CHAPTER XXXI—Shadows of the Past
IN a little summer-house at the edge of the rose garden of La Siesta, Tia Teresa was seated all alone. She was awaiting the coming of Mr. Robles to a rendezvous which he had arranged by a confidential message sent on the previous evening. It wanted some time yet of the appointed hour, but in her state of deep emotion and repressed excitement she had gladly sought the solitude of this secluded corner. Deep in thought, her mind was divided between the faraway past and the near-impending future.
Each recurring year this day to her had always been a sad and tragic anniversary. In the early hours of the morning she had been to the old Mexican cemetery on the hillside, and had bedecked with flowers the grave marked by the marble cross bearing the single word “Hermana,” also the graves close by of the parents of Don Manuel and Rosetta, the children she had nursed and tended and fondled from infancy to early manhood and womanhood, through twenty years of unalloyed happiness until the gringo had come, the ancestral acres had been filched away, and dishonor and death been brought to the slumbrously peaceful home.
And from that slumbrous peace what a sudden and terrible change! On this day thirty years ago poor little Rosetta had been found done to death beneath the precipice at Comanche Point. No less done to death by the shock and shame of the pitiful story thus revealed, the aged parents of the beautiful young girl were, within a few days, sleeping their long last sleep by her side in the churchyard on the hill. A whole family blighted and withered as by the blast of some death-laden sirocco.
Then had followed the years of terror during which Don Manuel, the White Wolf, the dreaded outlaw, had wreaked his vengeance on the whole race of gringos. She had never seen him all through that time, although at intervals money had reached her by Pierre Luzon’s trusted hand, enabling her to maintain herself in the little Mexican village near the old fort of Tejon. At last had come the fight when the band of outlaws had been finally dispersed, Pierre Luzon wounded and dragged away to serve the rest of his days in prison, Don Manuel vanished like a wraith in the mist, gone where no man could tell.
But through the years that succeeded, Tia Teresa had known that he lived—had known in her heart of hearts that he would live until the vendetta he had sworn against Ben Thurston would be accomplished. The remittances that arrived from time to time, first from Spain, then from England, needed no signature to show that they were from her young master of former years and that he still held his faithful old nurse in affectionate remembrance. And at last had come the crowning surprise of all.
Tia Teresa had been bidden to come to Los Angeles by a letter which bore a strange signature, but the handwriting of which she had immediately recognized. And there, in a fine home beneath the foothills that skirt the city to the north, she had found Don Manuel again, much older in manner than by lapse of years—quiet, reserved, tinged with a sadness of which she knew the cause, but happy withal, for he was married to a beautiful English girl and had a little baby daughter. And as nurse to this child Tia Teresa, to her great joy, was promptly installed.
Thus again she had become the trusted servant in Don Manuel’s home, the only one around him possessing his full confidence and knowing the secret story of his past. For, amid these changed surroundings, his name was Ricardo Robles, his standing that of a Spaniard or Mexican of wealth, of scholarly tastes, and devoted to the seclusion of his home with its spacious surrounding gardens.