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 vulgar _rendezvous_ into
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 an incident 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 Pancho Vallé that 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 rushing torrents 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
the _hacienda_ appeared 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 and bribing 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 (Doña Rita)
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.