“The live one is well and expecting you,” I replied. “The painted one is supplied with roses and tapers to make you very happy.”
As soon as we drew near the house, María and Emma came out to welcome Tránsito, to whom they said, among other things, that she was grown a very pretty girl; and it was so, for her happiness was beautifying her.
José received the affectionate greetings of the young ladies, hat in hand; throwing down the bag of vegetables he had brought as a present, he went in with us, at my urging, as far as my mother’s room. As he crossed the parlor, Mayo, who was asleep under a table, growled at him, and the mountaineer laughed and said: “Hello, grandfather, do you still dislike me? It must be because I am as old as you.”
“And Lucía?” María asked Tránsito, “why did she not come with you?”
“She is as lazy as never was, and then she is so shy.”
“But Efraín says that she is not so with him,” said Emma.
Tránsito laughed before she replied, “With the Señor she is less ashamed, because he comes there so often that she has got over being afraid.”
We tried to find out when the marriage was to be. José, to relieve his daughter’s embarrassment, replied: “We want it to be a week from today. If the thing is well planned, we will do like this: making a very early start from the house, we can reach the village by sunrise; if you leave here at five, you will overtake us just as we get there; and as the priest will have everything ready, we shall get the business done early. Luisa is an enemy of banquets, and the girls do not dance; so we will spend that Sunday like any other, with the difference that you will make us a visit; and then on Monday, everyone to his work. Don’t you approve of that?” he concluded, addressing me.
“Yes; but is Tránsito to go to the village on foot?”
“What!” exclaimed José.
“How, then?” asked she, astonished.
“On horseback. Aren’t my horses here?”
“But I would rather walk; and that is not all with Lucía—she is afraid of horses.”
“But why is that?” asked Emma.
“In Antioquia only white people ride horses. Is it not so, father?”
“Yes; though those who are not white do so when they are very old.”
“Who ever told you that you are not white?” I asked Tránsito; “and white as few are.”
The girl turned as red as a cherry, as she replied, “What I mean is rich people, the great ladies.”
José, as soon as he had gone to salute my father, said goodbye, promising to come back in the afternoon, though we urged him to stay to dinner with us.
At five, as the family walked out to accompany Tránsito as far as the foot of the mountain, María, who was at my side, said to me, “If you had seen my godchild in the bridal dress I have made for her, and in the bracelets and necklace Emma and mamma gave her, I am sure you would have thought her very pretty.”
“And why didn’t you call me?”
“Because Tránsito didn’t want us to. We must ask mamma what bridesmaids and groomsmen have to say and do in the ceremony.”
“Of course, and then they can tell us the responses which those who are married have to make, if we ever have to make them.”
Neither María’s eyes nor lips made any reply to this allusion to our future happiness; she remained pensive while we walked the short distance up to the foot of the mountain. Braulio was there, waiting for his betrothed, and rose to give us a smiling and respectful greeting.
“We shall be making you go back in the dark,” said Tránsito. The mountaineers took affectionate leave of us.
They had penetrated some distance into the forest, when we heard Braulio’s fine voice singing refrains of Antioquia.
As we were going down the last slope, Juan, whom María was leading, said to me, “María wants me to be brave, and walk alone; she is tired.”
I offered her my arm. We were now but a short distance from the house. The tints which the setting sun had left upon the western sierra were fading away; the moon, rising above the mountains behind us, threw forward upon the faintly illuminated walls flickering shadows of the willows and climbers in the garden.
I watched María’s face, without her knowing it, looking for symptoms of her disease; before an attack of it, always went such a melancholy as that which had suddenly taken possession of her.
“Why are you so sad?” I asked her at last.
“Haven’t I been as I always am?” she said, as if awaking from a light sleep. “But you are sad.”
“It is because I saw you were.”
“How can I please you?”
“Be happy again.”
“Happy! And will you be, too?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Look; now I am as you wish,” she said, smiling. “Is that all you want?”
“That’s all—or, stop, what you promised me and have not given me.”
“What can it be? I really don’t remember.”
“Don’t you? A lock of your hair.”
“And if they see it is gone?”
“Say you did it cutting off a ribbon.”
“Is that it?” she asked, after feeling under her neckerchief, and showing me something dark in her hand.
“Yes; give it to me.”
“If it is only a ribbon?” she inquired, hiding what she had shown me.
“Very well; I will ask no more.”
“Indeed! What was the use of my cutting off my hair? Well, I needed to, to comb it well.”
My arm lightly pressed hers, from which the sleeve of muslin and lace had slipped back; her hand sought mine, little by little; she let me lift it to my lips; and leaning on me as we went up the stairs in the corridor, she said to me, in slow and hushed tones: “Now are you happy. Do not let us be sad
