________________________________________________
_ AT THAT time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country
to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell's opinion of the
extraordinary value of his discovery. Clearly he was one of those
invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of
boasting. Captain Mitchell plumed himself upon his eye for
men--but he was not selfish--and in the innocence of his pride
was already developing that mania for "lending you my Capataz de
Cargadores" which was to bring Nostromo into personal contact,
sooner or later, with every European in Sulaco, as a sort of
universal factotum--a prodigy of efficiency in his own sphere of
life.
"The fellow is devoted to me, body and soul!" Captain Mitchell
was given to affirm; and though nobody, perhaps, could have
explained why it should be so, it was impossible on a survey of
their relation to throw doubt on that statement, unless, indeed,
one were a bitter, eccentric character like Dr. Monygham--for
instance--whose short, hopeless laugh expressed somehow an
immense mistrust of mankind. Not that Dr. Monygham was a prodigal
either of laughter or of words. He was bitterly taciturn when at
his best. At his worst people feared the open scornfulness of his
tongue. Only Mrs. Gould could keep his unbelief in men's motives
within due bounds; but even to her (on an occasion not connected
with Nostromo, and in a tone which for him was gentle), even to
her, he had said once, "Really, it is most unreasonable to demand
that a man should think of other people so much better than he is
able to think of himself."
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. There were
strange rumours of the English doctor. Years ago, in the time of
Guzman Bento, he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a
conspiracy which was betrayed and, as people expressed it,
drowned in blood. His hair had turned grey, his hairless, seamed
face was of a brick-dust colour; the large check pattern of his
flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established
defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had it not been for
the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been
taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral
eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every
exotic part of the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning
with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the Street of
the Constitution, when they saw him pass, with his limping gait
and bowed head, a short linen jacket drawn on carelessly over the
flannel check shirt, would remark to each other, "Here is the
Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He has got his little
coat on." The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was hidden
from their simple intelligence. Moreover, they expended no store
of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned--and a little
"loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people
suspected him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a
concession to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence. The doctor, with
his habit of sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of
showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who
was known in the country as the English Senora. He presented this
tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of his
habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly. She would never
have thought of imposing upon him this marked show of deference.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in
Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of
existence. She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because
she was guided by an alert perception of values. She was highly
gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate
shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal
comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in
Costaguana for three generations, always went to England for
their education and for their wives) imagined that he had fallen
in love with a girl's sound common sense like any other man, but
these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their
mature chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs.
Gould's house so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra.
She would have protested that she had done nothing for them, with
a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had
anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge
of the snow-line above Sulaco. But directly, with a little
capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an
explanation. "Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to
find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose they are homesick.
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick."
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall,
with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn
hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a
new arrival from over the sea. His grandfather had fought in the
cause of independence under Bolivar, in that famous English
legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been saluted by
the great Liberator as Saviours of his country. One of Charles
Gould's uncles had been the elected President of that very
province of Sulaco (then called a State) in the days of
Federation, and afterwards had been put up against the wall of a
church and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general,
Guzman Bento. It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later
Perpetual President, famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny,
readied his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary
land-haunting spectre whose body had been carried off by the
devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the
Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests
explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that
streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the
ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of
people besides Charles Gould's uncle; but with a relative
martyred in the cause of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this
was the phraseology of Guzman Bento's time; now they were called
Blancos, and had given up the federal idea), which meant the
families of pure Spanish descent, considered Charles as one of
themselves. With such a family record, no one could be more of a
Costaguanero than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was so
characteristic that in the talk of common people he was just the
Inglez--the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than a
casual tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite unknown
in Sulaco. He looked more English than the last arrived batch of
young railway engineers, than anybody out of the hunting-field
pictures in the numbers of Punch reaching his wife's drawing-room
two months or so after date. It astonished you to hear him talk
Spanish (Castillan, as the natives say) or the Indian dialect of
the country-people so naturally. His accent had never been
English; but there was something so indelible in all these
ancestral Goulds--liberators, explorers, coffee planters,
merchants, revolutionists--of Costaguana, that he, the only
representative of the third generation in a continent possessing
its own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English
even on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit
of the Llaneros--men of the great plains--who think that no one
in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles
Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur.
Riding for him was not a special form of exercise; it was a
natural faculty, as walking straight is to all men sound of mind
and limb; but, all the same, when cantering beside the rutty
ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English clothes and
with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment to
Costaguana at his easy swift pasotrote, straight out of some
green meadow at the other side of the world.
His way would lie along the old Spanish road--the Camino Real of
popular speech--the only remaining vestige of a fact and name
left by that royalty old Giorgio Viola hated, and whose very
shadow had departed from the land; for the big equestrian statue
of Charles IV at the entrance of the Alameda, towering white
against the trees, was only known to the folk from the country
and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the
pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos, turning off to
the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement
--Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as
incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier
reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos,
with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed
hat.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague
suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an
inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it
of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well known
to the people, keen and alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured
beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his
English coat. His mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered
in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at
home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm the shocking manner
in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with pearl
powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful
living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous
political changes, the constant "saving of the country," which to
his wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and
rapine played with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In
the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to
clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the
public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental
atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in them a comedy of naive
pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled
indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long
moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however,
he observed to her gently--
"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few
words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a
difference. She had a great confidence in her husband; it had
always been very great. He had struck her imagination from the
first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind
which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect
competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of
culture, who had represented his country at several European
Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner
in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona
Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities
of character with a truly patriotic heart.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan
face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what
he must have heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just
dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to
disregard the hottest hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of
white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his
heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then
the Senor Administrator would go up the staircase into the
gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between
the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor with their
leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space
is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the
quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light
and shadow on the flagstones.
Senor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five
o'clock almost every day. Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time
because the English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of
the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the
Court of St. James. He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking
his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on the
foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent
virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he held the cup
in his hands for a long time. His close-cropped head was
perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod
provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial period. Only
then he would say--
"Carlos, my friend, you have ridden from San Tome in the heat of
the day. Always the true English activity. No? What?"
He drank up all the tea at once in one draught. This performance
was invariably followed by a slight shudder and a low,
involuntary "br-r-r-r," which was not covered by the hasty
exclamation, "Excellent!"
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand,
extended with a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the
patriotic nature of the San Tome mine for the simple pleasure of
talking fluently, it seemed, while his reclining body jerked
backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of the sort exported
from the United States. The ceiling of the largest drawing-room
of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head.
The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight-backed
Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European
furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little
monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair.
There were knick-knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the
wall above marble consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two
groups of armchairs, each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller
rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles; three windows
from the ceiling down to the ground, opening on a balcony, and
flanked by the perpendicular folds of the dark hangings. The
stateliness of ancient days lingered between the four high,
smooth walls, tinted a delicate primrose-colour; and Mrs. Gould,
with her little head and shining coils of hair, sitting in a
cloud of muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table,
resembled a fairy posed lightly before dainty philtres dispensed
out of vessels of silver and porcelain.
Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tome mine. Worked in the
early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its
yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole
tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the
mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had
ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses
were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten. It was
rediscovered after the War of Independence. An English company
obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that
neither the exactions of successive governments, nor the
periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of
paid miners they had created, could discourage their
perseverance. But in the end, during the long turmoil of
pronunciamentos that followed the death of the famous Guzman
Bento, the native miners, incited to revolt by the emissaries
sent out from the capital, had risen upon their English chiefs
and murdered them to a man. The decree of confiscation which
appeared immediately afterwards in the Diario Official, published
in Sta. Marta, began with the words: "Justly incensed at the
grinding oppression of foreigners, actuated by sordid motives of
gain rather than by love for a country where they come
impoverished to seek their fortunes, the mining population of San
Tome, etc. . . ." and ended with the declaration: "The chief of
the State has resolved to exercise to the full his power of
clemency. The mine, which by every law, international, human,
and divine, reverts now to the Government as national property,
shall remain closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defence
of liberal principles has accomplished its mission of securing
the happiness of our beloved country."
And for many years this was the last of the San Tome mine. What
advantage that Government had expected from the spoliation, it is
impossible to tell now. Costaguana was made with difficulty to
pay a beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims,
and then the matter dropped out of diplomatic despatches. But
afterwards another Government bethought itself of that valuable
asset. It was an ordinary Costaguana Government--the fourth in
six years--but it judged of its opportunities sanely. It
remembered the San Tome mine with a secret conviction of its
worthlessness in their own hands, but with an ingenious insight
into the various uses a silver mine can be put to, apart from the
sordid process of extracting the metal from under the ground. The
father of Charles Gould, for a long time one of the most wealthy
merchants of Costaguana, had already lost a considerable part of
his fortune in forced loans to the successive Governments. He was
a man of calm judgment, who never dreamed of pressing his claims;
and when, suddenly, the perpetual concession of the San Tome mine
was offered to him in full settlement, his alarm became extreme.
He was versed in the ways of Governments. Indeed, the intention
of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet,
lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for
his signature. The third and most important clause stipulated
that the concession-holder should pay at once to the Government
five years' royalties on the estimated output of the mine.
Mr. Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal favour with
many arguments and entreaties, but without success. He knew
nothing of mining; he had no means to put his concession on the
European market; the mine as a working concern did not exist. The
buildings had been burnt down, the mining plant had been
destroyed, the mining population had disappeared from the
neighbourhood years and years ago; the very road had vanished
under a flood of tropical vegetation as effectually as if
swallowed by the sea; and the main gallery had fallen in within a
hundred yards from the entrance. It was no longer an abandoned
mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra,
where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks,
and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found
under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground. Mr.
Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that
desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before
his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to
exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.
It so happened, however, that the Finance Minister of the time
was a man to whom, in years gone by, Mr. Gould had,
unfortunately, declined to grant some small pecuniary assistance,
basing his refusal on the ground that the applicant was a
notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more than half
suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in a
remote country district, where he was actually exercising the
function of a judge. Now, after reaching his exalted position,
that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with
good to Senor Gould--the poor man. He affirmed and reaffirmed
this resolution in the drawing-rooms of Sta. Marta, in a soft and
implacable voice, and with such malicious glances that Mr.
Gould's best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery
to get the matter dropped. It would have been useless. Indeed,
it would not have been a very safe proceeding. Such was also the
opinion of a stout, loud-voiced lady of French extraction, the
daughter, she said, of an officer of high rank (officier
superieur de l'armee), who was accommodated with lodgings within
the walls of a secularized convent next door to the Ministry of
Finance. That florid person, when approached on behalf of Mr.
Gould in a proper manner, and with a suitable present, shook her
head despondently. She was good-natured, and her despondency was
genuine. She imagined she could not take money in consideration
of something she could not accomplish. The friend of Mr. Gould,
charged with the delicate mission, used to say afterwards that
she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with
the Government he had ever met. "No go," she had said with a
cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and using
turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown
than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer. "No; it's no
go. Pas moyen, mon garcon. C'est dommage, tout de meme. Ah! zut!
Je ne vole pas mon monde. Je ne suis pas ministre--moi! Vous
pouvez emporter votre petit sac."
For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the
tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her
influence in high places. Then, significantly, and with a touch
of impatience, "Allez," she added, "et dites bien a votre
bonhomme--entendez-vous?--qu'il faut avaler la pilule."
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and
pay. Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it
had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on
his brain. He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read
in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man
of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders. He also began to dream of
vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated to himself the disadvantages of
his new position, because he viewed it emotionally. His position
in Costaguana was no worse than before. But man is a desperately
conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this
outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody
around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands
that played their game of governments and revolutions after the
death of Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that,
however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate
expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace
would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the
want of a pretext. The first casual colonel of the barefooted
army of scarecrows that came along was able to expose with force
and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum of 10,000
dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a
gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould
knew that very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for
better times. But to be robbed under the forms of legality and
business was intolerable to his imagination. Mr. Gould, the
father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character:
he attached too much importance to form. It is a failing common
to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There was for
him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by
means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. "It will
end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day. And, in
fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver
pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything
else. The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the
profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould's letters to his
fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his
education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the
mine. He groaned over the injustice, the persecution, the outrage
of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the
fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from
every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of
horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the
Concession had been granted to him and his descendants for ever.
He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim
any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the
infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to
forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in
Europe. And each letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for
having stayed too long in that cavern of thieves, intriguers, and
brigands.
To be told repeatedly that one's future is blighted because of
the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a
matter of prime importance as to its main statement; but in its
form it is calculated to excite a certain amount of wonder and
attention. In course of time the boy, at first only puzzled by
the angry jeremiads, but rather sorry for his dad, began to turn
the matter over in his mind in such moments as he could spare
from play and study. In about a year he had evolved from the
lecture of the letters a definite conviction that there was a
silver mine in the Sulaco province of the Republic of Costaguana,
where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great many
years before. There was also connected closely with that mine a
thing called the "iniquitous Gould Concession," apparently
written on a paper which his father desired ardently to "tear and
fling into the faces" of presidents, members of judicature, and
ministers of State. And this desire persisted, though the names
of these people, he noticed, seldom remained the same for a whole
year together. This desire (since the thing was iniquitous)
seemed quite natural to the boy, though why the affair was
iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing wisdom, he
managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the
fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and
ghouls, which had lent to his father's correspondence the flavour
of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth
attained to as close an intimacy with the San Tome mine as the
old man who wrote these plaintive and enraged letters on the
other side of the sea. He had been made several times already to
pay heavy fines for neglecting to work the mine, he reported,
besides other sums extracted from him on account of future
royalties, on the ground that a man with such a valuable
concession in his pocket could not refuse his financial
assistance to the Government of the Republic. The last of his
fortune was passing away from him against worthless receipts, he
wrote, in a rage, whilst he was being pointed out as an
individual who had known how to secure enormous advantages from
the necessities of his country. And the young man in Europe grew
more and more interested in that thing which could provoke such a
tumult of words and passion.
He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without
bitterness. It might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor
dad, and the whole story threw a queer light upon the social and
political life of Costaguana. The view he took of it was
sympathetic to his father, yet calm and reflective. His personal
feelings had not been outraged, and it is difficult to resent
with proper and durable indignation the physical or mental
anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is one's
own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his
turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tome mine. But it was
another form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into
whose magic formula there entered hope, vigour, and
self-confidence, instead of weary indignation and despair. Left
after he was twenty to his own guidance (except for the severe
injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued his
studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a
mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours
remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a
personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied
characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity
to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in
Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings had for him strong
fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of
human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might
have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to
detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible,
almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of
material things. And at once her delight in him, lingering with
half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a
flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the
skies.
They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould
was staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had
married a middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis. She now
mourned that man, who had known how to give up his life to the
independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as
enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell
for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting
relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded
after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering
existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the
forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and
ruinous palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under
their painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the
cattle, together with the whole family of the tenant farmer.
The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles
Gould visited no mines, though they went together in a carriage,
once, to see some marble quarries, where the work resembled
mining in so far that it also was the tearing of the raw material
of treasure from the earth. Charles Gould did not open his heart
to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking
in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity. One of his
frequent remarks was, "I think sometimes that poor father takes a
wrong view of that San Tome business." And they discussed that
opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a mind
across half the globe; but in reality they discussed it because
the sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live
ardently in remote phrases. For this natural reason these
discussions were precious to Mrs. Gould in her engaged state.
Charles feared that Mr. Gould, senior, was wasting his strength
and making himself ill by his efforts to get rid of the
Concession. "I fancy that this is not the kind of handling it
requires," he mused aloud, as if to himself. And when she
wondered frankly that a man of character should devote his
energies to plotting and intrigues, Charles would remark, with a
gentle concern that understood her wonder, "You must not forget
that he was born there."
She would set her quick mind to work upon that, and then make the
inconsequent retort, which he accepted as perfectly sagacious,
because, in fact, it was so--
"Well, and you? You were born there, too."
He knew his answer.
"That's different. I've been away ten years. Dad never had such a
long spell; and it was more than thirty years ago."
She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after
receiving the news of his father's death.
"It has killed him!" he said.
He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out
before him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had
brought him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined
palazzo, a room magnificent and naked, with here and there a long
strip of damask, black with damp and age, hanging down on a bare
panel of the wall. It was furnished with exactly one gilt
armchair, with a broken back, and an octagon columnar stand
bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with sculptured masks and
garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles
Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his
boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken
cudgel in his bare right hand.
She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to
meet him at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand
near the wall of a vineyard.
"It has killed him!" he repeated. "He ought to have had many
years yet. We are a long-lived family."
She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplating with a
penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though
he had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was
only when, turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've
come to you--I've come straight to you--," without being able to
finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and
tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of
its misery. He caught hold of her hand, raised it to his lips,
and at that she dropped her parasol to pat him on the cheek,
murmured "Poor boy," and began to dry her eyes under the downward
curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white frock,
almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the
noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in
the contemplation of the marble urn.
Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till
he exclaimed suddenly--
"Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!"
And then they stopped. Everywhere there were long shadows lying
on the hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive
trees; the shadows of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm
buildings, of stone walls; and in mid-air the sound of a bell,
thin and alert, was like the throbbing pulse of the sunset glow.
Her lips were slightly parted as though in surprise that he
should not be looking at her with his usual expression. His usual
expression was unconditionally approving and attentive. He was
in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of
dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed
her power without detracting from his dignity. That slight girl,
with her little feet, little hands, little face attractively
overweighted by great coils of hair; with a rather large mouth,
whose mere parting seemed to breathe upon you the fragrance of
frankness and generosity, had the fastidious soul of an
experienced woman. She was, before all things and all flatteries,
careful of her pride in the object of her choice. But now he was
actually not looking at her at all; and his expression was tense
and irrational, as is natural in a man who elects to stare at
nothing past a young girl's head.
"Well, yes. It was iniquitous. They corrupted him thoroughly, the
poor old boy. Oh! why wouldn't he let me go back to him? But now
I shall know how to grapple with this."
After pronouncing these words with immense assurance, he glanced
down at her, and at once fell a prey to distress, incertitude,
and fear.
The only thing he wanted to know now, he said, was whether she
did love him enough--whether she would have the courage to go
with him so far away? He put these questions to her in a voice
that trembled with anxiety--for he was a determined man.
She did. She would. And immediately the future hostess of all the
Europeans in Sulaco had the physical experience of the earth
falling away from under her. It vanished completely, even to the
very sound of the bell. When her feet touched the ground again,
the bell was still ringing in the valley; she put her hands up to
her hair, breathing quickly, and glanced up and down the stony
lane. It was reassuringly empty. Meantime, Charles, stepping with
one foot into a dry and dusty ditch, picked up the open parasol,
which had bounded away from them with a martial sound of drum
taps. He handed it to her soberly, a little crestfallen.
They turned back, and after she had slipped her hand on his arm,
the first words he pronounced were--
"It's lucky that we shall be able to settle in a coast town.
You've heard its name. It is Sulaco. I am so glad poor father did
get that house. He bought a big house there years ago, in order
that there should always be a Casa Gould in the principal town of
what used to be called the Occidental Province. I lived there
once, as a small boy, with my dear mother, for a whole year,
while poor father was away in the United States on business. You
shall be the new mistress of the Casa Gould."
And later, in the inhabited corner of the Palazzo above the
vineyards, the marble hills, the pines and olives of Lucca, he
also said--
"The name of Gould has been always highly respected in Sulaco. My
uncle Harry was chief of the State for some time, and has left a
great name amongst the first families. By this I mean the pure
Creole families, who take no part in the miserable farce of
governments. Uncle Harry was no adventurer. In Costaguana we
Goulds are no adventurers. He was of the country, and he loved
it, but he remained essentially an Englishman in his ideas. He
made use of the political cry of his time. It was Federation. But
he was no politician. He simply stood up for social order out of
pure love for rational liberty and from his hate of oppression.
There was no nonsense about him. He went to work in his own way
because it seemed right, just as I feel I must lay hold of that
mine."
In such words he talked to her because his memory was very full
of the country of his childhood, his heart of his life with that
girl, and his mind of the San Tome Concession. He added that he
would have to leave her for a few days to find an American, a man
from San Francisco, who was still somewhere in Europe. A few
months before he had made his acquaintance in an old historic
German town, situated in a mining district. The American had his
womankind with him, but seemed lonely while they were sketching
all day long the old doorways and the turreted corners of the
mediaeval houses. Charles Gould had with him the inseparable
companionship of the mine. The other man was interested in mining
enterprises, knew something of Costaguana, and was no stranger to
the name of Gould. They had talked together with some intimacy
which was made possible by the difference of their ages. Charles
wanted now to find that capitalist of shrewd mind and accessible
character. His father's fortune in Costaguana, which he had
supposed to be still considerable, seemed to have melted in the
rascally crucible of revolutions. Apart from some ten thousand
pounds deposited in England, there appeared to be nothing left
except the house in Sulaco, a vague right of forest exploitation
in a remote and savage district, and the San Tome Concession,
which had attended his poor father to the very brink of the
grave.
He explained those things. It was late when they parted. She had
never before given him such a fascinating vision of herself. All
the eagerness of youth for a strange life, for great distances,
for a future in which there was an air of adventure, of combat--a
subtle thought of redress and conquest, had filled her with an
intense excitement, which she returned to the giver with a more
open and exquisite display of tenderness.
He left her to walk down the hill, and directly he found himself
alone he became sober. That irreparable change a death makes in
the course of our daily thoughts can be felt in a vague and
poignant discomfort of mind. It hurt Charles Gould to feel that
never more, by no effort of will, would he be able to think of
his father in the same way he used to think of him when the poor
man was alive. His breathing image was no longer in his power.
This consideration, closely affecting his own identity, filled
his breast with a mournful and angry desire for action. In this
his instinct was unerring. Action is consolatory. It is the
enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in
the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over
the Fates. For his action, the mine was obviously the only field.
It was imperative sometimes to know how to disobey the solemn
wishes of the dead. He resolved firmly to make his disobedience
as thorough (by way of atonement) as it well could be. The mine
had been the cause of an absurd moral disaster; its working must
be made a serious and moral success. He owed it to the dead man's
memory. Such were the--properly speaking--emotions of Charles
Gould. His thoughts ran upon the means of raising a large amount
of capital in San Francisco or elsewhere; and incidentally there
occurred to him also the general reflection that the counsel of
the departed must be an unsound guide. Not one of them could be
aware beforehand what enormous changes the death of any given
individual may produce in the very aspect of the world.
The latest phase in the history of the mine Mrs. Gould knew from
personal experience. It was in essence the history of her married
life. The mantle of the Goulds' hereditary position in Sulaco had
descended amply upon her little person; but she would not allow
the peculiarities of the strange garment to weigh down the
vivacity of her character, which was the sign of no mere
mechanical sprightliness, but of an eager intelligence. It must
not be supposed that Mrs. Gould's mind was masculine. A woman
with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she
is simply a phenomenon of imperfect
differentiation--interestingly barren and without importance.
Dona Emilia's intelligence being feminine led her to achieve the
conquest of Sulaco, simply by lighting the way for her
unselfishness and sympathy. She could converse charmingly, but
she was not talkative. The wisdom of the heart having no concern
with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with
the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command.
The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity,
tolerance, and compassion. A woman's true tenderness, like the
true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering
kind. The ladies of Sulaco adored Mrs. Gould. "They still look
upon me as something of a monster," Mrs. Gould had said
pleasantly to one of the three gentlemen from San Francisco she
had to entertain in her new Sulaco house just about a year after
her marriage.
They were her first visitors from abroad, and they had come to
look at the San Tome mine. She jested most agreeably, they
thought; and Charles Gould, besides knowing thoroughly what he
was about, had shown himself a real hustler. These facts caused
them to be well disposed towards his wife. An unmistakable
enthusiasm, pointed by a slight flavour of irony, made her talk
of the mine absolutely fascinating to her visitors, and provoked
them to grave and indulgent smiles in which there was a good deal
of deference. Perhaps had they known how much she was inspired
by an idealistic view of success they would have been amazed at
the state of her mind as the Spanish-American ladies had been
amazed at the tireless activity of her body. She would--in her
own words--have been for them "something of a monster." However,
the Goulds were in essentials a reticent couple, and their guests
departed without the suspicion of any other purpose but simple
profit in the working of a silver mine. Mrs. Gould had out her
own carriage, with two white mules, to drive them down to the
harbour, whence the Ceres was to carry them off into the Olympus
of plutocrats. Captain Mitchell had snatched at the occasion of
leave-taking to remark to Mrs. Gould, in a low, confidential
mutter, "This marks an epoch."
Mrs. Gould loved the patio of her Spanish house. A broad flight
of stone steps was overlooked silently from a niche in the wall
by a Madonna in blue robes with the crowned child sitting on her
arm. Subdued voices ascended in the early mornings from the paved
well of the quadrangle, with the stamping of horses and mules led
out in pairs to drink at the cistern. A tangle of slender bamboo
stems drooped its narrow, blade-like leaves over the square pool
of water, and the fat coachman sat muffled up on the edge,
holding lazily the ends of halters in his hand. Barefooted
servants passed to and fro, issuing from dark, low doorways
below; two laundry girls with baskets of washed linen; the baker
with the tray of bread made for the day; Leonarda--her own
camerista--bearing high up, swung from her hand raised above her
raven black head, a bunch of starched under-skirts dazzlingly
white in the slant of sunshine. Then the old porter would hobble
in, sweeping the flagstones, and the house was ready for the day.
All the lofty rooms on three sides of the quadrangle opened into
each other and into the corredor, with its wrought-iron railings
and a border of flowers, whence, like the lady of the mediaeval
castle, she could witness from above all the departures and
arrivals of the Casa, to which the sonorous arched gateway lent
an air of stately importance.
She had watched her carriage roll away with the three guests from
the north. She smiled. Their three arms went up simultaneously to
their three hats. Captain Mitchell, the fourth, in attendance,
had already begun a pompous discourse. Then she lingered. She
lingered, approaching her face to the clusters of flowers here
and there as if to give time to her thoughts to catch up with her
slow footsteps along the straight vista of the corredor.
A fringed Indian hammock from Aroa, gay with coloured
featherwork, had been swung judiciously in a corner that caught
the early sun; for the mornings are cool in Sulaco. The cluster
of flor de noche buena blazed in great masses before the open
glass doors of the reception rooms. A big green parrot, brilliant
like an emerald in a cage that flashed like gold, screamed out
ferociously, "Viva Costaguana!" then called twice mellifluously,
"Leonarda! Leonarda!" in imitation of Mrs. Gould's voice, and
suddenly took refuge in immobility and silence. Mrs. Gould
reached the end of the gallery and put her head through the door
of her husband's room.
Charles Gould, with one foot on a low wooden stool, was already
strapping his spurs. He wanted to hurry back to the mine. Mrs.
Gould, without coming in, glanced about the room. One tall, broad
bookcase, with glass doors, was full of books; but in the other,
without shelves, and lined with red baize, were arranged
firearms: Winchester carbines, revolvers, a couple of shot-guns,
and even two pairs of double-barrelled holster pistols. Between
them, by itself, upon a strip of scarlet velvet, hung an old
cavalry sabre, once the property of Don Enrique Gould, the hero
of the Occidental Province, presented by Don Jose Avellanos, the
hereditary friend of the family.
Otherwise, the plastered white walls were completely bare, except
for a water-colour sketch of the San Tome mountain--the work of
Dona Emilia herself. In the middle of the red-tiled floor stood
two long tables littered with plans and papers, a few chairs, and
a glass show-case containing specimens of ore from the mine.
Mrs. Gould, looking at all these things in turn, wondered aloud
why the talk of these wealthy and enterprising men discussing the
prospects, the working, and the safety of the mine rendered her
so impatient and uneasy, whereas she could talk of the mine by
the hour with her husband with unwearied interest and
satisfaction. And dropping her eyelids expressively, she added--
"What do you feel about it, Charley?"
Then, surprised at her husband's silence, she raised her eyes,
opened wide, as pretty as pale flowers. He had done with the
spurs, and, twisting his moustache with both hands, horizontally,
he contemplated her from the height of his long legs with a
visible appreciation of her appearance. The consciousness of
being thus contemplated pleased Mrs. Gould.
"They are considerable men," he said.
"I know. But have you listened to their conversation? They don't
seem to have understood anything they have seen here."
"They have seen the mine. They have understood that to some
purpose," Charles Gould interjected, in defence of the visitors;
and then his wife mentioned the name of the most considerable of
the three. He was considerable in finance and in industry. His
name was familiar to many millions of people. He was so
considerable that he would never have travelled so far away from
the centre of his activity if the doctors had not insisted, with
veiled menaces, on his taking a long holiday.
"Mr. Holroyd's sense of religion," Mrs. Gould pursued, "was
shocked and disgusted at the tawdriness of the dressed-up saints
in the cathedral--the worship, he called it, of wood and tinsel.
But it seemed to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of
influential partner, who gets his share of profits in the
endowment of churches. That's a sort of idolatry. He told me he
endowed churches every year, Charley."
"No end of them," said Mr. Gould, marvelling inwardly at the
mobility of her physiognomy. "All over the country. He's famous
for that sort of munificence." "Oh, he didn't boast," Mrs. Gould
declared, scrupulously. "I believe he's really a good man, but
so stupid! A poor Chulo who offers a little silver arm or leg to
thank his god for a cure is as rational and more touching."
"He's at the head of immense silver and iron interests," Charles
Gould observed.
"Ah, yes! The religion of silver and iron. He's a very civil man,
though he looked awfully solemn when he first saw the Madonna on
the staircase, who's only wood and paint; but he said nothing to
me. My dear Charley, I heard those men talk among themselves.
Can it be that they really wish to become, for an immense
consideration, drawers of water and hewers of wood to all the
countries and nations of the earth?"
"A man must work to some end," Charles Gould said, vaguely.
Mrs. Gould, frowning, surveyed him from head to foot. With his
riding breeches, leather leggings (an article of apparel never
before seen in Costaguana), a Norfolk coat of grey flannel, and
those great flaming moustaches, he suggested an officer of
cavalry turned gentleman farmer. This combination was gratifying
to Mrs. Gould's tastes. "How thin the poor boy is!" she thought.
"He overworks himself." But there was no denying that his
fine-drawn, keen red face, and his whole, long-limbed, lank
person had an air of breeding and distinction. And Mrs. Gould
relented.
"I only wondered what you felt," she murmured, gently.
During the last few days, as it happened, Charles Gould had been
kept too busy thinking twice before he spoke to have paid much
attention to the state of his feelings. But theirs was a
successful match, and he had no difficulty in finding his answer.
"The best of my feelings are in your keeping, my dear," he said,
lightly; and there was so much truth in that obscure phrase that
he experienced towards her at the moment a great increase of
gratitude and tenderness.
Mrs. Gould, however, did not seem to find this answer in the
least obscure. She brightened up delicately; already he had
changed his tone.
"But there are facts. The worth of the mine--as a mine--is beyond
doubt. It shall make us very wealthy. The mere working of it is
a matter of technical knowledge, which I have--which ten thousand
other men in the world have. But its safety, its continued
existence as an enterprise, giving a return to men--to strangers,
comparative strangers--who invest money in it, is left altogether
in my hands. I have inspired confidence in a man of wealth and
position. You seem to think this perfectly natural--do you? Well,
I don't know. I don't know why I have; but it is a fact. This
fact makes everything possible, because without it I would never
have thought of disregarding my father's wishes. I would never
have disposed of the Concession as a speculator disposes of a
valuable right to a company--for cash and shares, to grow rich
eventually if possible, but at any rate to put some money at once
in his pocket. No. Even if it had been feasible--which I
doubt--I would not have done so. Poor father did not understand.
He was afraid I would hang on to the ruinous thing, waiting for
just some such chance, and waste my life miserably. That was the
true sense of his prohibition, which we have deliberately set
aside."
They were walking up and down the corredor. Her head just reached
to his shoulder. His arm, extended downwards, was about her
waist. His spurs jingled slightly.
"He had not seen me for ten years. He did not know me. He parted
from me for my sake, and he would never let me come back. He was
always talking in his letters of leaving Costaguana, of
abandoning everything and making his escape. But he was too
valuable a prey. They would have thrown him into one of their
prisons at the first suspicion."
His spurred feet clinked slowly. He was bending over his wife as
they walked. The big parrot, turning its head askew, followed
their pacing figures with a round, unblinking eye.
"He was a lonely man. Ever since I was ten years old he used to
talk to me as if I had been grown up. When I was in Europe he
wrote to me every month. Ten, twelve pages every month of my
life for ten years. And, after all, he did not know me! Just
think of it--ten whole years away; the years I was growing up
into a man. He could not know me. Do you think he could?"
Mrs. Gould shook her head negatively; which was just what her
husband had expected from the strength of the argument. But she
shook her head negatively only because she thought that no one
could know her Charles--really know him for what he was but
herself. The thing was obvious. It could be felt. It required no
argument. And poor Mr. Gould, senior, who had died too soon to
ever hear of their engagement, remained too shadowy a figure for
her to be credited with knowledge of any sort whatever.
"No, he did not understand. In my view this mine could never have
been a thing to sell. Never! After all his misery I simply could
not have touched it for money alone," Charles Gould pursued: and
she pressed her head to his shoulder approvingly.
These two young people remembered the life which had ended
wretchedly just when their own lives had come together in that
splendour of hopeful love, which to the most sensible minds
appears like a triumph of good over all the evils of the earth. A
vague idea of rehabilitation had entered the plan of their life.
That it was so vague as to elude the support of argument made it
only the stronger. It had presented itself to them at the instant
when the woman's instinct of devotion and the man's instinct of
activity receive from the strongest of illusions their most
powerful impulse. The very prohibition imposed the necessity of
success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good
their vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of
weariness and despair. If the idea of wealth was present to them
it was only in so far as it was bound with that other success.
Mrs. Gould, an orphan from early childhood and without fortune,
brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual interests, had never
considered the aspects of great wealth. They were too remote, and
she had not learned that they were desirable. On the other hand,
she had not known anything of absolute want. Even the very
poverty of her aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing intolerable to a
refined mind; it seemed in accord with a great grief: it had the
austerity of a sacrifice offered to a noble ideal. Thus even the
most legitimate touch of materialism was wanting in Mrs. Gould's
character. The dead man of whom she thought with tenderness
(because he was Charley's father) and with some impatience
(because he had been weak), must be put completely in the wrong.
Nothing else would do to keep their prosperity without a stain on
its only real, on its immaterial side!
Charles Gould, on his part, had been obliged to keep the idea of
wealth well to the fore; but he brought it forward as a means,
not as an end. Unless the mine was good business it could not be
touched. He had to insist on that aspect of the enterprise. It
was his lever to move men who had capital. And Charles Gould
believed in the mine. He knew everything that could be known of
it. His faith in the mine was contagious, though it was not
served by a great eloquence; but business men are frequently as
sanguine and imaginative as lovers. They are affected by a
personality much oftener than people would suppose; and Charles
Gould, in his unshaken assurance, was absolutely convincing.
Besides, it was a matter of common knowledge to the men to whom
he addressed himself that mining in Costaguana was a game that
could be made considably more than worth the candle. The men of
affairs knew that very well. The real difficulty in touching it
was elsewhere. Against that there was an implication of calm and
implacable resolution in Charles Gould's very voice. Men of
affairs venture sometimes on acts that the common judgment of the
world would pronounce absurd; they make their decisions on
apparently impulsive and human grounds. "Very well," had said the
considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out
through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let
us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand.
There would then be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is
all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who
is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic.
So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate
fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the
name of Edwards, and--a Government; or, rather, two
Governments--two South American Governments. And you know what
came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of
it, Mr. Gould. However, here we possess the advantage of having
only one South American Government hanging around for plunder out
of the deal. It is an advantage; but then there are degrees of
badness, and that Government is the Costaguana Government."
Thus spoke the considerable personage, the millionaire endower of
churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native
land--the same to whom the doctors used the language of horrid
and veiled menaces. He was a big-limbed, deliberate man, whose
quiet burliness lent to an ample silk-faced frock-coat a
superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his eyebrows were
still black, and his massive profile was the profile of a
Caesar's head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German
and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French
blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable
imagination of conquest. He was completely unbending to his
visitor, because of the warm introduction the visitor had brought
from Europe, and because of an irrational liking for earnestness
and determination wherever met, to whatever end directed.
"The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it's
worth--and don't you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is
Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of 10 per cent. loans and
other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it
with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country
know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit
and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to.
But there's no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest
country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be giving the
word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art,
politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's
Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up
at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in
hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall
run the world's business whether the world likes it or not. The
world can't help it--and neither can we, I guess."
By this he meant to express his faith in destiny in words
suitable to his intelligence, which was unskilled in the
presentation of general ideas. His intelligence was nourished on
facts; and Charles Gould, whose imagination had been permanently
affected by the one great fact of a silver mine, had no objection
to this theory of the world's future. If it had seemed
distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden statement of
such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the actual
matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of
the Occidental Province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige
of magnitude. The sensation was disagreeable; but Charles Gould
was not dull. Already he felt that he was producing a favourable
impression; the consciousness of that flattering fact helped him
to a vague smile, which his big interlocutor took for a smile of
discreet and admiring assent. He smiled quietly, too; and
immediately Charles Gould, with that mental agility mankind will
display in defence of a cherished hope, reflected that the very
apparent insignificance of his aim would help him to success. His
personality and his mine would be taken up because it was a
matter of no great consequence, one way or another, to a man who
referred his action to such a prodigious destiny. And Charles
Gould was not humiliated by this consideration, because the thing
remained as big as ever for him. Nobody else's vast conceptions
of destiny could diminish the aspect of his desire for the
redemption of the San Tome mine. In comparison to the correctness
of his aim, definite in space and absolutely attainable within a
limited time, the other man appeared for an instant as a dreamy
idealist of no importance.
The great man, massive and benignant, had been looking at him
thoughtfully; when he broke the short silence it was to remark
that concessions flew about thick in the air of Costaguana. Any
simple soul that just yearned to be taken in could bring down a
concession at the first shot.
"Our consuls get their mouths stopped with them," he continued,
with a twinkle of genial scorn in his eyes. But in a moment he
became grave. "A conscientious, upright man, that cares nothing
for boodle, and keeps clear of their intrigues, conspiracies, and
factions, soon gets his passports. See that, Mr. Gould? Persona
non grata. That's the reason our Government is never properly
informed. On the other hand, Europe must be kept out of this
continent, and for proper interference on our part the time is
not yet ripe, I dare say. But we here--we are not this country's
Government, neither are we simple souls. Your affair is all
right. The main question for us is whether the second partner,
and that's you, is the right sort to hold his own against the
third and unwelcome partner, which is one or another of the high
and mighty robber gangs that run the Costaguana Government. What
do you think, Mr. Gould, eh?"
He bent forward to look steadily into the unflinching eyes of
Charles Gould, who, remembering the large box full of his
father's letters, put the accumulated scorn and bitterness of
many years into the tone of his answer--
"As far as the knowledge of these men and their methods and their
politics is concerned, I can answer for myself. I have been fed
on that sort of knowledge since I was a boy. I am not likely to
fall into mistakes from excess of optimism."
"Not likely, eh? That's all right. Tact and a stiff upper lip is
what you'll want; and you could bluff a little on the strength of
your backing. Not too much, though. We will go with you as long
as the thing runs straight. But we won't be drawn into any large
trouble. This is the experiment which I am willing to make. There
is some risk, and we will take it; but if you can't keep up your
end, we will stand our loss, of course, and then--we'll let the
thing go. This mine can wait; it has been shut up before, as you
know. You must understand that under no circumstances will we
consent to throw good money after bad."
Thus the great personage had spoken then, in his own private
office, in a great city where other men (very considerable in the
eyes of a vain populace) waited with alacrity upon a wave of his
hand. And rather more than a year later, during his unexpected
appearance in Sulaco, he had emphasized his uncompromising
attitude with a freedom of sincerity permitted to his wealth and
influence. He did this with the less reserve, perhaps, because
the inspection of what had been done, and more still the way in
which successive steps had been taken, had impressed him with the
conviction that Charles Gould was perfectly capable of keeping up
his end.
"This young fellow," he thought to himself, "may yet become a
power in the land."
This thought flattered him, for hitherto the only account of this
young man he could give to his intimates was--
"My brother-in-law met him in one of these one-horse old German
towns, near some mines, and sent him on to me with a letter. He's
one of the Costaguana Goulds, pure-bred Englishmen, but all born
in the country. His uncle went into politics, was the last
Provincial President of Sulaco, and got shot after a battle. His
father was a prominent business man in Sta. Marta, tried to keep
clear of their politics, and died ruined after a lot of
revolutions. And that's your Costaguana in a nutshell."
Of course, he was too great a man to be questioned as to his
motives, even by his intimates. The outside world was at liberty
to wonder respectfully at the hidden meaning of his actions. He
was so great a man that his lavish patronage of the "purer forms
of Christianity" (which in its naive form of church-building
amused Mrs. Gould) was looked upon by his fellow-citizens as the
manifestation of a pious and humble spirit. But in his own
circles of the financial world the taking up of such a thing as
the San Tome mine was regarded with respect, indeed, but rather
as a subject for discreet jocularity. It was a great man's
caprice. In the great Holroyd building (an enormous pile of
iron, glass, and blocks of stone at the corner of two streets,
cobwebbed aloft by the radiation of telegraph wires) the heads of
principal departments exchanged humorous glances, which meant
that they were not let into the secrets of the San Tome business.
The Costaguana mail (it was never large--one fairly heavy
envelope) was taken unopened straight into the great man's room,
and no instructions dealing with it had ever been issued thence.
The office whispered that he answered personally--and not by
dictation either, but actually writing in his own hand, with pen
and ink, and, it was to be supposed, taking a copy in his own
private press copy-book, inaccessible to profane eyes. Some
scornful young men, insignificant pieces of minor machinery in
that eleven-storey-high workshop of great affairs, expressed
frankly their private opinion that the great chief had done at
last something silly, and was ashamed of his folly; others,
elderly and insignificant, but full of romantic reverence for the
business that had devoured their best years, used to mutter
darkly and knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the
Holroyd connection meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole
Republic of Costaguana, lock, stock, and barrel. But, in fact,
the hobby theory was the right one. It interested the great man
to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it interested him so
much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to the first
complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number of
years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere
railway board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A
success would have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel
grounds; but, on the other side of the same feeling, it was
incumbent upon him to cast it off utterly at the first sign of
failure. A man may be thrown off. The papers had unfortunately
trumpeted all over the land his journey to Costaguana. If he was
pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he infused an
added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the very
last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould's white mules, he had said
in Charles's room--
"You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you
as long as you hold your own. But you may rest assured that in a
given case we shall know how to drop you in time."
To this Charles Gould's only answer had been: "You may begin
sending out the machinery as soon as you like."
And the great man had liked this imperturbable assurance. The
secret of it was that to Charles Gould's mind these
uncompromising terms were agreeable. Like this the mine
preserved its identity, with which he had endowed it as a boy;
and it remained dependent on himself alone. It was a serious
affair, and he, too, took it grimly.
"Of course," he said to his wife, alluding to this last
conversation with the departed guest, while they walked slowly up
and down the corredor, followed by the irritated eye of the
parrot--"of course, a man of that sort can take up a thing or
drop it when he likes. He will suffer from no sense of defeat.
He may have to give in, or he may have to die to-morrow, but the
great silver and iron interests will survive, and some day will
get hold of Costaguana along with the rest of the world."
They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of
a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere.
Parrots are very human.
"Viva Costaguana!" he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and,
instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up
somnolence behind the glittering wires.
"And do you believe that, Charley?" Mrs. Gould asked. "This seems
to me most awful materialism, and--"
"My dear, it's nothing to me," interrupted her husband, in a
reasonable tone. "I make use of what I see. What's it to me
whether his talk is the voice of destiny or simply a bit of
clap-trap eloquence? There's a good deal of eloquence of one sort
or another produced in both Americas. The air of the New World
seems favourable to the art of declamation. Have you forgotten
how dear Avellanos can hold forth for hours here--?"
"Oh, but that's different," protested Mrs. Gould, almost shocked.
The allusion was not to the point. Don Jose was a dear good man,
who talked very well, and was enthusiastic about the greatness of
the San Tome mine. "How can you compare them, Charles?" she
exclaimed, reproachfully. "He has suffered--and yet he hopes."
The working competence of men--which she never questioned--was
very surprising to Mrs. Gould, because upon so many obvious
issues they showed themselves strangely muddle-headed.
Charles Gould, with a careworn calmness which secured for him at
once his wife's anxious sympathy, assured her that he was not
comparing. He was an American himself, after all, and perhaps he
could understand both kinds of eloquence--"if it were worth while
to try," he added, grimly. But he had breathed the air of England
longer than any of his people had done for three generations, and
really he begged to be excused. His poor father could be
eloquent, too. And he asked his wife whether she remembered a
passage in one of his father's last letters where Mr. Gould had
expressed the conviction that "God looked wrathfully at these
countries, or else He would let some ray of hope fall through a
rift in the appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime
that hung over the Queen of Continents."
Mrs. Gould had not forgotten. "You read it to me, Charley," she
murmured. "It was a striking pronouncement. How deeply your
father must have felt its terrible sadness!"
"He did not like to be robbed. It exasperated him," said Charles
Gould. "But the image will serve well enough. What is wanted here
is law, good faith, order, security. Any one can declaim about
these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let
the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are
bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue
to exist. That's how your money-making is justified here in the
face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the
security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed
people. A better justice will come afterwards. That's your ray of
hope." His arm pressed her slight form closer to his side for a
moment. "And who knows whether in that sense even the San Tome
mine may not become that little rift in the darkness which poor
father despaired of ever seeing?"
She glanced up at him with admiration. He was competent; he had
given a vast shape to the vagueness of her unselfish ambitions.
"Charley," she said, "you are splendidly disobedient."
He left her suddenly in the corredor to go and get his hat, a
soft, grey sombrero, an article of national costume which
combined unexpectedly well with his English get-up. He came back,
a riding-whip under his arm, buttoning up a dogskin glove; his
face reflected the resolute nature of his thoughts. His wife had
waited for him at the head of the stairs, and before he gave her
the parting kiss he finished the conversation--
"What should be perfectly clear to us," he said, "is the fact
that there is no going back. Where could we begin life afresh? We
are in now for all that there is in us."
He bent over her upturned face very tenderly and a little
remorsefully. Charles Gould was competent because he had no
illusions. The Gould Concession had to fight for life with such
weapons as could be found at once in the mire of a corruption
that was so universal as almost to lose its significance. He was
prepared to stoop for his weapons. For a moment he felt as if the
silver mine, which had killed his father, had decoyed him further
than he meant to go; and with the roundabout logic of emotions,
he felt that the worthiness of his life was bound up with
success. There was no going back. _
Read next: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER VII
Read previous: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER V
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