“Years passed. I was captain in General Oribe’s army at the siege of my own city. One day a lad was captured in our lines, and came very near being put to death as a spy. He had come out from Montevideo, and was looking for me. He had been sent, he said, by Transita de la Barca, who was lying ill in the town, and desired to speak to me before she died. I asked and obtained permission from our General, who had a strong personal friendship for me, to penetrate into the town. This was, of course, dangerous, and more so for me, perhaps, than it would have been for many of my brother officers, for I was very well known to the besieged. I succeeded, however, by persuading the officers of a French sloop of war, stationed in the harbour, to assist me. These foreigners at that time had friendly relations with the officers of both armies, and three of them had at one time visited our General to ask him to let them hunt ostriches in the interior. He passed them on to me, and, taking them to my own estancia, I entertained them and hunted with them for several days. For this hospitality they had expressed themselves very grateful, inviting me repeatedly to visit them on board, and also saying that they would gladly do me any personal service in the town, which they visited constantly. I love not the French, believing them to be the most vain and egotistical, consequently the least chivalrous, of mankind; but these officers were in my debt, and I resolved to ask them to help me. Under cover of night I went on board their ship; I told them my story, and asked them to take me on shore with them disguised as one of themselves. With some difficulty they consented, and I was thus enabled next day to be in Montevideo and with my long-lost Transita. I found her lying on her bed, emaciated and white as death, in the last stage of some fatal pulmonary complaint. On the bed with her was a child between two and three years old, exceedingly beautiful like her mother, for one glance was sufficient to tell me it was Transita’s child. Overcome with grief at finding her in this pitiful condition, I could only kneel at her side, pouring out the last tender tears that have fallen from these eyes. We Orientals are not tearless men, and I have wept since then, but only with rage and hatred. My last tears of tenderness were shed over unhappy, dying Transita.
“Briefly she told me her story. No letter from me had ever reached Basilio; it was supposed that I had fallen in battle, or that my heart had changed. When her mother lay dying in Montevideo she was visited by a wealthy Argentine lady named Romero, who had heard of Transita’s singular beauty, and wished to see her merely out of curiosity. She was so charmed with the girl that she offered to take her and bring her up as her own daughter. To this the mother, who was reduced to the greatest poverty and was dying, consented gladly. Transita was in this way taken to Buenos Aires, where she had masters to instruct her, and lived in great splendour. The novelty of this life charmed her for a time; the pleasures of a large city, and the universal admiration her beauty excited, occupied her mind and made her happy. When she was seventeen the Señora Romero bestowed her hand on a young man of that city, named Andrada, a wealthy person. He was a fashionable man, a gambler, and a Sybarite, and, having conceived a violent passion for the girl, he succeeded in winning over the señora to aid his suit. Before marrying him Transita told him frankly that she felt incapable of great affection for him; he cared nothing for that, he only wished, like the animal he was, to possess her for her beauty. Shortly after marrying her he took her to Europe, knowing very well that a man with a full purse, and whose spirit is a compound of swine and goat, finds life pleasanter in Paris than in the Plata. In Paris Transita lived a gay, but an unhappy life. Her husband’s passion for her soon passed away, and was succeeded by neglect and insult. After three miserable years he abandoned her altogether to live with another woman, and then, in broken health, she returned with her child to her own country. When she had been several months in Montevideo she heard casually that I was still alive and in the besieging army; and, anxious to impart her last wishes to a friend, had sent for me.
“Could you, my friend, could any man, divine the nature of that dying request Transita wished to make?
“Pointing to her child, she said, ‘Do you not see that Margarita inherits that fatal gift of beauty which won for me a life of splendour, with extreme bitterness of heart and early death? Soon, before I die, perhaps, there will not be wanting some new señora Romero to take charge of her, who will at last sell her to some rich, cruel man, as I was sold; for how can her beauty remain long concealed? It was with very different views for her that I secretly left Paris and returned here. During all the miserable years I spent there I thought more and more of my childhood on that lonely coast, until, when I fell ill, I resolved to go back there to spend my last days on that beloved spot where I had been so happy. It was my intention to find some peasant family there who would be willing to take Margarita and bring her up as a peasant’s child, with no knowledge
