But his soul was not easy inside of him, Señor--and it could not be, because he was playing fast and loose with it--and so he laid the whole matter before his friend the Archbishop: hoping that for friendship's sake the Archbishop would be so obliging as to dispense him from his vow. For myself, Señor, I cannot but think that the Archbishop--for all that his position put him in close touch with heavenly matters, and gave him the right to deal with them--was not well advised in his action. At any rate, what he did was to tranquillize Don Tristan by telling him that the Blessed Virgin was too considerate to hold him to a contract that certainly would lay him up with a bad attack of rheumatism; and that even--so wearied out would he be by forcing his old thin legs to carry him all that distance--might be the death of him. And so the upshot of it was that the Archbishop, being an easy-going and a very good-natured gentleman, dispensed Don Tristan from his vow.
But a vow, Señor, is a vow--and even an Archbishop cannot cast one loose from it; and so they all found out on this occasion, and in a hurry--because the Blessed Virgin, while never huffed over trifles, does not let the grass grow under her feet when her anger justly is aroused.
Only three days after Don Tristan had received his dispensation--to which, as the event proved, he was not entitled--the Archbishop went on the twelfth of the month, in accordance with the custom observed in that matter, to celebrate mass at the Villa de Guadalupe in Our Lady's Sanctuary. The mass being ended, he came homeward on his mule by the causeway to the City; and as he rode along easily he was put into a great surprise by seeing Don Tristan walking toward him, and by perceiving that he was of a most dismal dead paleness and that his feet were bare. For a moment Don Tristan paused beside the Archbishop--whose mule had stopped short, all in a tremble--and clasped his hand with a hand that was of an icy coldness; then he passed onward--saying in a dismal voice, rusty and cavernous, that for his soul's saving he was fulfilling the vow that he had made to her Ladyship: because the knowledge had come to him that if this vow were not accomplished he certainly would spend the whole of Eternity blistering in hell! Having thus explained matters, not a word more did Don Tristan have to say for himself; nor did he even look backward, as he walked away slowly and painfully on his bare old feet toward Our Lady's shrine.