“Be it so,” replied Maria, sighing as if her soul would flee from her flesh with these words—“be it so, so long that nobody doth know that I remain bald.”
“I will give my word for it,” said the Mayoress, stepping from behind the curtains with a pair of sharp shears in her hands and a wrapper over her arm.
When Maria saw the scissors she turned as yellow as wax, and when they told her to sit down on the sacrificial chair, she felt herself grow faint and had to ask for a drink of water; and when they tied the wrapper round her throat it is related that she would have immediately torn it asunder if her courage had not failed her. And when at the first movement of the shears she felt the cold iron against her skull, I tell you it seemed to her as if they were piercing her heart with a bright dagger. It is possible that she did not keep her head still for a moment while this tonsuring was taking place; she moved it in spite of herself, now to one side, now to another, to flee from the clipping scissors, of which the rude cuts and the creaking axis wounded her ears. Her posture and movements, however, were of no avail to the poor shorn maiden, and the pertinacious shearer, with the anxiety and covetousness of a pregnant woman satisfying a caprice, seized the hair well, or ill, by handfuls, and went on bravely clipping, and the locks fell on to the white wrapper, slipping down thence till they reached the ground.
At last the business came to an end, and the Mayoress, who was beside herself with joy, caressingly passed the palm of her hand again and again over the mai bald head from the front to the back, saying—
“By my mother’s soul, I have shorn you so regularly and close to root, that the most skilful barber could not have shorn you better. Get up and braid the hair while my husband goes to get the money and I your clothes, so that you can leave the house without any one perceiving it.”
“AT THE FIRST MOVEMENT OF THE SHEARS ... IT SEEMED TO HER AS IF THEY WERE PIERCING HER HEART WITH A BRIGHT DAGGER.”
The Mayor and Mayoress went out of the room, and Maria, as soon as she found herself alone, went to look at herself in a mirror that hung there; and when she saw herself bald she lost the patience she had had until then, and groaned with rage and struck herself, and even tried to wrench off her ears, which appeared to her now outrageously large, although they were not so in reality. She stamped upon her hair and cursed herself for having ever consented to lose it, without remembering her father, and just as if she had no father at all. But as it is a quality of human nature to accept what cannot be altered, poor angry Maria calmed down little by little, and she picked up the hair from the ground and bound it together and braided it into great ropes, not without kissing it and lamenting over it many times. The Mayor and the Mayoress returned, he with the money and she with the every-day clothes of Maria, who undressed and folded her white robe in a kerchief, put on her old gown, hid herself with her shawl to the eyes, and walked, moaning, to the house of the Moor, without noticing that the man with the hood over his head was following behind her, and that when she, in a moment of forgetfulness, lowered her shawl through the habit she had of displaying her tresses, her bald head could be plainly seen. The Moor received the five hundred maravedies with that good will with which money is always received, and told Maria to bring Juan Lanas to his house to stay there so long as there was any risk in the cure. Maria went to fetch the old man, and kept silence as to her shorn head so as not to grieve him, and whilst Juan remained the physicia guest, Maria durst not leave her home except after nightfall and then well enveloped; this, however, did not hinder her being followed by the muffled-up man.
One evening the Moor told her in secret that the next morning he would remove the bandages from Jua eyes. Maria went to bed that night with great rejoicing, but thought to herself that when her father saw her (which would be with no little pleasure) he would be pleased three or four times more if he could see her with the pretty head-dress which she used to wear in her native town. Amidst such cavillation she donned the next day her best petticoat and ribands to hie to the Arabia house; and while she was sitting down to shoe herself she of a sudden felt something like a hood closing over her head, and, turning round, she saw behind her the muffled-up man of before, who, throwing aside his cloak, discovered himself to be the sword-cutler, Master Palomo, who, without speaking, presented Maria with a little Venetian mirror, in which she looked and saw herself with her own hair and garb in such wise that she wondered for a good time if it were not a dream that the Mayoress had shorn her. The fact was, that Master Palomo was a great crony of the old woman barber, and had seen in her house Mari tresses on the very same afternoon of the morning in which he saw Maria was bald, and keeping silence upon the matter, had wheedled the old woman into keeping Mari hair for him, and dressing for the Mayoress some other hair of the same hue which the crone had from a dead woman—a bargain by which the crafty old dame acquired many a bright crown. And the story relates that as soon as Maria regained her much-lamented and sighed-for hair by the hands of the gallant sword-cutler, the Master appeared to her much less ugly than before, and I do not know if it tells that from that moment she began to look on him with more favourable eyes, but i’sooth it is a fact that upon his asking her to accept his escort to the Moor’s house, she gave her assent, and the two set out hand in hand, the maiden holding her head up free from mufflers. As they both entered the physicia apartment her father threw himself into Mari arms, crying—
“Glory to God, I see thee now, my beloved daughter. How tall and beautiful thou art grown! Verily, it is worthwhile to become blind for five years to see on daughter matured thus! Now that I see daylight again, it is only right that I should no longer be a burden to thee. I shall work for myself, for as for thee it is already time for thee to marry.”