What boots it to dwell upon the sufferings of a breaking heart? Hearts must ache and break, just as souls must be born and die, for thus fate plans, and the world goes on the same.
Things went on the same at the plantation of San Isidro. Don Noé made no motion to leave it, and Felisa was happier than she had ever been, and so for once was in accord with her father. Beltran dreaded from day to day the signal for their departure, but it did not come.
Uncle Adan moved among all these happenings with a soul not above cacao seed and banana suckers. He kept tally at the wagon-train or in the field, and if he thought of Agueda at all it was with a shrug of the shoulders and the passing reflection: "She is as the women of her race have been. It is their fate." For she was surely of that race, though only tradition and not appearance was witness to the fact.
As for Agueda, no one about her could say what she felt or thought. She remained by herself. What she must see, that she saw. That which she could keep from knowing, she dulled her mind to receive, and refused to understand or to accept. She endeavoured to become callous to all impressions. One would have said that she did not care, that her passing fancy for Beltran, as well as his for her, had died a natural death. And yet, so contradictory is woman's nature, when placed in such straits as those which now overwhelmed her, that sometimes a fierce curiosity awoke within her, and then she would pass, to all appearance on some household errand bent, within the near neighbourhood of Beltran and his cousin. They, grown careless, as custom encourages, always gave her something to weep over. Then for a time she avoided them, only to return again to her foolish habit of inquiry.
Agueda grew deathly in pallor, and thin and weary looking. Her face had lost its brightness. Gaze where she would, she saw nothing upon her horizon but dark and lowering clouds. Sometimes she opened her drawer to look for a moment at the sewing, discarded now these many weeks, but she did no more than glance at it. "It will not be needed," she said to herself, with prophetic determination.
She might have said with Mildred: "I was so young. I loved him so. I had no mother. God forgot me, and I fell." As for pardon, Agueda did not think of that. Consciously she had committed no sin.
Not that she ever argued the matter out with herself. She would never have thought of continuing Mildred's plaint, and saying, "There may be pardon yet," although she felt, if she did not give expression to the feeling in words, "All's doubt beyond. Surely, the bitterness of death is past." There could be no "blot on the escutcheon" of Agueda. She had no escutcheon, as had Browning's heroine, though perhaps some drops of blood as proud coursed through her veins. She was not introspective. She did not reason nor argue with herself about Beltran's treatment of her. It was only that suddenly the light had become darkness, the sun had grown black and cold. There was no more joy in life, everything had finished for her. Truly, the bitterness of death was past.