“Ah, yes!” she said humbly. “I have realized that myself. Oh, for a long, long time I have felt as a stranger among them all,—they so good, so true; and I—O God, who am I? Ah, I used to pity Chinita, but they have given her her proper place. It must have been a worthy one, or Doña Isabel would not have made her her child. But when they separate me from Don Rafael what shall I be?”
“Do not think of it. He—this Ramirez—is gone, perhaps never to return,” said Ashley, soothingly. “And if not, why should you go with him? Appeal to Don Rafael, to Doña Feliz.”
“Doña Rita has told me already that would be worse than useless,” replied Chata. “Don Rafael and Doña Feliz have already interfered in his plans for me; to thwart him further would be to make him their deadly enemy. Oh, you know not, Señor, what men like Don José Ramirez will do; and yet he is my father!”
Her voice failed in an agony of terror and shame. Ashley’s words died on his lips. Here was a grief he could hardly understand, against which he could offer no advice to one whose education and mind were so different from his own. What could he say to her to lessen the burden of her grief? Surely not, as he would have done to Chinita, that she should strive to content herself in a destiny which would raise her from an obscure station to wealth,—for the revolutionary chieftain, he supposed, had never-failing resources,—and to a certain dignity, as the daughter of a popular hero. He could have imagined Chinita as glorying in such a position, and Rosario as reigning with a thousand airs and graces in the miniature court around her; but here was a child, a very child, shrinking from the possible contact with cruel and conscience-hardened adventurers, and stricken to the heart by the thought of losing the heritage of an honest name.
Presently Chata spoke again, as though to speak to this stranger in whom she had involuntarily confided was, in spite of her self-reproach, to lay her long repression, her doubts and fears, before a shrine. Almost incoherently, in the rapid utterance of overwhelming excitement, she poured forth the story of the interview of Ramirez and Doña Rita which she had overheard in the garden at El Toro. In her earnestness she did not even omit the project which had been discussed for uniting her future with that of Ruiz. Ashley’s teeth became set and his lips pressed each other as he listened. Here indeed was confirmation of the villain’s claim; and yet—and yet—
“It cannot be!” he interrupted. “I cannot believe it. You say yourself, your very being recoils from him—ah, it must be for some deep cause you hate him so! And I too—I hate him. Did I not tell you I have a long arrear of wrong to settle, and—”
“You!” she ejaculated wonderingly. “What wrong can he have done to you? Was it he who robbed and wounded you?”
“No, no!” he answered. “Those were but the chances of travel. There is something far greater than that; but while you believe him to be your father, I will not talk to you of avenging myself. I should be a brute indeed to add a feather’s weight to your trouble. Do not think of that again; but believe me, there is some mystery neither of us understands. The truth may be far from what you think it. I will demand it of Don Rafael, of Doña Feliz—they must know.”
She was looking at him wonderingly, almost in awe, with those large, clear, gray eyes, which seemed to have in them the reflection of a purer, calmer sky than the intense and fiery one beneath which she was born. As he looked at her, her very dress seemed a disguise, so entirely did she seem disassociated from the scenes in which he found her.
“Ah,” she said hopelessly, clasping her hands, “you do not know my people as I do. I have not asked Don Rafael or Doña Feliz to tell me the secret of my birth. They have concealed it for some weighty reason, and until the time comes when they judge it right for me to know, I might plead with them in vain. By going to them I should but lose their love, and become the object of their suspicion and doubt. Oh, I could not endure that, I would not endure it! Doña Rita is changed, is cold, distrustful; and why should I by useless haste bring their anger upon her? No, no, Señor, I beg, I entreat you, say nothing to Don Rafael. Let me be in peace as long as I may. My father has not come to-day; perhaps he has forgotten me!”