The carriage set off, swift as an arrow, and Lucía closed her eyes, letting her thoughts wander at will, enjoying the light caresses of the breeze, that blew back the ends of her necktie and her wavy tresses. And yet the scenery, picturesque and smiling, was well worthy of a glance. They passed cultivated fields, country houses with pointed roofs, English parks carpeted with fresh turf and fine grass, yellow now with the hues of autumn. Descrying a footpath winding among the fields, Artegui called to the driver to stop, and giving his hand to Lucía helped her to alight. The Biscayan sought the shelter of a wall where his horses, bathed in sweat, might rest with safety, and Artegui and Lucía proceeded on foot along the little path, the latter, who had now recovered her childlike gayety and her innocent delight in bodily motion, leading the way. She was enchanted with everything: the clover blossoms that covered the dark green field with crimson dots; the late chamomile and the pale corn-flowers growing by the roadside; the fox-gloves, that she gathered with a smile, bursting the pods between her hands; the curling plumes of the celery; the cabbages growing in rows, each row separated by a furrow. The earth, from over-culture, over-manuring, over-plowing, had acquired an indescribable air of decrepitude. Its flanks seemed to groan, exuding a viscous and warm moisture like sweat, while in the uncultivated land bordering the path were spots of virgin soil where grew at will the ornamental superfluities of the fields,—vaporous grasses, many-colored flowers, and sharp thistles.
The path was too narrow to admit of their walking side by side, and Artegui followed Lucía, although he strayed occasionally into the fields, with little regard for proprietorial rights. The young girl at last paused in her meandering course at the foot of a thick osier plantation on the borders of a marsh, shading a steep grassy bank from which could be obtained a view of the road they had traversed. They seated themselves on the natural divan and looked at the plain that stretched before them like a patch-work composed of the various shades of the vegetables cultivated in the different fields. In the high-road, that wound along like a white ribbon, they could distinguish a black spot—the basket-carriage and the ponies. The sun shone with a mild light that came softened through a veil of clouds, and the landscape showed dull tones,—sea-greens, sandy yellow patches, faint ash-colored distances, soft tints that were reflected in the tranquil pond.
“This is very lovely, Don Ignacio,” said Lucía, in order to say something, for the silence, the profound solitude of the place, was beginning to weigh upon her spirits. “Don’t you like it?”
“Yes, I like it,” answered Artegui, with an absent air.
“Although it seems, indeed, as if you liked nothing. You seem, always, as if you were tired—that is to say, not tired, but sad, rather. See here,” continued the young girl, taking hold of a flexible osier branch and wreathing it playfully around her head, “I wager you would not believe that your sadness is communicating itself to me, and that I, too, begin to be—I don’t know how to describe it—well, preoccupied. I would give, I don’t know what, to see you contented and—natural, like other men. Neither in your face nor your expression do you resemble other men, Don Ignacio.”
“And I, on my side,” he responded, “find your gayety infectious; I am sometimes in a better humor than you are yourself. Happiness, too, is contagious.”
As he spoke he drew toward him another osier branch, whose tender peel he stripped off with his fingers and threw into the pond, watching fixedly the circles it made on the surface of the water as it sank.
“Of course it is,” assented Lucía; “and if you wished to be frank, if you made up your mind to—to confide to me the cause of your trouble, you should see that in a second’s time I would chase away that shadow that you now wear on your face. I don’t know why it is that I imagine that all this seriousness, this gloom, this dejection is not caused by real unhappiness, but by—by—I don’t know how to explain myself—by nonsensical notions, by ideas without rhyme or reason, that swarm in your brain. I wager I am right.”
“You are so right,” exclaimed Artegui, dropping the osier branch and seizing the young girl’s hand, “that I am now firmly persuaded that pure and sinless natures possess a certain power of divination, a certain marvelous and peculiar intuition denied to us who, in exchange, see clearly the irremediable sadness of life.”
Lucía looked with a serious and disturbed countenance at her companion.