This was her only word of reproach, if reproach it might be called. For love that woman would have yielded even her life, and never have known the hollowness of her idol. Grief did the work that ingratitude and neglect—nay absolute cruelty—would perhaps never have effected, and in a few short months destroyed her life. As she was dying she called her daughter to her. “Isabel,” she said, “thou hast wealth, thy brother has nothing; swear to me by the Virgin and thy patron saint, that thou wilt be as a mother to him, that thou wilt refuse him nothing that thy hand can give! Money, money, money, is what makes men happy!” That had been the creed her life’s experience had taught her. For money her father had sold her; for that the husband she adored had given her fair words and caresses. “As thou wouldst have thy mother’s blessing, promise me that Leon shall never appeal to thee in vain!”
Isabel Garcia was but a child, and the boy Leon but three years younger; yet as she looked upon her dying mother she solemnly promised to fill her place, to take upon herself the rôle of sacrifice, which her religion taught her was that of motherhood. Poor Clarita! little had she understood a mother’s highest duties,—to warn, to guide, to plead with God for the beloved. The mere yielding of material things,—to clothe herself in sackcloth, that the child might be robed in purple, to walk barefoot that he might ride in state, to hunger that he might be delicately fed,—she had pictured these things to herself as the purest sacrifices, and surely the only ones to appeal to the hearts of such men as she had known; and the young Isabel entered upon her task with her mother’s precepts deeply engraved upon her heart, her mind all uninstructed, awaiting the iron finger of experience to write upon it its lessons.
After their mother’s death, the young brother and sister, mere children both, went to live in the house of some elderly relatives, who with generous though not always judicious kindness strove to forget the faults of the father by ignoring them when they became apparent in the boy. The uncle of Isabel, the Friar Francisco, became their tutor, but taught them little beyond the breviary. What could a woman need with more? As for Leon, he took more kindly to the lasso and saddle, to the pistol and sword, than to the book or pen,—and even while still a child in years, more passionately still to the gaming table. Though his elders with a shake of the head remembered his father’s fate, and sometimes pushed the boy half laughingly away from the monté table, or of a Sunday afternoon sent him out to the bull-ring for his diversion, where he was a mere spectator, rather than to the cock-pit, where he became a participant, yet the question did not present itself as one at all of questionable morals: every one gambled on a feast day, or at a social game among one’s friends. Perhaps of all those by whom he was surrounded, no one felt any serious anxiety for Leon except the young girl who with premature solicitude warned him of the evil, even as she supplied the means to indulge his wayward tastes.
Leon was a brilliant rather than a handsome boy, promising to be well grown; and his lithe, vigorous figure showed to good advantage in his gay riding-suits, whether of sombre black cloth with silver buttons set closely down the outer seam of the pantaloons and adorning the short round jacket, or in loose chapareras of buckskin bound by a scarlet sash and bedizened with leather fringes,—a costume that perhaps served to betray the Indian strain in his blood, which ordinarily was detected only by a slight prominence of the cheek bones and a somewhat furtive expression in the soft dark eyes. At unguarded moments, however, perhaps when he fancied himself unobserved and was practising with his pistol or sabre, those eyes could flash with concentrated fire, so that more than once Isabel had been constrained to call out: “Leon, Leon, you frighten me! You look like the great cat when he pounces upon a harmless little bird and crushes it for the very joy of killing!”
Then Leon would laugh, and the soft, dreamy haze would rise again over the eyes as he would turn upon her. “Ha!” he would say, “you will never be a man, Isabel; you will never understand why I love the sights and sounds that throw you poor women into fainting fits and tears. Ha! Isabel, if I were you I’d not stay in this dull house with a couple of old women to guard me, when you might go to the hacienda and be free as air.”
“Nonsense,” Isabel would retort; “what could I do there other than here? I could not turn herdsman or vaquero, nor even ride out to the fields to see how the crops were flourishing, nor roam like an Indian through the mountains.”
“But I would!” Leon would cry enthusiastically; and with his longing ardor for the free life of a country gentleman, with its barbaric luxury and wild sports, he thus first put into the young girl’s mind the thought of favoring the suit which her cousin, Don Gregorio Garcia, began to urge.
Don Gregorio had married young, soon after the death of Ignacio Garcia whom he succeeded in the management of the estate of which they had been joint owners; but his wife had died leaving him without an heir, and the first grief assuaged, it was but natural after the passage of years that the widower should weary of his loneliness. There were many reasons why his thoughts should turn to his distant cousin Isabel, for though she was many years younger than himself, such disparity of age was not unusual; the marriage would unite still more closely the family fortunes, and effectually prevent the intrusion of any undesirable stranger; and above all, Isabel was gracious and queenly and beautiful enough to charm the heart even of an anchorite, and Don Gregorio was far from being one. Indeed, in his very early years he had given indications of a partiality for a far more adventurous career than he had finally, by force of circumstances, been led to adopt. Thus he sympathized somewhat with Leon’s restless activity, and quite honestly secured the boy’s alliance,—no slight advantage in his siege of the heart of Isabel.
This, perhaps more than the good-will of the rest of the family, enabled Don Gregorio to approach so nearly to Isabel’s inmost nature that he learned far more of the strength of purpose and capability for passionate devotion possessed by the young untrained girl than any other being had done, and for the first time in his life knew a love far deeper and purer than any passion which mere physical charms could awaken. Such a love appealed to Isabel. She was perhaps constitutionally cold to sexual charms, but eminently susceptible to the sympathetic attrition of an appreciative mind, while her heart could translate far more readily the rational outpourings of friendship than the wild rhapsodies of passion. Thus, although Isabel would have shrunk from a man who in his ardor would have demanded of her affection some sacrifice of the unqualified devotion that she had vowed to her brother, she seemed to find in Don Gregorio one who could understand and applaud the exaggerated devotion to the ideal standard of filial and sisterly duty which she had unconsciously erected upon the few utterly irrational words of a weak and dying woman.
The first four years of Isabel’s married life passed uneventfully. Leon was constantly near her, and was the life of the great house, which despite the crowd of retainers that frequented it would without him have proved but a dull dwelling for so young a matron, with no illusions in regard to the staid and kindly husband, who was rather a friend to be consulted and revered than a lover to be adored,—for although Don Gregorio worshipped his beautiful young wife, he was at once too mindful of his own dignity, and too wary of startling Isabel’s passionless nature, to manifest or exact romantic and exhaustive proofs of affection. He used sometimes to mutter to himself: “‘The stronger the flame the sooner the wood is burnt;’ better that the substance of love should endure than be dissipated in smoke!”