What a pall seemed to fall upon the place when they were all gone! First, a great stillness pervaded the court and corridors where the children’s voices were wont to ring; and then hollow, ghostly noises woke the echoes. A second court was now opened which long had been closed, though the fountains played there, and the flower-pots were all rich with bloom. The doors of rooms which before at best had been only left ajar were opened wide; and Doña Feliz, with a few of her most trusty servants, swept out the long accumulated dust, and let the light stream in upon the disused furniture. Chinita had caught glimpses of these things before, indistinct, uncertain, as though they were far memories of a past existence. She and Chata had often talked of them in days when they played at being grand ladies, and in imagination they were rich and beautiful; but when she actually stood in the broad sunshine, and saw the gilt and varnish, the variegated stuffs and great mirrors, the reality seemed a dream, from which she feared to waken. For all these material things appealed to something in the child’s nature which it appeared impossible she should have inherited from a long line of plebeian ancestors,—a something that was not a mere gaping admiration for what was bright and beautiful and dazzling by its very height of separation from the poor possibilities of her life, but which one would say had sprung directly from the influences of lavish splendor. There was an impulse toward appropriation and enjoyment in the actual touch of these attributes of an aristocratic life, an instinctive knowledge of the uses of things she had never before seen or heard of, which seemed to come as naturally into her mind as would the art of swimming to a duckling that had passed its first days in the coop with its foster-mother the hen. Nothing surprised her, and the delight she felt was not merely that of novelty, but that of the satisfaction of a long-felt want. Doña Feliz had not forbidden her entrance when she first saw her at the door of Doña Isabel’s apartment, but watched her with grave surprise as she wandered through the long rooms, sometimes picking up a fan, a hand-glass, a cup, and unconsciously assuming the very air and walk of a grand lady,—an air so natural that even in her tattered red skirt it never for a moment made her appear grotesque.
Don Rafael returned home in the midst of the work of renovation. He had left his family with the dying mother, forced to return by the exigencies of business,—but ill pleased to leave them, for the roads were full of bandits, and the country was infested with wandering bands, as dangerous in their professed military character as the openly avowed robbers. They enjoyed immunity in all their depredations and deeds of violence, because they were committed under the standard of the Governor of the State, José Ramirez,—for to his rôle of military chieftain the adventurer had added that of politician. In this rôle he had hastened the tottering fortunes of President Comonfort to their fall, by seizing in his name a large sum of money belonging to foreign merchants, and with it buying over the troops under his command,—first to declare him military governor, and then to join with enthusiasm the clerical forces, which sprang into being as if by magic, bringing with them money in plenty, and gay uniforms, which put to shame the rags which the Liberals wore and which the resources of the legitimate government were insufficient to replace with more attractive garb. For months the name of José Ramirez had rung through the land in alternate shouts of triumph and joy and howls of execration. The prison doors had been thrown open, and hundreds of convicts had joined his ranks, ready to die for the man who had set them free,—not for gratitude, but in an excess of admiration for a spirit more lawless, more daring, than their own.
Chinita used to stand half aloof, and listen to these things, as wild rumors of them reached the hacienda, a burning pride glowing in her heart as she heard of deeds that made men tremble and stand aghast; and in imagination she saw the tall dark man whom she had made her hero riding through the streets in the full panoply of military splendor, followed by a train of mounted soldiers as gorgeous as himself,—then the blaring band, the gay foot soldiers shouting his name, and that terrible battle-cry of “Religion y Fueros,” in which so many infernal deeds were done; and last of all a multitude of half-clad men, women, and boys and girls like herself in ragged garments, not hungry nor wretched, though with all the grime and squalor of poverty upon them. She loathed them in her heart, though she did not consciously separate herself from their kind; but often ran to the covert of the tall corn, or the shade of some tree, and sat down and drew her reboso over her head, laughing softly and breathlessly, for had she not given this man the amulet which gave him a charmed life? Sometimes she heard of attacks made upon him,—how bullets had gone crashing through his carriage windows, how in the very streets of the city, as well as on the battle-field, his horses had been shot under him; but he had never once been hurt. She was a ragged, barefoot girl, but here was something which in her own eyes enwrapped her as with velvet and ermine,—the belief that she had some part in that dazzling career that attracted the gaze, the wonder, the terror of what was to her mind the whole wide world.
Through those hot summer days Pedro saw little of his foster child; and sometimes when he did see her, she would pass by as if he were nothing to her, or would shudder sometimes when he laid his hand with gentle violence upon her arm, and forced her in from the glaring sunshine, in which she often wandered for hours, unconscious of the heat which was burning her skin browner and browner, but painting roses on her cheeks, and filling her eyes with light; and sometimes she would come softly up behind him and throw the brown tangle of her hair over his eyes, almost smothering him in the golden crispness of its ruddy ends, and kiss him wildly between his bushy eyebrows, calling herself his wicked Chinita, his naughty child, until he would draw her on his knee and wipe away her streaming tears with the tenderness but none of the familiarity of a parent, and while he did so, sigh and sigh again, and wonder what these wild moods would lead to.
When Doña Feliz began the renovation of the family apartments Pedro stole in there one day when she chanced to be quite alone, and asked if it was true that Doña Isabel would soon return; it was many years—yes, twelve and more—since she had left them; and the niña Carmen, was it true that she was married? And the Señorita Herlinda? “Was it quite certain,” and his voice grew low,—“was it quite certain she was in a convent?”
“Did not Don Vicente tell you that?” queried Doña Feliz; “and his sad looks, did they not tell you? Ah, unhappy girl, where should she be but in a convent? Where else in the world should she hide, who was so at feud with life?” She started, remembering herself; but Pedro was looking at her with impassive stolidity. “Yes, yes,” she continued impatiently, “she has chosen her path; she has left the world forever.”
“But they say,” droned Pedro, monotonously, “that the convents will be opened and all the nuns be made free when the Señor Juarez takes his turn to rule. They say the day he enters the palace the dead men’s hands will open, and all their riches escape from their grasp. The silver and gold will be taken from the altars and given to the poor, and the monasteries and nunneries be pulled down, that the people may build their houses with the stones.”
Doña Feliz laughed. It was not often any sound of merriment passed her lips, and then not in scorn. “Dreams, dreams, Pedro!” she said. “Are you as foolish as the rest, and think the new law would give all the poor wealth, or even the despoiled their own? Do you think Juarez himself believes it? No, no! he is a sly fox; and while the Church and Comonfort were the lion and bear struggling over the carcass, he strives to glide in and steal the flesh. Do you think he will divide it among you hungry ones? No! these politicians are all alike, and whether with the cry of religion or liberty, fight and plot only for their own aggrandizement, and the poor country is forgotten, as it is drenched by the blood of her sons. There is not one true patriot in all this distracted land.”
She spoke rather to herself than Pedro, who shook his head with a sort of grim obstinacy. “I am thinking to go away, Doña Feliz,” he said. “You know the Señor Juarez is at liberty, and there will be bloody days soon if Zuloaga does not yield him his rightful place in Mexico. I have a mind to see a few of them. You know I was a good soldier in Santa Anna’s time, and as I sit in the gate I hear the sound of the cannon and the rattle of musketry and the voice of my old commander Gonzales, only it comes now from the lips of his son; and I feel I must go.”
Doña Feliz looked at him steadily. She knew her countryman well, and though she doubted not that something of the martial spirit of the time was stirring within him, she was equally certain that a second and more potent reason was prompting Pedro to leave Tres Hermanos; but she only said,—