“Down by the river looking for little Niebla. I knew she would be there when I missed her this morning.”
“How did you know that?” I asked. “You did not hear the story I told her.”
“I made her repeat it all to me last night,” said Monica.
After that little Anita was scolded, shaken, washed and dried, then fed, and finally lifted on to the back of her pony and sent to take care of the sheep. While undergoing this treatment she maintained a profound silence, her little face puckered up into an expression that boded tears. They were not for the public, however, and only after she was on the pony, with the reins in her little mites of hands and her back towards us, did she give way to her grief and disappointment at having failed to find the beautiful child of the mist.
I was astonished to find that she had taken the fantastic little tale invented to amuse her as truth; but the poor babe had never read books or heard stories, and the fairy tale had been too much for her starved little imagination. I remember that once on another occasion I told a pathetic story of a little child, lost in a great wilderness, to a girl about Anita's age, and just as unaccustomed to this kind of mental fare. Next morning her mother informed me that my little listener had spent half the night sobbing and begging to be allowed to go and look for that lost child I had told her about.
Hearing that Alday would not return till evening or till the following day, I asked his wife to lend or give me a horse to proceed on my journey. This, however, she could not do; then she added, very graciously, that while all the men were away my presence in the house would be a comfort to her, a man always being a great protection. The arrangement did not strike me as one very advantageous to myself, but, as I could not journey very well to Montevideo on foot, I was compelled to sit still and wait for Alday's return.
It was dull work talking to those two women in the kitchen. They were both great talkers, and had evidently come to a tacit agreement to share their one listener fairly between them, for first one, then the other would speak with a maddening monotony. Alday's wife had six favourite, fine-sounding words—elements, superior, division, prolongation, justification, and disproportion. One of these she somehow managed to drag into every sentence, and sometimes she succeeded in getting in two. Whenever this happened the achievement made her so proud that she would in the most deliberate cold-blooded way repeat the sentence again, word for word. The strength of the old woman lay in dates. Not an occurrence did she mention, whether it referred to some great public event or to some trivial domestic incident in her own rancho, without giving the year, the month, and the day. The duet between these two confounded barrel-organs, one grinding out rhetoric, the other chronology, went on all the morning, and often I turned to Monica, sitting over her sewing, in hopes of a different tune from her more melodious instrument, but in vain, for never a word dropped from those silent lips. Occasionally her dark, luminous eyes were raised for a moment, only to sink abashed again when they encountered mine. After breakfast I went for a walk along the river, where I spent several hours hunting for flowers and fossils, and amusing myself as best I could. There were legions of duck, coot, rosy spoonbills, and black-necked swans disporting themselves in the water, and I was very thankful that I had no gun with me, and so was not tempted to startle them with rude noises, and send any of them away to languish wounded amongst the reeds. At length, after having indulged in a good swim, I set out to walk back to the estancia.
When still about a mile from the house as I walked on, swinging my stick and singing aloud in lightness of heart, I passed a clump of willow-trees, and, looking up, saw Monica under them watching my approach. She was standing perfectly motionless, and, when I caught sight of her, cast her eyes demurely down, apparently to contemplate her bare feet, which looked very white on the deep green turf. In one hand she held a cluster of stalks of the large, crimson, autumnal lilies which had just begun to blossom. My singing ceased suddenly, and I stood for some moments gazing admiringly at the shy, rustic beauty.
“What a distance you have walked to gather lilies, Monica!” I said, approaching her. “Will you give me one of your stalks?”
“They were gathered for the Virgin, so I cannot give away any of these,” she replied. “If you will wait here under the trees I will find one to give you.”