A laugh sounded from the window above. She started and looked up, then dropped her head again and turned slowly away.
Chata gazed after her awestruck, though she knew not why. Her manner was so different from that of the proud and haughty dame she had pictured. Don Rafael looked from Doña Isabel to his mother. Both these women, it seemed to him, had grown wonderfully aged since they had met, but a month or so before. There was a subtile antagonism between them—these two who loved each other, as only such deep intense natures can—which tore and harried them far more than actual hate could have done.
“What hast thou, my life?” Doña Feliz whispered to Chata. “Art thou not happy? Have strange tales been told thee?” and she looked keenly at her daughter-in-law, who had smiled and courtesied in vain as Doña Isabel went by.
“My mother,” said Doña Rita in her softest voice, “the child is weary; she must rest. Heed not this silly child, Don Fernando. Thank Heaven, Rosario is not so fanciful!”
But Don Fernando was not thinking of Rosario, or of Chata either for that matter, but of how he had slunk away from his chief to prosecute a love-affair that he had believed no power could make less than a matter of life or death to him; and how in a moment it had become lighter than air. The boyish perversity with which he had determined, even at the risk of offending his patron, to continue his courtship of Rosario Sanchez, trusting to fate or her father’s generosity to make marriage with her possible, faded from his mind like a dream, and with it her image; and in its place rose the arch mocking face of the “little saint of the Wall.” Proved she angel or demon, he felt that she was henceforth the genius of his destiny. He was a vain and profligate adventurer; but all the same the arrow had found his heart, not as a thousand times before to inflict a passing scratch, but to bury itself in its inmost core.
All had taken place in a few short moments. While the horses were being unharnessed and led away; while the villagers were still crowding around the carriage, and Doña Rita’s baskets and packages were being lifted out; while a few words of greeting were exchanged,—emotions and passions had sprung into being that were to make the seemingly prosaic household a very vortex of conflicting elements.
The young American, who thought himself but a looker-on, was also not unmoved. Like Doña Isabel, he said within himself, “That young girl has a strange face and strange ways for the daughter of a Mexican. And yet what know I of Mexicans or their ways? This is a strange atmosphere, and fills my brain with strange fancies. Perhaps out of them all I shall evolve some reality. May the Fates grant me again such a chance as I had to-day of speaking to the wild gypsy Chinita! Nothing has happened here, I can well believe, that she cannot tell me of. But after the escapade of to-day, she will hardly escape the vigilance of her duenna again. Ah, here comes the young soldier—too travel-stained to be as dashing as is his custom, no doubt. He looks a gay bird with sadly bedraggled feathers.”
Pepé apparently approved of him as little, as he passed by to the room assigned him. The peasant did not cease from lounging against the wall or bare his head as an inferior should.
“Insolent barbarian!” muttered Don Fernando, in a revival of his usual contempt for the peasantry, as the swarthy young fellow scowled at him, he neither guessed nor cared why. What could such a vagabond have to do with the Señora Garcia’s protégée? He would serve when the time came, to make one, in the independent troop he, Fernando, would raise: such worms as he were only fit to serve men. There were wild rumors afloat of the wonderful fortune of that phœnix Benito Juarez. What if he, Ruiz, should join his standard? There was a strange fire and exultation in the young man’s veins. He had been tied to a resistless fate long enough,—he would break his trammels, and by one daring act free himself forever from control, from tutelage, from Ramirez.