She had placed in his hand a flat earring of quaint filagree work, one of the marvels of rude and almost barbaric workmanship that the untaught goldsmiths of the haciendas produce. Pedro would have returned it to her, swearing by all he held sacred to do her will; but some sound had startled her. She slipped the reliquary into her bosom, drew her scarf around her, and glided away. He saw her pass the small doorway like a spectre. He could scarcely believe that she had been there at all, that she had actually spoken to him. He crossed himself as he lost sight of her, and looked in a dazed way at the earring in his palm.
“Would to God,” he muttered, “I had told Doña Isabel all the truth, as I meant to, when I went to her from the dead man’s side. Why did I not tell her plainly I knew her daughter Herlinda to be the woman Ashley had come here to meet,—would she have dared then to say she was not his wife? Fool that I was! I myself doubted. What, doubt that sweet angel! Beast! imbecile!” and Pedro flung his striped blanket from him with a gesture of disgust. “And now, what would be the use, though I should trumpet abroad the whole matter? No, my hour has passed. Doña Isabel must work her will; I will not fail her, for only by being true can I serve her daughter. But who knows?—Herlinda may be deceived; her fears may have turned her brain. Yet all the same I will keep this token;” and he looked at the earring reverently, then placed it in his wallet. Two days later, when she left Tres Hermanos and he saw its fellow in Herlinda’s ear, he caught the momentary glance in her dark eye, and stood transfixed.
Pedro Gomez hitherto had been a careless, idle, rollicking fellow; thenceforward he became grave, watchful, and crafty,—the change which, had there been keen observers near, all might have noticed in the outward man being as nothing to that from the specious fellow whom Ashley had found it an easy matter to bribe, to the conscience-stricken man who stood at the gates of the great hacienda of the Garcias, cognizant of its conflicting interests, and sworn to guard them; his crafty mind inclining to Doña Isabel and the cause she represented, his heart yearning over the erring daughter.
VIII.
Though Herlinda Garcia had forced a smile to her lips as she left, perhaps forever, the house where she was born, as the carriage was driven rapidly across the fertile valley her eyes remained fixed with melancholy, even despairing, intensity upon the walls wherein she had learned in her brief experience of life much that combines to make up the sum of woman’s wretchedness.
Herlinda had ever been an imaginative child, even before she had attained the age of seven years, at which she had been taught to consider herself a reasoning, responsible being; she had been conscious of vague feelings and desires, which had in a measure separated her from her family and the people who surrounded her, and had set her in sullen opposition to the aimless and inane occupations which served to while away days that her eager nature longed to fill with action. Though she had not been conscious of any especial direction into which she would have thrown her energies, she had been most keenly conscious that she possessed them, and early rebelled against the petty tasks that curbed and strove to stifle them,—such tasks as the embroidering of capes and stoles, or drawing of threads from fine linen, to be replaced with intricate stitches of needle-work, to form the decoration of altar cloths, or the garments of the waxen Lady of Sorrows above the altar in the chapel, or of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the great sala,—as she did also against the endless repetition of prayers, for which she needlessly turned the leaves of her well-thumbed breviary. How she had longed for freedom to run with the peasant children over the fields! How many hours she had hung over the iron railing of her mother’s balcony, and gazed upon the far hills, and wondered what sort of world lay in the blue beyond them.
Sometimes Herlinda had attempted to talk to Vicente Gonzales of these things when he came from the city, privileged as the son of an old friend, and the scion of a wealthy and influential family, to form an early intimacy with the pretty child, whom later he would meet but in her mother’s presence with all the restrictions of Spanish etiquette. She had always liked the proud, handsome boy, but he was far slower in mental development than she, and could only laugh at her fancies. And so as they grew older, and he in secret grew more fond, she had become indifferent, restlessly longing for an expansion of her contracted and aimless existence, yet finding no promise in the prospects of war and political strife which began to allure Gonzales, and in which she could not hope to take part,—and to sit a spectator was not in the nature of Herlinda. Her mother delighted to watch the fray, to counsel and direct. It was perhaps this trait in Doña Isabel’s character that, while it had awakened her daughter’s admiration, had chafed and fretted her, checking the natural expression of her lively and energetic spirit, even as the cold and stately dignity of her manner repressed the affections which lay ardent within her, waiting but the magnetic touch of a responsive nature.
Such an one had not been found within her home; all were cold, preoccupied, absorbed in the every-day affairs of life. Sometimes, when by chance Herlinda had caught a glimpse of the repressed inner nature of Doña Feliz, the mother of the administrador, she had felt for a moment drawn toward her; but although all her life she had lived beneath the same roof with her, there had occurred no special circumstance to draw them into intimacy, or in any way lessen the barrier that difference in age and position raised between them,—for perhaps in no part of the world are the subtle differences of caste so clearly recognized and so closely observed as in those little worlds, the Mexican haciendas de campo.
Sometimes, in her unhappiest moods, when her unrest had become actual pain and resolved itself into a vague but real feeling of grief, Herlinda had thought of her father, in her heart striving to idealize what was but an uncertain memory of an elderly, formal-mannered man, handsome according to the type of his race,—sharp-featured, eagle-eyed, but small of stature, with small effeminate hands which Herlinda could remember she used to kiss, in the respectful salutation with which she had been taught to greet him. He had died when Herlinda was eight years old, just after the second daughter, Carmen, was born; and though Doña Isabel seldom mentioned him, it was understood that she had loved him deeply, and for his sake lived the life of semi-isolation which her age, her beauty, her talents, and wealth seemed to combine to render an unnatural choice. As she grew older, Herlinda began to wonder, and sometimes repine, at this utter separation from the world of which in a hurried visit to the city of Guanapila she had once caught a glimpse. Especially was this the case after the arrival of Mademoiselle La Croix, who was lost in wonder that any one should voluntarily resign herself to exile even in so lovely a spot; and although she opened for Herlinda a new world in the studies to which she directed her, they had been rather of an imaginative than a logical kind, and stimulated those faculties which should rather have been repressed, while personally the governess had answered no need in the frank yet repressed and struggling nature of her pupil.
These had been the conditions under which Herlinda had met John Ashley, and we know with what result. As the tiny stream rushes into the river and is carried away by its force, their waters mingling indistinguishably, so the mind, the very soul of Herlinda had felt the power of that perfect sympathy which, in the few short words uttered in the pauses of a dance (for they had first met at Guanapila) and the expressive glances of his eyes, she believed herself to have found in the mind and heart of the alien,—a man in her mother’s employ, one whom ordinarily she would have treated with perfect politeness, but would have thought of as set as far apart from her own life as though they were beings of a separate order of creation. The fact that he was a handsome young man would primarily have had no effect upon Herlinda, though undoubtedly it served to render to her mind more natural and delightful the ascendency which, in spite of all obstacles, he rapidly gained over her entire nature.