“Who are you? What do you know of me?” cried Chinita, shuddering, though she understood that the weapon of which the stranger spoke was no material tool. “Why should you join with me, or I with you? No, no; when Pedro is able, we will go away, you your way, and I mine!”
“Our ways lie together!” cried the woman, excitedly. “The one without the other would fail. Oh! you think me mad, but I am not. I could tell you things,—but no, I will wait; perhaps thou hast not even heard of me. Ah! how many years is it since I disappeared from the world, that I have been forgotten?”
Pedro raised himself upon his elbow painfully, and gazed at her with a long and eager scrutiny. “I know you now,” he said, “though I never saw you but once, and then you were beautiful as the Holy Madonna on the high altar at Pueblo.”
“Yes,” she interrupted; “I am Dolores, whom Vallé loved. Ah, you think that strange, because my beauty is gone, and I am old, and like a witch, living in this murky cave! Where else should I go—I, whom he stole away and betrayed, and despoiled and forsook?”
“But you are rich,” said Pepé in wonder, and in a tone that seemed to condone the rest.
“Rich!” she said scornfully. “Rich! yes, for such needs as mine. Rich! he used to give me jewels a queen might have been proud of. He thought I wasted, lost, destroyed them, as he would have done, but I kept them,—kept them for my child. Ah, I knew she would be beautiful, would be worthy of the rarest and costliest I could give her. Ah, I would give her jewels! such jewels as would buy her love, were she as capricious, as hard, as Ramirez himself.”
Chinita drew back from her, with a certain hauteur, a certain loathing upon her face. “I have heard of you,” she said coldly. “You chose your lot. If you have wrongs, they can be nothing to mine. See”—and she pointed to Pedro—“what Ramirez has done but now; while but for his murderous knife my father would have lived, and my mother would not have been obliged to hide her disgraced head in a convent, and I should not have been left a pauper at the gate of my mother’s house.”
“There can be no wrongs greater than these?” said the woman half interrogatively, half affirmatively. “Yet listen! He stole me away from my husband; I swear I did not go willingly, though I loved him,—oh my God, how I loved him! For him I died to the world. I forsook the father who was dear to me as life. I lived a life of infamy, hiding in obscure villages, in mountain huts, in caves when need were. I bore him children; but they died,—all died as though there was a curse upon them. That angered him; then he grew cold, then false and cruel. One day a captive was brought into the camp for ransom,—a captive he himself had made. He sent to me to look at the man and to set a price upon his head. I went, as he told me, in gay attire, with jewels blazing on my arms and neck, a diadem upon my head. When the prisoner looked up and saw me, with the price of my shame as he thought upon me, he staggered, gasped, and fell down dead. He was my father. My senses fled, yet when another child was born they returned to me. She was strong and beautiful. I clasped my treasure; but my heart burned against her father. I swore I would leave him, that I would hide the child where he never should discover her. Fool! fool! that I was! When I woke next day, for in my weakness I slept, the babe was gone,—dead they told me; gone too the pretty clothing I had made, the little trinkets I had placed about her neck. But the blessed prayers I had bought from the holy nuns of La Piedad were not in vain! No, no! wretch, demon, that he was!”
Chinita’s heart beat suffocatingly. “What! you think the child was still living?” she said.
“I know it! I know it!” cried Dolores. “I feel it here,—here in my heart, which beats for her. And sometime, when I find that child, if I do find her, think you she will love me? Think you she will hate her father as I do? Think you she will avenge my wrongs and hers?”