“And then, then, then?” she muttered; and Pepé leaned out from the wall, like a gaunt shadow, to hear the narration, as if every word was too significant to allow a single one to escape him. “Then?”
“Then,” resumed Ashley, “I seemed chained to the spot. I could not tear myself away, though reason told me that to stay there was useless; to hasten forward and demand the truth from those I had hitherto shrunk from offending, the only course open to me. Reason as I would, I could not force myself to leave the spot. After a time, yielding to necessity and to my command, Pepé left me. I was alone for hours with the dead. My mind was full of him; I heard his voice; I looked into the eyes which death had closed for so many unregarded years. I saw before me that face which I had so long forgotten; but my fancy pictured him never as in life, gay, happy, resolute, but pale, bloody, corpse-like, stretching out dead hands to me and speaking with the soundless voice of those we dream of. Who remembers the tone of a voice, silent forever? Yet it echoes in our heart; it awakens our joys, our griefs, our fears; it is more powerful, more terrible, than any living voice. And so upon that day was the voice of the dead John Ashley to me. As I listened to it, I swore never to leave Mexico until the mystery of his death, as well as that of his life, was open to me; until I had called to account the villain who had cut him off so secretly, so vilely.
“While I was full of the thought, and the whole world around me seemed to stretch on every side silent, void, waiting for me to choose whither I would go, in what direction I would set out to seek the nameless object of the new absorbing passion, which seemed more vital, more essential to my being than the air I breathed, I felt a presence near me. I looked up,—a man was leaning over the wall. I instantly conjectured he was not the mere peasant his dress indicated. A sense of mysterious connection between his life and mine seized upon me; it strengthened as he crossed the wall and strode toward me over the sunken graves. He came as though under a spell; I looked upon him as if under the fascination of a serpent-like gaze. I recoiled, yet for worlds I would not have turned from him. His eyes fell upon the cross; the expression of his face, the words that sprang from his lips,—vague though they were,—sped to my brain with an electric[electric] thrill. I knew the man before me was John Ashley’s murderer.”
Chinita had risen. She stretched out her hand and touched the hilt of the knife in Ashley’s belt. It was the action of a moment, yet it was a question that the quick beating of her heart and the panting breath made at the instant impossible from her lips. Ashley answered it by a brief account of the combat and its interruption.
As he ended, she drew a deep breath of relief. It did not occur to him that it could be for any other than himself. It flattered and pleased him, for an instant he realized how deeply, as having in it something of the tender unreasoning fears of gentle womanhood. Yet the readiness with which she had comprehended his passion for revenge, while it justified him, had set her in a harsh and cruel aspect, which made her lithe, dark beauty forbidding, unrelenting, tiger-like. Yet this strange young creature, he thought, at once so foreign to him, and still so near, concealed after all, under the surface of incomprehensible moods and half barbaric customs, those attributes of gentleness, those instincts of justness, which amidst the perplexing differences of national manners and standards of good and evil may be distinguished and understood by every mind. At that moment Ashley felt her to be less an alien than he had ever been able before to consider her. She was not only beautiful, bewitching, but in part, at least, comprehensible.
Chinita stood silent for many moments; she had not even started when he spoke the name Ramirez. The personality of the man of whom he had spoken had been a foregone conclusion in her mind.
“It was the amulet I gave him that saved him,” she said simply; and Ashley stared at her blankly, not comprehending the meaning of her words, but only that the relief she had experienced had been rather for the aggressor than for him. Had he then been mistaken? Was she an entire stranger to the thought which so permeated his own mind that he had imagined it must be present in hers?
“Yes, the amulet that I gave him must have all the virtues Pedro told me of,” she said musingly. “So it was the General Ramirez who killed the American? Dios mio! he must have had good cause; yet it angers me. Ah! it is well I have time to think what cause he must have had!”
“Cause!” ejaculated Ashley, “cause!”
The girl nodded her head in an argumentative way. In the dim light Ashley could read the struggle in her mind,—indignation at the deed, dismay at its consequences, battling with attempted justification of the perpetrator. “By my patron saint!” she exclaimed at length, “it was the woman who was to blame. Why did she torture him? He must have loved her; and what was there in the American to make her false to Ramirez? Strange she should have preferred another to him!”