University of Virginia Library

2. PART SECOND
THE ISABELS

1. CHAPTER ONE

THROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortune
of that struggle which Don José had characterized in
the phrase, "the fate of national honesty trembles in the
balance," the Gould Concession, "Imperium in Imperio,"
had gone on working; the square mountain had
gone on pouring its treasure down the wooden shoots
to the unresting batteries of stamps; the lights of San
Tomé had twinkled night after night upon the great,
limitless shadow of the Campo; every three months
the silver escort had gone down to the sea as if neither
the war nor its consequences could ever affect the
ancient Occidental State secluded beyond its high
barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place
on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks
lorded over by the white dome of Higuerota and as yet
unbreached by the railway, of which only the first part,
the easy Campo part from Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at
the foot of the pass, had been laid. Neither did the
telegraph line cross the mountains yet; its poles, like
slender beacons on the plain, penetrated into the forest
fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of the
track; and its wire ended abruptly in the construction
camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus,
in a long hut of planks with a corrugated iron
roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar trees — the quarters
of the engineer in charge of the advance section.

The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in railway
material, and with the movements of troops along
the coast. The O.S.N. Company found much occupation

for its fleet. Costaguana had no navy, and, apart
from a few coastguard cutters, there were no national
ships except a couple of old merchant steamers used as
transports.

Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick
of history, found time for an hour or so during an
afternoon in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould,
where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at
work around him, he professed himself delighted to get
away from the strain of affairs. He did not know what
he would have done without his invaluable Nostromo,
he declared. Those confounded Costaguana politics
gave him more work — he confided to Mrs. Gould —
than he had bargained for.

Don José Avellanos had displayed in the service of the
endangered Ribiera Government an organizing activity
and an eloquence of which the echoes reached even
Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera Government,
Europe had become interested in Costaguana.
The Sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the Municipal
Buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the Liberators
on the walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a
glass case above the President's chair, had heard all
these speeches — the early one containing the impassioned
declaration "Militarism is the enemy," the
famous one of the "trembling balance" delivered on
the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second
Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming Government;
and when the provinces again displayed their
old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento's time) there
was another of those great orations, when Don José
greeted these old emblems of the war of Independence,
brought out again in the name of new Ideals. The
old idea of Federalism had disappeared. For his part
he did not wish to revive old political doctrines. They

were perishable. They died. But the doctrine of
political rectitude was immortal. The second Sulaco
regiment, to whom he was presenting this flag, was going
to show its valour in a contest for order, peace, progress;
for the establishment of national self-respect without
which — he declared with energy — "we are a reproach
and a byword amongst the powers of the world."

Don José Avellanos loved his country. He had
served it lavishly with his fortune during his diplomatic
career, and the later story of his captivity and barbarous
ill-usage under Guzman Bento was well known
to his listeners. It was a wonder that he had not been
a victim of the ferocious and summary executions which
marked the course of that tyranny; for Guzman had
ruled the country with the sombre imbecility of political
fanaticism. The power of Supreme Government had
become in his dull mind an object of strange worship, as
if it were some sort of cruel deity. It was incarnated in
himself, and his adversaries, the Federalists, were the
supreme sinners, objects of hate, abhorrence, and fear,
as heretics would be to a convinced Inquisitor. For
years he had carried about at the tail of the Army of
Pacification, all over the country, a captive band of
such atrocious criminals, who considered themselves
most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed.
It was a diminishing company of nearly naked
skeletons, loaded with irons, covered with dirt, with
vermin, with raw wounds, all men of position, of education,
of wealth, who had learned to fight amongst themselves
for scraps of rotten beef thrown to them by
soldiers, or to beg a negro cook for a drink of muddy
water in pitiful accents. Don José Avellanos, clanking
his chains amongst the others, seemed only to exist in
order to prove how much hunger, pain, degradation,
and cruel torture a human body can stand without

parting with the last spark of life. Sometimes interrogatories,
backed by some primitive method of torture,
were administered to them by a commission of officers
hastily assembled in a hut of sticks and branches, and
made pitiless by the fear for their own lives. A lucky
one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would
perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a
file of soldiers. Always an army chaplain — some unshaven,
dirty man, girt with a sword and with a tiny
cross embroidered in white cotton on the left breast of a
lieutenant's uniform — would follow, cigarette in the
corner of the mouth, wooden stool in hand, to hear the
confession and give absolution; for the Citizen Saviour
of the Country (Guzman Bento was called thus officially
in petitions) was not averse from the exercise of rational
clemency. The irregular report of the firing squad
would be heard, followed sometimes by a single finishing
shot; a little bluish cloud of smoke would float up
above the green bushes, and the Army of Pacification
would move on over the savannas, through the forests,
crossing rivers, invading rural pueblos, devastating the
haciendas of the horrid aristocrats, occupying the inland
towns in the fulfilment of its patriotic mission, and
leaving behind a united land wherein the evil taint of
Federalism could no longer be detected in the smoke of
burning houses and the smell of spilt blood.
Don José Avellanos had survived that time.
Perhaps, when contemptuously signifying to him his
release, the Citizen Saviour of the Country might have
thought this benighted aristocrat too broken in health
and spirit and fortune to be any longer dangerous. Or,
perhaps, it may have been a simple caprice. Guzman
Bento, usually full of fanciful fears and brooding suspicions,
had sudden accesses of unreasonable self-
confidence when he perceived himself elevated on a
pinnacle of power and safety beyond the reach of mere
mortal plotters. At such times he would impulsively
command the celebration of a solemn Mass of thanksgiving,
which would be sung in great pomp in the
cathedral of Sta. Marta by the trembling, subservient
Archbishop of his creation. He heard it sitting in a
gilt armchair placed before the high altar, surrounded
by the civil and military heads of his Government.
The unofficial world of Sta. Marta would crowd into
the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody of
mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential
piety. Having thus acknowledged the only
power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself,
he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic
wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left
now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed
adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of
the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness
fed his insatiable vanity, and they could always be
got hold of again. It was the rule for all the women of
their families to present thanks afterwards in a special
audience. The incarnation of that strange god, El
Gobierno Supremo, received them standing, cocked
hat on head, and exhorted them in a menacing mutter
to show their gratitude by bringing up their children in
fidelity to the democratic form of government, "which
I have established for the happiness of our country."
His front teeth having been knocked out in some accident
of his former herdsman's life, his utterance was
spluttering and indistinct. He had been working for
Costaguana alone in the midst of treachery and opposition.
Let it cease now lest he should become
weary of forgiving!

Don José Avellanos had known this forgiveness.

He was broken in health and fortune deplorably

enough to present a truly gratifying spectacle to the
supreme chief of democratic institutions. He retired
to Sulaco. His wife had an estate in that province, and
she nursed him back to life out of the house of death and
captivity. When she died, their daughter, an only
child, was old enough to devote herself to "poor papa."

Miss Avellanos, born in Europe and educated partly
in England, was a tall, grave girl, with a self-possessed
manner, a wide, white forehead, a wealth of rich brown
hair, and blue eyes.

The other young ladies of Sulaco stood in awe of her
character and accomplishments. She was reputed to
be terribly learned and serious. As to pride, it was
well known that all the Corbelàns were proud, and her
mother was a Corbelàn. Don José Avellanos depended
very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia.
He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who,
though made in God's image, are like stone idols without
sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings. He
was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion
is not a bankrupt in life. Don José Avellanos
desired passionately for his country: peace, prosperity,
and (as the end of the preface to "Fifty Years of Misrule"
has it) "an honourable place in the comity of
civilized nations." In this last phrase the Minister
Plenipotentiary, cruelly humiliated by the bad faith
of his Government towards the foreign bondholders,
stands disclosed in the patriot.

The fatuous turmoil of greedy factions succeeding the
tyranny of Guzman Bento seemed to bring his desire to
the very door of opportunity. He was too old to
descend personally into the centre of the arena at Sta.
Marta. But the men who acted there sought his advice
at every step. He himself thought that he could
be most useful at a distance, in Sulaco. His name, his

connections, his former position, his experience commanded
the respect of his class. The discovery that
this man, living in dignified poverty in the Corbelàn
town residence (opposite the Casa Gould), could dispose
of material means towards the support of the
cause increased his influence. It was his open letter of
appeal that decided the candidature of Don Vincente
Ribiera for the Presidency. Another of these informal
State papers drawn up by Don José (this time in the
shape of an address from the Province) induced that
scrupulous constitutionalist to accept the extraordinary
powers conferred upon him for five years by an overwhelming
vote of congress in Sta. Marta. It was a
specific mandate to establish the prosperity of the
people on the basis of firm peace at home, and to redeem
the national credit by the satisfaction of all just claims
abroad.

On the afternoon the news of that vote had reached
Sulaco by the usual roundabout postal way through
Cayta, and up the coast by steamer. Don José, who
had been waiting for the mail in the Goulds' drawing-
room, got out of the rocking-chair, letting his hat fall
off his knees. He rubbed his silvery, short hair with
both hands, speechless with the excess of joy.

"Emilia, my soul," he had burst out, "let me embrace
you! Let me —"

Captain Mitchell, had he been there, would no doubt
have made an apt remark about the dawn of a new era;
but if Don José thought something of the kind, his
eloquence failed him on this occasion. The inspirer of
that revival of the Blanco party tottered where he
stood. Mrs. Gould moved forward quickly and, as she
offered her cheek with a smile to her old friend, managed
very cleverly to give him the support of her arm he
really needed.

Don José had recovered himself at once, but for a
time he could do no more than murmur, "Oh, you two
patriots! Oh, you two patriots!" — looking from one to
the other. Vague plans of another historical work,
wherein all the devotions to the regeneration of the
country he loved would be enshrined for the reverent
worship of posterity, flitted through his mind. The
historian who had enough elevation of soul to write of
Guzman Bento: "Yet this monster, imbrued in the
blood of his countrymen, must not be held unreservedly
to the execration of future years. It appears to be
true that he, too, loved his country. He had given it
twelve years of peace; and, absolute master of lives and
fortunes as he was, he died poor. His worst fault, perhaps,
was not his ferocity, but his ignorance;" the man
who could write thus of a cruel persecutor (the passage
occurs in his "History of Misrule") felt at the foreshadowing
of success an almost boundless affection for
his two helpers, for these two young people from over
the sea.

Just as years ago, calmly, from the conviction of
practical necessity, stronger than any abstract political
doctrine, Henry Gould had drawn the sword, so now,
the times being changed, Charles Gould had flung the
silver of the San Tomé into the fray. The Inglez of
Sulaco, the "Costaguana Englishman" of the third
generation, was as far from being a political intriguer as
his uncle from a revolutionary swashbuckler. Springing
from the instinctive uprightness of their natures
their action was reasoned. They saw an opportunity
and used the weapon to hand.

Charles Gould's position — a commanding position in
the background of that attempt to retrieve the peace
and the credit of the Republic — was very clear. At the
beginning he had had to accommodate himself to existing

circumstances of corruption so naïvely brazen as to
disarm the hate of a man courageous enough not to be
afraid of its irresponsible potency to ruin everything it
touched. It seemed to him too contemptible for hot
anger even. He made use of it with a cold, fearless
scorn, manifested rather than concealed by the forms
of stony courtesy which did away with much of the
ignominy of the situation. At bottom, perhaps, he
suffered from it, for he was not a man of cowardly
illusions, but he refused to discuss the ethical view with
his wife. He trusted that, though a little disenchanted,
she would be intelligent enough to understand that his
character safeguarded the enterprise of their lives
as much or more than his policy. The extraordinary
development of the mine had put a great power into his
hands. To feel that prosperity always at the mercy of
unintelligent greed had grown irksome to him. To
Mrs. Gould it was humiliating. At any rate, it was
dangerous. In the confidential communications passing
between Charles Gould, the King of Sulaco, and the
head of the silver and steel interests far away in California,
the conviction was growing that any attempt
made by men of education and integrity ought to be
discreetly supported. "You may tell your friend
Avellanos that I think so," Mr. Holroyd had written
at the proper moment from his inviolable sanctuary
within the eleven-storey high factory of great affairs.
And shortly afterwards, with a credit opened by the
Third Southern Bank (located next door but one to the
Holroyd Building), the Ribierist party in Costaguana
took a practical shape under the eye of the administrator
of the San Tomé mine. And Don José, the hereditary
friend of the Gould family, could say: "Perhaps,
my dear Carlos, I shall not have believed in vain."

2. CHAPTER TWO

AFTER another armed struggle, decided by Montero's
victory of Rio Seco, had been added to the tale of civil
wars, the "honest men," as Don José called them, could
breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The
Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of that regeneration,
the passionate desire and hope for which had
been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don José
Avellanos.

And when it was suddenly — and not quite unexpectedly
— endangered by that "brute Montero," it was a
passionate indignation that gave him a new lease of
life, as it were. Already, at the time of the President-
Dictator's visit to Sulaco, Moraga had sounded a note
of warning from Sta. Marta about the War Minister.
Montero and his brother made the subject of an earnest
talk between the Dictator-President and the Nestor-
inspirer of the party. But Don Vincente, a doctor of
philosophy from the Cordova University, seemed to
have an exaggerated respect for military ability, whose
mysteriousness — since it appeared to be altogether
independent of intellect — imposed upon his imagination.
The victor of Rio Seco was a popular hero. His
services were so recent that the President-Dictator
quailed before the obvious charge of political ingratitude.
Great regenerating transactions were being
initiated — the fresh loan, a new railway line, a vast
colonization scheme. Anything that could unsettle
the public opinion in the capital was to be avoided.
Don José bowed to these arguments and tried to dismiss

from his mind the gold-laced portent in boots, and with
a sabre, made meaningless now at last, he hoped, in the
new order of things.

Less than six months after the President-Dictator's
visit, Sulaco learned with stupefaction of the military
revolt in the name of national honour. The Minister
of War, in a barrack-square allocution to the officers of
the artillery regiment he had been inspecting, had
declared the national honour sold to foreigners. The
Dictator, by his weak compliance with the demands of
the European powers — for the settlement of long outstanding
money claims — had showed himself unfit to
rule. A letter from Moraga explained afterwards that
the initiative, and even the very text, of the incendiary
allocution came, in reality, from the other Montero, the
ex-guerillero, the Commandante de Plaza. The energetic
treatment of Dr. Monygham, sent for in haste "to
the mountain," who came galloping three leagues in the
dark, saved Don José from a dangerous attack of
jaundice.

After getting over the shock, Don José refused to let
himself be prostrated. Indeed, better news succeeded
at first. The revolt in the capital had been suppressed
after a night of fighting in the streets. Unfortunately,
both the Monteros had been able to make their escape
south, to their native province of Entre-Montes. The
hero of the forest march, the victor of Rio Seco, had
been received with frenzied acclamations in Nicoya, the
provincial capital. The troops in garrison there had
gone to him in a body. The brothers were organizing
an army, gathering malcontents, sending emissaries
primed with patriotic lies to the people, and with
promises of plunder to the wild llaneros. Even a
Monterist press had come into existence, speaking
oracularly of the secret promises of support given by

"our great sister Republic of the North" against the
sinister land-grabbing designs of European powers,
cursing in every issue the "miserable Ribiera," who
had plotted to deliver his country, bound hand and foot,
for a prey to foreign speculators.

Sulaco, pastoral and sleepy, with its opulent Campo
and the rich silver mine, heard the din of arms fitfully
in its fortunate isolation. It was nevertheless in the
very forefront of the defence with men and money; but
the very rumours reached it circuitously — from abroad
even, so much was it cut off from the rest of the Republic,
not only by natural obstacles, but also by the
vicissitudes of the war. The Monteristos were besieging
Cayta, an important postal link. The overland
couriers ceased to come across the mountains, and
no muleteer would consent to risk the journey at last;
even Bonifacio on one occasion failed to return from
Sta. Marta, either not daring to start, or perhaps
captured by the parties of the enemy raiding the
country between the Cordillera and the capital. Monterist
publications, however, found their way into the
province, mysteriously enough; and also Monterist
emissaries preaching death to aristocrats in the villages
and towns of the Campo. Very early, at the beginning
of the trouble, Hernandez, the bandit, had proposed
(through the agency of an old priest of a village in the
wilds) to deliver two of them to the Ribierist authorities
in Tonoro. They had come to offer him a free
pardon and the rank of colonel from General Montero
in consideration of joining the rebel army with his
mounted band. No notice was taken at the time of the
proposal. It was joined, as an evidence of good faith,
to a petition praying the Sulaco Assembly for permission
to enlist, with all his followers, in the forces
being then raised in Sulaco for the defence of the Five-

Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like
everything else, had found its way into Don José's
hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of
dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some
village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting
of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the
side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the
dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamp-
light of the Gould drawing-room over the document
containing the fierce and yet humble appeal of the man
against the blind and stupid barbarity turning an honest
ranchero into a bandit. A postscript of the priest
stated that, but for being deprived of his liberty for
ten days, he had been treated with humanity and the
respect due to his sacred calling. He had been, it appears,
confessing and absolving the chief and most of
the band, and he guaranteed the sincerity of their good
disposition. He had distributed heavy penances, no
doubt in the way of litanies and fasts; but he argued
shrewdly that it would be difficult for them to make
their peace with God durably till they had made peace
with men.

Never before, perhaps, had Hernandez's head been
in less jeopardy than when he petitioned humbly for
permission to buy a pardon for himself and his gang of
deserters by armed service. He could range afar from
the waste lands protecting his fastness, unchecked, because
there were no troops left in the whole province.
The usual garrison of Sulaco had gone south to the
war, with its brass band playing the Bolivar march on
the bridge of one of the O.S.N. Company's steamers.
The great family coaches drawn up along the shore of the
harbour were made to rock on the high leathern springs
by the enthusiasm of the señoras and the señoritas
standing up to wave their lace handkerchiefs, as lighter

after lighter packed full of troops left the end of the
jetty.

Nostromo directed the embarkation, under the super-
intendendence of Captain Mitchell, red-faced in the
sun, conspicuous in a white waistcoat, representing the
allied and anxious goodwill of all the material interests
of civilization. General Barrios, who commanded the
troops, assured Don José on parting that in three weeks
he would have Montero in a wooden cage drawn by
three pair of oxen ready for a tour through all the towns
of the Republic.

"And then, señora," he continued, baring his curly
iron-grey head to Mrs. Gould in her landau — "and
then, señora, we shall convert our swords into ploughshares
and grow rich. Even I, myself, as soon as this
little business is settled, shall open a fundacion on some
land I have on the llanos and try to make a little money
in peace and quietness. Señora, you know, all Costaguana
knows — what do I say? — this whole South
American continent knows, that Pablo Barrios has had
his fill of military glory."

Charles Gould was not present at the anxious and
patriotic send-off. It was not his part to see the soldiers
embark. It was neither his part, nor his inclination,
nor his policy. His part, his inclination, and his policy
were united in one endeavour to keep unchecked the
flow of treasure he had started single-handed from the
re-opened scar in the flank of the mountain. As the
mine developed he had trained for himself some native
help. There were foremen, artificers and clerks, with
Don Pépé for the gobernador of the mining population.
For the rest his shoulders alone sustained the whole
weight of the "Imperium in Imperio," the great Gould
Concession whose mere shadow had been enough to
crush the life out of his father.

Mrs. Gould had no silver mine to look after. In the
general life of the Gould Concession she was represented
by her two lieutenants, the doctor and the priest, but
she fed her woman's love of excitement on events whose
significance was purified to her by the fire of her
imaginative purpose. On that day she had brought the
Avellanos, father and daughter, down to the harbour
with her.

Amongst his other activities of that stirring time,
Don José had become the chairman of a Patriotic Committee
which had armed a great proportion of troops in
the Sulaco command with an improved model of a military
rifle. It had been just discarded for something
still more deadly by one of the great European powers.
How much of the market-price for second-hand weapons
was covered by the voluntary contributions of the
principal families, and how much came from those
funds Don José was understood to command abroad,
remained a secret which he alone could have disclosed;
but the Ricos, as the populace called them, had contributed
under the pressure of their Nestor's eloquence.
Some of the more enthusiastic ladies had been moved to
bring offerings of jewels into the hands of the man who
was the life and soul of the party.

There were moments when both his life and his soul
seemed overtaxed by so many years of undiscouraged
belief in regeneration. He appeared almost inanimate,
sitting rigidly by the side of Mrs. Gould in the landau,
with his fine, old, clean-shaven face of a uniform tint as
if modelled in yellow wax, shaded by a soft felt hat,
the dark eyes looking out fixedly. Antonia, the
beautiful Antonia, as Miss Avellanos was called in
Sulaco, leaned back, facing them; and her full figure, the
grave oval of her face with full red lips, made her look
more mature than Mrs. Gould, with her mobile expression

and small, erect person under a slightly swaying
sunshade.

Whenever possible Antonia attended her father; her
recognized devotion weakened the shocking effect of her
scorn for the rigid conventions regulating the life of
Spanish-American girlhood. And, in truth, she was no
longer girlish. It was said that she often wrote State
papers from her father's dictation, and was allowed to
read all the books in his library. At the receptions —
where the situation was saved by the presence of a very
decrepit old lady (a relation of the Corbelàns), quite
deaf and motionless in an armchair — Antonia could
hold her own in a discussion with two or three men at a
time. Obviously she was not the girl to be content
with peeping through a barred window at a cloaked
figure of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite —
which is the correct form of Costaguana courtship. It
was generally believed that with her foreign upbringing
and foreign ideas the learned and proud Antonia would
never marry — unless, indeed, she married a foreigner
from Europe or North America, now that Sulaco seemed
on the point of being invaded by all the world.

3. CHAPTER THREE

WHEN General Barrios stopped to address Mrs.
Gould, Antonia raised negligently her hand holding an
open fan, as if to shade from the sun her head, wrapped
in a light lace shawl. The clear gleam of her blue eyes
gliding behind the black fringe of eyelashes paused for a
moment upon her father, then travelled further to the
figure of a young man of thirty at most, of medium
height, rather thick-set, wearing a light overcoat.
Bearing down with the open palm of his hand upon the
knob of a flexible cane, he had been looking on from a
distance; but directly he saw himself noticed, he approached
quietly and put his elbow over the door of the
landau.

The shirt collar, cut low in the neck, the big bow of
his cravat, the style of his clothing, from the round hat
to the varnished shoes, suggested an idea of French
elegance; but otherwise he was the very type of a fair
Spanish creole. The fluffy moustache and the short,
curly, golden beard did not conceal his lips, rosy, fresh,
almost pouting in expression. His full, round face was
of that warm, healthy creole white which is never
tanned by its native sunshine. Martin Decoud was
seldom exposed to the Costaguana sun under which he
was born. His people had been long settled in Paris,
where he had studied law, had dabbled in literature, had
hoped now and then in moments of exaltation to become
a poet like that other foreigner of Spanish blood,
José Maria Herédia. In other moments he had, to pass
the time, condescended to write articles on European

affairs for the Semenario, the principal newspaper in
Sta. Marta, which printed them under the heading
"From our special correspondent," though the authorship
was an open secret. Everybody in Costaguana,
where the tale of compatriots in Europe is jealously
kept, knew that it was "the son Decoud," a talented
young man, supposed to be moving in the higher
spheres of Society. As a matter of fact, he was an idle
boulevardier, in touch with some smart journalists,
made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in
the pleasure haunts of pressmen. This life, whose
dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal
blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by
the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a
Frenchified — but most un-French — cosmopolitanism, in
reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual
superiority. Of his own country he used to say to
his French associates: "Imagine an atmosphere of
opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage
statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing,
intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is
screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and
the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate
of the universe. Of course, government in general, any
government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality
to a discerning mind; but really we Spanish-Americans
do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary intelligence
can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre.
However, these Ribierists, of whom we hear so much
just now, are really trying in their own comical way to
make the country habitable, and even to pay some of
its debts. My friends, you had better write up Señor
Ribiera all you can in kindness to your own bondholders.
Really, if what I am told in my letters is true, there is
some chance for them at last."

And he would explain with railing verve what Don
Vincente Ribiera stood for — a mournful little man oppressed
by his own good intentions, the significance of
battles won, who Montero was (un grotesque vaniteux et
féroce), and the manner of the new loan connected with
railway development, and the colonization of vast
tracts of land in one great financial scheme.

And his French friends would remark that evidently
this little fellow Decoud connaissait la question à fond.
An important Parisian review asked him for an article
on the situation. It was composed in a serious tone and
in a spirit of levity. Afterwards he asked one of his
intimates —

"Have you read my thing about the regeneration of
Costaguana — une bonne blague, hein?"

He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers.
But far from being that he was in danger of remaining a
sort of nondescript dilettante all his life. He had
pushed the habit of universal raillery to a point where it
blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature.
To be suddenly selected for the executive member of
the patriotic small-arms committee of Sulaco seemed to
him the height of the unexpected, one of those fantastic
moves of which only his "dear countrymen" were
capable.

"It's like a tile falling on my head. I —I — executive
member! It's the first I hear of it! What do I know
of military rifles? C'est funambulesque!" he had exclaimed
to his favourite sister; for the Decoud family —
except the old father and mother — used the French
language amongst themselves. "And you should see
the explanatory and confidential letter! Eight pages
of it — no less!"

This letter, in Antonia's handwriting, was signed by
Don José, who appealed to the "young and gifted

Costaguanero" on public grounds, and privately opened
his heart to his talented god-son, a man of wealth and
leisure, with wide relations, and by his parentage and
bringing-up worthy of all confidence.

"Which means," Martin commented, cynically, to
his sister, "that I am not likely to misappropriate
the funds, or go blabbing to our Chargé d'Affaires
here."

The whole thing was being carried out behind the
back of the War Minister, Montero, a mistrusted
member of the Ribiera Government, but difficult to
get rid of at once. He was not to know anything of it
till the troops under Barrios's command had the new
rifle in their hands. The President-Dictator, whose
position was very difficult, was alone in the secret.

"How funny!" commented Martin's sister and confidante;
to which the brother, with an air of best Parisian
blague, had retorted:

"It's immense! The idea of that Chief of the State
engaged, with the help of private citizens, in digging a
mine under his own indispensable War Minister. No!
We are unapproachable!" And he laughed immoderately.

Afterwards his sister was surprised at the earnestness
and ability he displayed in carrying out his mission,
which circumstances made delicate, and his want of
special knowledge rendered difficult. She had never
seen Martin take so much trouble about anything in his
whole life.

"It amuses me," he had explained, briefly. "I am
beset by a lot of swindlers trying to sell all sorts of gas-
pipe weapons. They are charming; they invite me to
expensive luncheons; I keep up their hopes; it's extremely
entertaining. Meanwhile, the real affair is
being carried through in quite another quarter."

When the business was concluded he declared suddenly
his intention of seeing the precious consignment
delivered safely in Sulaco. The whole burlesque business,
he thought, was worth following up to the end.
He mumbled his excuses, tugging at his golden beard,
before the acute young lady who (after the first wide
stare of astonishment) looked at him with narrowed
eyes, and pronounced slowly —

"I believe you want to see Antonia."

"What Antonia?" asked the Costaguana boulevardier,
in a vexed and disdainful tone. He shrugged
his shoulders, and spun round on his heel. His sister
called out after him joyously —

"The Antonia you used to know when she wore her
hair in two plaits down her back."

He had known her some eight years since, shortly before
the Avellanos had left Europe for good, as a tall
girl of sixteen, youthfully austere, and of a character
already so formed that she ventured to treat slightingly
his pose of disabused wisdom. On one occasion, as
though she had lost all patience, she flew out at him
about the aimlessness of his life and the levity of his
opinions. He was twenty then, an only son, spoiled by
his adoring family. This attack disconcerted him so
greatly that he had faltered in his affectation of amused
superiority before that insignificant chit of a school-girl.
But the impression left was so strong that ever since all
the girl friends of his sisters recalled to him Antonia
Avellanos by some faint resemblance, or by the great
force of contrast. It was, he told himself, like a
ridiculous fatality. And, of course, in the news the
Decouds received regularly from Costaguana, the
name of their friends, the Avellanos, cropped up frequently
— the arrest and the abominable treatment of
the ex-Minister, the dangers and hardships endured by

the family, its withdrawal in poverty to Sulaco, the
death of the mother.

The Monterist pronunciamento had taken place before
Martin Decoud reached Costaguana. He came
out in a roundabout way, through Magellan's Straits by
the main line and the West Coast Service of the O.S.N.
Company. His precious consignment arrived just in
time to convert the first feelings of consternation into a
mood of hope and resolution. Publicly he was made
much of by the familias principales. Privately Don
José, still shaken and weak, embraced him with tears
in his eyes.

"You have come out yourself! No less could be expected
from a Decoud. Alas! our worst fears have been
realized," he moaned, affectionately. And again he
hugged his god-son. This was indeed the time for men
of intellect and conscience to rally round the endangered
cause.

It was then that Martin Decoud, the adopted child of
Western Europe, felt the absolute change of atmosphere.
He submitted to being embraced and talked to
without a word. He was moved in spite of himself by
that note of passion and sorrow unknown on the more
refined stage of European politics. But when the tall
Antonia, advancing with her light step in the dimness
of the big bare Sala of the Avellanos house, offered him
her hand (in her emancipated way), and murmured, "I
am glad to see you here, Don Martin," he felt how impossible
it would be to tell these two people that he had
intended to go away by the next month's packet. Don
José, meantime, continued his praises. Every accession
added to public confidence, and, besides, what an
example to the young men at home from the brilliant
defender of the country's regeneration, the worthy expounder
of the party's political faith before the world!

Everybody had read the magnificent article in the
famous Parisian Review. The world was now informed:
and the author's appearance at this moment
was like a public act of faith. Young Decoud felt overcome
by a feeling of impatient confusion. His plan had
been to return by way of the United States through
California, visit Yellowstone Park, see Chicago,
Niagara, have a look at Canada, perhaps make a short
stay in New York, a longer one in Newport, use his
letters of introduction. The pressure of Antonia's hand
was so frank, the tone of her voice was so unexpectedly
unchanged in its approving warmth, that all he found to
say after his low bow was —

"I am inexpressibly grateful for your welcome; but
why need a man be thanked for returning to his native
country? I am sure Doña Antonia does not think so."

"Certainly not, señor," she said, with that perfectly
calm openness of manner which characterized all her
utterances. "But when he returns, as you return, one
may be glad — for the sake of both."

Martin Decoud said nothing of his plans. He not
only never breathed a word of them to any one, but only
a fortnight later asked the mistress of the Casa Gould
(where he had of course obtained admission at once),
leaning forward in his chair with an air of well-bred
familiarity, whether she could not detect in him that
day a marked change — an air, he explained, of more
excellent gravity. At this Mrs. Gould turned her face
full towards him with the silent inquiry of slightly
widened eyes and the merest ghost of a smile, an
habitual movement with her, which was very fascinating
to men by something subtly devoted, finely self-
forgetful in its lively readiness of attention. Because,
Decoud continued imperturbably, he felt no longer
an idle cumberer of the earth. She was, he assured

her, actually beholding at that moment the Journalist
of Sulaco. At once Mrs. Gould glanced towards Antonia,
posed upright in the corner of a high, straight-
backed Spanish sofa, a large black fan waving slowly
against the curves of her fine figure, the tips of crossed
feet peeping from under the hem of the black skirt.
Decoud's eyes also remained fixed there, while in an
undertone he added that Miss Avellanos was quite
aware of his new and unexpected vocation, which in
Costaguana was generally the speciality of half-
educated negroes and wholly penniless lawyers. Then,
confronting with a sort of urbane effrontery Mrs.
Gould's gaze, now turned sympathetically upon himself,
he breathed out the words, "Pro Patria!"

What had happened was that he had all at once
yielded to Don José's pressing entreaties to take the
direction of a newspaper that would "voice the aspirations
of the province." It had been Don José's old and
cherished idea. The necessary plant (on a modest
scale) and a large consignment of paper had been received
from America some time before; the right man
alone was wanted. Even Señor Moraga in Sta. Marta
had not been able to find one, and the matter was now
becoming pressing; some organ was absolutely needed
to counteract the effect of the lies disseminated by the
Monterist press: the atrocious calumnies, the appeals
to the people calling upon them to rise with their knives
in their hands and put an end once for all to the Blancos,
to these Gothic remnants, to these sinister mummies,
these impotent paraliticos, who plotted with foreigners
for the surrender of the lands and the slavery of the
people.

The clamour of this Negro Liberalism frightened
Seńor Avellanos. A newspaper was the only remedy.
And now that the right man had been found in Decoud,

great black letters appeared painted between the windows
above the arcaded ground floor of a house on the
Plaza. It was next to Anzani's great emporium of
boots, silks, ironware, muslins, wooden toys, tiny silver
arms, legs, heads, hearts (for ex-voto offerings), rosaries,
champagne, women's hats, patent medicines, even a few
dusty books in paper covers and mostly in the French
language. The big black letters formed the words,
"Offices of the Porvenir." From these offices a single
folded sheet of Martin's journalism issued three times a
week; and the sleek yellow Anzani prowling in a suit of
ample black and carpet slippers, before the many doors
of his establishment, greeted by a deep, side-long inclination
of his body the Journalist of Sulaco going to and
fro on the business of his august calling.

4. CHAPTER FOUR

PERHAPS it was in the exercise of his calling that he
had come to see the troops depart. The Porvenir of the
day after next would no doubt relate the event, but its
editor, leaning his side against the landau, seemed to
look at nothing. The front rank of the company of
infantry drawn up three deep across the shore end of the
jetty when pressed too close would bring their bayonets
to the charge ferociously, with an awful rattle; and then
the crowd of spectators swayed back bodily, even under
the noses of the big white mules. Notwithstanding the
great multitude there was only a low, muttering noise;
the dust hung in a brown haze, in which the horsemen,
wedged in the throng here and there, towered from the
hips upwards, gazing all one way over the heads. Almost
every one of them had mounted a friend, who
steadied himself with both hands grasping his shoulders
from behind; and the rims of their hats touching, made
like one disc sustaining the cones of two pointed crowns
with a double face underneath. A hoarse mozo would
bawl out something to an acquaintance in the ranks, or
a woman would shriek suddenly the word Adios!
followed by the Christian name of a man.

General Barrios, in a shabby blue tunic and white
peg-top trousers falling upon strange red boots, kept his
head uncovered and stooped slightly, propping himself
up with a thick stick. No! He had earned enough
military glory to satiate any man, he insisted to Mrs.
Gould, trying at the same time to put an air of gallantry
into his attitude. A few jetty hairs hung sparsely from

his upper lip, he had a salient nose, a thin, long jaw, and
a black silk patch over one eye. His other eye, small
and deep-set, twinkled erratically in all directions,
aimlessly affable. The few European spectators, all
men, who had naturally drifted into the neighbourhood
of the Gould carriage, betrayed by the solemnity of their
faces their impression that the general must have had too
much punch (Swedish punch, imported in bottles by
Anzani) at the Amarilla Club before he had started with
his Staff on a furious ride to the harbour. But Mrs.
Gould bent forward, self-possessed, and declared her
conviction that still more glory awaited the general in
the near future.

"Señora!" he remonstrated, with great feeling, "in
the name of God, reflect! How can there be any glory
for a man like me in overcoming that bald-headed
embustero with the dyed moustaches?"

Pablo Ignacio Barrios, son of a village alcalde, general
of division, commanding in chief the Occidental Military
district, did not frequent the higher society of the
town. He preferred the unceremonious gatherings of
men where he could tell jaguar-hunt stories, boast of
his powers with the lasso, with which he could perform
extremely difficult feats of the sort "no married man
should attempt," as the saying goes amongst the
llaneros; relate tales of extraordinary night rides, encounters
with wild bulls, struggles with crocodiles,
adventures in the great forests, crossings of swollen
rivers. And it was not mere boastfulness that prompted
the general's reminiscences, but a genuine love of that
wild life which he had led in his young days before he
turned his back for ever on the thatched roof of the
parental tolderia in the woods. Wandering away as
far as Mexico he had fought against the French by the
side (as he said) of Juarez, and was the only military

man of Costaguana who had ever encountered European
troops in the field. That fact shed a great lustre upon
his name till it became eclipsed by the rising star of
Montero. All his life he had been an inveterate gambler.
He alluded himself quite openly to the current
story how once, during some campaign (when in command
of a brigade), he had gambled away his horses,
pistols, and accoutrements, to the very epaulettes,
playing monte with his colonels the night before the
battle. Finally, he had sent under escort his sword
(a presentation sword, with a gold hilt) to the town in
the rear of his position to be immediately pledged for
five hundred pesetas with a sleepy and frightened
shop-keeper. By daybreak he had lost the last of that
money, too, when his only remark, as he rose calmly,
was, "Now let us go and fight to the death." From
that time he had become aware that a general could
lead his troops into battle very well with a simple stick
in his hand. "It has been my custom ever since," he
would say.

He was always overwhelmed with debts; even during
the periods of splendour in his varied fortunes of a
Costaguana general, when he held high military commands,
his gold-laced uniforms were almost always in
pawn with some tradesman. And at last, to avoid the
incessant difficulties of costume caused by the anxious
lenders, he had assumed a disdain of military trappings,
an eccentric fashion of shabby old tunics, which had
become like a second nature. But the faction Barrios
joined needed to fear no political betrayal. He was
too much of a real soldier for the ignoble traffic of buying
and selling victories. A member of the foreign
diplomatic body in Sta. Marta had once passed a
judgment upon him: "Barrios is a man of perfect
honesty and even of some talent for war, mais il manque

de tenue." After the triumph of the Ribierists he had
obtained the reputedly lucrative Occidental command,
mainly through the exertions of his creditors (the Sta.
Marta shopkeepers, all great politicians), who moved
heaven and earth in his interest publicly, and privately
besieged Señor Moraga, the influential agent of the
San Tomé mine, with the exaggerated lamentations
that if the general were passed over, "We shall all be
ruined." An incidental but favourable mention of his
name in Mr. Gould senior's long correspondence with
his son had something to do with his appointment, too;
but most of all undoubtedly his established political
honesty. No one questioned the personal bravery of
the Tiger-killer, as the populace called him. He was,
however, said to be unlucky in the field — but this was
to be the beginning of an era of peace. The soldiers
liked him for his humane temper, which was like a
strange and precious flower unexpectedly blooming on
the hotbed of corrupt revolutions; and when he rode
slowly through the streets during some military display,
the contemptuous good humour of his solitary eye roaming
over the crowds extorted the acclamations of the
populace. The women of that class especially seemed
positively fascinated by the long drooping nose, the
peaked chin, the heavy lower lip, the black silk eye-
patch and band slanting rakishly over the forehead.
His high rank always procured an audience of Caballeros
for his sporting stories, which he detailed very
well with a simple, grave enjoyment. As to the society
of ladies, it was irksome by the restraints it imposed
without any equivalent, as far as he could see. He had
not, perhaps, spoken three times on the whole to Mrs.
Gould since he had taken up his high command; but he
had observed her frequently riding with the Señor
Administrador, and had pronounced that there was
more sense in her little bridle-hand than in all the female
heads in Sulaco. His impulse had been to be very
civil on parting to a woman who did not wobble in the
saddle, and happened to be the wife of a personality
very important to a man always short of money. He
even pushed his attentions so far as to desire the aide-de-
camp at his side (a thick-set, short captain with a Tartar
physiognomy) to bring along a corporal with a file of
men in front of the carriage, lest the crowd in its backward
surges should "incommode the mules of the
señora." Then, turning to the small knot of silent
Europeans looking on within earshot, he raised his
voice protectingly —

"Señores, have no apprehension. Go on quietly
making your Ferro Carril — your railways, your telegraphs.
Your — There's enough wealth in Costaguana
to pay for everything — or else you would not be
here. Ha! ha! Don't mind this little picardia of my
friend Montero. In a little while you shall behold his
dyed moustaches through the bars of a strong wooden
cage. Si, señores! Fear nothing, develop the country,
work, work!"

The little group of engineers received this exhortation
without a word, and after waving his hand at them
loftily, he addressed himself again to Mrs. Gould —

"That is what Don José says we must do. Be enterprising!
Work! Grow rich! To put Montero in a
cage is my work; and when that insignificant piece of
business is done, then, as Don José wishes us, we shall
grow rich, one and all, like so many Englishmen, because
it is money that saves a country, and —"

But a young officer in a very new uniform, hurrying
up from the direction of the jetty, interrupted his
interpretation of Señor Avellanos's ideals. The general
made a movement of impatience; the other went on

talking to him insistently, with an air of respect. The
horses of the Staff had been embarked, the steamer's
gig was awaiting the general at the boat steps; and
Barrios, after a fierce stare of his one eye, began to take
leave. Don José roused himself for an appropriate
phrase pronounced mechanically. The terrible strain
of hope and fear was telling on him, and he seemed to
husband the last sparks of his fire for those oratorical
efforts of which even the distant Europe was to hear.
Antonia, her red lips firmly closed, averted her head
behind the raised fan; and young Decoud, though he
felt the girl's eyes upon him, gazed away persistently,
hooked on his elbow, with a scornful and complete detachment.
Mrs. Gould heroically concealed her dismay
at the appearance of men and events so remote
from her racial conventions, dismay too deep to be
uttered in words even to her husband. She understood
his voiceless reserve better now. Their confidential
intercourse fell, not in moments of privacy, but precisely
in public, when the quick meeting of their glances
would comment upon some fresh turn of events. She
had gone to his school of uncompromising silence, the
only one possible, since so much that seemed shocking,
weird, and grotesque in the working out of their purposes
had to be accepted as normal in this country.
Decidedly, the stately Antonia looked more mature and
infinitely calm; but she would never have known how
to reconcile the sudden sinkings of her heart with an
amiable mobility of expression.

Mrs. Gould smiled a good-bye at Barrios, nodded
round to the Europeans (who raised their hats simultaneously)
with an engaging invitation, "I hope to
see you all presently, at home"; then said nervously to
Decoud, "Get in, Don Martin," and heard him mutter
to himself in French, as he opened the carriage door,

"Le sort en est jeté." She heard him with a sort of
exasperation. Nobody ought to have known better
than himself that the first cast of dice had been already
thrown long ago in a most desperate game. Distant
acclamations, words of command yelled out, and a roll
of drums on the jetty greeted the departing general.
Something like a slight faintness came over her, and she
looked blankly at Antonia's still face, wondering what
would happen to Charley if that absurd man failed.
"A la casa, Ignacio," she cried at the motionless broad
back of the coachman, who gathered the reins without
haste, mumbling to himself under his breath, "Si,
la casa. Si, si niña."

The carriage rolled noiselessly on the soft track, the
shadows fell long on the dusty little plain interspersed
with dark bushes, mounds of turned-up earth, low
wooden buildings with iron roofs of the Railway
Company; the sparse row of telegraph poles strode
obliquely clear of the town, bearing a single, almost invisible
wire far into the great campo — like a slender,
vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a
moment of peace to enter and twine itself about the
weary heart of the land.

The café window of the Albergo d'ltalia Una was full
of sunburnt, whiskered faces of railway men. But at
the other end of the house, the end of the Signori
Inglesi, old Giorgio, at the door with one of his girls on
each side, bared his bushy head, as white as the snows of
Higuerota. Mrs. Gould stopped the carriage. She
seldom failed to speak to her protégé; moreover, the
excitement, the heat, and the dust had made her
thirsty. She asked for a glass of water. Giorgio sent
the children indoors for it, and approached with pleasure
expressed in his whole rugged countenance. It was not
often that he had occasion to see his benefactress,

who was also an Englishwoman — another title to his
regard. He offered some excuses for his wife. It
was a bad day with her; her oppressions — he tapped his
own broad chest. She could not move from her chair
that day.

Decoud, ensconced in the corner of his seat, observed
gloomily Mrs. Gould's old revolutionist, then, offhand —

"Well, and what do you think of it all, Garibaldino?"

Old Giorgio, looking at him with some curiosity, said
civilly that the troops had marched very well. One-
eyed Barrios and his officers had done wonders with the
recruits in a short time. Those Indios, only caught the
other day, had gone swinging past in double quick time,
like bersaglieri; they looked well fed, too, and had whole
uniforms. "Uniforms!" he repeated with a half-smile
of pity. A look of grim retrospect stole over his piercing,
steady eyes. It had been otherwise in his time
when men fought against tyranny, in the forests of
Brazil, or on the plains of Uruguay, starving on half-
raw beef without salt, half naked, with often only a
knife tied to a stick for a weapon. "And yet we
used to prevail against the oppressor," he concluded,
proudly.

His animation fell; the slight gesture of his hand
expressed discouragement; but he added that he had
asked one of the sergeants to show him the new rifle.
There was no such weapon in his fighting days; and if
Barrios could not —

"Yes, yes," broke in Don José, almost trembling
with eagerness. "We are safe. The good Señor Viola
is a man of experience. Extremely deadly — is it not
so? You have accomplished your mission admirably,
my dear Martin."

Decoud, lolling back moodily, contemplated old
Viola.

"Ah! Yes. A man of experience. But who are
you for, really, in your heart?"

Mrs. Gould leaned over to the children. Linda had
brought out a glass of water on a tray, with extreme
care; Giselle presented her with a bunch of flowers
gathered hastily.

"For the people," declared old Viola, sternly.

"We are all for the people — in the end."

"Yes," muttered old Viola, savagely. "And meantime
they fight for you. Blind. Esclavos!"

At that moment young Scarfe of the railway staff
emerged from the door of the part reserved for the
Signori Inglesi. He had come down to headquarters
from somewhere up the line on a light engine, and had
had just time to get a bath and change his clothes. He
was a nice boy, and Mrs. Gould welcomed him.

"It's a delightful surprise to see you, Mrs. Gould.
I've just come down. Usual luck. Missed everything,
of course. This show is just over, and I hear there has
been a great dance at Don Juste Lopez's last night. Is
it true?"

"The young patricians," Decoud began suddenly in
his precise English, "have indeed been dancing before
they started off to the war with the Great Pompey."

Young Scarfe stared, astounded. "You haven't
met before," Mrs. Gould intervened. "Mr. Decoud —
Mr. Scarfe."

"Ah! But we are not going to Pharsalia," protested
Don José, with nervous haste, also in English.
"You should not jest like this, Martin."

Antonia's breast rose and fell with a deeper breath.
The young engineer was utterly in the dark. "Great
what?" he muttered, vaguely.

"Luckily, Montero is not a Cæsar," Decoud continued.
"Not the two Monteros put together would

make a decent parody of a Cæsar." He crossed his
arms on his breast, looking at Señor Avellanos, who
had returned to his immobility. "It is only you, Don
José, who are a genuine old Roman — vir Romanus —
eloquent and inflexible."

Since he had heard the name of Montero pronounced,
young Scarfe had been eager to express his simple feelings.
In a loud and youthful tone he hoped that this
Montero was going to be licked once for all and done
with. There was no saying what would happen to the
railway if the revolution got the upper hand. Perhaps
it would have to be abandoned. It would not be the
first railway gone to pot in Costaguana. "You know,
it's one of their so-called national things," he ran on,
wrinkling up his nose as if the word had a suspicious
flavour to his profound experience of South American
affairs. And, of course, he chatted with animation, it
had been such an immense piece of luck for him at his
age to get appointed on the staff "of a big thing like
that — don't you know." It would give him the pull
over a lot of chaps all through life, he asserted. "Therefore
— down with Montero! Mrs. Gould." His artless
grin disappeared slowly before the unanimous gravity
of the faces turned upon him from the carriage; only
that "old chap," Don José, presenting a motionless,
waxy profile, stared straight on as if deaf. Scarfe did
not know the Avellanos very well. They did not give
balls, and Antonia never appeared at a ground-floor
window, as some other young ladies used to do attended
by elder women, to chat with the caballeros on
horseback in the Calle. The stares of these creoles did
not matter much; but what on earth had come to Mrs.
Gould? She said, "Go on, Ignacio," and gave him a
slow inclination of the head. He heard a short laugh
from that round-faced, Frenchified fellow. He coloured

up to the eyes, and stared at Giorgio Viola, who had
fallen back with the children, hat in hand.

"I shall want a horse presently," he said with some
asperity to the old man.

"Si, señor. There are plenty of horses," murmured
the Garibaldino, smoothing absently, with his brown
hands, the two heads, one dark with bronze glints, the
other fair with a coppery ripple, of the two girls by his
side. The returning stream of sightseers raised a
great dust on the road. Horsemen noticed the group.
"Go to your mother," he said. "They are growing up
as I am growing older, and there is nobody —"

He looked at the young engineer and stopped, as if
awakened from a dream; then, folding his arms on his
breast, took up his usual position, leaning back in the
doorway with an upward glance fastened on the white
shoulder of Higuerota far away.

In the carriage Martin Decoud, shifting his position
as though he could not make himself comfortable, muttered
as he swayed towards Antonia, "I suppose you
hate me." Then in a loud voice he began to congratulate
Don José upon all the engineers being convinced
Ribierists. The interest of all those foreigners
was gratifying. "You have heard this one. He is an
enlightened well-wisher. It is pleasant to think that
the prosperity of Costaguana is of some use to the
world."

"He is very young," Mrs. Gould remarked, quietly.

"And so very wise for his age," retorted Decoud.
"But here we have the naked truth from the mouth of
that child. You are right, Don José. The natural
treasures of Costaguana are of importance to the progressive
Europe represented by this youth, just as three
hundred years ago the wealth of our Spanish fathers
was a serious object to the rest of Europe — as represented

by the bold buccaneers. There is a curse of
futility upon our character: Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, chivalry and materialism, high-sounding sentiments
and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea
and a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption.
We convulsed a continent for our independence only to
become the passive prey of a democratic parody, the
helpless victims of scoundrels and cut-throats, our
institutions a mockery, our laws a farce — a Guzman
Bento our master! And we have sunk so low that when
a man like you has awakened our conscience, a stupid
barbarian of a Montero — Great Heavens! a Montero! —
becomes a deadly danger, and an ignorant, boastful
Indio, like Barrios, is our defender."

But Don José, disregarding the general indictment as
though he had not heard a word of it, took up the defence
of Barrios. The man was competent enough for
his special task in the plan of campaign. It consisted
in an offensive movement, with Cayta as base, upon the
flank of the Revolutionist forces advancing from the
south against Sta. Marta, which was covered by another
army with the President-Dictator in its midst. Don
José became quite animated with a great flow of speech,
bending forward anxiously under the steady eyes of his
daughter. Decoud, as if silenced by so much ardour,
did not make a sound. The bells of the city were striking
the hour of Oracion when the carriage rolled under
the old gateway facing the harbour like a shapeless
monument of leaves and stones. The rumble of wheels
under the sonorous arch was traversed by a strange,
piercing shriek, and Decoud, from his back seat, had a
view of the people behind the carriage trudging along
the road outside, all turning their heads, in sombreros
and rebozos, to look at a locomotive which rolled
quickly out of sight behind Giorgio Viola's house, under

a white trail of steam that seemed to vanish in the
breathless, hysterically prolonged scream of warlike
triumph. And it was all like a fleeting vision, the
shrieking ghost of a railway engine fleeing across the
frame of the archway, behind the startled movement
of the people streaming back from a military spectacle
with silent footsteps on the dust of the road. It was a
material train returning from the Campo to the palisaded
yards. The empty cars rolled lightly on the
single track; there was no rumble of wheels, no tremor
of the ground. The engine-driver, running past the
Casa Viola with the salute of an uplifted arm, checked
his speed smartly before entering the yard; and when
the ear-splitting screech of the steam-whistle for the
brakes had stopped, a series of hard, battering shocks,
mingled with the clanking of chain-couplings, made a
tumult of blows and shaken fetters under the vault of
the gate.

5. CHAPTER FIVE

THE Gould carriage was the first to return from the
harbour to the empty town. On the ancient pavement,
laid out in patterns, sunk into ruts and holes, the portly
Ignacio, mindful of the springs of the Parisian-built
landau, had pulled up to a walk, and Decoud in his
corner contemplated moodily the inner aspect of the
gate. The squat turreted sides held up between them
a mass of masonry with bunches of grass growing at the
top, and a grey, heavily scrolled, armorial shield of stone
above the apex of the arch with the arms of Spain nearly
smoothed out as if in readiness for some new device
typical of the impending progress.

The explosive noise of the railway trucks seemed to
augment Decoud's irritation. He muttered something
to himself, then began to talk aloud in curt, angry
phrases thrown at the silence of the two women. They
did not look at him at all; while Don José, with his semi-
translucent, waxy complexion, overshadowed by the
soft grey hat, swayed a little to the jolts of the carriage
by the side of Mrs. Gould.

"This sound puts a new edge on a very old
truth."

Decoud spoke in French, perhaps because of Ignacio
on the box above him; the old coachman, with his broad
back filling a short, silver-braided jacket, had a big
pair of ears, whose thick rims stood well away from his
cropped head.

"Yes, the noise outside the city wall is new, but the
principle is old."

He ruminated his discontent for a while, then began
afresh with a sidelong glance at Antonia —

"No, but just imagine our forefathers in morions and
corselets drawn up outside this gate, and a band of
adventurers just landed from their ships in the harbour
there. Thieves, of course. Speculators, too. Their
expeditions, each one, were the speculations of grave
and reverend persons in England. That is history, as
that absurd sailor Mitchell is always saying."

"Mitchell's arrangements for the embarkation of the
troops were excellent!" exclaimed Don José.

"That! — that! oh, that's really the work of that
Genoese seaman! But to return to my noises; there
used to be in the old days the sound of trumpets outside
that gate. War trumpets! I'm sure they were trumpets.
I have read somewhere that Drake, who was
the greatest of these men, used to dine alone in his
cabin on board ship to the sound of trumpets. In
those days this town was full of wealth. Those men
came to take it. Now the whole land is like a treasure-
house, and all these people are breaking into it, whilst
we are cutting each other's throats. The only thing
that keeps them out is mutual jealousy. But they'll
come to an agreement some day — and by the time we've
settled our quarrels and become decent and honourable,
there'll be nothing left for us. It has always been the
same. We are a wonderful people, but it has always
been our fate to be" — he did not say "robbed," but
added, after a pause — "exploited!"

Mrs. Gould said, "Oh, this is unjust!" And Antonia
interjected, "Don't answer him, Emilia. He is attacking
me."

"You surely do not think I was attacking Don Carlos!"
Decoud answered.

And then the carriage stopped before the door of the

Casa Gould. The young man offered his hand to the
ladies. They went in first together; Don José walked
by the side of Decoud, and the gouty old porter tottered
after them with some light wraps on his arm.

Don José slipped his hand under the arm of the
journalist of Sulaco.

"The Porvenir must have a long and confident article
upon Barrios and the irresistibleness of his army of
Cayta! The moral effect should be kept up in the
country. We must cable encouraging extracts to
Europe and the United States to maintain a favourable
impression abroad."

Decoud muttered, "Oh, yes, we must comfort our
friends, the speculators."

The long open gallery was in shadow, with its screen
of plants in vases along the balustrade, holding out
motionless blossoms, and all the glass doors of the
reception-rooms thrown open. A jingle of spurs died
out at the further end.

Basilio, standing aside against the wall, said in a soft
tone to the passing ladies, "The Señor Administrador is
just back from the mountain."

In the great sala, with its groups of ancient Spanish
and modern European furniture making as if different
centres under the high white spread of the ceiling, the
silver and porcelain of the tea-service gleamed among
a cluster of dwarf chairs, like a bit of a lady's
boudoir, putting in a note of feminine and intimate
delicacy.

Don José in his rocking-chair placed his hat on his
lap, and Decoud walked up and down the whole length
of the room, passing between tables loaded with knickknacks
and almost disappearing behind the high backs
of leathern sofas. He was thinking of the angry face of
Antonia; he was confident that he would make his

peace with her. He had not stayed in Sulaco to quarrel
with Antonia.

Martin Decoud was angry with himself. All he saw
and heard going on around him exasperated the preconceived
views of his European civilization. To
contemplate revolutions from the distance of the
Parisian Boulevards was quite another matter. Here
on the spot it was not possible to dismiss their tragic
comedy with the expression, "Quelle farce!"

The reality of the political action, such as it was,
seemed closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia's
belief in the cause. Its crudeness hurt his feelings. He
was surprised at his own sensitiveness.

"I suppose I am more of a Costaguanero than I would
have believed possible," he thought to himself.

His disdain grew like a reaction of his scepticism
against the action into which he was forced by his
infatuation for Antonia. He soothed himself by saying
he was not a patriot, but a lover.

The ladies came in bareheaded, and Mrs. Gould sank
low before the little tea-table. Antonia took up her
usual place at the reception hour — the corner of a
leathern couch, with a rigid grace in her pose and a fan
in her hand. Decoud, swerving from the straight line of
his march, came to lean over the high back of her seat.

For a long time he talked into her ear from behind,
softly, with a half smile and an air of apologetic familiarity.
Her fan lay half grasped on her knees. She
never looked at him. His rapid utterance grew more
and more insistent and caressing. At last he ventured
a slight laugh.

"No, really. You must forgive me. One must be
serious sometimes." He paused. She turned her
head a little; her blue eyes glided slowly towards him,
slightly upwards, mollified and questioning.

"You can't think I am serious when I call Montero a
gran' bestia every second day in the Porvenir? That
is not a serious occupation. No occupation is serious,
not even when a bullet through the heart is the penalty
of failure!"

Her hand closed firmly on her fan.

"Some reason, you understand, I mean some sense,
may creep into thinking; some glimpse of truth. I
mean some effective truth, for which there is no room
in politics or journalism. I happen to have said what
I thought. And you are angry! If you do me the
kindness to think a little you will see that I spoke like a
patriot."

She opened her red lips for the first time, not unkindly.

"Yes, but you never see the aim. Men must be used
as they are. I suppose nobody is really disinterested,
unless, perhaps, you, Don Martin."

"God forbid! It's the last thing I should like you to
believe of me." He spoke lightly, and paused.

She began to fan herself with a slow movement without
raising her hand. After a time he whispered passionately
—

"Antonia!"

She smiled, and extended her hand after the English
manner towards Charles Gould, who was bowing before
her; while Decoud, with his elbows spread on the back
of the sofa, dropped his eyes and murmured, "Bonjour."

The Señor Administrador of the San Tomé mine bent
over his wife for a moment. They exchanged a few
words, of which only the phrase, "The greatest enthusiasm,"
pronounced by Mrs. Gould, could be heard.

"Yes," Decoud began in a murmur. "Even he!"

"This is sheer calumny," said Antonia, not very
severely.

"You just ask him to throw his mine into the melting-
pot for the great cause," Decoud whispered.

Don José had raised his voice. He rubbed his hands
cheerily. The excellent aspect of the troops and the
great quantity of new deadly rifles on the shoulders of
those brave men seemed to fill him with an ecstatic
confidence.

Charles Gould, very tall and thin before his chair,
listened, but nothing could be discovered in his face
except a kind and deferential attention.

Meantime, Antonia had risen, and, crossing the
room, stood looking out of one of the three long windows
giving on the street. Decoud followed her. The
window was thrown open, and he leaned against the
thickness of the wall. The long folds of the damask
curtain, falling straight from the broad brass cornice,
hid him partly from the room. He folded his arms on
his breast, and looked steadily at Antonia's profile.

The people returning from the harbour filled the
pavements; the shuffle of sandals and a low murmur of
voices ascended to the window. Now and then a coach
rolled slowly along the disjointed roadway of the Calle
de la Constitucion. There were not many private
carriages in Sulaco; at the most crowded hour on the
Alameda they could be counted with one glance of the
eye. The great family arks swayed on high leathern
springs, full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes
looked intensely alive and black. And first Don Juste
Lopez, the President of the Provincial Assembly,
passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a
black frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a
debate from a high tribune. Though they all raised
their eyes, Antonia did not make the usual greeting
gesture of a fluttered hand, and they affected not to see
the two young people, Costaguaneros with European

manners, whose eccentricities were discussed behind the
barred windows of the first families in Sulaco. And
then the widowed Señora Gavilaso de Valdes rolled by,
handsome and dignified, in a great machine in which
she used to travel to and from her country house, surrounded
by an armed retinue in leather suits and big
sombreros, with carbines at the bows of their saddles.
She was a woman of most distinguished family, proud,
rich, and kind-hearted. Her second son, Jaime, had
just gone off on the Staff of Barrios. The eldest, a
worthless fellow of a moody disposition, filled Sulaco
with the noise of his dissipations, and gambled heavily
at the club. The two youngest boys, with yellow Ribierist
cockades in their caps, sat on the front seat.
She, too, affected not to see the Señor Decoud talking
publicly with Antonia in defiance of every convention.
And he not even her novio as far as the world knew!
Though, even in that case, it would have been scandal
enough. But the dignified old lady, respected and
admired by the first families, would have been still
more shocked if she could have heard the words they
were exchanging.

"Did you say I lost sight of the aim? I have only
one aim in the world."

She made an almost imperceptible negative movement
of her head, still staring across the street at the
Avellanos's house, grey, marked with decay, and with
iron bars like a prison.

"And it would be so easy of attainment," he continued,
"this aim which, whether knowingly or not, I
have always had in my heart — ever since the day when
you snubbed me so horribly once in Paris, you remember."

A slight smile seemed to move the corner of the lip
that was on his side.

"You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of
Charlotte Corday in a schoolgirl's dress; a ferocious
patriot. I suppose you would have stuck a knife into
Guzman Bento?"

She interrupted him. "You do me too much
honour."

"At any rate," he said, changing suddenly to a tone of
bitter levity, "you would have sent me to stab him
without compunction."

"Ah, par exemple!" she murmured in a shocked tone.

"Well," he argued, mockingly, "you do keep me here
writing deadly nonsense. Deadly to me! It has already
killed my self-respect. And you may imagine,"
he continued, his tone passing into light banter, "that
Montero, should he be successful, would get even with
me in the only way such a brute can get even with a
man of intelligence who condescends to call him a gran'
bestia three times a week. It's a sort of intellectual
death; but there is the other one in the background for
a journalist of my ability."

"If he is successful!" said Antonia, thoughtfully.

"You seem satisfied to see my life hang on a thread,"
Decoud replied, with a broad smile. "And the other
Montero, the 'my trusted brother' of the proclamations,
the guerrillero — haven't I written that he was taking
the guests' overcoats and changing plates in Paris at
our Legation in the intervals of spying on our refugees
there, in the time of Rojas? He will wash out that
sacred truth in blood. In my blood! Why do you
look annoyed? This is simply a bit of the biography of
one of our great men. What do you think he will do to
me? There is a certain convent wall round the corner
of the Plaza, opposite the door of the Bull Ring. You
know? Opposite the door with the inscription, Intrada
de la Sombra.' Appropriate, perhaps! That's where

the uncle of our host gave up his Anglo-South-American
soul. And, note, he might have run away. A man
who has fought with weapons may run away. You
might have let me go with Barrios if you had cared for
me. I would have carried one of those rifles, in which
Don José believes, with the greatest satisfaction, in the
ranks of poor peons and Indios, that know nothing
either of reason or politics. The most forlorn hope in
the most forlorn army on earth would have been safer
than that for which you made me stay here. When you
make war you may retreat, but not when you spend
your time in inciting poor ignorant fools to kill and to
die."

His tone remained light, and as if unaware of his
presence she stood motionless, her hands clasped
lightly, the fan hanging down from her interlaced
fingers. He waited for a while, and then —

"I shall go to the wall," he said, with a sort of jocular
desperation.

Even that declaration did not make her look at him.
Her head remained still, her eyes fixed upon the house
of the Avellanos, whose chipped pilasters, broken
cornices, the whole degradation of dignity was hidden
now by the gathering dusk of the street. In her whole
figure her lips alone moved, forming the words —

"Martin, you will make me cry."

He remained silent for a minute, startled, as if overwhelmed
by a sort of awed happiness, with the lines of
the mocking smile still stiffened about his mouth, and
incredulous surprise in his eyes. The value of a sentence
is in the personality which utters it, for nothing
new can be said by man or woman; and those were the
last words, it seemed to him, that could ever have been
spoken by Antonia. He had never made it up with
her so completely in all their intercourse of small encounters;

but even before she had time to turn towards
him, which she did slowly with a rigid grace, he had
begun to plead —

"My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My
father is transported with joy. I won't say anything
of my mother! Our mothers were like sisters. There
is the mail-boat for the south next week — let us go.
That Moraga is a fool! A man like Montero is
bribed. It's the practice of the country. It's tradition
— it's politics. Read 'Fifty Years of Misrule.'"

"Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes
—"

"I have the greatest tenderness for your father,"
he began, hurriedly. "But I love you, Antonia! And
Moraga has miserably mismanaged this business. Perhaps
your father did, too; I don't know. Montero was
bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his share of
this famous loan for national development. Why
didn't the stupid Sta. Marta people give him a mission
to Europe, or something? He would have taken five
years' salary in advance, and gone on loafing in Paris,
this stupid, ferocious Indio!"

"The man," she said, thoughtfully, and very calm
before this outburst, "was intoxicated with vanity.
We had all the information, not from Moraga only;
from others, too. There was his brother intriguing,
too."

"Oh, yes!" he said. "Of course you know. You
know everything. You read all the correspondence,
you write all the papers — all those State papers
that are inspired here, in this room, in blind deference
to a theory of political purity. Hadn't you Charles
Gould before your eyes? Rey de Sulaco! He and
his mine are the practical demonstration of what
could have been done. Do you think he succeeded

by his fidelity to a theory of virtue? And all those
railway people, with their honest work! Of course,
their work is honest! But what if you cannot work
honestly till the thieves are satisfied? Could he not,
a gentleman, have told this Sir John what's-his-name
that Montero had to be bought off — he and all his
Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve?
He ought to have been bought off with his own stupid
weight of gold — his weight of gold, I tell you, boots,
sabre, spurs, cocked hat, and all."

She shook her head slightly. "It was impossible,"
she murmured.

"He wanted the whole lot? What?"

She was facing him now in the deep recess of the
window, very close and motionless. Her lips moved
rapidly. Decoud, leaning his back against the wall,
listened with crossed arms and lowered eyelids. He
drank the tones of her even voice, and watched the
agitated life of her throat, as if waves of emotion had
run from her heart to pass out into the air in her
reasonable words. He also had his aspirations, he
aspired to carry her away out of these deadly futilities
of pronunciamientos and reforms. All this was wrong
— utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes
the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the
charm, replace the fascination by a sudden unwilling
thrill of interest. Some women hovered, as it were, on
the threshold of genius, he reflected. They did not
want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood
for all that, and he was ready to believe that some startlingly
profound remark, some appreciation of character,
or a judgment upon an event, bordered on the miraculous.
In the mature Antonia he could see with an
extraordinary vividness the austere schoolgirl of the
earlier days. She seduced his attention; sometimes he

could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and then he
advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they
began to argue; the curtain half hid them from the
people in the sala.

Outside it had grown dark. From the deep trench of
shadow between the houses, lit up vaguely by the
glimmer of street lamps, ascended the evening silence
of Sulaco; the silence of a town with few carriages, of
unshod horses, and a softly sandalled population. The
windows of the Casa Gould flung their shining parallelograms
upon the house of the Avellanos. Now and then
a shuffle of feet passed below with the pulsating red
glow of a cigarette at the foot of the walls; and the
night air, as if cooled by the snows of Higuerota, refreshed
their faces.

"We Occidentals," said Martin Decoud, using the
usual term the provincials of Sulaco applied to themselves,
"have been always distinct and separated. As
long as we hold Cayta nothing can reach us. In all our
troubles no army has marched over those mountains.
A revolution in the central provinces isolates us at once.
Look how complete it is now! The news of Barrios'
movement will be cabled to the United States, and only
in that way will it reach Sta. Marta by the cable from
the other seaboard. We have the greatest riches, the
greatest fertility, the purest blood in our great families,
the most laborious population. The Occidental
Province should stand alone. The early Federalism
was not bad for us. Then came this union which
Don Henrique Gould resisted. It opened the road to
tyranny; and, ever since, the rest of Costaguana hangs
like a millstone round our necks. The Occidental
territory is large enough to make any man's country.
Look at the mountains! Nature itself seems to cry
to us, 'Separate!'"

She made an energetic gesture of negation. A
silence fell.

"Oh, yes, I know it's contrary to the doctrine laid
down in the 'History of Fifty Years' Misrule.' I am
only trying to be sensible. But my sense seems always
to give you cause for offence. Have I startled you very
much with this perfectly reasonable aspiration?"

She shook her head. No, she was not startled, but
the idea shocked her early convictions. Her patriotism
was larger. She had never considered that possibility.

"It may yet be the means of saving some of your convictions,"
he said, prophetically.

She did not answer. She seemed tired. They
leaned side by side on the rail of the little balcony, very
friendly, having exhausted politics, giving themselves
up to the silent feeling of their nearness, in one of those
profound pauses that fall upon the rhythm of passion.
Towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals
in the brazeros of the market women cooking their
evening meal gleamed red along the edge of the pavement.
A man appeared without a sound in the light
of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle
of his bordered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging
to a point below his knees. From the harbour end
of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount,
gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark
shape of the rider.

"Behold the illustrious Capataz de Cargadores,"
said Decoud, gently, "coming in all his splendour after
his work is done. The next great man of Sulaco after
Don Carlos Gould. But he is good-natured, and let
me make friends with him."

"Ah, indeed!" said Antonia. "How did you make
friends?"

"A journalist ought to have his finger on the popular

pulse, and this man is one of the leaders of the populace.
A journalist ought to know remarkable men — and this
man is remarkable in his way."

"Ah, yes!" said Antonia, thoughtfully. "It is
known that this Italian has a great influence."

The horseman had passed below them, with a gleam
of dim light on the shining broad quarters of the grey
mare, on a bright heavy stirrup, on a long silver spur;
but the short flick of yellowish flame in the dusk was
powerless against the muffled-up mysteriousness of the
dark figure with an invisible face concealed by a great
sombrero.

Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the
balcony, side by side, touching elbows, with their heads
overhanging the darkness of the street, and the brilliantly
lighted sala at their backs. This was a tête-à-tête
of extreme impropriety; something of which in the
whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary
Antonia could be capable — the poor, motherless girl,
never accompanied, with a careless father, who had
thought only of making her learned. Even Decoud
himself seemed to feel that this was as much as he could
expect of having her to himself till — till the revolution
was over and he could carry her off to Europe, away
from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed
even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one
Montero there would be another, the lawlessness of a
populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediable
tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolivar had
said in the bitterness of his spirit, "America is ungovernable.
Those who worked for her independence
have ploughed the sea." He did not care, he declared
boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her that
though she had managed to make a Blanco journalist
of him, he was no patriot. First of all, the word had

no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness of
every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with
the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was
hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark
barbarism, the cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity,
of simple thieving.

He was surprised at the warmth of his own utterance.
He had no need to drop his voice; it had been low all
the time, a mere murmur in the silence of dark houses
with their shutters closed early against the night air,
as is the custom of Sulaco. Only the sala of the Casa
Gould flung out defiantly the blaze of its four windows,
the bright appeal of light in the whole dumb obscurity
of the street. And the murmur on the little balcony
went on after a short pause.

"But we are labouring to change all that," Antonia
protested. "It is exactly what we desire. It is our
object. It is the great cause. And the word you
despise has stood also for sacrifice, for courage, for
constancy, for suffering. Papa, who —"

"Ploughing the sea," interrupted Decoud, looking
down.

There was below the sound of hasty and ponderous
footsteps.

"Your uncle, the grand-vicar of the cathedral, has
just turned under the gate," observed Decoud. "He
said Mass for the troops in the Plaza this morning.
They had built for him an altar of drums, you know.
And they brought outside all the painted blocks to take
the air. All the wooden saints stood militarily in a row
at the top of the great flight of steps. They looked
like a gorgeous escort attending the Vicar-General. I
saw the great function from the windows of the Porvenir.
He is amazing, your uncle, the last of the
Corbelàns. He glittered exceedingly in his vestments

with a great crimson velvet cross down his back. And
all the time our saviour Barrios sat in the Amarilla
Club drinking punch at an open window. Esprit fort —
our Barrios. I expected every moment your uncle to
launch an excommunication there and then at the black
eye-patch in the window across the Plaza. But not
at all. Ultimately the troops marched off. Later
Barrios came down with some of the officers, and stood
with his uniform all unbuttoned, discoursing at the
edge of the pavement. Suddenly your uncle appeared,
no longer glittering, but all black, at the cathedral door
with that threatening aspect he has — you know, like a
sort of avenging spirit. He gives one look, strides over
straight at the group of uniforms, and leads away the
general by the elbow. He walked him for a quarter of
an hour in the shade of a wall. Never let go his elbow
for a moment, talking all the time with exaltation, and
gesticulating with a long black arm. It was a curious
scene. The officers seemed struck with astonishment.
Remarkable man, your missionary uncle. He hates an
infidel much less than a heretic, and prefers a heathen
many times to an infidel. He condescends graciously
to call me a heathen, sometimes, you know."

Antonia listened with her hands over the balustrade,
opening and shutting the fan gently; and Decoud talked
a little nervously, as if afraid that she would leave him
at the first pause. Their comparative isolation, the
precious sense of intimacy, the slight contact of their
arms, affected him softly; for now and then a tender
inflection crept into the flow of his ironic murmurs.

"Any slight sign of favour from a relative of yours is
welcome, Antonia. And perhaps he understands me,
after all! But I know him, too, our Padre Corbelàn.
The idea of political honour, justice, and honesty for
him consists in the restitution of the confiscated Church

property. Nothing else could have drawn that fierce
converter of savage Indians out of the wilds to work for
the Ribierist cause! Nothing else but that wild hope!
He would make a pronunciamiento himself for such an
object against any Government if he could only get
followers! What does Don Carlos Gould think of
that? But, of course, with his English impenetrability,
nobody can tell what he thinks. Probably he thinks of
nothing apart from his mine; of his 'Imperium in
Imperio.' As to Mrs. Gould, she thinks of her schools, of
her hospitals, of the mothers with the young babies, of
every sick old man in the three villages. If you were to
turn your head now you would see her extracting a report
from that sinister doctor in a check shirt — what's
his name? Monygham — or else catechising Don Pépé
or perhaps listening to Padre Romàn. They are all
down here to-day — all her ministers of state. Well,
she is a sensible woman, and perhaps Don Carlos is a
sensible man. It's a part of solid English sense not to
think too much; to see only what may be of practical
use at the moment. These people are not like ourselves.
We have no political reason; we have political passions
— sometimes. What is a conviction? A particular view
of our personal advantage either practical or emotional.
No one is a patriot for nothing. The word serves us
well. But I am clear-sighted, and I shall not use that
word to you, Antonia! I have no patriotic illusions. I
have only the supreme illusion of a lover."

He paused, then muttered almost inaudibly, "That
can lead one very far, though."

Behind their backs the political tide that once in
every twenty-four hours set with a strong flood through
the Gould drawing-room could be heard, rising higher
in a hum of voices. Men had been dropping in singly,
or in twos and threes: the higher officials of the province,

engineers of the railway, sunburnt and in tweeds, with
the frosted head of their chief smiling with slow, humorous
indulgence amongst the young eager faces. Scarfe,
the lover of fandangos, had already slipped out in search
of some dance, no matter where, on the outskirts of the
town. Don Juste Lopez, after taking his daughters
home, had entered solemnly, in a black creased coat
buttoned up under his spreading brown beard. The
few members of the Provincial Assembly present
clustered at once around their President to discuss the
news of the war and the last proclamation of the rebel
Montero, the miserable Montero, calling in the name of
"a justly incensed democracy" upon all the Provincial
Assemblies of the Republic to suspend their sittings till
his sword had made peace and the will of the people
could be consulted. It was practically an invitation to
dissolve: an unheard-of audacity of that evil madman.

The indignation ran high in the knot of deputies behind
José Avellanos. Don José, lifting up his voice,
cried out to them over the high back of his chair,
"Sulaco has answered by sending to-day an army upon
his flank. If all the other provinces show only half as
much patriotism as we Occidentals —"

A great outburst of acclamations covered the vibrating
treble of the life and soul of the party. Yes! Yes!
This was true! A great truth! Sulaco was in the forefront,
as ever! It was a boastful tumult, the hopefulness
inspired by the event of the day breaking out
amongst those caballeros of the Campo thinking of their
herds, of their lands, of the safety of their families.
Everything was at stake. . . . No! It was impossible
that Montero should succeed! This criminal,
this shameless Indio! The clamour continued for some
time, everybody else in the room looking towards the
group where Don Juste had put on his air of impartial

solemnity as if presiding at a sitting of the Provincial
Assembly. Decoud had turned round at the noise,
and, leaning his back on the balustrade, shouted into
the room with all the strength of his lungs, "Gran'
bestia!"

This unexpected cry had the effect of stilling the
noise. All the eyes were directed to the window with
an approving expectation; but Decoud had already
turned his back upon the room, and was again leaning
out over the quiet street.

"This is the quintessence of my journalism; that is
the supreme argument," he said to Antonia. "I have
invented this definition, this last word on a great
question. But I am no patriot. I am no more of a
patriot than the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores, this
Genoese who has done such great things for this harbour
— this active usher-in of the material implements for our
progress. You have heard Captain Mitchell confess
over and over again that till he got this man he could
never tell how long it would take to unload a ship.
That is bad for progress. You have seen him pass by
after his labours on his famous horse to dazzle the girls
in some ballroom with an earthen floor. He is a
fortunate fellow! His work is an exercise of personal
powers; his leisure is spent in receiving the marks of
extraordinary adulation. And he likes it, too. Can
anybody be more fortunate? To be feared and admired
is —"

"And are these your highest aspirations, Don
Martin?" interrupted Antonia.

"I was speaking of a man of that sort," said Decoud,
curtly. "The heroes of the world have been feared and
admired. What more could he want?"

Decoud had often felt his familiar habit of ironic
thought fall shattered against Antonia's gravity. She

irritated him as if she, too, had suffered from that inexplicable
feminine obtuseness which stands so often
between a man and a woman of the more ordinary sort.
But he overcame his vexation at once. He was very
far from thinking Antonia ordinary, whatever verdict
his scepticism might have pronounced upon himself.
With a touch of penetrating tenderness in his voice he
assured her that his only aspiration was to a felicity so
high that it seemed almost unrealizable on this earth.

She coloured invisibly, with a warmth against which
the breeze from the sierra seemed to have lost its cooling
power in the sudden melting of the snows. His whisper
could not have carried so far, though there was enough
ardour in his tone to melt a heart of ice. Antonia
turned away abruptly, as if to carry his whispered
assurance into the room behind, full of light, noisy with
voices.

The tide of political speculation was beating high
within the four walls of the great sala, as if driven
beyond the marks by a great gust of hope. Don Juste's
fan-shaped beard was still the centre of loud and
animated discussions. There was a self-confident ring
in all the voices. Even the few Europeans around
Charles Gould — a Dane, a couple of Frenchmen, a discreet
fat German, smiling, with down-cast eyes, the
representatives of those material interests that had got
a footing in Sulaco under the protecting might of the
San Tomé mine — had infused a lot of good humour into
their deference. Charles Gould, to whom they were
paying their court, was the visible sign of the stability
that could be achieved on the shifting ground of revolutions.
They felt hopeful about their various undertakings.
One of the two Frenchmen, small, black, with
glittering eyes lost in an immense growth of bushy
beard, waved his tiny brown hands and delicate wrists.

He had been travelling in the interior of the province
for a syndicate of European capitalists. His forcible
"Monsieur l' Administrateur" returning every minute
shrilled above the steady hum of conversations. He
was relating his discoveries. He was ecstatic. Charles
Gould glanced down at him courteously.

At a given moment of these necessary receptions it
was Mrs. Gould's habit to withdraw quietly into a
little drawing-room, especially her own, next to the
great sala. She had risen, and, waiting for Antonia,
listened with a slightly worried graciousness to the
engineer-in-chief of the railway, who stooped over her,
relating slowly, without the slightest gesture, something
apparently amusing, for his eyes had a humorous
twinkle. Antonia, before she advanced into the room
to join Mrs. Gould, turned her head over her shoulder
towards Decoud, only for a moment.

"Why should any one of us think his aspirations
unrealizable?" she said, rapidly.

"I am going to cling to mine to the end, Antonia,"
he answered, through clenched teeth, then bowed very
low, a little distantly.

The engineer-in-chief had not finished telling his
amusing story. The humours of railway building in
South America appealed to his keen appreciation of the
absurd, and he told his instances of ignorant prejudice
and as ignorant cunning very well. Now, Mrs. Gould
gave him all her attention as he walked by her side
escorting the ladies out of the room. Finally all three
passed unnoticed through the glass doors in the gallery.
Only a tall priest stalking silently in the noise of the sala
checked himself to look after them. Father Corbelàn,
whom Decoud had seen from the balcony turning into
the gateway of the Casa Gould, had addressed no one
since coming in. The long, skimpy soutane accentuated

the tallness of his stature; he carried his powerful
torso thrown forward; and the straight, black bar of
his joined eyebrows, the pugnacious outline of the bony
face, the white spot of a scar on the bluish shaven
cheeks (a testimonial to his apostolic zeal from a party
of unconverted Indians), suggested something unlawful
behind his priesthood, the idea of a chaplain of bandits.

He separated his bony, knotted hands clasped behind
his back, to shake his finger at Martin.

Decoud had stepped into the room after Antonia.
But he did not go far. He had remained just within,
against the curtain, with an expression of not quite
genuine gravity, like a grown-up person taking part in a
game of children. He gazed quietly at the threatening
finger.

"I have watched your reverence converting General
Barrios by a special sermon on the Plaza," he said, without
making the slightest movement.

"What miserable nonsense!" Father Corbelàn's
deep voice resounded all over the room, making all the
heads turn on the shoulders. "The man is a drunkard.
Señores, the God of your General is a bottle!"

His contemptuous, arbitrary voice caused an uneasy
suspension of every sound, as if the self-confidence of
the gathering had been staggered by a blow. But
nobody took up Father Corbelàn's declaration.

It was known that Father Corbelàn had come out of
the wilds to advocate the sacred rights of the Church
with the same fanatical fearlessness with which he had
gone preaching to bloodthirsty savages, devoid of human
compassion or worship of any kind. Rumours of
legendary proportions told of his successes as a missionary
beyond the eye of Christian men. He had baptized
whole nations of Indians, living with them like a savage
himself. It was related that the padre used to ride with

his Indians for days, half naked, carrying a bullock-hide
shield, and, no doubt, a long lance, too — who knows?
That he had wandered clothed in skins, seeking for
proselytes somewhere near the snow line of the Cordillera.
Of these exploits Padre Corbelàn himself was
never known to talk. But he made no secret of his
opinion that the politicians of Sta. Marta had harder
hearts and more corrupt minds than the heathen to
whom he had carried the word of God. His injudicious
zeal for the temporal welfare of the Church was damaging
the Ribierist cause. It was common knowledge
that he had refused to be made titular bishop of the
Occidental diocese till justice was done to a despoiled
Church. The political Géfé of Sulaco (the same
dignitary whom Captain Mitchell saved from the
mob afterwards) hinted with naíve cynicism that
doubtless their Excellencies the Ministers sent the padre
over the mountains to Sulaco in the worst season of the
year in the hope that he would be frozen to death by
the icy blasts of the high paramos. Every year a few
hardy muleteers — men inured to exposure — were known
to perish in that way. But what would you have?
Their Excellencies possibly had not realized what a
tough priest he was. Meantime, the ignorant were
beginning to murmur that the Ribierist reforms meant
simply the taking away of the land from the people.
Some of it was to be given to foreigners who made the
railway; the greater part was to go to the padres.

These were the results of the Grand Vicar's zeal.
Even from the short allocution to the troops on the
Plaza (which only the first ranks could have heard) he
had not been able to keep out his fixed idea of an
outraged Church waiting for reparation from a penitent
country. The political Géfé had been exasperated.
But he could not very well throw the brother-in-law

of Don José into the prison of the Cabildo. The chief
magistrate, an easy-going and popular official, visited
the Casa Gould, walking over after sunset from the
Intendencia, unattended, acknowledging with dignified
courtesy the salutations of high and low alike. That
evening he had walked up straight to Charles Gould
and had hissed out to him that he would have liked to
deport the Grand Vicar out of Sulaco, anywhere, to
some desert island, to the Isabels, for instance. "The
one without water preferably — eh, Don Carlos?" he had
added in a tone between jest and earnest. This uncontrollable
priest, who had rejected his offer of the
episcopal palace for a residence and preferred to hang
his shabby hammock amongst the rubble and spiders
of the sequestrated Dominican Convent, had taken into
his head to advocate an unconditional pardon for Hernandez
the Robber! And this was not enough; he
seemed to have entered into communication with the
most audacious criminal the country had known for
years. The Sulaco police knew, of course, what was
going on. Padre Corbelàn had got hold of that reckless
Italian, the Capataz de Cargadores, the only man fit
for such an errand, and had sent a message through him.
Father Corbelàn had studied in Rome, and could
speak Italian. The Capataz was known to visit the
old Dominican Convent at night. An old woman who
served the Grand Vicar had heard the name of Hernandez
pronounced; and only last Saturday afternoon
the Capataz had been observed galloping out of town.
He did not return for two days. The police would have
laid the Italian by the heels if it had not been for fear of
the Cargadores, a turbulent body of men, quite apt to
raise a tumult. Nowadays it was not so easy to govern
Sulaco. Bad characters flocked into it, attracted by the
money in the pockets of the railway workmen. The
populace was made restless by Father Corbelàn's discourses.
And the first magistrate explained to Charles
Gould that now the province was stripped of troops any
outbreak of lawlessness would find the authorities with
their boots off, as it were.

Then he went away moodily to sit in an armchair,
smoking a long, thin cigar, not very far from Don
José, with whom, bending over sideways, he exchanged
a few words from time to time. He ignored the entrance
of the priest, and whenever Father Corbelàn's
voice was raised behind him, he shrugged his shoulders
impatiently.

Father Corbelàn had remained quite motionless for a
time with that something vengeful in his immobility
which seemed to characterize all his attitudes. A lurid
glow of strong convictions gave its peculiar aspect to the
black figure. But its fierceness became softened as the
padre, fixing his eyes upon Decoud, raised his long,
black arm slowly, impressively —

"And you — you are a perfect heathen," he said, in a
subdued, deep voice.

He made a step nearer, pointing a forefinger at the
young man's breast. Decoud, very calm, felt the wall
behind the curtain with the back of his head. Then,
with his chin tilted well up, he smiled.

"Very well," he agreed with the slightly weary nonchalance
of a man well used to these passages. "But
is it perhaps that you have not discovered yet what is
the God of my worship? It was an easier task with our
Barrios."

The priest suppressed a gesture of discouragement.
"You believe neither in stick nor stone," he said.

"Nor bottle," added Decoud without stirring.
"Neither does the other of your reverence's confidants.
I mean the Capataz of the Cargadores. He does not

drink. Your reading of my character does honour to
your perspicacity. But why call me a heathen?"

"True," retorted the priest. "You are ten times
worse. A miracle could not convert you."

"I certainly do not believe in miracles," said Decoud,
quietly. Father Corbelàn shrugged his high, broad
shoulders doubtfully.

"A sort of Frenchman — godless — a materialist,"
he pronounced slowly, as if weighing the terms of a
careful analysis. "Neither the son of his own country
nor of any other," he continued, thoughtfully.

"Scarcely human, in fact," Decoud commented under
his breath, his head at rest against the wall, his eyes
gazing up at the ceiling.

"The victim of this faithless age," Father Corbelàn
resumed in a deep but subdued voice.

"But of some use as a journalist." Decoud changed
his pose and spoke in a more animated tone. "Has
your worship neglected to read the last number of the
Porvenir? I assure you it is just like the others. On
the general policy it continues to call Montero a gran'
bestia, and stigmatize his brother, the guerrillero, for a
combination of lackey and spy. What could be more
effective? In local affairs it urges the Provincial
Government to enlist bodily into the national army the
band of Hernandez the Robber — who is apparently
the protégé of the Church — or at least of the Grand
Vicar. Nothing could be more sound."

The priest nodded and turned on the heels of his
square-toed shoes with big steel buckles. Again, with
his hands clasped behind his back, he paced to and fro,
planting his feet firmly. When he swung about, the
skirt of his soutane was inflated slightly by the brusqueness
of his movements.

The great sala had been emptying itself slowly.

When the Géfé Político rose to go, most of those still
remaining stood up suddenly in sign of respect, and Don
José Avellanos stopped the rocking of his chair. But
the good-natured First Official made a deprecatory gesture,
waved his hand to Charles Gould, and went out
discreetly.

In the comparative peace of the room the screaming
"Monsieur l'Administrateur" of the frail, hairy Frenchman
seemed to acquire a preternatural shrillness. The
explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was still enthusiastic.
"Ten million dollars' worth of copper practically in
sight, Monsieur l'Administrateur. Ten millions in sight!
And a railway coming — a railway! They will never
believe my report. C'est trop beau." He fell a prey to
a screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding
heads, before Charles Gould's imperturbable calm.

And only the priest continued his pacing, flinging
round the skirt of his soutane at each end of his beat.
Decoud murmured to him ironically: "Those gentlemen
talk about their gods."

Father Corbelàn stopped short, looked at the journalist
of Sulaco fixedly for a moment, shrugged his
shoulders slightly, and resumed his plodding walk of an
obstinate traveller.

And now the Europeans were dropping off from the
group around Charles Gould till the Administrador of
the Great Silver Mine could be seen in his whole lank
length, from head to foot, left stranded by the ebbing
tide of his guests on the great square of carpet, as it
were a multi-coloured shoal of flowers and arabesques
under his brown boots. Father Corbelàn approached
the rocking-chair of Don José Avellanos.

"Come, brother," he said, with kindly brusqueness
and a touch of relieved impatience a man may feel at the
end of a perfectly useless ceremony. "A la Casa! A

la Casa! This has been all talk. Let us now go and
think and pray for guidance from Heaven."

He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the
frail diplomatist — the life and soul of the party — he
seemed gigantic, with a gleam of fanaticism in the
glance. But the voice of the party, or, rather, its
mouthpiece, the "son Decoud" from Paris, turned
journalist for the sake of Antonia's eyes, knew very well
that it was not so, that he was only a strenuous priest
with one idea, feared by the women and execrated by
the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the dilettante
in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure
from watching the picturesque extreme of wrong-
headedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction
may drive a man. "It is like madness. It
must be — because it's self-destructive," Decoud had
said to himself often. It seemed to him that every
conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into
that form of dementia the gods send upon those they
wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of
that example with the zest of a connoisseur in the art
of his choice. Those two men got on well together, as
if each had felt respectively that a masterful conviction,
as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man
very far on the by-paths of political action.

Don José obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand.
Decoud followed out the brothers-in-law. And there
remained only one visitor in the vast empty sala,
bluishly hazy with tobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-
cheeked man, with a drooping moustache, a hide merchant
from Esmeralda, who had come overland to
Sulaco, riding with a few peons across the coast range.
He was very full of his journey, undertaken mostly for
the purpose of seeing the Senor Administrador of San
Tomé in relation to some assistance he required in his

hide-exporting business. He hoped to enlarge it greatly
now that the country was going to be settled. It was
going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading
by a strange, anxious whine the sonority of the
Spanish language, which he pattered rapidly, like some
sort of cringing jargon. A plain man could carry on his
little business now in the country, and even think of
enlarging it — with safety. Was it not so? He seemed
to beg Charles Gould for a confirmatory word, a grunt
of assent, a simple nod even.

He could get nothing. His alarm increased, and in
the pauses he would dart his eyes here and there; then,
loth to give up, he would branch off into feeling allusion
to the dangers of his journey. The audacious Hernandez,
leaving his usual haunts, had crossed the
Campo of Sulaco, and was known to be lurking in the
ravines of the coast range. Yesterday, when distant
only a few hours from Sulaco, the hide merchant and his
servants had seen three men on the road arrested suspiciously,
with their horses' heads together. Two of
these rode off at once and disappeared in a shallow
quebrada to the left. "We stopped," continued the
man from Esmeralda, "and I tried to hide behind a
small bush. But none of my mozos would go forward
to find out what it meant, and the third horseman
seemed to be waiting for us to come up. It was no use.
We had been seen. So we rode slowly on, trembling.
He let us pass — a man on a grey horse with his hat down
on his eyes — without a word of greeting; but by-and-by
we heard him galloping after us. We faced about, but
that did not seem to intimidate him. He rode up at
speed, and touching my foot with the toe of his boot,
asked me for a cigar, with a blood-curdling laugh. He
did not seem armed, but when he put his hand back to
reach for the matches I saw an enormous revolver

strapped to his waist. I shuddered. He had very
fierce whiskers, Don Carlos, and as he did not offer to go
on we dared not move. At last, blowing the smoke
of my cigar into the air through his nostrils, he said,
'Señor, it would be perhaps better for you if I rode behind
your party. You are not very far from Sulaco
now. Go you with God.' What would you? We
went on. There was no resisting him. He might have
been Hernandez himself; though my servant, who has
been many times to Sulaco by sea, assured me that he
had recognized him very well for the Capataz of the
Steamship Company's Cargadores. Later, that same
evening, I saw that very man at the corner of the Plaza
talking to a girl, a Morenita, who stood by the stirrup
with her hand on the grey horse's mane."

"I assure you, Señor Hirsch," murmured Charles
Gould, "that you ran no risk on this occasion."

"That may be, señor, though I tremble yet. A most
fierce man — to look at. And what does it mean? A
person employed by the Steamship Company talking
with salteadores — no less, señor; the other horsemen
were salteadores — in a lonely place, and behaving like
a robber himself! A cigar is nothing, but what was
there to prevent him asking me for my purse?"

"No, no, Señor Hirsch," Charles Gould murmured,
letting his glance stray away a little vacantly from the
round face, with its hooked beak upturned towards him
in an almost childlike appeal. "If it was the Capataz
de Cargadores you met — and there is no doubt, is there?
— you were perfectly safe."

"Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-
looking man, Don Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a
most familiar manner. What would have happened if
I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What business
had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?"

But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave
not a sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the
embodied Gould Concession had its surface shades. To
be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King of
Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious
weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by
the power of speech, had as many shades of significance
as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of
negation — even of simple comment. Some seemed to
say plainly, "Think it over"; others meant clearly,
"Go ahead"; a simple, low "I see," with an affirmative
nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the
equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned
to trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the
great San Tomé mine, the head and front of the material
interests, so strong that it depended on no man's goodwill
in the whole length and breadth of the Occidental
Province — that is, on no goodwill which it could not buy
ten times over. But to the little hook-nosed man from
Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides, the
silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently
this was no time for extending a modest man's
business. He enveloped in a swift mental malediction
the whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisans of
Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipient
tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable
ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy
expanse of the Campo, with its single palms rising like
ships at sea within the perfect circle of the horizon, its
clumps of heavy timber motionless like solid islands of
leaves above the running waves of grass. There were
hides there, rotting, with no profit to anybody — rotting
where they had been dropped by men called away to
attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions.
The practical, mercantile soul of Señor Hirsch rebelled

against all that foolishness, while he was taking a
respectful but disconcerted leave of the might and
majesty of the San Tomé mine in the person of Charles
Gould. He could not restrain a heart-broken murmur,
wrung out of his very aching heart, as it were.

"It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this.
The price of hides in Hamburg is gone up — up. Of
course the Ribierist Government will do away with all
that — when it gets established firmly. Meantime —"

He sighed.

"Yes, meantime," repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.

The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not
ready to go yet. There was a little matter he would like
to mention very much if permitted. It appeared he had
some good friends in Hamburg (he murmured the name
of the firm) who were very anxious to do business, in
dynamite, he explained. A contract for dynamite with
the San Tomé mine, and then, perhaps, later on, other
mines, which were sure to — The little man from
Esmeralda was ready to enlarge, but Charles interrupted
him. It seemed as though the patience of the
Senor Administrador was giving way at last.

"Señor Hirsch," he said, "I have enough dynamite
stored up at the mountain to send it down crashing into
the valley" — his voice rose a little — "to send half
Sulaco into the air if I liked."

Charles Gould smiled at the round, startled eyes of
the dealer in hides, who was murmuring hastily, "Just
so. Just so." And now he was going. It was impossible
to do business in explosives with an Administrador
so well provided and so discouraging. He had
suffered agonies in the saddle and had exposed himself
to the atrocities of the bandit Hernandez for nothing
at all. Neither hides nor dynamite — and the very

shoulders of the enterprising Israelite expressed dejection.
At the door he bowed low to the engineer-in-
chief. But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio he
stopped short, with his podgy hand over his lips in an
attitude of meditative astonishment.

"What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?"
he muttered. "And why does he talk like this to me?"

The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the
empty sala, whence the political tide had ebbed out to
the last insignificant drop, nodded familiarly to the
master of the house, standing motionless like a tall
beacon amongst the deserted shoals of furniture.

"Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs.
The railway will know where to go for dynamite should
we get short at any time. We have done cutting and
chopping for a while now. We shall begin soon to blast
our way through."

"Don't come to me," said Charles Gould, with perfect
serenity. "I shan't have an ounce to spare for
anybody. Not an ounce. Not for my own brother, if
I had a brother, and he were the engineer-in-chief of
the most promising railway in the world."

"What's that?" asked the engineer-in-chief, with
equanimity. "Unkindness?"

"No," said Charles Gould, stolidly. "Policy."

"Radical, I should think," the engineer-in-chief observed
from the doorway.

"Is that the right name?" Charles Gould said, from
the middle of the room.

"I mean, going to the roots, you know," the engineer
explained, with an air of enjoyment.

"Why, yes," Charles pronounced, slowly. "The
Gould Concession has struck such deep roots in this
country, in this province, in that gorge of the mountains,
that nothing but dynamite shall be allowed to

dislodge it from there. It's my choice. It's my last
card to play."

The engineer-in-chief whistled low. "A pretty
game," he said, with a shade of discretion. "And have
you told Holroyd of that extraordinary trump card you
hold in your hand?"

"Card only when it's played; when it falls at the end
of the game. Till then you may call it a — a —"

"Weapon," suggested the railway man.

"No. You may call it rather an argument," corrected
Charles Gould, gently. "And that's how I've
presented it to Mr. Holroyd."

"And what did he say to it?" asked the engineer, with
undisguised interest.

"He" — Charles Gould spoke after a slight pause —
"he said something about holding on like grim death
and putting our trust in God. I should imagine he
must have been rather startled. But then" — pursued
the Administrador of the San Tomé mine — "but then,
he is very far away, you know, and, as they say in this
country, God is very high above."

The engineer's appreciative laugh died away down
the stairs, where the Madonna with the Child on her
arm seemed to look after his shaking broad back from
her shallow niche.

6. CHAPTER SIX

A PROFOUND stillness reigned in the Casa Gould.
The master of the house, walking along the corredor,
opened the door of his room, and saw his wife sitting in
a big armchair — his own smoking armchair — thoughtful,
contemplating her little shoes. And she did not
raise her eyes when he walked in.

"Tired?" asked Charles Gould.

"A little," said Mrs. Gould. Still without looking
up, she added with feeling, "There is an awful sense of
unreality about all this."

Charles Gould, before the long table strewn with
papers, on which lay a hunting crop and a pair of spurs,
stood looking at his wife: "The heat and dust must
have been awful this afternoon by the waterside," he
murmured, sympathetically. "The glare on the water
must have been simply terrible."

"One could close one's eyes to the glare," said Mrs.
Gould. "But, my dear Charley, it is impossible for me
to close my eyes to our position; to this awful . . ."

She raised her eyes and looked at her husband's face,
from which all sign of sympathy or any other feeling
had disappeared. "Why don't you tell me something?
" she almost wailed.

"I thought you had understood me perfectly from
the first," Charles Gould said, slowly. "I thought we
had said all there was to say a long time ago. There
is nothing to say now. There were things to be done.
We have done them; we have gone on doing them.
There is no going back now. I don't suppose that, even

from the first, there was really any possible way back.
And, what's more, we can't even afford to stand still."

"Ah, if one only knew how far you mean to go," said
his wife. inwardly trembling, but in an almost playful
tone.

"Any distance, any length, of course," was the
answer, in a matter-of-fact tone, which caused Mrs.
Gould to make another effort to repress a shudder.

She stood up, smiling graciously, and her little figure
seemed to be diminished still more by the heavy mass of
her hair and the long train of her gown.

"But always to success," she said, persuasively.

Charles Gould, enveloping her in the steely blue
glance of his attentive eyes, answered without hesitation
—

"Oh, there is no alternative."

He put an immense assurance into his tone. As to
the words, this was all that his conscience would allow
him to say.

Mrs. Gould's smile remained a shade too long upon
her lips. She murmured —

"I will leave you; I've a slight headache. The heat,
the dust, were indeed — I suppose you are going
back to the mine before the morning?"

"At midnight," said Charles Gould. "We are bringing
down the silver to-morrow. Then I shall take three
whole days off in town with you."

"Ah, you are going to meet the escort. I shall be on
the balcony at five o'clock to see you pass. Till then,
good-bye."

Charles Gould walked rapidly round the table, and,
seizing her hands, bent down, pressing them both to his
lips. Before he straightened himself up again to his full
height she had disengaged one to smooth his cheek with
a light touch, as if he were a little boy.

"Try to get some rest for a couple of hours," she murmured,
with a glance at a hammock stretched in a
distant part of the room. Her long train swished
softly after her on the red tiles. At the door she
looked back.

Two big lamps with unpolished glass globes bathed in
a soft and abundant light the four white walls of the
room, with a glass case of arms, the brass hilt of Henry
Gould's cavalry sabre on its square of velvet, and the
water-colour sketch of the San Tomé gorge. And Mrs.
Gould, gazing at the last in its black wooden frame,
sighed out —

"Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!"

"No," Charles Gould said, moodily; "it was impossible
to leave it alone."

"Perhaps it was impossible," Mrs. Gould admitted,
slowly. Her lips quivered a little, but she smiled with
an air of dainty bravado. "We have disturbed a good
many snakes in that Paradise, Charley, haven't we?"

"Yes, I remember," said Charles Gould, "it was
Don Pépé who called the gorge the Paradise of snakes.
No doubt we have disturbed a great many. But remember,
my dear, that it is not now as it was when you
made that sketch." He waved his hand towards the
small water-colour hanging alone upon the great bare
wall. "It is no longer a Paradise of snakes. We have
brought mankind into it, and we cannot turn our backs
upon them to go and begin a new life elsewhere."

He confronted his wife with a firm, concentrated gaze,
which Mrs. Gould returned with a brave assumption of
fearlessness before she went out, closing the door gently
after her.

In contrast with the white glaring room the dimly
lit corredor had a restful mysteriousness of a forest
glade, suggested by the stems and the leaves of the

plants ranged along the balustrade of the open side. In
the streaks of light falling through the open doors of the
reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and pale
lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a
stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the
vividness of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that
chequer the gloom of open glades in the woods. The
stones in the rings upon her hand pressed to her forehead
glittered in the lamplight abreast of the door of the
sala.

"Who's there?" she asked, in a startled voice. "Is
that you, Basilio?" She looked in, and saw Martin
Decoud walking about, with an air of having lost something,
amongst the chairs and tables.

"Antonia has forgotten her fan in here," said Decoud,
with a strange air of distraction; "so I entered
to see."

But, even as he said this, he had obviously given up
his search, and walked straight towards Mrs. Gould,
who looked at him with doubtful surprise.

"Señora," he began, in a low voice.

"What is it, Don Martin?" asked Mrs. Gould. And
then she added, with a slight laugh, "I am so nervous
to-day," as if to explain the eagerness of the question.

"Nothing immediately dangerous," said Decoud,
who now could not conceal his agitation. "Pray don't
distress yourself. No, really, you must not distress
yourself."

Mrs. Gould, with her candid eyes very wide open,
her lips composed into a smile, was steadying herself
with a little bejewelled hand against the side of the door.

"Perhaps you don't know how alarming you are,
appearing like this unexpectedly —"

"I! Alarming!" he protested, sincerely vexed and
surprised. "I assure you that I am not in the least

alarmed myself. A fan is lost; well, it will be found
again. But I don't think it is here. It is a fan I
am looking for. I cannot understand how Antonia
could — Well! Have you found it, amigo?"

"No, señor," said behind Mrs. Gould the soft voice
of Basilio, the head servant of the Casa. "I don't
think the señorita could have left it in this house at all."

"Go and look for it in the patio again. Go now, my
friend; look for it on the steps, under the gate; examine
every flagstone; search for it till I come down
again. . . . That fellow" — he addressed himself
in English to Mrs. Gould — "is always stealing up behind
one's back on his bare feet. I set him to look for
that fan directly I came in to justify my reappearance,
my sudden return."

He paused and Mrs. Gould said, amiably, "You are
always welcome." She paused for a second, too. "But
I am waiting to learn the cause of your return."

Decoud affected suddenly the utmost nonchalance.

"I can't bear to be spied upon. Oh, the cause?
Yes, there is a cause; there is something else that is lost
besides Antonia's favourite fan. As I was walking
home after seeing Don José and Antonia to their house,
the Capataz de Cargadores, riding down the street,
spoke to me."

"Has anything happened to the Violas?" inquired
Mrs. Gould.

"The Violas? You mean the old Garibaldino who
keeps the hotel where the engineers live? Nothing
happened there. The Capataz said nothing of them; he
only told me that the telegraphist of the Cable Company
was walking on the Plaza, bareheaded, looking out
for me. There is news from the interior, Mrs. Gould.
I should rather say rumours of news."

"Good news?" said Mrs. Gould in a low voice.

"Worthless, I should think. But if I must define
them, I would say bad. They are to the effect that a
two days' battle had been fought near Sta. Marta, and
that the Ribierists are defeated. It must have happened
a few days ago — perhaps a week. The rumour
has just reached Cayta, and the man in charge of the
cable station there has telegraphed the news to his
colleague here. We might just as well have kept
Barrios in Sulaco."

"What's to be done now?" murmured Mrs. Gould.

"Nothing. He's at sea with the troops. He will
get to Cayta in a couple of days' time and learn the
news there. What he will do then, who can say?
Hold Cayta? Offer his submission to Montero? Disband
his army — this last most likely, and go himself
in one of the O.S.N. Company's steamers, north or
south — to Valparaiso or to San Francisco, no matter
where. Our Barrios has a great practice in exiles and
repatriations, which mark the points in the political
game."

Decoud, exchanging a steady stare with Mrs. Gould,
added, tentatively, as it were, "And yet, if we had
Barrios with his 2,000 improved rifles here, something
could have been done."

"Montero victorious, completely victorious!" Mrs.
Gould breathed out in a tone of unbelief.

"A canard, probably. That sort of bird is hatched
in great numbers in such times as these. And even if it
were true? Well, let us put things at their worst, let
us say it is true."

"Then everything is lost," said Mrs. Gould, with the
calmness of despair.

Suddenly she seemed to divine, she seemed to see
Decoud's tremendous excitement under its cloak of
studied carelessness. It was, indeed, becoming visible

in his audacious and watchful stare, in the curve, half-
reckless, half-contemptuous, of his lips. And a French
phrase came upon them as if, for this Costaguanero of
the Boulevard, that had been the only forcible language
—

"Non, Madame. Rien n'est perdu."

It electrified Mrs. Gould out of her benumbed attitude,
and she said, vivaciously —

"What would you think of doing?"

But already there was something of mockery in
Decoud's suppressed excitement.

"What would you expect a true Costaguanero to do?
Another revolution, of course. On my word of honour,
Mrs. Gould, I believe I am a true hijo del pays, a true
son of the country, whatever Father Corbelàn may say.
And I'm not so much of an unbeliever as not to have
faith in my own ideas, in my own remedies, in my own
desires."

"Yes," said Mrs. Gould, doubtfully.

"You don't seem convinced," Decoud went on again
in French. "Say, then, in my passions."

Mrs. Gould received this addition unflinchingly. To
understand it thoroughly she did not require to hear
his muttered assurance —

"There is nothing I would not do for the sake of
Antonia. There is nothing I am not prepared to undertake.
There is no risk I am not ready to run."

Decoud seemed to find a fresh audacity in this voicing
of his thoughts. "You would not believe me if I were
to say that it is the love of the country which —"

She made a sort of discouraged protest with her arm,
as if to express that she had given up expecting that
motive from any one.

"A Sulaco revolution," Decoud pursued in a forcible
undertone. "The Great Cause may be served here,

on the very spot of its inception, in the place of its
birth, Mrs. Gould."

Frowning, and biting her lower lip thoughtfully, she
made a step away from the door.

"You are not going to speak to your husband?" Decoud
arrested her anxiously.

"But you will need his help?"

"No doubt," Decoud admitted without hesitation.
"Everything turns upon the San Tomé mine, but I
would rather he didn't know anything as yet of my —
my hopes."

A puzzled look came upon Mrs. Gould's face, and
Decoud, approaching, explained confidentially —

"Don't you see, he's such an idealist."

Mrs. Gould flushed pink, and her eyes grew darker
at the same time.

"Charley an idealist!" she said, as if to herself,
wonderingly. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Yes," conceded Decoud, "it's a wonderful thing to
say with the sight of the San Tomé mine, the greatest
fact in the whole of South America, perhaps, before our
very eyes. But look even at that, he has idealized this
fact to a point —" He paused. "Mrs. Gould, are
you aware to what point he has idealized the existence,
the worth, the meaning of the San Tomé mine? Are
you aware of it?"

He must have known what he was talking about.

The effect he expected was produced. Mrs. Gould,
ready to take fire, gave it up suddenly with a low little
sound that resembled a moan.

"What do you know?" she asked in a feeble voice.

"Nothing," answered Decoud, firmly. "But, then,
don't you see, he's an Englishman?"

"Well, what of that?" asked Mrs. Gould.

"Simply that he cannot act or exist without idealizing

every simple feeling, desire, or achievement. He could
not believe his own motives if he did not make them
first a part of some fairy tale. The earth is not quite
good enough for him, I fear. Do you excuse my frankness?
Besides, whether you excuse it or not, it is part
of the truth of things which hurts the — what do you call
them? — the Anglo-Saxon's susceptibilities, and at the
present moment I don't feel as if I could treat seriously
either his conception of things or — if you allow me to
say so — or yet yours."

Mrs. Gould gave no sign of being offended. "I suppose
Antonia understands you thoroughly?"

"Understands? Well, yes. But I am not sure that
she approves. That, however, makes no difference. I
am honest enough to tell you that, Mrs. Gould."

"Your idea, of course, is separation," she said.

"Separation, of course," declared Martin. "Yes;
separation of the whole Occidental Province from the
rest of the unquiet body. But my true idea, the only
one I care for, is not to be separated from Antonia."

"And that is all?" asked Mrs. Gould, without
severity.

"Absolutely. I am not deceiving myself about my
motives. She won't leave Sulaco for my sake, therefore
Sulaco must leave the rest of the Republic to its
fate. Nothing could be clearer than that. I like
a clearly defined situation. I cannot part with Antonia,
therefore the one and indivisible Republic of
Costaguana must be made to part with its western
province. Fortunately it happens to be also a sound
policy. The richest, the most fertile part of this land
may be saved from anarchy. Personally, I care little,
very little; but it's a fact that the establishment of
Montero in power would mean death to me. In all the
proclamations of general pardon which I have seen,

my name, with a few others, is specially excepted. The
brothers hate me, as you know very well, Mrs. Gould;
and behold, here is the rumour of them having won a
battle. You say that supposing it is true, I have plenty
of time to run away."

The slight, protesting murmur on the part of Mrs.
Gould made him pause for a moment, while he looked
at her with a sombre and resolute glance.

"Ah, but I would, Mrs. Gould. I would run away
if it served that which at present is my only desire. I
am courageous enough to say that, and to do it, too.
But women, even our women, are idealists. It is
Antonia that won't run away. A novel sort of vanity."

"You call it vanity," said Mrs. Gould, in a shocked
voice.

"Say pride, then, which. Father Corbelàn would tell
you, is a mortal sin. But I am not proud. I am simply
too much in love to run away. At the same time I
want to live. There is no love for a dead man. Therefore
it is necessary that Sulaco should not recognize the
victorious Montero."

"And you think my husband will give you his support?"

"I think he can be drawn into it, like all idealists,
when he once sees a sentimental basis for his action.
But I wouldn't talk to him. Mere clear facts won't
appeal to his sentiment. It is much better for him to
convince himself in his own way. And, frankly, I could
not, perhaps, just now pay sufficient respect to either
his motives or even, perhaps, to yours, Mrs. Gould."

It was evident that Mrs. Gould was very determined
not to be offended. She smiled vaguely, while she
seemed to think the matter over. As far as she could
judge from the girl's half-confidences, Antonia understood
that young man. Obviously there was promise of

safety in his plan, or rather in his idea. Moreover,
right or wrong, the idea could do no harm. And it was
quite possible, also, that the rumour was false.

"You have some sort of a plan," she said.

"Simplicity itself. Barrios has started, let him go
on then; he will hold Cayta, which is the door of the sea
route to Sulaco. They cannot send a sufficient force
over the mountains. No; not even to cope with the
band of Hernandez. Meantime we shall organize our
resistance here. And for that, this very Hernandez
will be useful. He has defeated troops as a bandit; he
will no doubt accomplish the same thing if he is made a
colonel or even a general. You know the country well
enough not to be shocked by what I say, Mrs. Gould.
I have heard you assert that this poor bandit was the
living,breathing example of cruelty, injustice, stupidity,
and oppression, that ruin men's souls as well as their
fortunes in this country. Well, there would be some
poetical retribution in that man arising to crush the evils
which had driven an honest ranchero into a life of
crime. A fine idea of retribution in that, isn't there?"

Decoud had dropped easily into English, which he
spoke with precision, very correctly, but with too many
z sounds.

"Think also of your hospitals, of your schools, of
your ailing mothers and feeble old men, of all that
population which you and your husband have brought
into the rocky gorge of San Tomé. Are you not responsible
to your conscience for all these people? Is it
not worth while to make another effort, which is not at
all so desperate as it looks, rather than —"

Decoud finished his thought with an upward toss of
the arm, suggesting annihilation; and Mrs. Gould
turned away her head with a look of horror.

"Why don't you say all this to my husband?" she

asked, without looking at Decoud, who stood watching
the effect of his words.

"Ah! But Don Carlos is so English," he began.
Mrs. Gould interrupted —

"Leave that alone, Don Martin. He's as much a
Costaguanero — No! He's more of a Costaguanero
than yourself."

"Sentimentalist, sentimentalist," Decoud almost
cooed, in a tone of gentle and soothing deference.
"Sentimentalist, after the amazing manner of your
people. I have been watching El Rey de Sulaco since
I came here on a fool's errand, and perhaps impelled by
some treason of fate lurking behind the unaccountable
turns of a man's life. But I don't matter, I am not a
sentimentalist, I cannot endow my personal desires
with a shining robe of silk and jewels. Life is not for
me a moral romance derived from the tradition of a
pretty fairy tale. No, Mrs. Gould; I am practical. I
am not afraid of my motives. But, pardon me, I have
been rather carried away. What I wish to say is that I
have been observing. I won't tell you what I have
discovered — "

"No. That is unnecessary," whispered Mrs. Gould,
once more averting her head.

"It is. Except one little fact, that your husband does
not like me. It's a small matter, which, in the circumstances,
seems to acquire a perfectly ridiculous importance.
Ridiculous and immense; for, clearly, money
is required for my plan," he reflected; then added,
meaningly, "and we have two sentimentalists to deal
with."

"I don't know that I understand you, Don Martin,"
said Mrs. Gould, coldly, preserving the low key of their
conversation. "But, speaking as if I did, who is the
other?"

"The great Holroyd in San Francisco, of course,"
Decoud whispered, lightly. "I think you understand
me very well. Women are idealists; but then they are
so perspicacious."

But whatever was the reason of that remark, disparaging
and complimentary at the same time, Mrs.
Gould seemed not to pay attention to it. The name of
Holroyd had given a new tone to her anxiety.

"The silver escort is coming down to the harbour tomorrow;
a whole six months' working, Don Martin!"
she cried in dismay.

"Let it come down, then," breathed out Decoud,
earnestly, almost into her ear.

"But if the rumour should get about, and especially
if it turned out true, troubles might break out in the
town," objected Mrs. Gould.

Decoud admitted that it was possible. He knew
well the town children of the Sulaco Campo: sullen,
thievish, vindictive, and bloodthirsty, whatever great
qualities their brothers of the plain might have had.
But then there was that other sentimentalist, who
attached a strangely idealistic meaning to concrete
facts. This stream of silver must be kept flowing
north to return in the form of financial backing from the
great house of Holroyd. Up at the mountain in the
strong room of the mine the silver bars were worth less
for his purpose than so much lead, from which at least
bullets may be run. Let it come down to the harbour,
ready for shipment.

The next north-going steamer would carry it off for
the very salvation of the San Tomé mine, which had
produced so much treasure. And, moreover, the
rumour was probably false, he remarked, with much
conviction in his hurried tone.

"Besides, señora," concluded Decoud, "we may

suppress it for many days. I have been talking with
the telegraphist in the middle of the Plaza Mayor; thus
I am certain that we could not have been overheard.
There was not even a bird in the air near us. And also
let me tell you something more. I have been making
friends with this man called Nostromo, the Capataz.
We had a conversation this very evening, I walking by
the side of his horse as he rode slowly out of the town
just now. He promised me that if a riot took place for
any reason — even for the most political of reasons, you
understand — his Cargadores, an important part of the
populace, you will admit, should be found on the side of
the Europeans."

"He has promised you that?" Mrs. Gould inquired,
with interest. "What made him make that promise to
you?"

"Upon my word, I don't know," declared Decoud, in
a slightly surprised tone. "He certainly promised me
that, but now you ask me why, I could not tell you
his reasons. He talked with his usual carelessness,
which, if he had been anything else but a common
sailor, I would call a pose or an affectation."

Decoud, interrupting himself, looked at Mrs. Gould
curiously.

"Upon the whole," he continued, "I suppose he
expects something to his advantage from it. You
mustn't forget that he does not exercise his extraordinary
power over the lower classes without a certain
amount of personal risk and without a great profusion
in spending his money. One must pay in some way or
other for such a solid thing as individual prestige. He
told me after we made friends at a dance, in a Posada
kept by a Mexican just outside the walls, that he had
come here to make his fortune. I suppose he looks
upon his prestige as a sort of investment."

"Perhaps he prizes it for its own sake," Mrs. Gould
said in a tone as if she were repelling an undeserved
aspersion. "Viola, the Garibaldino, with whom he has
lived for some years, calls him the Incorruptible."

"Ah! he belongs to the group of your protégés out
there towards the harbour, Mrs. Gould. Muy bien.
And Captain Mitchell calls him wonderful. I have
heard no end of tales of his strength, his audacity, his
fidelity. No end of fine things. H'm! incorruptible!
It is indeed a name of honour for the Capataz of the
Cargadores of Sulaco. Incorruptible! Fine, but vague.
However, I suppose he's sensible, too. And I talked to
him upon that sane and practical assumption."

"I prefer to think him disinterested, and therefore
trustworthy," Mrs. Gould said, with the nearest approach
to curtness it was in her nature to assume.

"Well, if so, then the silver will be still more safe.
Let it come down, señora. Let it come down, so that it
may go north and return to us in the shape of credit."

Mrs. Gould glanced along the corredor towards the
door of her husband's room. Decoud, watching her as
if she had his fate in her hands, detected an almost
imperceptible nod of assent. He bowed with a smile,
and, putting his hand into the breast pocket of his coat,
pulled out a fan of light feathers set upon painted leaves
of sandal-wood. "I had it in my pocket," he murmured,
triumphantly, "for a plausible pretext." He
bowed again. "Good-night, señora."

Mrs. Gould continued along the corredor away from
her husband's room. The fate of the San Tomé mine
was lying heavy upon her heart. It was a long time
now since she had begun to fear it. It had been an
idea. She had watched it with misgivings turning into
a fetish, and now the fetish had grown into a monstrous
and crushing weight. It was as if the inspiration of

their early years had left her heart to turn into a wall of
silver-bricks, erected by the silent work of evil spirits,
between her and her husband. He seemed to dwell
alone within a circumvallation of precious metal, leaving
her outside with her school, her hospital, the sick
mothers and the feeble old men, mere insignificant
vestiges of the initial inspiration. "Those poor people!"
she murmured to herself.

Below she heard the voice of Martin Decoud in the
patio speaking loudly:

"I have found Dona Antonia's fan, Basilio. Look.
here it is!"

7. CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS part of what Decoud would have called his
sane materialism that he did not believe in the possibility
of friendship between man and woman.

The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained,
that absolute rule. Friendship was possible
between brother and sister, meaning by friendship the
frank unreserve, as before another human being, of
thoughts and sensations; all the objectless and necessary
sincerity of one's innermost life trying to react
upon the profound sympathies of another existence.

His favourite sister, the handsome, slightly arbitrary
and resolute angel, ruling the father and mother Decoud
in the first-floor apartments of a very fine Parisian
house, was the recipient of Martin Decoud's confidences
as to his thoughts, actions, purposes, doubts,
and even failures. . . .

"Prepare our little circle in Paris for the birth of
another South American Republic. One more or less,
what does it matter? They may come into the world
like evil flowers on a hotbed of rotten institutions; but
the seed of this one has germinated in your brother's
brain, and that will be enough for your devoted assent.
I am writing this to you by the light of a single
candle, in a sort of inn, near the harbour, kept by an
Italian called Viola, a protégé of Mrs. Gould. The
whole building, which, for all I know, may have been
contrived by a Conquistador farmer of the pearl
fishery three hundred years ago, is perfectly silent. So
is the plain between the town and the harbour; silent,

but not so dark as the house, because the pickets of
Italian workmen guarding the railway have lighted little
fires all along the line. It was not so quiet around here
yesterday. We had an awful riot — a sudden outbreak
of the populace, which was not suppressed till late to-
day. Its object, no doubt, was loot, and that was defeated,
as you may have learned already from the
cablegram sent via San Francisco and New York last
night, when the cables were still open. You have read
already there that the energetic action of the Europeans
of the railway has saved the town from destruction, and
you may believe that. I wrote out the cable myself.
We have no Reuter's agency man here. I have also
fired at the mob from the windows of the club, in company
with some other young men of position. Our
object was to keep the Calle de la Constitucion clear for
the exodus of the ladies and children, who have taken
refuge on board a couple of cargo ships now in the harbour
here. That was yesterday. You should also
have learned from the cable that the missing President,
Ribiera, who had disappeared after the battle of Sta.
Marta, has turned up here in Sulaco by one of those
strange coincidences that are almost incredible, riding
on a lame mule into the very midst of the street fighting.
It appears that he had fled, in company of a
muleteer called Bonifacio, across the mountains from
the threats of Montero into the arms of an enraged
mob.

"The Capataz of Cargadores, that Italian sailor of
whom I have written to you before, has saved him from
an ignoble death. That man seems to have a particular
talent for being on the spot whenever there is something
picturesque to be done.

"He was with me at four o'clock in the morning at the
offices of the Porvenir, where he had turned up so early

in order to warn me of the coming trouble, and also to
assure me that he would keep his Cargadores on the
side of order. When the full daylight came we were
looking together at the crowd on foot and on horseback,
demonstrating on the Plaza and shying stones at the
windows of the Intendencia. Nostromo (that is the
name they call him by here) was pointing out to me
his Cargadores interspersed in the mob.

"The sun shines late upon Sulaco, for it has first to
climb above the mountains. In that clear morning
light, brighter than twilight, Nostromo saw right across
the vast Plaza, at the end of the street beyond the
cathedral, a mounted man apparently in difficulties with
a yelling knot of leperos. At once he said to me, 'That's
a stranger. What is it they are doing to him?' Then
he took out the silver whistle he is in the habit of using
on the wharf (this man seems to disdain the use of any
metal less precious than silver) and blew into it twice,
evidently a preconcerted signal for his Cargadores. He
ran out immediately, and they rallied round him. I
ran out, too, but was too late to follow them and help
in the rescue of the stranger, whose animal had fallen.
I was set upon at once as a hated aristocrat, and was
only too glad to get into the club, where Don Jaime
Berges (you may remember him visiting at our house
in Paris some three years ago) thrust a sporting gun into
my hands. They were already firing from the windows.
There were little heaps of cartridges lying about on the
open card-tables. I remember a couple of overturned
chairs, some bottles rolling on the floor amongst the
packs of cards scattered suddenly as the caballeros
rose from their game to open fire upon the mob. Most
of the young men had spent the night at the club in the
expectation of some such disturbance. In two of the
candelabra, on the consoles, the candles were burning

down in their sockets. A large iron nut, probably
stolen from the railway workshops, flew in from the
street as I entered, and broke one of the large mirrors
set in the wall. I noticed also one of the club servants
tied up hand and foot with the cords of the curtain and
flung in a corner. I have a vague recollection of Don
Jaime assuring me hastily that the fellow had been
detected putting poison into the dishes at supper. But
I remember distinctly he was shrieking for mercy, without
stopping at all, continuously, and so absolutely
disregarded that nobody even took the trouble to gag
him. The noise he made was so disagreeable that I had
half a mind to do it myself. But there was no time to
waste on such trifles. I took my place at one of the
windows and began firing.

"I didn't learn till later in the afternoon whom it was
that Nostromo, with his Cargadores and some Italian
workmen as well, had managed to save from those
drunken rascals. That man has a peculiar talent when
anything striking to the imagination has to be done. I
made that remark to him afterwards when we met after
some sort of order had been restored in the town, and
the answer he made rather surprised me. He said quite
moodily, 'And how much do I get for that, señor?'
Then it dawned upon me that perhaps this man's vanity
has been satiated by the adulation of the common
people and the confidence of his superiors!"

Decoud paused to light a cigarette, then, with his
head still over his writing, he blew a cloud of smoke,
which seemed to rebound from the paper. He took
up the pencil again.

"That was yesterday evening on the Plaza, while he
sat on the steps of the cathedral, his hands between his
knees, holding the bridle of his famous silver-grey mare.
He had led his body of Cargadores splendidly all day

long. He looked fatigued. I don't know how I
looked. Very dirty, I suppose. But I suppose I also
looked pleased. From the time the fugitive President
had been got off to the S. S. Minerva, the tide of success
had turned against the mob. They had been driven off
the harbour, and out of the better streets of the town, into
their own maze of ruins and tolderias. You must understand
that this riot, whose primary object was undoubtedly
the getting hold of the San Tomé silver
stored in the lower rooms of the Custom House (besides
the general looting of the Ricos), had acquired a
political colouring from the fact of two Deputies to the
Provincial Assembly, Señores Gamacho and Fuentes,
both from Bolson, putting themselves at the head of
it — late in the afternoon, it is true, when the mob, disappointed
in their hopes of loot, made a stand in the
narrow streets to the cries of 'Viva la Libertad! Down
with Feudalism!' (I wonder what they imagine
feudalism to be?) 'Down with the Goths and Paralytics.'
I suppose the Señores Gamacho and Fuentes
knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen.
In the Assembly they called themselves Moderates,
and opposed every energetic measure with philanthropic
pensiveness. At the first rumours of Montero's
victory, they showed a subtle change of the pensive
temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lopez
in his Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which
the poor man could only respond by a dazed smoothing
of his beard and the ringing of the presidential
bell. Then, when the downfall of the Ribierist cause
became confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt,
they have blossomed into convinced Liberals, acting
together as if they were Siamese twins, and ultimately
taking charge, as it were, of the riot in the name of
Monterist principles.

"Their last move of eight o'clock last night was to
organize themselves into a Monterist Committee which
sits, as far as I know, in a posada kept by a retired
Mexican bull-fighter, a great politician, too, whose
name I have forgotten. Thence they have issued a
communication to us, the Goths and Paralytics of the
Amarilla Club (who have our own committee), inviting
us to come to some provisional understanding for a
truce, in order, they have the impudence to say, that
the noble cause of Liberty 'should not be stained by the
criminal excesses of Conservative selfishness!' As I
came out to sit with Nostromo on the cathedral steps
the club was busy considering a proper reply in the
principal room, littered with exploded cartridges, with
a lot of broken glass, blood smears, candlesticks, and all
sorts of wreckage on the floor. But all this is nonsense.
Nobody in the town has any real power except
the railway engineers, whose men occupy the dismantled
houses acquired by the Company for their town station
on one side of the Plaza, and Nostromo, whose Cargadores
were sleeping under the arcades along the front of
Anzani's shops. A fire of broken furniture out of the
Intendencia saloons, mostly gilt, was burning on the
Plaza, in a high flame swaying right upon the statue of
Charles IV. The dead body of a man was lying on the
steps of the pedestal, his arms thrown wide open, and
his sombrero covering his face — the attention of some
friend, perhaps. The light of the flames touched the
foliage of the first trees on the Alameda, and played on
the end of a side street near by, blocked up by a jumble
of ox-carts and dead bullocks. Sitting on one of the
carcasses, a lepero, muffled up, smoked a cigarette. It
was a truce, you understand. The only other living
being on the Plaza besides ourselves was a Cargador
walking to and fro, with a long, bare knife in his hand,

like a sentry before the Arcades, where his friends were
sleeping. And the only other spot of light in the dark
town were the lighted windows of the club, at the corner
of the Calle."

After having written so far, Don Martin Decoud, the
exotic dandy of the Parisian boulevard, got up and
walked across the sanded floor of the café at one end of
the Albergo of United Italy, kept by Giorgio Viola, the
old companion of Garibaldi. The highly coloured
lithograph of the Faithful Hero seemed to look dimly,
in the light of one candle, at the man with no faith in
anything except the truth of his own sensations. Looking
out of the window, Decoud was met by a darkness so
impenetrable that he could see neither the mountains
nor the town, nor yet the buildings near the harbour;
and there was not a sound, as if the tremendous obscurity
of the Placid Gulf, spreading from the waters
over the land, had made it dumb as well as blind.
Presently Decoud felt a light tremor of the floor and a
distant clank of iron. A bright white light appeared,
deep in the darkness, growing bigger with a thundering
noise. The rolling stock usually kept on the sidings in
Rincon was being run back to the yards for safe keeping.
Like a mysterious stirring of the darkness behind the
headlight of the engine, the train passed in a gust of
hollow uproar, by the end of the house, which seemed to
vibrate all over in response. And nothing was clearly
visible but, on the end of the last flat car, a negro, in
white trousers and naked to the waist, swinging a
blazing torch basket incessantly with a circular movement
of his bare arm. Decoud did not stir.

Behind him, on the back of the chair from which he
had risen, hung his elegant Parisian overcoat, with a
pearl-grey silk lining. But when he turned back to
come to the table the candlelight fell upon a face that

was grimy and scratched. His rosy lips were blackened
with heat, the smoke of gun-powder. Dirt and rust
tarnished the lustre of his short beard. His shirt collar
and cuffs were crumpled; the blue silken tie hung down
his breast like a rag; a greasy smudge crossed his white
brow. He had not taken off his clothing nor used
water, except to snatch a hasty drink greedily, for some
forty hours. An awful restlessness had made him its
own, had marked him with all the signs of desperate
strife, and put a dry, sleepless stare into his eyes. He
murmured to himself in a hoarse voice, "I wonder if
there's any bread here," looked vaguely about him, then
dropped into the chair and took the pencil up again.
He became aware he had not eaten anything for many
hours.

It occurred to him that no one could understand him
so well as his sister. In the most sceptical heart there
lurks at such moments, when the chances of existence
are involved, a desire to leave a correct impression of
the feelings, like a light by which the action may be
seen when personality is gone, gone where no light of
investigation can ever reach the truth which every
death takes out of the world. Therefore, instead of
looking for something to eat, or trying to snatch an hour
or so of sleep, Decoud was filling the pages of a large
pocket-book with a letter to his sister.

In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep
out his weariness, his great fatigue, the close touch of his
bodily sensations. He began again as if he were talking
to her. With almost an illusion of her presence, he
wrote the phrase, "I am very hungry."

"I have the feeling of a great solitude around me,"
he continued. "Is it, perhaps, because I am the only
man with a definite idea in his head, in the complete
collapse of every resolve, intention, and hope about me?

But the solitude is also very real. All the engineers are
out, and have been for two days, looking after the
property of the National Central Railway, of that
great Costaguana undertaking which is to put money
into the pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans,
Germans, and God knows who else. The silence about
me is ominous. There is above the middle part of this
house a sort of first floor, with narrow openings like
loopholes for windows, probably used in old times for
the better defence against the savages, when the persistent
barbarism of our native continent did not wear the
black coats of politicians, but went about yelling, half-
naked, with bows and arrows in its hands. The woman
of the house is dying up there, I believe, all alone with
her old husband. There is a narrow staircase, the sort
of staircase one man could easily defend against a mob,
leading up there, and I have just heard, through the
thickness of the wall, the old fellow going down into
their kitchen for something or other. It was a sort of
noise a mouse might make behind the plaster of a wall.
All the servants they had ran away yesterday and have
not returned yet, if ever they do. For the rest, there
are only two children here, two girls. The father has
sent them downstairs, and they have crept into this
café, perhaps because I am here. They huddle together
in a corner, in each other's arms; I just noticed them a
few minutes ago, and I feel more lonely than ever."

Decoud turned half round in his chair, and asked,
"Is there any bread here?"

Linda's dark head was shaken negatively in response,
above the fair head of her sister nestling on her breast.

"You couldn't get me some bread?" insisted Decoud.
The child did not move; he saw her large eyes stare at
him very dark from the corner. "You're not afraid
of me?" he said.

"No," said Linda, "we are not afraid of you. You
came here with Gian' Battista."

"You mean Nostromo?" said Decoud.

"The English call him so, but that is no name either
for man or beast," said the girl, passing her hand gently
over her sister's hair.

"But he lets people call him so," remarked Decoud.

"Not in this house," retorted the child.

"Ah! well, I shall call him the Capataz then."

Decoud gave up the point, and after writing steadily
for a while turned round again.

"When do you expect him back?" he asked.

"After he brought you here he rode off to fetch the
Señor Doctor from the town for mother. He will be
back soon."

"He stands a good chance of getting shot somewhere
on the road," Decoud murmured to himself audibly; and
Linda declared in her high-pitched voice —

"Nobody would dare to fire a shot at Gian' Battista."

"You believe that," asked Decoud, "do you?"

"I know it," said the child, with conviction. "There
is no one in this place brave enough to attack Gian'
Battista."

"It doesn't require much bravery to pull a trigger
behind a bush," muttered Decoud to himself. "Fortunately,
the night is dark, or there would be but little
chance of saving the silver of the mine."

He turned again to his pocket-book, glanced back
through the pages, and again started his pencil.

"That was the position yesterday, after the Minerva
with the fugitive President had gone out of harbour, and
the rioters had been driven back into the side lanes of
the town. I sat on the steps of the cathedral with
Nostromo, after sending out the cable message for
the information of a more or less attentive world.

Strangely enough, though the offices of the Cable
Company are in the same building as the Porvenir, the
mob, which has thrown my presses out of the window
and scattered the type all over the Plaza, has been kept
from interfering with the instruments on the other side
of the courtyard. As I sat talking with Nostromo,
Bernhardt, the telegraphist, came out from under the
Arcades with a piece of paper in his hand. The little
man had tied himself up to an enormous sword and
was hung all over with revolvers. He is ridiculous, but
the bravest German of his size that ever tapped the
key of a Morse transmitter. He had received the
message from Cayta reporting the transports with
Barrios's army just entering the port, and ending with
the words, 'The greatest enthusiasm prevails.' I
walked off to drink some water at the fountain, and I
was shot at from the Alameda by somebody hiding
behind a tree. But I drank, and didn't care; with
Barrios in Cayta and the great Cordillera between us
and Montero's victorious army I seemed, notwithstanding
Messrs. Gamacho and Fuentes, to hold my
new State in the hollow of my hand. I was ready to
sleep, but when I got as far as the Casa Gould I found
the patio full of wounded laid out on straw. Lights
were burning, and in that enclosed courtyard on that
hot night a faint odour of chloroform and blood hung
about. At one end Doctor Monygham, the doctor of
the mine, was dressing the wounds; at the other, near
the stairs, Father Corbelàn, kneeling, listened to the
confession of a dying Cargador. Mrs. Gould was
walking about through these shambles with a large
bottle in one hand and a lot of cotton wool in the
other. She just looked at me and never even winked.
Her camerista was following her, also holding a bottle,
and sobbing gently to herself.

"I busied myself for some time in fetching water
from the cistern for the wounded. Afterwards I
wandered upstairs, meeting some of the first ladies of
Sulaco, paler than I had ever seen them before, with
bandages over their arms. Not all of them had fled to
the ships. A good many had taken refuge for the day
in the Casa Gould. On the landing a girl, with her hair
half down, was kneeling against the wall under the niche
where stands a Madonna in blue robes and a gilt crown
on her head. I think it was the eldest Miss Lopez;
I couldn't see her face, but I remember looking at the
high French heel of her little shoe. She did not make a
sound, she did not stir, she was not sobbing; she remained
there, perfectly still, all black against the
white wall, a silent figure of passionate piety. I am
sure she was no more frightened than the other white-
faced ladies I met carrying bandages. One was sitting
on the top step tearing a piece of linen hastily into strips
—the young wife of an elderly man of fortune here.
She interrupted herself to wave her hand to my bow, as
though she were in her carriage on the Alameda. The
women of our country are worth looking at during a
revolution. The rouge and pearl powder fall off, together
with that passive attitude towards the outer
world which education, tradition, custom impose upon
them from the earliest infancy. I thought of your face,
which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence
instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears
when some political commotion tears down the veil of
cosmetics and usage.

"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables
was sitting, the remnant of the vanished Provincial
Assembly. Don Juste Lopez had had half his beard
singed off at the muzzle of a trabuco loaded with slugs,
of which every one missed him, providentially. And as

he turned his head from side to side it was exactly
as if there had been two men inside his frock-coat, one
nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and
scared.

"They raised a cry of 'Decoud! Don Martin!' at
my entrance. I asked them, 'What are you deliberating
upon, gentlemen?' There did not seem to be any
president, though Don José Avellanos sat at the head of
the table. They all answered together, 'On the preservation
of life and property.' 'Till the new officials
arrive,' Don Juste explained to me, with the solemn
side of his face offered to my view. It was as if a
stream of water had been poured upon my glowing idea
of a new State. There was a hissing sound in my ears,
and the room grew dim, as if suddenly filled with vapour.

"I walked up to the table blindly, as though I had
been drunk. 'You are deliberating upon surrender,'
I said. They all sat still, with their noses over the
sheet of paper each had before him, God only knows
why. Only Don José hid his face in his hands, muttering,
'Never, never!' But as I looked at him, it
seemed to me that I could have blown him away with
my breath, he looked so frail, so weak, so worn out.
Whatever happens, he will not survive. The deception
is too great for a man of his age; and hasn't he seen the
sheets of 'Fifty Years of Misrule,' which we have begun
printing on the presses of the Porvenir, littering the
Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for
trabucos loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the
wind, trampled in the mud? I have seen pages floating
upon the very waters of the harbour. It would be
unreasonable to expect him to survive. It would be
cruel.

"'Do you know,' I cried, 'what surrender means

to you, to your women, to your children, to your
property?'

"I declaimed for five minutes without drawing
breath, it seems to me, harping on our best chances, on
the ferocity of Montero, whom I made out to be as
great a beast as I have no doubt he would like to be if he
had intelligence enough to conceive a systematic reign
of terror. And then for another five minutes or more
I poured out an impassioned appeal to their courage
and manliness, with all the passion of my love for
Antonia. For if ever man spoke well, it would be from
a personal feeling, denouncing an enemy, defending himself,
or pleading for what really may be dearer than
life. My dear girl, I absolutely thundered at them. It
seemed as if my voice would burst the walls asunder,
and when I stopped I saw all their scared eyes looking
at me dubiously. And that was all the effect I had
produced! Only Don José's head had sunk lower and
lower on his breast. I bent my ear to his withered lips,
and made out his whisper, something like, 'In God's
name, then, Martin, my son!' I don't know exactly.
There was the name of God in it, I am certain. It
seems to me I have caught his last breath — the breath
of his departing soul on his lips.

"He lives yet, it is true. I have seen him since; but
it was only a senile body, lying on its back, covered to
the chin, with open eyes, and so still that you might
have said it was breathing no longer. I left him thus,
with Antonia kneeling by the side of the bed, just before
I came to this Italian's posada, where the ubiquitous
death is also waiting. But I know that Don José
has really died there, in the Casa Gould, with that
whisper urging me to attempt what no doubt his soul,
wrapped up in the sanctity of diplomatic treaties and
solemn declarations, must have abhorred. I had exclaimed

very loud, 'There is never any God in a country
where men will not help themselves.'

"Meanwhile, Don Juste had begun a pondered oration
whose solemn effect was spoiled by the ridiculous
disaster to his beard. I did not wait to make it out.
He seemed to argue that Montero's (he called him The
General) intentions were probably not evil, though, he
went on, 'that distinguished man' (only a week ago we
used to call him a gran' bestia) 'was perhaps mistaken
as to the true means.' As you may imagine, I didn't
stay to hear the rest. I know the intentions of Montero's
brother, Pedrito, the guerrillero, whom I exposed
in Paris, some years ago, in a café frequented by
South American students, where he tried to pass himself
off for a Secretary of Legation. He used to come in
and talk for hours, twisting his felt hat in his hairy
paws, and his ambition seemed to become a sort of
Duc de Morny to a sort of Napoleon. Already, then,
he used to talk of his brother in inflated terms. He
seemed fairly safe from being found out, because the
students, all of the Blanco families, did not, as you may
imagine, frequent the Legation. It was only Decoud,
a man without faith and principles, as they used to say,
that went in there sometimes for the sake of the fun, as
it were to an assembly of trained monkeys. I know his
intentions. I have seen him change the plates at table.
Whoever is allowed to live on in terror, I must die the
death.

"No, I didn't stay to the end to hear Don Juste Lopez
trying to persuade himself in a grave oration of the
clemency and justice, and honesty, and purity of the
brothers Montero. I went out abruptly to seek
Antonia. I saw her in the gallery. As I opened the
door, she extended to me her clasped hands.

"'What are they doing in there?' she asked.

"'Talking,' I said, with my eyes looking into hers.

"'Yes, yes, but —'

"'Empty speeches,' I interrupted her. 'Hiding
their fears behind imbecile hopes. They are all great
Parliamentarians there — on the English model, as you
know.' I was so furious that I could hardly speak.
She made a gesture of despair.

"Through the door I held a little ajar behind me, we
heard Dun Juste's measured mouthing monotone go on
from phrase to phrase, like a sort of awful and solemn
madness.

"'After all, the Democratic aspirations have, perhaps,
their legitimacy. The ways of human progress are
inscrutable, and if the fate of the country is in the hand
of Montero, we ought —'

"I crashed the door to on that; it was enough; it was
too much. There was never a beautiful face expressing
more horror and despair than the face of Antonia. I
couldn't bear it; I seized her wrists.

"'Have they killed my father in there?' she asked.

"Her eyes blazed with indignation, but as I looked
on, fascinated, the light in them went out.

"'It is a surrender,' I said. And I remember I was
shaking her wrists I held apart in my hands. 'But it's
more than talk. Your father told me to go on in God's
name.'

"My dear girl, there is that in Antonia which would
make me believe in the feasibility of anything. One
look at her face is enough to set my brain on fire. And
yet I love her as any other man would — with the heart,
and with that alone. She is more to me than his Church
to Father Corbelàn (the Grand Vicar disappeared last
night from the town; perhaps gone to join the band
of Hernandez). She is more to me than his precious
mine to that sentimental Englishman. I won't speak

of his wife. She may have been sentimental once.
The San Tomé mine stands now between those two people.
'Your father himself, Antonia,' I repeated; 'your
father, do you understand? has told me to go on.'

"She averted her face, and in a pained voice —

"'He has?' she cried. 'Then, indeed, I fear he will
never speak again.'

"She freed her wrists from my clutch and began to
cry in her handkerchief. I disregarded her sorrow; I
would rather see her miserable than not see her at all,
never any more; for whether I escaped or stayed to die,
there was for us no coming together, no future. And
that being so, I had no pity to waste upon the passing
moments of her sorrow. I sent her off in tears to fetch
Doña Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment
was necessary to the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism
of the people that will never do anything for
the sake of their passionate desire, unless it comes to
them clothed in the fair robes of an idea.

"Late at night we formed a small junta of four — the
two women, Don Carlos, and myself — in Mrs. Gould's
blue-and-white boudoir.

"El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very
honest man. And so he is, if one could look behind his
taciturnity. Perhaps he thinks that this alone makes
his honesty unstained. Those Englishmen live on
illusions which somehow or other help them to get a
firm hold of the substance. When he speaks it is by
a rare 'yes' or 'no' that seems as impersonal as the
words of an oracle. But he could not impose on me by
his dumb reserve. I knew what he had in his head; he
has his mine in his head; and his wife had nothing in her
head but his precious person, which he has bound up
with the Gould Concession and tied up to that little
woman's neck. No matter. The thing was to make

him present the affair to Holroyd (the Steel and Silver
King) in such a manner as to secure his financial support.
At that time last night, just twenty-four hours
ago, we thought the silver of the mine safe in the
Custom House vaults till the north-bound steamer
came to take it away. And as long as the treasure
flowed north, without a break, that utter sentimentalist,
Holroyd, would not drop his idea of introducing, not
only justice, industry, peace, to the benighted continents,
but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of
Christianity. Later on, the principal European really
in Sulaco, the engineer-in-chief of the railway, came
riding up the Calle, from the harbour, and was admitted
to our conclave. Meantime, the Junta of the Notables
in the great sala was still deliberating; only, one of them
had run out in the corredor to ask the servant whether
something to eat couldn't be sent in. The first words
the engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir
were, 'What is your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war
hospital below, and apparently a restaurant above. I
saw them carrying trays full of good things into the
sala.'

"'And here, in this boudoir,' I said, 'you behold the
inner cabinet of the Occidental Republic that is to be.'

"He was so preoccupied that he didn't smile at that,
he didn't even look surprised.

"He told us that he was attending to the general
dispositions for the defence of the railway property at
the railway yards when he was sent for to go into the
railway telegraph office. The engineer of the railhead,
at the foot of the mountains, wanted to talk to him from
his end of the wire. There was nobody in the office
but himself and the operator of the railway telegraph,
who read off the clicks aloud as the tape coiled its
length upon the floor. And the purport of that talk,

clicked nervously from a wooden shed in the depths of
the forests, had informed the chief that President
Ribiera had been, or was being, pursued. This was
news, indeed, to all of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself,
when rescued, revived, and soothed by us, had been inclined
to think that he had not been pursued.

"Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of
his friends, and had left the headquarters of his discomfited
army alone, under the guidance of Bonifacio,
the muleteer, who had been willing to take the responsibility
with the risk. He had departed at day-
break of the third day. His remaining forces had
melted away during the night. Bonifacio and he rode
hard on horses towards the Cordillera; then they obtained
mules, entered the passes, and crossed the
Paramo of Ivie just before a freezing blast swept over
that stony plateau, burying in a drift of snow the little
shelter-hut of stones in which they had spent the night.
Afterwards poor Ribiera had many adventures, got
separated from his guide, lost his mount, struggled down
to the Campo on foot, and if he had not thrown himself
on the mercy of a ranchero would have perished a long
way from Sulaco. That man, who, as a matter of fact,
recognized him at once, let him have a fresh mule, which
the fugitive, heavy and unskilful, had ridden to death.
And it was true he had been pursued by a party commanded
by no less a person than Pedro Montero, the
brother of the general. The cold wind of the Paramo
luckily caught the pursuers on the top of the pass.
Some few men, and all the animals, perished in the icy
blast. The stragglers died, but the main body kept on.
They found poor Bonifacio lying half-dead at the foot
of a snow slope, and bayoneted him promptly in the
true Civil War style. They would have had Ribiera,
too, if they had not, for some reason or other, turned off

the track of the old Camino Real, only to lose their way
in the forests at the foot of the lower slopes. And
there they were at last, having stumbled in unexpectedly
upon the construction camp. The engineer at
the railhead told his chief by wire that he had Pedro
Montero absolutely there, in the very office, listening
to the clicks. He was going to take possession of Sulaco
in the name of the Democracy. He was very overbearing.
His men slaughtered some of the Railway Company's
cattle without asking leave, and went to work
broiling the meat on the embers. Pedrito made many
pointed inquiries as to the silver mine, and what had
become of the product of the last six months' working.
He had said peremptorily, "Ask your chief up there by
wire, he ought to know; tell him that Don Pedro
Montero, Chief of the Campo and Minister of the
Interior of the new Government, desires to be correctly
informed.'

"He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, a
lean, haggard face, ragged beard and hair, and had
walked in limping, with a crooked branch of a tree for
a staff. His followers were perhaps in a worse plight,
but apparently they had not thrown away their arms,
and, at any rate, not all their ammunition. Their lean
faces filled the door and the windows of the telegraph
hut. As it was at the same time the bedroom of the
engineer-in-charge there, Montero had thrown himself
on his clean blankets and lay there shivering and dictating
requisitions to be transmitted by wire to Sulaco.
He demanded a train of cars to be sent down at once to
transport his men up.

"'To this I answered from my end,' the engineer-in-
chief related to us, 'that I dared not risk the rolling-
stock in the interior, as there had been attempts to
wreck trains all along the line several times. I did that

for your sake, Gould,' said the chief engineer. 'The answer
to this was, in the words of my subordinate, "The filthy
brute on my bed said, 'Suppose I were to have you
shot?'" To which my subordinate, who, it appears,
was himself operating, remarked that it would not
bring the cars up. Upon that, the other, yawning,
said, "Never mind, there is no lack of horses on the
Campo." And, turning over, went to sleep on Harris's
bed.'

"This is why, my dear girl, I am a fugitive to-night.
The last wire from railhead says that Pedro Montero
and his men left at daybreak, after feeding on asado
beef all night. They took all the horses; they will find
more on the road; they'll be here in less than thirty
hours, and thus Sulaco is no place either for me or the
great store of silver belonging to the Gould Concession.

"But that is not the worst. The garrison of Esmeralda
has gone over to the victorious party. We have
heard this by means of the telegraphist of the Cable
Company, who came to the Casa Gould in the early
morning with the news. In fact, it was so early that
the day had not yet quite broken over Sulaco. His
colleague in Esmeralda had called him up to say that
the garrison, after shooting some of their officers, had
taken possession of a Government steamer laid up in
the harbour. It is really a heavy blow for me. I
thought I could depend on every man in this province.
It was a mistake. It was a Monterist Revolution in
Esmeralda, just such as was attempted in Sulaco, only
that that one came off. The telegraphist was signalling
to Bernhardt all the time, and his last transmitted
words were, 'They are bursting in the door, and taking
possession of the cable office. You are cut off. Can
do no more.'

"But, as a matter of fact, he managed somehow to

escape the vigilance of his captors, who had tried to
stop the communication with the outer world. He did
manage it. How it was done I don't know, but a few
hours afterwards he called up Sulaco again, and what
he said was, 'The insurgent army has taken possession
of the Government transport in the bay and are filling
her with troops, with the intention of going round the
coast to Sulaco. Therefore look out for yourselves.
They will be ready to start in a few hours, and may be
upon you before daybreak.'

"This is all he could say. They drove him away from
his instrument this time for good, because Bernhardt
has been calling up Esmeralda ever since without getting
an answer."

After setting these words down in the pocket-book
which he was filling up for the benefit of his sister, Decoud
lifted his head to listen. But there were no sounds,
neither in the room nor in the house, except the drip of
the water from the filter into the vast earthenware jar
under the wooden stand. And outside the house there
was a great silence. Decoud lowered his head again
over the pocket-book.

"I am not running away, you understand," he wrote
on. "I am simply going away with that great treasure
of silver which must be saved at all costs. Pedro
Montero from the Campo and the revolted garrison of
Esmeralda from the sea are converging upon it. That
it is there lying ready for them is only an accident. The
real objective is the San Tomé mine itself, as you may
well imagine; otherwise the Occidental Province would
have been, no doubt, left alone for many weeks, to be
gathered at leisure into the arms of the victorious party.
Don Carlos Gould will have enough to do to save his
mine, with its organization and its people; this 'Imperium
in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing, to

which his sentimentalism attaches a strange idea of
justice. He holds to it as some men hold to the idea of
love or revenge. Unless I am much mistaken in the
man, it must remain inviolate or perish by an act of his
will alone. A passion has crept into his cold and
idealistic life. A passion which I can only comprehend
intellectually. A passion that is not like the passions
we know, we men of another blood. But it is as
dangerous as any of ours.

"His wife has understood it, too. That is why she is
such a good ally of mine. She seizes upon all my suggestions
with a sure instinct that in the end they make
for the safety of the Gould Concession. And he defers
to her because he trusts her perhaps, but I fancy
rather as if he wished to make up for some subtle wrong,
for that sentimental unfaithfulness which surrenders
her happiness, her life, to the seduction of an idea. The
little woman has discovered that he lives for the mine
rather than for her. But let them be. To each his
fate, shaped by passion or sentiment. The principal
thing is that she has backed up my advice to get the
silver out of the town, out of the country, at once, at
any cost, at any risk. Don Carlos' mission is to preserve
unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould's
mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and
overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it
were an infatuation for another woman. Nostromo's
mission is to save the silver. The plan is to load it into
the largest of the Company's lighters, and send it across
the gulf to a small port out of Costaguana territory just
on the other side the Azuera, where the first north-
bound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The
waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness
of the gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and
by the time the day breaks over the ocean we shall be

out of sight, invisible, hidden by Azuera, which itself
looks from the Sulaco shore like a faint blue cloud on the
horizon.

"The incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores is the man
for that work; and I, the man with a passion, but without
a mission, I go with him to return — to play my part
in the farce to the end, and, if successful, to receive my
reward, which no one but Antonia can give me.

"I shall not see her again now before I depart. I
left her, as I have said, by Don José's bedside. The
street was dark, the houses shut up, and I walked out
of the town in the night. Not a single street-lamp had
been lit for two days, and the archway of the gate was
only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a tower, in
which I heard low, dismal groans, that seemed to answer
the murmurs of a man's voice.

"I recognized something impassive and careless in its
tone, characteristic of that Genoese sailor who, like me,
has come casually here to be drawn into the events for
which his scepticism as well as mine seems to entertain
a sort of passive contempt. The only thing he seems to
care for, as far as I have been able to discover, is to be
well spoken of. An ambition fit for noble souls, but
also a profitable one for an exceptionally intelligent
scoundrel. Yes. His very words, 'To be well spoken
of. Si, señor.' He does not seem to make any dif-.
ference between speaking and thinking. Is it sheer
naïveness or the practical point of view, I wonder?
Exceptional individualities always interest me, because
they are true to the general formula expressing the
moral state of humanity.

"He joined me on the harbour road after I had
passed them under the dark archway without stopping.
It was a woman in trouble he had been talking to.
Through discretion I kept silent while he walked by my

side. After a time he began to talk himself. It was
not what I expected. It was only an old woman, an
old lace-maker, in search of her son, one of the street-
sweepers employed by the municipality. Friends had
come the day before at daybreak to the door of their
hovel calling him out. He had gone with them, and
she had not seen him since; so she had left the food she
had been preparing half-cooked on the extinct embers
and had crawled out as far as the harbour, where she
had heard that some town mozos had been killed on the
morning of the riot. One of the Cargadores guarding
the Custom House had brought out a lantern, and had
helped her to look at the few dead left lying about there.
Now she was creeping back, having failed in her search.
So she sat down on the stone seat under the arch, moaning,
because she was very tired. The Capataz had
questioned her, and after hearing her broken and groaning
tale had advised her to go and look amongst the
wounded in the patio of the Casa Gould. He had also
given her a quarter dollar, he mentioned carelessly.

"'Why did you do that?' I asked. 'Do you know
her?'

"'No, señor. I don't suppose I have ever seen her
before. How should I? She has not probably been
out in the streets for years. She is one of those old
women that you find in this country at the back of huts,
crouching over fireplaces, with a stick on the ground by
their side, and almost too feeble to drive away the
stray dogs from their cooking-pots. Caramba! I
could tell by her voice that death had forgotten her.
But, old or young, they like money, and will speak well
of the man who gives it to them.' He laughed a little.
'Señor, you should have felt the clutch of her paw as I
put the piece in her palm.' He paused. 'My last, too,'
he added.

"I made no comment. He's known for his liberality
and his bad luck at the game of monte, which keeps him
as poor as when he first came here.

"'I suppose, Don Martin,' he began, in a thoughtful,
speculative tone, 'that the Señor Administrador of San
Tomé will reward me some day if I save his silver?'

"I said that it could not be otherwise, surely. He
walked on, muttering to himself. 'Si, si, without doubt,
without doubt; and, look you, Señor Martin, what it is
to be well spoken of! There is not another man that
could have been even thought of for such a thing. I
shall get something great for it some day. And let it
come soon,' he mumbled. 'Time passes in this country
as quick as anywhere else.'

"This, sœur chérie, is my companion in the great
escape for the sake of the great cause. He is more naïve
than shrewd, more masterful than crafty, more generous
with his personality than the people who make use of
him are with their money. At least, that is what he
thinks himself with more pride than sentiment. I am
glad I have made friends with him. As a companion
he acquires more importance than he ever had as a sort
of minor genius in his way — as an original Italian sailor
whom I allowed to come in in the small hours and talk
familiarly to the editor of the Porvenir while the paper
was going through the press. And it is curious to have
met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist
in personal prestige.

"I am waiting for him here now. On arriving at
the posada kept by Viola we found the children alone
down below, and the old Genoese shouted to his
countryman to go and fetch the doctor. Otherwise we
would have gone on to the wharf, where it appears
Captain Mitchell with some volunteer Europeans and a
few picked Cargadores are loading the lighter with the

silver that must be saved from Montero's clutches in
order to be used for Montero's defeat. Nostromo
galloped furiously back towards the town. He has
been long gone already. This delay gives me time to
talk to you. By the time this pocket-book reaches
your hands much will have happened. But now it is a
pause under the hovering wing of death in this silent
house buried in the black night, with this dying woman,
the two children crouching without a sound, and that
old man whom I can hear through the thickness of the
wall passing up and down with a light rubbing noise
no louder than a mouse. And I, the only other with
them, don't really know whether to count myself with
the living or with the dead. 'Quien sabe?' as the people
here are prone to say in answer to every question. But
no! feeling for you is certainly not dead, and the whole
thing, the house, the dark night, the silent children in
this dim room, my very presence here — all this is life,
must be life, since it is so much like a dream."

With the writing of the last line there came upon
Decoud a moment of sudden and complete oblivion.
He swayed over the table as if struck by a bullet. The
next moment he sat up, confused, with the idea that he
had heard his pencil roll on the floor. The low door of
the café, wide open, was filled with the glare of a torch in
which was visible half of a horse, switching its tail
against the leg of a rider with a long iron spur strapped
to the naked heel. The two girls were gone, and
Nostromo, standing in the middle of the room, looked
at him from under the round brim of the sombrero low
down over his brow.

"I have brought that sour-faced English doctor in
Señora Gould's carriage," said Nostromo. "I doubt if,
with all his wisdom, he can save the Padrona this time.
They have sent for the children. A bad sign that."

He sat down on the end of a bench. "She wants to
give them her blessing, I suppose."

Dazedly Decoud observed that he must have fallen
sound asleep, and Nostromo said, with a vague smile,
that he had looked in at the window and had seen him
lying still across the table with his head on his arms.
The English señora had also come in the carriage, and
went upstairs at once with the doctor. She had told
him not to wake up Don Martin yet; but when they sent
for the children he had come into the café.

The half of the horse with its half of the rider swung
round outside the door; the torch of tow and resin in the
iron basket which was carried on a stick at the saddle-
bow flared right into the room for a moment, and Mrs.
Gould entered hastily with a very white, tired face.
The hood of her dark, blue cloak had fallen back. Both
men rose.

"Teresa wants to see you, Nostromo," she said.
The Capataz did not move. Decoud, with his back
to the table, began to button up his coat.

"The silver, Mrs. Gould, the silver," he murmured in
English. "Don't forget that the Esmeralda garrison
have got a steamer. They may appear at any moment
at the harbour entrance."

"The doctor says there is no hope," Mrs. Gould spoke
rapidly, also in English. "I shall take you down to the
wharf in my carriage and then come back to fetch away
the girls." She changed swiftly into Spanish to address
Nostromo. "Why are you wasting time? Old Giorgio's
wife wishes to see you."

"I am going to her, señora," muttered the Capataz.
Dr. Monygham now showed himself, bringing back
the children. To Mrs. Gould's inquiring glance he only
shook his head and went outside at once, followed by
Nostromo.

The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his
head low, and the rider had dropped the reins to light
a cigarette. The glare of the torch played on the front
of the house crossed by the big black letters of its inscription
in which only the word ITALIA was lighted
fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as
Mrs. Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the
yellow-faced, portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the
box. By his side Basilio, dark and skinny, held a
Winchester carbine in front of him, with both hands,
and peered fearfully into the darkness. Nostromo
touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.

"Is she really dying, señor doctor?"

"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his
scarred cheek. "And why she wants to see you I cannot
imagine."

"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo,
looking away.

"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be
like that again," snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may
go to her or stay away. There is very little to be got
from talking to the dying. But she told Doña Emilia
in my hearing that she has been like a mother to you
ever since you first set foot ashore here."

"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me
to anybody. It is more as if she could not forgive me
for being alive, and such a man, too, as she would have
liked her son to be."

"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near
them. "Women have their own ways of tormenting
themselves." Giorgio Viola had come out of the house.
He threw a heavy black shadow in the torchlight, and
the glare fell on his big face, on the great bushy head of
white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with
his extended arm.

Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little
medicament box of polished wood on the seat of the
landau, turned to old Giorgio and thrust into his big,
trembling hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles out
of the case.

"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water,"
he said. "It will make her easier."

"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old
man, patiently.

"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back
to him, clicking the lock of the medicine case.

Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark
but for the glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy
mantel of the cooking-range, where water was boiling in
an iron pot with a loud bubbling sound. Between the
two walls of a narrow staircase a bright light streamed
from the sick-room above; and the magnificent Capataz
de Cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft leather
sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and
bronzed chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled
a Mediterranean sailor just come ashore from some
wine or fruit-laden felucca. At the top he paused,
broad shouldered, narrow hipped and supple, looking
at the large bed, like a white couch of state, with a
profusion of snowy linen, amongst which the Padrona
sat unpropped and bowed, her handsome, black-browed
face bent over her chest. A mass of raven hair with
only a few white threads in it covered her shoulders;
one thick strand fallen forward half veiled her cheek.
Perfectly motionless in that pose, expressing physical
anxiety and unrest, she turned her eyes alone towards
Nostromo.

The Capataz had a red sash wound many times round
his waist, and a heavy silver ring on the forefinger of the
hand he raised to give a twist to his moustache.

"Their revolutions, their revolutions," gasped Señora
Teresa. "Look, Gian' Battista, it has killed me at
last!"

Nostromo said nothing, and the sick woman with an
upward glance insisted. "Look, this one has killed
me, while you were away fighting for what did not
concern you, foolish man."

"Why talk like this?" mumbled the Capataz between
his teeth. "Will you never believe in my good sense?
It concerns me to keep on being what I am: every day
alike."

"You never change, indeed," she said, bitterly. "Always
thinking of yourself and taking your pay out in
fine words from those who care nothing for you."

There was between them an intimacy of antagonism
as close in its way as the intimacy of accord and affection.
He had not walked along the way of Teresa's
expectations. It was she who had encouraged him to
leave his ship, in the hope of securing a friend and defender
for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was aware
of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear
of her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected
state of the children. She had wanted to annex that apparently
quiet and steady young man, affectionate and
pliable, an orphan from his tenderest age, as he had
told her, with no ties in Italy except an uncle, owner
and master of a felucca, from whose ill-usage he had
run away before he was fourteen. He had seemed to
her courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his
way in the world. From gratitude and the ties of
habit he would become like a son to herself and Giorgio;
and then, who knows, when Linda had grown up. . . .
Ten years' difference between husband and wife was not
so much. Her own great man was nearly twenty years
older than herself. Gian' Battista was an attractive

young fellow, besides; attractive to men, women, and
children, just by that profound quietness of personality
which, like a serene twilight, rendered more seductive
the promise of his vigorous form and the resolution of
his conduct.

Old Giorgio, in profound ignorance of his wife's views
and hopes, had a great regard for his young countryman.
"A man ought not to be tame," he used to tell her,
quoting the Spanish proverb in defence of the splendid
Capataz. She was growing jealous of his success. He
was escaping from her, she feared. She was practical,
and he seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift
of these qualities which made him so valuable. He got
too little for them. He scattered them with both
hands amongst too many people, she thought. He laid
no money by. She railed at his poverty, his exploits,
his adventures, his loves and his reputation; but in her
heart she had never given him up, as though, indeed, he
had been her son.

Even now, ill as she was, ill enough to feel the chill,
black breath of the approaching end, she had wished to
see him. It was like putting out her benumbed hand to
regain her hold. But she had presumed too much on
her strength. She could not command her thoughts;
they had become dim, like her vision. The words faltered
on her lips, and only the paramount anxiety and
desire of her life seemed to be too strong for death.

The Capataz said, "I have heard these things many
times. You are unjust, but it does not hurt me. Only
now you do not seem to have much strength to talk, and
I have but little time to listen. I am engaged in a work
of very great moment."

She made an effort to ask him whether it was true that
he had found time to go and fetch a doctor for her.
Nostromo nodded affirmatively.

She was pleased: it relieved her sufferings to know
that the man had condescended to do so much for those
who really wanted his help. It was a proof of his
friendship. Her voice become stronger.

"I want a priest more than a doctor," she said,
pathetically. She did not move her head; only her
eyes ran into the corners to watch the Capataz
standing by the side of her bed. "Would you go to
fetch a priest for me now? Think! A dying woman
asks you!"

Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not
believe in priests in their sacerdotal character. A
doctor was an efficacious person; but a priest, as priest,
was nothing, incapable of doing either good or harm.
Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of them as old
Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was
what struck him most.

"Padrona," he said, "you have been like this before,
and got better after a few days. I have given you
already the very last moments I can spare. Ask
Señora Gould to send you one."

He was feeling uneasy at the impiety of this refusal.
The Padrona believed in priests, and confessed herself
to them. But all women did that. It could not be of
much consequence. And yet his heart felt oppressed
for a moment — at the thought what absolution would
mean to her if she believed in it only ever so little. No
matter. It was quite true that he had given her already
the very last moment he could spare.

"You refuse to go?" she gasped. "Ah! you are
always yourself, indeed."

"Listen to reason, Padrona," he said. "I am needed
to save the silver of the mine. Do you hear? A
greater treasure than the one which they say is guarded
by ghosts and devils on Azuera. It is true. I am resolved

to make this the most desperate affair I was
ever engaged on in my whole life."

She felt a despairing indignation. The supreme test
had failed. Standing above her, Nostromo did not
see the distorted features of her face, distorted by a
paroxysm of pain and anger. Only she began to
tremble all over. Her bowed head shook. The broad
shoulders quivered.

"Then God, perhaps, will have mercy upon me!
But do you look to it, man, that you get something for
yourself out of it, besides the remorse that shall overtake
you some day."

She laughed feebly. "Get riches at least for once,
you indispensable, admired Gian' Battista, to whom
the peace of a dying woman is less than the praise of
people who have given you a silly name — and nothing
besides — in exchange for your soul and body."

The Capataz de Cargadores swore to himself under
his breath.

"Leave my soul alone, Padrona, and I shall know
how to take care of my body. Where is the harm of
people having need of me? What are you envying me
that I have robbed you and the children of? Those
very people you are throwing in my teeth have done
more for old Giorgio than they ever thought of doing
for me."

He struck his breast with his open palm; his
voice had remained low though he had spoken in a
forcible tone. He twisted his moustaches one after
another, and his eyes wandered a little about the
room.

"Is it my fault that I am the only man for their purposes?
What angry nonsense are you talking, mother?
Would you rather have me timid and foolish, selling
water-melons on the market-place or rowing a boat for

passengers along the harbour, like a soft Neapolitan without
courage or reputation? Would you have a young
man live like a monk? I do not believe it. Would you
want a monk for your eldest girl? Let her grow. What
are you afraid of? You have been angry with me for
everything I did for years; ever since you first spoke to
me, in secret from old Giorgio, about your Linda. Husband
to one and brother to the other, did you say?
Well, why not! I like the little ones, and a man must
marry some time. But ever since that time you have
been making little of me to everyone. Why? Did you
think you could put a collar and chain on me as if I were
one of the watch-dogs they keep over there in the rail-
way yards? Look here, Padrona, I am the same man
who came ashore one evening and sat down in the
thatched ranche you lived in at that time on the other
side of the town and told you all about himself. You
were not unjust to me then. What has happened since?
I am no longer an insignificant youth. A good name,
Giorgio says, is a treasure, Padrona."

"They have turned your head with their praises,"
gasped the sick woman. "They have been paying you
with words. Your folly shall betray you into poverty,
misery, starvation. The very leperos shall laugh at
you — the great Capataz."
Nostromo stood for a time as if struck dumb. She
never looked at him. A self-confident, mirthless smile
passed quickly from his lips, and then he backed away.
His disregarded figure sank down beyond the doorway.
He descended the stairs backwards, with the usual sense
of having been somehow baffled by this woman's disparagement
of this reputation he had obtained and
desired to keep.

Downstairs in the big kitchen a candle was burning,
surrounded by the shadows of the walls, of the ceiling,

but no ruddy glare filled the open square of the outer
door. The carriage with Mrs. Gould and Don Martin,
preceded by the horseman bearing the torch, had gone
on to the jetty. Dr. Monygham, who had remained,
sat on the corner of a hard wood table near the candlestick,
his seamed, shaven face inclined sideways, his
arms crossed on his breast, his lips pursed up, and his
prominent eyes glaring stonily upon the floor of black
earth. Near the overhanging mantel of the fireplace,
where the pot of water was still boiling violently, old
Giorgio held his chin in his hand, one foot advanced, as
if arrested by a sudden thought.

"Adios, viejo," said Nostromo, feeling the handle of
his revolver in the belt and loosening his knife in its
sheath. He picked up a blue poncho lined with red
from the table, and put it over his head. "Adios, look
after the things in my sleeping-room, and if you hear
from me no more, give up the box to Paquita. There
is not much of value there, except my new serape from
Mexico, and a few silver buttons on my best jacket.
No matter! The things will look well enough on the
next lover she gets, and the man need not be afraid I
shall linger on earth after I am dead, like those Gringos
that haunt the Azuera."

Dr. Monygham twisted his lips into a bitter smile.
After old Giorgio, with an almost imperceptible nod and
without a word, had gone up the narrow stairs, he
said —

"Why, Capataz! I thought you could never fail in
anything."

Nostromo, glancing contemptuously at the doctor,
lingered in the doorway rolling a cigarette, then struck a
match, and, after lighting it, held the burning piece of
wood above his head till the flame nearly touched his
fingers.

"No wind!" he muttered to himself. "Look here,
señor — do you know the nature of my undertaking?"

Dr. Monygham nodded sourly.

"It is as if I were taking up a curse upon me, señor
doctor. A man with a treasure on this coast will have
every knife raised against him in every place upon the
shore. You see that, señor doctor? I shall float
along with a spell upon my life till I meet somewhere the
north-bound steamer of the Company, and then indeed
they will talk about the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores
from one end of America to another."

Dr. Monygham laughed his short, throaty laugh.
Nostromo turned round in the doorway.

"But if your worship can find any other man ready
and fit for such business I will stand back. I am not
exactly tired of my life, though I am so poor that I can
carry all I have with myself on my horse's back."

"You gamble too much, and never say 'no' to a pretty
face, Capataz," said Dr. Monygham, with sly simplicity.
"That's not the way to make a fortune. But
nobody that I know ever suspected you of being poor.
I hope you have made a good bargain in case you come
back safe from this adventure."

"What bargain would your worship have made?"
asked Nostromo, blowing the smoke out of his lips
through the doorway.

Dr. Monygham listened up the staircase for a moment
before he answered, with another of his short,
abrupt laughs —

"Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death
upon my back, as you call it, nothing else but the whole
treasure would do."

Nostromo vanished out of the doorway with a grunt
of discontent at this jeering answer. Dr. Monygham
heard him gallop away. Nostromo rode furiously in

the dark. There were lights in the buildings of the
O.S.N. Company near the wharf, but before he got
there he met the Gould carriage. The horseman preceded
it with the torch, whose light showed the white
mules trotting, the portly Ignacio driving, and Basilio
with the carbine on the box. From the dark body of
the landau Mrs. Gould's voice cried, "They are waiting
for you, Capataz!" She was returning, chilly and excited,
with Decoud's pocket-book still held in her hand.
He had confided it to her to send to his sister. "Perhaps
my last words to her," he had said, pressing Mrs.
Gould's hand.

The Capataz never checked his speed. At the head
of the wharf vague figures with rifles leapt to the head of
his horse; others closed upon him — cargadores of the
company posted by Captain Mitchell on the watch. At
a word from him they fell back with subservient murmurs,
recognizing his voice. At the other end of the
jetty, near a cargo crane, in a dark group with glowing
cigars, his name was pronounced in a tone of relief.
Most of the Europeans in Sulaco were there, rallied
round Charles Gould, as if the silver of the mine had
been the emblem of a common cause, the symbol of the
supreme importance of material interests. They had
loaded it into the lighter with their own hands. Nostromo
recognized Don Carlos Gould, a thin, tall shape
standing a little apart and silent, to whom another tall
shape, the engineer-in-chief, said aloud, "If it must be
lost, it is a million times better that it should go to the
bottom of the sea."

Martin Decoud called out from the lighter, "Au
revoir, messieurs, till we clasp hands again over the
new-born Occidental Republic." Only a subdued murmur
responded to his clear, ringing tones; and then it
seemed to him that the wharf was floating away into the

night; but it was Nostromo, who was already pushing
against a pile with one of the heavy sweeps. Decoud
did not move; the effect was that of being launched into
space. After a splash or two there was not a sound but
the thud of Nostromo's feet leaping about the boat.
He hoisted the big sail; a breath of wind fanned
Decoud's cheek. Everything had vanished but the light
of the lantern Captain Mitchell had hoisted upon the
post at the end of the jetty to guide Nostromo out of
the harbour.

The two men, unable to see each other, kept silent till
the lighter, slipping before the fitful breeze, passed out
between almost invisible headlands into the still deeper
darkness of the gulf. For a time the lantern on the
jetty shone after them. The wind failed, then fanned
up again, but so faintly that the big, half-decked boat
slipped along with no more noise than if she had been
suspended in the air.

"We are out in the gulf now," said the calm voice of
Nostromo. A moment after he added, "Señor Mitchell
has lowered the light."

"Yes," said Decoud; "nobody can find us now."

A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the
boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds
above. Nostromo, after striking a couple of matches
to get a glimpse of the boat-compass he had with
him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind on his
cheek.

It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness
of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as
if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of
that dense night. The Placido was sleeping profoundly
under its black poncho.

The main thing now for success was to get away from
the coast and gain the middle of the gulf before day

broke. The Isabels were somewhere at hand. "On
your left as you look forward, señor," said Nostromo,
suddenly. When his voice ceased, the enormous stillness,
without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud's
senses like a powerful drug. He didn't even know at
times whether he were asleep or awake. Like a man
lost in slumber, he heard nothing, he saw nothing.
Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his
eyes. The change from the agitation, the passions and
the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore,
was so complete that it would have resembled death
had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this
foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light,
like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may
haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere
of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself,
shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him
was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul
having just returned into his body from the circumambient
darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains,
and the rocks were as if they had not been.

Nostromo's voice was speaking, though he, at the
tiller, was also as if he were not. "Have you been
asleep, Don Martin? Caramba! If it were possible I
would think that I, too, have dozed off. I have a
strange notion somehow of having dreamt that there
was a sound of blubbering, a sound a sorrowing man
could make, somewhere near this boat. Something
between a sigh and a sob."

"Strange!" muttered Decoud, stretched upon the
pile of treasure boxes covered by many tarpaulins.
"Could it be that there is another boat near us in the
gulf? We could not see it, you know."

Nostromo laughed a little at the absurdity of the idea.
They dismissed it from their minds. The solitude

could almost be felt. And when the breeze ceased, the
blackness seemed to weigh upon Decoud like a stone.

"This is overpowering," he muttered. "Do we
move at all, Capataz?"

"Not so fast as a crawling beetle tangled in the
grass," answered Nostromo, and his voice seemed
deadened by the thick veil of obscurity that felt
warm and hopeless all about them. There were long
periods when he made no sound, invisible and inaudible
as if he had mysteriously stepped out of the lighter.

In the featureless night Nostromo was not even certain
which way the lighter headed after the wind had
completely died out. He peered for the islands. There
was not a hint of them to be seen, as if they had sunk to
the bottom of the gulf. He threw himself down by the
side of Decoud at last, and whispered into his ear that
if daylight caught them near the Sulaco shore through
want of wind, it would be possible to sweep the lighter
behind the cliff at the high end of the Great Isabel,
where she would lie concealed. Decoud was surprised
at the grimness of his anxiety. To him the removal
of the treasure was a political move. It was necessary
for several reasons that it should not fall into the hands
of Montero, but here was a man who took another
view of this enterprise. The Caballeros over there did
not seem to have the slightest idea of what they had
given him to do. Nostromo, as if affected by the gloom
around, seemed nervously resentful. Decoud was
surprised. The Capataz, indifferent to those dangers
that seemed obvious to his companion, allowed himself
to become scornfully exasperated by the deadly nature
of the trust put, as a matter of course, into his hands.
It was more dangerous, Nostromo said, with a laugh
and a curse, than sending a man to get the treasure
that people said was guarded by devils and ghosts in the

deep ravines of Azuera. "Señor," he said, "we must
catch the steamer at sea. We must keep out in the
open looking for her till we have eaten and drunk all
that has been put on board here. And if we miss her by
some mischance, we must keep away from the land till
we grow weak, and perhaps mad, and die, and drift
dead, until one or another of the steamers of the
Compania comes upon the boat with the two dead men
who have saved the treasure. That, señor, is the only
way to save it; for, don't you see? for us to come to the
land anywhere in a hundred miles along this coast with
this silver in our possession is to run the naked breast
against the point of a knife. This thing has been given
to me like a deadly disease. If men discover it I am
dead, and you, too, señor, since you would come with
me. There is enough silver to make a whole province
rich, let alone a seaboard pueblo inhabited by thieves
and vagabonds. Señor, they would think that heaven
itself sent these riches into their hands, and would cut
our throats without hesitation. I would trust no fair
words from the best man around the shores of this wild
gulf. Reflect that, even by giving up the treasure at
the first demand, we would not be able to save our lives.
Do you understand this, or must I explain?"

"No, you needn't explain," said Decoud, a little
listlessly. "I can see it well enough myself, that the
possession of this treasure is very much like a deadly
disease for men situated as we are. But it had to be removed
from Sulaco, and you were the man for the task."

"I was; but I cannot believe," said Nostromo, "that
its loss would have impoverished Don Carlos Gould
very much. There is more wealth in the mountain. I
have heard it rolling down the shoots on quiet nights
when I used to ride to Rincon to see a certain girl,
after my work at the harbour was done. For years

the rich rocks have been pouring down with a noise like
thunder, and the miners say that there is enough at the
heart of the mountain to thunder on for years and years
to come. And yet, the day before yesterday, we have
been fighting to save it from the mob, and to-night I
am sent out with it into this darkness, where there is
no wind to get away with; as if it were the last lot of
silver on earth to get bread for the hungry with. Ha!
ha! Well, I am going to make it the most famous and
desperate affair of my life — wind or no wind. It shall
be talked about when the little children are grown up
and the grown men are old. Aha! the Monterists must
not get hold of it, I am told, whatever happens to Nostromo
the Capataz; and they shall not have it, I tell
you, since it has been tied for safety round Nostromo's
neck."

"I see it," murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that
his companion had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.

Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way
men's qualities are made use of, without any fundamental
knowledge of their nature, by the proposal
they should slip the long oars out and sweep the
lighter in the direction of the Isabels. It wouldn't
do for daylight to reveal the treasure floating within a
mile or so of the harbour entrance. The denser the
darkness generally, the smarter were the puffs of wind
on which he had reckoned to make his way; but tonight
the gulf, under its poncho of clouds, remained
breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.

Don Martin's soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging
at the thick handle of the enormous oar. He stuck
to it manfully, setting his teeth. He, too, was in the
toils of an imaginative existence, and that strange work
of pulling a lighter seemed to belong naturally to the

inception of a new state, acquired an ideal meaning
from his love for Antonia. For all their efforts, the
heavily laden lighter hardly moved. Nostromo could
be heard swearing to himself between the regular
splashes of the sweeps. "We are making a crooked
path," he muttered to himself. "I wish I could see the
islands."

In his unskilfulness Don Martin over-exerted himself.
Now and then a sort of muscular faintness would run
from the tips of his aching fingers through every fibre
of his body, and pass off in a flush of heat. He had
fought, talked, suffered mentally and physically,
exerting his mind and body for the last forty-eight hours
without intermission. He had had no rest, very little
food, no pause in the stress of his thoughts and his
feelings. Even his love for Antonia, whence he drew
his strength and his inspiration, had reached the point
of tragic tension during their hurried interview by Don
José's bedside. And now, suddenly, he was thrown
out of all this into a dark gulf, whose very gloom, silence,
and breathless peace added a torment to the
necessity for physical exertion. He imagined the
lighter sinking to the bottom with an extraordinary
shudder of delight. "I am on the verge of delirium,"
he thought. He mastered the trembling of all his
limbs, of his breast, the inward trembling of all his
body exhausted of its nervous force.

"Shall we rest, Capataz?" he proposed in a careless
tone. "There are many hours of night yet before us."

"True. It is but a mile or so, I suppose. Rest your
arms, señor, if that is what you mean. You will find
no other sort of rest, I can promise you, since you let
yourself be bound to this treasure whose loss would
make no poor man poorer. No, señor; there is no rest
till we find a north-bound steamer, or else some ship

finds us drifting about stretched out dead upon the
Englishman's silver. Or rather — no; por Dios! I shall
cut down the gunwale with the axe right to the water's
edge before thirst and hunger rob me of my strength.
By all the saints and devils I shall let the sea have the
treasure rather than give it up to any stranger. Since
it was the good pleasure of the Caballeros to send me off
on such an errand, they shall learn I am just the man
they take me for."

Decoud lay on the silver boxes panting. All his
active sensations and feelings from as far back as he
could remember seemed to him the maddest of dreams.
Even his passionate devotion to Antonia into which he
had worked himself up out of the depths of his scepticism
had lost all appearance of reality. For a moment
he was the prey of an extremely languid but not unpleasant
indifference.

"I am sure they didn't mean you to take such a
desperate view of this affair," he said.

"What was it, then? A joke?" snarled the man, who
on the pay-sheets of the O.S.N. Company's establishment
in Sulaco was described as "Foreman of the
wharf" against the figure of his wages. "Was it for a
joke they woke me up from my sleep after two days of
street fighting to make me stake my life upon a bad
card? Everybody knows, too, that I am not a lucky
gambler."

"Yes, everybody knows of your good luck with
women, Capataz," Decoud propitiated his companion
in a weary drawl.

"Look here, señor," Nostromo went on. "I never
even remonstrated about this affair. Directly I heard
what was wanted I saw what a desperate affair it must
be, and I made up my mind to see it out. Every
minute was of importance. I had to wait for you first.

Then, when we arrived at the Italia Una, old Giorgio
shouted to me to go for the English doctor. Later on,
that poor dying woman wanted to see me, as you know.
Señor, I was reluctant to go. I felt already this cursed
silver growing heavy upon my back, and I was afraid
that, knowing herself to be dying, she would ask me to
ride off again for a priest. Father Corbelàn, who is
fearless, would have come at a word; but Father Corbelàn
is far away, safe with the band of Hernandez,
and the populace, that would have liked to
tear him to pieces, are much incensed against the
priests. Not a single fat padre would have consented
to put his head out of his hiding-place to-night to save a
Christian soul, except, perhaps, under my protection.
That was in her mind. I pretended I did not believe
she was going to die. Señor, I refused to fetch a priest
for a dying woman . . ."

Decoud was heard to stir.

"You did, Capataz!" he exclaimed. His tone
changed. "Well, you know — it was rather fine."

"You do not believe in priests, Don Martin? Neither
do I. What was the use of wasting time? But she —
she believes in them. The thing sticks in my throat.
She may be dead already, and here we are floating helpless
with no wind at all. Curse on all superstition.
She died thinking I deprived her of Paradise, I suppose.
It shall be the most desperate affair of my life."

Decoud remained lost in reflection. He tried to
analyze the sensations awaked by what he had been
told. The voice of the Capataz was heard again:

"Now, Don Martin, let us take up the sweeps and try
to find the Isabels. It is either that or sinking the
lighter if the day overtakes us. We must not forget
that the steamer from Esmeralda with the soldiers may
be coming along. We will pull straight on now. I have

discovered a bit of a candle here, and we must take the
risk of a small light to make a course by the boat compass.
There is not enough wind to blow it out — may
the curse of Heaven fall upon this blind gulf!"

A small flame appeared burning quite straight. It
showed fragmentarily the stout ribs and planking in the
hollow, empty part of the lighter. Decoud could see
Nostromo standing up to pull. He saw him as high as
the red sash on his waist, with a gleam of a white-
handled revolver and the wooden haft of a long knife
protruding on his left side. Decoud nerved himself for
the effort of rowing. Certainly there was not enough
wind to blow the candle out, but its flame swayed a
little to the slow movement of the heavy boat. It was
so big that with their utmost efforts they could not
move it quicker than about a mile an hour. This was
sufficient, however, to sweep them amongst the Isabels
long before daylight came. There was a good six hours
of darkness before them, and the distance from the
harbour to the Great Isabel did not exceed two miles.
Decoud put this heavy toil to the account of the
Capataz's impatience. Sometimes they paused, and
then strained their ears to hear the boat from Esmeralda.
In this perfect quietness a steamer moving
would have been heard from far off. As to seeing anything
it was out of the question. They could not see
each other. Even the lighter's sail, which remained
set, was invisible. Very often they rested.

"Caramba!" said Nostromo, suddenly, during one of
those intervals when they lolled idly against the heavy
handles of the sweeps. "What is it? Are you distressed,
Don Martin?"

Decoud assured him that he was not distressed in the
least. Nostromo for a time kept perfectly still, and
then in a whisper invited Martin to come aft.

With his lips touching Decoud's ear he declared his
belief that there was somebody else besides themselves
upon the lighter. Twice now he had heard the sound of
stifled sobbing.

"Señor," he whispered with awed wonder, "I am
certain that there is somebody weeping in this lighter."

Decoud had heard nothing. He expressed his incredulity.
However, it was easy to ascertain the truth
of the matter.

"It is most amazing," muttered Nostromo. "Could
anybody have concealed himself on board while the
lighter was lying alongside the wharf?"

"And you say it was like sobbing?" asked Decoud,
lowering his voice, too. "If he is weeping, whoever he
is he cannot be very dangerous."

Clambering over the precious pile in the middle, they
crouched low on the foreside of the mast and groped
under the half-deck. Right forward, in the narrowest
part, their hands came upon the limbs of a man, who
remained as silent as death. Too startled themselves
to make a sound, they dragged him aft by one arm and
the collar of his coat. He was limp — lifeless.

The light of the bit of candle fell upon a round,
hook-nosed face with black moustaches and little side-
whiskers. He was extremely dirty. A greasy growth of
beard was sprouting on the shaven parts of the cheeks.
The thick lips were slightly parted, but the eyes remained
closed. Decoud, to his immense astonishment,
recognized Señor Hirsch, the hide merchant from
Esmeralda. Nostromo, too, had recognized him. And
they gazed at each other across the body, lying with its
naked feet higher than its head, in an absurd pretence of
sleep, faintness, or death.

8. CHAPTER EIGHT

FOR a moment, before this extraordinary find, they
forgot their own concerns and sensations. Señor
Hirsch's sensations as he lay there must have been those
of extreme terror. For a long time he refused to give a
sign of life, till at last Decoud's objurgations, and, perhaps
more, Nostromo's impatient suggestion that he
should be thrown overboard, as he seemed to be dead,
induced him to raise one eyelid first, and then the other.

It appeared that he had never found a safe opportunity
to leave Sulaco. He lodged with Anzani, the
universal storekeeper, on the Plaza Mayor. But when
the riot broke out he had made his escape from his
host's house before daylight, and in such a hurry that
he had forgotten to put on his shoes. He had run out
impulsively in his socks, and with his hat in his hand,
into the garden of Anzani's house. Fear gave him the
necessary agility to climb over several low walls, and
afterwards he blundered into the overgrown cloisters of
the ruined Franciscan convent in one of the by-streets.
He forced himself into the midst of matted bushes with
the recklessness of desperation, and this accounted for
his scratched body and his torn clothing. He lay hidden
there all day, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his
mouth with all the intensity of thirst engendered by
heat and fear. Three times different bands of men invaded
the place with shouts and imprecations, looking
for Father Corbelàn; but towards the evening, still lying
on his face in the bushes, he thought he would die from
the fear of silence. He was not very clear as to what

had induced him to leave the place, but evidently he had
got out and slunk successfully out of town along the
deserted back lanes. He wandered in the darkness near
the railway, so maddened by apprehension that he dared
not even approach the fires of the pickets of Italian
workmen guarding the line. He had a vague idea
evidently of finding refuge in the railway yards, but the
dogs rushed upon him, barking; men began to shout;
a shot was fired at random. He fled away from the
gates. By the merest accident, as it happened, he
took the direction of the O.S.N. Company's offices.
Twice he stumbled upon the bodies of men killed during
the day. But everything living frightened him much
more. He crouched, crept, crawled, made dashes,
guided by a sort of animal instinct, keeping away from
every light and from every sound of voices. His idea
was to throw himself at the feet of Captain Mitchell
and beg for shelter in the Company's offices. It was
all dark there as he approached on his hands and knees,
but suddenly someone on guard challenged loudly,
"Quien vive?" There were more dead men lying about,
and he flattened himself down at once by the side of a
cold corpse. He heard a voice saying, "Here is one of
those wounded rascals crawling about. Shall I go and
finish him?" And another voice objected that it was
not safe to go out without a lantern upon such an errand;
perhaps it was only some negro Liberal looking
for a chance to stick a knife into the stomach of an
honest man. Hirsch didn't stay to hear any more, but
crawling away to the end of the wharf, hid himself
amongst a lot of empty casks. After a while some
people came along, talking, and with glowing cigarettes.
He did not stop to ask himself whether they would
be likely to do him any harm, but bolted incontinently
along the jetty, saw a lighter lying moored at the end,
and threw himself into it. In his desire to find cover
he crept right forward under the half-deck, and he had
remained there more dead than alive, suffering agonies
of hunger and thirst, and almost fainting with terror,
when he heard numerous footsteps and the voices of
the Europeans who came in a body escorting the wagon-
load of treasure, pushed along the rails by a squad of
Cargadores. He understood perfectly what was being
done from the talk, but did not disclose his presence
from the fear that he would not be allowed to remain.
His only idea at the time, overpowering and masterful,
was to get away from this terrible Sulaco. And now
he regretted it very much. He had heard Nostromo
talk to Decoud, and wished himself back on shore.
He did not desire to be involved in any desperate affair
— in a situation where one could not run away. The
involuntary groans of his anguished spirit had betrayed
him to the sharp ears of the Capataz.

They had propped him up in a sitting posture against
the side of the lighter, and he went on with the moaning
account of his adventures till his voice broke, his head
fell forward. "Water," he whispered, with difficulty.
Decoud held one of the cans to his lips. He revived
after an extraordinarily short time, and scrambled up to
his feet wildly. Nostromo, in an angry and threatening
voice, ordered him forward. Hirsch was one of those
men whom fear lashes like a whip, and he must have had
an appalling idea of the Capataz's ferocity. He displayed
an extraordinary agility in disappearing forward
into the darkness. They heard him getting over the
tarpaulin; then there was the sound of a heavy fall,
followed by a weary sigh. Afterwards all was still in
the fore-part of the lighter, as though he had killed himself
in his headlong tumble. Nostromo shouted in a
menacing voice —

"Lie still there! Do not move a limb. If I hear
as much as a loud breath from you I shall come over
there and put a bullet through your head."

The mere presence of a coward, however passive,
brings an element of treachery into a dangerous situation.
Nostromo's nervous impatience passed into
gloomy thoughtfulness. Decoud, in an undertone, as
if speaking to himself, remarked that, after all, this
bizarre event made no great difference. He could
not conceive what harm the man could do. At most
he would be in the way, like an inanimate and useless
object — like a block of wood, for instance.

"I would think twice before getting rid of a piece of
wood," said Nostromo, calmly. "Something may
happen unexpectedly where you could make use of it.
But in an affair like ours a man like this ought to be
thrown overboard. Even if he were as brave as a lion
we would not want him here. We are not running
away for our lives. Señor, there is no harm in a brave
man trying to save himself with ingenuity and courage;
but you have heard his tale, Don Martin. His being
here is a miracle of fear —" Nostromo paused.
"There is no room for fear in this lighter," he added
through his teeth.

Decoud had no answer to make. It was not a position
for argument, for a display of scruples or feelings.
There were a thousand ways in which a panic-stricken
man could make himself dangerous. It was evident
that Hirsch could not be spoken to, reasoned with, or
persuaded into a rational line of conduct. The story
of his own escape demonstrated that clearly enough.
Decoud thought that it was a thousand pities the
wretch had not died of fright. Nature, who had made
him what he was, seemed to have calculated cruelly
how much he could bear in the way of atrocious anguish

without actually expiring. Some compassion was due
to so much terror. Decoud, though imaginative enough
for sympathy, resolved not to interfere with any action
that Nostromo would take. But Nostromo did nothing.
And the fate of Señor Hirsch remained suspended
in the darkness of the gulf at the mercy of
events which could not be foreseen.

The Capataz, extending his hand, put out the candle
suddenly. It was to Decoud as if his companion had
destroyed, by a single touch, the world of affairs, of
loves, of revolution, where his complacent superiority
analyzed fearlessly all motives and all passions, including
his own.

He gasped a little. Decoud was affected by the
novelty of his position. Intellectually self-confident,
he suffered from being deprived of the only weapon he
could use with effect. No intelligence could penetrate
the darkness of the Placid Gulf. There remained only
one thing he was certain of, and that was the overweening
vanity of his companion. It was direct, uncomplicated,
naïve, and effectual. Decoud, who had
been making use of him, had tried to understand his
man thoroughly. He had discovered a complete
singleness of motive behind the varied manifestations
of a consistent character. This was why the man remained
so astonishingly simple in the jealous greatness
of his conceit. And now there was a complication. It
was evident that he resented having been given a task
in which there were so many chances of failure. "I
wonder," thought Decoud, "how he would behave if I
were not here."

He heard Nostromo mutter again, "No! there is no
room for fear on this lighter. Courage itself does not
seem good enough. I have a good eye and a steady
hand; no man can say he ever saw me tired or uncertain

what to do; but por Dios, Don Martin, I have been
sent out into this black calm on a business where neither
a good eye, nor a steady hand, nor judgment are any
use. . . ." He swore a string of oaths in Spanish
and Italian under his breath. "Nothing but sheer
desperation will do for this affair."

These words were in strange contrast to the prevailing
peace — to this almost solid stillness of the gulf.
A shower fell with an abrupt whispering sound all
round the boat, and Decoud took off his hat, and, letting
his head get wet, felt greatly refreshed. Presently a
steady little draught of air caressed his cheek. The
lighter began to move, but the shower distanced it. The
drops ceased to fall upon his head and hands, the whispering
died out in the distance. Nostromo emitted a
grunt of satisfaction, and grasping the tiller, chirruped
softly, as sailors do, to encourage the wind. Never for
the last three days had Decoud felt less the need for
what the Capataz would call desperation.

"I fancy I hear another shower on the water," he observed
in a tone of quiet content. "I hope it will catch
us up."

Nostromo ceased chirruping at once. "You hear
another shower?" he said, doubtfully. A sort of thinning
of the darkness seemed to have taken place, and
Decoud could see now the outline of his companion's
figure, and even the sail came out of the night like a
square block of dense snow.

The sound which Decoud had detected came along
the water harshly. Nostromo recognized that noise
partaking of a hiss and a rustle which spreads out on all
sides of a steamer making her way through a smooth
water on a quiet night. It could be nothing else but
the captured transport with troops from Esmeralda.
She carried no lights. The noise of her steaming, growing

louder every minute, would stop at times altogether,
and then begin again abruptly, and sound startlingly
nearer; as if that invisible vessel, whose position could
not be precisely guessed, were making straight for the
lighter. Meantime, that last kept on sailing slowly and
noiselessly before a breeze so faint that it was only by
leaning over the side and feeling the water slip through
his fingers that Decoud convinced himself they were
moving at all. His drowsy feeling had departed. He
was glad to know that the lighter was moving. After
so much stillness the noise of the steamer seemed uproarious
and distracting. There was a weirdness in not
being able to see her. Suddenly all was still. She had
stopped, but so close to them that the steam, blowing off,
sent its rumbling vibration right over their heads.

"They are trying to make out where they are," said
Decoud in a whisper. Again he leaned over and put his
fingers into the water. "We are moving quite smartly,"
he informed Nostromo.

"We seem to be crossing her bows," said the Capataz
in a cautious tone. "But this is a blind game with
death. Moving on is of no use. We mustn't be seen
or heard."

His whisper was hoarse with excitement. Of all his
face there was nothing visible but a gleam of white eye-
balls. His fingers gripped Decoud's shoulder. "That
is the only way to save this treasure from this steamer
full of soldiers. Any other would have carried lights.
But you observe there is not a gleam to show us where
she is."

Decoud stood as if paralyzed; only his thoughts were
wildly active. In the space of a second he remembered
the desolate glance of Antonia as he left her at the bedside
of her father in the gloomy house of Avellanos, with
shuttered windows, but all the doors standing open, and

deserted by all the servants except an old negro at the
gate. He remembered the Casa Gould on his last visit,
the arguments, the tones of his voice, the impenetrable
attitude of Charles, Mrs. Gould's face so blanched with
anxiety and fatigue that her eyes seemed to have
changed colour, appearing nearly black by contrast.
Even whole sentences of the proclamation which he
meant to make Barrios issue from his headquarters at
Cayta as soon as he got there passed through his mind;
the very germ of the new State, the Separationist proclamation
which he had tried before he left to read hurriedly
to Don José, stretched out on his bed under the
fixed gaze of his daughter. God knows whether the old
statesman had understood it; he was unable to speak,
but he had certainly lifted his arm off the coverlet; his
hand had moved as if to make the sign of the cross in the
air, a gesture of blessing, of consent. Decoud had that
very draft in his pocket, written in pencil on several
loose sheets of paper, with the heavily-printed heading,
"Administration of the San Tomé Silver Mine. Sulaco.
Republic of Costaguana." He had written it furiously,
snatching page after page on Charles Gould's table.
Mrs. Gould had looked several times over his shoulder
as he wrote; but the Señor Administrador, standing
straddle-legged, would not even glance at it when it was
finished. He had waved it away firmly. It must have
been scorn, and not caution, since he never made a
remark about the use of the Administration's paper
for such a compromising document. And that showed
his disdain, the true English disdain of common prudence,
as if everything outside the range of their own
thoughts and feelings were unworthy of serious recognition.
Decoud had the time in a second or two to become
furiously angry with Charles Gould, and even resentful
against Mrs. Gould, in whose care, tacitly it
is true, he had left the safety of Antonia. Better
perish a thousand times than owe your preservation to
such people, he exclaimed mentally. The grip of
Nostromo's fingers never removed from his shoulder,
tightening fiercely, recalled him to himself.

"The darkness is our friend," the Capataz murmured
into his ear. "I am going to lower the sail, and trust
our escape to this black gulf. No eyes could make us
out lying silent with a naked mast. I will do it now, before
this steamer closes still more upon us. The faint
creak of a block would betray us and the San Tomé
treasure into the hands of those thieves."

He moved about as warily as a cat. Decoud heard
no sound; and it was only by the disappearance of the
square blotch of darkness that he knew the yard had
come down, lowered as carefully as if it had been made
of glass. Next moment he heard Nostromo's quiet
breathing by his side.

"You had better not move at all from where you are,
Don Martin," advised the Capataz, earnestly. "You
might stumble or displace something which would make
a noise. The sweeps and the punting poles are lying
about. Move not for your life. Por Dios, Don Martin,"
he went on in a keen but friendly whisper, "I am so
desperate that if I didn't know your worship to be a
man of courage, capable of standing stock still whatever
happens, I would drive my knife into your heart."

A deathlike stillness surrounded the lighter. It was
difficult to believe that there was near a steamer full of
men with many pairs of eyes peering from her bridge for
some hint of land in the night. Her steam had ceased
blowing off, and she remained stopped too far off apparently
for any other sound to reach the lighter.

"Perhaps you would, Capataz," Decoud began in a
whisper. "However, you need not trouble. There

are other things than the fear of your knife to keep my
heart steady. It shall not betray you. Only, have you
forgotten —"

"I spoke to you openly as to a man as desperate as
myself," explained the Capataz. "The silver must be
saved from the Monterists. I told Captain Mitchell
three times that I preferred to go alone. I told Don
Carlos Gould, too. It was in the Casa Gould. They
had sent for me. The ladies were there; and when I
tried to explain why I did not wish to have you with me,
they promised me, both of them, great rewards for your
safety. A strange way to talk to a man you are sending
out to an almost certain death. Those gentlefolk do not
seem to have sense enough to understand what they
are giving one to do. I told them I could do nothing
for you. You would have been safer with the bandit
Hernandez. It would have been possible to ride out of
the town with no greater risk than a chance shot sent
after you in the dark. But it was as if they had been
deaf. I had to promise I would wait for you under the
harbour gate. I did wait. And now because you are a
brave man you are as safe as the silver. Neither more
nor less."

At that moment, as if by way of comment upon Nostromo's
words, the invisible steamer went ahead at half
speed only, as could be judged by the leisurely beat of
her propeller. The sound shifted its place markedly,
but without coming nearer. It even grew a little more
distant right abeam of the lighter, and then ceased
again.

"They are trying for a sight of the Isabels," muttered
Nostromo, "in order to make for the harbour in a
straight line and seize the Custom House with the
treasure in it. Have you ever seen the Commandant of
Esmeralda, Sotillo? A handsome fellow, with a soft

voice. When I first came here I used to see him in the
Calle talking to the señoritas at the windows of the
houses, and showing his white teeth all the time. But
one of my Cargadores, who had been a soldier, told me
that he had once ordered a man to be flayed alive in the
remote Campo, where he was sent recruiting amongst
the people of the Estancias. It has never entered his
head that the Compania had a man capable of baffling
his game."

The murmuring loquacity of the Capataz disturbed
Decoud like a hint of weakness. And yet, talkative
resolution may be as genuine as grim silence.

"Sotillo is not baffled so far," he said. "Have you
forgotten that crazy man forward?"

Nostromo had not forgotten Señor Hirsch. He reproached
himself bitterly for not having visited the
lighter carefully before leaving the wharf. He reproached
himself for not having stabbed and flung
Hirsch overboard at the very moment of discovery without
even looking at his face. That would have been
consistent with the desperate character of the affair.
Whatever happened, Sotillo was already baffled. Even
if that wretch, now as silent as death, did anything to
betray the nearness of the lighter, Sotillo — if Sotillo
it was in command of the troops on board — would be
still baffled of his plunder.

"I have an axe in my hand," Nostromo whispered,
wrathfully, "that in three strokes would cut through
the side down to the water's edge. Moreover, each
lighter has a plug in the stern, and I know exactly where
it is. I feel it under the sole of my foot."

Decoud recognized the ring of genuine determination
in the nervous murmurs, the vindictive excitement of
the famous Capataz. Before the steamer, guided by a
shriek or two (for there could be no more than that,

Nostromo said, gnashing his teeth audibly), could find
the lighter there would be plenty of time to sink this
treasure tied up round his neck.

The last words he hissed into Decoud's ear. Decoud
said nothing. He was perfectly convinced. The
usual characteristic quietness of the man was gone.
It was not equal to the situation as he conceived it.
Something deeper, something unsuspected by everyone,
had come to the surface. Decoud, with careful movements,
slipped off his overcoat and divested himself of
his boots; he did not consider himself bound in honour
to sink with the treasure. His object was to get down
to Barrios, in Cayta, as the Capataz knew very well; and
he, too, meant, in his own way, to put into that attempt
all the desperation of which he was capable. Nostromo
muttered, "True, true! You are a politician, señor.
Rejoin the army, and start another revolution." He
pointed out, however, that there was a little boat belonging
to every lighter fit to carry two men, if not more.
Theirs was towing behind.

Of that Decoud had not been aware. Of course, it
was too dark to see, and it was only when Nostromo
put his hand upon its painter fastened to a cleat in the
stern that he experienced a full measure of relief. The
prospect of finding himself in the water and swimming,
overwhelmed by ignorance and darkness, probably in a
circle, till he sank from exhaustion, was revolting. The
barren and cruel futility of such an end intimidated his
affectation of careless pessimism. In comparison to it,
the chance of being left floating in a boat, exposed
to thirst, hunger, discovery, imprisonment, execution,
presented itself with an aspect of amenity worth securing
even at the cost of some self-contempt. He did not
accept Nostromo's proposal that he should get into the
boat at once. "Something sudden may overwhelm us,

señor," the Capataz remarked promising faithfully, at
the same time, to let go the painter at the moment
when the necessity became manifest.

But Decoud assured him lightly that he did not mean
to take to the boat till the very last moment, and that
then he meant the Capataz to come along, too. The
darkness of the gulf was no longer for him the end of all
things. It was part of a living world since, pervading
it, failure and death could be felt at your elbow. And
at the same time it was a shelter. He exulted in its
impenetrable obscurity. "Like a wall, like a wall," he
muttered to himself.

The only thing which checked his confidence was the
thought of Señor Hirsch. Not to have bound and
gagged him seemed to Decoud now the height of improvident
folly. As long as the miserable creature had
the power to raise a yell he was a constant danger. His
abject terror was mute now, but there was no saying
from what cause it might suddenly find vent in shrieks.

This very madness of fear which both Decoud and
Nostromo had seen in the wild and irrational glances,
and in the continuous twitchings of his mouth, protected
Señor Hirsch from the cruel necessities of this desperate
affair. The moment of silencing him for ever had
passed. As Nostromo remarked, in answer to Decoud's
regrets, it was too late! It could not be done without
noise, especially in the ignorance of the man's exact
position. Wherever he had elected to crouch and
tremble, it was too hazardous to go near him. He
would begin probably to yell for mercy. It was much
better to leave him quite alone since he was keeping so
still. But to trust to his silence became every moment
a greater strain upon Decoud's composure.

"I wish, Capataz, you had not let the right moment
pass," he murmured.

"What! To silence him for ever? I thought it good
to hear first how he came to be here. It was too
strange. Who could imagine that it was all an accident?
Afterwards, señor, when I saw you giving him water to
drink, I could not do it. Not after I had seen you
holding up the can to his lips as though he were your
brother. Señor, that sort of necessity must not be
thought of too long. And yet it would have been no
cruelty to take away from him his wretched life. It is
nothing but fear. Your compassion saved him then,
Don Martin, and now it is too late. It couldn't be
done without noise."

In the steamer they were keeping a perfect silence,
and the stillness was so profound that Decoud felt as if
the slightest sound conceivable must travel unchecked
and audible to the end of the world. What if Hirsch
coughed or sneezed? To feel himself at the mercy of
such an idiotic contingency was too exasperating to be
looked upon with irony. Nostromo, too, seemed to be
getting restless. Was it possible, he asked himself, that
the steamer, finding the night too dark altogether, intended
to remain stopped where she was till daylight?
He began to think that this, after all, was the real danger.
He was afraid that the darkness, which was his
protection, would, in the end, cause his undoing.

Sotillo, as Nostromo had surmised, was in command
on board the transport. The events of the last forty-
eight hours in Sulaco were not known to him; neither
was he aware that the telegraphist in Esmeralda had
managed to warn his colleague in Sulaco. Like a good
many officers of the troops garrisoning the province,
Sotillo had been influenced in his adoption of the Ribierist
cause by the belief that it had the enormous
wealth of the Gould Concession on its side. He had
been one of the frequenters of the Casa Gould, where he

had aired his Blanco convictions and his ardour for reform
before Don José Avellanos, casting frank, honest
glances towards Mrs. Gould and Antonia the while. He
was known to belong to a good family persecuted and
impoverished during the tyranny of Guzman Bento.
The opinions he expressed appeared eminently natural
and proper in a man of his parentage and antecedents.
And he was not a deceiver; it was perfectly natural for
him to express elevated sentiments while his whole
faculties were taken up with what seemed then a solid
and practical notion — the notion that the husband of
Antonia Avellanos would be, naturally, the intimate
friend of the Gould Concession. He even pointed this
out to Anzani once, when negotiating the sixth or
seventh small loan in the gloomy, damp apartment
with enormous iron bars, behind the principal shop in
the whole row under the Arcades. He hinted to the
universal shopkeeper at the excellent terms he was on
with the emancipated señorita, who was like a sister
to the Englishwoman. He would advance one leg and
put his arms akimbo, posing for Anzani's inspection, and
fixing him with a haughty stare.

"Look, miserable shopkeeper! How can a man like
me fail with any woman, let alone an emancipated girl
living in scandalous freedom?" he seemed to say.

His manner in the Casa Gould was, of course, very
different — devoid of all truculence, and even slightly
mournful. Like most of his countrymen, he was carried
away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered
by himself. He had no convictions of any sort upon
anything except as to the irresistible power of his
personal advantages. But that was so firm that even
Decoud's appearance in Sulaco, and his intimacy with
the Goulds and the Avellanos, did not disquiet him.
On the contrary, he tried to make friends with that

rich Costaguanero from Europe in the hope of borrowing
a large sum by-and-by. The only guiding motive
of his life was to get money for the satisfaction of his
expensive tastes, which he indulged recklessly, having
no self-control. He imagined himself a master of
intrigue, but his corruption was as simple as an animal
instinct. At times, in solitude, he had his moments of
ferocity, and also on such occasions as, for instance,
when alone in a room with Anzani trying to get a loan.

He had talked himself into the command of the
Esmeralda garrison. That small seaport had its importance
as the station of the main submarine cable connecting
the Occidental Provinces with the outer world,
and the junction with it of the Sulaco branch. Don
José Avellanos proposed him, and Barrios, with a rude
and jeering guffaw, had said, "Oh, let Sotillo go. He is
a very good man to keep guard over the cable, and the
ladies of Esmeralda ought to have their turn." Barrios,
an indubitably brave man, had no great opinion of Sotillo.

It was through the Esmeralda cable alone that the
San Tomé mine could be kept in constant touch with
the great financier, whose tacit approval made the
strength of the Ribierist movement. This movement
had its adversaries even there. Sotillo governed
Esmeralda with repressive severity till the adverse
course of events upon the distant theatre of civil war
forced upon him the reflection that, after all, the great
silver mine was fated to become the spoil of the victors.
But caution was necessary. He began by assuming
a dark and mysterious attitude towards the faithful
Ribierist municipality of Esmeralda. Later on, the
information that the commandant was holding assemblies
of officers in the dead of night (which had
leaked out somehow) caused those gentlemen to neglect

their civil duties altogether, and remain shut up in their
houses. Suddenly one day all the letters from Sulaco
by the overland courier were carried off by a file of
soldiers from the post office to the Commandancia,
without disguise, concealment, or apology. Sotillo had
heard through Cayta of the final defeat of Ribiera.

This was the first open sign of the change in his convictions.
Presently notorious democrats, who had been
living till then in constant fear of arrest, leg irons, and
even floggings, could be observed going in and out at
the great door of the Commandancia, where the horses
of the orderlies doze under their heavy saddles, while
the men, in ragged uniforms and pointed straw hats,
lounge on a bench, with their naked feet stuck out
beyond the strip of shade; and a sentry, in a red baize
coat with holes at the elbows, stands at the top of the
steps glaring haughtily at the common people, who uncover
their heads to him as they pass.

Sotillo's ideas did not soar above the care for his
personal safety and the chance of plundering the town
in his charge, but he feared that such a late adhesion
would earn but scant gratitude from the victors. He
had believed just a little too long in the power of the
San Tomé mine. The seized correspondence had confirmed
his previous information of a large amount of
silver ingots lying in the Sulaco Custom House. To
gain possession of it would be a clear Monterist move; a
sort of service that would have to be rewarded. With
the silver in his hands he could make terms for himself
and his soldiers. He was aware neither of the riots, nor
of the President's escape to Sulaco and the close pursuit
led by Montero's brother, the guerrillero. The game
seemed in his own hands. The initial moves were the
seizure of the cable telegraph office and the securing
of the Government steamer lying in the narrow creek

which is the harbour of Esmeralda. The last was effected
without difficulty by a company of soldiers
swarming with a rush over the gangways as she lay
alongside the quay; but the lieutenant charged with the
duty of arresting the telegraphist halted on the way before
the only café in Esmeralda, where he distributed
some brandy to his men, and refreshed himself at the
expense of the owner, a known Ribierist. The whole
party became intoxicated, and proceeded on their
mission up the street yelling and firing random shots at
the windows. This little festivity, which might have
turned out dangerous to the telegraphist's life, enabled
him in the end to send his warning to Sulaco. The
lieutenant, staggering upstairs with a drawn sabre, was
before long kissing him on both cheeks in one of those
swift changes of mood peculiar to a state of drunkenness.
He clasped the telegraphist close round the neck,
assuring him that all the officers of the Esmeralda
garrison were going to be made colonels, while tears of
happiness streamed down his sodden face. Thus it
came about that the town major, coming along later,
found the whole party sleeping on the stairs and in
passages, and the telegraphist (who scorned this chance
of escape) very busy clicking the key of the transmitter.
The major led him away bareheaded, with his hands tied
behind his back, but concealed the truth from Sotillo,
who remained in ignorance of the warning despatched
to Sulaco.

The colonel was not the man to let any sort of darkness
stand in the way of the planned surprise. It appeared
to him a dead certainty; his heart was set upon
his object with an ungovernable, childlike impatience.
Ever since the steamer had rounded Punta Mala, to
enter the deeper shadow of the gulf, he had remained on
the bridge in a group of officers as excited as himself.

Distracted between the coaxings and menaces of Sotillo
and his Staff, the miserable commander of the steamer
kept her moving with as much prudence as they would
let him exercise. Some of them had been drinking
heavily, no doubt; but the prospect of laying hands
on so much wealth made them absurdly foolhardy, and,
at the same time, extremely anxious. The old major
of the battalion, a stupid, suspicious man, who had
never been afloat in his life, distinguished himself by
putting out suddenly the binnacle light, the only one
allowed on board for the necessities of navigation. He
could not understand of what use it could be for finding
the way. To the vehement protestations of the ship's
captain, he stamped his foot and tapped the handle of
his sword. "Aha! I have unmasked you," he cried,
triumphantly. "You are tearing your hair from
despair at my acuteness. Am I a child to believe that
a light in that brass box can show you where the harbour
is? I am an old soldier, I am. I can smell a
traitor a league off. You wanted that gleam to betray
our approach to your friend the Englishman. A thing
like that show you the way! What a miserable lie!
Que picardia! You Sulaco people are all in the pay of
those foreigners. You deserve to be run through the
body with my sword." Other officers, crowding round,
tried to calm his indignation, repeating persuasively,
"No, no! This is an appliance of the mariners, major.
This is no treachery." The captain of the transport
flung himself face downwards on the bridge, and refused
to rise. "Put an end to me at once," he repeated
in a stifled voice. Sotillo had to interfere.

The uproar and confusion on the bridge became so
great that the helmsman fled from the wheel. He took
refuge in the engine-room, and alarmed the engineers,
who, disregarding the threats of the soldiers set on

guard over them, stopped the engines, protesting that
they would rather be shot than run the risk of being
drowned down below.

This was the first time Nostromo and Decoud heard
the steamer stop. After order had been restored, and
the binnacle lamp relighted, she went ahead again, passing
wide of the lighter in her search for the Isabels. The
group could not be made out, and, at the pitiful entreaties
of the captain, Sotillo allowed the engines to
be stopped again to wait for one of those periodical
lightenings of darkness caused by the shifting of the
cloud canopy spread above the waters of the gulf.

Sotillo, on the bridge, muttered from time to time
angrily to the captain. The other, in an apologetic
and cringing tone, begged su merced the colonel to take
into consideration the limitations put upon human
faculties by the darkness of the night. Sotillo swelled
with rage and impatience. It was the chance of a
lifetime.

"If your eyes are of no more use to you than this, I
shall have them put out," he yelled.

The captain of the steamer made no answer, for just
then the mass of the Great Isabel loomed up darkly
after a passing shower, then vanished, as if swept away
by a wave of greater obscurity preceding another downpour.
This was enough for him. In the voice of a man
come back to life again, he informed Sotillo that in an
hour he would be alongside the Sulaco wharf. The
ship was put then full speed on the course, and a great
bustle of preparation for landing arose among the
soldiers on her deck.

It was heard distinctly by Decoud and Nostromo.
The Capataz understood its meaning. They had made
out the Isabels, and were going on now in a straight line
for Sulaco. He judged that they would pass close; but

believed that lying still like this, with the sail lowered,
the lighter could not be seen. "No, not even if they
rubbed sides with us," he muttered.

The rain began to fall again; first like a wet mist, then
with a heavier touch, thickening into a smart, perpendicular
downpour; and the hiss and thump of the
approaching steamer was coming extremely near. Decoud,
with his eyes full of water, and lowered head,
asked himself how long it would be before she drew
past, when unexpectedly he felt a lurch. An inrush of
foam broke swishing over the stern, simultaneously with
a crack of timbers and a staggering shock. He had the
impression of an angry hand laying hold of the lighter
and dragging it along to destruction. The shock, of
course, had knocked him down, and he found himself
rolling in a lot of water at the bottom of the lighter. A
violent churning went on alongside; a strange and
amazed voice cried out something above him in the
night. He heard a piercing shriek for help from Señor
Hirsch. He kept his teeth hard set all the time. It
was a collision!

The steamer had struck the lighter obliquely, heeling
her over till she was half swamped, starting some of her
timbers, and swinging her head parallel to her own
course with the force of the blow. The shock of it on
board of her was hardly perceptible. All the violence
of that collision was, as usual, felt only on board the
smaller craft. Even Nostromo himself thought that
this was perhaps the end of his desperate adventure.
He, too, had been flung away from the long tiller, which
took charge in the lurch. Next moment the steamer
would have passed on, leaving the lighter to sink or
swim after having shouldered her thus out of her way,
and without even getting a glimpse of her form, had it
not been that, being deeply laden with stores and the

great number of people on board, her anchor was low
enough to hook itself into one of the wire shrouds of the
lighter's mast. For the space of two or three gasping
breaths that new rope held against the sudden strain.
It was this that gave Decoud the sensation of the
snatching pull, dragging the lighter away to destruction.
The cause of it, of course, was inexplicable to him. The
whole thing was so sudden that he had no time to think.
But all his sensations were perfectly clear; he had kept
complete possession of himself; in fact, he was even
pleasantly aware of that calmness at the very moment
of being pitched head first over the transom, to struggle
on his back in a lot of water. Señor Hirsch's shriek he
had heard and recognized while he was regaining his feet,
always with that mysterious sensation of being dragged
headlong through the darkness. Not a word, not a
cry escaped him; he had no time to see anything; and
following upon the despairing screams for help, the
dragging motion ceased so suddenly that he staggered
forward with open arms and fell against the pile of the
treasure boxes. He clung to them instinctively, in the
vague apprehension of being flung about again; and
immediately he heard another lot of shrieks for help,
prolonged and despairing, not near him at all, but
unaccountably in the distance, away from the lighter
altogether, as if some spirit in the night were mocking at
Señor Hirsch's terror and despair.

Then all was still — as still as when you wake up in
your bed in a dark room from a bizarre and agitated
dream. The lighter rocked slightly; the rain was still
falling. Two groping hands took hold of his bruised
sides from behind, and the Capataz's voice whispered,
in his ear, "Silence, for your life! Silence! The
steamer has stopped."

Decoud listened. The gulf was dumb. He felt the

water nearly up to his knees. "Are we sinking?" he
asked in a faint breath.

"I don't know," Nostromo breathed back to him.
"Señor, make not the slightest sound."

Hirsch, when ordered forward by Nostromo, had not
returned into his first hiding-place. He had fallen near
the mast, and had no strength to rise; moreover, he
feared to move. He had given himself up for dead, but
not on any rational grounds. It was simply a cruel and
terrifying feeling. Whenever he tried to think what
would become of him his teeth would start chattering
violently. He was too absorbed in the utter misery
of his fear to take notice of anything.

Though he was stifling under the lighter's sail which
Nostromo had unwittingly lowered on top of him, he
did not even dare to put out his head till the very
moment of the steamer striking. Then, indeed, he
leaped right out, spurred on to new miracles of bodily
vigour by this new shape of danger. The inrush of
water when the lighter heeled over unsealed his lips.
His shriek, "Save me!" was the first distinct warning of
the collision for the people on board the steamer. Next
moment the wire shroud parted, and the released anchor
swept over the lighter's forecastle. It came against the
breast of Señor Hirsch, who simply seized hold of it,
without in the least knowing what it was, but curling
his arms and legs upon the part above the fluke with an
invincible, unreasonable tenacity. The lighter yawed
off wide, and the steamer, moving on, carried him away,
clinging hard, and shouting for help. It was some
time, however, after the steamer had stopped that his
position was discovered. His sustained yelping for
help seemed to come from somebody swimming in the
water. At last a couple of men went over the bows and
hauled him on board. He was carried straight off to

Sotillo on the bridge. His examination confirmed the
impression that some craft had been run over and sunk,
but it was impracticable on such a dark night to look for
the positive proof of floating wreckage. Sotillo was
more anxious than ever now to enter the harbour without
loss of time; the idea that he had destroyed the
principal object of his expedition was too intolerable to
be accepted. This feeling made the story he had heard
appear the more incredible. Señor Hirsch, after being
beaten a little for telling lies, was thrust into the chart-
room. But he was beaten only a little. His tale had
taken the heart out of Sotillo's Staff, though they all
repeated round their chief, "Impossible! impossible!"
with the exception of the old major, who triumphed
gloomily.

"I told you; I told you," he mumbled. "I could
smell some treachery, some diableria a league off."

Meantime, the steamer had kept on her way towards
Sulaco, where only the truth of that matter could be
ascertained. Decoud and Nostromo heard the loud
churning of her propeller diminish and die out; and
then, with no useless words, busied themselves in making
for the Isabels. The last shower had brought with
it a gentle but steady breeze. The danger was not
over yet, and there was no time for talk. The lighter
was leaking like a sieve. They splashed in the water
at every step. The Capataz put into Decoud's hands
the handle of the pump which was fitted at the side
aft, and at once, without question or remark, Decoud
began to pump in utter forgetfulness of every
desire but that of keeping the treasure afloat. Nostromo
hoisted the sail, flew back to the tiller, pulled
at the sheet like mad. The short flare of a match
(they had been kept dry in a tight tin box, though
the man himself was completely wet), disclosed to

the toiling Decoud the eagerness of his face, bent low
over the box of the compass, and the attentive stare
of his eyes. He knew now where he was, and he hoped
to run the sinking lighter ashore in the shallow cove
where the high, cliff-like end of the Great Isabel is
divided in two equal parts by a deep and overgrown
ravine.

Decoud pumped without intermission. Nostromo
steered without relaxing for a second the intense, peering
effort of his stare. Each of them was as if utterly
alone with his task. It did not occur to them to speak.
There was nothing in common between them but the
knowledge that the damaged lighter must be slowly
but surely sinking. In that knowledge, which was like
the crucial test of their desires, they seemed to have
become completely estranged, as if they had discovered
in the very shock of the collision that the loss of the
lighter would not mean the same thing to them both.
This common danger brought their differences in aim, in
view, in character, and in position, into absolute prominence
in the private vision of each. There was no bond
of conviction, of common idea; they were merely two
adventurers pursuing each his own adventure, involved
in the same imminence of deadly peril. Therefore they
had nothing to say to each other. But this peril, this
only incontrovertible truth in which they shared,
seemed to act as an inspiration to their mental and
bodily powers.

There was certainly something almost miraculous in
the way the Capataz made the cove with nothing but
the shadowy hint of the island's shape and the vague
gleam of a small sandy strip for a guide. Where the
ravine opens between the cliffs, and a slender, shallow
rivulet meanders out of the bushes to lose itself in the
sea, the lighter was run ashore; and the two men, with

a taciturn, undaunted energy, began to discharge her
precious freight, carrying each ox-hide box up the bed
of the rivulet beyond the bushes to a hollow place which
the caving in of the soil had made below the roots of a
large tree. Its big smooth trunk leaned like a falling
column far over the trickle of water running amongst
the loose stones.

A couple of years before Nostromo had spent a whole
Sunday, all alone, exploring the island. He explained
this to Decoud after their task was done, and they sat,
weary in every limb, with their legs hanging down the
low bank, and their backs against the tree, like a pair
of blind men aware of each other and their surroundings
by some indefinable sixth sense.

"Yes," Nostromo repeated, "I never forget a place
I have carefully looked at once." He spoke slowly, almost
lazily, as if there had been a whole leisurely life
before him, instead of the scanty two hours before daylight.
The existence of the treasure, barely concealed
in this improbable spot, laid a burden of secrecy upon
every contemplated step, upon every intention and plan
of future conduct. He felt the partial failure of this
desperate affair entrusted to the great reputation he had
known how to make for himself. However, it was also
a partial success. His vanity was half appeased. His
nervous irritation had subsided.

"You never know what may be of use," he pursued
with his usual quietness of tone and manner. "I spent
a whole miserable Sunday in exploring this crumb of
land."

"A misanthropic sort of occupation," muttered Decoud,
viciously. "You had no money, I suppose, to
gamble with, and to fling about amongst the girls in
your usual haunts, Capataz."

"È vero!" exclaimed the Capataz, surprised into the

use of his native tongue by so much perspicacity. "I
had not! Therefore I did not want to go amongst those
beggarly people accustomed to my generosity. It is
looked for from the Capataz of the Cargadores, who
are the rich men, and, as it were, the Caballeros amongst
the common people. I don't care for cards but as a
pastime; and as to those girls that boast of having
opened their doors to my knock, you know I wouldn't
look at any one of them twice except for what the
people would say. They are queer, the good people of
Sulaco, and I have got much useful information simply
by listening patiently to the talk of the women that
everybody believed I was in love with. Poor Teresa
could never understand that. On that particular Sunday,
señor, she scolded so that I went out of the house
swearing that I would never darken their door again unless
to fetch away my hammock and my chest of clothes.
Señor, there is nothing more exasperating than to hear
a woman you respect rail against your good reputation
when you have not a single brass coin in your pocket.
I untied one of the small boats and pulled myself out
of the harbour with nothing but three cigars in my
pocket to help me spend the day on this island. But
the water of this rivulet you hear under your feet is cool
and sweet and good, señor, both before and after a
smoke." He was silent for a while, then added reflectively,
"That was the first Sunday after I brought
down the white-whiskered English rico all the way
down the mountains from the Paramo on the top of the
Entrada Pass — and in the coach, too! No coach had
gone up or down that mountain road within the memory
of man, señor, till I brought this one down in charge of
fifty peons working like one man with ropes, pickaxes,
and poles under my direction. That was the rich
Englishman who, as people say, pays for the making of
this railway. He was very pleased with me. But my
wages were not due till the end of the month."

He slid down the bank suddenly. Decoud heard the
splash of his feet in the brook and followed his footsteps
down the ravine. His form was lost among the bushes
till he had reached the strip of sand under the cliff.
As often happens in the gulf when the showers
during the first part of the night had been frequent and
heavy, the darkness had thinned considerably towards
the morning though there were no signs of daylight
as yet.

The cargo-lighter, relieved of its precious burden,
rocked feebly, half-afloat, with her fore-foot on the sand.
A long rope stretched away like a black cotton thread
across the strip of white beach to the grapnel Nostromo
had carried ashore and hooked to the stem of a tree-like
shrub in the very opening of the ravine.

There was nothing for Decoud but to remain on the
island. He received from Nostromo's hands whatever
food the foresight of Captain Mitchell had put on
board the lighter and deposited it temporarily in the
little dinghy which on their arrival they had hauled up
out of sight amongst the bushes. It was to be left with
him. The island was to be a hiding-place, not a prison;
he could pull out to a passing ship. The O.S.N. Company's
mail boats passed close to the islands when going
into Sulaco from the north. But the Minerva, carrying
off the ex-president, had taken the news up north of the
disturbances in Sulaco. It was possible that the next
steamer down would get instructions to miss the port
altogether since the town, as far as the Minerva's
officers knew, was for the time being in the hands of the
rabble. This would mean that there would be no
steamer for a month, as far as the mail service went; but
Decoud had to take his chance of that. The island was

his only shelter from the proscription hanging over his
head. The Capataz was, of course, going back. The
unloaded lighter leaked much less, and he thought that
she would keep afloat as far as the harbour.

He passed to Decoud, standing knee-deep alongside,
one of the two spades which belonged to the equipment
of each lighter for use when ballasting ships. By working
with it carefully as soon as there was daylight
enough to see, Decoud could loosen a mass of earth and
stones overhanging the cavity in which they had
deposited the treasure, so that it would look as if it had
fallen naturally. It would cover up not only the cavity,
but even all traces of their work, the footsteps, the displaced
stones, and even the broken bushes.

"Besides, who would think of looking either for you
or the treasure here?" Nostromo continued, as if he
could not tear himself away from the spot. "Nobody
is ever likely to come here. What could any man want
with this piece of earth as long as there is room for his
feet on the mainland! The people in this country are
not curious. There are even no fishermen here to intrude
upon your worship. All the fishing that is done
in the gulf goes on near Zapiga, over there. Señor, if
you are forced to leave this island before anything can
be arranged for you, do not try to make for Zapiga. It
is a settlement of thieves and matreros, where they
would cut your throat promptly for the sake of your
gold watch and chain. And, señor, think twice before
confiding in any one whatever; even in the officers of
the Company's steamers, if you ever get on board one.
Honesty alone is not enough for security. You must
look to discretion and prudence in a man. And always
remember, señor, before you open your lips for a confidence,
that this treasure may be left safely here for
hundreds of years. Time is on its side, señor. And

silver is an incorruptible metal that can be trusted to
keep its value for ever. . . . An incorruptible
metal," he repeated, as if the idea had given him a profound
pleasure.

"As some men are said to be," Decoud pronounced,
inscrutably, while the Capataz, who busied himself in
baling out the lighter with a wooden bucket, went on
throwing the water over the side with a regular splash.
Decoud, incorrigible in his scepticism, reflected, not
cynically, but with general satisfaction, that this man
was made incorruptible by his enormous vanity, that
finest form of egoism which can take on the aspect of
every virtue.

Nostromo ceased baling, and, as if struck with a
sudden thought, dropped the bucket with a clatter into
the lighter.

"Have you any message?" he asked in a lowered
voice. "Remember, I shall be asked questions."

"You must find the hopeful words that ought to be
spoken to the people in town. I trust for that your
intelligence and your experience, Capataz. You understand?"

"Si, señor. . . . For the ladies."

"Yes, yes," said Decoud, hastily. "Your wonderful
reputation will make them attach great value to your
words; therefore be careful what you say. I am looking
forward," he continued, feeling the fatal touch of
contempt for himself to which his complex nature was
subject, "I am looking forward to a glorious and successful
ending to my mission. Do you hear, Capataz?
Use the words glorious and successful when you speak
to the señorita. Your own mission is accomplished
gloriously and successfully. You have indubitably
saved the silver of the mine. Not only this silver, but
probably all the silver that shall ever come out of it."

Nostromo detected the ironic tone. "I dare say,
Señor Don Martin," he said, moodily. "There are very
few things that I am not equal to. Ask the foreign
signori. I, a man of the people, who cannot always
understand what you mean. But as to this lot
which I must leave here, let me tell you that I would
believe it in greater safety if you had not been with
me at all."

An exclamation escaped Decoud, and a short pause
followed. "Shall I go back with you to Sulaco?" he
asked in an angry tone.

"Shall I strike you dead with my knife where you
stand?" retorted Nostromo, contemptuously. "It
would be the same thing as taking you to Sulaco.
Come, señor. Your reputation is in your politics, and
mine is bound up with the fate of this silver. Do you
wonder I wish there had been no other man to share my
knowledge? I wanted no one with me, señor."

"You could not have kept the lighter afloat without
me," Decoud almost shouted. "You would have gone
to the bottom with her."

"Yes," uttered Nostromo, slowly; "alone."

Here was a man, Decoud reflected, that seemed as
though he would have preferred to die rather than deface
the perfect form of his egoism. Such a man was
safe. In silence he helped the Capataz to get the grapnel
on board. Nostromo cleared the shelving shore
with one push of the heavy oar, and Decoud found himself
solitary on the beach like a man in a dream. A
sudden desire to hear a human voice once more seized
upon his heart. The lighter was hardly distinguishable
from the black water upon which she floated.

"What do you think has become of Hirsch?" he
shouted.

"Knocked overboard and drowned," cried Nostromo's

voice confidently out of the black wastes of sky
and sea around the islet. "Keep close in the ravine,
señor. I shall try to come out to you in a night or
two."

A slight swishing rustle showed that Nostromo was
setting the sail. It filled all at once with a sound as of
a single loud drum-tap. Decoud went back to the
ravine. Nostromo, at the tiller, looked back from
time to time at the vanishing mass of the Great Isabel,
which, little by little, merged into the uniform texture
of the night. At last, when he turned his head
again, he saw nothing but a smooth darkness, like a
solid wall.

Then he, too, experienced that feeling of solitude
which had weighed heavily on Decoud after the lighter
had slipped off the shore. But while the man on the
island was oppressed by a bizarre sense of unreality
affecting the very ground upon which he walked, the
mind of the Capataz of the Cargadores turned alertly
to the problem of future conduct. Nostromo's faculties,
working on parallel lines, enabled him to steer straight,
to keep a look-out for Hermosa, near which he had to
pass, and to try to imagine what would happen tomorrow
in Sulaco. To-morrow, or, as a matter of fact,
to-day, since the dawn was not very far, Sotillo would
find out in what way the treasure had gone. A gang of
Cargadores had been employed in loading it into a rail-
way truck from the Custom House store-rooms, and
running the truck on to the wharf. There would be
arrests made, and certainly before noon Sotillo would
know in what manner the silver had left Sulaco, and
who it was that took it out.

Nostromo's intention had been to sail right into the
harbour; but at this thought by a sudden touch of the
tiller he threw the lighter into the wind and checked

her rapid way. His re-appearance with the very boat
would raise suspicions, would cause surmises, would
absolutely put Sotillo on the track. He himself would
be arrested; and once in the Calabozo there was no
saying what they would do to him to make him speak.
He trusted himself, but he stood up to look round.
Near by, Hermosa showed low its white surface as flat
as a table, with the slight run of the sea raised by the
breeze washing over its edges noisily. The lighter
must be sunk at once.

He allowed her to drift with her sail aback. There
was already a good deal of water in her. He allowed
her to drift towards the harbour entrance, and, letting
the tiller swing about, squatted down and busied himself
in loosening the plug. With that out she would fill
very quickly, and every lighter carried a little iron
ballast — enough to make her go down when full of
water. When he stood up again the noisy wash about
the Hermosa sounded far away, almost inaudible; and
already he could make out the shape of land about the
harbour entrance. This was a desperate affair, and he
was a good swimmer. A mile was nothing to him, and
he knew of an easy place for landing just below the
earthworks of the old abandoned fort. It occurred to
him with a peculiar fascination that this fort was a good
place in which to sleep the day through after so many
sleepless nights.

With one blow of the tiller he unshipped for the purpose,
he knocked the plug out, but did not take the
trouble to lower the sail. He felt the water welling up
heavily about his legs before he leaped on to the taffrail.
There, upright and motionless, in his shirt and trousers
only, he stood waiting. When he had felt her settle he
sprang far away with a mighty splash.

At once he turned his head. The gloomy, clouded

dawn from behind the mountains showed him on the
smooth waters the upper corner of the sail, a dark wet
triangle of canvas waving slightly to and fro. He saw
it vanish, as if jerked under, and then struck out for the
shore.