether it lives or dies.”
The passionless composure with which she said these words, the absolute
freedom from any tone of vindictiveness, gave to them the accent of
perfect trust. There was nothing of cruelty, nothing of hesitancy in the
tone or words or manner with which Doña Isabel Garcia laid in the arms
of Feliz a new-born sleeping infant, and thus separated herself and her
family from the fate which with absolute confidence she placed in the
hands of the statuesque, cold-faced woman who stood there to receive it.
But with the child in her arms a great change swept over the face of
Feliz. One could not have told at a glance whether it was loathing and
resentment, or an agony of pity, that convulsed her features, or all
combined. “My words are all said,” she murmured. “Herlinda is, you say,
resigned. Oh, Doña Isabel, Doña Isabel, you will rue this hour! I do
your will; do not you blame or accuse me in the future!”
The diligence had driven through the village. To the astonishment of the
idlers it stopped before the wall that circled the half-ruined _quinta_;
a woman stepped through the doorway, and was helped to her seat. She had
evidently been expected by the driver. They would have been still more
surprised had they also seen the lady who waved a white hand at parting,
and who turned back into the garden with a deep-drawn sigh of relief,
followed by a groan that seemed to rend and distort the lips through
which it came, and which she vainly strove to keep from trembling as she
entered the house, and answered the call of her awakened daughter.
What can I say of the scene that followed? What that will awaken pity,
unstained with blame, for that poor creature, so powerless in that land
that her sisters, in others more blessed, perhaps, find it impossible to
put themselves in imagination in her place even for a single moment? But
the captive slave can writhe; woman, the pampered toy, may weep: and
where woman was both (for even in Mexico a new era is dawning on her),
she could struggle and despair and die,—but, as Herlinda knew too well,
in youth at least she could not assert her womanhood, and make or mar
her own destiny. In such a land, in such a cause, what champion would
arise to beat down the iron laws of custom which manacled and crushed
her? Not one!