It took all my courage to knock at the door of the house. A servant let me in. Leaping down, I flung him the bridle, and hastily rushed through the entrance and the corridor leading to the parlor. It was in darkness. I had taken a few steps in it when I heard a cry, and felt myself embraced.
“María! My María!” I exclaimed, pressing to my heart that head abandoned to my caresses.
“Alas! no, no. My God!” I was interrupted by a sobbing voice.
Loosening her arms from my neck, she fell upon the sofa. It was Emma. She was dressed in black. The moon showed her face, pale and wet with tears.
At that moment the door of my mother’s room opened. Uttering incoherent cries, and kissing me repeatedly, she bore me to the seat where Emma was sitting silent and motionless.
“Where is she, then? Where is she?” I cried, rising to my feet.
“My darling boy!” exclaimed my mother, in a tone of the deepest tenderness, pressing me to her bosom again, “in heaven!”
Something like the cold blade of a dagger pierced my brain. I could not see or breathe. It was Death wounding me. Cruel and implacable, why did he not kill?
LV
I could not tell what had happened, when I awoke one night on a bed surrounded by objects and persons that I could scarcely distinguish. A shaded lamp, whose light made the curtains of my bed the more opaque, diffused a faint gleam throughout the silent room. I tried in vain to sit up. I called, and felt my hands pressed. I called again, and the name I feebly pronounced brought a sob for an answer. Turning to the side from which it came, I recognized my mother. Her anxious and tearful eyes were fixed on my face. In the softest voice, she asked me many times if I was better.
“So it is true, then?” I said to her, when the confused remembrance of the last time I had seen her came to me.
Without replying, she laid her head on the pillow beside mine. After a few minutes of silence, I was cruel enough to say: “So they deceived me! What have I come for?”
“Haven’t I suffered, too?” she interrupted me, her tears falling on my neck.
But all her sorrow and tenderness could not bring any to my eyes.
It was evident they were trying to guard against any strong emotion, for, a little afterwards, my father came in silently, and pressed my hand while he wiped his eyes, about which I saw the dark circles of sleeplessness.
My mother, Eloisa, and Emma took turns that night in watching by my bed, after the doctor had gone away promising a slow but certain recovery. Uselessly they exerted every effort to induce me to go to sleep. When my mother at last fell asleep herself, worn out by fatigue, I guessed that I had been home more than twenty-four hours.
Emma knew the only thing I wanted to learn—the history of her last days, and her last words. I felt that I had not courage to hear, yet I could not control my desire to know the sorrowful details; and I asked her often to tell me. She would only reply to me, in the tone of a mother putting her child to sleep in his cradle, “In the morning.”
LVI
Two months had passed over her grave, and my lips had not murmured a prayer over her. I still felt myself too weak to visit the abandoned house where we had loved each other, or to gaze upon that tomb which hid her from my eyes and denied her to my arms. Yet she must be waiting for me there. There were the mournful farewell gifts she had left for me.
Only by degrees did Emma drop into my heart all the bitterness of María’s last messages to me.
The morning after María had written me her last letter, Emma found her seated on the stone bench in the garden. She had been weeping.
“Why did you come alone today?” asked Emma. “I wanted to come with you, as I did yesterday.”
“Yes,” she replied, “I knew it; but I wanted to come alone. I thought I should be strong enough. Help me walk.”
She leaned on Emma’s arm and went to the rosebush before my window. María looked at it with a smile, and said, as she picked the two freshest roses: “Perhaps they will be the last. See how many buds there are!”
Drawing the most heavily loaded branch to her cheek, she added: “Farewell, my rose! You will tell him that I took care of it as long as I could,” she said, turning to Emma, who was weeping with her.
My sister tried to lead her from the garden, saying: “Why do you sadden yourself so? Has not papa agreed to delay our going? We will come here every day. Isn’t it true that you feel better?”
“Let us stay here longer,” she replied, slowly going up to my window. Forgetting Emma, she leaned over, and picked all the lilies on her favorite plant, saying to my sister: “Tell him that it never stopped flowering. Now we will go.”
She stopped again by the brook, and leaned her face against Emma’s bosom, murmuring, “I do not want to die without seeing him here again.”
During the day she was more sad and quiet than usual. At twilight, Emma found her in my room, leaning out of the window.
“María,” she said, “won’t this night-wind do you harm?”
She was startled at first, but drew my sister to her side on the sofa, and said, “Nothing can do me harm
