“What, girl!” he said, “is not this news worth so much as a ‘thank you’? Is it nothing to you whether you are the dust of the roadway or a jewel of the mine? Well, I lied to you. Ah! ah! what know I who you are? It was my joke! Tio Reyes always likes a jest with a pretty girl.”
“But this is no jest,” said Chinita, quick to perceive that the man was already half repentant of his words; “you can better put the ocean into a well, than shut up the truth when it is once out. Ah, I did not need you to tell me I was no beggar’s brat, picked up by chance on the plain. I have heard them say that Pedro has rich clothes which I was wrapped in. He has always laughed at me when I have asked about them, but all the same he shall show them to you this very night.”
“Chut!” interrupted the man, “what should I know of swaddling clothes? ’T is just a maid’s folly to think of such trifles. They would not prove thee a Garcia, any more than the lack of them belies it, or my mere word insures it!”
“That which puzzles me is,” said Chinita, gravely, turning her head on one side and looking at him keenly by the dim light, “why you have told me this. Have you been sent with a message from—from those who left me here?”
“No, by my faith,” said the man, laughing; “and why do I laugh, think you? Why, you are the first one who ever asked Tio Reyes for a reason. Does anybody who knows me say, ‘Why did you take Don Fulano with all his dollars safe through the mountains, and then allow that poor devil De Tal, who had not so much as a four-penny piece, to be shot down like a dog by the wayside?’ No, even the village idiot knows Tio Reyes has reasons too great to be tossed from one to another like a ball; and yet you ask me why I have told you the secret I have kept for years, and perhaps expect an answer! No, no! that plum is not ripe enough to fall at the first puff of wind.”
“I will tell you one thing, though you tell me nothing,” said Chinita, shrewdly, after a pause: “It is not from love to Doña Isabel that you have told me this, nor for love of me either. What good have you done me by telling me I am a Garcia? Why, if I had had the sense of a parrot, I might have known it before.” It seemed to her in her excitement as if, indeed, she had always known it.
“A word to the wise is enough,” said the man, mysteriously. “Keep your knowledge to yourself, but use it to your advantage. You were sent like a package to Doña Isabel years ago, but stopped by a clumsy messenger. She finds you in her path now; let her find something alive under the shabby coverings. God puts many a sweet nut in a rough shell, many a poison in despised weeds!”
“Oh!” cried Chinita, with a wicked little laugh, though even at that moment the chords of kinship thrilled, “I am but a weed to Doña Isabel, eh? Shall I go to her and say, ‘Here is a Garcia to be trodden down’?”
She said this with so superb an air of derision that the man who unconsciously all his life had been an inimitable actor in his way, muttered a deep caramba of enthusiastic admiration.
“I would by all the saints I could stay here to see how you will goad and sting my grand Señora,” he said vindictively. “Ay, remember you are a Garcia, with a hundred old scores to pay off. I have put the cards in your hands,—patience, and shuffle them well!”