Section 7

It so happened, however, that the Finance Minister of the time was a man to whom, in years gone by, Mr. Gould had, unfortunately, declined to grant some small pecuniary assistance, basing his refusal on the ground that the applicant was a notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more than half suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in a remote country district, where he was actually exercising the function of a judge. Now, after reaching his exalted position, that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with good to Sefior Gould—the poor man. He affirmed and reaffirmed this resolution in the drawing- rooms of Sta. Marta, in a soft and implacable voice, and with such malicious glances that Mr. Gould’s: best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery
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to get the matter dropped. It would have been useless.
- Indeed, it would not have been a very safe proceeding.
_ Such was also the opinion of a stout, loud-voiced lady of
_ French extraction, the daughter, she said, of an officer
of high rank (officier supérieur de V'armée), who was
accommodated with lodgings within the walls of a secularized convent next door to the Ministry of Finance. That florid person, when approached on be- half of Mr. Gould in a proper manner, and with a suitable present, shook her head despondently. She was good-natured, and her despondency was genuine. She imagined she could not take money in consideration of something she could not accomplish. The friend of Mr. Gould, charged with the delicate mission, used to say afterwards that she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with the Government he had ever met. “No go,” she had said with a cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and using turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer. ‘“‘No; it’s no go. Pas moyen, mon gargon. C’est dommage, tout de méme. Ah! gut! Je ne vole pas mon monde. Je ne suis pas ministre—moi! Vous pouvez emporter votre petit sac.”
For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her influence in high places. Then, signifi- cantly, and with a touch of impatience, “Allez,” she added, ‘et dites bien a votre bonhomme—entendez-vous? — qu'il faut avaler la pilule.”’
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and pay. Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain. He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read in light
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literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders. He also began to dream of vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated to him- self the disadvantages of his new position, because he viewed it emotionally. His position in Costaguana was no worse than before. But man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities, Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that, however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext. The first casual colonel of the barefooted army of scarecrows that came along was able to expose with force and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum of 10,000 dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould knew that very well, and, armed with resigna- tion, had waited for better times. But to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his imagination. Mr. Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character: he attached too much importance to form. It is a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by preju- dices. There was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. “It will end by killing me,” he used to affirm many times a day. And, in fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else. The Finance Minister could
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THE SILVER OF THE MINE oe
have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould’s letters to his fourteen- year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, the persecu- tion, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the Concession had been granted to him and his descen- dants for ever. He implored his son never to return to
Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance
there, because it was tainted by the infamous Con- cession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to for-
get that America existed, and pursue a mercantile
career in Europe. And each letter ended with bitter
self-reproaches for having stayed too long in that
cavern of thieves, intriguers, and brigands.
To be told repeatedly that one’s future is blighted because of the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a matter of prime importance as to its main statement; but in its form it is calculated to excite
‘a certain amount of wonder and attention. In course
of time the boy, at first only puzzled by the angry jeremiads, but rather sorry for his dad, began to turn the matter over in his mind in such moments as he could spare from play and study. In about a year he had evolved from the lecture of the letters a definite conviction that there was a silver mine in the Sulaco province of the Republic of Costaguana, where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great many
-years before. There was also connected closely with that mine a thing called the “iniquitous Gould Con- cession,” apparently written on a paper which his
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father desired ardently to “tear and fling into the faces” of presidents, members of judicature, and ministers of State. And this desire persisted, though the names of these people, he noticed, seldom remained the same for a whole year together. This desire (since the thing was iniquitous) seemed quite natural to the boy, though why the affair was iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing wisdom, he man- aged to clear the plain truth of the business from the fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and ghouls, which had lent to his father’s correspon- dence the flavour of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth attained to as close an intimacy with the San Tomé mine as the old man who wrote these plaintive and enraged letters on the other side of the sea. He had been made several times al- ready to pay heavy fines for neglecting to work the mine, he reported, besides other sums extracted from him on account of future royalties, on the ground that a man with such a valuable concession in his pocket could not refuse his financial assistance to the Government of the Republic. The last of his fortune was passing away from him against worthless receipts, he wrote, in a rage, whilst he was being pointed out as an individual who had known how to secure enormous advantages from the necessities of his country. And the young man in Europe grew more and more interested in that thing which could provoke such a tumult of words and passion.
He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without bitterness. It might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor dad, and the whole story threw a queer light upon the social and political life of Costa- guana. The view he took of it was sympathetic to his father, yet calm and reflective. His personal feelings
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had not been outraged, and it is difficult to resent with, proper and durable indignation the physical or mental anguish of another organism, even if that other organ- ism is one’s own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tomé mine. But it was another form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into whose
magic formula there entered hope, vigour, and self-
confidence, instead of weary. indignation and despair. Left after he was twenty to his own guidance (except for the severe injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for him af dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from’ a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall.' Abandoned workings had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of hu- man misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood. His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things. And at once her delight in him, linger- ing with half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the skies. |
They had become acquainted in Italy, where the . future Mrs. Gould was staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had married a middle-aged,
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impoverished Italian marquis. She now mourned that man, who had known how to give up his life to the independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as the young- est of those who fell for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a naval victory.
The Marchesa led a still, whispering existence, nun-like:
in her black robes and a white band over the forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinous palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under their painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the cattle, together with the whole family of the tenant farmer.
The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles Gould visited no mines, though they ‘went together in a carriage, once, to see some marble quarries, where the work resembled mining in so far that it also was the tearing of the raw material of treasure from the earth. Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity. One of his frequent remarks was, “I think sometimes that poor father takes a wrong view of that San Tomé business.” And they discussed that opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a mind across half the globe; but in reality they discussed it because the sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live ardently in remote phrases. For this natural reason these discussions were precious to Mrs. Gould in her engaged state. Charles feared that Mr. Gould, senior, was wasting his strength and making himself ill by his efforts to get rid of the Concession. “I fancy that this is not the kind of handling it requires,” he mused aloud, as if to himself,
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And when she wondered frankly that a man of character should devote his energies to plotting and intrigues, Charles would remark, with a gentle concern that understood her wonder, ‘“‘ You must not forget that he was born there.”
She would set her quick mind to work upon that, and then make the inconsequent retort, which he accepted as perfectly sagacious, because, in fact, it was so—— “Well, and you? You were born there, too.”
He knew his answer.
“That’s different. I’ve been away ten years. Dad never had such a long spell; and it was more than thirty years ago.”
She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after receiving the news of his father’s death.
“Tt has killed him!” he said.
He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out before him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had brought him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room mag- nificent and naked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black with damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It was furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken back, and an octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy marble vase orna- mented with sculptured masks and garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken cudgel in his bare right hand.
She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved, swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to meet him at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand near the wall of a vineyard.
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“It has killed him!’ he repeated. “He ought ta have had many years yet. Weare a long-lived family.”
She was too startled to say anything; he was contem- plating with a penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though he had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was only when, turn- ing suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, “I’ve come to you I’ve come straight to you »” without being able to finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of its misery. He caught hold of her hand, raised it to his lips, and at that she dropped her parasol to pat him on the cheek, murmured “Poor boy,” and began to dry her eyes under the downward curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white frock, almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the noble hall, while he stood by her, again
perfectly motionless in the contemplation of the marble _
urn. Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till he exclaimed suddenly—
“Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!”’
And then they stopped. Everywhere there were’
long shadows lying on the hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive trees; the shadows of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm buildings, of stone walls; and in mid-air the sound of a bell, thin and alert, was like the throbbing pulse of the sunset glow. Her lips were slightly parted as though in surprise that he should not be looking at her with his usual expression. His usual expression was unconditionally approving and atten- tive. He was in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed her power without detracting
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from his dignity. That slight girl, with her little feet, - jittle hands, little face attractively overweighted by great coils of hair; with a rather large mouth, whose _ mere parting seemed to breathe upon you the fragrance _ of frankness and generosity, had the fastidious soul of - an experienced woman. She was, before all things and all flatteries, careful of her pride in the object of her choice. But now he was actually not looking at her at all; and his expression was tense and irrational, as is natural in a man who elects to stare at nothing past a young girl’s head. { “Well, yes. It was iniquitous. They corrupted him thoroughly, the poor old boy. Oh! why wouldn’t he let me go back to him? But now I shall know how to grapple with this.”
After pronouncing these words with immense as- surance, he glanced down at her, and at once fell a prey to distress, incertitude, and fear.
The only thing he wanted to know now, he said, was whether she did love him enough—whether she would have the courage to go with him so far away? He put these questions to her in a voice that trembled with anxiety—for he was a determined man.
She did. She would. And immediately the future hostess of all the Europeans in Sulaco had the physical experience of the earth falling away from under her. It vanished completely, even to the very sound of the bell. When her feet touched the ground again, the bell was still ringing in the valley; she put her hands up to her hair, breathing quickly, and glanced up and down the stony lane. It was reassuringly empty. Meantime, Charles, stepping with one foot into a dry and dusty ditch, picked up the open parasol, which had bounded away from them with a martial sound of drum taps. He handed it to her soberly, a little crestfallen.