XXVII

That afternoon, before the ladies went out to make coffee, as they always did when there were guests in the house, I turned the conversation to the boys’ fishing, and told why I had promised to witness the baiting of the hooks that day in the ravine. My proposal to choose that direction for a walk was accepted. Only María looked at me as if to say, “Can’t it be helped, then?”

We were crossing the garden. It had been necessary to wait for María, and also for my sister, who had gone to find the reason for María’s delay. I gave my arm to my mother. Emma politely declined that of Carlos, under pretext of having to lead one of the children; but María accepted it, almost trembling, and as she placed her hand upon it she turned to look for me; I could only signify to her that she must not hesitate.

We had reached that point on the shore where, in the hollow of the meadow, carpeted with fine grass, here and there black rocks thrust themselves up spotted with white moss.

Carlos’s voice dropped into a confidential tone; till then he had undoubtedly been rallying his courage, and now began to draw off to one side so as to get a good opportunity to speak. María tried to draw back again; in her glance at my mother and at me there was almost a prayer; my only resource was not to look at her. She must have seen in my face something which revealed to her the torment I was enduring, since I saw in her countenance, pale as it was, a frown of determination wholly unusual in her. From Carlos’s appearance, I was sure that the moment had come when I wished to hear what was said. She began to speak, and as her voice, though tremulous, was more distinct than he seemed to desire, my ears caught these broken phrases:

“It would have been better if you had spoken only to them⁠—I deeply appreciate the honor which you⁠—This refusal⁠—”

Carlos was confused. María had released his arm, and when she finished speaking, began to play with Juan’s curls. The boy had laid hold of her skirt and was pointing out to her a bunch of adorotes hanging from a neighboring tree.

I doubt if the scene, which I have described as exactly as I could, was taken at its true significance by Don Jerónimo, who, with his hands in the pockets of his blue jacket, came up just then with my father. For the latter, it was as if he had heard everything.

María joined herself dexterously to our group, starting to help Juan pick some mulberries which he could not reach. After I had gathered the fruit to give to the child, she said to me, as she took it, “What can I do, not to go back with him?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

But I went up to Carlos and asked him to go down with me a little farther through the meadow to see a beautiful pool; and I proposed, with as much naturalness as it was possible for me to assume, that we should come to bathe in it the next morning. It was a picturesque spot, but decidedly Carlos saw little of the beauty of the trees and the flowering canes which dipped themselves in the foam of the water, like garlands torn off by the wind.

As the sun went down, it tinted the hills, the woods, and the streams with a glowing topaz color, with that mild and mysterious light which the country people call the “deer’s sun,” doubtless because at such a time the inhabitants of the thick forests come out to feed on the coarse grass of the high ridges, or at the foot of the magueys growing in the crevices of the rocks.

As Carlos and I fell in with the group formed by the others, already on their way to the house, my father said to Don Jerónimo, with a perfectly plain intention, “We must not be taken after this for valetudinarians; let us go back as escorts.”

This said, he took María’s hand and put it on his arm, leaving Señor M⁠⸺ to accompany my mother and Emma.

“They have been more gallant than we,” I said to Carlos, pointing to my father and his.

We followed them. I carried Juan as he had come up to me with outstretched arms, saying, “Take me, for the path is thorny, and I am tired.”

María told me afterwards that my father had asked her, when they began to go over the slope of the meadow, what she had said to Carlos; and as he pleasantly insisted that she should tell him, she succeeded at last in obeying him.

“That is to say,” asked my father, almost laughing, after listening to her hesitating story⁠—“that is to say, you never wish to marry?”

She replied by shaking her head in sign of denial, though she did not dare to look at him.

“My daughter,” continued my father, “can it be that you are pledged to another? That isn’t so, is it?”

“Yes, it is so,” replied María, in a great fright.

“Is he better than this fine fellow you have refused?” As he said this, my father put his free hand on her forehead, to make her look at him.

“Do you know that you are very beautiful?”

“I? No, Señor.”

“Yes, you are; and someone must have told you so a great many times. Tell me who is the favored one.”

María trembled, without daring to say a word more, but my father continued: “He will become worthy of you at last; you want him to be a man of standing⁠—come, confess it to me. Hasn’t he told you that he has acknowledged everything to me?”

“But if there is nothing to tell?”

“What! are you going to have secrets from your papa?” He said this in a tone of complaint, yet looking at her affectionately. María gathered courage to say, “Well, haven’t you said that he has told you everything?”

My father kept silent for a moment. It seemed as if some memory was saddening him. As they were going up the stairs of the garden corridor she heard him say, “Poor Salomón!”

At the same time he stroked the hair of his friend’s daughter.

My father exerted himself to the utmost to make the position of Señor M⁠⸺ and his son as little painful as possible, but all was in vain. Don Jerónimo having already said that he would set off early the next morning, reasserted that he must be at his farm very early, and went to bed with Carlos at nine o’clock, after taking leave of the family in the parlor.

I went with my friend to his room. All my affection for him had revived in these last hours of his stay; his high-bred character, of which he had given me so many proofs in the course of our student life, resumed its power over me. The reserve which I had felt myself forced to maintain towards him seemed to me almost hateful. If, when I learned of his intentions, I said to myself, I had confided to him my love for María, and all that she had become to me in those three months, he would have desisted from his purpose, and I, less ambiguous and more loyal, would have had nothing to be ashamed of.

As soon as we were alone in my room he said to me, putting on the old frank air, although the disappointment he had suffered did not entirely disappear from his face:

“I must get you to forgive me for a lack of confidence in your friendship.”

“What lack?” I responded. “I have noticed none.”

“You haven’t noticed any?”

“No.”

“Don’t you know why I and my father came here?”

“Yes.”

“Have you learned the result of my proposal?”

“Not altogether, but⁠ ⁠…”

“But you guess it.”

“I do.”

“Very well; then, why did I not speak with you about my intentions before anyone else⁠—before my father, even?”

“An extreme delicacy on your part⁠—”

“Nothing of the kind. It was pure stupidity, lack of foresight, forgetfulness of⁠ ⁠… of whatever you please; that is not called by the name you have used.”

He walked up and down the room; then he paused before my chair, and said: “Listen, and admire my innocence. Cáspita! what on earth is the use of having lived twenty-four years? It is a little more than a year since I left you to come to Cauca, and would that I had waited for you as you wished! As soon as I got home I received the most polite attentions from your father and all your family. They saw in me your friend, probably because you had told them what good friends we were. Before you came I saw the Señorita María and your sister two or three times, at our house and here. About a month ago my father told me that it would give him great pleasure if I were to marry one of them. Your cousin had already destroyed in me, though she did not know it, all those memories of Bogotá which were such a torture to me, as I told you in my first letters. I agreed with my father that he should ask the Señorita María’s hand for me. Why did I not see you first? It is true I was kept in the city by my mother’s long illness, but why did I not write to you? Do you know why? It was because I thought that to tell you of my intentions would be like asking you to favor them, and pride kept me from doing it. I forgot that you were my friend; you would have the right, you have it, to forget it also. But if your cousin had loved me; if what was only the regard shown me as a friend of yours had been really love, you would have consented to her being my wife without⁠—What a fool I am to ask you! And you are sensible not to answer.”

“See here,” he added, after leaning his elbows on the windowsill for a moment, “you know that I am not one of the men who die for these things; you remember how I always used to laugh at your faith in the great passions of those French dramas with which you used to read me to sleep winter nights. This is a different thing; I must needs get myself married, and I flattered myself that I should enter your family almost as your brother. It has not turned out that way; but I shall search for a woman who will love me without making me deserving of your hate, and⁠ ⁠…”

“My hate!” I exclaimed, interrupting him.

“Yes; excuse my frankness. What a silly thing⁠—rather, what a reckless thing it would have been for me to have placed myself in such a situation! A fine result it would have been: sorrow for your family, remorse for me, and the loss of your friendship.

“You must love her very much,” he proceeded, after a pause, “for a few hours have been enough for me to see it, in spite of your trying to conceal it. Isn’t it true that you love her as you thought you might come to love when you were eighteen?”

“I do,” replied I, overcome by his noble candor.

“And your father doesn’t know it?”

“He knows it.”

“He does!”

Then I told him of the talk I had had with my father some days before.

“And so you risk everything, everything?” he asked me, in amazement. “And this disease, which is probably the same that her mother had⁠—Why, are you going to spend half your life seated beside a grave?”

These last words overwhelmed me with grief; coming from one whose affection for me dictated them⁠—from Carlos, who was subject to no hallucination⁠—they had a terrible solemnity, more terrible, even, than the “yes” with which I answered them.

I rose, and Carlos caught me in a close and tender embrace. I left him, plunged in sadness, yet free from that humiliating feeling with which I had begun the interview.

I went back to the parlor. While my sister was trying a new waltz on the guitar, María told me of what had passed between her and my father. Never had she been so demonstrative with me; recalling the conversation with my father, she frequently dropped her eyes in shame; yet happiness played about her lips.