“Bah! What should happen to my god-father?” she said. “And thou knowest thou wilt want for nothing. Hark thou! there is nothing to cry for that thy uncle is gone. Has he not often told us of the dollars he made in the wars?”
“I fear me he is likely rather to receive hard blows than hard dollars now,” answered Florencia, disconsolately,—an expression of expectancy, however, relieving her doleful countenance, as she added, “Ah, Chinita of my soul, thou wert ever the kerchief to wipe away my tears.”
Chinita laughed. “Thou used to say I was a prickly pear to draw tears, rather than a kerchief to dry them,” she presently said, pushing her chocolate toward Florencia, and thrusting into her hand the little twists of bread.
“There, take them; I would a thousand times rather have a thick cake and a drink of white gruel. One is not always in the humor for sweets;” and she tugged viciously at the hair she tried vainly to smooth,—she was always at feud with it because it was not longer. But at last she confined it in two short tresses, tying each with a red ribbon; and then suddenly dropping on her knees before Florencia, placed her hands palm downward upon the floor, and looking up in the woman’s face with a laugh exclaimed, as a tinge of red deepened the olive of her complexion, “And what of the American, Florencia? Is he like him thou sayest the Señorita Herlinda loved?”
“Ave Maria Purissima!” cried the startled woman. “The saints forbid that I should say such a thing of a Garcia, and she dedicated to the Madonna!” But recovering herself, “Certainly this American is like the other. Is not one cactus like another that grows on the same mountain? Should a white-blooded American be like a cavalier of blue-blood, or like an Indian of the villages? Yet both, one and the other, are we not Mexicans?” and she uttered the words as one might say, “Are we not gods?”
“That is very true,” commented Chinita, gravely; “and yet they are not frights, these Americans. Why should not the Señorita Herlinda have loved one if it pleased her? Listen, Florencia; I will tell thee a dream I had one night. When one’s bed is too soft, one dreams dreams.”
Florencia looked at the girl with an admiring glance. How amiable she could be, this Chinita, when she chose. “Little puss! little puss!” she murmured, giving her the pet name Pedro had used, when in her kittenish moods one had never known whether she would scratch or fondle one with soft purrings, begun and ended in a moment. “Little puss! thou wert ever good to thy Florencia.”
“Thou art a flatterer!” ejaculated Chinita, half-inclined to withhold her confidence, yet longing for a listener. “Ay, Florencia, thou knowest not what it is to sit for hours in the gloom within four walls. Ah, what thoughts come into one’s head! When I ran about the village, the wind blew the thoughts about as it did my hair; but now my brains are like cobwebs, and when a thought touches them it clings like dust, and so they grow thicker and heavier until my very skull aches;” and she pressed her head with her hands, and heaved a deep sigh.
“But to think is not to dream,” said Florencia, in some disappointment, for she had a child’s love for the marvellous, and did not understand Chinita’s abstractions,—unstudied and simple though they were.
“But dreams come from thoughts,” answered Chinita; “and what should I think of here but of mysteries,—such as why the Señora should keep me with her, though she loves me not; why she walks the floor and counts her beads, and when she forgets I am in the room murmurs over and over the name of Herlinda; why she looks before her sometimes, as you used to tell me the woman looked who saw the ghost of the American,—and that is always when she chances to meet this Don ’Guardo whom she will not speak of, or suffer Doña Feliz to invite to our table, though he stays here so long. And after I have asked so many things, I set myself to the answer. Oh, you would wonder at what I say to myself of all these things,—and then sometimes come dreams to tell me I am right.”