Two female figures issued panting from the covert,—it seemed that the elder woman had striven to hold the other back, but the younger had triumphed. Doña Isabel uttered a cry of infinite gratitude and joy. Chata caught and held the girl as she came. “Chinita! thank God,” she cried, “you are here!”
Pedro in an ecstasy seized the robe of Herlinda. “There, there,” he cried, “is your child! your beautiful child!”
“Yes!” cried Chinita in mad excitement which only burning words could relieve. Not then could she pause for fond greetings or reverent tears; the sight of Ramirez seemed at once to fire yet absorb her wildest passions. She sprang toward him, as one may suppose the lion’s whelp faces a tiger that in some fierce struggle has filled the air with the scent of blood. The very aroma arouses and maddens its kindred nature. With an outburst of eloquence which like arrows tipped with venom seemed to sting and paralyze the object upon which they were directed, she assailed Ramirez with the story of his crimes; and separated from the picturesque and daring events that had accompanied and disguised them, and told with dramatic eloquence and vivid anger, they thrilled every listener with shuddering abhorrence and dismay. Blackest of all, she pictured the murder of John Ashley. Ramirez himself seemed visibly to shrink and wither before her scathing words, while Herlinda pressed her hands over her ears, entreating her to cease. The agonized woman could not endure the vivid rendition, for the girl unconsciously acted out, as she conceived, the scene of midnight murder.
From the moment of Chinita’s appearance, Ramirez had seemed overwhelmed as by the sight of some unearthly being; and while she spoke his eyes riveted themselves upon her, his jaw fell, his countenance took the hue of death. Suddenly the girl burst into wild sobs and tears. Her rage was spent. “Go, go!” she said,—“you who have cursed my life, you who killed my father, you who condemned my mother to a convent and me to a beggar’s life; for was it strange they cast me out, hoping I should die? And so I should have done but for Pedro— Fiend, to pursue him with devilish tortures after so many years! Oh! that it was which brought my hate upon you. Ah, I had loved you from a child,—not with a woman’s fancy, but as though the thought of you were the very soul that was born with me. Of you I thought, for you I prayed—was it not so, Chata? It was I who gave you the amulet they said would insure life and fortune. I planned and schemed to give you wealth and power. Ah, even when I knew the cursed wrong you had done me, I could not believe, I could not realize; that murdered man had been dead so long he seemed of another world, another time,—he seemed nothing to me. But the torture of Pedro,—ah, that was real, that was of my life; it maddened me. Ah! ah! ah! it brought your downfall. You have wondered how your skill, your well-laid plans, your valor, all have failed you. It was because of me! because of us!”
Chinita turned and indicated her companion with a gesture of her hand. She saw then what had riveted the gaze of Ramirez, and rather than her words had held each witness dumb. Dolores—her face kindled into fictitious youth, her beautiful eyes gleaming with a flame that seemed to scathe—had drawn from her brows the kerchief she had worn. The act had revealed a wondrous mass of brown hair, with the russet tinge of the chestnut, gleaming in the sunlight with threads and spirals of gold. The two heads, that of Chinita and of the woman, seemed to have been modelled the one from the other, so exact was their form, and so similar the texture and color and peculiar growth of the marvellous wealth of curls that crowned them both.
Chinita drew back with dilated eyes, speechless with the overwhelming horror of conviction. Chata would have clasped her in her arms, but she drew herself away. In the woman whose wild laugh rang upon the air Chata recognized the one who had thrown herself before the horse of Ramirez, and who had lain a bruised and shameful figure upon the convent steps at El Toro.
There was a moment of profound silence. Even the sultry air seemed waiting, as though for the thunderclap that follows the lightning flash.
“Ah, Leon Vallé! you know now who accuses you,” cried the woman. “Oh, is not this a sweet revenge, to curse you by the lips of your own child,—the child you robbed me of? What! you thought that your child!” she pointed with ineffable contempt to Chata, who in the overwhelming excitement of the moment clung to the pallid and trembling Herlinda. “Bah! what is she to the beautiful being I bore you,—into whose soul was infused the idolatrous love that had been wrested from my heart, the love that had been my ruin? Ah, such love dies hard! It lived again in her,—it lived in her heart for you. Because of it I dared not claim her, though I knew her the moment my eyes fell upon her,—yes, as you know her now. In whom but in our child could be reproduced this wonderful wealth of hair you used to call the siren’s dower? In whom but in our child could reappear your own face, glorified, masked, by woman’s softness? Ah, Doña Isabel and this Pedro were deceived; they thought it was the beauty of Herlinda that they saw. But I knew it to be yours. Ah, in all these weeks I have taught your child how to hate you; I have plucked out that root of love; I have made more real the fancied wrongs of which she has accused you. Trifles! trifles! trifles all!—the murder of a supposed father, the torture of an old man, the death of a base lover,—yes, that Ruiz to whom from her birth you destined her. But I,—I cry to you give back my innocence! give back my ruined life! give back my father, who by your act was killed as surely as though your hand had struck the blow! give me the young years of my daughter’s life, those she squandered a beggar at your sister’s gate! Ah, you cannot, you cannot! But I,—I can avenge my wrongs and hers.”
Quick as a flash the infuriate woman levelled a pistol. Quick as an answering flash Chinita threw herself before her and sprang to her father’s breast. A second shot following so quickly on the first that they seemed as one, a cry of agony, a scream of madness, the cries of women, the hoarse voices of men, made the garden a pandemonium of hideous sounds. The desperate woman, whose bullet had touched its mark harmlessly to Ramirez through the slender form of Chinita, fled madly. Ramirez, scarce conscious whether the blood which streamed over him was that of his daughter or his own, bore the wounded girl through the throng that pressed him, wildly calling upon his child,—alas, alas! his but for the brief span during which her warm young blood should leap from the deadly puncture in her breast!
Herlinda, the first to regain self-control even amid the intense revulsion of feeling through which she had almost instantaneously passed, tore into shreds some portion of her garments and strove to stanch the wound; but in vain. Chinita, with a smile which succeeded her first wild cry and stare of horror, motioned her away. She pressed her own fingers on the wound, raising her head from the arm of Ramirez to say, “I saved you, I saved you! just as I used to think I would do. Ah, I could not hate you,—no, no! though I tried. And she could not root out my love,—it lives here still.” She pressed her hand still tighter on the wound. “My father! my father!”