Читать книгу Chata and Chinita - Laura Preston - Страница 7

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As Doña Isabel Garcia turned from her daughter’s apartment, she stepped into a corridor flooded with the dazzling sunshine of a perfect morning, and as she passed on in her long black dress, the heavily beamed roof interposing between her uncovered head and the clear and shining blue of the sky, there was something almost terrible in the stony gaze with which she met the glance of the woman-servant who hurried after her to know if she would as usual break her fast in the little arbor near the fountain. It terrified the woman, who drew back with a muttered “Pardon, Señora!” as the lady swept by her, and entered her own chamber.

The volcano of feeling which surged within her burst forth, not in sobs and cries, not in passionate interjections, but in the tones of absolute horror in which she uttered the two names that had severally been to her the dearest upon earth,—“Leon!” and “Herlinda!” and which at that moment were equally synonymous of all most terrible, most dreaded, and were the most powerful factors amid the love, the honor, the pride, the passions and prejudices which controlled her being.

For a time she stood in the centre of her apartment, striking unconsciously with her clenched hand upon her breast blows that at another time would have been keenly felt, but the swelling emotions within rendered her insensible to mere bodily pain. Indeed, as the moments passed it brought a certain relief; and as her walking to and fro brought her at last in front of the window which opened upon the broad prospect to the west, she paused, and looked long and fixedly toward the reduction-works, as if her vision could penetrate the stone walls, and read the mind which had perished with the man who lay murdered within them.

As she stood thus, she presently became aware that a sound which she had heard without heeding,—as one ignores passing vibrations upon the air, that bring no special echo of the life of which we are active, conscious parts,—was persistently striving to make itself heard; and with an effort she turned to the door, upon which fell another timid knock, and bade the suppliant enter; for the very echo of his knocking proclaimed a suppliant. She started as her eyes fell upon the haggard face of Pedro the gate-keeper.

He entered almost stealthily, closing the door softly behind him. “Señora,” he whispered, coming up to her quite closely, extending his hands in a deprecating way, “Señora, by the golden keys of my patron, I swear to you I was powerless. Don Juan told me he had your Grace’s own authority; he told me they were married!”

Doña Isabel started. In the same sentence the man had so skilfully mingled truth and falsehood that even she was deceived. By representing to his mistress that Ashley had used her name to gain entrance to the hacienda, he had hoped to divert her anger from himself,—and what matter though it fell unjustly upon the dead man? But in fact the second phrase of the sentence, “He told me they were married,” was what struck most keenly upon the ear of Doña Isabel, and chilled her very blood. How much, then, did this servant know? How far was she in his power? Until that moment she had not known—had not suspected—that the murdered man and the murderer had been within the walls of the hacienda buildings. This knowledge but confirmed her intuitions! Partly to learn facts which might guide her, and partly to gain time, she looked with her coldest, most petrifying gaze upon the man, and asked him what he meant, and bade him tell her all, even as he would confess to the priest, for so only he might hope to escape her most severe displeasure.

As she spoke, she had glided behind him and slipped the bolt of the door, and stood before the solid slab of unpolished but time-darkened cedar, a very monument of wrath. Pedro trembled more than ever, but was not for that the less consistent in his tale of mingled truth and falsehood. He had begun it with the name “The Señorita Herlinda,” but Doña Isabel stopped him with a portentous frown.

“Her name,” she said, “my daughter’s name need not be mentioned. She knows nothing of the woman John Ashley came here to see, if there is one; the Señorita Herlinda has nothing to do with her, nor with your tale. Proceed.”

Pedro, not so deeply versed in the dissimulation of the higher class as was Doña Isabel in that of the lower, looked at her a moment in utter incredulity. He learned nothing from her impassive face, but with the quickwittedness of his race divined that one of the many dark-eyed damsels who served in the house was to be considered the cause of Ashley’s midnight visits. In that light, his own breach of trust seemed more venial. Unconsciously, he shaped his story to that end, and even took to himself a sort of comfort in feigning to believe, what in his heart he knew to be an assumption—whether merely verbal or actual he knew not—of Doña Isabel.

The arguments by which he had been induced by Ashley to open the doors of the hacienda for his midnight admittance he would have dwelt on at some length, but Doña Isabel stopped him. “Tell me only of what happened last night,” she said; and in a low whisper he obeyed, shuddering as he spoke of the man whom he had admitted under the guise of a peasant, and who had rushed out to encounter the devoted American, as a madman or wild beast might rush upon its prey.

At his description, eloquent in its brevity, Doña Isabel for a moment lost her calmness; her face dropped upon her hands; her figure shrank together.

“Pedro!” she murmured, “Pedro! you knew him? You are certain?” she continued in a low, eager voice.

“Certain, Señora! Should I be likely to be mistaken? I, who have held him upon my knees a thousand times; who first taught him to ride; who saw him when—”

Doña Isabel stopped the enumeration with a gesture. She paused a moment in deep thought; then she extended her hand, and the man bent over it, not daring to touch it, but reverently, as if it were that of a queen or a saint.

“Silence, Pedro!” she said. “Silence! One word, and the law would be upon him,—though God knows there should be no law to avenge these false Americans, who respect neither authority nor hospitality, and would take our very country from us. Pedro, this deed must not bring fresh disaster; ’t was a mistake; but as you live, as I pardon you the share you bore in it, keep silence!”

The words were not an entreaty; they were a command. Doña Isabel understood too well the ascendency which as lords of the soil the Garcias held over all who had been born and bred on their estates, to take the false step of lessening it by any act of weakness. She comprehended that that very ascendency had led him to open the gates to the declared husband of Herlinda—ay! as to her lover he would have opened them. It was the house of Garcia he served, as represented by the individual possessing the dominant influence of the hour. As occasion offered, he and his associates would have favored the interests of any member in affairs of love, believing the intrigue the natural pleasure of youth, and conceiving it presumption to impugn the actions of one of the seigneurial family.

Doña Isabel became, at this time, when the terrible consequences of his levity overpowered him, the controlling power, and with absolute genius in a few words, admitting nothing, explaining nothing, offering no reward, she made the conscience-stricken man the keeper of the honor of the powerful house of which he was but the veriest minion.

Within the hour, while the people still thronged the walls of the reduction-works, Doña Feliz left the great house. The few who witnessed her departure were accustomed to the peremptory commands of the Señora Doña Isabel and the instant obedience of her confidential servant, and had as little speculation in their minds as in the gaze with which they followed the carriage and its outriders,—yet murmured a few words of pity for those who, after the horror of the tragedy, would lose the sombre splendor of the rites which must necessarily follow.

Upon the next day, John Ashley, carried in procession by the entire population of men, women, and children of Tres Hermanos, excepting only the immediate family of Doña Isabel and Pedro the gate-keeper, was borne across the wide valley, up the bleak hillside, and laid in a corner of the low-walled, unkempt graveyard, among the lowly dead of the plebe.

Not a sound escaped Herlinda, as from the windows of her mother’s room she watched the funeral procession. She had intuitively guessed the time it would issue from the gates of the reduction-works, and her mother placed no restraint upon her movements. Through the clear atmosphere of the May day she could perfectly distinguish the form, ay the very features of her beloved, as he lay stretched upon a wide board surrounded by flowering boughs, his fair curls resting upon the greenery, his hands clasped upon his breast.

To steady their steps perhaps, rather than from any religious custom, the people sang one of those minor airs peculiar to the country, and which are at once so sad and shrill that the piercing wail reached even so far as the great house,—a weird accompaniment to the swaying of the ghostly white lengths of candles borne in scores of hands, and the pale flames of which burned colorless in the brilliant sunshine.

Strangely impressive, even to an indifferent eye, might well have been that scene; the slow march of Death and Woe across the smiling fields, blotting the clear radiance of the cloudless sky, and awesome then even to a careless ear that wail of agony. Mademoiselle La Croix burst into tears and threw herself upon the floor. Doña Isabel, deadly pale, covered her eyes with a hand as cold and white as snow. Herlinda sank upon her knees with parted lips and straining eyes to watch the form upborne before that dark and sinuous procession; but when it became lost to view amid the throng which encircled the open grave, she fell prone to the floor with such a moan as only woe itself can utter,—a moan that seemed the outburst of a maddened brain and a bursting heart.

That night instead of lamentation the sounds of festivity began to be heard, and days of revelry among the peasants followed the hours of horror and gloom which had for a brief period prevailed. In the midst of them Doña Feliz returned to the hacienda. Wherever her journey had led her it had outwardly been unimportant, and drew but little comment from the men who had attended her, and was speedily forgotten. She herself gave no description of it, nor volunteered any information as to its object or result. Even to Doña Isabel, who raised inquiring eyes to the face of her emissary as she entered her private room, she said, briefly, “No, there is no record; absolutely none.”

Doña Isabel sank back in her chair with a deep-drawn breath as if some mighty tension, both of mind and body, had suddenly relaxed. She had herself sought in vain through the papers of Ashley for proofs of the alleged marriage with Herlinda, and Feliz had scanned the public records with vigilant eyes. Part of these records had in some pronunciamiento been destroyed by fire, but the book containing those of the date she sought was intact. The names of John Ashley and Herlinda Garcia did not appear therein; the marriage, if marriage there had been, was unrecorded, and as secret as it was illegal. Conscience was satisfied, and Doña Isabel was content to be passive. Why bring danger upon one still infinitely dear to her? The heart of Doña Isabel turned cold at the thought. Why rouse a scandal which could so easily be avoided? Why strive to legalize a marriage which could but bring ridicule upon herself, and shame and contempt upon Herlinda?

That day, for the first time in many, Doña Isabel could force a smile to her lip; for even for policy it had not been possible for her to smile before. She was by nature neither cold nor cruel, but she had been brought up in the midst of petty intrigues, of violent passions and narrow prejudices; and while she had scorned them, they had moulded her mind,—as the constant wearing of rock upon rock forms the hollow in the one, and rounds the jagged surface of the other. What would have been monstrous to her youth became natural to her middle age. She had suffered and striven. Was it not the common lot of woman? What more natural than that her daughter should do the same? And what more natural than that the mother should raise her who had fallen?—for fallen indeed, in spite of the ceremony of marriage, would the world think Herlinda. But why should the world know? She pitied her daughter, even as a woman pities another in travail; yet she looked to the future, she shrank from the complexities of the present; and so silently, relentlessly, shaping her course, ignoring circumstance, she, like a goddess making a law unto herself, thus unflinchingly ordered the destiny of her child. Could she herself have divined the various motives that influenced her? Nay, no more perhaps than the circumstances which will be developed in this tale may make clear the love, the woman’s purity, the high-born lady’s pride, that all combined to bid her ignore the marriage, which, though irregular, had evidently been made in good faith; and for which, in spite of open malice or secret innuendo, the power and influence of her family could have won the Pope’s sanction, and so silenced the cavillings if not the gossip of the world.