Ashley Ward had been, an involuntary though perhaps not entirely an unwilling guest, at Tres Hermanos a month or more before it dawned upon him that he was not a perfectly welcome one. Throughout his illness, which had been prolonged by the peculiar nursing and diet to which he had been for the first time in his life subjected, he had, though left almost entirely to the care of Selsa, been provided with luxuries and delicacies that even his imperfect knowledge of the country and situation enabled him to know were rare and costly, and most difficult to obtain. Doña Isabel Garcia was like a princess in her quiet dignity and in her gifts; and like a princess too, he grew to think, in the punctiliousness with which, every day, she sent to inquire after his health, and the infrequency with which she entered to express a hope that he lacked nothing. She never touched his hand, seldom indeed turned her eyes upon him when she spoke, and never smiled; and when she left him he inwardly raged, and vowed he would leave the hacienda on the morrow, even though he should die from the exertion. But his wound was slow in healing; the fever had sapped his strength; he was alone, and no opportunity of securing escort presented itself. He was virtually a prisoner. And besides, after these periods of vexation he would fall into a fit of musing, which would end in the resolve never to leave Tres Hermanos until certain doubts were set at rest, which from day to day grew more and more perplexing.
The nurse, Selsa, was more communicative than the Indian peasant woman is apt to be. She had been employed constantly in and about the great house in positions of some trust, and had lost that awe of superiors, which held the mere common people dumb. In a sense, indeed, she felt herself one of the family, privileged to use gentle insistence with the sick, even against their aristocratic wills, and to be present, though eyes and ears were to be as blind and deaf as the walls around her, while matters of family polity were at least hinted at, if not openly discussed. She had in fact been to the house of Garcia “the confidential servant,” without which no Mexican household is complete,—one of those peculiar beings who however false, cruel, deceitful, and thievish with the world in general is silent as the grave, devoted even unto death, true as the lode-star, to the person or family which she serves.
There was something in the personality of this wrinkled crone, growing out of these relations, which early impressed the young American; and gradually he grew to feel that he was face to face with an oracle, had he but the magic to unseal her lips, as the witch-like Chinita had had to change her air of vexed though friendly equality into unobtrusive yet unmistakable deference. Other servants who came and went spoke with some envy and spite of the sudden elevation of the gatekeeper’s foster-child. But Selsa, sitting in the doorway of the sick man’s room, combing out her long black locks,—for that, though she never succeeded in smoothing them, was her favorite occupation,—would glance askance at Ward and say,—
“Be silent! the Señora knows what she does. Go now! she has a heart like any other Christian. What was to become of the girl, now that Pedro will be leaving for the wars? Would you have Don ’Guardo think we are barbarians here, who would leave the innocents to be devoured like lambs by the coyotes?”
Don ’Guardo was the name Selsa had evolved from Ward, which she had perhaps believed to be the foreign contraction of Eduardo; and as Ashley, with boyish enthusiasm easily acquiring the limited vocabulary of those around him, began to relieve the monotony of his convalescence by listening to their conversations, and asking some idle questions, he found himself answering to the convenient appellation and alluding to himself by it, until it became as familiar to his ears as his own baptismal name, and certainly conveyed far more friendliness to him than the formal Señor Ward, which Don Rafael and his mother rendered with infinite stumbling over the unattainable W.
There was a subdued excitement throughout the hacienda upon the day that Don ’Guardo first appeared at the great gateway. Pedro was sitting there in the dull, dejected manner suggestive of loss, or waiting, or both; and it was only when Florencia, with an exclamation, twitched his sleeve that he looked up.
“Maria Sanctissima!” he stammered, staggering to his feet. Ashley stood in the dim light in the rear of the deep vestibule, with his hand on Pepé’s shoulder,—for the boy had been called to attend him,—but with a sudden faintness he had paused to rest against the stone wall hung with serpents. Ashley was a handsome youth, but in Pedro’s eyes a thousand times more startling than the most hideous snake or savage beast. So had he seen John Ashley stand a hundred times or more, not pale and trembling, but full of life and joy. Was this his sad ghost, come with reproachful eyes to haunt him?
“It is the Señor American,” said Florencia. “My life! how pale he looks! Go, go, Pepito! bring him hither before the carriage of my Señora drives in; here it is at the very gate.”
Pedro instantly recovered his usual stoicism. “Wait, Señor!” he said, “you are well placed where you are. The carriage can pass and not throw an atom of dust on you.” And at that moment the feet of the horses and the rattle of wheels were heard on the stone paving, and the hacienda carriage was driven rapidly into the courtyard. As it passed, Ashley caught a glimpse of Doña Isabel—how pale and statuesque!—and beside her a creature radiant in triumph, who nodded to Pedro as she passed; her smile seeming to say, “Behold me!” Hers was not an ignoble pride, but the wild exultation of an eaglet that had been chained to earth, and for the first time had tried its wings in the empyrean. That morning Doña Isabel had said, “Chinita, thou shalt go with me;” and though the lady’s brows had risen a little when with unconscious audacity the girl had taken the seat beside her, and not that opposite, where Doña Feliz was wont to sit, she said nothing. “The child is pale,” she thought, “and needs the air; there is no one to heed that she sits beside me.”
It would be hard to tell what were the thoughts of Chinita; they were a sudden delirium after the intense quiet of the semi-imprisonment, which she had borne with stoical fortitude for the sake of a dimly seen future of power. In this enforced quiet, day by day, her ambitions were shaping themselves; the dominant passion of her being was seeking a point from which she might have advantage over all the narrow field within the range of her mental vision. As yet her aspirations knew no name; they were mere vague, impatient longings, or rather impatient spurning of the old ignoble conditions of life. To ride in a carriage was an intoxication to her, because the low-born peasant went afoot. She chafed in a very thraldom of inaction because the high-born toiled not. She loved the rustle of a gaudy silk, while her hand shrank from the contact of the stiff and rustling fabric, because such attire was only for the rich and great. As undefined as had been the joy with which she had heard she was a Garcia, was still the delight of each fresh conquest that she made. No eager virtuoso groping in the dark among undescribed treasures could be more ignorant yet more wildly anticipative of the glories the daylight should discover than she of what the future should reveal.