Section 22

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 some- thing?” she almost wailed.
“T 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. Idon’t suppose that, eve
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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 hesita- tion—
‘“‘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—
**T 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 bring- ing 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.
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“Try to get some rest for a couple of hours,” she mur- mured, 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 im- possible 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 re- member, 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 confroxuted 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
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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 fore- head 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 some- thing, amongst the chairs and tables.
“Antonia has forgotten her fan in here,” said De- coud, 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.
**Sefiora,”’ 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 7
“I! Alarming!” he protested, sincerely vexed and surprised. “I assure you that I am not in the least
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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, sefior,” said behind Mrs. Gould the soft voice of Basilio, the head servant of the Casa. “I don’t think the sefiorita 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 be- hind 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. “T 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 Com- pany was walking on the Plaza, bareheaded, looking out for me. There is news from the interior, Mrs. Gould. I should ratber say rumours of news.” “Good news?” said Mrs. Gould in a low voice.
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“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 hap- pened 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? Dis- band 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 cepatriations, 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
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- 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 lan-
age—
“Non, Madame. Rien n’est perdu.”
Tt electrified Mrs. Gould out of her benumbed atti- tude, 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 Corbelan 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 under- take. ‘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 A
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,
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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?” De- coud 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
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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 frank- ness? 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. “TI sup- pose Antonia understands you thoroughly?”’
“Understands? Well, yes. But Iam 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, there- fore 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 An- tonia, 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 tome. Inall the proclamations of general pardon which I have seen,
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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 Corbelan would tell you, isamortalsin. ButIamnot proud. Iam simply too much in love to run away. At the same time I want to live. There isno love fora dead man. There- fore it is necessary that Sulaco should not recognize the victorious Montero.”
“And you think my husband will give you his sup- port?”
“TI 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 under- stood that young man. Obviously there was promise of
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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 qill 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?”