University of Virginia Library

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.