As she passed through the many courts, reaching at last that upon which the church opened, she was so absorbed that she did not notice she was closely followed by a man who had been very near when Doña Isabel had repulsed her, and who with a few apparently careless questions had possessed himself of all there was to know of Chinita’s history.
“Look you!” said one, “did not Pedro say that a man as black as the devil dropped her into his hands? Who knows but she is the fiend’s own child? Vaya, she struck me over the face with talons like a cat’s only last week.”
“And well thou deservedst it,” cried the boy called Pepé. But he was laughed down by a shrill majority, for Doña Isabel’s unaccountable repulse of her had turned the tide of public opinion strongly against the foundling; and the woman toward whom Tio Reyes—for he it was—now turned for additional particulars, rightly judging that in such matters female memories would prove most explicit, crossed herself as she opined “that the fox knows much, but more he who traps him, and that Pedro who had found the girl could best tell whence she came,”—a saying which elicited many nods and exclamations of approval, for Pedro had never been believed quite honest in the matter. A wild story that he had received the babe from the hands of a beautiful and pallid spectre which had once been seen to speak with him in the corridor, and that this was the ghost of some lovely woman he had murdered in those early days when he and Don Leon were comrades in many a wild adventure, had passed into a sort of legend, which if not entirely accepted, certainly was not utterly disbelieved by any one.
“Go thy way! She is the devil’s own brat,” cried the wife of the man Chinita had once attacked.
“Ay, to be sure!” cried another; “was it not to be remembered how she had struggled and screamed when the good Father Francisco baptized her, and had sputtered and spat out the salt which the good priest had put in her mouth like a very cat. And little good had it done her, for she had never been called by a Christian name.”
“Tut! tut!” said the new-comer, “what need of a name has such a pretty maid as that, or of a father or mother either? Though ye women have no mercy, she’ll laugh at you all yet. The lads will not be blind, eh Pancho?”
“That they will not!” cried the lad Pepé, throwing a meaning glance at Pancho as if daring him to take up the cudgels in behalf of his old playfellow. “What care I who she is? She’s not the first who came into the world by a crooked road; and must all the women hint that it began at the Devil’s door because they can’t trace it back? Ay, they know enough ways to the same place.”
“Well said, young friend!” cried Tio Reyes with a hearty slap on the boy’s shoulder. “But, hist! here comes Pedro—with an ill look too in his eye. Ah! I thought so,” as the men suddenly became noisily busy with the unsaddling of their horses, and the women slipped away to their household occupations. “Tio Pedro is not a man to be trifled with. But, ah, there goes the girl!” and in a moment of confusion he adroitly left the court without being seen, and as has been said followed her steps till, as she crouched behind one of the buttresses of the church, he halted behind another and looked at her keenly, impatient with the uncertain light, eager to approach her before it darkened, yet waiting stoically until she was settled in a sullen crouching attitude, probably for that vigil of silence and hunger in which a ranchero’s anger usually expends itself, or crystallizes into a revengeful memory.
After some minutes, during which the girl neither sobbed nor moved, he suddenly bent over and touched her on the shoulder. She was accustomed to such intrusions, and shook herself sullenly, not even looking up when an unknown voice accosted her. “Hist, thou! I have something for thee.”
“I want nothing, not manna from Heaven even.”