“Señorita,” he said, “is it not true that when you think of an American, you have in your mind a pale-faced, mysterious, unresisting youth, gliding spectre-like about the hacienda walls, tempting by a love-song the bloody steel of some dark and daring desperado? In a word, is it not the vision—distorted, insufficient, faint—of my murdered cousin, John Ashley, that comes before you?”
The young girl started. “Yes! yes!” she said hurriedly, not knowing what she said. “At least, once I thought like that. I had not seen an American then; I did not know—”
“And the first American you have known has had the benefit of the preconception,” interrupted Ashley, grimly. “Well, it is something to know the secret of a contemptuous indifference which has always been so frankly expressed.” This comment was in English, and though Chinita watched the motion of his lips, their silence could not have given her better opportunity to recover her confused and startled thoughts.
“Then it is true,” she said. “You are of the family of the poor American, who was killed like a rabbit by a hawk. Why, they say that he could not have even clapped his hand on his belt, though a man from very instinct would draw a knife on his enemy, even in his last gasp. Is it not so, Pepito? I used to tell Chata that, when she would shed her soft tears of pity for him. Well, I could not cry, but I have watched at the mesquite-tree for the coming of his ghost a thousand times; yet I never saw it—and it was I who found his grave.”
“And it was you who bade Pepé show it me,” interrupted Ashley; “and perhaps not as a mere jest as he thought.” She nodded, looking up at him vaguely and keenly. “You thought perhaps I had come these many miles from my own country to find it?” he added. “Well, that was scarcely so; it had not presented itself to me as possible that the obscure grave of a murdered foreigner should be remembered still, and that his name should be found above it. No, I came for proofs of John Ashley’s life, not of his death. It was not even to trace his murderer or to avenge him that I came.”
She looked incredulous. “Why then should you come?” she asked. “Had you a vow? If I had known and loved the dead man, it would have been to kill the man who struck him in secret that I would have come. But it is as Captain Ruiz says,—the blood of an American runs so slowly it cools his heart, while ours is a burning torrent that causes the soul to leap and the hand to smite at a word.”
Ashley realized that impatient contempt of him was struggling with a feeling to which, with sudden apprehension of its importance, she dared not give utterance; or perhaps the idea that had long been shaping itself was for the moment obscured, but yet in the darkness and confusion was growing to an overwhelming certainty in her mind. Chinita had risen to her feet, but suddenly she sat down, covering her face with a hand which Ashley saw in the dim light shook with suppressed excitement. Her attitude was that of a listener; and in a low voice he told her of his boyhood, of the days when he had come in from school and stood at the shoulder of his grown cousin,—the young man with the silky shadow just darkening his upper lip, and with the clear frank eyes of a boy, who looked so eagerly forward into the active life of manhood, restive under the restraints and cautions that hampered him, until at last he broke away, and was no more seen, nor scarcely heard of, until the news of his early and violent death came to cast an unending gloom over the household, which before had been captious, foreboding, but ever loving, ever secretly proud of the bold, irrepressible spirit it could not chain to its standard of decorum, or tame to walk in the narrow path of uneventful and passionless existence. The years of his own youth he passed lightly by; there was nothing in them for comment until he came to the time of his aunt’s death, his inheritance of the fortune that should have been John Ashley’s, the reading of those few letters which had given to Mary Ashley such strange dreams, and which in the re-reading had filled his mind with thoughts of the same possibilities that racked her own. He spoke of them briefly in a single sentence: “We found by his letters that he believed himself married; it was to find the woman he had loved, or any trace of her, that I came.”
Chinita sat so still one might have doubted if she heard; but that very stillness convinced Ashley that she listened with an absorbing interest, too great for questioning. She could but wait breathlessly for what was to come.
“After long and vexatious wanderings I was taken wounded to Tres Hermanos,” continued the young man. “There, when my hope was almost exhausted, I heard the name that had been in my mind so long,—heard it only to make inquiries which ended in confusion, and threatened to involve me in endless complications; so at last I was glad to suffer myself to be convinced that my conjectures were the mere vagaries of an overburdened fancy, a too scrupulous conscience, and to turn my face homeward, determined that thereafter I would live my life, and take in peace the goods fortune sent me. In such a mind I rode with the troop across the plain and up the desolate hillside, along which the scattered graves of the poor lay, the mounds scarce noticeable among the rocks and cacti. Pepé remembered your jesting command; it would give him an opportunity to withdraw from the troops unheeded. He invited me to go with him to see something that would interest me. When I saw the grave, my heart began to beat; when I read the name upon the fallen cross, the blood rushed into my eyes and suffocated me; every drop in my heart accused me! There lay my cousin murdered, and in looking for a possible claimant to his name, I had forgotten him! I had forgotten that his death was still unatoned for, the murderer undiscovered, unsought, unpunished.”
Chinita dropped her hand from her face and looked up, her eyes glowing, her lips apart, her bosom rising and falling with the quick breath that came and went. Here were words she could understand; here was a spirit that touched her own.