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assistance, he sank into uneasy slumber, she had opportunity to
wonder at the impulse that had induced her to receive this stranger
of a race, that whether American or English, she had long abjured,
and to feel once more as she gazed upon his wan features
something of the bitter detestation with which she had looked upon
Ashley’s dead face.
Doña Isabel started; the thought had entered her mind just as
they were emerging from the great chasm of rocks which gave
entrance to the plain, and she saw once more the Eden from which
she had been driven. The house was so far distant still that she
caught, across the fields of tall corn, but a mere suggestion of its flat
roofs and the square turrets at the corners of the encircling walls;
but though more distant still, the tall chimney of the reduction-works
rose clearly defined against the sky,—so clearly that she could see
where a few bricks had fallen from the cornice, and how a solitary
pigeon was circling it in settling to its nest. What a picture of
solitariness! Doña Isabel groaned, and covered her face with her
hand. It was as she had known it would be. The first objects to meet
her gaze were those that could waken the darkest and bitterest
memories. Why had she come? Oh that she could retrace the rough
path that she had traversed!
The wounded man groaned; he was fainting. “Hasten, hasten!”
she cried, “send Anselmo forward; bid them prepare a bed. The road
is not so rough; let them drive faster!”
Thus Doña Isabel’s words belied the desire of her heart, for she
could not by her own wish have approached her home too slowly.
This boy was a stranger, not even brought thither by her will, as the
other had been; yet as the other had driven her forth, this one was
hastening her back. Was it fancy, or did the boy’s lips pronounce a
name? No, no! it was but her excited imagination. No wonder! Did
not the earth and sky, the wide circle of the hills, all cry out to her,
“What hast thou done? Where is Herlinda?”
 XVIII.

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.
 XIX.

Once within the court, Chinita paused and looked around her
cautiously. The doors of the lower rooms stood open, and she might
have entered any one of them unnoticed and found a shelter for the
night. But she was in no mood for solitude. Indeed it was hard for
her to check a certain wild impulse that seized her, as she saw a
faint glimmer of light which streamed through a slight opening of a
door on the upper corridor, and that urged her to rush at once into
the presence of Doña Isabel and claim recognition. To what
relationship, and to what rights, she did not ask herself; a positive
though undefined certainty that Doña Isabel herself would know,
and would be forced to yield her justice, possessed her.
Chinita was now a child neither in stature nor mind, but though so
young in years, had reached the first development of her powers
with the mingled precocity of the Indian and Spaniard, fostered by a
clime that seems the very elixir of passion. She had been maturing
rapidly in the last few months, and as she stood that night in the
faint starlight, the last trace of childhood seemed to drop visibly from
her. She folded her arms on her breast, and sighed deeply,—not for
sorrow, but as if she breathed a life that was new to her, and her
lungs were oppressed by the weight of a strange and too heavily
perfumed atmosphere.
In her absorption Chinita was unconscious that she was observed,
—but it chanced that Don Rafael Sanchez and his mother had just
left the Señora Doña Isabel, and were passing through the upper
corridor to their own apartments. The gallery was wide and they
were in the shadow, but a stray gleam of light touched the upturned
face of the girl and exhibited it in strong relief within the framing of
her waving hair. As they caught sight of it, they involuntarily paused
to look at her.
“I do not wonder,” whispered Feliz “that such a face is an accusing
conscience to Doña Isabel. There is a strange familiarity in every
feature; and what a spirit, too, she has,—one even to glory in strife!”
Don Rafael nodded. “There has always seemed to me something
in that child to mark her as the offspring of a dominant family,” he
said; “it is inevitable that she must break the lines an adverse Fate
has cast about her. Others such as she stretch out a hand to Vice; if
something better comes to her, who are we to hinder it?”
The brow of Doña Feliz contracted. “Ay, Rafael,” she murmured,
“what a change a few miserable years have wrought! Once I was a
sister to Doña Isabel, and now—”
“You are no traitress,” interposed Don Rafael, “and it is by
circumstance only that the change has come. Console yourself, dear
mother, and remember we are pledged. Though we seem false to
her mother, only so can we be true to Herlinda.”
He breathed the name so low that even Doña Feliz did not hear it;
she listened rather to the beating of the heart that seemed to repeat
without cessation the name of one so loved and lost. “How strange it
is, Rafael,” she said presently, “that I have such persistent, such
mocking dreams, which against my reason, against all precedent,
create in me the belief that all is not ended for Herlinda Garcia.”
Don Rafael looked at her musingly.
“There is a man called Juarez who has dreams such as yours,” he
said; “but they are of the freedom of a race, not of one woman
alone. But he is hardly able to work miracles. Yet, mother, this truly
is the time of prodigies; what think you this boy, the young American
that Doña Isabel brought hither, calls himself?”
“I have asked him,” she said, “but he did not understand me. Oh,
Rafael! my heart stood still when I saw him first; yet after all he is
not so very like—”
“Yet he has the same name, Mother. It may be but chance; those
Americans are half barbarians as we know,—they forget the saints,
and seek to glorify their great men by giving their children as
Christian names the surnames of those who have distinguished
themselves in battle or statesmanship. Sometimes, too, a mother
proud of the surname of her own family gives it to her son. It may
have been so with this man. When I gave him pen and paper, and
bade him write his name, it was thus: ‘Ashley Ward.’”
The name as spoken by Don Rafael was mispronounced, would
have been hardly recognizable in the ears of him who owned it; yet
to Doña Feliz it was like a trumpet blast. “Strange! strange! strange!”
she repeated again and again. “Can it be mere chance?”
“That we shall soon know,” said Don Rafael. “These Americans
blurt out their affairs to the first comer, expecting help from every
quarter. There is no rain that falls but that they fancy it is to water
their own field. Nay, mother,” as Doña Feliz made a movement
toward the stairway, “go not near the man to-night; he has fever,
and is in need of quiet. Old Selsa is with him, and he can need no
better care. He is safe to remain here many days; let him rest in
peace now. And do you, mother, try to sleep; you are weary and
worn.”
With the filial solicitude of a true Mexican, the man, already
middle-aged, took his mother’s hand fondly and led her to the door
of her own apartment. There she detained him long in low and
earnest conversation, and when on leaving her he looked down into
the court it was entirely deserted.
In glancing around her, Chinita’s eyes had caught no glimpse of
the figures above, perhaps because they had been diverted by a
faint glimmer of light at one angle of the courtyard; and
remembering that this came from the room to which the wounded
man had been carried, she darted swiftly and noiselessly toward it,
and in a moment had pushed the door sufficiently ajar to admit of
her entrance, and had passed in. She arrested her footsteps at the
foot of the narrow bed, which extended like a bier from the wall to
the centre of the room. There was not another article of furniture in
the apartment, except a chair upon which the sick man’s coat was
thrown; but Chinita’s eyes, accustomed to the vault-like and vacant
suites of square cells that made up the greater part of the vast
building, were struck with no sense of desolation. A slender jar of
water, and a number of earthen utensils of different forms and
shapes, containing medicaments and food, were gathered upon the
floor near the bed’s head; and on a deep window-ledge was placed a
sputtering tallow-candle, which had already half filled with grease
the clay sconce in which it was sunk.
As Chinita leaned over the foot of the bed and peered through her
unkempt locks at its occupant, he looked up with a start, and
presently said something in an appealing tone, which certainly
touched her more than the words, could she have understood them,
would have done. He had in fact exclaimed in English, with an
unmistakable American intonation, “Heavens, what a gypsy! and
what can she want here in this miserable jail they have left me in?”
She thought he had perhaps asked for water, so she gave him
some, which was not unacceptable,—though it irritated him that
after giving him the cup, she took up the candle and held it close to
his face while he drank. She was in the mood for new impressions
however rather than for kindness, and the sight of a strange face
pleased her. Burning with fever though he was, and tossing with all
the impatience natural to his condition, he could not but notice the
totally unaffected ease with which she made her inspection. He
might have been a curly-headed infant instead of a man, so utterly
unconcernedly did she look into his dark-blue eyes, and note the
broad white brow upon which his damp yellow hair clustered, even
touching lightly with her finger the firm white throat bared by the
opened collar sufficiently to expose the clumsily arranged dressings
on the wounded shoulder. Instantly, with a few deft movements, she
made them more comfortable, for which the young man thanked her
in a few of the very scanty words of Spanish at his command,—at
which she laughed, not ironically, but with a sort of nervous
irrelevance, thinking to herself the while, “He is beautiful—bless me,
yes! as beautiful as they say the murdered American was! Who
knows? this one may come from the same district! It must be but a
little place, his country,—there cannot be such a very great world
outside the mountains yonder; they touch heaven everywhere. Look
now, how white his arms are, and his brow, where the sun has not
touched it! and how red his cheeks! But that must be with the fever.”
And so half audibly she made her comments upon the wounded
stranger, seemingly entirely unconscious or regardless that there was
any mind or soul within this body she so frankly admired,—lifting his
unwounded arm sometimes, or turning his face into better view, as
she might have done parts of a mechanism that pleased her.
“Evidently she thinks me wooden,” he said with a gleam of humor
in his eyes. “As I am dumb to her, she believes me also senseless
and sightless. Thanks, for taking away that ill-smelling candle,” as
with the offending taper in her hand she passed to the other side of
the bed. Then she stopped and laughed, and he remembered that
he had seen the old woman who had been left in charge of him
arrange her sheepskins there and throw herself upon them. Until the
young girl had come, old Selsa’s snores had vexed him; since that he
had forgotten them, though now they became audible again. As
Chinita laughed, she placed the candle-stick upon the window-ledge
and looked around her, stretching herself and yawning. The hour
was late for her, the diversion caused by sight of the blond stranger
and the little service she had rendered him had relaxed the tension
of her mind, and she felt herself aweary; the shadows fell dark in
every corner of the room,—there was something grewsome in its
aspect even to Chinita’s accustomed eyes. It subdued her wild and
reckless mood, and she scanned the place narrowly for something
upon which she might lie. Presently the young man saw her glide
toward the sleeping nurse, and deftly, with a half mischievous, half
triumphant expression upon her face, draw out one of the sheepskin
mats upon which the old woman was lying, and taking it to the
opposite side of the bed arrange it to her liking upon the brick floor,
and sinking upon it softly and daintily as a cat might have done,
compose herself to sleep.
The candle on the window-sill sputtered and flickered; old Selsa
snored in her corner, seemingly undisturbed by the abstraction of a
part of her bed; the shadows in the apartment grew longer and
longer; the eyelids of the young girl closed, her regular breathing
parted her full lips. The young man had painfully raised himself upon
one arm, and assured himself of this. He himself was dropping off
into snatches of slumber which promised to become profound, when
suddenly with a start he found himself wide awake, and staring at a
draped figure which had noiselessly glided into his chamber. Save for
the candle it bore he would have thought it a visitant from another
world; but his first surprise over, he recognized it as that of a
woman. He was conscious that his heart beat wildly; his fever had
returned. Where had he seen this pale proud face, these classic
features, these dark penetrating eyes? For a moment again he felt
as if swinging between heaven and earth, between life and death.
Ah! yes, he comprehended,—he had been brought thither in some
swaying vehicle, and this woman had been beside him; she perhaps
had saved his life.
He murmured a word of thanks, but she did not notice it. “Señor,”
she said in a voice soft in courtesy, “I pray you forgive me that I had
for a little time forgotten my guest. I trust you lack for nothing? Ah!
what—alone?” and with a frown, she made a motion as if to awaken
the servant Selsa. He understood the gesture though not the words,
and stopped her by one as expressive.
“No, no!” he exclaimed. “I too shall sleep; and she is old. I would
not awaken her. See, if I need anything a touch of my hand will
rouse this girl,”—and the young man indicated by a turn of his head
and arm the recumbent figure which his visitor had not observed.
With some curiosity she moved to the opposite side of the bed,
and bending over lightly removed the fringe of the reboso which
shaded the face of the sleeper. Doña Isabel started, and a slight
exclamation escaped her lips as she turned hurriedly away,—as
hurriedly returning, and shading the candle with her hand, that its
light might not fall upon the eyes of the sleeper, she gazed upon the
young girl long and earnestly. Unmindful of herself, she suffered the
full glare of the candle to illuminate her own countenance; and as he
looked upon it, the young American thought it might serve as the
very model for the mask of tragedy. Nothing more pitiless, more
remorseless, more sombre than its expression could be imagined;
yet as she gazed, a flush of shame rose from neck to brow. Her eyes
clouded, her breath came with a quick gasp. She stood for a
moment clasping the rod at the foot of the bed with her white
nervous hand; she looked at the American fixedly, yet she seemed to
have no consciousness that she herself was seen; and presently,
with the slow movement of a somnambulist, so absorbing was her
thought, she turned to the door.
Ashley was watching her intently; suddenly her light was
extinguished, and she vanished as if dissolved in air. He was calm
enough to remember that she had spoken to him, to know that she
could be no phantom of his imagination, and to suppose that upon
stepping into the corridor she had extinguished her light, and sped
noiselessly along the wall to some other apartment; yet for a long
time a feeling of mystery oppressed him, and he could not sleep. A
vague consciousness of some strange influence near him kept him
feverish, with all his senses on the alert; yet he heard no movement
of the woman who crouched within the doorway, leaning against the
cold wall, and who during the long silent night passed in review the
strange events that had brought her—the Señora Isabel Garcia de
Garcia—to guard the slumbers of a foundling, the foster-child of a
man so low in station as the gate-keeper of her house.
 XX.

Doña Isabel Garcia had been born within the walls of Tres
Hermanos, her father having been part owner of the estate, and her
mother the daughter of an impoverished gentleman of the
neighboring city of Guanapila. Doña Clarita had been a most
beautiful woman, whose attractions had been utilized to prop the
falling fortunes of her house by her marriage with the elderly but
kindly proprietor Don Ignacio Garcia.
At the time of her marriage, Clarita Rodriguez was very young,
and with the habits of submission universal among her
countrywomen would probably have taken kindly to her fate, never
doubting its justice, but that from her balcony she had one day seen
a young officer of the city troop ride by in all the magnificence of the
military uniform of the period. A dazzling vision of gold lace and
braid, clanking spurs and sabre, and of eyes and teeth and smile
more dazzling still, haunted her for weeks. Yet that might have
passed, but that the vision glided from the eye to the heart, when
on one luckless night, at the governor’s ball, Pancho Vallé was
introduced to her, and they twice were partners in that lover’s
delirium the slow and voluptuous danza. As they moved together in
the dreamy measure, a few low words were exchanged,—
commonplace perhaps but not harmless, and by one at least never
to be forgotten. Afterward an occasional missive penned in most
regular characters upon daintily tinted paper came to her hands
through some complaisant servant. But Don Ranulfo Rodriguez was
too jealous a guardian to suffer many such to escape him, and had
been far too wise in his generation to place it in his daughter’s
power to engage in such dangerous pastime as the production of
replies to unwelcome suitors. Like most other girls of her age and
position, Clarita had been strenuously prevented from learning to
write, and it is doubtful if she ever knew the exact import of Vallé’s
perfumed missives, although her heart doubtless guessed what her
eyes could not decipher.
Whether Vallé’s impassioned glances meant all they indicated or
not, certain it was that he had not ventured to declare himself to the
father as a suitor for the fair Clarita’s hand, when Don Ignacio Garcia
stepped in and literally carried away the prize. The courtship had
been short, the position of the groom unassailable. Clarita shed
some tears, but the delighted father declared they were for joy at
her good fortune; and they were indeed of so mixed a character—
baffled love, wounded pride, and an irrepressible sense of triumph at
her unexpected promotion—that she herself scarce cared to analyze
them. She danced with Vallé once again on the occasion of her
marriage; again a few words were spoken, and the passionate heart
of Clarita was pierced with a secret dart, which never ceased to
rankle.
Don Ignacio Garcia conducted her immediately to the hacienda,
where his jealous nature found no cause for suspicion; and there the
little Isabel was born; and on beholding the wealth of maternal
affection which the young wife lavished upon her child, the husband
forgot the indifference that had sometimes chafed him, and for a
few brief months imagined himself beloved. This egotistic delusion
was never dispelled, for at its height, upon the second anniversary
of their wedding day, when taking part in a bull-chase, Don Ignacio’s
horse swerved as he urged him to the side of the infuriated animal;
a moment’s hesitancy was fatal; the horse was ripped open by the
powerful horn of the bull, and plunging wildly, fell back upon his
luckless rider, whose neck was instantly broken. It was an accident
which it seemed incredible could have happened to a man so skilled
in horsemanship as was Don Ignacio. The spectators were for a
moment dumb with horror and surprise, then with groans and
shrieks rushed to the rescue, but only to lift a corpse. Doña Clarita
with a wild shriek had fainted as the horse plunged back, and upon
regaining her senses, threw herself in an agony of not unremorseful
grief upon the body of her husband. It was, however, of that violent
character which soon expends itself; and before the funeral
obsequies were well over, she began to look around the narrow
horizon of Tres Hermanos, and remember, if not rejoice, that she
was free to go beyond it.
Don Gregorio, the cousin of Clarita’s husband’s, though a mere
boy, had been brought up on the estate, and was competent to take
charge, and the administrador and clerks were trusty men; so there
was no absolute reason why the young widow should remain to
guard her interests and those of her child, and it seemed but natural
she should return to her father’s house, at least during the first
months of her sorrow. Thither indeed she went. She had dwelt there
before, a dependent child, to be disposed of at her father’s will; she
returned to it a rich widow, profuse of her favors but tenacious of
her rights, one of which all too soon proclaimed itself to be that of
choosing for herself a second husband. A month or two after her
arrival in the city, Don Pancho Vallé returned from some expedition
in which patriotism and personal gain were deftly combined, with
the halo of success added to his personal attractions, and was quick
to declare an unswerving devotion to the divinity at whose shrine he
had worshipped but doubtfully while it remained ungilded by the sun
of prosperity. Whether Clarita had learned to read or not, certain it is
that Don Pancho’s impassioned missives met with a response more
satisfactory than pen and ink alone could give, for immediately after
the expiration of the year due to the memory of Don Ignacio, she
became the wife of the gay soldier.
Don Pancho and his wife were both young, both equally delighted
in excitement and luxury; and within an incredibly short time the
ample resources which had seemed to them boundless were
perceptibly narrowed. To the taste for extravagant living, for
gorgeous apparel, for numerous and magnificent horses, shared by
them in common, were added a passionate love of gambling, and a
scarcely less expensive one for military enterprises of an
independent and half guerilla order, on the part of Don Pancho; and
thus a few years saw the wife’s fortune reduced to an encumbered
interest in the lands of Tres Hermanos.
 Don Pancho in spite of numerous infidelities still retained his
influence over the heart and mind of Clarita; and one night in play
against Don Gregorio Garcia—who, like other caballeros, occasionally
engaged in a game or two for pastime—he staked the last acre of
her estate, knowing she would refuse him nothing, and lost. For a
moment he looked blank,—a most unwonted manifestation of
dismay in so practised a gambler,—then laughed and shook hands
with his fortunate opponent. There was a laughing group around
him, condoling with him banteringly, for Pancho Vallé had never
seemed to make any misfortune a serious matter, when a pistol-shot
was heard. For a moment no one realized what had happened; the
young officer stood in his gay uniform, smiling still, his gold-mounted
pistol in his hand, then fell heavily forward. The ball had passed
through his heart. His widow had the satisfaction of seeing by the
smile that remained on his handsome countenance that he had died
as joyously as he had lived; not a trace of care showed that aught
deeper than mere pique and caprice had moved him. “Angel of my
life!” she cried, when her first burst of grief was over, “thou wert
beginning to make my heart ache, for I had nothing more to give
thee!”
This was her only word of reproach, if reproach it might be called.
For love that woman would have yielded even her life, and never
have known the hollowness of her idol. Grief did the work that
ingratitude and neglect—nay absolute cruelty—would perhaps never
have effected, and in a few short months destroyed her life. As she
was dying she called her daughter to her. “Isabel,” she said, “thou
hast wealth, thy brother has nothing; swear to me by the Virgin and
thy patron saint, that thou wilt be as a mother to him, that thou wilt
refuse him nothing that thy hand can give! Money, money, money, is
what makes men happy!” That had been the creed her life’s
experience had taught her. For money her father had sold her; for
that the husband she adored had given her fair words and caresses.
“As thou wouldst have thy mother’s blessing, promise me that Leon
shall never appeal to thee in vain!”
Isabel Garcia was but a child, and the boy Leon but three years
younger; yet as she looked upon her dying mother she solemnly
promised to fill her place, to take upon herself the rôle of sacrifice,
which her religion taught her was that of motherhood. Poor Clarita!
little had she understood a mother’s highest duties,—to warn, to
guide, to plead with God for the beloved. The mere yielding of
material things,—to clothe herself in sackcloth, that the child might
be robed in purple, to walk barefoot that he might ride in state, to
hunger that he might be delicately fed,—she had pictured these
things to herself as the purest sacrifices, and surely the only ones to
appeal to the hearts of such men as she had known; and the young
Isabel entered upon her task with her mother’s precepts deeply
engraved upon her heart, her mind all uninstructed, awaiting the
iron finger of experience to write upon it its lessons.
After their mother’s death, the young brother and sister, mere
children both, went to live in the house of some elderly relatives,
who with generous though not always judicious kindness strove to
forget the faults of the father by ignoring them when they became
apparent in the boy. The uncle of Isabel, the Friar Francisco, became
their tutor, but taught them little beyond the breviary. What could a
woman need with more? As for Leon, he took more kindly to the
lasso and saddle, to the pistol and sword, than to the book or pen,—
and even while still a child in years, more passionately still to the
gaming table. Though his elders with a shake of the head
remembered his father’s fate, and sometimes pushed the boy half
laughingly away from the monté table, or of a Sunday afternoon
sent him out to the bull-ring for his diversion, where he was a mere
spectator, rather than to the cock-pit, where he became a
participant, yet the question did not present itself as one at all of
questionable morals: every one gambled on a feast day, or at a
social game among one’s friends. Perhaps of all those by whom he
was surrounded, no one felt any serious anxiety for Leon except the
young girl who with premature solicitude warned him of the evil,
even as she supplied the means to indulge his wayward tastes.
Leon was a brilliant rather than a handsome boy, promising to be
well grown; and his lithe, vigorous figure showed to good advantage
in his gay riding-suits, whether of sombre black cloth with silver
buttons set closely down the outer seam of the pantaloons and
adorning the short round jacket, or in loose chapareras of buckskin
bound by a scarlet sash and bedizened with leather fringes,—a
costume that perhaps served to betray the Indian strain in his blood,
which ordinarily was detected only by a slight prominence of the
cheek bones and a somewhat furtive expression in the soft dark
eyes. At unguarded moments, however, perhaps when he fancied
himself unobserved and was practising with his pistol or sabre, those
eyes could flash with concentrated fire, so that more than once
Isabel had been constrained to call out: “Leon, Leon, you frighten
me! You look like the great cat when he pounces upon a harmless
little bird and crushes it for the very joy of killing!”
Then Leon would laugh, and the soft, dreamy haze would rise
again over the eyes as he would turn upon her. “Ha!” he would say,
“you will never be a man, Isabel; you will never understand why I
love the sights and sounds that throw you poor women into fainting
fits and tears. Ha! Isabel, if I were you I’d not stay in this dull house
with a couple of old women to guard me, when you might go to the
hacienda and be free as air.”
“Nonsense,” Isabel would retort; “what could I do there other than
here? I could not turn herdsman or vaquero, nor even ride out to the
fields to see how the crops were flourishing, nor roam like an Indian
through the mountains.”
“But I would!” Leon would cry enthusiastically; and with his
longing ardor for the free life of a country gentleman, with its
barbaric luxury and wild sports, he thus first put into the young girl’s
mind the thought of favoring the suit which her cousin, Don Gregorio
Garcia, began to urge.
Don Gregorio had married young, soon after the death of Ignacio
Garcia whom he succeeded in the management of the estate of
which they had been joint owners; but his wife had died leaving him
without an heir, and the first grief assuaged, it was but natural after
the passage of years that the widower should weary of his
loneliness. There were many reasons why his thoughts should turn
to his distant cousin Isabel, for though she was many years younger
than himself, such disparity of age was not unusual; the marriage
would unite still more closely the family fortunes, and effectually
prevent the intrusion of any undesirable stranger; and above all,
Isabel was gracious and queenly and beautiful enough to charm the
heart even of an anchorite, and Don Gregorio was far from being
one. Indeed, in his very early years he had given indications of a
partiality for a far more adventurous career than he had finally, by
force of circumstances, been led to adopt. Thus he sympathized
somewhat with Leon’s restless activity, and quite honestly secured
the boy’s alliance,—no slight advantage in his siege of the heart of
Isabel.
This, perhaps more than the good-will of the rest of the family,
enabled Don Gregorio to approach so nearly to Isabel’s inmost
nature that he learned far more of the strength of purpose and
capability for passionate devotion possessed by the young untrained
girl than any other being had done, and for the first time in his life
knew a love far deeper and purer than any passion which mere
physical charms could awaken. Such a love appealed to Isabel. She
was perhaps constitutionally cold to sexual charms, but eminently
susceptible to the sympathetic attrition of an appreciative mind,
while her heart could translate far more readily the rational
outpourings of friendship than the wild rhapsodies of passion. Thus,
although Isabel would have shrunk from a man who in his ardor
would have demanded of her affection some sacrifice of the
unqualified devotion that she had vowed to her brother, she seemed
to find in Don Gregorio one who could understand and applaud the
exaggerated devotion to the ideal standard of filial and sisterly duty
which she had unconsciously erected upon the few utterly irrational
words of a weak and dying woman.
The first four years of Isabel’s married life passed uneventfully.
Leon was constantly near her, and was the life of the great house,
which despite the crowd of retainers that frequented it would
without him have proved but a dull dwelling for so young a matron,
with no illusions in regard to the staid and kindly husband, who was
rather a friend to be consulted and revered than a lover to be
adored,—for although Don Gregorio worshipped his beautiful young
wife, he was at once too mindful of his own dignity, and too wary of
startling Isabel’s passionless nature, to manifest or exact romantic
and exhaustive proofs of affection. He used sometimes to mutter to
himself: “‘The stronger the flame the sooner the wood is burnt;’
better that the substance of love should endure than be dissipated in
smoke!”
Don Gregorio was somewhat of a philosopher; and as such, as
soon as the glamour thrown over him by Leon’s brilliant but
inconsequent sallies of wit, and his daring and dashing manner, was
dimmed, and above all as soon as his unreasoning sympathy with
Isabel’s predispositions settled into a calm and sincere desire for her
certain happiness and welfare, he began to look with some suspicion
upon traits which had at first attracted him as the natural outcome
of an ardent and generous nature.
Friar Francisco had accompanied the young brother and sister to
the hacienda, partly to minister in the church, and partly as tutor to
Leon; but in the latter capacity he found little exercise for his talents.
Upon one pretext or another the boy at first evaded and later
absolutely refused study; but he joined so heartily in the labors as
well as pleasures of hacienda life,—he was so ready in resource, so
untiring in action, so companionable alike to all classes, that Nature
seemed to have fitted him absolutely for the position that he was
apparently destined to fill in life. Yet though he was the prince of
rancheros, the life of the city sometimes seemed to possess an
irresistible attraction for him; and after months perhaps spent
among the employees of the hacienda, in riding with the vaqueros or
in penetrating the recesses of the mountain, even sleeping in the
huts of charcoal burners, or in caves with rovers of still more
doubtful reputation, he would suddenly weary of it all, and followed
by a servant or two ride gayly down to the city to see how the world
went there.
At first Don Gregorio had no idea how much those visits cost
Isabel; but as time went on, and rumors reached them of the boy’s
extravagant mode of life, Isabel became anxious and Don Gregorio
indignant. Some investigation showed that a troop of young
roysterers who called him captain were maintained in the mountains,
and that a thousand wild freaks which had mystified the neighboring
villages and haciendas might be traced to these mad spirits, among
whom Don Gregorio shrewdly conjectured might be found many of
the most daring young fellows, both of the higher and lower orders,
who had one by one mysteriously disappeared during the few
months preceding Leon’s eighteenth birthday.
Leon only laughed when taxed with his guerilla following, and
although as he managed it it was a somewhat costly amusement, it
was not an unusual or an altogether useless one in those days of
anarchy; for no one could say how soon the fortunes of war might
turn an enemy upon the land and stores of Tres Hermanos, and
even Don Gregorio was not displeased to find the most refractory of
his retainers placed in a position to defend rather than imperil the
interests of the estate. As to the escapades of city life he found them
less pardonable, for they consisted chiefly in mad devotion to the
gaming-table, which Leon was never content to leave until his
varying fortunes turned to disaster and his wild excitement was
quelled by the tardy reflection that his sister’s generosity would be
taxed in thousands to pay the folly of a night.
Before the age of twenty Leon Vallé had run the gamut of the
vices and extravagances peculiar to Mexican youths, and large as
the resources of Doña Isabel were, he had begun to encroach
seriously upon them; for true to her mother’s request, she had never
refused to supply his demands for money, though of late she had
begun to make remonstrances, which were received half
incredulously, half sullenly, as though he realized neither their justice
nor their necessity. Isabel was now a mother, her daughter Herlinda
having been born a year after her marriage, and their son Norberto,
the pride and hope of Don Gregorio, three years later; and naturally
the young mother longed to consider the interests of her children,
which so far as her own property was concerned seemed utterly
obliterated and overwhelmed by the mad extravagances of her
brother.
Strangely enough, Don Gregorio attempted no interference with
his wife’s disposal of her income, though it seemed not improbable
that at no distant day even the lands would be in jeopardy. Perhaps
he foresaw that as her means to gratify his insatiable demands
declined, so gradually Leon’s strange fascination over his sister
would cease; for inevitably his restless spirit would draw him afar to
find fresh fields for adventure, since in those days, when the great
struggle between Church and State was beginning and foreign
complications were forming, such a leader as he might prove to be
would find no lack of occasion for daring deeds and reckless
followers, nor scarcity of plunder with which to repay the latter.
Whatever were his thoughts, Don Gregorio guarded them well,
saying sometimes either to Leon himself, or to some friend who
expressed a half horrified conjecture as to where such absolute
madness must end, “See you not, ’t is foolish to squeeze the orange
until one tastes the bitterness of the rind?” He expected some
sudden and violent reaction in Isabel’s mind and conduct. But
though she began to show she realized and suffered, she bore the
strain put upon her with royal fortitude. Youth can hope through
such adverse circumstances, and it always seemed to her that one
who “meant so well” as Leon, must eventually turn from temptation
and begin a new and nobler career.
At last what appeared to Isabel the turning point in her brother’s
destiny was reached. He became violently enamored of the beautiful
daughter of a Spaniard, one Señor Fernandez, who of a family too
distinguished to be flattered by an alliance with a mere attaché of a
wealthy and powerful house, was so poor as to be willing to consider
it should a suitable provision be made to insure his daughter’s future
prosperity. The beautiful Dolores was herself favorably inclined
toward the gay cavalier, who most ardently pressed his suit,—the
more ardently perhaps that he was piqued and indignant that the
wary father utterly refused to consider the matter until Don Gregorio
or Doña Isabel herself should formally ask the hand of his daughter,
presenting at the same time unmistakable assurances of Leon’s
ability to fulfil the promises he recklessly poured forth.
That Leon had turned from his old evil courses seemed as months
passed on an absolute certainty. Not even the administrador himself
could be more utterly bound to the wheel of routine than he. To see
his changed life, his absolute repugnance even to the sports suitable
to his age, was almost piteous; his whole heart and mind seemed
set upon atonement for the folly of the past, and in preparation for a
life of toil and anxiety in the future. For in examining into her affairs,
Doña Isabel found that her income was largely overdrawn; Leon’s
extravagances, together with heavy losses incurred in the working of
the reduction-works, had so far crippled her resources that it was
only by stringent effort, and an appeal to Don Gregorio for aid, that
she was enabled so to rehabilitate the fortunes of Leon that he could
hope to win the prize which was to make or mar his future.
Doña Isabel was as happy as the impatient lover himself when she
could place in his hands the deeds of a small but productive estate,
famous for the growth of the maguey, from which the sale of pulque
and mescal promised a never failing revenue. The money had been
raised largely through concessions made by Don Gregorio, and was
to be repaid from the income of Isabel’s encumbered estate, so that
for some years at least it would be out of her power to render Leon
any further assistance. Don Gregorio shook his head gravely over the
whole matter; yet the fact that the young man was virtually thrown
upon the resources provided for him, which certainly without the
concentration of all his energies and tact would be altogether
insufficient for his maintenance, and also that he had great faith in
the energy of character which for the first time appeared diverted
into a legitimate channel, inclined him to believe that at last, urged
by necessity as well as love, Leon would redeem his past and settle
down into the reputable citizen and relative who was to justify and
repay the sister’s tireless and extraordinary devotion. “Or at least,”
he said to himself, “Isabel will be satisfied that no more can or
should be done; and it is worth a fortune to convince her of that.”
Strangely enough, though Isabel had addressed herself with a
frenzy of determination to the task of securing a competency for
Leon that might enable him to marry and enter upon a life which
was to relieve her of the constant drain upon her resources, both
material and mental, which for years had been sapping her
prosperity and peace, yet as she beheld him ride away toward the
town in which his inamorata dwelt to make the final arrangements
for his marriage, her heart sank within her; and instead of relief and
thankfulness, she felt a frightful pang of apprehension, she knew not
why, as if a prophetic voice warned her that her own hand had
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