“How much I thank you for your promptness!”
He laughed boisterously, swinging the hammock to give himself air. At last he said, “Ingrate!”
“No, it is not that. You know that I cannot, that I should not, delay a single hour more than is absolutely necessary. It is imperative that I get home very quickly.”
“Yes, yes; that is true. It would be selfishness on my part,” he said, quite seriously now.
“What do you know about it?”
“The disease which one of the young ladies has … but you must have received the letters I forwarded to you at Panama.”
“Yes, thanks, just as I went on board.”
“Do they not say that she is better?”
“They do.”
“And Lorenzo?”
“He says the same.”
We were both silent for a moment, and then the collector sat up in the hammock, and called, “Marcos! the dinner!”
A servant entered at once to announce that dinner was served.
“Come,” said my host, rising, “I’m hungry. If you had taken the brandy you would have a fine appetite. Say,” he added, addressing a servant as we entered the dining-room, “if anyone comes to look for us, tell him that we are not in the house. You must go to bed early,” he remarked to me, pointing me to the seat at the head of the table, “in order to get off early in the morning.”
He and Lorenzo placed themselves on either side of me.
“The deuce!” exclaimed the collector, when the light of the fine table-lamp fell upon my face; “what a fuzz of a beard you have brought back! If you were not so swarthy, I could swear that you couldn’t so much as say ‘good day’ in Spanish. It seems as if I were seeing your father when he was twenty—though I think you are taller than he. But for that sedateness, which I suppose you have inherited from your mother, I could believe that I was with your father when he first landed in Quibdó! Don’t it seem so to you, Lorenzo?”
“Precisely,” replied he.
“If you could have seen,” continued my host, addressing Lorenzo, “the excitement of our little Englishman when I told him that he would have to stay two days with me. He was so vexed that he said my brandy would burn up I don’t know what. I declare I was afraid he would quarrel with me. Let’s see if you think the same of this wine, and if we can make you smile. How is it?” he added, after I had tasted the wine.
“It is very good.”
“I was trembling for fear you would make a face over it, for it is the very best I could get for you to take with you on the river.”
The collector’s jollity did not flag an instant for two hours. He allowed me to go to bed at nine, promising to be up at four in the morning to go with me to the landing. As he said good night, he added: “I hope you will not have to complain of the rats in the morning, as you did before. That bad night they gave you has cost them dear. Since then, it has been war to the death between them and me.”
LI
My good friend knocked at my door at four. I had been waiting for him an hour, all ready to set out. He, Lorenzo, and I took coffee while the boatmen were carrying my luggage to the canoes, and soon after we were all on the beach.
The moon, at the full, was already sinking in the west. As it shone out below the clouds which had been concealing it, it bathed the distant forests, the mangrove-trees on the shores, and the smooth and quiet sea in a flush of tremulous light.
“Well, when shall I see you again?” asked the collector, as he gave me a parting embrace.
“Perhaps I shall be back very soon,” I replied.
“You mean to go back to Europe, then?”
“Perhaps.”
That cheerful man seemed suddenly to grow melancholy. As our canoe pushed off from the shore, he shouted, “A very prosperous journey!”
Then he called to the two boatmen, “Cortico! Laurean! take good care of him for me; take as good care of him as if he belonged to me.”
“Yes, master,” replied the two negroes together.
We were about two hundred yards from the beach, but I thought I could distinguish the collector’s white bulk, motionless, in the spot where he had taken leave of me. The yellowish gleam of the moon, sometimes hidden, always funereal, lighted us until after we had entered the mouth of the Dagua.
I stood at the door of the rude cabin, above which arched a roof made of reeds and broad leaves thatched together. Lorenzo arranged a sort of bed for me upon some boards in that floating grotto, and sat at my feet with his head upon his knees, apparently taking a nap. Cortico (or, rather, Gregorio, as he had been baptized) was rowing near us, muttering, at intervals, a dancing tune. The athletic body of Laurean was sketched, like the profile of a giant, against the last flush of the vanishing moon.
Almost inaudible were the monotonous and hoarse cries of the toads in the mangrove-trees on the shores, and the subdued rush of the current. Nothing else broke in upon that solemn silence which pervades the wilderness in its last sleep—a sleep always as deep as man’s in the last hours of the night.
“Try a swallow, Cortico, and then you will sing that mournful song better,” I said to the dwarfish boatman.
“What do you say, my master? Does that seem mournful to you?”
Lorenzo poured out of his painted horn a large amount
