The diligence had driven through the village. To the astonishment of the idlers it stopped before the wall that circled the half-ruined quinta; a woman stepped through the doorway, and was helped to her seat. She had evidently been expected by the driver. They would have been still more surprised had they also seen the lady who waved a white hand at parting, and who turned back into the garden with a deep-drawn sigh of relief, followed by a groan that seemed to rend and distort the lips through which it came, and which she vainly strove to keep from trembling as she entered the house, and answered the call of her awakened daughter.
What can I say of the scene that followed? What that will awaken pity, unstained with blame, for that poor creature, so powerless in that land that her sisters, in others more blessed, perhaps, find it impossible to put themselves in imagination in her place even for a single moment? But the captive slave can writhe; woman, the pampered toy, may weep: and where woman was both (for even in Mexico a new era is dawning on her), she could struggle and despair and die,—but, as Herlinda knew too well, in youth at least she could not assert her womanhood, and make or mar her own destiny. In such a land, in such a cause, what champion would arise to beat down the iron laws of custom which manacled and crushed her? Not one!
X.
One day Pedro Gomez, half-sleeping half-meditating as he sat on the stone bench beneath the hanging serpents that garnished the vestibule of Tres Hermanos, thought he saw a ghost upon the stairs which led from one corner of the wide court into which he had glanced, to the corridor of the upper floor. An apparition of Doña Feliz, he thought, had passed up them; and with ready superstition he decided in his own mind that some evil had befallen her in her journeyings. He was so disturbed by this idea that a few moments later, as her son Don Rafael passed through the vestibule, he ventured to stop him and tell him what he had seen; whereat Don Rafael burst into a loud laugh.
“What, do you not know,” he said, “that my mother has returned? Ah, I remember you were at Mass this morning. She came over from the post-house on donkey-back. A wonderful woman is my mother; but she knew we had need of her, and she came none too soon. I opened the door to her myself;” and Don Rafael hastened to his own apartments, where it was understood Doña Rita his wife hourly awaited the pangs of motherhood, and left Pedro gazing after him in open-mouthed astonishment.
In the first place nothing had been heard of the probability of the return of Doña Feliz; in the second, the manner of her return was unprecedented. She was a woman of some consequence at the hacienda. It was an almost incredible thing that under any circumstances she should arrive unexpectedly at the diligence post, and ride a league upon a donkey’s back like the wife of a laborer. And thirdly it was a miracle that he Pedro had himself gone to Mass that morning,—he could not remember how it had come about,—and that discovering his absence from the gate Don Rafael had himself performed his functions, and had not soundly rated him for his unseasonable devotion; for Don Rafael was not a man to confound the claims of spiritual and secular duties.
Pedro Gomez did not put the matter to himself in precisely these words; nevertheless it haunted and puzzled him, and kept him in an unusual state of abstraction,—which perhaps accounted for the fact that later in the day, just at high-noon, when the men were afield and the women busy in their huts, and Pedro had ample leisure for his siesta, he was suddenly aroused by a voice that seemed to fall from the skies. Springing to his feet, he almost struck against a powerful black horse, which was reined in the doorway; and dazzled by the sun, and confused by the unexpected encounter, he gazed stupidly into the face of a man who was bending toward him, his broad hat pushed back from a mass of coal-black hair, his white teeth exposed by the laugh that lighted up his whole face as he exclaimed,—
“Here, brother! here is a good handful for thee! I found it on the road yonder. Caramba! my horse nearly stepped on it! Do people in these parts scatter such seeds about? I fancy the crop would be but a poor one if they did, and I saw a good growth of little ones in the village yonder. Well, well! I have no use for such treasure; I freely bestow it on thee,”—and with a dexterous movement the stranger placed a bundle, wrapped in a tattered scarf, in the hands of the astounded Pedro, and without waiting question or thanks, whichever he might have expected, put spurs to his horse and galloped across the dusty plain.
Twice that day had Pedro Gomez been left, as he would have said, open-mouthed. Almost unconscious of what he did, he stood there watching the cloud of dust in which the horse and rider disappeared, until he felt himself pulled by the sleeve, and a sharp voice asked, “In the name of the Blessed, Tio, what have you there? Ay, Holy Babe! it is a child!”
A faint cry from the bundle confirmed these words; a tiny pink fist thrust out gave assurance to the eyes.