O D T A A
I
Santa Barbara, being the most leeward of the Sugar States, is at the
angle of the Continent, with two coasts, one facing north, the other
east. The city of Santa Barbara is in a bay at the angle where these two
coasts trend from each other.
Those who will look at the map of the State will see that it contains,
in all, ten provinces: three eastern, four central, three western, each
of which must be briefly described. The visitor sees the land as
low-lying coast, growing sugar, with immense ranges of scrub, wild land
and pasture behind the sugar country, then foothills above and behind
the ranges, and behind the foothills, as the southern boundary of the
State, the Sierras of the Three Kings, all forest to the snowline.
The easternmost province of the State is that of Santa Barbara, which
contains the capital city. This, Meruel and Redemption, are the three
eastern provinces.
Meruel, to the south of Santa Barbara, has a more temperate climate than
the western provinces, owing to the cold Southern Drift which follows
the prevalent southerly along the coast. Meruel, the capital of the
province, stands on a rise of iron outcrop which gives the earth a
reddish look. The people of Santa Barbara nicknamed the Meruel land “the
Red Country” and the Meruel people “the Reds.”
Redemption, the coal country, lies to the south and west of Meruel. It
was formerly a small independent Republic. It was seized by Santa
Barbara in 1865, in the war of aggression known as the Redemption War,
when a young man, Lopez Zubiaga, the son of a Meruel landowner, “wedded”
(as they put it) “the Meruel iron to the Redemption coal.”
The four central provinces are Pituba, near the sea, San Jacinto, in the
heart of the State, and the two mountain masses, Gaspar and Melchior.
Pituba, once the home of the warlike Carib race, the Pitubas, is now one
of the richest sugar countries in the world. It stretches along the
northern coast for nearly two hundred miles, no mile of which is without
its plantation, either of sugar or of coffee.
San Jacinto, which lies to the south of Pituba, is the most barren of
the provinces; most of it is of that poor soil known as scrubs or burnt
land: it is mainly thorny waste, with patches of pasture. In spite of
its barrenness, it is most beautiful, because of its expanses. Its chief
town, the Mission city of San Jacinto, stands on a peninsula rock above
the river of San Jacinto, which rises in the Sierras and comes down in
force there, in a raddled and dangerous stream (now controlled so as to
be navigable).
Gaspar and Melchior, to the south of San Jacinto, are vast, wild,
forested mountain masses.
The three western provinces are Baltazar, Encinitas and Matoche.
Baltazar, to the south, is a mountain mass, forested to the snowline: it
is part of the Sierra, like Gaspar and Melchior.
Encinitas, to the north of Baltazar, lies between the San Jacinto River
and the Western Bay. Of all the provinces, Encinitas is the most
delightful to an English mind. It is mainly an expanse of grass,
marvellous to see. It rises from the river into a range of downs or
gentle hills, called the Encarnacion Hills, which are crowned with a
little walled town, called Encinitas, because the Conquistador, who
founded it, came from the village of that name in Spain.
To the north of Encinitas there is a narrow, hilly strip which thrusts
out a snout into the ocean. The strip is the western province of
Matoche: the snout is the northernmost point of the State, Cape
Caliente. The copper found in the hills is smelted and exported at Port
Matoche, on the western coast of the snout, in the deep water at the
mouth of the Western Bay, the State’s western boundary.
The bay is a deep, dangerous expanse dotted with volcanic islets.
At the time of this story, and for many years afterwards, only seven of
the ten provinces ranked as inhabited. The mass of the Sierras, forest
to the snowline, were hardly visited by white men: the three forest
provinces of Gaspar, Melchior and Baltazar had not been explored.
Seasonal rains made the forest unendurable from November until April:
the forest fever, to which the Indians burnt copal in copper bowls, was
fatal to man and beast from April till November.
* * * * *
At the time of the Spanish Conquest the lowlands were inhabited by small
warlike tribes of Caribs who lived in stockaded settlements near the
coasts. Of these tribes, the Araguayas, of Meruel, and the Pitubas, of
Pituba, were the most important. When the Spaniards landed, Don Manuel
of Encinitas, the Conquistador of the State, allied himself to the
Pitubas by marrying the daughter of their chief. With the help of his
allies he exterminated the Araguayas and drove the survivors of all
other tribes into the forests of the south, where a few of their
descendants still exist, as forest-Indians; that is, as the shadows of
what they were.
After the conquest, vast tracks of land in Encinitas were granted to Don
Manuel: other tracts in San Jacinto were granted to a Castilian noble,
from whom they passed to a branch of the de Leyvas.
The colony or province of Santa Barbara was administered like all other
Spanish possessions in the New World for a little more than three
centuries. Jesuit missionaries converted the Indians; the owners of
haciendas imported negroes. In the course of the three centuries the
northward provinces became sparsely inhabited by horse and cattle
breeders, sugar-growers, rum-makers and copper-miners, governed (if it
can be called government) by a Viceroy in Santa Barbara city.
In the year 1817, the inhabitants, following the example of other
Spanish colonists, broke the link with Spain, by declaring the land to
be the Republic of Santa Barbara, with a Constitution partly modelled
upon that of the United States. At the time of the foundation of the
Republic the State contained, perhaps, one hundred thousand souls, of
whom not more than one-third were white.
It happened that a retired English naval lieutenant named William
Higgs-Rixon took a prominent part in the capture of Santa Barbara from
the Spanish garrison. For this reason, and from the fact that English
merchants were the only traders to and from the country, English was
taught in the schools, and English people were (as they still are)
popular throughout the State. After the War of Independence a good many
Englishmen came (and were welcomed) as settlers in the land about Santa
Barbara city. In the ’fifties and ’sixties the copper boom brought
others, mostly Cornishmen, to Matoche. After the Redemption War a good
many more (mostly from the northern Midlands) came to Meruel, to mine
iron or coal. In the ’seventies others, from all parts of England,
settled as sugar-planters along the northern sea coast in the Pituba
country. These men, though they were but a sprinkling, helped profound
changes in the land, which in three generations of men multiplied the
population tenfold.
It is well, now, to talk of these changes.
Soon after the establishment of the Republic the two political parties
in the land became defined as Feudalist and Modernist. In Encinitas and
in western San Jacinto, the will of the great landowners was still law:
in Santa Barbara City, Pituba and in Meruel a new and vigorous race was
demanding freedom from the feudal lords and wider teaching than the
priests gave. As the feeling between the two parties ran highest upon
the point of Church teaching, the Church party, which was that of the
great landlords, came to be known as the Surplices or Whites. For a
while, as the Reds were without a leader, the governments of the
Republic were White.
Mention was made of one Lopez Zubiaga, who seized the coal country of
Redemption in 1865. This Lopez, born in 1840, was the first leader of
the Red or forward party to count in affairs. At the time of the
Redemption raid, he was a tall, strongly built, masterful and very
handsome young man, with a contemptuous manner and savage courage. He
was fair-haired and blue-eyed, which made some think that he was not the
son of the landowner, but of an Englishman, named variously Corbet,
Corphitt or Cardiff, about whom there had been talk.
After his success in seizing Redemption, Lopez was elected President of
the Republic in place of old General Chavez, the White. As President he
rallied the Reds, and carried through what was called “the Liberal
Struggle,” which made all Meruel and Redemption places of mines and
factories, and took the schools from the control of the Church. After
four years of his Presidency, the Whites returned to office, under the
hidalgo, Miguel de Leyva, of San Jacinto, a man of burning faith, more
ardent than wise, who provoked the forward party almost to the point of
civil war. At the next election, the Whites were turned out of office
and the Reds put in, with such unanimity that Lopez could rule as he
chose. After the election of 1878, which repeated his triumph, Lopez
declared himself Dictator, “while his country had need of him.”
Miguel de Leyva, disgusted, retired from politics: the Whites had no
other leader, save young General Luis Chavez, who was indolent, and
Hermengildo Bazan, who was only a speaker.
The Dictatorship of Lopez was marked outwardly by a great increase in
the foreign trade of the eastern provinces, the threefold growth of the
city of Santa Barbara, and an improvement of all the ports, harbours and
coastwise railways. After 1884, those who studied the land’s politics
felt that the real Dictator was no longer Lopez, but old Mordred
Weycock, the manager of the United Sugar Company, an unscrupulous
business man.
It was at this time that the oddness and brusqueness in Lopez’ character
changed to a madness not likely to be forgotten.
* * * * *
The madness began to show itself in a passion for building big and
costly public works. He rebuilt the cathedral (a Colonial Renaissance
building) on the lines of the temple at Hloatl. He built himself a
palace of glass, having heard, though wrongly, that the Queen of England
lived in one. He then built himself a summerhouse, roofed with silver
plates, and added to it an ivory room inlaid with gold. Being a Red, he
caused all the bread used in his palace to be coloured red. He
frequented shambles in order to see, as he said, “the divine colour.”
He had two favourites. Livio and Zarzas; two negro servants, Green
Feather and the Knife; and one son, the child of his youth, Don José,
born in 1860, a depraved youth of sickly beauty, who headed a clique of
vicious lads at the court.
Late in the year 1886, the Dictator’s madness began to take other forms,
of hatred and suspicion of the Whites, fear of assassination, and the
belief that he was god. All these obsessions were fostered by Mordred
Weycock, who contrived to win, from each of them, advantages for himself
or his firm.
In all his schemes, Mordred was helped by his nephew, Roger Weycock,
twenty-seven years of age, who had been in Santa Barbara since 1883,
after having failed for the Diplomatic Service. Roger was a tall,
polite, brown-haired, fair-bearded man, with a pleasant manner and a
pale, inscrutable face. He was the channel through which Englishmen knew
Santa Barbara. It was through his able weekly letters to the English
press that English opinion was in favour of Lopez for so long. He knew
Lopez to be mad; but the Red party favoured his firm and he had no pity
for the Whites: old Miguel de Leyva had once kept him waiting in the
hall, and had then brushed by to lunch.
Miguel de Leyva was now dead, leaving many children, including his
youngest, the girl Carlotta, born in 1868, who even in infancy impressed
people as a creature from another world. She comes into this story (as
into many others) as a rare thing, whose passing made all things not
quite the same. She was of a delicate, exquisite, unearthly charm, which
swayed men, women and children: the Indians of San Jacinto used to kneel
as she passed: some have said that animals and birds would come to her:
at the least she had a beauty and grace not usual.
* * * * *
Nearly all the province of Encinitas was owned by the last descendant of
the Conquistador, Don Manuel of Encinitas, who lived at his palace in
his town, or in his hacienda below it, with his old mother, whom they
called the Queen Dowager.
Don Manuel was born in 1857. He has been so often described, that it
need only be said of him that he was a very glorious young man, noble in
beauty and in intellect. In the days of this story he was an unmarried
man of not quite thirty. In his youth, before his father died, he had
had his wild time in the city with other young men. He had been a friend
of Don José, Don Lopez’ son, and had practised black magic with Rafael
Hirsch. All this ceased when his father died in 1879. Since then he had
lived at Encarnacion, breeding horses, for the men of his State, who are
among the great horsemen of the world. He took his stature, beauty and
masterful fierce eyes from his mother, the Queen Dowager, who had been a
Peralta from Matoche.
In October, 1886, Don Manuel met Carlotta de Leyva for the first time:
they became betrothed that same month, to the great joy of the Queen
Dowager, who had longed to see her son married.
Miguel de Leyva had a sister Emilia, who married a Piranha of Santa
Barbara city, and lived there, after her husband’s death, in a house too
big for her fortune. She had been much in England with her husband,
either for pleasure or the marketing of copper. She spoke English well.
She caused her daughter Rosa, who had been for some years a convent
friend of her cousin Carlotta, to spend a year in an English household.
Rosa returned to Santa Barbara from England some months before this tale
begins.
Rosa Piranha was then nearly twenty, being a few months older than
Carlotta. She was slight in build and not very strong, but had a mannish
spirit, with courage and dash enough for anything. She had no looks: she
was very short-sighted: she always wore tinted spectacles, even when
indoors. Yet she was amusing, and very attractive: several Englishmen
proposed to her during her stay in England; but she would not marry into
their Church.
She was brown-haired, not dark like most of her country women. In
herself she had that mixture of boyish cheek with feminine grace which
one loves in Viola, in “Twelfth Night.”
On New Year’s Day, 1887, Carlotta and Manuel planned to be married at
Easter, in the cathedral church of Santa Barbara.
On that same New Year’s Day, Don Lopez, the Dictator, in his palace of
Plaza Verde, in Santa Barbara city, gave a lunch to some of the great of
the State, the Red ministers, his son Don José, his creatures Don Livio
and Don Zarzas, some merchants and English speculators and the
Archbishop of Santa Barbara. At this lunch he publicly accused the
prelate of using the power of the Church against the Red party. “I have
my eyes everywhere, like the Almighty,” he said. “Nor can there be two
supreme authorities, here or in heaven.”
To this the Archbishop replied: “There is but one supreme authority:
Lucifer has always found that.”
To this Don Lopez answered: “A greater than Lucifer prepares his wings.”
Having said this, in tones of threat, he rose from the banquet, told
Pluma Verde to call the prelate’s carriage, and invited his other guests
to come within, to watch some dancers.
Roger Weycock, who was present at this lunch, has left an account of it
in his history, _The Last of the Dictators_, where he says that, “It
made him feel that some explosion within the State was about to occur.”
He wrote that evening to the English newspapers that Don Lopez had
received information of a White conspiracy against him: “No names were
mentioned; but all the great White families, as well as the Church, are
said to be involved. It is possible that Don Lopez will be forced to
take extreme measures, to end for ever the menace of White reprisals.
The Whites have never forgiven and never will forgive his part in ‘the
Liberal struggle’ and in the remaking of the land. The Church hates him
for his establishment of secular schools: the great landowners hate him
for his establishment of a commercial class which out-manœuvres them in
Senate and out-votes them in Congress. This must not seem to suggest
that either Church or hidalgos would go so far as to employ an assassin;
but both parties of the White side control large numbers of violent,
ignorant, passionate fanatics, to whom the killing of Lopez would be an
act pleasing to God. What Don Lopez seems to expect is a _soulèvement
générale_ of the Whites against his government at the time of the Easter
celebrations.
“Undoubtedly, with such a ruler as Don Lopez, forewarned is forearmed:
we need not doubt that he has the situation well in hand.”
As it happens, another Englishman, without any bias of party or
interest, saw Don Lopez on this New Year’s Day, and described him thus:
“I watched Don Lopez, while I was with him, very carefully, because of
the strange tales I had heard of his extravagance in building, in
cedarwood, ivory and silver, etc. I had thought that these were lies or
exaggerations, but I am now convinced that they are true. He has built
or begun to build such buildings, but not finished them: he never
finishes: he begins, then begins something grander, and then begins
something new.
“All the time that I was with him some unseen musicians made music upon
some Indian instruments, seemingly of some kind of strings and a rattle.
It was irritating at first, then perplexing, then troublesome and
exciting. I was told that he has this music always in his palace. He
listened to what I had to say with attention, and said that what I
wished should be done. Then, to my surprise, he said, ‘They are seeking
my life. One of them was behind the gateway this afternoon. See there,
you see that man passing beyond the gates? He is a murderer, paid by
those Whites to kill me. My mission here is not accomplished. It is but
begun. What did Jove do in heaven? He forged thunderbolts. He crushed
them. But Jove was all-seeing. I, too, am becoming all-seeing. This
palace may seem stone to your eyes, but it is not stone. It is all eyes,
and this city is all eyes, and I see into their hearts, into their
councils, into the pretence of their God. But a little while longer and
the world will see that a ruler can be godlike, as in Rome.’
“I was made a little uneasy by his words and by the restless, queer
manner in which he uttered them. I had seen him some years before, when
I had been much struck by his air of overbearing masterfulness. That air
was still on him. He looked masterful and overbearing, but there was
something about him now which did not look well. His hair seemed thin
and somewhat staring, his skin seemed dry and his eyes both dry and
bright. Then his mouth, which had always shown an expression between a
snarl and a sneer, seemed permanently caught up at one side, so as to
show the teeth. Possibly it was some malformation, possibly some play of
muscle, which had become habitual or fixed, but it gave the effect of a
state of nerves, never (as I should imagine) quite human, that had
become those of a tiger about to bite. I was suddenly reminded of one of
the late busts of Nero.
“Seeing me looking through the window at the marble tank surrounding the
palace fountain, he said to me, ‘What colour is the water in the
fountain?’
“‘It looks whiteish.’
“‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or
I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall
come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God
shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am
as patient as God. But tell them that.’
“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his
throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People
mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son,
Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a
languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite
features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He
turned to me as his father ceased speaking.
“‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’
“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians
entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold
chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested
dill-birds.
“‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the
father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let
them see to it.’
“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent
beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped
him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his
horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed
with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop.
They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which
had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had
gone.
“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the
White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too:
you see.’”
Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story.
In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good
deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend
to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a
man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa
Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He
married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust
mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and
fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was
his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not
quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that
Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.
This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people,
the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with
a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here
Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly
devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a
horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses.
He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his
daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he
used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could
have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can
do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts
enough not to sink.”
His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would
be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her
children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her
daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the
boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life,
the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved
best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.
Bell Ridden, the daughter, was a lovely, shy girl, worshipped by her
father and mother. As she lived at home, she helped her father in the
stable: she was clever with horses; the stable boys loved her: she got
more out of them than Bill could. It was her instinct that sent the
Lilybud to Mandarin, by which Bill got Chinese White, the horse which
won him his glory.
The five older children were scattered: Polly and Sally married, Harold
in a line regiment, Chilcote and Rowton in the city, in copper.
This brings us to the youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, the Hi of
these pages, the lad who had not yet found what he could do. He was of
the middling height and build, with brown hair, and a pleasant, freckled
face, somewhat puckered at the eyes from his habit of not wearing a hat.
His eyes were grey-blue, under eyebrows darker than one would expect
from the eyes: his nose was a small pug nose, neatly made and set. His
ears were well made and placed. His mouth was wide, pleasant,
thin-lipped and firm. He was a nice-looking lad, who would have done
well enough under other parents, or with none.
Being the last of the seven, he came at a time when both his parents had
had enough of children, but wanted, as they said, “a filly to finish up
with.” As Hi turned out to be a colt, or as Bill put it, “another of
these buck pups to have about,” he was a disappointment to them from the
first.
He went to the school where the other Riddens had been, he got his
second eleven colours in his last summer term; but learned nothing; he
was “always messing about with cog-wheels.”
In the Christmas holidays Bill called him into his “study,” where he
kept two hunting horns, six long hunting-pictures by Henry Alken, seven
foxes’ masks (one of them almost white, killed in the winter of the
great frost), eleven crops on a rack, three small oil portraits of
Moonbird, Sirocco and Peter, much tobacco of all sorts, and many bottles
of liqueur, made by himself.
“Now, Highworth,” he said, “you’ve come to an age now when you’ve got to
decide what to do. You’ve had a first-rate education; at least, if you
haven’t, it’s your own fault, I know it’s cost enough. Now what are you
going to be? What do you want to do?”
“Well, sir, as you know, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”
“I’ve already gone into that, boy. I thought you knew my mind on that
point once for all. But it’s the kind of answer I expected from this
last report of yours. You waste your time at an expensive public school
messing with toy engines with that young maniac you persuaded us to
invite here, and then say you want to be an engineer. A nice thing it
would be for your mother and sister to see you a . . . mechanic doing
the drains with a spanner. By God, boy, you’ve got a fine sense of
pride, I don’t think.”
Hi said that engineering was a fine profession and that lots of people
went in for it.
“What do you know about its being a fine profession?”
“Because it gives men all sorts of power, sir.”
“Power be damned, boy. Power to stink of paraffin whenever they go out
to dinner; though that must be seldom, even now, I’m glad to think.”
“Sir James Russel was a fine man, sir; and so was William Horrocks, who
made the Gartishan Dam.”
“Sir James Russel may have been God Almighty, for all I know or care; I
never heard of him; but William Horrocks I do know, or at least know of,
for his uncle was old John Horrocks, the mealman down at Kill Hill, and
a dirtier, old, snuffy scoundrel I never saw out of an almshouse.”
“I don’t know what his uncle was, sir.”
“No, boy, but if you will let me say so, the point is, that I do.”
“Yes, sir, but I am talking of William Horrocks.”
“I think I understand as much. I am merely pointing out to you, in the
teeth of a great deal of interruption, that your hero was a man whom no
one here would touch with a barge-pole or have inside his house.”
“Sir, a man ought not to be judged by what his uncle is, but by what he
is in himself.”
“A man is judged by what his uncle is. In this country, thank God,
having respectable relations counts for a good deal, and so it should.
You’re a Ridden and a Foliat, and I’m not going to have you messing an
honoured name with wheel-grease because you’ve read some damned
subversive rag which you’ve neither the sense to drop nor the wit to
judge. There are some things which a man can do and keep his
self-respect and be asked out to dinner, but going round with a spanner
isn’t one of them.”
“I don’t ask to go round with a spanner, sir, nor to be asked out to
dinner.”
“What do you ask, then?”
“I would like to learn engineering, sir, because I’ve always enjoyed
engines and the application of power, and that sort of thing.”
“What do you call that but going round with a spanner? And how do you
propose to learn engineering?”
“I hoped, sir, that you would let me go to an engineering works.”
“Engineering works be damned.”
“I don’t see it, sir. It’s the thing I should do best.”
“Well, I do see it, sir, and it’s the thing I won’t have.”
“But why not, sir? I should work at it. I shouldn’t disgrace you.”
“Your notions of disgrace aren’t mine. Your notions of disgrace are the
sort of damned sentiment that will wreck this country and all that’s in
it.”
“I don’t see why, sir. I don’t want to argue with you, sir; but it is
important to me: what I am to do all my life.”
“It is equally important to me that my son should not make a mistaken
choice.”
“But what a man most wants to do, sir, can’t be a mistaken choice.”
“You’re not a man; but a damned young ass. That being so, and it is so,
it’s for me to decide. I’ve got to supply the money whatever you do; I
suppose you won’t deny that.”
“I was wondering, sir, whether you would advance to me Aunt Melloney’s
money, that I’m to have when I’m of age, and let me pay for myself.”
“Pay what for yourself?”
“The fees or premiums, sir, for going through the shops.”
“So that’s what the fellow meant, was it? Now I know. ‘The shops,’ he
said. There was a drunken engineer at Newmarket, who said, ‘Let the
gentleman keep clear of the shops.’ He was drunk when he said it; but
that’s what he meant; now I know; and he showed a fine sense of the
situation.”
“Would you advance me the money, sir?”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort. These engineers and fellows are a gang I
will not tolerate. They defile God’s country. They’ve already spoiled
the hunting, and the racing’s following as fast as it can go. If you’d
been a boy with any guts, instead of clockwork, you’d have been glad, I
should have thought, to have been at home here, and borne a hand in the
stable. Breeding is about the last thing this poor country’s got in
these damned days. We’ve still got horses, thank God. We don’t depend on
a traction-engine gang, doing a tenth of the work for double the money.
Why don’t you take off your coat and come into the stable? It’s a needed
job; a pleasant job; and a gentleman’s job, what’s more. What’s wrong
with that?”
“Nothing, sir; but I’m not very good at horses. Besides, you’ve got Bell
in the stables. I should only be in the way.”
“Ashamed of working with your sister, are you?”
“No, sir; but Bell wouldn’t want me there, and you’d always be swearing
at me.”
“Damme,” Bill said, “there are things in you boys that would make any
father swear. You go to a prep. school for three years, then to a public
school for five years, then you ask to be kept for another seven while
you learn a profession, and by God, when you’ve learnt it, you can’t
make a living at it. I’ve been talking to your mother about this, as
well as to Rosa Piranha before she sailed. You’ll not go back to school,
that I’m resolved on, after this last report. You’ll stay here a week or
two to get some clothes, and then you’ll do what I did. You’ll go to
Santa Barbara and see if you can keep your head above water by your own
hands. If you can, well and good. You will have letters to people; a lot
better people than I ever had; and you will have time given you to look
about you. You ought to be able to make good; I don’t say in copper,
that is over, but in a new land there are new things and new
opportunities. There are always sugar, tobacco and ranching; there
should be timber, cocoa, piacaba, countless things. As I said, you ought
to be able to make good. If you can’t, it will be your own lookout.
You’ve got to paddle your own canoe, like any other youngest son. Now
I’m not going to have any argument about the superior beauties of
cog-wheels. I’ve written to people and written about your ticket. Since
you won’t work in the stable here and have no choice of your own, except
a damned dirty falallery which I won’t have, you’ll go to Santa Barbara.
You may count yourself more than lucky to have the chance. Very few
youngest sons ever get into the sun at all, but stink in a rotten town,
by God, where even the horses puke at the air they breathe.
“You turn up your nose, do you? I wish I was going to Santa Barbara to
have my time again. You can turn up your nose as much as you like, but
that’s what you’ll do, so make up your mind to it. When you’ve seen the
place you’ll thank me for having sent you there. When you’ve been there
a few days you’ll thank your stars for your luck.”
Hi did not answer his father, knowing that thumbs were down. His heart
sank at the thought of the foreign country, yet leaped again at the
thought of liberty from school and life beginning. He had still one
little ray of hope, which his mother extinguished.
“Your father’s got his back up,” she said. “Between you and me, Hi, he
has had a bad year. Newmarket was nearly a finisher. So be a good old
sport and go; there’s a dear. There’s far more scope there than here;
everybody says so. Besides, your Aunt Melloney’s money went into
Hicks’s. I don’t know that you could get it out, even if your father
agreed.”
* * * * * * *
There was a brief delay, in spite of Bill’s speed, because the first
letter from Rosa Piranha brought the news that Santa Barbara politics
were somewhat unsettled. Bill had to pause to make some enquiries,
through his sons in the copper business and his friends in the United
Sugar Company. “It’s probably nothing much,” he said, when he had heard
the reports. “These Reds and Whites are always at each other, in the way
these foreigners always are. It won’t concern the boy, if he’s got the
sense to keep out of it. Let him go and learn sense in the only school
for it.” After this, there was a second brief delay for farewell visits
to relations. When Hi returned from these, his clothes, of drill and
flannel, were ready in their ant-proof tin trunks. Towards the end of
February, he sailed for Santa Barbara city in the _Recalde_.
During the week in which he left home, Don José, the son of the
Dictator, caused his favourite, Lucas Zanja, to be beheaded in the ivory
room, “so that he might enjoy,” as he said, “the beauty of the blood
upon the ivory.” Don Lopez’ papers called this a
DASTARDLY ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE
OUR PRESIDENT’S SON
and added in smaller type
ASSASSIN PERISHES IN THE ATTEMPT.
The Whites did nothing. Zanja was infamous, even for a Red of the palace
set.
II
Hi had planned to learn “enough Spanish to rub along with” on the voyage
out, but fate disposed of this plan. He was seasick till after Lisbon;
then they started cricket; then, by chance, he met the third engineer,
who was as fond of cog-wheels as himself. After this, he passed most of
his time either in the third engineer’s cabin or in the engine-room. He
learned no Spanish whatever. “You’ll not need it,” the third engineer
said, “they’re very intelligent people: they’ll make out what you want.”
Ten mornings later Hi was roused from sleep by his cabin steward.
“The dawn is just breaking, Mr. Ridden,” he said. “We are just entering
the outer harbour now.”
Hi turned out on deck in his pyjamas; he saw before him the promised
land of Santa Barbara about which he had thought so much. It was still
dim, close in shore. A big light was near at hand to his right; a small
revolving light blinked far away to the left. In between, in the arc of
the bay, were the lights of the city and of the ships at anchor. The
city itself was little more than a smudge against a darkness. Far beyond
the city, in a line like an army, were the high Sierras of the Three
Kings. Their peaks rose up out of the clouds like mountains in another
world. As they were now catching the dawn they seemed made of jewels.
Mount Gaspar was golden. Mount Baltazar was like a bubble of blood, and
Mount Melchior a blue and evil finger glistening. As Hi watched, amazed
by the beauty of the scene, colour began to come upon the bay. He saw
away to his left an enormous expanse of shallow water, over which
strange birds, such as he had never seen, were now passing from their
night ashore.
“You see those birds?” said the fourth officer of the _Recalde_ beside
him. “They’re bobacherry birds. You always see them working their lower
jaws as though to get the cherry in. It’s a pretty place, Santa Barb, of
a morning like this.”
He passed away to get the watch to the washing of the decks; Hi remained
staring at the shore.
“I had never thought that it was to be like this,” he thought. “It’s
like an earthly paradise. I might have been stewing in London like
Rowton; or being frozen up six months of the year in British Columbia. I
shall be as happy here as the day is long.”
As the _Recalde_ passed the dead-slow limit Hi saw some lighters bearing
down upon her from both sides, urged by the sweeps of such men as he had
never seen nor dreamed of. They were wild-looking men of enormous
stature. All were almost naked; all shone as though the life in them
made them radiant. All were of a rich red-golden colour like new
pennies. Even the smallest of them looked a match for two strong
Europeans. Even the most benign of them looked like the devil he was and
the cannibal he could be. All wore gold, ivory or copper placques,
shaped like new moons, which hung from their noses and covered their
mouths. They looked curiously like the lids of letter-boxes.
“See those fellows, Mr. Ridden?” said the captain on the bridge.
“They’re Pitubas from up-country and they’re cannibals to a man. You’d
better put a coat over those pyjamas of yours, or the sight of you may
be more than they can stand. They like their meat white, and they like
it young.”
Some of the lighters swept alongside and made fast, the winches at once
began at all three hatches; baggage and mails were hove out before the
_Recalde_ reached her moorings. At breakfast the tables were covered
with flowers and fruits, of kinds new to Hi. Clinging to the flowers
were insects, coloured like jewels, shaped like sticks, or leaves or
blades of grass.
“This is your first taste of the new world, Mr. Ridden,” said the
captain, “what d’you think of it?”
“I think it’s amazing, sir,” Hi said.
“Well, it’s all that,” said the captain, “but after a few years of it,
you’ll curse these blue skies and give a year’s pay to be able to see
your breath.”
“I don’t think I shall ever tire of this, sir,” Hi said. “It’s the kind
of place I have dreamed of all my life.”
“Pretty scenery,” the captain said. “But give me Sefton Park.”
* * * * * * *
After breakfast, Hi was rowed ashore from the _Recalde_, to begin his
new life. He saw the _Recalde_, which linked him with home (for his
mother had walked her deck and leaned over her rail), now drop away into
the past. In front of him was a new world, to which he had at present
three keys, his friendship with the Piranhas, a letter to Mr. Roger
Weycock of the Sugar Company, and a letter to Mr. Allan Winter, a
sugar-planter (not far from the city) whom Bill had known in the past.
These were his keys, but his father had told him not to trust to them.
“The thing you’ve got to trust to, and the only thing, is just you
yourself. That’s the only key that will open doors to a man, of any kind
worth getting open.”
With some distrust of this key and some anxiety about his boatman’s
fare, he drew near to the landing stairs, where pirates of five colours,
in turbans and kerchiefs of every colour, showed their teeth at him and
offered him all things, from brothels to the new cathedral. As the boat
sidled up to the steps, he heard his name shouted: “Mr. Highworth. Mr.
Ridden. Mr. Highworth.” He caught sight of a little man diving down the
stairs at him and crying, “Dammy, dammy, dammy, I’ll get drunk
to-night.”
“O, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Highworth, Mr. Ridden,” he cried. “Don’t ’ee know
me? I knew you, sir; the minute I seen ’ee.” Here he turned on the other
pirates who were laying hold of Hi’s baggage. “Get out of this,” he
said, in the seaport language made up of the oaths of all civilised
lands. “Get out of this, heekoes de pooters. I take all the Señor’s
gear. Don’t ’ee know me, Mr. Highworth? I know thee, soon’s I seen ’ee.”
He was weeping like a child and sucking his tears into his mouth with
twitches of his face: he had all Hi’s baggage in his hands. “Pay the
boatman, sir,” he said. “One of the big ones and a small one. This sort
is sharks. You’d ought to have took a licensed boat, which would have
been only one peseta.” He led the way up the stairs and shoved through
the crowd on the Mole. “O, dammy, dammy,” he kept saying, “I’ll break
into my burial money, but I’ll get drunk to-night.” He was dressed in an
old pair of English riding breeches, a black velvet coat, much too tight
at the shoulders and elbows, a tall black sombrero, and part of a yellow
serape. Hi didn’t like the look of the man, nor his display of emotion.
“Look at me, Master Highworth,” he said. “Don’t ’ee know me?”
“No, I don’t,” Hi said. “Who are you?”
“Don’t ’ee know ’Zekiel Rust?” the man said. “I did use to beat for
Squire William Ridden, many’s the time, till I had to run for it. I
knowed you and your father and Mr. Rowton and Miss Mary. But you were
young, Mr. Highworth. You might never have heard tell. They may have
kept it from you, the deed of gore I done. I’m not an ordinary man, you
understand. I had to run for it; I’m Rust, the murderer. It was I killed
old Keeper Jackson. I’d a-been hung, if they’d a-took me. Now you
remember me? You remember how I killed Keeper Jackson?”
“Good Lord,” Hi said. “Yes; now I remember. And you have been here ever
since.”
“Dammy, dammy, bless you for remembering,” the man said. “Now, but
Master Highworth, I don’t want to presume; but I’ve been all these
years, seven years now, in this unchristian land, and I never see a word
of anyone come from the old part. Anyhow I’ll see to thy baggage, Master
Ridden. Now you want to go to a good hotel. The Santiago is the one for
you. I’ll see you to there, Master Highworth, and I’ll look after you,
and don’t you turn from me, Master Highworth, for anyone would have
killed Keeper Jackson, the way he spoke.
“I was out on a moony night, and I’ll tell ’ee just where I were. I were
up there by the valley, where the water comes out; and it wasn’t murder
really. I’d gone out with my old pin-fire. It was a lovely moony night,
and I got a hare. Well then, a hare’s a rebel, ain’t he, and game? So I
got a hare and put ’un in my pocket and I was going on away along up,
when I see another hare. He was on a bank just above the road. So ‘I’ll
have ’ee, my master,’ I says, and I up after him and I give him my
pin-fire and he went over the bank, and I went over the bank; and he
wasn’t a hare, not really, he was a fox. I see him when I got up the
bank. And there was Keeper Jackson and he says, ‘I’ve got you, my man,’
he says, ‘you best come quiet.’ And I says, ‘That wasn’t a hare,’ I
says, ‘that was a fox, and a fox is a rebel and he isn’t game.’ And he
says, ‘You come quiet. I’ve had my eye on you a long time,’ he says, and
he lets fly at me with his gun. And one of the pellets went through my
gaiters, and so I give him pin-fire. And when I see I killed him, I go
along up the downs and there I come upon a man driving sheep. I put old
pin-fire in a ditch and cover him over. I goes along with the man
driving the sheep, until we come to Salisbury. But I’ll tell you all
about that. We’ll go along to the Santiago.”
Hi remembered the man very well now as a poacher, who did odd jobs for
Squire Bill in the dog-breaking and ferret business. It was perfectly
true that he had murdered Keeper Jackson and had been searched and
advertised for as a murderer, but had escaped.
Hi had been only ten at the time; but the thing had made a stir in that
quiet place.
By this time Ezekiel had hailed a carriage, partly by signs and partly
by noises, which the signs explained. For a moment he showed Hi plainly
that he meant to run after the carriage until it reached the hotel, but
this Hi would not allow. He made him sit with him inside.
“You’re the first ever I’ve seen from anywhere near those parts, Mr.
Highworth,” Ezekiel said. “You see, after I got to Salisbury, they read
in a paper how the body was found and it was me, so I thought I’d best
not stay there, so I out of the pub, and, as I come out of the pub,
there come up thirteen policemen and they were looking for me. And they
walked straight by me and never took me. So I thought the best thing I
could do is to follow these men now they’ve passed me, so I followed
them along a bit, and then they separated, and I thought, ‘This won’t
do,’ so I went along the road a bit and there was a man driving some
cows, so I said to him, ‘I’m going along the road a bit. Shall I help
thee drive?’ So I drive them along a bit, and he said to me, ‘Where are
you going?’ And I thought, ‘Well, it won’t do to tell anybody where I’m
going,’ so I said, ‘I’ll just turn back and go into the town now.’ And
so I turned back, because I thought, ‘Well, he’ll notice me,’ and he
must have been suspicious or he wouldn’t have asked where I was going
to. And I thought, ‘Now, I’ll diddle him like I diddled the policemen.
I’ll go right across this town and out the other side. No one would
think of looking for me there.’
“Well, I went across and, as I was going across, I passed like an inn
yard, and just at that inn yard door, like a gateway, there was Black
George Rylands that used to drive Mr. Hanshaw. If I’d a-took another
step I’d a-been right into him, and so I thought, ‘Now, Ezekiel Rust,
you’re doomed. They all knows that you’re here. They’re all on the
scent.’ So then I don’t know what to do, and presently I see Black
George turn away into the inn, so then I made one dart.
“So then I got out of Salisbury, and I come up out on a place, like it
was downs, and there were some gipsy fellows there. I’d known some of
them come round with baskets, but they didn’t know me, and I asked them
which way I’d better go to get out of England, and they said they’d set
me on the road, part of the way, and so we set off next day and we come
to a town. I thought I was safe when I was with them, but, coming
through that town, my blood run cold.”
“Why?” said Hi. “Were there more police?”
“No, Mr. Ridden, there was not more police, there was soldiers—soldiers
after me, hundreds of ’em. I come into the town, and there was all they
soldiers in red coats, looking for me. But I got past ’em and I come to
a town, and there was a man wanting another man to help him take charge
of a bull. He was coming out to these parts and there was to have been
another man in charge of the bull, but the other man, if you understand
me, Mr. Ridden, he didn’t want, when the time come, to live up to his
bargain. And I didn’t want to let it be known, not at once, that I was
eager to get out of the country, because that wouldn’t have done. They’d
all have known that I was a murderer, if I let ’em think that. Naturally
that was the first thing they’d have thought. So I pretended first I was
afraid of bulls, and then I said I didn’t like to leave my old mother,
and then I said I didn’t much like these foreign parts by what I’d heard
of them. I let them think the wrong thing, you see, Mr. Highworth. But
in the end I said I’d help take the bull. So then they said they didn’t
want to run any risks, and said, ‘You’d better come on board
straightaway.’ So they took me along and we passed through a gate where
there was a lot of notices and there I read what made my blood run cold.
Now I had always been against they photographs. Often people said to me,
‘Now you stand there and let me take your picture.’ But I knew better.
‘No,’ I always used to say. My golly, Mr. Highworth, I tell ’ee, there
they’d got me all described and wrote out. ‘Wanted, for murder,
suffering from a crushed left thumbnail,’ it said. It must have been
Mrs. Thompson told them that.
“You may talk what you like, Mr. Ridden, about there not being a God,
but there is a God. And how do I know that there is a God? Because, when
I read that, there was a policeman there and I got my left thumb in my
pocket at the moment, and, if I’d not had my left thumb in my pocket at
that moment, why, he’d have seen it, wouldn’t he?
“There, that shows you whether there’s a God or not. So the other
fellows that wanted me to take the bull, they didn’t want me to be
reading there; they wanted me to come along. But it wouldn’t have done
to come along, not with that policeman there. No, because he’d have
thought at once, ‘There’s something funny,’ if I’d have gone along.
There was fifty pounds reward, too, for me.
“And the policeman says to one of the chaps that was with me, ‘Seen
anything of this chap?’ he says.
“‘No,’ they says, ‘worse luck, because we could do with fifty pounds.’
“‘Well,’ he says, ‘he’s pretty sure to be coming around here. Who’s this
you’ve got?’
“‘Why,’ they says, ‘he’s a drover coming to look after the old
Astounder, that big bull they’ve got on board.’
“‘Well, I wish him joy of his job, then,’ the policeman said, ‘for a
bull is a fair coughdrop, when he’s seasick.’
“Well then, we got on board the ship. That’ll show you whether there’s a
God or not.
“Well, I hope your troubles were at an end then,” said Hi.
“No, Mr. Highworth, they were not. And why were they not? Why, use is
second nature, as we say. Soon as I got on board that old ship, they
said the captain wanted to see me and so I thought, ‘Well, now they’ve
caught me; now what am I to do?’ Then I thought I’d better go, I might
brazen it out. And I went up to a place all shining, and there was all
the chief detectives of London town come to look for me. And the
captain, he says, ‘Now, my man, what’s your name?’ Now what would you
have answered? Use is second nature, isn’t it? So I plumped out
straightaway ‘Ezekiel Rust,’ I said. Then, directly I said that, I see
what I done. And he said, ‘Well, you put your name on that paper there.’
And then I know what to do. I said, ‘Please, sir, I can’t write.’ And so
he says, ‘Well, you must put your mark.’ And there was a man writing on
a paper and he wrote my name, only he hadn’t wrote it right. He wrote it
wrong, because he hadn’t followed what I said. He put ‘Jack Crust.’ And
so I put my mark and the detectives they looked at me and they didn’t
recognise me and I thought, ‘My boys, there’s the worth of fifty pounds
in me and I never been worth more than eleven and a penny at one time
before, and that they cheated me of, coming back from the races.’ And so
he said, ‘Now, my man, go down to that bull and mind he don’t toss you.
They call him the Wrekin’s Astounder,’ he said, ‘and he’ll astound you,
if you don’t be careful.’
“And I went down and had a look at the bull and I thought ‘This ’ere
creature will be a friend to me. They won’t come looking for me, not
down with this old Astounder.’ But they did come looking for me, and a
policeman come and they come with the captain and he says, ‘Who’ve we
got here,’ he says.
“‘Oh, that’s the prize bull and his keeper,’ they says, ‘what you read
about in the papers.’
“‘Well,’ I thought, ‘now I’m safe. There won’t be any more policemen
come along for me.’ Then the steward come down. He calls me, ‘Crust,
Crust. Where’s this man, Crust?’ he says. It make my blood run cold to
hear my name called like that. So he says, ‘Come along and get your tea,
man. Get your tea while you can eat it. We shall be gone in another hour
and you’d best have something to be sick on, if you’re going to be
sick.’
“Well, I sat down to supper with a lot of others, and be darned if one
of them didn’t say, ‘Your name Crust? You any relation of the murderer?’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘thank God.’
“And another said, ‘What murderer’s that, Bert?’
“‘Why,’ he says, ‘a man called Crust shot a gamekeeper and there’s fifty
pounds reward for him.’
“So then I saw that they suspected me and I said, ‘There’s only one way
to deal with murderers and it’s what they call the old way. They used to
get a great big tin of paraffin and they put the murderer into that and
then they boil him. Wherever that’s been tried,’ I said, ‘people know
enough not to do any more, because they know what they’ll get.’
“And then one of them said, ‘Yes, but they’re not always caught. They
know that.’
“And I said, ‘No, they’re not always caught at once, but in the end
they’re always caught.’
“Now you’d think that I’d run dare-devil escapes enough by that time.
That very evening the ship began to go and I thought, ‘Now I’m free.’
And then I wake up in the night and the ship were groaning awful. She
gave great creaking groans like right down and I thought, ‘I know how
it’s going to be. There’s going to be a storm, because it knows that I’m
on board and there’ll be a storm until they find out who it is.’ And
then some men came by with a lantern and I was in the stall, if you
understand me, next to my bull, and I lay down in the straw and they
went past. They didn’t see me. And the next morning, when I got up, I
thought, ‘I’ll see whether we’re away from England or not.’ So I went
up, and the first thing I see you could have knocked me down. There was
a lot of men-of-war’s men. Some of them was here and some of them was
there, if you understand what I mean. They made my blood run cold. ‘I
see what it is,’ I said, ‘They know I’ve come this way, but they don’t
know which I am and so they’re stopping and watching every place. My
only chance is to keep down just by the bull.’ So I went down to him and
he knew I had shot old Jackson, and he rammed at me with his great horns
and I stayed there all day. I stayed down there two weeks. Proper lot of
whiskers I grew while I was down there. At the end of that time the
captain said, ‘I’ve never had a man,’ he said, ‘look after a beast like
you’ve looked after that old bull. Now I’ll give you five pounds,’ he
said, those were his words, ‘I’ll give you five pounds,’ that’ll show
you what he thought of me, ‘if you’ll stay and take the other bulls that
we have, like you took this. He eats out of your hand just like a tame
canary.’
“So I said, ‘No, thank you, sir, I’m sure. I’d like to go with my bull.’
“So you’d think my troubles were at an end then. We come to the foreign
place where the bull was to go ashore. It wasn’t here, it was somewhere
further down from here. I heard one of the men say, ‘The police-boat’s
come alongside,’ and then my blood run cold. I thought, ‘They know that
I’m on board here, because why, they’ll have sent the description and
that. It would have gone quicker by post than we could have come.’ So I
stayed down by my bull and presently, when we got the bull ashore, there
was a policeman, at least he didn’t look like what we should call a
policeman. He stopped me, but luckily for me there was the captain there
and he knew me and he said, ‘He’s come with the bull.’ And so I went
with that bull; oh, a matter of five hundred miles, I should think. I
don’t know where we didn’t get to. I come to a very nice place. I never
see more rabbits than were in that place, though they weren’t rabbits
neither, come to think of it: I thought, ‘If I had got old pin-fire and
my two ferrets, I’d have some of you fine chaps.’
“Well, that’s seven years ago, and I’ve been up and down since, and I’m
married to one of these foreigners now. Isabella her name is. I don’t
understand what she says half the time, because she don’t talk any
Christian language. And we live in Medinas Close, Cercado as they call
it, but it means close, three floors up, number 41; where we’ve got a
room, and, if ever you want me, Mr. Highworth, it’s the middle room of
three, and there’s no job I can’t turn my hand to; or if you want an
English body-servant, it wouldn’t matter my having a wife, because I
knowed your father, Mr. Highworth, Squire William, and I know all about
this land, in case you wish to know. There’s goings on and there’s
goings on, but what I once say a white man is a white man, isn’t he? You
can’t get away from that. Isn’t he a white man? And why did the Lord
make him a white man, do you suppose? Why, so that he shouldn’t be a
black man, I suppose. Very well then, there’s fine goings on. I don’t
say a word against black men. There’s very good ones here, very cheerful
sort of people, the black men here. Only their feet—they don’t have
feet like we do. The leg-bone comes down in the middle of the boot, not
at the end, like with us. But, when you get used to that, they’re very
nice, cheerful people; they wouldn’t do you any harm. You trust the
black people and they’ll trust you. No, it’s these yellow fellows, those
are the ones, and there’s queer goings on. Now, look there, look there,
Master Highworth Foliat Ridden, there’s what I don’t like to see, those
yellows.”
At that moment the carriage had to draw to the pavement. There came a
noise of a barbaric music of rattles, drums and gongs, to which cavalry
were marching. A column in twos came slouching by the carriage. They
were led by an almost naked yellow savage who wore scarlet plumes in his
hair. The music followed him, swaying from side to side or giving little
leaps in their seats from the excitement of the rhythm. After the music
came the troop of perhaps fifty savages, carrying red pennoned lances.
They wore nothing which could be called uniform, except the metal moons
over their mouths. Some wore linen coats or drawers, some had ponchos or
serapes. They were smoking, singing and calling out to the passers-by.
“There,” Ezekiel said, “they’re the yellows. Tents of Shem, I call it.
They all got lids to their mouths. Government’s made those yellow
soldiers; and they come in, hundreds of them. Now, Government doesn’t
see them in the way we see them; they don’t live with Government the way
they live with us. But these yellow fellows, they’ve been brought into
this here city, and they don’t look Christians do they, and they aren’t
Christians. And why aren’t they Christians? Because they’re cannibals.
And they’ve been billeted down Medina Close, and what do you think they
say they’ve come here for? They’re going to eat baked Christians, they
say, baked Christians!”
He said all this in a broad English country dialect, mixed up with
scraps of Spanish and emphasised by a lot of signs, which no doubt could
be understood by Isabella. Hi thought that the man was as mad as a
hatter as well as being a murderer.
He did not quite like being with a mad murderer, even though it was
seeing life, but it smote him to the heart to see the poor old fellow
weeping at the sight of him, and swearing to be drunk that night, even
if it took the burial money: his heart warmed to him.
They drove through a square where a squadron of Pituba lancers, newly
arrived in town, were forming a bivouac. These men looked as though they
had been on a foray. Some of them had newly-slaughtered sheep slung
across their horses in front of them, others had big round loaves of
army bread or, in some cases, chickens, on their lance-points. They rode
uncared-for, wiry, evil little horses of a pale sorrel colour. They rode
with a leather thong instead of reins. Most of them had no stirrups, but
knotted leather thongs, hanging from the saddles, which they clutched
between their toes.
“Now, Master Highworth,” ’Zeke said, “I don’t expect anything from you,
neither now nor any time. You’re a great gentleman and you don’t want to
come and speak with a murderer; not that he was a murderer. And why
wasn’t it a murder? Because old Jackson, he was a rebel, and he fired at
me, didn’t he, and he’d got a better gun than me, didn’t he, and he shot
me through the gaiters, didn’t he, and besides it wasn’t a hare I was
after, it was a fox, and he knew that as well as I, and I didn’t know,
not really, when old pin-fire would go and when he wouldn’t, for the
matter of that. But Number 41 Medinas Close, three floors up. Don Crust
they calls me and my wife Señora Crust. Anybody knows me. I could tell
you of queer goings on, very queer; things you’d want to know, so as you
could watch out, Master Ridden. But there’s another thing, Master
Highworth; you wouldn’t want to come to Medinas Close not after dark,
not in your good things. It’s always safer to wear a poncho—because
why? Why then, if they come at you, you’ve got something to stop it
with. It isn’t like these ordinary tight things. You can’t really tell
where a man ends inside a blanket.
“Besides, there’s another thing, Master Highworth, which I wouldn’t tell
to everyone; but old Keeper Jackson’s forgiven me. He didn’t at first,
not he. In the night, he used to come to me, ‘Darn ’ee,’ he said, ‘I’ll
have ’ee yet,’ he said. He used to come all sideways at me with his blue
teeth at first; not quite at first, you understand, Master Highworth;
for he must have been a bit confused at first, from old pin-fire and
being in the moon, but it was when I was with the bull he began to come.
Many a shiny night he come at me. ‘You come back,’ he said, ‘you best
come quiet, or darn ’ee I’ll make ’ee come.’ And he done his best to
make me come; there were temptations come to make me go back, but I saw
through them. But he lost track of me among this new religion. He didn’t
know the lingo or something, or else their tiddlewinks upset him.
“Then one night he come again; be blest if he didn’t come again. But he
didn’t come like he ever come afore. He come in sort of shiny, not what
you would call an angel, Mr. Ridden and sir, but he hadn’t so many teeth
as the other times, if you understand what I mean. ‘Darn ’ee, Rust,’ he
says to me, ‘you’ve given me a bad go in Tencombe graveyard, along of
all them damned and women. But I’m out of sitting there,’ he said, ‘and
I don’t mind about it now, like I did. It’s a darned poor snipe,’ he
said, ‘could sit on a grave seven years and bear malice at the end.
Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m going; they’ve given me a horse, and I’m off in
the morning.’
“He wouldn’t tell me where he was off to. He was always one of they
artful ones. ‘I thought I’d tell ’ee I was going,’ he said, ‘there’s a
whole lot of us got horses.’
“But 41 Medinas Close is where you’ll find me, Master Hi; it isn’t a
nosegay, nor anything to please the eye. It’s back of the cathedral, not
dead back of it, for that’s the Bishop’s, but keep to the right of that,
and then there’s a gate, but you mustn’t take that, for it don’t lead
anywhere, but bear round, and then you’ll come to a place stinks like
chemicals, for it is chemicals; only you don’t go in there, but more
round, if you understand, till you come into Two Brothers Fountain Lane.
Well, it isn’t far from there. Two naked brothers in a fountain; you’d
think they’d a-been ashamed; but these foreigners don’t know the value
of clothes the same way that we do.”
“How did you know me?” Hi asked. “I was only ten or eleven when you saw
me last.”
“Master Highworth, I’ve known all your family since I don’t know when. I
know your blessed great-grandfather, when he wore his pigtail. But use
is second nature, as we say; they all wore pigtails, come to think of
it. Then I know old Mr. William and Master Rowton, not your brother
Master Rowton, but your father’s, the squire’s, older brother that was.
Lord, he was a proper one, Master Rowton. ‘A horse can jump anything,’
he used to say, ‘if you want him to.’ Well, he wouldn’t take warnings;
not once, nor twice, so the third time they bring him home on a door.
That was jumping into that pit at Beggar’s Ash. Old Mr. William didn’t
say much about his son, but he took on about the six-year-old, for he’d
backed him in a race.
“So when I seen ’ee, I said, ‘That’s a Ridden out of the Foliats,’ I
said; ‘don’t tell me, because it can’t be anybody else. And it won’t be
Mr. Chilcote, for Mr. Chilcote keeps his lip cocked up, and besides,
this is too young for Mr. Chilcote. And Mr. Rowton’s got a swelled
mouth, like old Mr. William had the same, almost as though he’d had a
smack on it, so it won’t be him. It’s young Mr. Highworth.”
Hi promised to see him within a few days. He did not like to offer the
old man money, but contrived to make him a present, partly as a wedding
present, partly to celebrate his meeting with a Tencombe man. He found
himself in an upper room of the hotel, looking out on an array of roofs
from which washing was hanging. Somehow, the washing looked more
romantic in that bright light than it had ever looked in England. He was
cheered at being at last an independent man of the world. He had had a
lovely voyage, and at the end of it there had been this welcome, from
one who knew all his people and the land from which he came.
His room had a scarlet carpet and a red plush rocking-chair, which
seemed out of place in that climate, already as hot as an English May.
The walls, which had been white, were marked with dirty fingers.
Somebody, who had occupied the room earlier that morning, had smoked
cigars in it. Bitten ends of cigar were in a flower-pot near the window.
The place seemed frowsy, untidy and feckless. The mosquito-curtains over
his bed were smeared with the bloody corpses of old mosquitoes. All
round the room, wherever the carpet failed to reach the wall, little
pale yellow ants came and went. He sat down upon his bed, feeling
suddenly homesick; then, realising that there were three electric fans
in the room, he set them all going, knelt down and began to unpack. He
had not knelt for thirty seconds when something bit him viciously in the
leg; glancing down, he saw a small black thing flying at great speed
along the floor. He looked at the place bitten, which had swollen and
was itching. He scratched the place and went back to his unpacking, but
was bitten again and then again. This time, having learned to be very
swift, he slew his attacker, who smelt, when dead, worse than he liked.
Feeling indignant at being placed in such a room, he went down to the
hotel bar to see the proprietor.
“Yes, Mr. Ridden,” said the proprietor, “what is it? What can I do for
you?”
“Look here,” Hi said, “you’ve put me in a room all full of bugs and
things.”
“I haven’t got a bug in the house,” the man said. “Them ain’t bugs,
them’s bichos. What you want to take is this bottle here, called
Blenkiron’s Bicho Blaster. No bicho nor skeeto will come where Blenkiron
blasts. Squirt Blaster freely round in floor and bed, the skeetos will
be downed, the bichos dead.”
After unpacking, Hi walked out into the city to see the sights of the
new world all shining in the sun. On the water-front, negroes and Caribs
were loading a lighter with what looked like bunches of rusty wire: they
were nearly naked: they shone and sang. Old negresses in scarlet turbans
kept time for them by clinking bottles together. At the south end, were
the gates of what had been the Viceroy’s garden in the old days. They
stood ajar, yet still bore the device of the horse and globe. In the
garden were flowers, butterflies like flying flowers, and birds like
jewels and flowers. Beyond the flowers was the old white Spanish
fortress, from which floated a blood-red banner, with a golden star for
each province.
“I am glad I’ve come to this place,” Hi thought, “if only I can find
something to do, I shall be as happy as the day is long.”
In his saunterings upon the water-front, he paused to look into the
window of a picture-dealer’s shop, which was decked with three sketches
in oil of scenes in a bull-ring. The picture-dealer, a man with a
strangely broad face, was smoking a cigarette at his door. Hi asked him
if the scenes had been sketched in Santa Barbara. The man replied,
“You’d better inform yourself, sir.” The unusual rudeness of the answer
made Hi wonder if the man were sane: he noted the name over the shop,
and passed on, less happy than before.
Yet in spite of this one man’s rudeness, the morning proved to be a long
adventure of delight.
The narrow, busy, crowded streets, so full of life, colour, strangeness
and beauty, all lit as never in England, excited him. There were fruits
and flowers, and costumes like fruits and flowers, men from the west,
Indians from the plains and from the forest; negroes, Caribs; women in
mantillas, women with roses in their ears; men in serapes, men hung with
silver, like images in chapels; peones in black and silver driving
ox-teams; church processions intoning Latin; all were marvellous. Yet an
impression formed in his mind that all was not well; the Indian lancers
and certain parties of foot soldiers, who looked as though they had been
rolled in brickdust, seemed to be there for no good.
At the cathedral parvise, some workmen were sinking scarlet flag-poles
into sockets in the gutters. Inside the cathedral, men were hanging
scarlet draperies all round the sanctuary; Hi supposed that they were
making ready for the Easter festivals. “They’re beginning early,” he
thought.
Near the cathedral was the green in which the palace stood. “Palacio,” a
guide, explained to him. “This is the palace of President Lopez.” He had
never seen a palace before; he stopped to stare at it. The guards at the
gate wore scarlet serapes; they rode white horses so bitted with heavy
silver that Hi longed to protest. The palace was a big, squat, yellow
building; at one end of it was a glittering pinnacle still surrounded by
scaffolding. “I’ve heard of that,” Hi thought, “that’s his silver
building. I’ll bet it isn’t silver, though; but quicksilver. I suppose
the President is inside there somewhere, because the flag is flying.”
It was now drawing towards noon. Men in evening dress, wearing scarlet
rosettes or sashes, were driving to the gates, dismounting from their
carriages, and entering the palace precincts, either for a cabinet
meeting or for lunch. Some of these people were cheered by the
onlookers, especially one man, who had the look of a “spoiled priest.”
At noon, some gunners in red fired a noon-gun in front of the palace;
instantly throughout the city there came a change in the noise of the
day as though everyone had ceased suddenly from work and pattered out to
dinner. Hi returned to his hotel, to lunch upon foods which were strange
to him: okra, manati, water-melon and a sangaree of limes.
After lunch, he wrote to his mother and to Señora Piranha, to say that
he had arrived. Having posted these letters, he set out to the offices
of the Sugar Company, to present his letter to Mr. Roger Weycock, who
received him very kindly and asked him to dine that night at the Club.
“Do you know any other Englishman here?” he asked.
“I’ve a letter to Mr. Allan Winter.”
“That’s lucky. He’s in town. He was here a few minutes ago; we’ll get
him to dine with us. Oh, all the English here belong to the Club; we
must see about making you a temporary member. But we’ll go into that
to-night, shall we, at the Club?”
* * * * *
At dinner at the Club that night, Mr. Weycock introduced Hi to Mr. Allan
Winter, who was a grizzled and rugged soul, of long standing as a
sugar-planter.
“I’ll call for you at eight to-morrow,” he said, “and drive you out to
my place, where you will see the sort of place it is.” Seeing that Hi
was perplexed, he added, “But perhaps you’re doing something else
to-morrow.”
“No, thanks, sir,” Hi said, “but I’ve written to a friend to say that I
shall be here all day to-morrow.”
“Oh, have you friends in Santa Barbara?” Mr. Weycock asked.
“I know a girl,” Hi said. “Miss Rosa Piranha, sir. Perhaps if you know
her you can tell me if she’s in town?”
“Oh, you know Miss Piranha, do you?” Mr. Weycock said. “I suppose you
met her in England?”
“Yes, sir.”
A change came on Mr. Weycock’s face, as though the subject were
unpleasant to him. “I have met her,” he said, “but I do not know whether
she’s in town or not. You see, Ridden, my work brings me into touch with
the dynamic party, the Reds, now in power here. I am not well in favour
with people like the Piranhas. You can always call on the Piranhas. I
would go with Winter to-morrow, if I were you.”
“I’d love to,” Hi said, “but I don’t feel quite free.”
“No, I see your point,” Mr. Winter said. “You aren’t quite free. So
don’t decide now. I’ll call at eight to-morrow and you can come if you
can. You may have had an answer by then. Leave it like that.”
Hi asked why so many soldiers were in the city.
“Precaution,” Mr. Weycock said; “the Reds, the present Government, are
being threatened by the Whites. The feeling is running very high.”
“I should think it ought to run high,” Mr. Winter said, “when these
gangs of cannibals are imported to keep order. I never saw such a set of
ruffians in my life. ‘I will not ask what the disease be, the cure being
what it is.’”
“They are surely as civilised,” Mr. Weycock said, “as some of these
Whites, who would burn heretics here to-morrow if they had their will.
Besides, you must know, Winter, that the Pitubas have always been allies
here. They helped the Spaniards in the Conquest.”
“I’ve nothing against that,” Winter said. “But whatever my politics
were, if I were a white citizen here, seeing those yellow cannibals
brought in to keep me in order, would make me want to shoot someone. But
I don’t meddle with politics here and, I hope, never will.”
“I do not meddle in them,” Mr. Weycock said, “but I’m bound to watch
them for the sake of the firm. I only hope that the measures taken will
be sufficient. It would be a disaster to this Republic if Don Lopez were
to be killed now.”
“Killed,” Mr. Winter said, “killed and disaster? Rats.”
“Well, I’m glad you take that cheery view.”
After this, they put away all thought of Red and White, but dined and
were merry. Hi was introduced to several very good fellows; he was
nominated for election at the next ballot and admitted to the Club
privileges pending election. He passed a very pleasant evening. As he
walked back to his hotel, he thought that he had never passed so
wonderful a day.
“And I may spend my life here,” he thought. “It may not have the charm
of engineering; but it must be wonderful to pass one’s days in a place
so beautiful.”
Yet as he walked, he saw three Pituba lancers dragging a white man to a
divisional gaol, which had its entrance on the water-front. The sight
angered him strangely; and again he had the feeling that things were
wrong in the land. “There are strange goings on,” old Rust had said;
“they’re going to eat baked Christians.” He noticed the looks of
citizens who watched the dragging, and the looks of other citizens
watching for looks of disapproval. “I’ll ask Rosa about all this,” he
thought. “There ought to be a letter from her in the morning.”
There was no letter from her in the morning, but Mr. Winter called and
drove him out to his plantation at Quezon.
III
During the drive, he asked Winter if he feared any civil trouble.
“Yes and no,” he said. “The Whites and Reds always bicker a bit at
Easter; they go out of their way to do it. They’ll do it this year. But
it will be nothing. And my advice to you is to pay no attention to
politics here, unless you’re naturalised. I’m not a citizen, and don’t
intend to be, so I keep clear of both parties. What you want to steer
clear of in this country are foreigners with axes to grind, like
Weycock’s old uncle. I say nothing against young Weycock; he’s friendly
and decent, and all that, but when I hear him boosting the Reds I wonder
how much his uncle’s had to make him sing.”
“But he said that Lopez was in fear of being murdered by the Whites.”
“Rats. The Whites won’t murder Lopez; they’ve got no one to put in his
place, and they know it. Besides, they know that it isn’t Lopez who is
running this land, but the foreign firms who’ve put money into it and
mean to get it back. As for Lopez being afraid of being murdered, I say,
rats again. He’s afraid of nothing, from hell-fire up; never has been.”
Hi spent a happy day at Quezon, slept there, and was driven back to his
hotel the next morning. “You go in and see your friends,” Mr. Winter
said, “then come out here again and spend a week or two. Everything’s
hard work here, like everywhere else. A lot of these young bloods come
out here thinking life’s going to dances and belonging to the Cocktail
Club. You’re too wise for that foolishness; you’ve got some sense.
“And now just let me say this, I stand in _loco parentis_ here, mind.
Don’t accept a job from the United Sugar people without just coming and
talking it over with me. They may have nothing for you, of course.
They’re in with a very queer set, who aren’t out for sugar or any other
kind of sweetness, but just both hands in the till. I see their
workings, and I know. The matter with Lopez is not that he’s afraid, but
that he’s too darned indolent to watch their steps a little.”
* * * * * * *
When he returned to the hotel, Hi found no letter from the Piranhas. “No
answer,” he thought. “She’s had time enough for a dozen answers. It
means that she’s out of town. Yet Rosa, in her last letter, said that
she would be in town now.”
He wandered out into the streets, where the work and beauty of a seaport
filled every yard with wonder. He felt that he could never tire of a
life so varied, so full of colour, passed in such light. Yet again the
people gave him the impression that all was not well. He was a newcomer,
who saw the game from outside, with fresh eyes. He felt that the Whites
and Reds were certainly going out of their ways to bicker at this coming
Easter. On his way back to the hotel, he saw some Red officials sacking
(as it seemed) a little newspaper office. A young American, who seemed
amused at his want of grasp of the case, explained that the cops were
pulling the joint and pinching the editor.
“What for?”
“I dunno. He’s one of these White guys. I guess he wrote something some
big bug didn’t quite stand for.”
He watched the sack to its completion. He could tell from the looks on
people’s faces what their politics were, and his heart went out to the
under dogs, the Whites, who were outnumbered there, and dared not show
all that they felt. “Rosa is a White,” he thought, “I’ll get her to tell
me what is going on.”
* * * * * * *
He was just about to lunch at his hotel, when a negro waiter, who seemed
impressed by something, came to tell him, chiefly by signs, that he was
wanted in the foyer. Wondering what he could have done wrong, or what
could cause the negro’s manner, he went out to the foyer, where a
footman, in a green and white livery, very politely told him, in Spanish
and pantomime, that there was something very important for him,
seemingly outside the doors. Looking as the footman’s signs directed, he
saw an old carriage, in which two ladies sat, beneath green parasols.
“Rosa,” he thought, “Rosa and her mother.”
One of the ladies was old, with white hair; she sat upright with an
absorbed look as though she were praying. The other was Rosa, but
changed indeed from the Rosa of the Foliats; this creature was painted
into a kind of purple mask with high lights of white powder on her nose.
Over her eyes, arches of plainly false eyebrows had been put in with the
brow-stick. Great gold ear-rings, enclosing green stones, hung from her
ears, her mouth was scarlet. He had never seen a more raddled-looking
baggage, yet this was the Rosa of four months before, who had galloped
hatless astraddle before breakfast with him. Both ladies turned to him
at once with an air which made him feel ashamed that he had no hat to
take off to them and very thankful that he hadn’t. The old lady was more
subtly made up than her daughter, but even she seemed to wear a mask or
glaze of enamel. “I suppose it’s the fashion here,” he thought.
Glaze or not, they were plainly great ladies here, conferring incredible
honour upon the hotel. Half the staff was there to attend their pleasure
already. The Señora held her hand for Hi to kiss (his good angel guarded
him from shaking it), she bade him welcome in English. He had not seen
her since he was a little child, but he remembered her clearly, as Donna
Emilia, a lady who held herself very straight and was always praying.
“She needed not to have made up,” Hi thought. “There is something very
beautiful in her face.”
“Welcome,” she said; “your father has been a good friend to us. You and
yours have been good friends to Rosa. I hope that all your household was
well when you left England. Let me see you, Highworth. You are liker
your mother than your father. But my eyes are failing, I cannot be sure
of this. Come now, with us, will you, to spend some hours at our house?”
“I should love to,” Hi said.
“Go and get your hat, then, and put it on,” Rosa said. “Never, never
come out without a hat again. Put it on at once, or this sun will skin
you. It doesn’t come through a watery envelope as it does in England.
That is your vanity, wanting to look brown. You wouldn’t look brown,
you’d crack, and all your poor little brains would pop.”
They drove down the water-front, past the Viceroy’s garden, to the gate.
Several houses on the water-front were displaying the scarlet banners,
starred with gold, which Lopez had declared to be the national flag.
“Is there to be some sort of celebration?” Hi asked.
“A display, I understand,” Donna Emilia said.
“How wonderful the bay looks with the shipping,” Rosa said quickly. “Do
you see, Hi, the shallows beyond the bay? All that southern bay is only
about six feet deep.”
“Good bathing, I should think,” Hi said. “Is one allowed to bathe
there?”
“I believe that some of the Indians sometimes bathe there,” Rosa said,
“but there are swarms of sharks. If you go out in a boat, they’ll come
all round you, and rub along the side and try to tip you out.”
“What do you do then?” Hi asked. “Sing them to sleep?”
“The best way is to hit them a bat with the flat of an oar-blade.”
“I wonder you don’t stare at them,” Hi said. “No shark can resist the
power of the human eye.”
“Women’s eyes excite them,” Rosa said.
“I should have thought a haughty look would shrivel them. The books are
full of it: ‘She darted a freezing glance at him.’”
At this moment they were passing through the gate of the city. On their
right was a park of palms, flowers and busts, on their left, beyond the
fortress, was the approach to the market pier, where the boats landed
fish, fruit and other produce at dawn each morning. A party of men and
women were coming from this pier with donkey carts laden with fruits,
eggs and vegetables. “They’re the second market,” Rosa said, “they buy
up the leavings from the boats and hawk them through the closes.”
The men of the second market recognised the liveries of the Piranhas.
They stopped their carts, stood still, uncovered and cried, “Long live
the Whites. Long live the Whites. Let the Reds perish.” To Hi’s
astonishment neither woman took the slightest notice. They stared ahead
as though they neither saw nor heard. Hi thought it odd that they did
not bow; Rosa turned to him.
“Do you see the boats, Hi?” she asked. “Those are some of the coast
boats which bring the produce. There are many market gardens along this
great shallow bay, especially at La Boca, ten miles down. The gardeners
send their things in the boats, which are just as fast as boats can be.
They often race both ways. We can see them from our windows.”
Out in the bay there was enough wind to ruffle the water. About a dozen
boats of queer rigs were rushing home under all the sail they could set.
Some were lateen-rigged with striped sails of blue and white; most were
polacca schooners with steeved bowsprits setting a sprit beneath upon a
yard. The sails of these were of a bright orange colour. All had high
curved whaler’s bows topped with gilt emblems. All were fast boats; even
Hi was surprised at the way they travelled. A rounded white gleam at
their sides showed their speed and the cleanness of their thrust.
“Aren’t they like dolphins?” Rosa said. “Don’t they seem to enjoy it?”
Less than half a mile from the gate of the city they entered the gates
of the Piranhas’ estate, which lay to the left, between the road and the
sea. In the niches of the masonry of the gates were figures of painted
terra-cotta, representing Friendship and Affection, one on each side.
They had been labelled when new, but time had destroyed the plaster on
which the labels were painted. “We can’t tell t’other from which now,”
Rosa said. “People think they’re both the Virgin, and lay little bunches
of flowers before them on their way to work.”
The gates were old masterpieces of wrought iron, now frail from rust,
their palm leaves were snapping, some of their bars had worn through.
All within the gates showed the same marks of decay. It had once been an
Italian garden, but time, poverty and the sea winds had helped to bring
it to ruin. Marble busts of poets and nymphs were fallen, or overgrown
with trailers. The great red clay or terra-cotta urns had been split by
the roots of their flowers, so that they looked like fountains of
flowers falling under the living glitter of the humming birds. The
shingle of the walk, though marked with wheels and horse-hoofs, was
almost overgrown with a thick green-leaved trailer, full of minute blue
flowers. The house was a biggish, oblong, yellow building, with
decorative panels of scarlet plaster in the recesses of the masonry. The
scarlet had faded to pale red, it was scaley and mildewed; altogether,
the house looked out of fashion. There had been a device between
supporters over the door. The supporters were now nothing but legs, two
hairy, with paws, two human, with feet. The device was wholly gone. Part
of a label bore the legend:
non sufficit.
Hi wondered what it was that did not suffice.
As the carriage stopped below the perron an old negro with powdered
hair, wearing the uniform of the Piranhas, white with green splashes on
the shoulders, came down the steps to welcome them. He carried a long
ebony cane with a gold pineapple at the end. Hi helped Donna Emilia up
the steps. Outside the house, all things gave evidence of a great family
coming down in the world. Inside, it was all as it had been in the time
of its splendour, except that colours had faded.
“Come into my room, Highworth,” Donna Emilia said.
She led him into a pleasant room hung with portraits of her own and her
husband’s families. She took her seat in a great brocaded chair that was
like a throne. Hi was only a boy, but he was impressed by her bearing.
She gave him the impression of being a work of art held together by
nothing but will, and a sense of style.
Hi closed the door at her bidding. Rosa was gone.
“It is thirty years, Highworth,” she said, “since your father in this
room brought news to my husband and myself that our fortunes were
secured in the days of the copper crisis. My husband promised then that
this house should be a home to any of your race. There to your right you
will see a drawing of your father as he was then. It is a pleasure to me
to see you stand where your father stood.”
She rang a little bell which stood on a table beside her; the negro with
the ebony cane appeared. “This is my old retainer, Pablo,” she said,
“faithful as one of the old age. Pablo,” she said, “this is Mr.
Highworth, whose father you will remember. In all ways and at all times
you are to consider him as one of this household.”
After Pablo had gone she turned again to Hi.
“This is talking beneath the surface,” she said, “which the English do
not do. Now tell me. What are your plans for your life in this country?
Your father says that you have letters and that we are not to help you
till we see that you have helped yourself.”
“I have only just landed,” Hi said. “I have letters to Mr. Weycock and
Mr. Winter.”
“To Mr. Mordred Weycock?” she asked.
“No, his nephew.”
“Did either Mr. Winter or Mr. Weycock tell you of troubles impending in
this country.”
“They seemed to think that things were not perfectly settled,” Hi said.
“And what do you yourself think, now that you have seen them?”
“They don’t seem quite happy somehow,” Hi said.
“How can they be happy,” she said, “with Antichrist upon the throne? I
am a woman and meddle little with politics, but very much with religion,
which is a force that your Mr. Weycocks do not admit to exist. He and
his friends, Highworth, are rousing up in this country something which
they cannot understand, the very depths of the soul of this people. But
come, Highworth, take this flower. Give me your arm. Open that door for
me. This is the chapel of the Piranhas; this tomb is where my husband
lies. He loved your father, who was more than a friend to us in a time
of calamity. Lay the flower upon his tomb. He will be glad to know that
your father’s son is in this house in this time of calamity.”
“Surely Señora,” he said, “the calamity is not so great.”
She looked at him and could not answer.
“Leave me here a little, Highworth,” she said. “There is a Greco over
the altar. But you will not care for these things. You will find Rosa in
the garden room.”
It was dim in the chapel. It was built of white Otorin marble in barrel
vaulting, with one piercing in the sanctuary. Hi saw a blackness with
bronze gleams where he laid his flower. He knew that Donna Emilia was
crying.
“O Señora,” he said. He felt that he could not stay there: he went
quickly back to the light.
Pablo led the way to a room full of sunlight: it opened upon the garden,
but was itself more full of flowers than the garden, from a bank of
white cuencas near the French windows. The light poured upon these, so
that every white trumpet of the cuencas seemed to quiver with life.
Little yellow butterflies poised above the flowers. A crested humming
bird with a dazzling throat hovered in the light near the door.
“Well, Hi,” Rosa said, “how are you liking Santa Barbara?”
“Oh, I love it.”
“You came in the _Recalde_, of course. When did you write to mother; do
you remember?”
“Yes, the day before yesterday; a few hours after I landed.”
“I thought so,” she said. “I suppose you wondered why we didn’t answer.”
“I thought you were out of town.”
“We did not receive your letter till this morning,” she said. “The
censorship is on again.”
“What censorship?”
“The Government’s. You see, we are a White family. All our people are
Whites, or Surplices even, the sort of purest of the pure. The Reds have
been planning something unusual for some time. They have been talking
about a conspiracy to kill Don Lopez and evidence of a White rebellion.
They always talk like that before a devilry. Then they say that they
were provoked to measures of safeguard.
“Latterly there has been no censorship of letters; but I was afraid that
one had begun two or three days ago. Now I am sure of it.”
“What do they do?”
“Take all the letters addressed to eminent Whites to some Red officer in
the fortress; then he steams them, I suppose, and reads them and has
them photographed or copied before they are delivered.”
“I wonder they take the pains,” Hi said. “If they’re dirty enough skunks
to read other people’s letters, they’re dirty enough skunks to forge
false ones.”
“Oh, they are; but they like to know what is going on, as well as what
they imagine. Don’t speak of these things to mother, or before her, Hi,
if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I rather shut you up when you asked about
the celebrations. But mother hasn’t been well for some time. She thinks
that something terrible is happening; or soon going to happen. Any
allusion to the Reds just now upsets her.”
“Right,” Hi said, “I’ll be silent. But I say, Rosa; I wish you’d tell me
why you didn’t bow or smile or anything when those market people cheered
you.”
“Did it seem very bad manners?”
“It struck me as a little odd.”
“We’re Whites,” she answered. “We’re watched pretty closely. What is to
stop the Reds from sending agents to cheer the Whites in our presence,
and watching whether we applaud? What would stop them arresting us for
fomenting party feeling or ‘encouraging White excesses,’ as they would
call it?”
“They couldn’t,”
“Why not? What is to stop them?”
“For smiling and bowing just because people cheer you?”
“Yes, Hi, and for even looking as though you wished to smile and bow.
‘Gestures prejudicial to civil peace,’ is the phrase they use, or
‘conduct deemed to be provocative of civil disturbance,’ that is
another.”
“Arrest you and your mother?”
“Yes, rather; like billio.”
“But, good Lord, what are the Whites doing to let these Reds do these
things? They must be jugginses.”
“There aren’t many Whites on this side of Santa Barbara: the Whites are
all in the west.”
“Yes; but they must know.”
“It isn’t so easy as it sounds. The Whites did a lot of stupid things
when they were in power; trying to stop the Schools Acts and other Acts
which the Reds had just passed; naturally the Reds were furious.”
“Yes; but hang it all, Rosa, stopping a sort of Act of Parliament is
done in a civilised way, by law; but these Reds have brought in all
these yellow devils. I can’t see why the Whites allow that.”
“The Pitubas? We’re used to them here. They’re not so bad as they look.
They don’t eat all the babies they’re credited with. They may munch a
finger here and there. What I mind is the censorship and the spying, and
the knowledge that all the time these Red officers are making dossiers
against all whom one holds dear: false dossiers, with forged evidence,
which they may use.”
“Why should they use them?”
“You haven’t seen the gang who governs us? They are in touch with a set
of people who want to ‘open up’ this land, as they call it and will pay
for the privilege. Naturally, they would get their money back a
hundredfold. Since the Whites stand in the way, naturally the Reds want
to get rid of them; and the dirty way is the way the Reds take by
nature, being what they are, people without dignity and without belief.”
“I don’t know anything about it, of course,” Hi said, “but I should have
thought it would be a good thing to get opened up a bit: have a few more
railways and get more of the land under cultivation.”
“If a gang of scoundrels came down on England, to open England up a bit,
would you like that, Hi?”
“Father always says that that is what is always happening in England, so
I suppose we are used to it.”
“Well, we aren’t. Now I’ve got heaps to do. I’ve got to cut all this
linen to pattern for our children’s Easter frocks. So although you may
not think it a manly job, I want you to help me at it, will you, like a
brick? We’ll open this linen up a bit to make little panties for our
bambini.”
Hi was always ready for any job. They set to work.
“By the way, Hi,” Rosa said, “my cousin, Carlotta de Leyva, will be here
at lunch. She talks English, so you needn’t be scared.”
“I shan’t be scared, if she’s anything like you,” he said.
“Well, she isn’t, worse luck,” Rosa said. “But I thought I’d have you
alone to warn you. Carlotta is a very special person. She’s not like
anybody else; but it’s no good your falling in love with her.”
“All right,” he said; “I shan’t fall in love.”
“It won’t be any good if you do,” she said. “Carlotta is to be married
from here in less than a month. By the way, you’ll have to come to the
wedding, heretic or no.”
“Who is she marrying?” he asked; not that he cared.
“Don Manuel.”
“A sort of local buck?”
“You would call him that.”
“Has he a surname?”
“Yes. Encinitas.”
“I thought that was a province.”
“So it is: he owns most of it.”
“And she owns most of the province next to it?”
“Her brother does.”
“So when the two marry, they will control about half of Santa Barbara
between them?”
“Why shouldn’t they, if they are wise and good?”
“It seems rather a lot for two; what sort of a man is Don Manuel; a good
sort?” Rosa made a grimace.
“He hasn’t done much good yet. Even if he had, he wouldn’t be good
enough for her.”
“That is what women always say before a wedding,” he said, “‘. . . of
course he isn’t good enough for her.’”
“Any man before his wedding will say it’s true.”
“Men in love will agree to anything. I say, Rosa, is there anything I
ought not to do at lunch?”
“Any local custom?” she said. “Yes, we don’t eat with our knives and we
always cluck as we swallow to show how much we are enjoying it.”
“No; I say Rosa, you’re always ragging. What ought I not to do? You
might tell a fellow.”
“I’ve warned you, Hi: not to fall in love with my cousin.”
“Fall in love: rats,” he said.
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “Rats.”
Someone in the hall outside was moving to and fro, arranging flowers in
the bowls on the tables. At first, Hi thought that this was Donna
Emilia; then the unseen woman began to sing in a low voice, as though
thinking of something else. It was not Donna Emilia. Hi could not make
out the words, but thought the voice and tune pretty.
“What’s the song, Rosa?” he asked.
“That? An old lullaby. It’s about roses going to bed because it’s late.”
“It’s pretty.”
“My dear boy, you’re cutting that thing so that it’ll have neither cut
nor hang.”
“Oh, dash it, so I am.”
“You pay attention to what you’re doing and never mind about lullabies.”
Presently, after the song had stopped, something bumped upon the door;
the voice of the singer called to them in English to “open the door,
please.” Hi opened the door. A woman stood on the threshold, holding a
jar full of sprays of white stellas.
“I’ve brought these for you, Rosa,” she said.
“That’s sweet of you,” Rosa said. “You two haven’t met yet. Carlotta,
this is Mr. Highworth Ridden, an old flame of mine. He’s helping me to
cut panties; men do these things in England. Hi, this is my cousin,
Señorita de Leyva.”
“How do you do, Mr. Ridden?” Carlotta said. “Will you take these flowers
for me?”
He said something in broken Spanish and took the jar to the table; the
stellas were the sweetest flowers he had ever known. In a gush of memory
he saw a hedge of honeysuckle at home in June. At the table, he turned
to look at Carlotta, who was unlike anyone he had ever seen. “She’s an
angel of Paradise,” he thought.
He had not thought of women; until that moment he had never bothered his
head about them. He had considered them as a race apart, with ways of
their own which, on the whole, he resented. From time to time he had met
a girl who had been a jolly good sport: Rosa was rather a good sport;
anyhow, they were the exceptions. The rest were in a world of their own,
with nerves and standards of their own which he disliked but respected.
Now suddenly there stood before him a woman who realised all his dreams
of what a woman should be. Yet she was not like any other woman. She was
as little like a woman as a humming bird is like a bird. She was a
small, perfect, spiritual shape, glowing like a humming bird. He had
once heard somebody say that “you only get perfection in small things”;
he had thought the man an ass at the time, but remembered it now. This
woman was perfect. Her hair was of a most deep, dark brown, very
abundant, but caught close to her head by a narrow fillet of gold. This
gave her something the look of a boy, enough, perhaps, to establish a
sympathy with a boy like Hi. The eyes were darker than the hair. They
shone as though the brain behind them were one glow of light. They were
not only kind, good eyes, but so very merry. The eyebrows were
remarkable. As in most clever faces, the base of her nose, at the brow,
was broad, and the space between the eyes not small. The unusual beauty
of the eyebrows was their length; they continued the demarcation of the
brow to the right and left; they were straight in line over the eyes,
and lifted a little at the right and left sides, in a way impossible to
describe, though it made the face most vivid and unusual. The nose was
straight. The ears, which are seldom beautiful, even in the beautiful,
were perfect in her. The cheeks were of a rich colour as though the life
within were very intense. The mouth was the great distinction: it was of
a faultless beauty. All fun, all thoughtfulness, all generosity, were in
those gentle, sensitive, proud curves. She wore white, with a green
jacket. Her voice seemed to Hi to be the quality of voice he had always
most longed to hear. She spoke English faultlessly.
“So Rosa has put you to cutting out Easter dresses?” she asked.
“Women are always making men slaves,” he said.
“Well, after lunch, you shall be free. Manuel will be here to lunch,
Rosa, so if it’s cool enough we might play tennis afterwards. Would you
play, Mr. Ridden?”
“I’d love some tennis.”
She picked up some pattern-paper, turned it, folded it, snipped it with
scissors, refolded it, snipped it again, and then shook it out as a sort
of cape or shawl of lace.
“That is what the negresses wear in San Jacinto,” she said. “They cut
the linen and wear it over scarlet; it looks just like lace at a little
distance.”
“You are clever,” Hi said, “to cut it all out like that. I wish you’d
show me how you did it.”
“Like this,” she said, picking up another piece of paper.
“The English are always wanting to do things,” Rosa said. “They never
say, ‘Here’s a perfect day, let’s think about perfection.’ They say,
‘Here, it’s stopped raining, let’s do something.’”
“You did your share when you were in England,” he said, “so you needn’t
talk.”
“She seems to have been busy this morning,” Carlotta said. “We’ll talk
about perfection, if you like.”
“I don’t want to talk, but to listen,” Rosa said. “Suppose you sing.”
Carlotta went to the piano and sang a couple of Spanish songs, one
strange, the other grim, both haunting. Hi thought them the most
beautiful things he had ever heard, sung by the most marvellous voice.
He could not turn his eyes from her face and throat. She was the most
exquisite thing he had ever seen. He felt himself to be vile and a boor,
and unfit to walk the same planet. He wondered whether he could possibly
take the pattern-papers which she had cut, or the scissors she had used.
He stared and stared. He knew it to be rude, but could not help it. “My
God, she is beautiful,” he thought. “She is lovely, lovely. O God, I
wish I could fight for her or do something for her.”
He noticed her hands. They were not the thin, pale, very knuckly bundles
of skewers which ladies’ hands usually seemed to him, but perfections of
form and marks of capacities. There was a ring on one finger. “There it
is,” he thought; “she’s engaged to be married, to this devil Manuel, who
isn’t good enough for her. This devil Manuel can kiss her. I’d like to
call him out.” Glancing suddenly away from the lovely face he saw Rosa
watching him with a certain malice tinged just a little, unselfish as
she was, with envy. No one had stared at her in quite that way before
she had taken any pains to secure it.
Rosa smiled somewhat bitterly; a gong was beaten to call them to lunch.
“Manuel is late,” Carlotta said; “he said he might be.”
Hi hated Manuel for being late, and for being called “Manuel,” and for
being at all. He wanted to shine before her, but could think of nothing
to say; he seemed to be spurting orange-juice everywhere. Then he was
ashamed that three women, living in this lovely room, should all speak
good English, in compliment to himself, while he could hardly say,
“Thank you” in Spanish.
IV
“Rosa, my daughter,” Donna Emilia said, “I have had such a strange
message from Señora Artigas. Her son, Estifanio, has disappeared.”
“We passed him in the cathedral last night, mother, at about six or
half-past, as we left the service.”
“He was at home after that. At nearly midnight two young men, in evening
dress, called for him to say that Porfirio Rivera, his great friend, had
been hurt in a duel, was dying, and had asked for him. Estifanio did not
know the young men; but, of course, he went with them, and he has not
returned.”
“If his friend were dying, mother, he would stay with him.”
“But the story was false, my dear. Porfirio called for Estifanio this
morning; he had fought no duel, is in perfect health, and has sent no
message. Estifanio has disappeared. Imagine his mother’s anxiety.”
Hi saw Rosa and Carlotta look at each other with a glance which he could
not interpret. He felt that there was trouble and that he had better say
something.
“We had a fellow at school,” he said, “who disappeared one summer
holidays. He went out in a boat with another fellow. The boat upset, but
they were picked up by a steamer. However, the steamer was carrying the
mails and could not stop, so these two fellows had to go all the way to
New York before they could send a message home. They’d both been buried,
or at least had the burial-service read over them by that time.”
“Estifanio will turn up, in the same way, mother,” Rosa said.
“I trust so,” the old lady said. “Suddenness of death is ever a thing I
pray God to spare my friends.”
“Estifanio is a great hunter,” Carlotta said. “He rides out to this
‘drag,’ do you call it? which the English have started. Are you fond of
hunting, Mr. Ridden?” He thought her an angel of tact to have changed
the conversation a little.
“I love riding,” he said, “but of course, my father only lets me ride
the old crocks. Still, sometimes he lets me be his second horseman, and
then I have had some wonderful times.”
“Rosa said that you are fond of engines.”
“Yes, I love engines.”
“So do I,” she said. “I’m racing my brother with one. He is having an
irrigation canal dug by men, and I am doing a little bit of it with
machines; but the nature of the ground doesn’t make it quite a fair
match. What engines interest you most?”
“No particular engine,” he said, “but more the nature of engines. I’m
always thinking of all sorts of little engines which everybody could
have. For instance, a little engine to sweep the floor of a room, or
dust walls, or clean big glass panes like the windows of shops. Then, I
expect you’ll think it very silly, but don’t you think one could have a
little engine on a boat?”
“Oh, the engine on a boat,” Rosa said. “Hi is a lovely character,
Carlotta. He would die for me or for you at a moment’s notice; but the
engine on a boat is his mad streak. Of course it’s nice to have a mad
streak; it shows the oldness of your family; but there it is.”
“Why should there not be an engine on a boat?” Carlotta asked. “What
sort of little engine do you mean, Mr. Ridden?”
“Oh, call him Hi, Carlotta,” Rosa said. “This is his home here,
remember; call him Hi.”
“I don’t know whether he will let me,” Carlotta said.
“I’ll be frightfully proud if you will,” Hi said, and blushed scarlet,
and knew that Rosa watched the blush.
“What sort of engine . . . Hi?” Carlotta asked.
“Thank you,” he said, wondering whether he would ever be able to save
her life and in reward be asked to call her Carlotta.
“You see,” he said, “Rosa is always ragging. She worked at this engine
when she was in England. You see, we live in a part of England which is
mostly rolling grass hills. We call them downs, but they are really a
sort of ups. Well, we are a good long way from the Thames; too far to go
for a day’s boating. Now I’m not much good at rowing, but I do love
messing about in a boat. I mean, being in a boat.”
“I do, too,” Carlotta said; “there is a sort of lake at home. I go out
in a boat to watch the flamingoes.”
“We’ve not got any lake, alas,” Hi said, “but there is a little sort of
brook, or chalk-stream. It’s got plenty of water always, but it isn’t
broad enough for oars. So what I’ve always wanted to do is to make a
little engine to go in a boat. I don’t mean a steam-engine, but a hand
engine, so that one could have the exercise of rowing. A man would sit
on the thwart and turn a crank, or pull it to and fro, and that would
turn a paddle-wheel; only I don’t want the paddle-wheel to be at the
side, but either in front or let into the boat in a sort of well, so as
not to take up room. They all say that it couldn’t go, but I say it must
go.”
“Of course it would go,” Carlotta said.
“How could it go?” Rosa asked. “It could no more go than if you were to
stand in the boat and pull the boat-rope.”
“You’ve not even got enough mechanical sense, Rosa,” Hi said, “to make
you keep quiet when mechanics are being talked. If I’d had an old boat
or punt to experiment on, instead of a clothes-basket covered with
rick-cloth, I’d have proved that my thing would go.”
“If it would go, why hasn’t it been done? All the English are always
messing about in boats.”
“My engine is not for ordinary rivers, but for the brooks at home, or
even the canals, where you cannot always row, nor even paddle in
comfort.”
“There wasn’t much comfort in your clothes-basket, if I remember
rightly,” Rosa said.
“There isn’t much comfort in any good thing.”
“I should have thought religion,” Rosa said.
“You try it and see.”
“Manuel is very late,” Donna Emilia said. “We’re almost at an end here.
Do you think that he will come, ’Lotta?”
“Yes, I think I hear him.” A horse came at a quick canter up the drive.
Carlotta turned to Hi.
“After my marriage,” she said, “you must come out to stay with us, if
you will. There are rivers there not unlike what I should imagine yours
to be, and rolling hills of grass.”
“I would love that,” he said. He looked at her, and was at once shot
through with anguish to think that she was to be married to a man not
good enough for her. “He has frightened her,” he thought, “or got some
hold upon her, in the way these beasts do.”
Suddenly he realised that Don Manuel was there, kissing Donna Emilia’s
hand; he must have come in like a panther.
“I say,” he thought, “what a man.”
All manly strength, beauty and grace moved in that figure; but the face
was the extraordinary thing; it won Hi at once, partly by its power,
partly by its resemblance to the bust of the young Napoleon on the
landing at the Foliats. The man turned to Hi, with eyes most strange,
masterful, unbearable and bright as flames. “This is an extraordinary
man,” Hi thought. “Either splendid or very queer, perhaps both.” The
extraordinary man greeted him in English; then burst out with:
“Ah, I am glad to see you, Mr. Ridden. Your father sixteen years ago
sent me two English hunting saddles, because I rode his stallion, what?
And how is your father? And how do you like Santa Barbara? Ah, your
father; I was proud of those saddles; no gift have I liked so. You shall
come to me at Encinitas and ride and ride. That is the life, what?”
He took Hi’s hands in both his own, in his impulsive way, and looked
into his eyes, in a way that was both frightening and winning; it
entirely won Hi.
“You’re not a bit like your father,” he said, “not a little bit. Your
father likes being top-dog; sometimes bully, sometimes blarney. You want
to make things. I know your sort.
“Where are you staying?” he continued. “At the Santiago? That’s a vile
hole, the Santiago. Yet all our visitors form their first impressions
there. Whereabouts have they put you?”
“On the third floor,” Hi said, “Room 67.”
“Looking out on the back, what? Well, looking out on the front wouldn’t
have been much more cheerful. The palace, the Santiago and the
cathedral. I’d like to raze them all three and start afresh.
“By the way, about your Santiago. I am a night bird. I pass the back of
that hotel at night at two in the morning. You can get in at the back
through the cellar-grating. The negro waiters run a gambling hell there;
fan-tan, what? They also do a private trade in the hotel liquor. And now
forgive me everybody for being so late.”
“You are scandalously late, Manuel,” Rosa said. “You deserve no lunch.”
“I want no lunch,” he said, “but coffee and some bread. I am late,
because I have been tracking a crime. Estifanio Artigas was murdered in
this city last night.”
“Then it was murder?”
“We were talking of him a moment since.”
“That will be death to the poor mother; her only child.”
“There is more than this,” Carlotta said. “The murder was planned. By
whom?”
“The Murder Gang of the Palace. A club of young criminals headed by Don
José, the son of our Dictator, Mr. Ridden. They murdered the lad in that
tunnel or passage where the windmills used to be. I have been with the
murderer. Here’s a copy of his confession, made before Chacon, the
notary. I’ve sent copies of it to Chavez and Hermengildo, as well as to
your brother, Carlotta. Who could want food after this? Now the Whites
move again; we have a cause and a case.
“This Murder Club was founded by Don José at the end of last year as a
new excitement; he and eight young men are the members; all very select.
They have now murdered five men; one a month is their rule, each in a
different way.
“Pablo Hinestrosa was chosen to kill Estifanio. Two of the others came
to help him; four were posted, to keep guard during the murder; the
other two brought Estifanio to the place.
“I learned all this from Pablo’s own lips this morning.”
“Pablo Hinestrosa was always as weak as water,” Rosa said. “Cruel, too;
I remember him putting worms under his rocking horse as a little child.”
“I found Pablo in the street, as I came back from my ride this morning,”
Don Manuel continued. “He was crying and quaking; so I brought him to my
rooms. Bit by bit, I got the story out of him.”
“One moment, Manuel,” Carlotta said; “this Hinestrosa man, who is
plainly of weak intelligence, may have imagined all this.”
“Ah, no, alas,” Don Manuel said, “I have proved it to be true. One
decoyed the victim to the carriage, one drove the carriage to the
tunnel. Then the decoy led him into the tunnel, where Pablo killed him.
Don José helped in the killing. There were the tracks and the body,
everything corresponded exactly.
“You will think this next a strange thing:
“Don José is very clever as well as very vicious. He and Spallo took
Pablo home after the murder, and, as they saw that he was shaken, they
feared that he would betray them.
“Now Pablo feared that they feared this, so he contrived to leave them
where he could hear them talking. He heard Don José say: ‘I knew that he
would be sentimental. He will confess the whole thing to the first
priest he can find. Shall we finish him? It would be rather a neat end
to the night.’ It must have been an anxious moment for Pablo, waiting
for the answer; but Spallo said, ‘Better not. . . . He’ll be all right
after a sleep.’
“After that, Spallo and José went away, but now another strange thing
happened. When they had gone (so Pablo says) the ghost of Estifanio’s
father came in and sat beside him. He never spoke, but whenever Pablo
tried to run from the room, this ghost slid in front of him.”
“What happened then?”
“Pablo said that he ‘burned the ghost away, with matches and texts of
Scripture.’ When the ghost was gone he ran into the street; but it was
worse there, he said, because Estifanio kept looking through the windows
at him.
“I got a doctor to give him an opiate; now he’s asleep in Chacon’s
house.”
“God give us mercy,” Donna Emilia said. “Is there to be no measure to
the wickedness of this time?”
“When will General Chavez know of this?” Carlotta asked.
“Now. He’ll be in town by six. Congress meets at eight. We will arraign
the palace on this question.”
“God help this unhappy land,” Donna Emilia said.
“God is helping this land,” Don Manuel said. “He gives us this sword
against the Lopez gang; now we shall end them.”
“I am not so sure, Manuel,” Carlotta said. “There is much shrewdness in
the men about Lopez. They would be only too glad to get rid of Don José.
This case may rid the land of Don José; but I do not think that Lopez
will be involved. His hands may even be strengthened.”
Manuel listened to her with much attention.
“Not as ours are strengthened,” he said. “Chavez and Bazan must stir at
this. I have the confession and all the evidence. The Reds suspect
nothing. We shall have a _coup de théâtre_ in only five hours. This
magazine shall explode under their feet.”
“I wonder,” Carlotta said. “General Chavez may think the time
inopportune.”
“Inopportune? When the Reds are declaiming about a White conspiracy?”
“If not inopportune, he may find some other excuse for not acting.”
“He must act upon this.”
“He is a very indolent man.”
“If he will not act, we will find who will. I see three here to start
with; no, four, for I am sure that Mr. Ridden will be with us.”
“Rather, if you’ll have me, sir,” Hi said.
“It will begin your stay here well, to help in the downfall of a
Dictator.”
“Manuel,” Rosa said, “you are not to drag Hi into our party politics.”
“Manuel,” Carlotta said, “I think that you are going beyond the present
issue, which is, to denounce the Murder Club. Lopez has sufficient
readiness, and bigness, to banish, or even to prosecute, his son; and
then face you in a stronger position than ever.”
“I believe that Lopez is mad,” Manuel said. “To-night, when this begins,
I shall declare him to be unfit to govern.”
As he spoke, the major-domo entered with a telegram upon a salver.
“For Don Manuel,” he said.
When Don Manuel had read the telegram, he changed countenance; it was
plain that he had received a blow.
“Is it ill news from Encarnacion?” Donna Emilia asked.
“Is your mother worse, Manuel?” Carlotta asked.
“Yes,” he said, “my beloved mother is dangerously ill at Encarnacion. I
must go at once.”
“There will be no train to San Jacinto till noon to-morrow.”
“No,” he said, “but I can go by the mountain train at four; and ride
from Melchior, it is only sixty-seven miles. If I telegraph for horses,
I can be at home by dusk to-morrow night. That will save five hours.”
“You must go at once, if you are to catch the four train,” Carlotta
said. “I’ll drive you to the station.”
“We will go, then,” Manuel said. “While they bring the chaise, I’ll
order horses; you shall send the telegrams when I am gone.”
* * * * * * *
As Don Manuel made his farewells, he took Hi’s hand in both his own
hands. “My greetings to your father,” he said. “Tell him I remember the
saddles. I shall expect you presently at my home.”
“You will stay with us, will you not?” Carlotta said.
“I would love to,” Hi said. “I would love it more than anything.”
They all went out of doors to see them start. Carlotta was driving two
marvellous little horses, full of fire. Hi looking at her as she sat
watching her horses, felt that the only possible happiness on earth
would be to live and die for her; since everything about her was
beautiful and came not from this world. He saw that all there thought as
he thought and felt as he felt about her. “You beautiful and gracious
and glorious thing,” he thought. “I wish I could die for you.”
The peones stepped from the horses’ heads, the gates opened, the horses
strained to the collars and the marvellous girl was gone. Often,
afterwards, he thought of that scene.
“I trust that he may find his mother alive,” Donna Emilia said.
“I must be going, too,” Hi said.
“Going! nonsense,” Rosa said. “You’ve come for the day. You’ve had
neither tennis nor a swim. Come in.”
When he had come in, Rosa looked at him with malice.
“Isn’t he handsome, Hi?” she asked.
“Handsome? I should think he is,” Hi said. “He is everything and has
everything.”
“No; he hasn’t everything,” Rosa said. “I know several things that he
has not. But even if he had everything, he wouldn’t be good enough for
her.”
Hi did not answer, for the thought of Manuel having the beautiful
Carlotta went through him with a pang.
“He wouldn’t be good enough for her; would he?” Rosa repeated.
“I hope so.”
“No, you don’t,” Rosa said. “You know that he wouldn’t. Confess, Hi, he
wouldn’t.”
Hi looked at her with a look of pain.
“Isn’t she wonderful?” she said.
“I understand your being fond of her.”
“Fond of her? People aren’t fond of her. They worship her and would die
for her. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would,” he said, after a pause. “You know I would. And you
would, too.”
“I told you not to,” Rosa said. “I gave you fair warning. You’d better
put her out of your mind. Besides,” she added with malice, “he’s
frightfully jealous.”
“He’ll have some cause, I should say.”
“Well, come on into the garden. I’ll play you tennis.”
“No, be square, Rosa. You don’t really want me. I must clear out.”
“I’ll tell you when to clear out,” she said. “But stay a little.
Carlotta will be back in half an hour. Stay to see her. It will be the
last time you’ll see her before she marries.”
“I thought you said that they wouldn’t be married till Easter.”
“Not now,” she said. “She’ll go to him by the noon train to-morrow; you
will see. I shall have to go with her. She’ll be married by the Bishop
to-morrow midnight, so that the mother may see the son married. Then
she’ll be with that man all her life.”
“She chose him, out of all the men in the world,” he said. “And I don’t
wonder; he’s a fine fellow.”
“A fine fellow? Only a few years ago he was the friend of this Don José
of the Murder Gang.”
“I don’t know about that,” Hi said. “He’s a fine fellow now; and she
thinks so.”
“She thinks so now, but in a week, in a month . . . with that man all
the time.”
“Here’s Pablo, with a message for you,” Hi said.
“There is someone to see you, Señorita,” Pablo said, “Tomás Chacon, the
notary from Santa Barbara.”
“Strange,” Rosa said to Hi. “This is the notary whom Manuel left in
charge of the murderer. If you will stay by these roses, to watch the
humming birds for a moment, I will speak to him.”
* * * * * * *
He watched the humming birds for ten minutes, while Rosa spoke with the
man. He did not think of the humming birds; the love of Carlotta was
eating him up, in an agony that was yet sweet.
I did but see her passing by,
But I shall love her till I die.