As Carlos and I fell in with the group formed by the others, already on their way to the house, my father said to Don Jerónimo, with a perfectly plain intention, “We must not be taken after this for valetudinarians; let us go back as escorts.”
This said, he took María’s hand and put it on his arm, leaving Señor M⸺ to accompany my mother and Emma.
“They have been more gallant than we,” I said to Carlos, pointing to my father and his.
We followed them. I carried Juan as he had come up to me with outstretched arms, saying, “Take me, for the path is thorny, and I am tired.”
María told me afterwards that my father had asked her, when they began to go over the slope of the meadow, what she had said to Carlos; and as he pleasantly insisted that she should tell him, she succeeded at last in obeying him.
“That is to say,” asked my father, almost laughing, after listening to her hesitating story—“that is to say, you never wish to marry?”
She replied by shaking her head in sign of denial, though she did not dare to look at him.
“My daughter,” continued my father, “can it be that you are pledged to another? That isn’t so, is it?”
“Yes, it is so,” replied María, in a great fright.
“Is he better than this fine fellow you have refused?” As he said this, my father put his free hand on her forehead, to make her look at him.
“Do you know that you are very beautiful?”
“I? No, Señor.”
“Yes, you are; and someone must have told you so a great many times. Tell me who is the favored one.”
María trembled, without daring to say a word more, but my father continued: “He will become worthy of you at last; you want him to be a man of standing—come, confess it to me. Hasn’t he told you that he has acknowledged everything to me?”
“But if there is nothing to tell?”
“What! are you going to have secrets from your papa?” He said this in a tone of complaint, yet looking at her affectionately. María gathered courage to say, “Well, haven’t you said that he has told you everything?”
My father kept silent for a moment. It seemed as if some memory was saddening him. As they were going up the stairs of the garden corridor she heard him say, “Poor Salomón!”
At the same time he stroked the hair of his friend’s daughter.
My father exerted himself to the utmost to make the position of Señor M⸺ and his son as little painful as possible, but all was in vain. Don Jerónimo having already said that he would set off early the next morning, reasserted that he must be at his farm very early, and went to bed with Carlos at nine o’clock, after taking leave of the family in the parlor.
I went with my friend to his room. All my affection for him had revived in these last hours of his stay; his high-bred character, of which he had given me so many proofs in the course of our student life, resumed its power over me. The reserve which I had felt myself forced to maintain towards him seemed to me almost hateful. If, when I learned of his intentions, I said to myself, I had confided to him my love for María, and all that she had become to me in those three months, he would have desisted from his purpose, and I, less ambiguous and more loyal, would have had nothing to be ashamed of.
As soon as we were alone in my room he said to me, putting on the old frank air, although the disappointment he had suffered did not entirely disappear from his face:
“I must get you to forgive me for a lack of confidence in your friendship.”
“What lack?” I responded. “I have noticed none.”
“You haven’t noticed any?”
“No.”
“Don’t you know why I and my father came here?”
“Yes.”
“Have you learned the result of my proposal?”
“Not altogether, but …”
“But you guess it.”
“I do.”
“Very well; then, why did I not speak with you about my intentions before anyone else—before my father, even?”
“An extreme delicacy on your part—”
“Nothing of the kind. It was pure stupidity, lack of foresight, forgetfulness of … of whatever you please; that is not called by the name you have used.”
He walked up and down the room; then he paused before my chair, and said: “Listen, and admire my innocence. Cáspita! what on earth is the use of having lived twenty-four years? It is a little more than a year since I left you to come to Cauca, and would that I had waited for you as you wished! As soon as I got home I received the most polite attentions from your father and all your family. They saw in me your friend, probably because you had told them what good friends we were. Before you came I saw the Señorita María and your sister two or three times, at our house and here. About a month ago my father told me that it would give him great pleasure if I were to marry one of them. Your cousin had already destroyed in me, though she did not know it, all those memories of Bogotá which were such a torture to me, as I told you in my first letters. I agreed with my father that he should ask the Señorita María’s hand for me. Why did I not see you first? It is true I was kept in the city by my mother’s long illness, but why did I not write to you? Do you
