________________________________________________
_ CHARLES GOULD turned towards the town. Before him the jagged
peaks of the Sierra came out all black in the clear dawn. Here
and there a muffled lepero whisked round the corner of a
grass-grown street before the ringing hoofs of his horse. Dogs
barked behind the walls of the gardens; and with the colourless
light the chill of the snows seemed to fall from the mountains
upon the disjointed pavements and the shuttered houses with
broken cornices and the plaster peeling in patches between the
flat pilasters of the fronts. The daybreak struggled with the
gloom under the arcades on the Plaza, with no signs of country
people disposing their goods for the day's market, piles of
fruit, bundles of vegetables ornamented with flowers, on low
benches under enormous mat umbrellas; with no cheery early
morning bustle of villagers, women, children, and loaded donkeys.
Only a few scattered knots of revolutionists stood in the vast
space, all looking one way from under their slouched hats for
some sign of news from Rincon. The largest of those groups
turned about like one man as Charles Gould passed, and shouted,
"Viva la libertad!" after him in a menacing tone.
Charles Gould rode on, and turned into the archway of his house.
In the patio littered with straw, a practicante, one of Dr.
Monygham's native assistants, sat on the ground with his back
against the rim of the fountain, fingering a guitar discreetly,
while two girls of the lower class, standing up before him,
shuffled their feet a little and waved their arms, humming a
popular dance tune.
Most of the wounded during the two days of rioting had been taken
away already by their friends and relations, but several figures
could be seen sitting up balancing their bandaged heads in time
to the music. Charles Gould dismounted. A sleepy mozo coming out
of the bakery door took hold of the horse's bridle; the
practicante endeavoured to conceal his guitar hastily; the girls,
unabashed, stepped back smiling; and Charles Gould, on his way to
the staircase, glanced into a dark corner of the patio at another
group, a mortally wounded Cargador with a woman kneeling by his
side; she mumbled prayers rapidly, trying at the same time to
force a piece of orange between the stiffening lips of the dying
man.
The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and
sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of
lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavour to attain
an enduring solution of the problem. Unlike Decoud, Charles
Gould could not play lightly a part in a tragic farce. It was
tragic enough for him in all conscience, but he could see no
farcical element. He suffered too much under a conviction of
irremediable folly. He was too severely practical and too
idealistic to look upon its terrible humours with amusement, as
Martin Decoud, the imaginative materialist, was able to do in the
dry light of his scepticism. To him, as to all of us, the
compromises with his conscience appeared uglier than ever in the
light of failure. His taciturnity, assumed with a purpose, had
prevented him from tampering openly with his thoughts; but the
Gould Concession had insidiously corrupted his judgment. He
might have known, he said to himself, leaning over the balustrade
of the corredor, that Ribierism could never come to anything. The
mine had corrupted his judgment by making him sick of bribing and
intriguing merely to have his work left alone from day to day.
Like his father, he did not like to be robbed. It exasperated
him. He had persuaded himself that, apart from higher
considerations, the backing up of Don Jose's hopes of reform was
good business. He had gone forth into the senseless fray as his
poor uncle, whose sword hung on the wall of his study, had gone
forth--in the defence of the commonest decencies of organized
society. Only his weapon was the wealth of the mine, more
far-reaching and subtle than an honest blade of steel fitted into
a simple brass guard.
More dangerous to the wielder, too, this weapon of wealth,
double-edged with the cupidity and misery of mankind, steeped in
all the vices of self-indulgence as in a concoction of poisonous
roots, tainting the very cause for which it is drawn, always
ready to turn awkwardly in the hand. There was nothing for it now
but to go on using it. But he promised himself to see it
shattered into small bits before he let it be wrenched from his
grasp.
After all, with his English parentage and English upbringing, he
perceived that he was an adventurer in Costaguana, the descendant
of adventurers enlisted in a foreign legion, of men who had
sought fortune in a revolutionary war, who had planned
revolutions, who had believed in revolutions. For all the
uprightness of his character, he had something of an adventurer's
easy morality which takes count of personal risk in the ethical
appraising of his action. He was prepared, if need be, to blow up
the whole San Tome mountain sky high out of the territory of the
Republic. This resolution expressed the tenacity of his
character, the remorse of that subtle conjugal infidelity through
which his wife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts,
something of his father's imaginative weakness, and something,
too, of the spirit of a buccaneer throwing a lighted match into
the magazine rather than surrender his ship.
Down below in the patio the wounded Cargador had breathed his
last. The woman cried out once, and her cry, unexpected and
shrill, made all the wounded sit up. The practicante scrambled to
his feet, and, guitar in hand, gazed steadily in her direction
with elevated eyebrows. The two girls--sitting now one on each
side of their wounded relative, with their knees drawn up and
long cigars between their lips--nodded at each other
significantly.
Charles Gould, looking down over the balustrade, saw three men
dressed ceremoniously in black frock-coats with white shirts, and
wearing European round hats, enter the patio from the street. One
of them, head and shoulders taller than the two others, advanced
with marked gravity, leading the way. This was Don Juste Lopez,
accompanied by two of his friends, members of Assembly, coming to
call upon the Administrador of the San Tome mine at this early
hour. They saw him, too, waved their hands to him urgently,
walking up the stairs as if in procession.
Don Juste, astonishingly changed by having shaved off altogether
his damaged beard, had lost with it ninetenths of his outward
dignity. Even at that time of serious pre-occupation Charles
Gould could not help noting the revealed ineptitude in the aspect
of the man. His companions looked crestfallen and sleepy. One
kept on passing the tip of his tongue over his parched lips; the
other's eyes strayed dully over the tiled floor of the corredor,
while Don Juste, standing a little in advance, harangued the
Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine. It was his firm opinion
that forms had to be observed. A new governor is always visited
by deputations from the Cabildo, which is the Municipal Council,
from the Consulado, the commercial Board, and it was proper that
the Provincial Assembly should send a deputation, too, if only to
assert the existence of parliamentary institutions. Don Juste
proposed that Don Carlos Gould, as the most prominent citizen of
the province, should join the Assembly's deputation. His position
was exceptional, his personality known through the length and
breadth of the whole Republic. Official courtesies must not be
neglected, if they are gone through with a bleeding heart. The
acceptance of accomplished facts may save yet the precious
vestiges of parliamentary institutions. Don Juste's eyes glowed
dully; he believed in parliamentary institutions--and the
convinced drone of his voice lost itself in the stillness of the
house like the deep buzzing of some ponderous insect.
Charles Gould had turned round to listen patiently, leaning his
elbow on the balustrade. He shook his head a little, refusing,
almost touched by the anxious gaze of the President of the
Provincial Assembly. It was not Charles Gould's policy to make
the San Tome mine a party to any formal proceedings.
"My advice, senores, is that you should wait for your fate in
your houses. There is no necessity for you to give yourselves up
formally into Montero's hands. Submission to the inevitable, as
Don Juste calls it, is all very well, but when the inevitable is
called Pedrito Montero there is no need to exhibit pointedly the
whole extent of your surrender. The fault of this country is the
want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in
illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction--that, senores, is
not the way to a stable and prosperous future."
Charles Gould stopped before the sad bewilderment of the faces,
the wondering, anxious glances of the eyes. The feeling of pity
for those men, putting all their trust into words of some sort,
while murder and rapine stalked over the land, had betrayed him
into what seemed empty loquacity. Don Juste murmured--
"You are abandoning us, Don Carlos. . . . And yet, parliamentary
institutions--"
He could not finish from grief. For a moment he put his hand over
his eyes. Charles Gould, in his fear of empty loquacity, made no
answer to the charge. He returned in silence their ceremonious
bows. His taciturnity was his refuge. He understood that what
they sought was to get the influence of the San Tome mine on
their side. They wanted to go on a conciliating errand to the
victor under the wing of the Gould Concession. Other public
bodies--the Cabildo, the Consulado--would be coming, too,
presently, seeking the support of the most stable, the most
effective force they had ever known to exist in their province.
The doctor, arriving with his sharp, jerky walk, found that the
master had retired into his own room with. orders not to be
disturbed on any account. But Dr. Monygham was not anxious to
see Charles Gould at once. He spent some time in a rapid
examination of his wounded. He gazed down upon each in turn,
rubbing his chin between his thumb and forefinger; his steady
stare met without expression their silently inquisitive look. All
these cases were doing well; but when he came to the dead
Cargador he stopped a little longer, surveying not the man who
had ceased to suffer, but the woman kneeling in silent
contemplation of the rigid face, with its pinched nostrils and a
white gleam in the imperfectly closed eyes. She lifted her head
slowly, and said in a dull voice--
"It is not long since he had become a Cargador--only a few weeks.
His worship the Capataz had accepted him after many entreaties."
"I am not responsible for the great Capataz," muttered the
doctor, moving off.
Directing his course upstairs towards the door of Charles Gould's
room, the doctor at the last moment hesitated; then, turning away
from the handle with a shrug of his uneven shoulders, slunk off
hastily along the corredor in search of Mrs. Gould's camerista.
Leonardo told him that the senora had not risen yet. The senora
had given into her charge the girls belonging to that Italian
posadero. She, Leonarda, had put them to bed in her own room. The
fair girl had cried herself to sleep, but the dark one--the
bigger--had not closed her eyes yet. She sat up in bed clutching
the sheets right up under her chin and staring before her like a
little witch. Leonarda did not approve of the Viola children
being admitted to the house. She made this feeling clear by the
indifferent tone in which she inquired whether their mother was
dead yet. As to the senora, she must be asleep. Ever since she
had gone into her room after seeing the departure of Dona Antonia
with her dying father, there had been no sound behind her door.
The doctor, rousing himself out of profound reflection, told her
abruptly to call her mistress at once. He hobbled off to wait for
Mrs. Gould in the sala. He was very tired, but too excited to sit
down. In this great drawing-room, now empty, in which his
withered soul had been refreshed after many arid years and his
outcast spirit had accepted silently the toleration of many
side-glances, he wandered haphazard amongst the chairs and tables
till Mrs. Gould, enveloped in a morning wrapper, came in rapidly.
"You know that I never approved of the silver being sent away,"
the doctor began at once, as a preliminary to the narrative of
his night's adventures in association with Captain Mitchell, the
engineer-in-chief, and old Viola, at Sotillo's headquarters. To
the doctor, with his special conception of this political crisis,
the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill-omened
measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his
troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The
whole lot of ingots might have been concealed somewhere where
they could have been got at for the purpose of staving off the
dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould Concession.
The Administrador had acted as if the immense and powerful
prosperity of the mine had been founded on methods of probity, on
the sense of usefulness. And it was nothing of the kind. The
method followed had been the only one possible. The Gould
Concession had ransomed its way through all those years. It was a
nauseous process. He quite understood that Charles Gould had got
sick of it and had left the old path to back up that hopeless
attempt at reform. The doctor did not believe in the reform of
Costaguana. And now the mine was back again in its old path, with
the disadvantage that henceforth it had to deal not only with the
greed provoked by its wealth, but with the resentment awakened by
the attempt to free itself from its bondage to moral corruption.
That was the penalty of failure. What made him uneasy was that
Charles Gould seemed to him to have weakened at the decisive
moment when a frank return to the old methods was the only
chance. Listening to Decoud's wild scheme had been a weakness.
The doctor flung up his arms, exclaiming, "Decoud! Decoud!" He
hobbled about the room with slight, angry laughs. Many years ago
both his ankles had been seriously damaged in the course of a
certain investigation conducted in the castle of Sta. Marta by a
commission composed of military men. Their nomination had been
signified to them unexpectedly at the dead of night, with
scowling brow, flashing eyes, and in a tempestuous voice, by
Guzman Bento. The old tyrant, maddened by one of his sudden
accesses of suspicion, mingled spluttering appeals to their
fidelity with imprecations and horrible menaces. The cells and
casements of the castle on the hill had been already filled with
prisoners. The commission was charged now with the task of
discovering the iniquitous conspiracy against the Citizen-Saviour
of his country.
Their dread of the raving tyrant translated itself into a hasty
ferocity of procedure. The Citizen-Saviour was not accustomed to
wait. A conspiracy had to be discovered. The courtyards of the
castle resounded with the clanking of leg-irons, sounds of blows,
yells of pain; and the commission of high officers laboured
feverishly, concealing their distress and apprehensions from each
other, and especially from their secretary, Father Beron, an army
chaplain, at that time very much in the confidence of the
Citizen-Saviour. That priest was a big round-shouldered man, with
an unclean-looking, overgrown tonsure on the top of his flat
head, of a dingy, yellow complexion, softly fat, with greasy
stains all down the front of his lieutenant's uniform, and a
small cross embroidered in white cotton on his left breast. He
had a heavy nose and a pendant lip. Dr. Monygham remembered him
still. He remembered him against all the force of his will
striving its utmost to forget. Father Beron had been adjoined to
the commission by Guzman Bento expressly for the purpose that his
enlightened zeal should assist them in their labours. Dr.
Monygham could by no manner of means forget the zeal of Father
Beron, or his face, or the pitiless, monotonous voice in which he
pronounced the words, "Will you confess now?"
This memory did not make him shudder, but it had made of him what
he was in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of
common decencies, something between a clever vagabond and a
disreputable doctor. But not all respectable people would have
had the necessary delicacy of sentiment to understand with what
trouble of mind and accuracy of vision Dr. Monygham, medical
officer of the San Tome mine, remembered Father Beron, army
chaplain, and once a secretary of a military commission. After
all these years Dr. Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the
hospital building in the San Tome gorge, remembered Father Beron
as distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night,
sometimes, in his sleep. On such nights the doctor waited for
daylight with a candle lighted, and walking the whole length of
his rooms to and fro, staring down at his bare feet, his arms
hugging his sides tightly. He would dream of Father Beron sitting
at the end of a long black table, behind which, in a row,
appeared the heads, shoulders, and epaulettes of the military
members, nibbling the feather of a quill pen, and listening with
weary and impatient scorn to the protestations of some prisoner
calling heaven to witness of his innocence, till he burst out,
"What's the use of wasting time over that miserable nonsense! Let
me take him outside for a while." And Father Beron would go
outside after the clanking prisoner, led away between two
soldiers. Such interludes happened on many days, many times, with
many prisoners. When the prisoner returned he was ready to make a
full confession, Father Beron would declare, leaning forward with
that dull, surfeited look which can be seen in the eyes of
gluttonous persons after a heavy meal.
The priest's inquisitorial instincts suffered but little from the
want of classical apparatus of the Inquisition At no time of the
world's history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and
bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to
them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early
refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that
primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He
was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour
ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice.
The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the
innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod;
a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even
a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human
fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the
infliction of the most exquisite torture. The doctor had been a
very stubborn prisoner, and, as a natural consequence of that
"bad disposition" (so Father Beron called it), his subjugation
had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in
his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks
were so pronounced. His confessions, when they came at last, were
very complete, too. Sometimes on the nights when he walked the
floor, he wondered, grinding his teeth with shame and rage, at
the fertility of his imagination when stimulated by a sort of
pain which makes truth, honour, selfrespect, and life itself
matters of little moment.
And he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase,
"Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and
lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of
unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst.
Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr.
Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This
contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but
the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking
anybody in the face.
Dr. Monygham. had become, in a manner, the slave of a ghost. It
was obviously impossible to take his knowledge of Father Beron
home to Europe. When making his extorted confessions to the
Military Board, Dr. Monygham was not seeking to avoid death. He
longed for it. Sitting half-naked for hours on the wet earth of
his prison, and so motionless that the spiders, his companions,
attached their webs to his matted hair, he consoled the misery of
his soul with acute reasonings that he had confessed to crimes
enough for a sentence of death--that they had gone too far with
him to let him live to tell the tale.
But, as if by a refinement of cruelty, Dr. Monygham was left for
months to decay slowly in the darkness of his grave-like prison.
It was no doubt hoped that it would finish him off without the
trouble of an execution; but Dr. Monygham had an iron
constitution. It was Guzman Bento who died, not by the knife
thrust of a conspirator, but from a stroke of apoplexy, and Dr.
Monygham was liberated hastily. His fetters were struck off by
the light of a candle, which, after months of gloom, hurt his
eyes so much that he had to cover his face with his hands. He was
raised up. His heart was beating violently with the fear of this
liberty. When he tried to walk the extraordinary lightness of his
feet made him giddy, and he fell down. Two sticks were thrust
into his hands, and he was pushed out of the passage. It was
dusk; candles glimmered already in the windows of the officers'
quarters round the courtyard; but the twilight sky dazed him by
its enormous and overwhelming brilliance. A thin poncho hung over
his naked, bony shoulders; the rags of his trousers came down no
lower than his knees; an eighteen months' growth of hair fell in
dirty grey locks on each side of his sharp cheek-bones. As he
dragged himself past the guard-room door, one of the soldiers,
lolling outside, moved by some obscure impulse, leaped forward
with a strange laugh and rammed a broken old straw hat on his
head. And Dr. Monygham, after having tottered, continued on his
way. He advanced one stick, then one maimed foot, then the other
stick; the other foot followed only a very short distance along
the ground, toilfully, as though it were almost too heavy to be
moved at all; and yet his legs under the hanging angles of the
poncho appeared no thicker than the two sticks in his hands. A
ceaseless trembling agitated his bent body, all his wasted limbs,
his bony head, the conical, ragged crown of the sombrero, whose
ample flat rim rested on his shoulders.
In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr. Monygham go
forth to take possession of his liberty. And these conditions
seemed to bind him indissolubly to the land of Costaguana like an
awful procedure of naturalization, involving him deep in the
national life, far deeper than any amount of success and honour
could have done. They did away with his Europeanism; for Dr.
Monygham had made himself an ideal conception of his disgrace. It
was a conception eminently fit and proper for an officer and a
gentleman. Dr. Monygham, before he went out to Costaguana, had
been surgeon in one of Her Majesty's regiments of foot. It was a
conception which took no account of physiological facts or
reasonable arguments; but it was not stupid for all that. It was
simple. A rule of conduct resting mainly on severe rejections is
necessarily simple. Dr. Monygham's view of what it behoved him
to do was severe; it was an ideal view, in so much that it was
the imaginative exaggeration of a correct feeling. It was also,
in its force, influence, and persistency, the view of an
eminently loyal nature.
There was a great fund of loyalty in Dr. Monygham's nature. He
had settled it all on Mrs. Gould's head. He believed her worthy
of every devotion. At the bottom of his heart he felt an angry
uneasiness before the prosperity of the San Tome mine, because
its growth was robbing her of all peace of mind. Costaguana was
no place for a woman of that kind. What could Charles Gould have
been thinking of when he brought her out there! It was
outrageous! And the doctor had watched the course of events with
a grim and distant reserve which, he imagined, his lamentable
history imposed upon him.
Loyalty to Mrs. Gould could not, however, leave out of account
the safety of her husband. The doctor had contrived to be in town
at the critical time because he mistrusted Charles Gould. He
considered him hopelessly infected with the madness of
revolutions. That is why he hobbled in distress in the
drawing-room of the Casa Gould on that morning, exclaiming,
"Decoud, Decoud!" in a tone of mournful irritation.
Mrs. Gould, her colour heightened, and with glistening eyes,
looked straight before her at the sudden enormity of that
disaster. The finger-tips on one hand rested lightly on a low
little table by her side, and the arm trembled right up to the
shoulder. The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all
the fulness of its power high up on the sky from behind the
dazzling snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate,
smooth, pearly greyness of light, in which the town lies steeped
during the early hours, into sharp-cut masses of black shade and
spaces of hot, blinding glare. Three long rectangles of sunshine
fell through the windows of the sala; while just across the
street the front of the Avellanos's house appeared very sombre in
its own shadow seen through the flood of light.
A voice said at the door, "What of Decoud?"
It was Charles Gould. They had not heard him coming along the
corredor. His glance just glided over his wife and struck full at
the doctor.
"You have brought some news, doctor?"
Dr. Monygham blurted it all out at once, in the rough. For some
time after he had done, the Administrador of the San Tome mine
remained looking at him without a word. Mrs. Gould sank into a
low chair with her hands lying on her lap. A silence reigned
between those three motionless persons. Then Charles Gould
spoke--
"You must want some breakfast."
He stood aside to let his wife pass first. She caught up her
husband's hand and pressed it as she went out, raising her
handkerchief to her eyes. The sight of her husband had brought
Antonia's position to her mind, and she could not contain her
tears at the thought of the poor girl. When she rejoined the two
men in the diningroom after having bathed her face, Charles Gould
was saying to the doctor across the table--
"No, there does not seem any room for doubt."
And the doctor assented.
"No, I don't see myself how we could question that wretched
Hirsch's tale. It's only too true, I fear."
She sat down desolately at the head of the table and looked from
one to the other. The two men, without absolutely turning their
heads away, tried to avoid her glance. The doctor even made a
show of being hungry; he seized his knife and fork, and began to
eat with emphasis, as if on the stage. Charles Gould made no
pretence of the sort; with his elbows raised squarely, he twisted
both ends of his flaming moustaches--they were so long that his
hands were quite away from his face.
"I am not surprised," he muttered, abandoning his moustaches and
throwing one arm over the back of his chair. His face was calm
with that immobility of expression which betrays the intensity of
a mental struggle. He felt that this accident had brought to a
point all the consequences involved in his line of conduct, with
its conscious and subconscious intentions. There must be an end
now of this silent reserve, of that air of impenetrability behind
which he had been safeguarding his dignity. It was the least
ignoble form of dissembling forced upon him by that parody of
civilized institutions which offended his intelligence, his
uprightness, and his sense of right. He was like his father. He
had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that
prevail in this world. They hurt him in his innate gravity. He
felt that the miserable death of that poor Decoud took from him
his inaccessible position of a force in the background. It
committed him openly unless he wished to throw up the game--and
that was impossible. The material interests required from him the
sacrifice of his aloofness--perhaps his own safety too. And he
reflected that Decoud's separationist plan had not gone to the
bottom with the lost silver.
The only thing that was not changed was his position towards Mr.
Holroyd. The head of silver and steel interests had entered into
Costaguana affairs with a sort of passion. Costaguana had become
necessary to his existence; in the San Tome mine he had found the
imaginative satisfaction which other minds would get from drama,
from art, or from a risky and fascinating sport. It was a
special form of the great man's extravagance, sanctioned by a
moral intention, big enough to flatter his vanity. Even in this
aberration of his genius he served the progress of the world.
Charles Gould felt sure of being understood with precision and
judged with the indulgence of their common passion. Nothing now
could surprise or startle this great man. And Charles Gould
imagined himself writing a letter to San Francisco in some such
words: ". . . . The men at the head of the movement are dead or
have fled; the civil organization of the province is at an end
for the present; the Blanco party in Sulaco has collapsed
inexcusably, but in the characteristic manner of this country.
But Barrios, untouched in Cayta, remains still available. I am
forced to take up openly the plan of a provincial revolution as
the only way of placing the enormous material interests involved
in the prosperity and peace of Sulaco in a position of permanent
safety. . . ." That was clear. He saw these words as if written
in letters of fire upon the wall at which he was gazing
abstractedly.
Mrs Gould watched his abstraction with dread. It was a domestic
and frightful phenomenon that darkened and chilled the house for
her like a thundercloud passing over the sun. Charles Gould's
fits of abstraction depicted the energetic concentration of a
will haunted by a fixed idea. A man haunted by a fixed idea is
insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice;
for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved
head? The eyes of Mrs. Gould, watching her husband's profile,
filled with tears again. And again she seemed to see the despair
of the unfortunate Antonia.
"What would I have done if Charley had been drowned while we were
engaged?" she exclaimed, mentally, with horror. Her heart turned
to ice, while her cheeks flamed up as if scorched by the blaze of
a funeral pyre consuming all her earthly affections. The tears
burst out of her eyes.
"Antonia will kill herself!" she cried out.
This cry fell into the silence of the room with strangely little
effect. Only the doctor, crumbling up a piece of bread, with his
head inclined on one side, raised his face, and the few long
hairs sticking out of his shaggy eyebrows stirred in a slight
frown. Dr. Monygham thought quite sincerely that Decoud was a
singularly unworthy object for any woman's affection. Then he
lowered his head again, with a curl of his lip, and his heart
full of tender admiration for Mrs. Gould.
"She thinks of that girl," he said to himself; "she thinks of the
Viola children; she thinks of me; of the wounded; of the miners;
she always thinks of everybody who is poor and miserable! But
what will she do if Charles gets the worst of it in this infernal
scrimmage those confounded Avellanos have drawn him into? No one
seems to be thinking of her."
Charles Gould, staring at the wall, pursued his reflections
subtly.
"I shall write to Holroyd that the San Tome mine is big enough to
take in hand the making of a new State. It'll please him. It'll
reconcile him to the risk."
But was Barrios really available? Perhaps. But he was
inaccessible. To send off a boat to Cayta was no longer possible,
since Sotillo was master of the harbour, and had a steamer at his
disposal. And now, with all the democrats in the province up, and
every Campo township in a state of disturbance, where could he
find a man who would make his way successfully overland to Cayta
with a message, a ten days' ride at least; a man of courage and
resolution, who would avoid arrest or murder, and if arrested
would faithfully eat the paper? The Capataz de Cargadores would
have been just such a man. But the Capataz of the Cargadores was
no more.
And Charles Gould, withdrawing his eyes from the wall, said
gently, "That Hirsch! What an extraordinary thing! Saved himself
by clinging to the anchor, did he? I had no idea that he was
still in Sulaco. I thought he had gone back overland to
Esmeralda more than a week ago. He came here once to talk to me
about his hide business and some other things. I made it clear
to him that nothing could be done."
"He was afraid to start back on account of Hernandez being
about," remarked the doctor.
"And but for him we might not have known anything of what has
happened," marvelled Charles Gould.
Mrs. Gould cried out--
"Antonia must not know! She must not be told. Not now."
"Nobody's likely to carry the news," remarked the doctor. "It's
no one's interest. Moreover, the people here are afraid of
Hernandez as if he were the devil." He turned to Charles Gould.
"It's even awkward, because if you wanted to communicate with the
refugees you could find no messenger. When Hernandez was ranging
hundreds of miles away from here the Sulaco populace used to
shudder at the tales of him roasting his prisoners alive."
"Yes," murmured Charles Gould; "Captain Mitchell's Capataz was
the only man in the town who had seen Hernandez eye to eye.
Father Corbelan employed him. He opened the communications first.
It is a pity that--"
His voice was covered by the booming of the great bell of the
cathedral. Three single strokes, one after another, burst out
explosively, dying away in deep and mellow vibrations. And then
all the bells in the tower of every church, convent, or chapel in
town, even those that had remained shut up for years, pealed out
together with a crash. In this furious flood of metallic uproar
there was a power of suggesting images of strife and violence
which blanched Mrs. Gould's cheek. Basilio, who had been waiting
at table, shrinking within himself, clung to the sideboard with
chattering teeth. It was impossible to hear yourself speak.
"Shut these windows!" Charles Gould yelled at him, angrily. All
the other servants, terrified at what they took for the signal of
a general massacre, had rushed upstairs, tumbling over each
other, men and women, the obscure and generally invisible
population of the ground floor on the four sides of the patio.
The women, screaming "Misericordia!" ran right into the room,
and, falling on their knees against the walls, began to cross
themselves convulsively. The staring heads of men blocked the
doorway in an instant--mozos from the stable, gardeners,
nondescript helpers living on the crumbs of the munificent
house--and Charles Gould beheld all the extent of his domestic
establishment, even to the gatekeeper. This was a half-paralyzed
old man, whose long white locks fell down to his shoulders: an
heirloom taken up by Charles Gould's familial piety. He could
remember Henry Gould, an Englishman and a Costaguanero of the
second generation, chief of the Sulaco province; he had been his
personal mozo years and years ago in peace and war; had been
allowed to attend his master in prison; had, on the fatal
morning, followed the firing squad; and, peeping from behind one
of the cypresses growing along the wall of the Franciscan
Convent, had seen, with his eyes starting out of his head, Don
Enrique throw up his hands and fall with his face in the dust.
Charles Gould noted particularly the big patriarchal head of that
witness in the rear of the other servants. But he was surprised
to see a shrivelled old hag or two, of whose existence within the
walls of his house he had not been aware. They must have been the
mothers, or even the grandmothers of some of his people. There
were a few children, too, more or less naked, crying and clinging
to the legs of their elders. He had never before noticed any sign
of a child in his patio. Even Leonarda, the camerista, came in a
fright, pushing through, with her spoiled, pouting face of a
favourite maid, leading the Viola girls by the hand. The crockery
rattled on table and sideboard, and the whole house seemed to
sway in the deafening wave of sound. _
Read next: PART THIRD - THE LIGHTHOUSE: CHAPTER V
Read previous: PART THIRD - THE LIGHTHOUSE: CHAPTER III
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