From where Don ’Guardo and his attendant stood, they could see Doña Isabel and Chinita as they descended from the carriage. Doña Isabel, without glancing around, ascended the stairs to her own apartment. Chinita followed a step or two behind, then turned and paused. Her quick eye scanned the little group that had gathered in the court. Ashley Ward himself was startled by the change that had passed over her since he had seen her last. What had been elfish in her wild abandonment of bearing had become a subtle grace of manner, which gave piquancy to a hauteur that counterfeited the dignity of inherent nobleness. “The gypsy has borrowed the air of a queen!” was the thought of the American. He felt Pepé quiver beneath his hand, and looking at him saw a sullen fire in his dark, slumberous eyes, though his lips were white and his dusky face ashen as if a chill had seized him. The girl had overlooked him and all the plebeian crowd, and her eyes rested in a triumphant challenge on Ashley. She smiled, and a ray of sunlight darted down and reddened the crisp and straggling tendrils of her hair. The smile or the sunlight dazzled him; he leaned heavier on Pepé’s shoulder. She reminded him of a Medusa idealized, of incarnate passion surrounded by the halo of radiant youth.
Ashley was roused by a sudden movement of Pepé, who had for the moment forgotten his station, and impetuously thrown himself upon a bench in an attitude of impotent grief and rage; then he sprang to his feet, and again placed his shoulder under Ashley’s hand. Once more he was the mere stock and stick; but Ashley had discovered in him the soul and heart of a man.
“Poor fool!” he thought, with a sort of anger mingled with his pity; “here is a touch of the tragic in this little comedy, which the wily little peasant is inspired to play so daintily. She appears to have bewitched me with the rest; I can’t keep the thought of her, or rather of her words, out of my head,—and yet I have only a word to build a whole fabric of theory upon.”
These thoughts had passed through his mind in an instant,—the instant in which Chinita had lightly run up the stone steps after Doña Isabel, and in which Ashley and Pepé had reached the broad gateway of the hacienda. Ashley sank upon the stone bench where Pedro was wont to sit, and Pepé leaned sullenly against the rough wall. Both looked in silence over the village, across the fields, the narrow line of cottonwood trees and yellow mud which marked the bed of a torrent in the rainy season and a waste of desolation in the long drought, and onward still to the gray and barren mountains whose distant peaks of purple pierced the deep blue of the cloudless sky. The scene to Pepé was as old as his years, too familiar to distract for a moment his tortured mind; but Ashley beheld it in a sort of rapture. Perhaps any glimpse of the outer world would have charmed him after his unwonted imprisonment; but the fertility of the valley, this gem set in the broad expanse of bare and sterile Mexico, was a revelation to him of that wonderful productiveness and beauty which in his journeyings he had often heard of but had never encountered, until at last he had believed that the horrors of war, in its years of duration, had swept over the land and blasted it. But here was one spot at least that had escaped,—such a spot as he had pictured for months, and sought in vain.
For a time he gazed upon it in simple admiration, then at first almost unconsciously began to look about him for certain landmarks. Yes, here at his back was the great pile of buildings; here on the sandy slope in front, the village of adobe thatched with knife-grass; there along the line of the watercourse, the few straggling huts of the miners and laborers; there away to the right, the low walls of the reduction-works with its tall brick chimney, and in its rear the gaping cleft of the mountain which marked the entrance to the mine. All now was silent and deserted; yet for a moment he seemed to look upon it with other eyes, and to see the trains of laden mules filing in and out of the wide gateways, and to trace the black smoke rising in a column to the cloudless sky. “This must be the place!” he inwardly exclaimed; and drawing from his breast-pocket a flat case of papers, he selected from them a torn and yellow letter, and read it slowly over, ever and anon raising his eyes to identify some point in the description, which a hand as young, more firm, more resolute than his own, had in an hour of leisure so accurately written years before. The date of the missive was gone, and with it the name of this new place in which the writer seemed to have found an earthly paradise,—“not wanting,” as he said at the close of the letter, “an Eve to be at once the gem of this perfect setting, and the inaccessible star to which poor mortals may raise longing eyes, but may never hope to win.”
Ashley smiled as he read the words. Who could this divinity have been? But for other letters that had been put into his hands he would have thought the paragraph mere bathos, boyish gush, and sentiment; but it was a prelude to what might prove a strange and fateful series of events. Somewhere here his cousin had years ago lived and loved and been done to death; and his mission was to trace the sequence of these events, and to learn whether or no with John Ashley had passed away all possible influence upon the fortunes of his own life.
Until within a few months such questions had never occurred to him. The John Ashley whom he had dimly remembered had been murdered years before; and so had ended an adventurous career, which had been his own choice, or perhaps his evil destiny. To Ward, as to others, that had been the sum and substance of the tragedy which had thrown a gloom for a time over all the family, and had stricken a proud mother to the heart. She had suffered years in silence, the name of her wayward son never passing her lips; her young daughter had grown up with no knowledge of her brother but his name. It was she who after the mother’s death had found these letters, and entreated her cousin to seek the fatal spot of John Ashley’s death,—surely there must be somewhere records that would give the exact location,—and to make inquiries for the wife, and for the possible child, of whom he wrote in his last short letter, full of passionate appeal to his mother in behalf of the young creature who for him had forfeited the confidence, perhaps the love, of her own. “Herlinda! Herlinda! Herlinda!” was the burden of the letter. “The name rings in my ears,” Mary Ashley had said. “How could my mother have been deaf to it? She thought of those people as barbarous, false, cruel, treacherous. But what matters that to me, if there is among them one who has my brother’s blood, or one who loved him?”
“The marriage laws of those countries are strange,” Ward had ventured to say. “Perhaps your mother feared complications which could but bring disgrace and misery.”
“I do not fear them,” said Mary Ashley, proudly. “It is a wild country for a woman to go to, but if you will not investigate this matter, I will brave any inconvenience, any danger, to do so. I cannot live with this tantalizing fear in my heart.”
The idea that tormented Mary seemed at best that of a mere possibility to Ashley,—the possibility of an event which, as the mother had seen, might if proved bring far more pain than joy, especially at this late date; yet it worked upon his mind gradually, as it had upon Mary’s suddenly,—perhaps the more surely because he personally profited by the supposition that his cousin had died unwed. By his aunt’s will he had been left the share in her property that John would have inherited, on condition that neither he nor any legitimate heir should appear to claim it.