After some years of separation, the two friends met again. Solomon was already a widower. Sarah, his wife, had left him a child who was then three years old. My father found him morally and physically disfigured by grief, and then his new religion gave him comforts for his cousin, comforts which relatives had sought in vain to save him. He urged Solomon to give him his daughter to bring her up by our side; and he dared to propose that he would make her a Christian. Solomon agreed, saying, "It is true that my daughter alone has prevented me from undertaking a journey to India, which would improve my spirit and remedy my poverty: she also has been my only comfort after Sarah's death; but you will it, let her be your daughter. Christian women are sweet and good, and your wife must be a saintly mother. If Christianity gives in supreme misfortunes the relief you have given me, perhaps I would make my daughter unhappy by leaving her a Jewess. Do not tell our relatives, but when you reach the first coast where there is a Catholic priest, have her baptised and have the name Esther changed to Mary. This the unhappy man said, shedding many tears.
A few days later the schooner that was to take my father to the coast of New Granada set sail in Montego Bay. The light ship was testing her white wings, as a heron of our forests tests his wings before taking a long flight. Solomon came into my father's room, who had just finished mending his shipboard suit, carrying Esther seated in one of his arms, and hanging on the other a chest containing the child's luggage: she held out her little arms to her uncle, and Solomon, placing her in those of his friend, dropped sobbing on the little boot. That child, whose precious head had just bathed with a shower of tears the baptism of sorrow rather than the religion of Jesus, was a sacred treasure; my father knew it well, and never forgot it. Solomon was reminded by his friend, as he jumped into the boat that was to separate them, of a promise, and he answered in a choked voice: "My daughter's prayers for me, and mine for her and her mother, shall go up together to the feet of the Crucified.
I was seven years old when my father returned, and I disdained the precious toys he had brought me from his journey, to admire that beautiful, sweet, smiling child. My mother showered her with caresses, and my sisters showered her with tenderness, from the moment my father laid her on his wife's lap, and said, "This is Solomon's daughter, whom he has sent to you.
During our childish games her lips began to modulate Castilian accents, so harmonious and seductive in a pretty woman's mouth and in the laughing mouth of a child.
It must have been about six years ago. As I entered my father's room one evening, I heard him sobbing; his arms were folded on the table, and his forehead resting on them; near him my mother was weeping, and Mary was leaning her head on her knees, not understanding his grief, and almost indifferent to her uncle's lamentations; it was because a letter from Kingston, received that day, gave the news of Solomon's death. I remember only one expression of my father's on that afternoon: "If all are leaving me without my being able to receive their last farewells, why should I return to my country? Alas! his ashes should rest in a strange land, without the winds of the ocean, on whose shores he frolicked as a child, whose immensity he crossed young and ardent, coming to sweep over the slab of his grave the dry blossoms of the blossom trees and the dust of the years!
