Mrs. Gould was too intelligently sympathetic not to share that feeling.
It made life exciting, and she was too much of a woman not to like
excitement. But it frightened her, too, a little; and when Don Jose
Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go so far as to say,
“Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed; even if some untoward event
were yet to destroy your work--which God forbid!--you would have
deserved well of your country,” Mrs. Gould would look up from the
tea-table profoundly at her unmoved husband stirring the spoon in the
cup as though he had not heard a word.
Not that Don Jose anticipated anything of the sort. He could not praise
enough dear Carlos’s tact and courage. His English, rock-like quality
of character was his best safeguard, Don Jose affirmed; and, turning to
Mrs. Gould, “As to you, Emilia, my soul”--he would address her with the
familiarity of his age and old friendship--“you are as true a patriot as
though you had been born in our midst.”
This might have been less or more than the truth. Mrs. Gould,
accompanying her husband all over the province in the search for labour,
had seen the land with a deeper glance than a trueborn Costaguanera
could have done. In her travel-worn riding habit, her face powdered
white like a plaster cast, with a further protection of a small silk
mask during the heat of the day, she rode on a well-shaped, light-footed
pony in the centre of a little cavalcade. Two mozos de campo,
picturesque in great hats, with spurred bare heels, in white embroidered
calzoneras, leather jackets and striped ponchos, rode ahead with
carbines across their shoulders, swaying in unison to the pace of the
horses. A tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of a thin
brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very near the tail, legs
thrust far forward, the wide brim of his hat set far back, making a sort
of halo for his head. An old Costaguana officer, a retired senior major
of humble origin, but patronized by the first families on account of
his Blanco opinions, had been recommended by Don Jose for commissary and
organizer of that expedition. The points of his grey moustache hung far
below his chin, and, riding on Mrs. Gould’s left hand, he looked about
with kindly eyes, pointing out the features of the country, telling the
names of the little pueblos and of the estates, of the smooth-walled
haciendas like long fortresses crowning the knolls above the level of
the Sulaco Valley. It unrolled itself, with green young crops, plains,
woodland, and gleams of water, park-like, from the blue vapour of the
distant sierra to an immense quivering horizon of grass and sky, where
big white clouds seemed to fall slowly into the darkness of their own
shadows.
Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen, small on a boundless
expanse, as if attacking immensity itself. The mounted figures of
vaqueros galloped in the distance, and the great herds fed with all
their horned heads one way, in one single wavering line as far as eye
could reach across the broad potreros. A spreading cotton-wool tree
shaded a thatched ranche by the road; the trudging files of burdened
Indians taking off their hats, would lift sad, mute eyes to the
cavalcade raising the dust of the crumbling camino real made by the
hands of their enslaved forefathers. And Mrs. Gould, with each day’s
journey, seemed to come nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous
disclosure of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer
of the coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain and people,
suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic immobility of
patience.
She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with a sort of
slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting long, blind walls and
heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures. She was given the head of the
tables, where masters and dependants sat in a simple and patriarchal
state. The ladies of the house would talk softly in the moonlight under
the orange trees of the courtyards, impressing upon her the sweetness
of their voices and the something mysterious in the quietude of their
lives. In the morning the gentlemen, well mounted in braided sombreros
and embroidered riding suits, with much silver on the trappings of
their horses, would ride forth to escort the departing guests before
committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of God at the
boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households she
could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined,
imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously
executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the
country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let
loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases.
And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law,
without security, and without justice.
She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that power
of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there in some
quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of possession by
a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old Costaguana major--after
much display of solicitude for the delicate lady, had ended by
conferring upon her the name of the “Never-tired Senora.” Mrs. Gould
was indeed becoming a Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a
knowledge of true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth
of the people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures upon
the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white clothing
flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered the villages by
some group of Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her memory,
by the face of some young Indian girl with a melancholy and sensual
profile, raising an earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a
dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid
wooden wheels of an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed
the strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man’s load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept
stretched in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the conquerors
proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the tribute-labour of vanished
nations. The power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of
some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the low mud walls of a
village, Don Pepe would interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--
“Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres, nothing for
the people; and now it is everything for those great politicos in Sta.
Marta, for negroes and thieves.”
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the
principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the estates. The
commandantes of the districts offered him escorts--for he could show an
authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day. How much the
document had cost him in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between
himself, a great man in the United States (who condescended to answer
the Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort,
with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the Palace
of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and
Europeanism generally in a rather French style because he had lived in
Europe for some years--in exile, he said. However, it was pretty well
known that just before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all
the cash in the Custom House of a small port where a friend in power had
procured for him the post of subcollector. That youthful indiscretion
had, amongst other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living for a
time as a cafe waiter in Madrid; but his talents must have been great,
after all, since they had enabled him to retrieve his political
fortunes so splendidly. Charles Gould, exposing his business with an
imperturbable steadiness, called him Excellency.
The provincial Excellency assumed a weary superiority, tilting his chair
far back near an open window in the true Costaguana manner. The military
band happened to be braying operatic selections on the plaza just then,
and twice he raised his hand imperatively for silence in order to listen
to a favourite passage.
“Exquisite, delicious!” he murmured; while Charles Gould waited,
standing by with inscrutable patience. “Lucia, Lucia di Lammermoor! I am
passionate for music. It transports me. Ha! the divine--ha!--Mozart. Si!
divine . . . What is it you were saying?”
Of course, rumours had reached him already of the newcomer’s intentions.
Besides, he had received an official warning from Sta. Marta. His manner
was intended simply to conceal his curiosity and impress his visitor.
But after he had locked up something valuable in the drawer of a large
writing-desk in a distant part of the room, he became very affable, and
walked back to his chair smartly.
“If you intend to build villages and assemble a population near the
mine, you shall require a decree of the Minister of the Interior for
that,” he suggested in a business-like manner.
“I have already sent a memorial,” said Charles Gould, steadily, “and I
reckon now confidently upon your Excellency’s favourable conclusions.”
The Excellency was a man of many moods. With the receipt of the money
a great mellowness had descended upon his simple soul. Unexpectedly he
fetched a deep sigh.
“Ah, Don Carlos! What we want is advanced men like you in the province.
The lethargy--the lethargy of these aristocrats! The want of public
spirit! The absence of all enterprise! I, with my profound studies in
Europe, you understand--”
With one hand thrust into his swelling bosom, he rose and fell on
his toes, and for ten minutes, almost without drawing breath, went on
hurling himself intellectually to the assault of Charles Gould’s polite
silence; and when, stopping abruptly, he fell back into his chair,
it was as though he had been beaten off from a fortress. To save his
dignity he hastened to dismiss this silent man with a solemn
inclination of the head and the words, pronounced with moody, fatigued
condescension--
“You may depend upon my enlightened goodwill as long as your conduct as
a good citizen deserves it.”
He took up a paper fan and began to cool himself with a consequential
air, while Charles Gould bowed and withdrew. Then he dropped the fan
at once, and stared with an appearance of wonder and perplexity at the
closed door for quite a long time. At last he shrugged his shoulders as
if to assure himself of his disdain. Cold, dull. No intellectuality. Red
hair. A true Englishman. He despised him.
His face darkened. What meant this unimpressed and frigid behaviour? He
was the first of the successive politicians sent out from the capital
to rule the Occidental Province whom the manner of Charles Gould in
official intercourse was to strike as offensively independent.
Charles Gould assumed that if the appearance of listening to deplorable
balderdash must form part of the price he had to pay for being left
unmolested, the obligation of uttering balderdash personally was by
no means included in the bargain. He drew the line there. To these
provincial autocrats, before whom the peaceable population of
all classes had been accustomed to tremble, the reserve of that
English-looking engineer caused an uneasiness which swung to and fro
between cringing and truculence. Gradually all of them discovered that,
no matter what party was in power, that man remained in most effective
touch with the higher authorities in Sta. Marta.
This was a fact, and it accounted perfectly for the Goulds being by
no means so wealthy as the engineer-in-chief on the new railway could
legitimately suppose. Following the advice of Don Jose Avellanos,
who was a man of good counsel (though rendered timid by his horrible
experiences of Guzman Bento’s time), Charles Gould had kept clear of the
capital; but in the current gossip of the foreign residents there he
was known (with a good deal of seriousness underlying the irony) by the
nickname of “King of Sulaco.” An advocate of the Costaguana Bar, a
man of reputed ability and good character, member of the distinguished
Moraga family possessing extensive estates in the Sulaco Valley, was
pointed out to strangers, with a shade of mystery and respect, as
the agent of the San Tome mine--“political, you know.” He was tall,
black-whiskered, and discreet. It was known that he had easy access to
ministers, and that the numerous Costaguana generals were always anxious
to dine at his house. Presidents granted him audience with facility. He
corresponded actively with his maternal uncle, Don Jose Avellanos;
but his letters--unless those expressing formally his dutiful
affection--were seldom entrusted to the Costaguana Post Office. There
the envelopes are opened, indiscriminately, with the frankness of a
brazen and childish impudence characteristic of some Spanish-American
Governments. But it must be noted that at about the time of the
re-opening of the San Tome mine the muleteer who had been employed by
Charles Gould in his preliminary travels on the Campo added his small
train of animals to the thin stream of traffic carried over the mountain
passes between the Sta. Marta upland and the Valley of Sulaco. There
are no travellers by that arduous and unsafe route unless under very
exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland trade did not visibly
require additional transport facilities; but the man seemed to find his
account in it. A few packages were always found for him whenever he
took the road. Very brown and wooden, in goatskin breeches with the
hair outside, he sat near the tail of his own smart mule, his great hat
turned against the sun, an expression of blissful vacancy on his long
face, humming day after day a love-song in a plaintive key, or, without
a change of expression, letting out a yell at his small tropilla in
front. A round little guitar hung high up on his back; and there was a
place scooped out artistically in the wood of one of his pack-saddles
where a tightly rolled piece of paper could be slipped in, the wooden
plug replaced, and the coarse canvas nailed on again. When in Sulaco
it was his practice to smoke and doze all day long (as though he had
no care in the world) on a stone bench outside the doorway of the Casa
Gould and facing the windows of the Avellanos house. Years and years
ago his mother had been chief laundry-woman in that family--very
accomplished in the matter of clear-starching. He himself had been
born on one of their haciendas. His name was Bonifacio, and Don Jose,
crossing the street about five o’clock to call on Dona Emilia, always
acknowledged his humble salute by some movement of hand or head. The
porters of both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of grave
intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and to calls in a spirit
of generous festivity upon the peyne d’oro girls in the more remote
side-streets of the town. But he, too, was a discreet man.