Chinita smiled with cynical bitterness, and said indifferently, “I promise. Yes, I promise. Ah, yes, Señor, you will see I have been silent when you come again. And now I will go back. What if the Señora Doña Isabel should wake and find me missing?—the child she loves so well!”
She waved her hand, and stepped backward through the darkness. At the door of the chamber where Doña Isabel lay, she seemed to vanish into air, so swift, so silent, was her going.
Ashley gazed after her long in silence,—so long that another spectral figure stole through the doorway, and with noiseless steps reached Pepé’s side. “The Señora slept like the dead,” Juana whispered; “but not for a thousand hard dollars would I lie in Chinita’s place again, while she forgets time in lover’s chat. I wonder at thee, Pepé! thou hast not a man’s heart in thee. I thought thou lovedst her thyself!”
“Fool!” said Pepé, sulkily, and turned away; while Juana, ill paid for her devotion, sought a corner of the corridor in which to sink to sleep.
“Strange, incomprehensible creature!” muttered Ashley at length. “What emotions, what thoughts are hers? At least it is certain that the fascination of Ramirez is dissolved,—horror, hatred perhaps, has taken its place. She is safe. And now Pepé, my horse; I must take the road. And if it be true that Juarez is at hand, even Ramirez himself may tremble; the combined forces of Gonzales and Ruiz will hold him at bay, and keep an open road for the intrepid Liberal to the capital.”
It was scarcely two hours past midnight, though his interview with Chinita had lasted long, when Ashley cautiously emerged from the inn, and took his way toward the open country. The troops lay at the east end of the town; but giving the watchword to the few sentinels who challenged him, he avoided them, and soon found himself in the vast solitude of the night. He had taken the precaution to procure a fresh horse, and for some leagues the way lay across a level country, so he made such speed as brought him by dawn within sight of the mountain upon which Pedro lay,—but on a side many miles nearer El Toro, his destination, where Gonzales, with his insufficient garrison, was anxiously awaiting the reinforcements without which he could neither dare to advance, nor hope to maintain his position in case of attack.
As Ashley glanced toward the ragged and solitary cliffs where like a hunted animal the man was lying, he remembered that after the first horror was passed, Chinita had spoken no more of her foster-father, had asked no question as to what hands were set to tend him, nor in what direction lay the cave in which he was sheltered. Such queries would have been useless,—she could do nothing; yet it would have been but natural that she should have made them. Even if the gate-keeper’s care of her neglected infancy was forgotten, or accepted as a matter of course, and though her mind was absorbed by thoughts of her own history and her wrongs, yet his very connection with them should have made him an object of interest if not of tenderness.
“Heavens!” murmured Ashley, “can it be that this strange creature, as different in her instincts as in her appearance and education, is of the same blood as Mary? A bewildering charge shall I take to her, if Doña Isabel still, to save the reputation of her daughter, lays no claim to this beautiful girl, and denies her such scanty justice as she can give! For a daughter of an Ashley must not be left to the sport of chance,—neither to be sold to the first who bargains for her beauty; nor, worse still, to be consigned to a convent, as the unhappy Herlinda was.” He reasoned calmly, yet his heart and temples beat hotly. “Let me think. If this Gonzales but proves a man of honor, I may gain some aid from him; he, at least, may know in which convent this woman—whom he also loved—is immured. By the way, he is a fanatic upon this new scheme of Juarez, of secularizing the property of the clergy. Ah, in event of the success of the Liberal arms, that might work countless and unimagined changes!”
The thought was full of suggestion. Ashley gave rein to his horse, and dashed forward with fresh vigor. Afterward he scarce remembered how the day passed; but its close found him, spent and weary, alighting at the door of the inn of El Toro.
Almost at the same moment, far on the other side of the mountain, two travellers, so wrapped in long striped blankets and covered by wide sombreros as to be almost indistinguishable, the man from the woman, drew rein before a mass of cactus and gray rock; and while the one gazed furtively around, vainly seeking a sign of human contiguity, the other dismounted, and bending to a mere crevice in the rock gave a long, low whistle, then turned to help his companion, saying, “That will bring Stefano. Chinita, thou wilt see that, though a coward, he is no fool, and has cared well for thy foster-father. Said I not so? Ah, here he comes.”