“I did not finish this letter last night, as mamma and Emma came to look for me. They think it does me harm to be here; while, if they prevent me from coming to your room, I do not know what I should do.
“Juan woke up this morning, and asked if you had come back; in his sleep he heard me speak your name.
“The first lily has blossomed, and a piece of it goes in this letter. Aren’t you sure the plant will keep on flowering? I must believe it will, as I do that the rosebush will bear the most beautiful roses in the whole garden.”
XLIX
For a whole year I had letters from María twice a month. The last ones were filled with a melancholy so profound that the earlier ones seemed as if written in our days of undisturbed happiness.
I had in vain tried to rouse her, telling her that such sadness would injure her health, although up to that time she said she had been well. She had replied to me: “I know that it is not very long before I shall see you. After that I can be sad no more. I shall always be with you. Nothing shall separate us again.”
The letter containing these words was the only one I received from her in two months.
About the last of June, Señor A⸺ came to see me one afternoon. He had just arrived in Paris. I had not seen him since the winter before.
“I am bringing you some letters from home,” he said, after our greeting.
“For three mails?”
“For only one. We must first have a few words,” he observed, retaining the packet.
I perceived something ominous in his face, and I was troubled.
“I have come,” he added, walking back and forth in the room for a few moments in silence—“I have come to help you arrange for your return to America.”
“To Cauca!” I exclaimed, forgetting everything momentarily but María and my country.
“Yes,” he replied; “but you must have already guessed the reason.”
“My mother?” I broke in, greatly agitated.
“She is well,” he answered.
“Who is it, then?” I cried, laying hold of the packet which he kept in his hands.
“No one has died.”
“María! María!” I exclaimed, as if she could run to me at the sound of my voice; and I fell helpless on a chair.
“Come,” said Señor A⸺, “that is the reason I came. She will live if you arrive in time. Read these letters; there must be one from her here.”
“Come,” she wrote, “come quickly, or I shall die without seeing you. At last they consent to have me tell you the truth. For a year that disease of which happiness was curing me has been killing me. If that happiness had not been broken off, I should have lived for you.
“If you come—yes, you will come, for I have strength to endure till I see you; if you come you will find only a shadow of your María, but that shadow must embrace you before it vanishes. If I do not wait for you, if a force more mighty than my will takes me away beyond your power to revive me, takes me away without having you by to close my eyes, I shall leave with Emma to keep for you all that I know will be precious to you; the braids of my hair, the locket in which yours is with my mother’s, the ring you put on my hand the night before you went away, and all your letters.
“But why do I grieve you with saying all this? If you come, I will recover strength. If I hear your voice again, if your eyes say to me only for an instant what they alone can say, I shall live, and be again as I was before. I do not wish to die. I cannot die and leave you alone forever.”
“You must finish,” said Señor A⸺, picking up my father’s letter, which had fallen at my feet. “You yourself know that there is no time to lose.”
My father wrote what I had already learned in so overwhelming a manner. The doctors had but one hope of saving María; that rested in my return. Before that necessity my father did not hesitate; he commanded my immediate departure, and reproached himself for not having done so before.
Two hours afterwards I left for London.
L
The sun of the 25th of July was setting in the misty horizon of the sea, filling the western sky with gleaming ruby and gold. The level rays pursued the blue waves, that ran as fugitives to hide beneath the dark forests on the coast. The Emilia López on board of which I had come from Panama, anchored in the Bay of Buenaventura. To those who saw her from the shore the beautiful schooner must have seemed like a handsome peasant-girl, in holiday attire, running hastily through the meadows to gather flowers for her adornment at the evening merrymaking.
Leaning against the rail, I gazed upon those mountains the very sight of which revived such sweet hopes. Seventeen months before, gliding by them, as I was borne on by the swift current of the Dagua, my heart had said goodbye to each one of them, and their voiceless solitude
