Although Chinita had divined aright when she declared that the carriage
she had seen in the distance could be no other than that of Doña Isabel,
and the sounds which penetrated from the court announced the arrival of
her outrider, she was wrong in supposing that the lady herself would be
speedily at hand. There was a long delay in which Doña Feliz had time to
recover outwardly from the agitation into which she was thrown, and
accustom herself to this verification of her foresight, when upon
hearing of the marriage of Carmen she had felt a conviction that Doña
Isabel in her loneliness and the unaccustomed lack of interests around
her would be irresistibly attracted to the home she had virtually
forsworn.
Don Rafael having listened eagerly to the courier’s account of the
meeting with Ramirez’s band, left him to give fuller details to the
anxious villagers who gathered around,—many of whom had sons or husbands
at that part of the hacienda lands known as the ranchito del
Refugio,—and rushed up to Doña Feliz with the news, then down again to
the court to mount a horse which had been instantly saddled, and
followed by a clerk and servants galloped away to give meet welcome to
the lady who had just entered upon her own domains.
Calling the maids, Doña Feliz caused the long-disused beds to be spread
with fresh linen, and completed the preparations for this vaguely yet
confidently expected arrival. “She had felt it in the air,” she said to
herself, for she knew nothing of any theory of second sight, nor had
ever reasoned, on the other hand, that even the most trivial
circumstances of life must work toward some given result, which they
instinctively foreshadow to the observant, as the bodily eye makes out
the reflection of a material object in a dimmed and besmirched mirror.
She bestirred herself as if in a dream, her mind full of Doña Isabel and
the past. Yet like an undercurrent beneath the flood of her thoughts
flowed the idea of the new element that Doña Isabel was bringing with
her. “A _foreigner_!” she muttered, as if she could scarce believe her
words. “Can it be possible that the hand once stung can dally again with
the scorpion? Ah, no! necessity wears the guise of heresy, but it is not
possible that Doña Isabel can forget.”
She glanced around her; Chinita had disappeared. Doña Feliz saw her no
more until the long-delayed carriage rolled into the court, when she
descended to greet her mistress.
The long summer’s day had almost waned, and so dark was the court that
torches of pitch-pine had been stuck into rude sconces against the
pillars, and the face of Doña Isabel looked wan and ghastly in the lurid
and flickering glare. She could not descend from the carriage until the
wounded youth had been lifted out. Doña Feliz had never seen but one man
so fair. She started as her eyes fell upon the yellow masses of hair
that lay disordered upon his brow, but pointed to a chamber which a
woman ran to open, and into which the stranger was carried: while Doña
Isabel, cramped and stiff, leaned upon the arm of Don Rafael, and
stepped to the ground. As she did so she would have fallen but for two
strong young hands which caught hers, and as she involuntarily held them
and steadied herself she turned her eyes upon the face which was level
with her own. Her eyes opened widely, and with an exclamation of actual
horror she threw Chinita from her with a sudden and violent struggle,
and passed proudly though tremblingly across the court.
Don Rafael and Doña Feliz followed, too astounded to make one movement
to assist their lady’s ascent of the stairs; but when they reached the
corridor and heard the door of the bed-chamber heavily closed, they
turned toward each other, their faces pale in the twilight. “Her
thoughts are serpents to lash her,” murmured Doña Feliz; adding with a
sort of national pride, “The Castillian woman may choose to ignore, but
she can never forget or forgive.”
Don Rafael shrugged his shoulders. How much with some races a shrug may
signify! His then was one of dogged resolution. “It is well,” it seemed
to say; and he muttered, “As the mistress leads, the servant must
follow,” while his mother, shaking her head doubtfully, pointed to the
court below.
Chinita had rushed furiously away from the carriage and the group of
men, who after the first silence of surprise had broken into but
half-suppressed laughter, which was soon lost in the babel of greetings
that the disappearance of Doña Isabel gave an opportunity for
exchanging, and scarcely knowing in her blind rage where she went, had
thrown herself upon one of the stone seats that bordered the fountain,
and with her small clinched fist was beating the rugged stone. Pedro
stood near her, his face as indignant as her own, vainly endeavoring
with a voice that shook with anger to soothe her wounded pride, while
with one hand he strove to lead her away. She spoke not a word.
Suddenly, as the young face of the girl was lifted to the light, Feliz
clasped her hands together, and leaned eagerly forward. She motioned to
Don Rafael,—she would not break the spell by speech; but unheeding her
he left the corridor and walked away, and presently Pedro was obliged to
hasten to his duties at the doorway, and the girl and the woman were
left alone in the enclosure. Doña Feliz leaned motionless over the
railing. Chinita, still beating the stone with her fist, sat upon the
edge of the fountain. With her native instinct of propriety, to meet
Doña Isabel she had put on her second best skirt—not the green one—and
all her necklaces circled her throat. Her hair was closely braided, but
curled wilfully round her brow and the nape of her neck. She pulled at
it abstractedly in a manner she had when excited. Her face was turned
aside, but to Doña Feliz there was something strangely familiar in her
attitude,—something which suggested other personalities, but of whom;
which recalled the past, but how?
While Chinita still sat there, Doña Isabel came out of her chamber and
crossed to the side of Feliz. Her face quivered as her eyes fell on the
child, and she laid her nervous white hand upon Feliz’s arm. The two
women looked at each other, but said not a word; the eyes of the one
were full of reproach, those of the other of defiant distrust. When they
turned them upon the court again, the girl had moved noiselessly away.
Her passion of anger was spent, and with the instinct of the Indian
strain in her mixed blood, she had gone to hide herself away in some
sheltered corner and brood sullenly upon her wrongs.
As she passed through the many courts, reaching at last that upon which
the church opened, she was so absorbed that she did not notice she was
closely followed by a man who had been very near when Doña Isabel had
repulsed her, and who with a few apparently careless questions had
possessed himself of all there was to know of Chinita’s history.
“Look you!” said one, “did not Pedro say that a man as black as the
devil dropped her into his hands? Who knows but she is the fiend’s own
child? Vaya, she struck me over the face with talons like a cat’s only
last week.”
“And well thou deservedst it,” cried the boy called Pepé. But he was
laughed down by a shrill majority, for Doña Isabel’s unaccountable
repulse of her had turned the tide of public opinion strongly against
the foundling; and the woman toward whom Tio Reyes—for he it was—now
turned for additional particulars, rightly judging that in such matters
female memories would prove most explicit, crossed herself as she opined
“that the fox knows much, but more he who traps him, and that Pedro who
had found the girl could best tell whence she came,”—a saying which
elicited many nods and exclamations of approval, for Pedro had never
been believed quite honest in the matter. A wild story that he had
received the babe from the hands of a beautiful and pallid spectre which
had once been seen to speak with him in the corridor, and that this was
the ghost of some lovely woman he had murdered in those early days when
he and Don Leon were comrades in many a wild adventure, had passed into
a sort of legend, which if not entirely accepted, certainly was not
utterly disbelieved by any one.
“Go thy way! She is the devil’s own brat,” cried the wife of the man
Chinita had once attacked.
“Ay, to be sure!” cried another; “was it not to be remembered how she
had struggled and screamed when the good Father Francisco baptized her,
and had sputtered and spat out the salt which the good priest had put in
her mouth like a very cat. And little good had it done her, for she had
never been called by a Christian name.”
“Tut! tut!” said the new-comer, “what need of a name has such a pretty
maid as that, or of a father or mother either? Though ye women have no
mercy, she’ll laugh at you all yet. The lads will not be blind, eh
Pancho?”
“That they will not!” cried the lad Pepé, throwing a meaning glance at
Pancho as if daring him to take up the cudgels in behalf of his old
playfellow. “What care I who she is? She’s not the first who came into
the world by a crooked road; and must all the women hint that it began
at the Devil’s door because they can’t trace it back? Ay, they know
enough ways to the same place.”
“Well said, young friend!” cried Tio Reyes with a hearty slap on the
boy’s shoulder. “But, hist! here comes Pedro—with an ill look too in his
eye. Ah! I thought so,” as the men suddenly became noisily busy with the
unsaddling of their horses, and the women slipped away to their
household occupations. “Tio Pedro is not a man to be trifled with. But,
ah, there goes the girl!” and in a moment of confusion he adroitly left
the court without being seen, and as has been said followed her steps
till, as she crouched behind one of the buttresses of the church, he
halted behind another and looked at her keenly, impatient with the
uncertain light, eager to approach her before it darkened, yet waiting
stoically until she was settled in a sullen crouching attitude, probably
for that vigil of silence and hunger in which a ranchero’s anger usually
expends itself, or crystallizes into a revengeful memory.
After some minutes, during which the girl neither sobbed nor moved, he
suddenly bent over and touched her on the shoulder. She was accustomed
to such intrusions, and shook herself sullenly, not even looking up when
an unknown voice accosted her. “Hist, thou! I have something for thee.”
“I want nothing, not manna from Heaven even.”
“’T will prove better than that.”
“Then keep it thyself. Thou’rt a stranger. I take neither a blow from a
woman nor a gift from a man.”
“Ah!” said the man, coming a little nearer and laying a hand lightly on
her shoulder, “if thou wilt have no gift, shall I _tell_ thee
something?”
The girl shrugged her shoulder uneasily under his hand. “I am not a baby
to care for tales,” she said contemptuously; yet the man noticed she
turned her head slightly toward him.
“Thou art one of a thousand!” he ejaculated admiringly. “Hey now, proud
one, suppose I should tell thee who thou art,—what wouldst thou give Tio
Reyes for that?”
“Bah!” said the girl, “I have never thought about it.” Yet she was
conscious that her heart began to beat wildly and her voice sounded
faint in her ears. A little picture formed itself before her eyes, of
Pepé and Marta and Ranulfo and a score of others, waifs of humanity, and
she herself on a height looking down upon them. She had never
consciously separated herself from them,—she had never even wished that
she, like them, had at least a mother; but presently she was conscious
of a new feeling. Yet she laughed as she said, “I was born then like
other children,—I had a mother?”
“That had you; but I am not going to sing all that’s in the book,
_niña_. The wise man talks little and the prudent woman asks few
questions, and thus fewer lies are spoken.”
“But thou art not my father?” queried Chinita, insolently, yielding to a
sudden apprehension that seized her, and turning full upon the stranger.
“God deliver me!” answered he; “badly fared the owl that nourished the
young eaglet.”
“Tell me who I am!” cried Chinita, in a sudden passion of eagerness
clutching the man’s arm.
“Tut! tut! tut! that is not my business; and as you will not hear my
pretty little tale,”—for Chinita thrust him violently aside,—“I will
give you but one word of warning and be gone: the old hind pushes at the
young fawn, but they both make venison.”
Chinita was accustomed to the obscure phraseology and symbolical
meanings of the thousand proverbs used by her country people, and she
instantly caught the idea the speaker sought to convey; but its very
audacity held her silent for some moments. It was only after she had
gazed at him long and searchingly that she could stammer, “Doña
Isabel—and I—Chinita—the same—of one blood!”
The man nodded, but put his finger upon his lip. He feared perhaps some
wild outburst of surprise or exultation; but instead she said in an awed
whisper, “Is she then my mother?”
Tio Reyes leaned against the church and burst into irrepressible though
silent laughter. “What next will the girl dream of?” he ejaculated at
length, and laughed again.
“What, am I then such a fool?” asked Chinita, coolly, though with inward
rage. “Look you, if you had told me yes, I would not have believed you
any more than I believed when Señor Enrique said that she had the young
American killed who died so many years ago. Bah! one thing is as foolish
as the other,” and she turned away disdainfully.
“What!” exclaimed the man, eagerly, “do they say that? Humph! Well,
things as strange as that have happened in her day.”
“But that is a lie,” cried Chinita, excitedly; “it was only because Doña
Isabel would not interfere to save his son from being shot as murderer
and _ladron_ that Enrique said so. He went away himself the day after,
and he it was who led Calvo to the rancho del Refugio. But what has that
to do with us?” and now first, perhaps because there had been time for
the matter to take shape in her mind, she showed an eager and excited
curiosity. “Tell me who I am; you surely have more to tell me than that
I was born Garcia!”
The man stared, then cried, “And is not that enough? Why, for a word
thou canst be as good as Doña Isabel’s daughter. With that face of thine
she dare not refuse thee anything.”
Chinita looked at him as if she would have torn his secret from him.
Strange to say, not a suspicion that he was jesting with her entered her
mind. Even as she stood there almost in rags, she felt instinctively
that she was far removed from him. The one thought that she was a
Garcia, one of the family whom she looked upon as the incarnation of
wealth and power, overpowered every other emotion, even that of
curiosity. She was vexed, baffled that he said no more, yet felt as
though she had known all, and had but for a moment forgotten. She even
turned away from him with a momentary impulse to rush into the presence
of Doña Isabel and assail her with the cry, “Look at me! Why did you
thrust me away? I too am a Garcia!”
“Stay!” cried Tio Reyes, as she started from his side. Her wild thoughts
had flashed by so rapidly that, quick though he was to read the
countenance, he had caught scarce an inkling of what had passed through
her mind, and was certain only of the half-dazed dislike with which she
looked at him. It irritated and disappointed him.
“What, girl!” he said, “is not this news worth so much as a ‘thank you’?
Is it nothing to you whether you are the dust of the roadway or a jewel
of the mine? Well, I lied to you. Ah! ah! what know I who you are? It
was my joke! Tio Reyes always likes a jest with a pretty girl.”
“But this is no jest,” said Chinita, quick to perceive that the man was
already half repentant of his words; “you can better put the ocean into
a well, than shut up the truth when it is once out. Ah, I did not need
you to tell me I was no beggar’s brat, picked up by chance on the plain.
I have heard them say that Pedro has rich clothes which I was wrapped
in. He has always laughed at me when I have asked about them, but all
the same he shall show them to you this very night.”
“Chut!” interrupted the man, “what should I know of swaddling clothes?
’T is just a maid’s folly to think of such trifles. They would not prove
thee a Garcia, any more than the lack of them belies it, or my mere word
insures it!”
“That which puzzles me is,” said Chinita, gravely, turning her head on
one side and looking at him keenly by the dim light, “why you have told
me this. Have you been sent with a message from—from those who left me
here?”
“No, by my faith,” said the man, laughing; “and why do I laugh, think
you? Why, you are the first one who ever asked Tio Reyes for a reason.
Does anybody who knows me say, ‘Why did you take Don Fulano with all his
dollars safe through the mountains, and then allow that poor devil De
Tal, who had not so much as a four-penny piece, to be shot down like a
dog by the wayside?’ No, even the village idiot knows Tio Reyes has
reasons too great to be tossed from one to another like a ball; and yet
you ask me why I have told you the secret I have kept for years, and
perhaps expect an answer! No, no! that plum is not ripe enough to fall
at the first puff of wind.”
“I will tell you one thing, though you tell me nothing,” said Chinita,
shrewdly, after a pause: “It is not from love to Doña Isabel that you
have told me this, nor for love of me either. What good have you done me
by telling me I am a Garcia? Why, if I had had the sense of a parrot, I
might have known it before.” It seemed to her in her excitement as if,
indeed, she had always known it.
“A word to the wise is enough,” said the man, mysteriously. “Keep your
knowledge to yourself, but use it to your advantage. You were sent like
a package to Doña Isabel years ago, but stopped by a clumsy messenger.
She finds you in her path now; let her find something alive under the
shabby coverings. God puts many a sweet nut in a rough shell, many a
poison in despised weeds!”
“Oh!” cried Chinita, with a wicked little laugh, though even at that
moment the chords of kinship thrilled, “I am but a weed to Doña Isabel,
eh? Shall I go to her and say, ‘Here is a Garcia to be trodden down’?”
She said this with so superb an air of derision that the man who
unconsciously all his life had been an inimitable actor in his way,
muttered a deep _caramba_ of enthusiastic admiration.
“I would by all the saints I could stay here to see how you will goad
and sting my grand Señora,” he said vindictively. “Ay, remember you are
a Garcia, with a hundred old scores to pay off. I have put the cards in
your hands,—patience, and shuffle them well!”
“Patience, and shuffle your cards,”—those cards simply the knowledge
that she was a Garcia, with presumably the wrongs of parents to avenge.
The thoughts were not very clear in her mind, but the instincts of
resentment of insult and of filial devotion were those which amid so
much that is ungenerous, evil, and fierce, ever pervade the breast of
the Mexican. She turned again to ask almost imploringly, “My father—my
mother—who were they?” when she found she was alone. The stranger had
extorted no promise of secrecy, offered no bribe; it was as if he had
put a weapon in her hand, knowing that its very preciousness and
subtlety would prevent her from revealing whence she had received it,
and would indicate the use to which it was to be turned.
Chinita leaned against the buttress and pondered. Strangely enough, she
did not for a moment think to seek the man and demand further
explanation. As she felt he had divined her character, so she divined
his. He had said all he would say. After all, it was enough. At the end
of an hour she left that spot, which she never saw after without a
thrill of the heart, and walked straight to the doorway where Pedro sat.
He was eating his supper mechanically, with a disturbed countenance,
which cleared when he saw her.
“They are _tamales de chile_, daughter,” he said, pushing toward her the
platter, upon which lay some morsels of corn-pastry and pepper-sauce,
wrapped in corn-leaves. “Eat, thou must be hungry.”
Pedro sighed, for perplexity and vexation had destroyed his own
appetite, and thought enviously, as Chinita’s white teeth closed on the
soft pastry, which was yellow in comparison, “It is a good thing nothing
but unrequited love keeps the young from supping,—and that only for a
time.”
The gate-keeper watched Chinita narrowly as she was eating and drinking
atole from the rough earthen jar. There was some change in her he could
not understand, quite different from the passion in which he had last
seen her, or the languor which would naturally succeed it. She did not
talk, and something kept him from referring to the scene in the
courtyard; he felt that she would resent it. Two or three times she bent
over him and touched his hand caressingly; yet he was not encouraged to
smooth her tangled hair, or offer any of those awkward proofs of
affection which she was wont to receive and laugh at or return as the
humor seized her; neither did he remind her that it was getting late,
but at last rose and took from his girdle the key of the postern.
“Put it back, Pedro!” she said in her softest voice. “I shall never
sleep in the hut with Florencia and the children again; yet be not
afraid, I will not go to the corridor either. There is room and to spare
in yon great house.” She nodded toward the inner court, muttered a
good-night, and before Pedro could recover from his surprise
sufficiently to speak, swiftly crossed the patio and disappeared.
Pedro looked after her stupefied. He realized that a great gulf had
opened between them; that figuratively speaking, his foster-child had
left him forever. He looked like one who, holding a pet bird loosely in
his hand, had beheld it suddenly escape him, and soar across a wide and
bridgeless chasm. Would it dash itself into atoms against the opposite
cliffs, or perchance reach a safe haven? Such was the essence of the
thoughts for which Pedro framed no words. “God is great,” he muttered at
length, “and knows what He does;” adding with a sort of heathen and
dogged obstinacy, “but Pedro still is here; Pedro does not forget
_niña_!” He looked up as if to some invisible auditor, crossed himself,
then wearily threw himself upon his pallet; but weary as he was, the
strong young subject of his cares was sunk in deep and dreamless sleep
long before he closed his eyes.