“Tush, Pedro, give it to me!” cried one stout matron, longing to take the little creature to her motherly breast. “What know you of nursing infants? A drop of mother’s milk would be more welcome to it than all thy dry hugs. Ah, here comes the Señor Administrador,” and the crowd opened to admit the passage of Don Rafael, who attracted by the commotion had hastened to the spot in no small anger, ordering the crowd to disperse; but he was greeted with an incomprehensible chorus of which he only heard the one word “baby,” and exclaimed in indignation,—
“And is this the way to show your delight, when the poor woman is at the point of death perhaps? Get you gone, and it will be time enough to make this hubbub when it comes.”
The women burst out laughing, the men grinned from ear to ear, and the children fell into ecstasies of delight. Don Rafael was naturally thinking of the expected addition to his own family, and was enraged at what he supposed to be a premature manifestation of sympathy. Pedro alone was grave, and stepping back pointed to the infant, which was now quiet upon the bosom of Refugio, her volunteer nurse. “This is the child they speak of, Señor,” he said, and in a few words related the manner in which it had been delivered to him.
If he had expected to see any consciousness or confusion upon the face of Don Rafael, he must certainly have been disappointed, for there was simply the frankest and most perfect amazement, as he turned to the woman who had stepped out a little from the crowd and held the infant toward him. He saw at a glance that it was no Indian child,—the whiteness of its skin, the fineness of its garments, above all the yellow nimbus of hair, already curling in tiny rings around the little head, struck him with wonder. He crossed himself, and ejaculated a pious “Heaven help us!” and touched the child’s cheek with the tip of his finger, and turned its face from its nurse’s dusky breast in a very genuine amaze, which Pedro watched jealously. The child cried sleepily, and nestled under the reboso which the woman drew over it, hushing it in her arms, murmuring caressingly, as her own child tugged at her skirts,—“There, there, sleep little one, sleep! nothing shall harm thee; sleep, Chinita, sleep!”
But the little waif—whose soft curls had suggested the pet name—was not yet to slumber; for at that moment Doña Feliz appeared. Pedro noticed as she crossed the courtyard that she was extremely pale. Some of the women rushed toward her with voluble accounts of the beauty of the child and the fineness of its garments. She smiled wearily, and turned from them to look at the foundling. A flush spread over her face as she examined it, not reddening but deepening its clear olive tint. She looked at Rafael searchingly, at Pedro questioningly. He muttered over his thrice-told tale. “Was there no word, no paper?” she said, but waited for no answer. “This is no plebeian child, Rafael. What shall we do with it? Doña Isabel is not here, perhaps will not be here for years!”
There was a buzz of astonishment, for this was the first intimation of Doña Isabel’s intended length of absence. In the midst of it Pedro had taken the sleeping child from Refugio’s somewhat reluctant arm, and wrapping it in a scarf taken from his niece’s shoulders, had laid it on the sheepskin in the alcove in which he usually slept. This tacit appropriation perhaps settled the fate of the infant; still Doña Feliz looked at her son uneasily, and he rubbed his hands in perplexity. “Of all the days in the year for a babe like this to be left here,” he said, “when, the Saints willing, I am to have one of my own! No, no, mother, Rita would never consent.”
“Consent to what?” she answered almost testily. “What! Because this foundling chances to be white, would you have your wife adopt it as her own, when after so many years of prayer Heaven has sent her a child? No, no, Rafael, it would be madness!”
“There is no need,” interpolated Pedro, with a half-savage eagerness, and with a look which, strangely combined of indignation and relief, should have struck dumb the woman who thus to the mind of the gate-keeper was revealed as the incarnation of deceit,—“there is no need. I will keep the child; ‘without father or mother or a dog to bark for me,’ who can care for it better? Here are Refugio and Teresa and Florencia will nurse it for me. It will want for nothing.” A chorus of voices answered him: “We will all be its mother.”—“Give it to me when it cries, and I will nurse it.”—“The Saints will reward thee, Pedro!”—in the midst of which, in answer to a call from above, Doña Feliz hastened away, saying, “Nothing could be better for the present. Come, Rafael, you are wanted. I will write to Doña Isabel, Pedro; she will doubtless do something when you are tired of it. There is, for example, the asylum at Guanapila.”
Pedro gazed after her blankly. In spite of that momentary flush on the face, Doña Feliz had seemed as open as the day. He never ceased thereafter to look upon her in indignant admiration and fear. Her slightest word was like a spell upon him. Pedro was of a mind to propitiate demons, rather than worship angels. There was something to his mind demoniacal in this Doña Feliz.
Half an hour after she had ascended the stairs, and the idlers had dispersed to chatter over this event, leaving the new-found babe to its needed slumber, the woman who acted the part of midwife to Doña Rita ran down to the gate where Pedro and his niece were standing, to tell them that there was a babe, a girl, born to the wife of the administrador. A boy, who was lounging near, rushed off to ring the church bell, for this was a long-wished-for event; but before the first stroke fell on the air, the voice of Doña Feliz was heard from the window: “Silence! Silence! there are two. No bells, no bells!”