Though Chinita as was usual was made the scapegoat for Chata’s
fault,—Doña Rita averring that the girl possessed an irresistible power
for evil over her own innocent children,—Chata on this occasion felt
herself most heavily punished, for Don Rafael strengthened his wife’s
fiat against the dangerous temptress, the gate-keeper’s child, by
absolutely prohibiting her entrance to his house. Chata wept for her
playmate, and for many days Rosario moped and sulked; while Chinita hung
disconsolate—as the Peri at the gate of Paradise—about the entrance to
the court, finding small solace in the young fawn Pepé had given her,
though she twined her arms around it and held its head against her
bosom, that its large pensive eyes might seem to join in the appeal of
her own. And perhaps the two aided by time and Chata’s grief might have
conquered; but there was a sudden interruption of the quiet course of
life at Tres Hermanos.
One day Chinita found the whole house open to her; there was no one
there either to welcome or repulse her save Doña Feliz. Don Rafael, with
his wife and children, had obeyed a sudden call, and had hastened to the
dying bed of Doña Rita’s mother. For the first time in her life Chata
had left the hacienda. Rosario had twice before gone with her mother to
visit relatives, but for various reasons Chata had remained at home.
Doña Rita seemed half inclined to leave her at this time also; but Don
Rafael cut the matter short by ordering her few necessaries to be
packed, and in a flutter of excitement, perhaps heightened by the frown
upon her mother’s face, Chata took her seat in the carriage that was to
bear her far beyond the circle of hills which had heretofore bounded her
vision.
What a pall seemed to fall upon the place when they were all gone!
First, a great stillness pervaded the court and corridors where the
children’s voices were wont to ring; and then hollow, ghostly noises
woke the echoes. A second court was now opened which long had been
closed, though the fountains played there, and the flower-pots were all
rich with bloom. The doors of rooms which before at best had been only
left ajar were opened wide; and Doña Feliz, with a few of her most
trusty servants, swept out the long accumulated dust, and let the light
stream in upon the disused furniture. Chinita had caught glimpses of
these things before, indistinct, uncertain, as though they were far
memories of a past existence. She and Chata had often talked of them in
days when they played at being grand ladies, and in imagination they
were rich and beautiful; but when she actually stood in the broad
sunshine, and saw the gilt and varnish, the variegated stuffs and great
mirrors, the reality seemed a dream, from which she feared to waken. For
all these material things appealed to something in the child’s nature
which it appeared impossible she should have inherited from a long line
of plebeian ancestors,—a something that was not a mere gaping admiration
for what was bright and beautiful and dazzling by its very height of
separation from the poor possibilities of her life, but which one would
say had sprung directly from the influences of lavish splendor. There
was an impulse toward appropriation and enjoyment in the actual touch of
these attributes of an aristocratic life, an instinctive knowledge of
the uses of things she had never before seen or heard of, which seemed
to come as naturally into her mind as would the art of swimming to a
duckling that had passed its first days in the coop with its
foster-mother the hen. Nothing surprised her, and the delight she felt
was not merely that of novelty, but that of the satisfaction of a
long-felt want. Doña Feliz had not forbidden her entrance when she first
saw her at the door of Doña Isabel’s apartment, but watched her with
grave surprise as she wandered through the long rooms, sometimes picking
up a fan, a hand-glass, a cup, and unconsciously assuming the very air
and walk of a grand lady,—an air so natural that even in her tattered
red skirt it never for a moment made her appear grotesque.
Don Rafael returned home in the midst of the work of renovation. He had
left his family with the dying mother, forced to return by the
exigencies of business,—but ill pleased to leave them, for the roads
were full of bandits, and the country was infested with wandering bands,
as dangerous in their professed military character as the openly avowed
robbers. They enjoyed immunity in all their depredations and deeds of
violence, because they were committed under the standard of the Governor
of the State, José Ramirez,—for to his _rôle_ of military chieftain the
adventurer had added that of politician. In this _rôle_ he had hastened
the tottering fortunes of President Comonfort to their fall, by seizing
in his name a large sum of money belonging to foreign merchants, and
with it buying over the troops under his command,—first to declare him
military governor, and then to join with enthusiasm the clerical forces,
which sprang into being as if by magic, bringing with them money in
plenty, and gay uniforms, which put to shame the rags which the Liberals
wore and which the resources of the legitimate government were
insufficient to replace with more attractive garb. For months the name
of José Ramirez had rung through the land in alternate shouts of triumph
and joy and howls of execration. The prison doors had been thrown open,
and hundreds of convicts had joined his ranks, ready to die for the man
who had set them free,—not for gratitude, but in an excess of admiration
for a spirit more lawless, more daring, than their own.
Chinita used to stand half aloof, and listen to these things, as wild
rumors of them reached the hacienda, a burning pride glowing in her
heart as she heard of deeds that made men tremble and stand aghast; and
in imagination she saw the tall dark man whom she had made her hero
riding through the streets in the full panoply of military splendor,
followed by a train of mounted soldiers as gorgeous as himself,—then the
blaring band, the gay foot soldiers shouting his name, and that terrible
battle-cry of “Religion y Fueros,” in which so many infernal deeds were
done; and last of all a multitude of half-clad men, women, and boys and
girls like herself in ragged garments, not hungry nor wretched, though
with all the grime and squalor of poverty upon them. She loathed them in
her heart, though she did not consciously separate herself from their
kind; but often ran to the covert of the tall corn, or the shade of some
tree, and sat down and drew her reboso over her head, laughing softly
and breathlessly, for had she not given this man the amulet which gave
him a charmed life? Sometimes she heard of attacks made upon him,—how
bullets had gone crashing through his carriage windows, how in the very
streets of the city, as well as on the battle-field, his horses had been
shot under him; but he had never once been hurt. She was a ragged,
barefoot girl, but here was something which in her own eyes enwrapped
her as with velvet and ermine,—the belief that she had some part in that
dazzling career that attracted the gaze, the wonder, the terror of what
was to her mind the whole wide world.
Through those hot summer days Pedro saw little of his foster child; and
sometimes when he did see her, she would pass by as if he were nothing
to her, or would shudder sometimes when he laid his hand with gentle
violence upon her arm, and forced her in from the glaring sunshine, in
which she often wandered for hours, unconscious of the heat which was
burning her skin browner and browner, but painting roses on her cheeks,
and filling her eyes with light; and sometimes she would come softly up
behind him and throw the brown tangle of her hair over his eyes, almost
smothering him in the golden crispness of its ruddy ends, and kiss him
wildly between his bushy eyebrows, calling herself his wicked Chinita,
his naughty child, until he would draw her on his knee and wipe away her
streaming tears with the tenderness but none of the familiarity of a
parent, and while he did so, sigh and sigh again, and wonder what these
wild moods would lead to.
When Doña Feliz began the renovation of the family apartments Pedro
stole in there one day when she chanced to be quite alone, and asked if
it was true that Doña Isabel would soon return; it was many years—yes,
twelve and more—since she had left them; and the _niña_ Carmen, was it
true that she was married? And the Señorita Herlinda? “Was it quite
certain,” and his voice grew low,—“was it quite certain she was in a
convent?”
“Did not Don Vicente tell you that?” queried Doña Feliz; “and his sad
looks, did they not tell you? Ah, unhappy girl, where should she be but
in a convent? Where else in the world should she hide, who was so at
feud with life?” She started, remembering herself; but Pedro was looking
at her with impassive stolidity. “Yes, yes,” she continued impatiently,
“she has chosen her path; she has left the world forever.”
“But they say,” droned Pedro, monotonously, “that the convents will be
opened and all the nuns be made free when the Señor Juarez takes his
turn to rule. They say the day he enters the palace the dead men’s hands
will open, and all their riches escape from their grasp. The silver and
gold will be taken from the altars and given to the poor, and the
monasteries and nunneries be pulled down, that the people may build
their houses with the stones.”
Doña Feliz laughed. It was not often any sound of merriment passed her
lips, and then not in scorn. “Dreams, dreams, Pedro!” she said. “Are you
as foolish as the rest, and think the new law would give all the poor
wealth, or even the despoiled their own? Do you think Juarez himself
believes it? No, no! he is a sly fox; and while the Church and Comonfort
were the lion and bear struggling over the carcass, he strives to glide
in and steal the flesh. Do you think he will divide it among you hungry
ones? No! these politicians are all alike, and whether with the cry of
religion or liberty, fight and plot only for their own aggrandizement,
and the poor country is forgotten, as it is drenched by the blood of her
sons. There is not one true patriot in all this distracted land.”
She spoke rather to herself than Pedro, who shook his head with a sort
of grim obstinacy. “I am thinking to go away, Doña Feliz,” he said. “You
know the Señor Juarez is at liberty, and there will be bloody days soon
if Zuloaga does not yield him his rightful place in Mexico. I have a
mind to see a few of them. You know I was a good soldier in Santa Anna’s
time, and as I sit in the gate I hear the sound of the cannon and the
rattle of musketry and the voice of my old commander Gonzales, only it
comes now from the lips of his son; and I feel I must go.”
Doña Feliz looked at him steadily. She knew her countryman well, and
though she doubted not that something of the martial spirit of the time
was stirring within him, she was equally certain that a second and more
potent reason was prompting Pedro to leave Tres Hermanos; but she only
said,—
“Then you wish to join Vicente Gonzales? They say he, with all his band,
has thrown his fortunes in with those of Juarez. Well, well, perhaps
anything was better than that he should be linked with Ramirez. If
Vicente is a traitor, it is at least with a noble aim, not for mere
plunder. There was something strange, forbidding, terrible, about that
man Ramirez. Did you notice his face, Pedro, when he was here?”
Pedro shook his head, returning with pertinacity to his own plans. “You
will talk to Don Rafael for me, will you not, Señora?” he said, with a
trace of the abject whine in his tone that marked the habit of serfdom,
which a few years of nominal freedom had done little to alter, “and with
your good leave I will go, and take Chinita with me.” He spoke
hesitatingly, as though fearful his right would be disputed.
“Take Chinita!” exclaimed Doña Feliz. “What, to a soldiers’ camp, to her
ruin! You are mad, Pedro. No, she shall remain here with me. I will take
her into the house. I will teach her to sew. She shall be my child
rather than my servant! I—” she stopped in extreme agitation, for within
the doorway the child stood.
“I will be no one’s servant!” she said, proudly drawing herself up; “and
as to going to the Indian’s camp—ah, I know a better place than that,”
and she nodded her head significantly. “You shall leave me, Father
Pedro, with your Doña Isabel!”
Doña Feliz and Pedro started as if they had been shot.
“I came to tell you she is coming,” continued the child. “I was out
beyond the granaries, letting my fawn browse on the little hill, and as
I was looking toward the gorge I saw a horseman coming, and far behind
him was a carriage and many men. Is all ready?” and she glanced around
her with the air of a prophetess. “Hark! the courier is in the court
now. Doña Isabel will not be long behind him.”
Pedro hastened from the room with an exclamation of alarmed amazement.
“Go, go!” cried Feliz. “You are too late!” for she knew in her heart
that it was in very fear of this visit, and to remove the child from the
chance of encountering Doña Isabel, that Pedro had proposed to leave the
hacienda; and here was Doña Isabel herself,—for strangely enough,
neither of them doubted that what the child had assumed was true. The
thoughts of Doña Feliz were inexplicable even to herself. She felt as
though she was placed in some vast and gloomy theatre, with the curtain
about to rise upon some strange play, which at the will of the actors
might become either comedy or tragedy. Though of late she had felt
certain that Doña Isabel would return to the hacienda, that very act
seemed dramatic, the precursor of inevitable complications.
“Why could she not be content in the new life she had chosen?” muttered
Doña Feliz. “What voice has been sounding in her ears, to call her back
to resurrect old griefs, to walk among the spectres of long-silent
agonies and shame? Foolish, foolish woman! Yet as the magnet attracts
iron, so thy hard heart is drawn by these bitter remembrances. Go, go!
thou child!” she exclaimed aloud, and almost angrily. “Doña Isabel would
be vexed to see thee in her room. Go, and keep thee out of her way!” She
gazed after Chinita with a look of perplexity and pain, as with a bound
of irresistible excitement the girl sprang out upon the corridor, her
laugh rising through the still air as if in notes of defiance. “What
said the child?” muttered Doña Feliz. “‘Leave me with your Doña
Isabel’?”