Pepé shuffled uneasily to regain possession of the blanket, answering pettishly and in a stifled voice, “Is the servant to talk when the master stands by with the words ready? Go now, Chinita, you knew better than that when Florencia used to pull your ears for a saucy one!”
The girl pouted, turning to Ashley with a lowering face. She felt instinctively that what had been to her a matter of simple expediency, a means of securing the fortunes of a man who was in her imagination all that was noble and great, might have a meaner aspect to this stranger, who would perhaps think she had meant harm to Doña Isabel. Why had Pepé dragged this American into the matter at all? Idiot! Ruiz had said nothing but evil would come of it; and here was the stranger standing so straight and silent to be questioned,—and looking at her, too, with a sort of pity in the curious gaze he turned upon her. She felt half inclined to turn back to the room whence she had come; yet she said somewhat mockingly,
“It is you, Señor, who must speak, though it was the servant I sent on my errand; but perhaps you have seen Pedro and asked him my questions?”
“You had better sit down, Chinita,” answered Ashley, severely. “I should not be here to-night if it were not to tell you things hard for you to listen to, and only to learn of matters of life or death should you have consented to come. Heavens! what a strange perversity of fate that you of all others should be anxious for the welfare, infatuated with the character, of—Ramirez!”
He spoke the name as though it were a curse, and the ready flame leaped into Chinita’s eyes and cheek.
“Ah, then,” she said, in a low but intense and penetrating tone, “you have come to tell me, like the others, that he is a brigand and a wretch! It is false! He is too brave, too daring, too noble for such cowardly spirits as yours to understand! Pepé, thou wert a craven. Stupid, it was Pedro I bade thee go to, not to this pale American, who has lost all his blood through a single wound!”
Ashley smiled faintly, vexed to find himself stung by a girl’s unreasoning passion, but interposed quietly, “We lose time, Señorita, which is prudent neither for you nor for me. I beg you will listen to what I have to say. You will agree with me then that this is no hour to talk of my courage or the lack of it.”
He had stepped between her and Pepé, to whom with a strange perversity she turned as if to show her disdain for the foreigner, whose every word had a tone of reproach. A mere suggestion that the proprieties which Doña Feliz and Doña Isabel had attempted to graft upon the rude stalk of her untrained, unguarded childhood had some other meaning than an elder’s caprices, touched Chinita’s mind: a young man could know nothing of woman’s freaks and prejudices; she felt the hot blood rising to her cheek as she encountered his quiet gaze. All at once the court and corridor seemed to become wonderfully dark and still. A slight shudder ran through her frame; she drew back from the American and sat down where he had directed her, drawing her reboso close around her.
“Señor,” she said, quite humbly, “I am listening.”
Ashley did not speak at once, though Pepé seemed to urge him to do so by a motion of the head, which betokened readiness to confirm his speech; and when he began, it was at a point entirely unexpected by either listener.