Very early the next morning after the usual deep cup of chocolate Brainard joined Hollinger and Major Calloway, and the little party set forth on horseback. They rode through the silent town, between high walls jealously guarding the privacy of large gardens, out into the fields which were drenched with a heavy dew like rain. The birds sang in the arching trees above the road. The sun came up from a golden mist in the lowlands below and touched the hoary crest of Orizaba. Brainard had never seen such an incarnation of spring upon the earth as this glorious May morning, and his heart sang joyously, free of care, forgetful of the burden of his heavy bag and all the coil of events that had brought him hither. Like a schoolboy he was resolved to have his holiday. The lively chestnut horse with which Calloway had mounted him danced mincingly, chafing at the heavy bit. The magnate of the fight trust in a short jacket and leather breeches, a broad straw sombrero on his head, a long black cigar in his mouth, had the appearance of a bull fighter on parade. He too seemed gay in mood, and called Brainard’s attention to the richness of the land, the varied specimens of tropical trees beneath which they rode, the beauty of the landscape, always dominated by the symmetrical snow-crowned mountain. Calloway and the German took the expedition more phlegmatically, discussing the prospects of the new coffee yield.
From the shaded hill road they emerged upon a fertile valley where the peons were already at work in the fields. And they also began to meet the country population moving towards Jalapa for the weekly fair. Hollinger, who seemed to have a fair command of Spanish, joked with men and women along the road.
“You couldn’t do that in the States!” he remarked to Brainard. “They’d just give you a couple of sour looks and vote for no license.” . . .
The little party rode up to the Haçienda di Rosas in time for the second breakfast. The old Englishman seemed delighted to welcome Calloway’s friends and presented them to his placid Mexican wife and his two daughters. The younger of these fell to Brainard at the breakfast, which was served in the cool patio shaded by a thick canopy of rose vines. Señorita Marie was very small, very pretty, and very naïve,—just home from a convent near Madrid, she told the young American. She spoke English daintily, mixed occasionally with French and Spanish phrases and some very modern American slang whose meaning she seemed scarcely to understand. She was so unlike the few American girls that Brainard had known, so little able “to look out for herself” as they were, so appealing with shy glances from her black eyes, that from the first moment he scarce remembered where he was or heard the conversation at the other end of the table. She was exquisitely small and dainty, like one of those Spanish beauties by Goya that Brainard had seen in the Metropolitan Museum. Her black hair was drawn close about her delicate head, concealing her ears and setting off the fairness of her skin, which had an underglow of faint rose. Her voice was a murmur and a whisper, at times like broken bird notes, as if meant for one ear alone. They talked of the nothings that mean much to youth. She told him of her life in the convent, her one winter in the City of Mexico with its formal parties, her brother studying to be an engineer in a New York school.
After the siesta they went into the plantation, and Brainard lingered while the others drifted on discussing the culture of coffee and its future. Señorita Marie showed him her favorite walk with a view of Orizaba across the valley, told him that her favorite poet was Tennyson, the flower she loved best was the rose, the time of the year spring, the time of the day twilight. And she asked him if he had brothers and sisters and was a good Catholic. The time might come, and shortly perhaps, when the childishness of this little mind would be apparent to Brainard, but on this heavenly May afternoon with the birds singing in the thickets and lazy white clouds floating across the snowy summit of the volcano, their talk seemed quite wonderful and the girl herself the most exquisite and adorable creature he had ever known.
“American girls do not talk like that, no?” she murmured, appealing to him.
“No, they don’t!”
“Ah, but you see it’s different down here—we have only little things to think about, we women, all day long.”
“It is very pleasant down here,” the young American sighed.
“You like it?” she responded eagerly. “But you would not like it for always. . . . You American men are like that. You come to see the plantation and drink coffee and talk—maybe you flirt a little, no?—and then you ride away and say you will write. But you never write, and you never come back!”