“But if he loved her,” said Chinita; “if he meant to separate her from—from such a woman as you had been! Oh, I know you have suffered, that you have reason for vengeance; but—” she cried hysterically, striking her hands together, terribly moved, she knew not why. The strange woman broke into sobs, piteous to hear. Chinita clasped her hands. “But you would not have her—your child—his child—hate the man you loved?”
“Hate him!” echoed Dolores. “I would have her hate him with such hate as she would bear toward the fiends of hell. I would have her know him as you know him,—the insatiable monster who wrecked the happiness of a sister too fond, even when most foully wronged, to seize the vengeance that was within her grasp. Ah, Doña Isabel it was who set him free to murder, to betray, to wrench the child from its maddened mother, and cast it out by the first rude and careless hand that would do his will! My God! were you his child could you have pity? Would you not feel your wrongs,—the wrongs of the mother who bore you?”
Dolores spoke with the wild excitement of one who for years had brooded on this theme. Chinita herself seemed to be struggling with some fantasy of a disordered brain. The woman actually glared upon her, as if on her reply hung her destiny. Overcome by the unexpected demand upon her sympathy,—a demand that the peculiar circumstances of her life made irresistibly impressive,—Chinita shrank with horror at the tumult of emotion which revealed to her mind the possibilities of her own passionate nature.
“Tell me no more! Ask me no more!” she cried. “Ah, if I were his daughter! But no, I am the daughter of Herlinda Garcia, and of the man he murdered in secret. Yes, I will seek Ramirez out. I—I—O God! I know not what I will do, but I will have justice! revenge! revenge!”
The girl ended with a scream, and fell down, burying her head on Pedro’s shoulder. The wounded man, his ghastly face pressed close against her twining hair, looked appealingly to the excited woman who stood over them. There was scorn, rage, intense offence upon her face; but slowly they died out, and she turned away with the weary air of one in whom some periodic excess of passion or madness had wrought its work and brought its consequent exhaustion. A half hour later she brought the girl some food, wonderfully dainty for the place and its resources, and gently fed and soothed her. Pepé and Pedro looked on wonderingly. All that had been said had passed so quickly that they had not realized that aught of consequence had happened; but in the quiescent attitude of Chinita, and the strange calm that had fallen upon the excited and erratic woman, they instinctively felt that a new phase of life had begun for them. A new spirit was in future to lead and rule them; and it dwelt in the frame of this half-crazed woman, who had declared herself mistress of the cave. The men thenceforth seemed led by a spell; and to the same spell Chinita gradually succumbed.
This had been the first meeting of Chinita with the woman who stood talking with her nearly two months later at the garden gate of Las Parras. They had left the cave weeks before,—Pepé and Pedro, the latter still bruised and maimed, to join the troops of Gonzales; and Chinita, unable to resist the influence of Dolores, followed rebelliously with swift and unerring movement the fortunes of Ramirez. By what arguments Pedro had been won to consent to separate from his foster-child, and to maintain silence concerning her to Ashley, can be but guessed; though certain it is that Chinita on her part reminded him of the promise he had made Herlinda to protect her child from Doña Isabel, to whose care she justly suspected Ashley Ward would strive to return her. Meanwhile Dolores adroitly fostered in the girl’s mind that hope of a peculiar and swift revenge, which was to satisfy at once the many wrongs that in those diverse lives were clamorous for justice; while an intense anticipation urged the gatekeeper to hasten without delay to join the Liberal army,—the anticipation of that event which presented to his mind such wondrous possibilities. The convents once opened, would Herlinda claim her child? Would she by some strange miracle confront Leon Vallé and her proud mother with the proof of that which Ashley Ward had in spite of adverse law and custom declared still possible,—the proof of her marriage with the American who had been slain without accusation, without the possibility of defence?
Pedro could not reason; he could but doggedly wait, and guard with silent fidelity and ferocity the charge that had been given him. That a superior intelligence, an undeclared authority potent as an armed power, had for a time wrested Chinita from him, made him only the more tenacious when once again he held her in his grasp. His foster-child while in the mountains with the woman whose life was bound in the same interests, the same mysteries, as her own, was safe from the possibilities of removal from his cognizance.
Pedro was asked no questions which he cared not to answer, when he presented himself among the Liberal forces. Ashley, tranquil in the belief that Chinita was with Doña Carmen in Guanapila, avoided more than casual mention of her name; and Pedro jealously guarded his secret, and patiently waited the moment he superstitiously believed would come,—the moment which, when it did come, gave him the sharpest sting he had ever known in his stoical existence; when Herlinda Garcia cried in uncontrollable horror and dismay, “What! you,—you have brought up my child? She was given to you!”
On the journey from El Toro there was but one thought in the mind of him who had served with such blind faithfulness. For the first time a doubt tormented him. “Would the beautiful, uncontrollable idol of his heart satisfy the longing—the years of longing—of the woman who freed from her bonds was hastening to claim her daughter and acknowledge her before the world?” As the hours passed, Pedro shunned the eyes of Herlinda, though they looked upon him with a grateful affection that should have been at once an invitation to confidence and a recompense of his long fidelity. Yet with the remembrance of Chinita ever before him, the glance of Herlinda seemed that of accusation and reproof. Her words rang like a knell in his heart. He, who knew the vices and virtues of the two castes which he and the still beautiful woman represented, knew that like oil and water they were irreconcilable, and understood the full significance of that involuntary cry, “What! you,—you have brought up my child?”