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_ AFTER another armed struggle, decided by Montero's victory of Rio
Seco, had been added to the tale of civil wars, the "honest men,"
as Don Jose called them, could breathe freely for the first time
in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of
that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had
been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don Jose Avellanos.
And when it was suddenly--and not quite unexpectedly--endangered
by that "brute Montero," it was a passionate indignation that
gave him a new lease of life, as it were. Already, at the time of
the President-Dictator's visit to Sulaco, Moraga had sounded a
note of warning from Sta. Marta about the War Minister. Montero
and his brother made the subject of an earnest talk between the
Dictator-President and the Nestor-inspirer of the party. But Don
Vincente, a doctor of philosophy from the Cordova University,
seemed to have an exaggerated respect for military ability, whose
mysteriousness--since it appeared to be altogether independent of
intellect--imposed upon his imagination. The victor of Rio Seco
was a popular hero. His services were so recent that the
President-Dictator quailed before the obvious charge of political
ingratitude. Great regenerating transactions were being
initiated--the fresh loan, a new railway line, a vast
colonization scheme. Anything that could unsettle the public
opinion in the capital was to be avoided. Don Jose bowed to
these arguments and tried to dismiss from his mind the gold-laced
portent in boots, and with a sabre, made meaningless now at last,
he hoped, in the new order of things.
Less than six months after the President-Dictator's visit, Sulaco
learned with stupefaction of the military revolt in the name of
national honour. The Minister of War, in a barrack-square
allocution to the officers of the artillery regiment he had been
inspecting, had declared the national honour sold to foreigners.
The Dictator, by his weak compliance with the demands of the
European powers--for the settlement of long outstanding money
claims--had showed himself unfit to rule. A letter from Moraga
explained afterwards that the initiative, and even the very text,
of the incendiary allocution came, in reality, from the other
Montero, the ex-guerillero, the Commandante de Plaza. The
energetic treatment of Dr. Monygham, sent for in haste "to the
mountain," who came galloping three leagues in the dark, saved
Don Jose from a dangerous attack of jaundice.
After getting over the shock, Don Jose refused to let himself be
prostrated. Indeed, better news succeeded at first. The revolt in
the capital had been suppressed after a night of fighting in the
streets. Unfortunately, both the Monteros had been able to make
their escape south, to their native province of Entre-Montes. The
hero of the forest march, the victor of Rio Seco, had been
received with frenzied acclamations in Nicoya, the provincial
capital. The troops in garrison there had gone to him in a body.
The brothers were organizing an army, gathering malcontents,
sending emissaries primed with patriotic lies to the people, and
with promises of plunder to the wild llaneros. Even a Monterist
press had come into existence, speaking oracularly of the secret
promises of support given by "our great sister Republic of the
North" against the sinister land-grabbing designs of European
powers, cursing in every issue the "miserable Ribiera," who had
plotted to deliver his country, bound hand and foot, for a prey
to foreign speculators.
Sulaco, pastoral and sleepy, with its opulent Campo and the rich
silver mine, heard the din of arms fitfully in its fortunate
isolation. It was nevertheless in the very forefront of the
defence with men and money; but the very rumours reached it
circuitously--from abroad even, so much was it cut off from the
rest of the Republic, not only by natural obstacles, but also by
the vicissitudes of the war. The Monteristos were besieging
Cayta, an important postal link. The overland couriers ceased to
come across the mountains, and no muleteer would consent to risk
the journey at last; even Bonifacio on one occasion failed to
return from Sta. Marta, either not daring to start, or perhaps
captured by the parties of the enemy raiding the country between
the Cordillera and the capital. Monterist publications, however,
found their way into the province, mysteriously enough; and also
Monterist emissaries preaching death to aristocrats in the
villages and towns of the Campo. Very early, at the beginning of
the trouble, Hernandez, the bandit, had proposed (through the
agency of an old priest of a village in the wilds) to deliver two
of them to the Ribierist authorities in Tonoro. They had come to
offer him a free pardon and the rank of colonel from General
Montero in consideration of joining the rebel army with his
mounted band. No notice was taken at the time of the proposal. It
was joined, as an evidence of good faith, to a petition praying
the Sulaco Assembly for permission to enlist, with all his
followers, in the forces being then raised in Sulaco for the
defence of the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition,
like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He
had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper
(perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed,
illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut
by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the
dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the
Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and
yet humble appeal of the man against the blind and stupid
barbarity turning an honest ranchero into a bandit. A postscript
of the priest stated that, but for being deprived of his liberty
for ten days, he had been treated with humanity and the respect
due to his sacred calling. He had been, it appears, confessing
and absolving the chief and most of the band, and he guaranteed
the sincerity of their good disposition. He had distributed heavy
penances, no doubt in the way of litanies and fasts; but he
argued shrewdly that it would be difficult for them to make their
peace with God durably till they had made peace with men.
Never before, perhaps, had Hernandez's head been in less jeopardy
than when he petitioned humbly for permission to buy a pardon for
himself and his gang of deserters by armed service. He could
range afar from the waste lands protecting his fastness,
unchecked, because there were no troops left in the whole
province. The usual garrison of Sulaco had gone south to the
war, with its brass band playing the Bolivar march on the bridge
of one of the O.S.N. Company's steamers. The great family
coaches drawn up along the shore of the harbour were made to rock
on the high leathern springs by the enthusiasm of the senoras and
the senoritas standing up to wave their lace handkerchiefs, as
lighter after lighter packed full of troops left the end of the
jetty.
Nostromo directed the embarkation, under the superintendendence
of Captain Mitchell, red-faced in the sun, conspicuous in a white
waistcoat, representing the allied and anxious goodwill of all
the material interests of civilization. General Barrios, who
commanded the troops, assured Don Jose on parting that in three
weeks he would have Montero in a wooden cage drawn by three pair
of oxen ready for a tour through all the towns of the Republic.
"And then, senora," he continued, baring his curly iron-grey head
to Mrs. Gould in her landau--"and then, senora, we shall convert
our swords into plough-shares and grow rich. Even I, myself, as
soon as this little business is settled, shall open a fundacion
on some land I have on the llanos and try to make a little money
in peace and quietness. Senora, you know, all Costaguana
knows--what do I say?--this whole South American continent knows,
that Pablo Barrios has had his fill of military glory."
Charles Gould was not present at the anxious and patriotic
send-off. It was not his part to see the soldiers embark. It was
neither his part, nor his inclination, nor his policy. His part,
his inclination, and his policy were united in one endeavour to
keep unchecked the flow of treasure he had started single-handed
from the re-opened scar in the flank of the mountain. As the mine
developed he had trained for himself some native help. There were
foremen, artificers and clerks, with Don Pepe for the gobernador
of the mining population. For the rest his shoulders alone
sustained the whole weight of the "Imperium in Imperio," the
great Gould Concession whose mere shadow had been enough to crush
the life out of his father.
Mrs. Gould had no silver mine to look after. In the general life
of the Gould Concession she was represented by her two
lieutenants, the doctor and the priest, but she fed her woman's
love of excitement on events whose significance was purified to
her by the fire of her imaginative purpose. On that day she had
brought the Avellanos, father and daughter, down to the harbour
with her.
Amongst his other activities of that stirring time, Don Jose had
become the chairman of a Patriotic Committee which had armed a
great proportion of troops in the Sulaco command with an improved
model of a military rifle. It had been just discarded for
something still more deadly by one of the great European powers.
How much of the market-price for second-hand weapons was covered
by the voluntary contributions of the principal families, and how
much came from those funds Don Jose was understood to command
abroad, remained a secret which he alone could have disclosed;
but the Ricos, as the populace called them, had contributed under
the pressure of their Nestor's eloquence. Some of the more
enthusiastic ladies had been moved to bring offerings of jewels
into the hands of the man who was the life and soul of the party.
There were moments when both his life and his soul seemed
overtaxed by so many years of undiscouraged belief in
regeneration. He appeared almost inanimate, sitting rigidly by
the side of Mrs. Gould in the landau, with his fine, old,
clean-shaven face of a uniform tint as if modelled in yellow wax,
shaded by a soft felt hat, the dark eyes looking out fixedly.
Antonia, the beautiful Antonia, as Miss Avellanos was called in
Sulaco, leaned back, facing them; and her full figure, the grave
oval of her face with full red lips, made her look more mature
than Mrs. Gould, with her mobile expression and small, erect
person under a slightly swaying sunshade.
Whenever possible Antonia attended her father; her recognized
devotion weakened the shocking effect of her scorn for the rigid
conventions regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood.
And, in truth, she was no longer girlish. It was said that she
often wrote State papers from her father's dictation, and was
allowed to read all the books in his library. At the receptions--
where the situation was saved by the presence of a very decrepit
old lady (a relation of the Corbelans), quite deaf and motionless
in an armchair--Antonia could hold her own in a discussion with
two or three men at a time. Obviously she was not the girl to be
content with peeping through a barred window at a cloaked figure
of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite--which is the correct
form of Costaguana courtship. It was generally believed that with
her foreign upbringing and foreign ideas the learned and proud
Antonia would never marry--unless, indeed, she married a
foreigner from Europe or North America, now that Sulaco seemed on
the point of being invaded by all the world. _
Read next: PART SECOND - THE ISABELS: CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART SECOND - THE ISABELS: CHAPTER I
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