“Oh!” ejaculated Chinita, significantly, and she laughed. “Then it is no use for me to tell you where he is buried. If there was no American, he could not have a grave.”
“Yet you have found it!” cried Chata, in intense excitement, for the story, more or less veracious, that had often been told her of the murder of the American years before, and the return of his ghost from time to time to haunt the spot accursed by his unavenged blood, had taken a strong hold upon her imagination. “Oh, Chinita! did you go, as you said you would, among the graves on the hillside? Did you go?”
“Why, yes, I did go,” answered Chinita, slowly, winding her arms around her knees, as she leaned from her high perch, her brown face almost touching that of the smaller child, who still stood before her. “But I sha’n’t tell you anything more, so you may as well go home. Ah, I think I hear them calling you,” and she straightened herself up as if to listen.
“No! no! no!” cried Chata in an agony of impatience, “I will not go till you tell me. I will know! Oh, Chinita, if I were but like you, and could run about at will, over the fields and up the hills!” The tears rose to her eyes as she spoke,—poor little captive, in her stolen moment of liberty feeling in her soul the iron of bondage to custom or necessity.
“Well, then,” said Chinita, deliberately, prolonging the impatience of her supplicant, while the tears in the dark gray eyes lifted to her own moved her, “I went through the cornfield. I drove Pepé back when he wanted to go with me. Oh, how afraid that big boy is of me! Yes, I went through the corn,—oh, it is so high, so high, I thought it was the very wood where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza met the robbers; but I was not afraid. And then I came to the beanfield, and oh, niña! I meant to go again this very day, and bring an armful of the sweet blossoms to Our Lady, and I forgot it!” clasping her hands penitently.
“And well for thee that thou didst,” exclaimed Chata, “or a pretty rating my father would have given thee! He says it is enough to make the Blessed Virgin vexed for a year to see the good food-blossoms wasted, when there are millions of flowers God only meant for her and the bees. But, Chinita, I would I were a bee, to make thee cry as I wish! Thou art slower than ever to-day. Tell me, tell me, what didst thou next?”
“Well, did I not tell you I came to the beanfield,—what should I do but go through it?” remonstrated Chinita; “and then I walked under the willows. Ah, if you could only once walk under the willows, niña! it is like heaven in the green shade by the clear water, and there are great brakes of rushes, with the birds skimming over them. I saw among them a stork standing on one leg, and he had in his mouth a little striped snake, yellow and scarlet and black, which so wriggled and twisted! Ah, and I saw, besides, little fish in the shallow water, and—”
Chata sighed. She had unconsciously sunk upon the mud floor; her eyes opened wide, as if in imagination she saw all those things of which, though she was set in the very heart of Nature, her bodily eyes had caught no glimpse. How in her heart of hearts the sheltered, cloistered daughter of the administrador envied the wild foster-child of the gate-keeper, who was so free, and from whom the woods and fields could keep no secrets! “Go on!” she whispered, and Chinita said, in a sort of recitative,—
“Yes, I went on and on, not very long by the water’s edge, though I loved it, but up the little path through the stones and the thorny cacti. Oh, but they were full of yellow blossoms, and they smelled so sweet; but they were full of prickles too, and as I went up the steep hillside they caught my reboso every minute, and when I stood among the graves my hands were tingling and smarting, and I was half blind and stumbling. I was so tired, oh, so tired! and I sat down and rubbed my hands in the sand. It was very still there; it seemed to me that a little wind was always singing, but perhaps it was the dry grass rustling; but as I bent down to listen, I fell asleep, and when I woke up the sun was no higher in the sky than the width of my hand, and I had no time to look for anything.”
“Ah, stupid creature!” cried Chata, after a moment’s silent disappointment. “Why did you not tell me so before? I must be missed. I shall be scolded,” and in a sudden panic she rose to her feet and turned to the door.