My mother took them without a word, though she put her handkerchief to her eyes more than once while packing them. I went out, and as I was coming back with some papers which were to go, I found María leaning on the railing of the corridor.
“What is it?” I said. “Why are you crying?”
“I am not crying.”
“Remember what you promised me.”
“Yes, I do—to have courage for all this. If it were only possible for you to give me some of yours! But I have not promised you or mamma not to cry. If your face did not say more than these tears, I would conceal them. But, anyhow, no one will know it.”
I wiped her cheeks with my handkerchief, and said: “Wait for me. I am coming back.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
She was in the same spot. I leaned on the railing at her side.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the dark valley—“look, how gloomy the nights have become. When the August evenings come back, where will you be?”
After silence for a few moments, she proceeded: “If you had not come at all … if, as papa’s first plan was, you had not returned before going to Europe …”
“Would it have been better?”
“Better? Better? Have you ever thought so for a single moment?”
“You know well that I could not.”
“But I have, once; the time I heard papa say that about the disease I had. And didn’t you ever?”
“Never.”
“Not even in those ten days?”
“I loved you then as I do now; but what the doctor and my father …”
“Yes; mamma told me. How can I ever repay you?”
“You have already … all that I could ask.”
“Something worth as much as that?”
“Loving me as much as I loved you then—as much as I love you now.”
“Yes, but that has not repaid you for what you did. Formerly,” she continued, “I should have died of shame to speak like this to you. Perhaps it is not right now.”
“Not right, María? Aren’t you almost the same as my wife?”
“What, now? Already?”
“I cannot imagine how you will be and how I shall be then, but …”
“What are you looking for?” she asked, feeling my hands on hers.
“This,” I replied, taking from the ring finger of her left hand a ring upon which the initials of her parents’ names were engraved.
“For you to wear? I would have offered it to you if you wore rings.”
“I will give it back to you the day of our marriage. Meanwhile, put this one in its place; it is one my mother gave me when I went to college. On the inside is your name and mine. It doesn’t fit me, but it will you, won’t it?”
“Perfectly. But this one I shall never give back to you. I remember that the day you went away you let it fall into the garden brook. I took off my shoes and stockings to find it for you, and as I got very wet, mamma was vexed.”
Something dark as María’s hair passed before our eyes. María gave a smothered cry, and covered her face with her hands.
“The black bird!” she exclaimed, in horror.
Trembling, she seized my arm. A thrill of fear ran through me. The hard rush of the wings could no longer be heard. María was motionless. My mother, alarmed at María’s cry, came out of the study with a light.
“What is it?” she asked.
“That bird which we saw in Efraín’s room.”
The light trembled in my mother’s hand, but she said:
“Why, child, why are you so frightened?”
“You do not understand … but I am over it now. Let us go away from here,” she added, calling me with her eyes, now quite calm.
The bell rang in the dining-room, and we were going in answer to it, when María went up to my mother, and said, “Don’t tell papa about my fright, for he will laugh at me.”
XLII
At seven the next morning my father’s luggage was already out of the house, and he and I were taking our coffee, dressed for the road. I was to go with him as far as the M⸺’s farm, to say goodbye to them and to other neighbors. The whole family was in the corridor when our horses were brought round. Emma and María, as I observed, came from my room. My father kissed my mother’s cheek, and the forehead of María and Emma and of all the children down to Juan, who took occasion to remind him of a commission to buy a little saddle with pistol-holsters, desired for an orphan pony which was the boy’s delight in those days.
My father stopped again in front of María before going down the stairway, and said to her, in a low voice, laying a hand on her hair, and vainly trying to get her to look at him, “It is agreed that you are going to be very good and sensible, isn’t it, my lady?”
María nodded affirmatively.
I said goodbye till afternoon, and as I was standing near María, she said to me, so that no one could hear her, “Not a minute after five.”
Carlos was the only one of Don Jerónimo’s family at home. He received me with the greatest pleasure, and at once wanted me to agree to stay with him all day. We were smoking after breakfast, when Carlos said to me: “It seems, then, that I shall be unable to see you before we say goodbye—you with your happy student’s face, that face you used to put on to torture me when I would tell you of some desperate whim
