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 nine-tenths 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.
Leonarda 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.