As Don Rafael in an unwonted state of complacency, which drew the
anxious eyes of his mother upon him, disappeared with his jovial guest
the General, the younger officer, Don Vicente Gonzales, drew a long
breath of relief, and at a sign from Doña Feliz followed her to the
window, with the half-sombre, half-expectant air of one who is about to
speak of past events with an old and tried friend; and throwing himself
into a chair, he turned his face toward her with the air and gesture
which says more plainly than words, “What have you to tell, or ask? We
are alone; let us exchange confidences.”
In truth they were not quite alone. Chinita had half-sulkily,
half-defiantly, crept after Doña Feliz, and had sunk down in her usual
crouching attitude within the shadow of the wall. She would have
preferred to follow Don Rafael and the General in their rounds, but she
knew that was impracticable; Pedro would have stopped her at the gate,
and sent her to Florencia, or kept her close beside him,—and so even the
inferior pleasure of seeing and listening to the less attractive
stranger would have been denied her. Chinita was an imaginative child;
she used sometimes to stand upon the balcony with Chata, and gaze and
gaze far away into the blue which seemed to lie beyond the farthest
hills, and wonder vaguely what strange creatures lived there. Sometimes
her wild imagination pictured such uncouth monsters, such terrifying
shapes, that she herself was seized with nervous tremblings, and Chata
and Rosario would clasp each other and cry out in fright; but oftener
she peopled that world with cavaliers such as she had occasionally seen,
and stately dames such as she imagined Doña Isabel and the niña Herlinda
must be,—for the accidental mention of those names was as potent as
would have been the smoke of opium to fill her brain with dreams. By the
sight of Don José Ramirez in his picturesque apparel, part of these
vague dreams seemed realized; and even the quiet figure of Don Vicente
and the sound of his stranger voice had the charm of novelty. She placed
herself where she could best see his face, with infantile philosophy
contenting herself with the next best where the actual pleasure desired
was unattainable. She was very quiet, for she had naturally the Indian
stealthiness of movement, and she had besides a vague instinct that her
presence upon the corridor might be forbidden. Still she did not feel
herself in any sense an intruder; she felt as a petted animal may be
supposed to do, that she had a perfect right in any spot from which she
was not driven.
But as Doña Feliz and the new-comer were long silent, she became
impatient, and half-resolved to settle herself to sleep there and then.
She had drawn her feet under her, covering them with the ragged edges of
her skirt, and drawing her scarf over her head and shoulders, tightly
over the arms which clasped her knee, looked out as from a little tent,
and instead of sleeping became gradually absorbed in the contemplation
of the face and figure which, when seen beside those of the dashing
Ramirez, had appeared gloomy and insignificant. The young man was
dressed in black; the close-fitting riding trousers, the short round
jacket, the wide hat, which now lay on the ground beside him, being
relieved only by a scanty supply of silver buttons,—a contrast to the
usual lavishness of a young cavalier; and in its severe outlines and its
expression of gloom, his face, as he sat in the moonlight, was in entire
harmony with his dress. How rigid looked the clear-cut profile against
the dead whiteness of the column against which it rested, his
close-cropped head framed in black, his youthful brow corrugated in
painful thought. Suddenly he lifted the dark eyes which had rested upon
Doña Feliz, and turned them on the fountain which was splashing within
the circle of flowering plants and murmured:—
“I feel as though in a dream. Is it possible I am here, and she is gone,
gone forever? How often I have seen her by the side of the fountain,
raising herself upon the jutting stone-work to pluck the red geraniums
and place them in her hair! Even when I was a boy her pretty unstudied
ways delighted me,—and Herlinda as naturally as she breathed acted her
dainty coquetries. And to fancy now that all that grace and beauty is
lost to me, to the world, forever! that she is sacrificed—buried!”
He spoke bitterly and sighed, yet with that tone of renunciation which
more completely than to death itself, marks the voices of the children
of the Church of Rome as they yield their loved ones to her cloisters.
It was in the voice of Doña Feliz, as she presently replied,—
“It seems indeed a strange destiny for so bright a life; but against the
call of religion we cannot murmur, Vicente. Many and great have been the
sins of the Garcias. May Herlinda’s prayers, her vigils, her tears
condone them!” She crossed herself and sighed heavily.
“I cannot accept even the inevitable so calmly,” cried the young man in
sudden passion. “I loved her from a child; I never had a thought but for
her! She was promised me when we were boy and girl! She used to tease
me, saying she hated me, and then with a soft glance of her dark eyes
disarmed my anger. She would thrust me from her with her tiny foot, and
then draw me to her with one slender finger hooked in the dangling chain
of a jacket button, and laughingly promise to be good, breaking her word
the next moment. She would taunt me when I sprang toward her in alarm as
she leaped from the fountain parapet, and in turn would cry out in
agonies of fright as I hung from the highest boughs of the garden trees,
or when I dashed by her on the back of a half-broken horse, stopping him
or throwing him perhaps on his haunches, with one turn of the cruel bit.
Through all her vagaries I loved her, and perhaps the more because of
them; and I fancied she loved me. Even later, when she had grown more
formal and I more ardent, I believed that her coy repulses were but
maiden arts to win me on.”
“I always told Doña Isabel,” interrupted Feliz, “that such freedom of
intercourse between youth and maiden would but lead to weariness on one
side or the other. But she was a hater of old customs. She said there
was more danger in two glances exchanged from the pavement and the
balcony than in hours of such youthful chat and frolic.”
“Yet this freedom was designed to bind our hearts together,” said
Vicente. “The wish of Doña Isabel’s heart for years was to see us one
day man and wife. Yet she changed as suddenly—more suddenly and
completely than Herlinda did. What is the secret? Is not Tres Hermanos
productive enough to provide dowers for two daughters? Is all this to be
centred on Carmen? Rich men have immured their daughters in convents to
leave their wealth undivided. Can it be that Doña Isabel—”
“Be silent!” interrupted Doña Feliz, as she might have done to a foolish
child. “Let us talk no more of Herlinda, Vicente; it makes my heart
sore, and can but torture thine.”
“No, it relieves me; it soothes me,” cried Vicente. “I have longed to
come here to talk to you. Doña Isabel is unapproachable. She has
relapsed once more into the icy impenetrability that characterized her
in that terrible time so many years ago. I can just remember—”
“Let the dead rest,” cried Doña Feliz, sharply. “That is a forbidden
subject in Doña Isabel’s house. You are her guest.”
Vicente accepted the reproof with a shrug of his shoulders, and Doña
Feliz added, as if at once to turn his thoughts and afford the sympathy
he craved, “Talk to me then, if you will, of Herlinda. Do you know where
she is now?”
“Yes, in Lagos, in that dreariest of prisons the convent of Our Lady of
Tribulation. Think you Maria Santisima can desire such scourgings, such
long fastings, such interminable vigils as they say are practised there?
God grant the scoffers are right, and that the reputed self-immolations
are but imaginings,—tales of the priests to attract richer offerings to
the Church shrine. When I saw it, it was groaning beneath vessels of
gold and silver and wreaths of jewels. Oh, Feliz! Feliz! higher and
heavier than the treasures they pile on their altars are the woes these
monks and nuns accumulate upon our devoted country!”
Doña Feliz glanced around warily, but an expression of genuine
acquiescence gleamed from her eyes.
“You are where I have always hoped to see you,” she said in a low tone;
“but beware of a too indiscriminate zeal. They say Comonfort himself has
been too hasty, must draw back—retract—”
“Retract!” cried Vicente. “Never! Down, I say, with these tyrants in
priestly garments,—these robbers in the guise of saints! The land is
overrun with them; their dwellings rise in hundreds in the sunlight of
prosperity, and the hovels of the poor are covered in the darkness of
their oppressions. The finest lands, the richest mines, the wealth of
whole families have passed into their cunning and grasping hands. There
is no right, either temporal or spiritual, but is controlled by them.
Better let us be lost eternally than be saved by such a clergy. What,
saved by bull-baiters, cock-fighters, the deluders of the widow and
orphan, the oppressors of the poor!”
“You are bitter and unjust,” interrupted Doña Feliz; “remember, too, the
base ministers of the Church take nothing from the sanctity of her
ordinances.”
“So be it,” answered Vicente. “Perhaps,” he added, with a short laugh,
“you think I have lost my senses. No, no; but my personal loss has
quickened my sense of public wrongs. In losing Herlinda, I lost all that
held me to the past,—old superstitions, old deceptions. The idle boyish
life died then, and up sprang the discontented, far-seeing, turbulent
new spirit which spurns old dogmas, breaks old chains, and cries for
freedom.”
Vicente had risen to his feet; his face lighted with enthusiasm; his
pain was for a moment forgotten. The listening child felt a glow at her
heart, though his words were as Greek to her. Doña Feliz thrilled with a
purer, more reasonable longing for that liberty which as a child she had
heard proclaimed, but which had flitted mockingly above her country,
refusing to touch its ground. Her enthusiasm kindled at that of the
young man, though his sprung from bitterness. How many enthusiasms own
the same origin! Sweetness and content produce no frantic
dissatisfactions, no daring aims, no conquering endeavors.
“You belie yourself,” she said, after a pause. “It is not merely the
bitterness of your heart which has made you a patriot. The needs, the
wrongs, the aspirations of the time have aroused you. Had Herlinda been
yours, you still must have listened to those voices. With such men as
you at his call, Comonfort should not falter. The cause he espoused must
triumph.”
“Humph!” muttered Vicente, doubtfully, while Feliz, with a sudden qualm
at her outspoken approbation of measures subversive of an authority that
her training had made her believe sanctioned by heaven cried:—
“Ave Maria Santisima! what have I said? In blaming, in casting reproach
upon the clergy, am I not casting mud upon our Holy Mother the Church?”
“Feliz!” cried Vicente, impatiently, “that question too asks Comonfort.
Such irrational fears as these are the real foes of progress; and so
deeply are old prejudices and superstitions rooted, that they find a
place in every heart; no matter how powerful the intellect, how clear
the comprehension of the political situation, how scrupulous or
unscrupulous the conscience, the same ghostly fears hang over all. What
spells have those monks with their oppressions and their shameless lives
thrown over us that we have been wax in their hands? Think of your own
father,—a man of parts, generous, lofty-minded, but a fanatic. He
shunned the monté table, the bull-fight, and all such costly sports as
the _hacenderos_ love; he almost lived in the Church. But that could not
keep misfortune from his door: his cattle died; his horses were driven
away in the revolution; his fields were devastated; and he was forced to
borrow money on his lands. And to whom should he look but the
clergy,—who so eager to lend, who so suave and kind as they? And when he
was in the snare, who so pitiless in winding it around and about him,
strangling, withering his life?”
“But, Vicente,” said Feliz, in a hard, embittered voice, “in our lot
there was a show of justice. If you would have a more unmitigated use of
pitiless craft, think of the fate of your own cousin Inez.”
The child within the shadow of the wall was listening breathlessly. Her
innate rebellion against all authority made her quick to grasp the
situation; a secret detestation of the coarse-handed, loud-voiced
village priest who had succeeded Padre Francisco at Tres Hermanos
quickened her apprehension. She looked at Vicente with glistening eyes.
“Ah, well I remember poor Inez,” he said; “forced by her father to
become a nun, that at his death he might win pardon for his soul by
satisfying the greed of his councillors, she implored, wept, raved, fell
into imbecility, and died; and her sad story, penetrating even the
thickness of convent walls, was blackened by the assertion that she was
possessed of devils foul and unclean,—she, the whitest, purest soul that
ever stood before the gates of heaven.”
His voice choked; he was silent and sank again into his chair. “And
Comonfort,” he muttered presently, “strives to conciliate wretches such
as these. He is a man, Feliz, who with all his courage believes a poor
compromise better than a long fight. Ah, the world believes Mexicans
savage, unappeasable, blood-thirsty. How can they be otherwise with
these blind leaders who precipitate them into those ditches which they
fondly hope will prove roads to liberty and peace!”
Feliz looked at him with disquietude. “What, Vicente,” she said, “are
you a man to be blown about by every wind,—a mere ordinary revolutionist
seeking a new chief for each fresh battle?”
Vicente flushed at the insinuation. “One cause and a _thousand_ chiefs
if need be,” he said. “But there is now a man in Mexico, Feliz, who must
inevitably become the head of this movement,—who, like the cause, will
remain the same through all mischances. To-day he is the friend of
Comonfort, but who knows? To-morrow—”
“He may be his enemy,” ejaculated Feliz. “I wonder if in all this land
there can be found one man who can be faithful!”
“To-morrow,” said Vicente, completing his sentence, “he may be the
friend and leader of all the lovers of freedom in Mexico; and if so,
_my_ leader. I have talked with that man, and he sees to the farthest
ramifications of this great canker that is eating out the very vitals of
our land. You will hear of him soon, Feliz, if you have not done so
already. His name is Benito Juarez.”
Feliz smiled. “What, that Indian?” she said. “It is a new thing for a
gentleman of pure Spanish blood to choose such a leader. Ah, Vicente,
you disappoint me! It must be this Ramirez, who has in his every
movement the air of a guerilla, a free-fighter, who has infected you.”
“No,” answered Vicente, sullenly, “Ramirez has no influence over me;
only the fortune of war has thrown us together,—a blustering fellow on
the surface, but so deep, so astute, that none can fathom him. He is not
the man I could make my friend.”
“Where does he come from?” asked Doña Feliz with interest. “There is
something familiar to me in his voice or expression.”
“A mere fancy on your part,” answered Vicente; “just such a fancy as
makes me glance at him sometimes as he rides silent at my side, and with
a sudden start clap my hand upon my sword. I have an instinctive dread
of him,—not a fear, but such a dread as I have of a deadly reptile. I
wonder,” he added gloomily, “if it is to be my fate to take his life.”
Feliz shuddered. Chinita’s eyes flashed.
“And yet once I saved him, when we were fighting against the guerillas
of Ortiz. He was caught in a defile of the mountains; four assailants
dashed upon him at once with exultant cries; and though he fought
gallantly, had I not rushed to the rescue he must have been killed
there. Together we beat the villains off, and he fancies he owes me some
thanks; and perhaps too I have some kindness for the man I saved,—and
yet there are times when I cannot trust myself to look upon him.”
“Strange! strange indeed!” said Doña Feliz, musingly. “I have heard his
name before. Is he not the man who stopped the train of wagons by which
the merchants of Guanapila were despatching funds to make their foreign
payments, and who took fifty thousand dollars or more to pay his
troops?”
“The same,” answered Vicente; “and those troops were reinforced by a
chain-gang he had released the day before,—vile miscreants every one. We
quarrelled over each of these acts; but he laughed us all—the merchants,
the government, myself—into good-humor again. He is one of those
anomalies one detests, and admires,—crafty, daring, licentious,
superstitious, yielding, cruel, all in turn and when least expected. He
will rob a city with one hand, and feed the poor or enrich a church with
the other. But here he comes!”
The man thus spoken of was, indeed, crossing the court with Don Rafael,
who seemed to reel slightly in his walk, and was laughing and talking
volubly. “Yes, yes,” he was saying, as he came within hearing, “you are
right, Señor Don José; the herd of brood mares of Tres Hermanos is the
finest in the country. There are more than a hundred well-broken horses
in the pasture, besides scores upon scores that no man has crossed. I
sent a hundred and fifty to Don Julian a month ago. Doña Isabel
begrudges nothing to the cause of liberty.”
“Then I will take the other hundred to-morrow,” said Ramirez, lightly.
Don Rafael stared at him blankly. There was something in the General’s
face that almost sobered him. The countenance of Gonzales darkened.
“Believe me, Señor Comonfort shall know of your goodwill, and that of
the excellent lady Doña Isabel,” continued Ramirez, suavely. “She will
lose nothing by the complacency of her administrador,” and as he spoke,
he smiled half indulgently, half contemptuously, upon Don Rafael.
“You promised me that here at least no seizures should be made,”
exclaimed Don Vicente, in a low indignant voice, hot with the thought
that even the men he had himself mustered and commanded were so utterly
under the spell of Ramirez that upon any disagreement they were likely
to shift their allegiance,—for those free companies were even less to be
depended upon than the easily rebellious regulars.
“There have been no seizures, nor will there be,” answered the General,
laughing. “Don Rafael and I have been talking together as friends and
brothers; he has told me of his amiable family, and I him of my footsore
troops.”
Vicente, silenced but enraged, glared upon Ramirez as he bade farewell
to Doña Feliz. As he took her hand, he bent and lightly kissed it. The
action was a common one,—Doña Feliz scarcely noticed it; her eyes rested
upon her son, who shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, his
garrulity checked, his gaze confused and alarmed.
“We shall be gone at daybreak. You will be glad to be rid of us,” the
General said laughingly; “yet we are innocent folk, and would do you no
harm. Hark! how sweetly our followers are singing,”—and, indeed, the
plaintive notes of a love ditty faintly floated on the air. “My adieus
to the Señora de Sanchez and her lovely children.”
While the General spoke thus, with many low bows and formal words of
parting, he was quite in the shadow of the wall. Doña Feliz could scarce
see his face, but Chinita’s eyes never left it. As he turned away, a sob
rose in her throat; but for a sudden fear, she would have darted after
him. Her blood seemed afire. There was something in the very atmosphere
stirred by this man that roused her wild nature, even as the advent of
its fellow casts an admonishing scent upon the air breathed by some
savage beast.
Don Rafael stole away to bed, but Don Vicente and Doña Feliz continued
their interrupted conversation far into the night. Chinita sat in the
same place, and slumbered fitfully, and dreamed. All through her dreams
sounded the voice of the General Ramirez; all through her dreams
Gonzales followed him, with hand upon his sword.
It was near morning, when at last the child awoke, chilled and stiff,
and found herself alone in the corridor. The moon had sunk, and only the
faint light of the stars shone on the vast and silent building; but she
was not afraid. She was used to dropping asleep, as did others of the
peasant class, where best it suited her, and at best her softest bed was
a sheep-skin. She sleepily crept to the most sheltered part of the
corridor and slept again. But the stony pillow invited to no lengthy
repose; and when the dawn broke, the sound of movement in the outer
court quickly roused her, and she ran out just in time to see the
officers hastily swallowing their chocolate, while Don Rafael, Pedro,
and a crowd of laborers, shivering in their _jorongos_, were looking on,
while the sumpter mules were being laden. At the village, the camp women
were already making their shrill adieus, taking their departure upon
sorry beasts, laden with screeching chickens, grunting young pigs, and
handfuls of rice, coffee, chile, or whatever edibles they had been able
to filch or beg, tied in scraps of cloth and hung from their wide
panniers, where the children were perched at imminent risk of losing
their balance and breaking their brown necks. It was not known, however,
that such accidents had ever happened, and the women jogged merrily
away, to fall into the rear when outstripped by their better mounted
lords.
Don Rafael wore a gloomy face. A squad of soldiers had already been
despatched for the horses; his own herders were lassooing them in the
pastures, and they were presently driven past the hacienda gates,
plunging and snorting. He felt that had he not in Doña Isabel’s name
yielded them, they would have been forcibly seized; yet his conscience
troubled him. The night before he had drunk too much; the wine had
strangely affected him,—he had been maudlin and garrulous. These were
times when no prudent man should talk unnecessarily, and especially to
such a listener as the adventurer General José Ramirez.
The neighing and whinnying of the horses, the hollow ringing of their
unshod hoofs upon the road-way, the shouts of the men, the shrill voices
of the women, all combined to fill the air with unwonted sounds, and
brought the family of the administrador early from their beds. As
Vicente Gonzales, after shaking hands coldly with Don Rafael, rode away
at the head of his band, he half turned in his saddle to glance at Doña
Isabel’s balcony. At the rear of the house, a faint glow was beginning
to steal up the sky and touch the tops of the trees which rose above the
garden wall, and tinge with opal the square towers of the church; he
remembered the good Padre Francisco, and piously breathed a prayer for
his soul. The drooping rose on the balcony of what he knew to be Doña
Isabel’s chamber seemed the very emblem of death and desolation. With a
sigh he pulled his hat over his eyes and rode on; but the General, José
Ramirez, who had been longer in his adieus, caught sight of Doña Rita in
the corner balcony, leaning over her two half-dressed children. Their
two heads were close together, their laughing faces side by side, their
four eyes making points of dancing light behind the black bars of the
balcony railing.
Don José Ramirez was in a gentle mood; a sudden impulse seized him to
turn his horse and ride close to the building, turning his eyes
searchingly upon the children. Both coquettishly turned their faces
away. Rosario covered her eyes with her fingers, glancing coyly through
them; then kissing the tips of the other hand, opened them lightly above
him in an imaginary shower of kisses. No goddess could have sprinkled
them more deftly than did this infantine coquette.
Ramirez answered the salute laughingly, then turned away with a frown on
his brow. The slight delay had left him behind the troop, amid the dust
of the restive horses. Yet he made no haste to escape the inconvenience,
but yielding for the moment to some absorbing thought rode slowly. The
voice of a child suddenly caused him to arrest his horse with an
ungentle hand. He looked around him with a start,—an object indistinctly
seen under a mesquite tree caused his heart to bound. The blood left his
cheek, he shook in his saddle. His horse, as startled as he, bounded in
the air, and trembled in every limb. A moment later and José Ramirez
laughed aloud. His name was repeated. “What do you there, child?” he
cried; “thou art a witch, and hast frightened my horse. And by my patron
saint,” he added in a lower tone, “I was startled myself!”
Chinita the foundling came forward calmly, though her skirt was in
tatters, and her draggled scarf scarce covered her shoulders; but there
was an air about her as if she had been dressed in imperial robes. “Ah!”
she said quite calmly, “it is the smell of the blood that has startled
your horse; they say no animal passes here without shying and plunging,
since the American was killed!”
Ramirez glanced around him with wild eyes. “Oh, you cannot see him now,”
cried the child; “that happened long ago. No, no, there is nothing here
that will hurt you. Why do you look at me like that? It is not I—a poor
little girl—who could injure you, but men like those,” and she pointed
to the columns of soldiers whose bayonets were glistening in the rising
sun. Her eye seemed to single out Gonzales, though he was beyond her
vision. The thought of Ramirez perchance followed hers, yet he only sat
and stared at her, his eyes fixed, his body shrunken and bowed.
“See here,” she said slowly, raising herself on tiptoe, and with eager
hand drawing something from beneath her clothing, “I have a charm of
jet: Pedro put it on my neck when I was a baby. It will ward off the
evil eye. Take it; wear it. An old man gave it to Pedro on his
death-bed; he had been a soldier, a highwayman; he had fought many
battles, killed many men, yet had never had a wound! Take it!” She took
from her neck a tiny bit of jet, hanging from a hempen string, and
thrust it into his hand.
Ramirez was astounded. He looked upon her as a vision from another
world,—he who was accustomed to outbursts of strange eloquence, even
from the lips of unclothed children amid those untutored peasantry. She
seemed to him a thing of witchcraft. His eyes fixed themselves on the
child’s face as if fascinated; he saw it grimy, vivacious, beautiful but
weird, tempting, mysterious. No angel, he felt, had stopped him on his
way. He took the charm mechanically, and the child, with a joyous yet
mocking laugh, fled away. He roused as from a spell, called after her,
tossed the charm into the air, and caught it again, and called once
more, but she neither answered nor stopped. He gazed around him once
again. A superstitious awe, akin to terror, crept over him; he
shuddered, thrust the talisman into his belt, and put spurs to his
horse.
That day, for the most part, he rode alone, and when for a time he
joined Gonzales, he was silent; silent, too, was his companion, and
neither one nor the other divined the thoughts of the man who rode at
his side.