XLIV
The parlor clock was striking five. My mother and Emma were waiting for me in the corridor. María was seated on the bottom steps of the staircase. She wore that green dress which contrasted so beautifully with her dark hair. Juan was lying in her lap half asleep. She rose as I dismounted. The child begged for a little ride on my horse, and María brought him in her arms, and helped me place him on the saddle-holsters. Said she: “It’s just five. How prompt you are! If you only were so always!”
“What have you done today with your Mimiya?” I asked Juan, as soon as we were a little away from the house.
“She is the one who has been bad today,” he replied.
“How’s that?”
“Why, crying.”
“Ah! Why didn’t you amuse her?”
“She wouldn’t let me, though I was good to her, and brought her flowers. But I told mamma.”
“And what did she do?”
“She kissed her and made her feel better, because Mimiya loves mamma more than me. She has been bad, but don’t say so to her.”
María took Juan as I brought him back.
“Have you watered the plants today?” I asked her, as I was going up the stairs.
“No; I was waiting for you. Talk to mamma and Emma a little while,” she added, in a low voice, “and as soon as it is time, I will go to the garden.”
She was always afraid lest my mother and sister might think that she had weakened my affection for them, and tried to make up to them the loss of a part of my love by showing them still more of her own.
María and I had just watered the flowers. Seated on a stone bench, with the brook almost at our feet, we were hidden by a mass of jasmines from all eyes except Juan’s. He was singing away in his usual fashion, and was wholly absorbed in setting afloat captured beetles and grasshoppers on dry leaves and passionflower calyxes.
The sun was setting behind the Mulaló mountains, half hidden by clouds hanging about it like fillets of gold, and its lurid rays sported with the long shadows of the willows, whose green summits the wind was caressing.
We had talked of Carlos and his whimsicalities, and of my visit to Salome. María’s lips wore a sad smile.
“Look at me,” I said to her.
Her glance had something of that languor which I had noticed in it on the nights when she was watching by my father’s bed.
“Juan told me the truth,” I added.
“What has he told you?”
“That you have been bad today—don’t call him—that you have cried, and that he could not comfort you. Is that true?”
“Yes. When you and papa were riding away this morning, it occurred to me that perhaps you were deceiving me, and that you would not come back. I went to your room, and then I saw it could not be so, there were so many of your things which you could not leave. After you had gone out of sight, everything seemed so sad and silent that I more than ever dreaded that day which is coming—which is coming without our being able to prevent it. What shall I do? Tell me, tell me what I must do to make those years go by. You will not be looking upon all this. Absorbed in your studies, seeing new countries, you will be able to forget, hours together. But I shall not be able to forget at all. You leave me here. I shall die of remembering and waiting.”
She laid her hand upon my shoulder, and let her head rest upon it for an instant.
“Don’t talk in that way, María,” I said to her, in a choking voice, stroking her pale forehead with my unsteady hand; “don’t talk so. You will extinguish what little courage I have left.”
“Ah, you have some courage still, but it is days since I lost all mine. I have been able to agree to everything,” she went on, hiding her face in her handkerchief. “I have succeeded in concealing within myself the dread and anguish I feel, because at your side all this is changed into something which I suppose is happiness. But you are going away, and I shall remain alone. I cannot be again as I was before. Alas! why did you ever come?”
Her last words wrung my heart, and I covered my face with my hands.
“Efraín,” said she, in the tenderest voice, after a few minutes, “Efraín, look; I am not crying now.”
“María,” I replied, lifting my face, in which she must have seen something strange and solemn, so fixedly did she look at me, “do not blame me for coming back. Blame the one who made you the companion of my boyhood, the one who wished me to love you as I do; complain, then, that you are what you are—blame God. What have I asked of you, what have you given me, that could not be asked and given in His presence?”
“Nothing, nothing. Why do you ask me? I do not blame you. Oh, how could I? I will not complain any more.”
“Haven’t you just done it once for all?”
“No, no; what did I say to you? I am only a silly girl, and do not know what I say. Look at me. Do not be angry with me for my silliness. I shall be brave now. I shall be equal to everything. I will not complain of anything.”
I drew her head to my shoulder again, and she added:
“I will never say that to you again. You have never been offended with me.”
As I dried her last tears, my lips for the first time touched the hair fringing her face. She put up her hands as if to prevent my lips from touching her forehead. It was needless. I did not dare to let them.
XLV
On the 28th of January,
