The face of the hardened man contracted in agony. He turned toward Doña Isabel and Herlinda with a heartrending cry. “You are avenged,—both, both, avenged! O my God! You never can have known such agony as this. Oh wretched man that I am, to see the sum of all my crimes cancelled by this terrible reprisal!”
The hand of the dying girl fell from its place. Chata knelt and placed her own with desperate energy against the fatal wound. Chinita smiled and faintly kissed her. “My dream has come true,” she said. “Ah, when they pity me you will say, ‘She always longed to die for him.’ Tell them it was best that I should die, I loved him so. Death wipes out every wrong. He is my father!”
Ramirez groaned. Great drops of sweat stood on his brow. He strove still to support her; but Gonzales on the one side and Ashley on the other bore her weight.
By this time the garden was full of people. A man forced his way through the throng.
“Reyes! Reyes!” cried Ramirez, “Villain, did you not as I commanded give my child to Isabel, my sister; or was yours the accursed hand that brought her to this pass?”
Reyes gazed at the dying girl in horror. A suspicion of the misapprehension under which Ramirez had acted, and which had confirmed Ruiz in his treachery, had haunted him for days, since in a remote village he had met the administrador of Tres Hermanos and heard from him the tale of the carrying away of Chata. He had hastened toward Las Parras with Don Rafael and his mother, bent on warning Ramirez and confessing the wild carelessness with which he had disposed of the child who had been confided to him, and who he had supposed until his meeting with Chinita had indirectly reached the person to whom she was destined. It had not been possible for him—a man in whom the paternal instinct had never dwelt—to imagine it the one virtue in the callous, fierce, and unscrupulous Ramirez. But with this bleeding, dying figure in his arms Ramirez seemed transformed. Reyes fell on his knees.
“Ah, had you but told me the whole truth!” sighed the dying girl. “A Garcia you said! Ah, I should have been prouder to be his daughter than a thousand times Garcia!”
She turned her head, and her eyes fell on Ashley’s face and rested there. A soft, strange illumination animated her own, as though from some inward light just kindled. “Adios! Adios!” she murmured. “Ah, you were noble, generous! yet you thought I did not feel, that I did not understand. Ah, could I live, you should see! But this is best; you will never need trouble now for Chinita. No, no, no! do not grieve— Ah, that might make me weak! I would not—find it—hard—to die.”
She looked at him long and fixedly,—perhaps to her as to Ashley a secret as sacred as it was precious, was then revealed. A blueness crept around her mouth, a glaze over her beautiful eyes. “No wonder that she loved the American!” she whispered at length,—dreamily, as though her mind wandered to the past. The words sank like lead in Ashley’s heart, to be forgotten never, never!
After a moment the lips of the dying girl moved in prayer. The priest, who had from time to time endeavored to control an emotion which seemed a personal rather than a merely sympathetic grief, bent over her, and all present fell on their knees. Chinita whispered in his ear a few words, and received absolution with a smile of perfect peace. Then began the solemn litany for the departing soul; Chinita was evidently sinking rapidly.