One day,ñaltaMartayMarí while encamped in the park at Sevilla, the colonel called him into his tent and asked him,--
"Isn't it a number of days since you have had a letter from your mother, Peñalta?"
"Don't be alarmed, child;[12] I happened to learn that she wasn't very well."
Ricardo understood perfectly, and fell into the colonel's arms, shedding a flood of tears. That night he took the train for the north.
The dismal night spent in that journey remained deeply impressed upon his mind. When the engine whistled, and his comrades, who had come to see him off, standing on the platform, waved their _adios_, he went and sat in a corner of the carriage, wrapped up in his cloak, feigning to sleep, in order better to abandon himself to his painful, gloomy thoughts. Oh, how painful and gloomy his thoughts! He imagined the guardian angel of his infancy, the mother of his heart, dying alone, without receiving her son's last kiss, perhaps calling for him with yearning in the supreme moment of her agony. He remembered that when he had last left her, her health was rather feeble, and the embrace which she gave him was much longer than usual, and her kisses more numerous, as though the poor woman had felt a presentiment that she should never see him again. In her wide, moist eyes he read a fervent silent prayer that he would abandon his profession and not leave her. But he, pleased with the vanities of society, and seduced by the voice of selfishness, had paid no heed to this prayer which the unhappy woman had not dared to formulate with her lips. He felt deeply angry with himself, and called himself the most insulting and humiliating names. From time to time he put his head out of the window and breathed the cool night air, to prevent the sobs from choking him. The vague, mysterious outline of the undulating landscape, wrapt in shadows, transformed his despair into grief, which gradually changed into a solemn melancholy like the gloomy clouds hovering above the still more gloomy earth. The silent majesty of inanimate nature calmed his agitation, but it made him think with cold chills of the perfect loneliness awaiting him. The tie that bound him to earth, and through which he felt that all human beings were his kin, was cut; now he had no one in the world whom he could call his own. The wind, stirred by the swift rush of the train, hummed in his ears and seemed to say to him, Alone! alone! The harsh racket of the wheels and engine violently excited his morbid state of mind, giving him a sensation almost of pain like that caused by the thoughts rushing through his brain. The noisy, metallic rhythm of the wheels likewise seemed to say, with still more relentless accent, Alone! alone! His sad face followed the far-off line of the horizon, and this came back to him in quivering, prophetic reflections, which barely sufficed to cleave asunder the network of shadows, gloom upon gloom. The light from the engine cast a reddish gleam, tingeing as with blood the ground and the trees lining the track. Where there were no trees, the telegraph poles flew past him with bewildering rapidity like the happy hours of his youth. Above his head floated the huge black plume of the smoke, emitted by the smoke-stack of the engine, and this, as it disappeared in the atmosphere, in dying made a thousand strange and monstrous phantasms. These phantasms, as they fled away, rolling along just above the ground, seemed also to say mournfully, Alone! alone! Thereupon, being no longer able to endure the icy breath of the deserted landscape which penetrated his breast and parched his eyes, he shut the window and again returned to his corner and his tears.