Chata and Chinita: A Novel

by Laura Preston

It was conjectured that the missing servant had in his flight to the mountains accidentally come upon the soldiers of the Clergy, and to turn attention from himself had betrayed the proximity of the Liberals. A hurried march in the early morning hours had proved the truth of the servant’s information; and the surprise and some advantage in numbers—for the Captain Alva had spoken with a trace of the usual exaggeration of the speech of his countrymen, in describing the enemy as numbering three hundred—turned the chances in favor of the attacking party; although Calvo at first seemed inclined to contest the matter obstinately, and Ward, with an involuntary feeling of fealty to his host (though he had already some inkling of his intentions in regard to himself) had ranged himself upon his side. He soon saw with indignation, however, that the defence of the poor villagers held no part in Calvo’s thoughts. To frustrate some movement of the enemy, he actually ordered the firing of a hut in which women and children had taken refuge; and it was while defending the humble spot from Puro and Mocho alike, that Ward received the wound which disabled him,—that covered with blows from muskets and swords he fell, and trampled beneath the feet of the now flying and pursuing soldiers, for a few horrible moments believed himself doomed to die in a senseless mêlée, in which his only interest had been to protect the weak, but in which he recognized no inherent principle of right. Later he saw in those apparently senseless broils the throes and struggles of an undisciplined and purblind nation toward the attainment of a dimly seen ideal of justice and freedom, and learned the truth that these people, who seemed so lightly swayed by the mere love of adventure, held within their breasts the divine spark that distinguishes man from the brute,—the deathless fire of patriotism. They too could suffer, bear imprisonment, famine, even death, for freedom.

But these were none of Ashley Ward’s reflections as he found himself laid apart from three or four dead men, who had been hurriedly thrown together for burial, and after being subjected to a hasty examination—which resulted in the abstraction of his remaining funds, his watch and other valuables, and the binding up of his wound—lifted to the back of a raw-boned troop-horse, and forced to join the march of the triumphant guerillas. He would have preferred to be left to the care of the houseless and destitute shepherds; but Captain Alva, whether with the hope of some ultimate benefit from the capture of the foreigner or not it is impossible to tell, professed himself horrified at the barbarity of deserting him,—and, as we have seen later, in apprehension of his death from exposure to the sun, and the fever that seized him, availed himself of the opportunity of evading the responsibility of the death of an American upon his hands, by delivering him to the care of Doña Isabel Garcia.

And so, still weak, and destitute of money until he could arrange for a supply from the City of Mexico, but full of hope, confident that he had reached his goal, and that a few discreet inquiries would give him the information he sought, and perhaps allay forever the doubts that tormented his sensitive conscience, Ashley Ward drew a deep breath of satisfaction as he sat at the hacienda gate; and in an animated mood, which supplemented his insufficient Spanish, addressed himself to the reticent and gloomy Pedro, startling him from his usual stoicism by the exclamation, “And you, my man, can you tell me of the American your foster-child spoke of? There is not so much happens here that you can have forgotten.”

Had Ashley known anything of the instincts and customs of the genuine ranchero, he would have begun his investigations in a far more guarded manner. That a certain Don Juan had met a bloody death there years before, he already knew; that this had been his cousin, he surmised; that the gatekeeper should know more of the domestic life of an employee of the hacienda than the owner herself, or even the administrador, was a natural conclusion. But had Ashley Ward wished to seal the lips of the suspicious and astute gatekeeper, he could not have chosen a more effective manner of accomplishing it. As well touch the horns of a snail and expect that it would not withdraw into its shell, as to question this man directly and hope to learn aught of value.

Pedro looked at the inquirer from under the shadow of his bushy eyebrows and wide hat; and though his heart bounded, his face became a very mask of rustic stupidity as he answered, “Your grace has had much fever with your wound. Heaven and all the saints be thanked that you are young and healthy, and will soon be as strong as ever.”

“Um!” ejaculated Ward, for the moment disconcerted. “Yes, I have had fever, but that has nothing to do with the American. He was a living man fourteen or fifteen years ago, if there be any truth in what your—young mistress told me.” He hesitated how to designate the girl, whose status and relations seemed so strangely undefined.

Pedro’s eyes for a moment lightened. Pepé laughed ironically, yet he would have turned like a wild beast on another who had done so.

“Who speaks much, speaks to his undoing,” quoth Pedro, gruffly, and turned away; yet he eyed the young American furtively, with an inborn hostility to his race, an unreasoning belief that in the guise of such fair tempters lurked the demon who would destroy unwary damsels body and soul, yet with an almost irresistible desire to unburden his soul of the weight that had so long oppressed it, to cry aloud, “I can tell you all you would know,—how the American lived, how he died, how the child he never saw lives after him. Is it her you seek? And why?”

Pedro clenched his hands with a gasp. He remembered that the natural instincts of kindred had changed to bitterness against Herlinda’s child. She had been cast out, disowned, deserted. Who was this stranger, this foreigner, that he should be more just, more generous, toward the doubtful offspring of one who had died years before? How should he even guess such a child to be in existence? No, he could not guess it. What a mad thought had darted through his own brain! Pedro actually laughed at his own perplexed imaginings. What! the secret of Herlinda, which had been kept so inscrutably, in danger from this idle news-seeker? Preposterous! yet an odd conceit entered the gatekeeper’s mind: “The blind man dreamed that he saw, and dreamed what he desired.” This groping youth had come far to inquire into the fate of a man long dead,—it must be because it would bring him profit, for it did not for a moment occur to Pedro that the questions asked were from mere idle curiosity,—and would it be possible anything should escape him? “Well, what God wills, the saints themselves cannot hinder.”

Pedro sat down upon the stone bench opposite, in an affectation of sullen obstinacy. Ashley was weary and chagrined, and in silence looked over the landscape with an increasing sense of recognition. Pepé stood in the same lounging attitude, patiently waiting. One might have thought him carved of wood against the stone wall, yet of the three men he it was whose passions were fiercest, whose thoughts like unbridled coursers followed one another in mad confusion. His mind was full of Chinita! Chinita! Chinita! her beauty, her insolent grace,—the memory of her pretty, haughty ways when she had been but a barefoot, ragged peasant like himself, and the contemplation of the hopeless height to which she had risen. Never before had he been conscious that he had aspired. Now, bruised, torn, wounded as if by a fall into hopeless depths, he saw her image swimming before his disordered vision; he thought of her as a princess, a goddess, yet he laughed when he heard her named as mistress.