the morning had been crumpled; her contracted forehead revealed an unbearable suffering, and a light perspiration moistened her temples; tears had tried to flow from her closed eyes, which glistened on the lashes of her eyelashes.
My father, understanding all my suffering, rose to his feet to retire; but before leaving, he approached the bed, and taking Mary's pulse, said:
–It's all over. Poor child! It is exactly the same evil that her mother suffered from.
Mary's bosom rose slowly as if to form a sob, and returning to its natural state, she exhaled only a sigh. My father being gone, I placed myself at the head of the bed, and forgetting my mother and Emma, who remained silent, I took one of Maria's hands from the cushion, and bathed it in the torrent of my tears hitherto restrained. It measured all my misfortune: it was the same malady as her mother's, who had died very young, attacked by an incurable epilepsy. This idea took possession of my whole being to break it.
I felt some movement in that inert hand, to which my breath could not return the warmth. Mary was already beginning to breathe more freely, and her lips seemed to struggle to utter a word. She moved her head from side to side, as if trying to throw off an overwhelming weight. After a moment's repose, she stammered unintelligible words, but at last my name was clearly perceived among them. As I stood, my gaze devouring her, perhaps I pressed my hands too tightly in hers, perhaps my lips called out to her. She slowly opened her eyes, as if wounded by an intense light, and fixed them on me, making an effort to recognise me. Half sitting up a moment later, "What is it?" she said, drawing me aside; "What has happened to me?" she continued, turning to my mother. We tried to reassure her, and with an accent in which there was something of remonstrance, which I could not at the time explain to myself, she added, "You see, I was afraid.
She was, after the access, in pain and deeply saddened. I returned in the evening to see her, when the etiquette established in such cases by my father permitted it. As I bade her farewell, holding my hand for a moment, she said, "See you to-morrow," and emphasised this last word as she used to do whenever our conversation was interrupted in some evening, looking forward to the next day for us to conclude it.
Chapter XV
As I went out into the corridor that led to my room, an impetuous breeze was swaying the willows in the courtyard; and as I approached the orchard, I heard it tearing through the orange groves, from which the frightened birds were darting. Faint flashes of lightning, like the instantaneous reflection of a buckler wounded by the glow of a fire, seemed to want to illuminate the gloomy bottom of the valley.
Leaning against one of the columns in the corridor, without feeling the rain lashing at my temples, I thought of Mary's illness, about which my father had spoken such terrible words; my eyes wanted to see her again, as in the silent and serene nights that might never come again!
I don't know how much time had passed, when something like the vibrating wing of a bird came to brush against my forehead. I looked towards the immediate woods to follow it: it was a black bird.
My room was cold; the roses at the window trembled as if they feared to be abandoned to the rigours of the tempestuous wind; the vase contained already withered and fainting the lilies that Mary had placed in it in the morning. At this a gust of wind suddenly blew out the lamp; and a clap of thunder let its rising rumble be heard for a long time, as if it were that of a gigantic chariot plunging from the rocky peaks of the mountain.
In the midst of that sobbing nature, my soul had a sad serenity.
The clock in the living room had just struck twelve. I heard footsteps near my door, and then my father's voice calling me. "Get up," he said as soon as I answered; "Maria is still unwell.
The access had been repeated. After a quarter of an hour I was ready to leave. My father was giving me the last indications about the symptoms of the illness, while the little black Juan Angel was quieting my impatient and frightened horse. I mounted; his shod hooves crunched on the cobbles, and a moment later I was riding down towards the plains of the valley, looking for the path in the light of some livid flashes of lightning. I was going in search of Dr. Mayn, who was then spending a season in the country three leagues from our farm.
The image of Mary as I had seen her in bed that afternoon, as she said to me, "See you tomorrow," that perhaps she would not come, was with me, and, quickening my impatience, made me measure incessantly the distance that separated me from the end of the journey; an impatience which the speed of the horse was not enough to moderate,
The plains began to disappear, fleeing in the opposite direction to my run, like immense blankets swept away by the hurricane. The forests that I thought were closest to me seemed to recede as I advanced towards them. Only the moaning of the wind among the shady fig-trees and chiminangos, only the weary wheezing of the horse and the clash of its hoofs on the sparking flints, interrupted the silence of the night.
Some huts of Santa Elena were on my right, and soon after I stopped hearing the barking of their dogs. Sleeping cows on the road began to make me slow down.
The beautiful house of the lords of M***, with its white chapel and its ceiba groves, could be seen in the distance in the first rays of the rising moon, like a castle whose towers and roofs had crumbled with the passing of time.
The Amaime was rising with the rains of the night, and its roar announced it to me long before I reached the shore. By the light of the moon, which, piercing the foliage of the banks, was going to silver the waves, I could see how much its flow had increased. But I could not wait: I had done two leagues in an hour, and it was still too little. I put my spurs to the horse's hindquarters, and with his ears laid back towards the bottom of the river, and snorting deafly, he seemed to calculate the impetuosity of the waters that were lashing at his feet: he plunged his hands into them, and, as if overcome by an invincible terror, he spun back on his legs. I stroked his neck and moistened his mane, and again prodded him into the river; then he threw up his hands impatiently, asking at the same time for all the rein, which I gave him, fearful that I had missed the flood-hole. He went up the bank about twenty rods, taking the side of a crag; he brought his nose close to the foam, and raising it at once, plunged into the stream. The water covered almost all of me, reaching up to my knees. The waves soon curled around my waist. With one hand I patted the animal's neck, the only visible part of its body, while with the other I tried to make it describe the cut line more curved upwards, because otherwise, having lost the lower part of the slope, it was inaccessible due to its height and the force of the water, which swung over the broken branches. The danger had passed. I alighted to examine the girths, one of which had burst. The noble brute shook himself, and a moment later I continued my march.
After a quarter of a league, I crossed the waves of the Nima, humble, diaphanous and smooth, which rolled illuminated until they were lost in the shadows of silent forests. I left the pampa of Santa R., whose house, in the midst of ceiba groves and under the group of palm trees that raise their foliage above its roof, resembles on moonlit nights the tent of an oriental king hanging from the trees of an oasis.
It was two o'clock in the morning when, after crossing the village of P***, I dismounted at the door of the house where the doctor lived.
Chapter XVI
In the evening of the same day the doctor took leave of us, after leaving Maria almost completely recovered, and having prescribed a regimen to prevent a recurrence of the access, and promised to visit her frequently. I was unspeakably relieved to hear him assure her that there was no danger, and for him, twice as fond as I had hitherto been of her, just because such a speedy recovery was predicted for Maria. I went into her room, as soon as the doctor and my father, who was to accompany him a league's journey, had set out. She was just finishing braiding her hair, looking at herself in a mirror that my sister held up on the cushions. Blushing, she pushed the piece of furniture aside and said to me:
