Pedro had fallen on his knees before her, in grief too deep for words. Pepé from behind him gazed into her glazing eyes with stoical despair. Suddenly she smiled, and laying her arm over Pedro’s shoulder, extended her blood-stained hand, looking at Pepé with the pretty, winning, disdainful smile of old, and said faintly, though proudly, “I am the daughter of the Señor General. Lead me, Pepé,—lead me. I am tired!”
And thus with her arm around him who had been so blindly faithful, and with her hand in that of the peasant youth who through life had been her adoring slave, with one long sigh, which left her lips smiling as it passed, Chinita fell asleep,—resting forever from the passion and turmoil of life.
“Peace, peace, peace!” reiterated the solemn voice of the priest, in assurance, in warning, in invocation. It penetrated hearts to which the very word had seemed a mockery. The hardest, the most reprobate, the haughtiest, the most sorrowful, repeated it with a sob. Ramirez on his knees, crushed to the earth, heard it as the cry of a despairing angel. Where for him could peace be found?
XLVII.
When Pedro Gomez rose from his knees he held in his hand a little square reliquary of faded blue. The string from which it had hung had been pierced by the fatal bullet, and it had dropped unheeded from Chinita’s neck.
Reverent hands bore the corpse into the desolate house; while Ramirez, or Leon Vallé,—for by his true name he was ever after called,—rising at the entreaty of his sister, stood like one bereft of sense or movement. Suddenly he laid his hand upon the gatekeeper’s arm and muttered hoarsely, “Kill me Pedro! See, I have no sword. If thou wilt not for vengeance, do it for love. You loved her,—for her sake end my misery!”
Pedro laid the reliquary in his hand. “If it should not be true?” he said doggedly of the faded silk. “Oh, was it for this I bore so many years the mocking silence of Doña Feliz and my mistress? No, no! it cannot be. Open this. ’Twas on her bosom when she came into my hands. The niña Herlinda promised me a token. It will be found there,—there in the blessed reliquary. Fool that I was to think it had nothing to declare to me. Ah, how your hands shake! Well, ’tis but a moment’s work.”
The gatekeeper ripped the sewed edges with his dagger’s point quickly, desperately, as though he were profaning a sacred thing,—then blankly looked at the worthless trifles on his palm. Just a tiny curl of brown and gold, and the eye-tooth of some animal, a fancied charm against infantile diseases, both wrapped in a paper scrawled with a faintly-written prayer.
Pedro was convinced. Till then he had clung to the belief that had given to his clownish life the elements of heroism, of love and sacrifice. Chinita the beautiful, the beloved, was dead—dead; but to his soul there came a bereavement far more terrible than that of death. He raised his glazing eyes appealingly, hopelessly. Ah, there was Doña Feliz,—she whom all these years he had accused as the hard, unpitying witness of the degradation of Herlinda’s child! and of her Doña Isabel with sobs was entreating brokenly in God’s name some news of the charge she had received years before. Pedro listened with a jealous eagerness, which the involuntary cry of Chata, interrupting for a moment the answering voice of Doña Feliz, made intolerable. “Mother of God!” he cried at length, “it was Doña Feliz then who guarded Herlinda’s child!”
“O false, cruel Feliz! why did you deceive me?” cried Doña Isabel. “Why did you suffer me to believe the gatekeeper’s foundling was of my own flesh and blood? Ah, God, so she was! It was the beauty of my mother that deceived me; it was repeated in the offspring of Leon, as it could never be in that of the American. Ah, it was for that I loved Chinita with such passionate tenderness and remorse! Oh, why did you suffer it? Why give me no warning? And now Chinita is dead, and my daughter cries to me for her child, and I cannot answer her.”