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Interior drew a salary from the San Tomé mine. It was natural. And Pedrito intended to be Minister of the Interior and President of the Council in his brother’s Government. The Duc de Morny had oc- cupied those high posts during the Second French Empire with conspicuous advantage to himself.
A table, a chair, a wooden bedstead had been procured for His Excellency, who, after a short siesta, rendered absolutely necessary by the labours and the pomps of his entry into Sulaco, had been getting hold of the adminis- trative machine by making appointments, giving orders, and signing proclamations. Alone with Charles Gould in the audience room, His Excellency managed with his well-known skill to conceal his annoyance and consterna- tion. He had begun at first to talk loftily of confiscation, but the want of all proper feeling and mobility in the - Sefior Administrador’s features ended by affecting adversely his power of masterful expression. Charles Gould had repeated: ‘‘The Government can certainly bring about the destruction of the San Tomé mine if it likes; but without me it can do nothing else.’ It was an alarming pronouncement, and well calculated to hurt the sensibilities of a politician whose mind is bent upon the spoils of victory. And Charles Gould said also that the destruction of the San Tomé mine would cause the ruin of other undertakings, the withdrawal of European capital, the withholding, most probably, of the last instalment of the foreign loan. That stony fiend of a man said all these things (which were ac- cessible to His Excellency’s intelligence) in a cold- blooded manner which made one shudder.
A long course of reading historical works, light and gossipy in tone, carried out in garrets of Parisian hotels, sprawling on an untidy bed, to the neglect of his duties, menial or otherwise, had affected the manners of Pedro
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Montero. Had he seen around him the splendour of the old Intendencia, the magnificent hangings, the gilt furniture ranged along the walls; had he stood upon a dais on a noble square of red carpet, he would have prob- ably been very dangerous from a sense of success and elevation. But in this sacked and devastated residence, with the three pieces of common furniture huddled up in the middle of the vast apartment, Pedrito’s imagina- tion was subdued by a feeling of insecurity and impermanence. That feeling and the firm attitude of Charles Gould who had not once, so far, pronounced the word “Excellency,” diminished him in his own eyes. He assumed the tone of an enlightened man of the world, and begged Charles Gould to dismiss from his mind every cause for alarm. He was now conversing, he reminded him, with the brother of the master of the country, charged with a reorganizing mission. The trusted brother of the master of the country, he re- peated. Nothing was further from the thoughts of that wise and patriotic hero than ideas of destruction. **I entreat you, Don Carlos, not to give way to your anti-democratic prejudices,” he cried, in a burst of condescending effusion.
Pedrito Montero surprised one at first sight by the vast development of his bald forehead, a shiny yellow expanse between the crinkly coal-black tufts of hair without any lustre, the engaging form of his mouth, and an unexpectedly cultivated voice. But his eyes, very glistening as if freshly painted on each side of hig hooked nose, had a round, hopeless, birdlike stare when opened fully. Now, however, he narrowed them agree- ably, throwing his square chin up and speaking with closed teeth slightly through the nose, with what he imagined to be the manner of a grand seigneur.
In that attitude, he declared suddenly that the highest
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expression of democracy was Cesarism: the imperial tule based upon the direct popular vote. Czesarism was conservative. It was strong. It recognized the legitimate needs of democracy which requires orders, titles, and distinctions. They would be showered upon deserving men. Czesarism was peace. It was progressive. It secured the prosperity of a country. Pedrito Montero was carried away. Look at what the Second Empire had done for France. It was a regime which delighted to honour men of Don Carlos’s stamp. The Second Empire fell, but that was because its chief was devoid of that military genius which had raised General Montero to the pinnacle of fame and glory. Pedrito elevated his hand jerkily to help the idea of pinnacle, of fame. “We shall have many talks yet. We shall understand each other thoroughly, Don Carlos!” he cried in a tone of fellowship. Republican- ism had done its work. Imperial democracy was the power of the future. Pedrito, the guerrillero, showing his hand, lowered his voice forcibly. A man singled out by his fellow-citizens for the honourable nickname of El Rey de Sulaco could not but receive a full recogni- tion from an imperial democracy as a great captain of industry and a person of weighty counsel, whose popular designation would be soon replaced by a more solid title. “Eh, Don Carlos? No! What do you say? Conde de Sulaco—Eh?—or marquis ise He ceased. The air was cool on the Plaza, where a pa- trol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrat- ing into the streets, which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias. The orders were not to interfere with the enjoyments of the people. And above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of
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darkening blue sky before the windows of the Inten- —
dencia. After a time Pedrito Montero, thrusting his hand in the bosom of his coat, bowed his head with slow dignity. The audience was over. _
Charles Gould on going out passed his hand over his forehead as if to disperse the mists of an oppressive dream, whose grotesque extravagance leaves behind a subtle sense of bodily danger and intellectual decay. In the passages and on the staircases of the old palace Montero’s troopers lounged about insolently, smoking and making way for no one; the clanking of sabres and spurs resounded all over the building. Three silent groups of civilians in severe black waited in the main gallery, formal and helpless, a little huddled up, each keeping apart from the others, as if in the exercise of a public duty they had been overcome by a desire to shun the notice of every eye. These were the deputations waiting for their audience. The one from the Provin- cial Assembly, more restless and uneasy in its corporate expression, was overtopped by the big face of Don Juste Lopez, soft and white, with prominent eyelids and wreathed in impenetrable solemnity as if in a dense cloud. The President of the Provincial Assembly, coming bravely to save the last shred of parliamentary institutions (on the English model), averted his eyes from the Administrador of the San Tomé mine as a dignified rebuke of his little faith in that only saving principle.
The mournful severity of that reproof did not affect Charles Gould, but he was sensible to the glances of the others directed upon him without reproach, as if only to read their own fate upon his face. All of them had talked, shouted, and declaimed in the great sala of the Casa Gould. The feeling of compassion for those men, struck with a strange impotence in the toils of moral
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degradation, did not induce him to make a sign. He suffered from his fellowship in evil with them too much. He crossed the Plaza unmolested. The Amarilla Club was full of festive ragamuffins. Their frowsy heads protruded from every window, and from within came drunken shouts, the thumping of feet, and the twanging of harps. Broken bottles strewed the pavement below. Charles Gould found the doctor still in his house.
Dr. Monygham came away from the crack in the shutter through which he had been watching the street.
“Ah! You are back at last!” he said in a tone of relief. ‘I have been telling Mrs. Gould that you were perfectly safe, but I was not by any means certain that the fellow would have let you go.”
“Neither was I,” confessed Charles Gould, laying his hat on the table.
“You will have to take action.”
The silence of Charles Gould seemed to admit that this was the only course. This was as far as Charles Gould was accustomed to go towards expressing his intentions.
“T hope you did not warn Montero of what you mean to do,” the doctor said, anxiously.
“T tried to make him see that the existence of the mine was bound up with my personal safety,” continued Charles Gould, looking away from the doctor, and fixing his eyes upon the water-colour sketch upon the wall.
“He believed you?” the doctor asked, eagerly.
“God knows!” said Charles Gould. “I owed it to my wife to say that much. He is well enough informed. He knows that I have Don Pépé there. Fuentes must have told him. They know that the old major is per- fectly capable of blowing up the San Tomé mine with- out hesitation or compunction. Had it not been for
that I don’t think I’d have left the Intendencia a free
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man. He would blow everything up from loyalty ©
and from hate—from hate of these Liberals, as they call themselves. Liberals! The words one knows so well have a nightmarish meaning in this country. Liberty, democracy, patriotism, government—all of them have a flavour of folly and murder. Haven’t they, doctor? . . . Ialone can restrain Don Pépé. If they were to—to do away with me, nothing could prevent him.”
“They will try to tamper with him,” the doctor suggested, thoughtfully.
“It is very possible,” Charles Gould said very low, as if speaking to himself, and still gazing at the sketch of the San Tomé gorge upon the wall. “Yes, I expect they will try that.” Charles Gould looked for the first time at the doctor. “It would give me time,” he added.
“Exactly,” said Dr. Monygham, suppressing his ex- citement.. “Especially if Don Pépé behaves diplomatic- ally. Why shouldn’t he give them some hope of success? Eh? Otherwise you wouldn’t gain so much time, Couldn’t he be instructed to——”’ .
Charles Gould, looking at the doctor steadily, shook his head, but the doctor continued with a certain amount of fire—
“Yes, to enter into negotiations for the surrender of the mine. It is a good notion. You would mature your plan. Of course, I don’t ask what it is. I don’t want to know. I would refuse to listen to you if you tried to tell me. I am not fit for confidences.”
“What nonsense!’’ muttered Charles Gould, with displeasure.
He disapproved of the doctor’s sensitiveness about that far-off episode of his life. So much memory shocked Charles Gould. It was like morbidness.. And again he shook his head. He refused to tamper with
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the open rectitude of Don Pépé’s conduct, both from taste and from policy. Instructions would have to be either verbal or in writing. In either case they ran the risk of being intercepted. It was by no means certain that a messenger could reach the mine; and, besides, there was no one to send. It was on the tip of Charles’s tongue to say that only the late Capataz de Cargadores could have been employed with some chance of success and the certitude of discretion. But he did not say that. He pointed out to the doctor that it would have been bad policy. Directly Don Pépé let it be supposed that he could be bought over, the Administrador’s personal safety and the safety of his friends would be- - come endangered. For there would be then no reason for moderation. The incorruptibility of Don Pépé was the essential and restraining fact. The doctor hung his head and admitted that in a way it was so.
He couldn’t deny to himself that the reasoning was sound enough. Don Pépé’s usefulness consisted in his unstained character. As to his own usefulness, he reflected bitterly it was also his own character. He declared to Charles Gould that he had the means of keeping Sotillo from joining his forces with Montero, at least for the present.
“Tf you had had all this silver here,” the doctor said, “or even if it had been known to be at the mine, you could have bribed Sotillo to throw off his recent Mon- terism. You could have induced him either to go away in his steamer or even to join you.”
“Certainly not that last,” Charles Gould declared, firmly. “What could one do with a man like that, afterwards—tell me, doctor? The silver is gone, and I am glad of it. It would have been an immediate and strong temptation. The scramble for that visible plunder would have precipitated a disastrous ending.
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I would have had to defend it, too. I am glad we’ve removed it—even if it is lost. It would have been a danger and a curse.”
“Perhaps he is right,” the doctor, an hour later, said hurriedly to Mrs. Gould, whom he met in the corridor. “The thing is done, and the shadow of the treasure may do just as well as the substance. Let me try to serve you to the whole extent of my evil reputation. I am off now to play my game of betrayal with Sotillo, and keep him off the town.”
She put out both her hands impulsively. “Dr. Monyg- ham, you are running a terrible risk,” she whispered, averting from his face her eyes, full of tears, for a short glance at the door of her husband’s room. She pressed both his hands, and the doctor stood as if rooted to the spot, looking down at her, and trying to twist his lips into a smile.
“Oh, I know you will defend my memory,” he uttered at last, and ran tottering down the stairs across the patio, and out of the house. In the street he kept up a great pace with his smart hobbling walk, a case of in- struments under his arm. He was known for being loco. Nobody interfered with him. From under the seaward gate, across the dusty, arid plain, interspersed with low bushes, he saw, more than a mile away, the ugly enorm- ity of the Custom House, and the two or three other buildings which at that time constituted the seaport of Sulaco. Far away to the south groves of palm trees edged the curve of the harbour shore. The distant peaks of the Cordillera had lost their identity of clear- cut shapes in the steadily deepening blue of the eastern _ sky. The doctor walked briskly. A darkling shadow seemed to fall upon him from the zenith. The sun had set. For a time the snows of Higuerota continued to glow with the reflected glory of the west. The
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doctor, holding a straight course for the Custom House, appeared lonely, hopping amongst the dark bushes like a tall bird with a broken wing.
Tints of purple, gold, and crimson were mirrored in the clear water of the harbour. A long tongue of land, straight as a wall, with the grass-grown ruins of the fort making a sort of rounded green mound, plainly visible from the inner shore, closed its circuit; while beyond the Placid Gulf repeated those splendours of colouring on a greater scale and with a more sombre magnificence. The great mass of cloud filling the head of the gulf had long red smears amongst its convoluted folds of grey and black, as of a floating mantle stained with blood. The three Isabels, overshadowed and clear cut in a great smoothness confounding the sea and sky, appeared suspended, purple-black, in the air. The little wavelets seemed to be tossing tiny red sparks upon the sandy beaches. The glassy bands of water along the horizon gave out a fiery red glow, as if fire and water had been mingled together in the vast bed of the ocean.
At last the conflagration of sea and sky, lying em- braced and still in a flaming contact upon the edge of the world, went out. The red sparks in the water vanished together with the stains of blood in the black mantle draping the sombre head of the Placid Gulf; a sudden breeze sprang up and died out after rustling heavily the growth of bushes on the ruined earthwork of the fort. Nostromo woke up from a fourteen hours’ sleep, and arose full length from his lair in the long grass. He stood knee deep amongst the whispering undulations of the green blades with the lost air of a man just born into the world. Handsome, robust, and supple, he threw back his head, flung his arms open, and stretched himself with a slow twist of the waist and a leisurely
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growling yawn of white teeth, as natural and free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious wild beast. ‘Then, in the suddenly steadied glance fixed upon nothing from under a thoughtful frown, appeared the man.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Arter landing from his swim Nostromo had scram- bled up, all dripping, into the main quadrangle of the old fort; and there, amongst ruined bits of walls and rotting remnants of roofs and sheds, he had slept the day through. He had slept in the shadow of the mountains, in the white blaze of noon, in the stillness and solitude of that overgrown piece of land between the oval of the harbour and the spacious semi-circle of the gulf, He lay asifdead. A rey-zemuro, appear- ing like a tiny black speck in the blue, stooped, circling prudently with a stealthiness of flight startling in a bird of that great size. The shadow of his pearly-white body, of his black-tipped wings, fell on the grass no more silently than he alighted himself on a hillock of rubbish within three yards of that man, lying as still as a corpse. The bird stretched his bare neck, craned his bald head, loathsome in the brilliance of varied colouring, with an air of voracious anxiety towards the promising stillness of that prostrate body. ‘Then, sinking his head deeply into his soft plumage, he settled himself to wait. The first thing upon which Nos- tromo’s eyes fell on waking was this patient watcher for the signs of death and corruption. When the man got up the vulture hopped away in great, side-long, flutter- ing jumps. He lingered for a while, morose and reluct- ant, before he rose, circling noiselessly with a sinister droop of beak and claws.