Forgetting everything, I went straight to the room where María was, and could scarcely control the mad impulse to press her to my heart and restore her to full life. My father was seated at the foot of her bed. He fixed upon me one of his intense looks, and then, turning towards María, seemed to be accusing me as he pointed to her. My mother was there: but she did not look at me. She knew of my love, and like a good mother, knew how to pity me.
I stood motionless, gazing at María, without daring to ask the cause of her sickness. Her face, half hidden by her disheveled hair, wore a deadly pallor. In her hair were the flowers I had given her in the morning, now all crushed. Her contracted forehead spoke of unbearable pain, and a slight moisture was on her temples. Her eyes were closed; but tears had tried to force their way out, and lay glistening under her lashes.
My father understood my anguish. He rose to go out, but before opening the door he went to the bed and felt of María’s pulse.
“She’s getting better,” he said. “Poor child! It’s the same disease her mother had.”
Her breathing was growing less convulsive. I stood at the head of the bed, and as soon as my father was gone, unmindful of Emma and my mother, I took the hand which lay upon the pillow and bathed it in the tears I could no longer keep back. I understood the full force of the calamity; it was the same disease her mother had. Her mother had died very young of an incurable form of epilepsy. This was the thought that was mastering and almost destroying me.
I perceived a slight movement in the cold and heavy hand. María was breathing more freely, and trying to say something. Her head moved back and forth as if trying to free itself from a crushing weight. Finally she murmured some meaningless words; at last I thought I could distinguish my name. I leaned over her, devouring her with my gaze. Perhaps I pressed her hand too hard, perhaps I called her. She slowly opened her eyes, as if an intense light were hurting them, and fixed them on me, trying to recognize me. Half conscious only, she said, “What is it?”
Seeing my mother, she added, “What has happened to me?”
We tried to quiet her; but she said, in a reproachful tone, which I could not then understand, “Now you see. I was afraid of it.”
She remained profoundly sad. But when I came back to see her at night, she said, on taking leave of me, “Goodbye till tomorrow,” and emphasized the last word, as she was accustomed to whenever any conversation of ours was broken off in the evening.
XIV
When I went out into the corridor leading to my room a strong north wind was swaying the willows in the courtyard; and I could hear it sweeping through the orange groves in the garden, blowing the frightened birds from the trees. Fitful flashes of lightning, like the momentary reflection on a shield of a flame leaping up in the fireplace, seemed to be trying to light up the gloomy depths of the valley.
Leaning against one of the pillars of the corridor, heeding not the rain which beat into my face, I stood thinking of María’s sickness, and of the dreadful words of my father. How I longed to see her again, as in those silent and calm nights which perhaps would never return!
I do not know how long I had been there, when something like a flapping wing brushed my forehead. I looked towards the neighboring trees, to follow its flight; the bird was black.
My room was cold. The roses at the window trembled as before a winter wind. In the vase, the irises which María had put there in the morning were already dry and shriveled. A gust of wind put out my lamp. Thunder began to roll in louder and louder rumbles through the rocky ridges of the mountains. Yet my soul maintained a sad composure.
It had just struck twelve on the parlor clock. I heard steps near my door, and then my father’s voice calling me.
“Get up,” he said, as soon as I answered; “María is worse again.”
The attack had returned.
In fifteen minutes I was ready to go. My father told me the latest symptoms of the disease, while Juan Ángel was quieting my black horse, which was restless and a little frightened. I mounted. The iron hoofs rang out upon the paving, and a moment later I was descending towards the valley, following the path by the light of the incessant lightning. I was going for Dr. Mayn, who used to spend the season in his country-house, three leagues away.
The image of María as she was when she said “Goodbye till tomorrow,” went with me—alas! that tomorrow might never come—and the speed of my horse was not at all equal to my impatience.
The plains began to disappear, fleeing away behind me like great sheets whirled off by the hurricane. The forests which seemed so near retreated as I advanced towards them. Only the roar of the wind through the higuerones and the chiminangos, only the tired panting of the horse, and the sound of his hoofs on the rocky path, broke the silence of the night.
I saw the cabins of Santa Elena on my right; soon I was out of hearing of the barking of their dogs. I sometimes had to draw up on account of cows asleep in the road. The fine house of the M⸺s, with its white chapel and grove of cottonwoods, appeared at a distance in the first rays of the rising moon, like a castle
