“Believe me, Señor Comonfort shall know of your goodwill, and that of the excellent lady Doña Isabel,” continued Ramirez, suavely. “She will lose nothing by the complacency of her administrador,” and as he spoke, he smiled half indulgently, half contemptuously, upon Don Rafael.
“You promised me that here at least no seizures should be made,” exclaimed Don Vicente, in a low indignant voice, hot with the thought that even the men he had himself mustered and commanded were so utterly under the spell of Ramirez that upon any disagreement they were likely to shift their allegiance,—for those free companies were even less to be depended upon than the easily rebellious regulars.
“There have been no seizures, nor will there be,” answered the General, laughing. “Don Rafael and I have been talking together as friends and brothers; he has told me of his amiable family, and I him of my footsore troops.”
Vicente, silenced but enraged, glared upon Ramirez as he bade farewell to Doña Feliz. As he took her hand, he bent and lightly kissed it. The action was a common one,—Doña Feliz scarcely noticed it; her eyes rested upon her son, who shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, his garrulity checked, his gaze confused and alarmed.
“We shall be gone at daybreak. You will be glad to be rid of us,” the General said laughingly; “yet we are innocent folk, and would do you no harm. Hark! how sweetly our followers are singing,”—and, indeed, the plaintive notes of a love ditty faintly floated on the air. “My adieus to the Señora de Sanchez and her lovely children.”
While the General spoke thus, with many low bows and formal words of parting, he was quite in the shadow of the wall. Doña Feliz could scarce see his face, but Chinita’s eyes never left it. As he turned away, a sob rose in her throat; but for a sudden fear, she would have darted after him. Her blood seemed afire. There was something in the very atmosphere stirred by this man that roused her wild nature, even as the advent of its fellow casts an admonishing scent upon the air breathed by some savage beast.
Don Rafael stole away to bed, but Don Vicente and Doña Feliz continued their interrupted conversation far into the night. Chinita sat in the same place, and slumbered fitfully, and dreamed. All through her dreams sounded the voice of the General Ramirez; all through her dreams Gonzales followed him, with hand upon his sword.
It was near morning, when at last the child awoke, chilled and stiff, and found herself alone in the corridor. The moon had sunk, and only the faint light of the stars shone on the vast and silent building; but she was not afraid. She was used to dropping asleep, as did others of the peasant class, where best it suited her, and at best her softest bed was a sheep-skin. She sleepily crept to the most sheltered part of the corridor and slept again. But the stony pillow invited to no lengthy repose; and when the dawn broke, the sound of movement in the outer court quickly roused her, and she ran out just in time to see the officers hastily swallowing their chocolate, while Don Rafael, Pedro, and a crowd of laborers, shivering in their jorongos, were looking on, while the sumpter mules were being laden. At the village, the camp women were already making their shrill adieus, taking their departure upon sorry beasts, laden with screeching chickens, grunting young pigs, and handfuls of rice, coffee, chile, or whatever edibles they had been able to filch or beg, tied in scraps of cloth and hung from their wide panniers, where the children were perched at imminent risk of losing their balance and breaking their brown necks. It was not known, however, that such accidents had ever happened, and the women jogged merrily away, to fall into the rear when outstripped by their better mounted lords.
Don Rafael wore a gloomy face. A squad of soldiers had already been despatched for the horses; his own herders were lassooing them in the pastures, and they were presently driven past the hacienda gates, plunging and snorting. He felt that had he not in Doña Isabel’s name yielded them, they would have been forcibly seized; yet his conscience troubled him. The night before he had drunk too much; the wine had strangely affected him,—he had been maudlin and garrulous. These were times when no prudent man should talk unnecessarily, and especially to such a listener as the adventurer General José Ramirez.
The neighing and whinnying of the horses, the hollow ringing of their unshod hoofs upon the road-way, the shouts of the men, the shrill voices of the women, all combined to fill the air with unwonted sounds, and brought the family of the administrador early from their beds. As Vicente Gonzales, after shaking hands coldly with Don Rafael, rode away at the head of his band, he half turned in his saddle to glance at Doña Isabel’s balcony. At the rear of the house, a faint glow was beginning to steal up the sky and touch the tops of the trees which rose above the garden wall, and tinge with opal the square towers of the church; he remembered the good Padre Francisco, and piously breathed a prayer for his soul. The drooping rose on the balcony of what he knew to be Doña Isabel’s chamber seemed the very emblem of death and desolation. With a sigh he pulled his hat over his eyes and rode on; but the General, José Ramirez, who had been longer in his adieus, caught sight of Doña Rita in the corner balcony, leaning over her two half-dressed children. Their two heads were close together, their laughing faces side by side, their four eyes making points of dancing light behind the black bars of the balcony railing.