 CHAPTER II Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist, a fragmentary and interrupted message, had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gold. When he thought of the saved silver, he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. In his simple way he was proud at being a party to this extremely clever expedient. It was he who had given it a practical shape by suggesting the possibility of intercepting at sea the northbound steamer, and it was advantageous to his company, too, which would have lost a valuable freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated. The pleasure of disappointing the Monterrists was also very great. Curitative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain Mitchell was no Democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt for parliamentarism itself. His excellency Don Vincente Ribiera, he used to say, whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honor, sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death, deferred too much to his Congress. It was a mistake, a distinct mistake, sir. The guileless old seamen, superintending the OSN service, imagined that the last three days had exhausted every startling surprise the political life of Costa Guena could offer. He used to confess afterwards that the events which followed surpassed his imagination. To begin with, Solaco, because of the seizure of the cables and the disorganization of the steam service, remained for a whole fortnight cut off from the rest of the world like a besieged city. One would not have believed it possible, but so it was, sir, a full fortnight. The account of the extraordinary things that happened during that time and the powerful emotions he experienced acquired a comic impressiveness from the pompous matter of his personal narrative. He opened it always by assuring his hearer that he was, in the thick of things, from first to last. Then he would begin by describing the getting away of the silver, and his natural anxiety lest his fellow, in charge of the lighter, should make some mistake. Apart from the loss of so much precious metal, the life of Senor Martin de Col, an agreeable, healthy and well-informed young gentleman, would have been jeopardized through his falling into the hands of his political enemies. Captain Mitchell also admitted that in his solitary vigil on the wharf he had felt a certain measure of concern for the future of the whole country. A feeling, sir, he explained, perfectly comprehensible and a man properly grateful for the many kindnesses received from the best families of merchants and other native gentlemen of independent means, who, barely saved by us from the excesses of the mob, seemed, to my mind's eye, destined to become the prey in person and fortune of the native soldiery, which, as is well known, behave with regrettable barbarity to the inhabitants during their civil commotion. And then, sir, there were the golds, for both of whom, man and wife, I could not but entertain the warmest feelings deserved by their hospitality and kindness. I felt, too, the dangers of the gentleman of the Amarillo Club, who had made me honorary member and had treated me with uniform regard and civility, both in my capacity of consular agent and as superintendent of an important steam service. Miss Antonio Avelinos, the most beautiful and accomplished young lady whom it had ever been my privilege to speak to, was not a little, in my mind, I confess, how the interests of my company would be affected by the impending change of officials, claimed a large share of my attention, too. In short, sir, I was extremely anxious and very tired, as you may suppose, by the exciting and memorable events in which I had taken my little part. The company's building, containing my residence, was within five minutes' walk, with the attraction of some supper and of my hammock. I always take my nightly rest in a hammock, as the most suitable to the climate. But somehow, sir, though evidently I could do nothing for anyone by remaining about, I could not tear myself away from that wharf, where the fatigue made me stumble painfully at times. The night was excessively dark, the darkest I remember in my life, so that I began to think that the arrival of the transport from Esmeralda could not possibly take place before daylight, owing to the difficulty of navigating the gulf. The mosquitoes bit like fury. We have been infested here with mosquitoes before the late improvements. A peculiar harbour brand, sir, renowned for its ferocity. They were like a cloud about my head, and I shouldn't wonder that but for the attacks, I would have dozed off as I walked up and down and got a heavy fall. I kept on smoking cigar after cigar, more to protect myself from being eaten up alive than from any real relish for the weed. Then, sir, when perhaps for the twentieth time I was approaching my watch to the lighted end in order to see the time and observing with surprise that it wanted yet ten minutes to midnight, I heard the splash of a ship's propeller, an unmistakable sound to a sailor's ear on such a calm night. It was faint indeed, because they were advancing with precaution and dead slow, both on account of the darkness and from their desire of not revealing too soon their presence, a very unnecessary care, because I verily believe in all the enormous extent of this harbour I was the only living soul about. Even the usual staff of watchmen and others had been absent from their post for several nights owing to the disturbances. I stood stock still after dropping and stamping out my cigar, a circumstance highly agreeable, I should think, to the mosquitoes, if I may judge from the state of my face next morning. But that was a trifling inconvenience in comparison with the brutal proceedings I became victim of on the part of Sotilo, something utterly inconceivable, sir, more like the proceedings of a maniac than the action of a sane man, however lost to all sense of honour and decency. But Sotilo was furious at the failure of his thievish scheme. In this Captain Mitchell was right. Sotilo was indeed infuriated. Captain Mitchell, however, had not been arrested at once. A vivid curiosity induced him to remain on the wharf, which is nearly four hundred feet long, to see, or rather hear, the whole process of disembarkation. Concealed by the railway truck used for the silver, which had been run back afterwards to the shore end of the jetty, Captain Mitchell saw the small detachment thrown forward, passed by, taking different directions upon the plane. Meantime the troops were being landed and formed into a column whose head crept up gradually so close to him that he made it out, barring nearly the whole width of the wharf, only a very few yards from him. Then the low, shuffling, murmuring, clinking sound ceased, and a whole mast remained for about an hour motionless and silent, awaiting the return of the scouts. On land nothing was to be heard except the deep baying of the mastiffs at the railway yards answered by the faint barking of the currs infesting the outer limits of the town. A detached knot of dark shapes stood in front of the head of the column. Presently the picket at the end of the wharf began to challenge and undertones single figures approaching from the plane. Those messengers, sent back from the scouting parties, flung to their comrades brief sentences and passed on rapidly, becoming lost in the great motionless mass to make their report to the staff. It occurred to Captain Mitchell that his position could become disagreeable and perhaps dangerous when suddenly at the head of the jetty there was a shout of command, a bugle call followed by a stir and a rattling of arms and a murmuring noise that ran right up the column. Nearby a loud voice directed hurriedly, pushed that railway car out of the way. With a rush of bare feet to execute the order, Captain Mitchell skipped back a pace or two. The car, suddenly impelled by many hands, flew away from him along the rails, and before he knew what had happened he found himself surrounded and seized by his arms and the collar of his coat. "'We have caught a man hiding here, meet Tiniente?' cried one of his captors. "'Hold him on one side till the rear guard comes along,' answered the voice. The whole column streamed past Captain Mitchell at a run, the thundering noise of their feet dying away suddenly on the shore. His captors held him tightly, disregarding his declaration that he was an Englishman, and his loud demands to be taken at once before their commanding officer. Finally, he lapsed into dignified silence, with a hollow rumble of wheels on the planks, a couple of field guns dragged by hand, rolled by. Then, after a small body of men had marched past, escorting four or five figures which walked in advance, with a jingle of steel scabbards, he felt a tug at his arms, and was ordered to come along. During the passage from the wharf to the Custom House it is to be feared that Captain Mitchell was subjected to certain indignities at the hands of the soldiers, such as jerks, jumps on the neck, forcible application of the butt of a rifle to the small of his back. Their ideas of speed were not in accord with his notion of dignity. He became flustered, flushed, and helpless. It was as if the world were coming to an end. The long building was surrounded by troops which were already piling arms by companies and preparing to pass the night, lying on the ground in their panchas with their sacks under their heads. This moved with swinging lanterns, posting sentries all round the walls, wherever there was a door or an opening. Sotella was taking his measures to protect his conquest, as if it had indeed contained the treasure. His desire to make his fortune at one audacious stroke of genius had overmastered his reasoning faculties. He would not believe in the possibility of failure. The mere hint of such a thing made his brain real with rage. Every circumstance pointing to it appeared incredible. The statement of Hirsch, which was so absolutely fatal to his hopes, could by no means be admitted. It is true, too, that Hirsch's story had been told so incoherently, with such excessive signs of destruction, that it really looked improbable. It was extremely difficult, as the saying is, to make head or tail of it. On the bridge of the steamer, directly after his rescue, Sotella and his officers, in their impatience and excitement, would not give the wretched man time to collect such few wits as remained to him. He ought to have been quieted, soothed, and reassured, whereas he had been roughly handled. Cuffed, shaken, and addressed in menacing tones. His struggles, his wriggles, his attempts to get down on his knees, followed by the most violent efforts to break away, as if he meant incontinently to jump overboard. His shrieks and shrinkings and cowering wild glances had filled them first with amazement, then with a doubt of his genuineness, as men are wont to suspect the sincerity of every great passion. His Spanish, too, became so mixed up with German that the better half of his statements remained incomprehensible. He tried to propitiate them by calling them Akvolgeborenharen, which in itself sounded suspicious. When admonished sternly not to trifle, he repeated his entreaties and protestations of loyalty and innocence again in German, obstinately, because he was not aware in what language he was speaking. His identity, of course, was perfectly known as an inhabitant of Esmeralda, but this made the matter no clearer. Because he kept on forgetting Dick Holt's name, mixing him up with several other people he had seen in the Casa Gold, it looked as if they all had been in the lighter together, and for a moment Sotelo thought that he had drowned every prominent Rebierist of Solaco. The improbability of such a thing threw a doubt upon the whole statement. Hirsch was either mad or playing a part, pretending fear and distraction on the spur of the moment to cover the truth. Sotelo's rapacity, excited to the highest pitch by the prospect of an immense booty, could believe in nothing adverse. This Jew might have been very much frightened by the accident, but he knew where the silver was concealed and had invented the story with his Jewish cunning to put him entirely off the track as to what had been done. Sotelo had taken up his quarters on the upper floor in a vast apartment with heavy black beams, but there was no ceiling, and the eye lost itself in the darkness under the high pitch of the roof. The thick shutters stood open. On a long table could be seen a large ink stand, some stumpy inky quill pens, and two square wooden boxes, each holding half a hundred weight of sand. Sheets of gray coarse official paper bestrewed the floor. It must have been a room occupied by some higher official of the customs because a large leather armchair stood behind the table with other high-backed chairs scattered about. A net hammock was swung under one of the beams for the official's afternoon siesta, no doubt. A couple of candles stuck into tall iron candlesticks gave a dim reddish light. The Colonel's hat, sword, and revolver lay between them, and a couple of his more trusty officers lounged gloomily against the table. The Colonel threw himself into the armchair, and a big negro with the sergeant's stripes on his ragged sleeve, kneeling down, pulled off his boots. Sotelo's ebony mustache contrasted violently with the vivid coloring of his cheeks. His eyes were somber, and as if sunk very far into his head. He seemed exhausted by his perplexities, languid with disappointment, but when the sentry on the landing thrust his head in to announce the arrival of a prisoner, he revived at once. Let him be brought in, he shouted fiercely. The door flew open, and Captain Mitchell, bareheaded, his waist cut open, the bow of his tie, under his ear, was hustled into the room, so Sotelo recognized him at once. He could not have hoped for a more precious capture. There was a man who could tell him, if he chose, everything he wished to know, and directly the problem of how best to make him talk to the point presented itself to his mind. The resentment of a foreign nation had no tears for Sotelo. The might of the whole armed Europe would not have protected Captain Mitchell from insults and ill usage so well as the quick reflection of Sotelo that this was an Englishman who had most likely turned obstinate under bad treatment and become quite unmanageable. At all events the Colonel smoothed the skull on his brow. What! The excellent Senor Mitchell, he cried, and effected dismay. The pretended anger of his swift advance and of his shout, released the caviaro at once, was so effective that the astounded soldiers positively sprang away from their prisoner. Once suddenly deprived of forcible support, Captain Mitchell reeled as though about to fall. Sotelo took him familially, under the arm, led him to a chair, waved his hand at the room. Go out, all of you, he commanded. When they had been left alone he stood, looking down, irresolute and silent, watching till Captain Mitchell had recovered his power of speech. In his very grasp was one of the men concerned in the removal of the silver. Sotelo's temperament was of that sort that he experienced an ardent desire to beat him. Just as formally when negotiating with difficulty alone from the cautious and zoning, his fingers always itched to take the shopkeeper by the throat. As to Captain Mitchell, the suddenness, unexpectedness, and general inconceivableness of this experience, had confused his thoughts. Moreover he was physically out of breath. I've been knocked down three times between this and the wharf, he gasped out at last. Somebody shall be made to pay for this. He had certainly stumbled more than once, and had been dragged along for some distance before he could regain his stride. With his recovered breath, his indignation seemed to madden him. He jumped up, crimson, all his white hair bristling. His eyes glaring vengefully, and shook violently the flaps of his ruined waistcoat before the disconcerted Sotelo. Look, those uniformed thieves of yours downstairs have robbed me of my watch. The old sailor's aspect was very threatening. Sotelo saw himself cut off from the table on which his sabre and revolver were lying. I demand restitution and apologies. Sotelo thundered at him, quite beside himself. From you! Yes, from you! For the space of a second or so the colonel stood with a perfectly stony expression of face. Then as Captain Mitchell flunked out an arm towards the table, as if to snatch up the revolver, Sotelo, with a yell of alarm, bounded to the door, and was gone in a flash, slamming it after him. Surprise calmed Captain Mitchell's fury. During the closed door Sotelo shouted on the landing, and there was a great tumble of feet on the wooden staircase. Disarm him, bind him. The colonel could be heard vociferating. Captain Mitchell had just the time to glance once at the windows, with three perpendicular bars of iron each, and some twenty feet from the ground, as he well knew, before the door flew open and the rush upon him took place. In an incredibly short time he found himself bound with many turns of a hide-rope to a highback chair, so that his head alone remained free. Not till then did Sotelo, who had been leaning in the doorway trembling visibly, venture again with him. The soldiers, picking up from the floor the rifles they had dropped, to grapple with the prisoner, filed out of the room. The officers remained, leaning on their swords and looking on. The watch! The watch! Raved the colonel, pacing to and fro like a tiger in a cage. Give me that man's watch. It was true that when searched for arms in the hall downstairs, before being taken into Sotelo's presence, Captain Mitchell had been relieved of his watch and chain. But at the colonel's clamor it was produced quickly enough, a corporal bringing it up, carried carefully in the palms of his joined hands. Sotelo snatched it and pushed the clenched fist, from which it dangled close to Captain Mitchell's face. Now, then, you arrogant Englishman, you dare to call the soldiers of the army thieves? Behold, your watch! He flourished his fist as if aiming blows the prisoner's nose. Captain Mitchell, helpless as a swabbed infant, looked anxiously at the six-digene gold half-chronometer, presented to him years ago by a committee of underwriters for saving his ship from total loss by fire. Sotelo, too, seemed to perceive its valuable appearance. He became silent suddenly, stepped aside to the table, and began a careful examination in the light of the candles. He had never seen anything so fine. His officers closed in and creamed their necks behind his back. He became so interested that for an instant he forgot his precious prisoner. There is always something childish in the rapacity of the passionate, clear-minded southern races, wanting in the misty idealism of the northerners who, at the smallest encouragement, dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth. Sotelo was fond of jewels, gold trinkets, of personal adornment. After a moment he turned about and with a commanding gesture made all of his officers fall back. He laid down the watch on the table, then negligently pushed his hat over it. Ah! he began, going up very close to the chair. You dare call my valiant soldiers of the Esmeralda Regiment thieves. You dare! What impudence! You foreigners come here to rob our country of its wealth. You never have enough. Your audacity knows no bounds. He looked towards the officers, amongst whom there was an approving murmur. The older major was moved to declare, see me Colonel, they are all traitors. I shall say nothing, continued Sotelo, fixing the motionless and powerless Mitchell with an angry but an easy stare. I shall say nothing of your treacherous attempt to get possession of my revolver, to shoot me while I was trying to treat you with consideration you did not deserve. You have forfeited your life. Your only hope is in my clemency. He watched for the effect of his words, but there was no obvious sign of fear on Captain Mitchell's face. His white hair was full of dust, which covered also the rest of his helpless person. As if he had heard nothing he twitched an eyebrow to get rid of a bit of straw which hung amongst the hairs. Sotelo advanced one leg and put his arms akimbo. It is you, Mitchell, he said emphatically, who are the thief, not my soldiers. He pointed at his prisoner a forefinger with a long almond-shaped nail. Where is the silver of the Santa May mine? I ask you, Mitchell, where is the silver that was deposited in this custom house? Answer me that. You stole it. You were a party to steal it. It was stolen from the government. Aha! You think I do not know what I say, but I am up to your foreign tricks. It is gone, the silver, no? Gone in one of your lunches, you miserable man. How dared you! This time he produced his effect. How on earth has Sotelo known that, thought Mitchell, has had the only part of his body that could move, betrayed his surprise by a sudden jerk. Ha! You tremble! Sotelo shouted. Suddenly, it is a conspiracy. It is a crime against the state. Did you not know that the silver belongs to the republic till the government claims are satisfied? Where is it? Where have you hidden it, you miserable thief? At this question, Captain Mitchell's sinking spares revived. In whatever incomprehensible manner Sotelo had already got his information about the lighter, he had not captured it. That was clear. In his outraged heart, Captain Mitchell had resolved that nothing would induce him to say a word while he remained so disgracefully bound, but his desire to help the escape of the silver made him depart from its resolution. His wits were very much at work. He detected in Sotelo a certain Arab doubt of irresolution. That man, he said to himself, is not certain of what he advances. For all his pomposity and social intercourse, Captain Mitchell could meet the realities of life in a resolute and ready spirit. Now he had got over the first shock of the abominable treatment. He was cool and collected enough. The immense contempt he felt for Sotelo steadied him, and he said oracularly, no doubt it is very well concealed by this time. Sotelo, too, had time to cool down. Muy bien, Mitchell, he said in a cold and threatening manner, but can you produce the government receipt for the royalty and the custom house permit of embarkation, eh? Can you? No. Then the silver has been removed illegally, and the guilty shall be made to suffer, unless it is produced within five days from this. He gave orders for the prisoner to be unbound and locked up in one of the smaller rooms downstairs. He walked about the room, moody and silent, till Captain Mitchell, with each of his arms held by a couple of men, stood up, shook himself, and stamped his feet. How did you like to be tied up, Mitchell, he asked derisively. It is the most incredible, abominable use of power. Captain Mitchell declared in a loud voice, and whatever your purpose, you shall gain nothing from it, I can promise you. The tall, carnal, livid, with his whole black ringlets and moustache, crouched, as it were, to look into the eyes of the short, thick-set, red-faced prisoner with rumpled white hair. That we shall see. You shall know my power a little better when I tie you up to a potalon outside in the sun for a whole day. He drew himself up hotly, and made a sign for Captain Mitchell to be led away. What about my watch? cried Captain Mitchell, hanging back from the efforts of the men pulling him towards the door. Sotila turned to his officers. No, but only listened to this piccolo, Caballeros, who pronounced with affected scorn, and was answered by a chorus of derisive laughter. He demands his watch. He ran up again to Captain Mitchell, for the desire to relieve his feelings by inflicting blows and pain upon his Englishman was very strong within him. Your watch, you are a prisoner in war time, Mitchell. In war time you have no rights and no property. Caramba, the very breath in your body, belongs to me. Remember that. Bosh, said Captain Mitchell, concealing a disagreeable impression. Down below, in a great hall, with the earthen floor and with a tall mound grown up by white ants in a corner, the soldiers had kindled a small fire with broken chairs and tables near the arched gateway, through which the faint murmur of the harbour waters on the beach could be heard. While Captain Mitchell was being led down the staircase, an officer passed him, running up to report to Sotila the capture of more prisoners. A lot of smoke hung about in the vast gloomy place. The fire crackled, and as if through a haze, Captain Mitchell made out, surrounded by short soldiers with fixed bayonets, the heads of three tall prisoners, the doctor, the engineer-in-chief, and the white leonine mane of old Viola, who stood half turned away from the others with his chin on his breast and his arms crossed. Mitchell's astonishment knew no bounds. He cried out. The other two exclaimed also. But he hurried on, diagonally, across the big cavern-like hall. Lots of thoughts surmises, hence of caution, and so on, crowded his head to destruction. "'Is he actually keeping you?' shouted the chief engineer, whose single eyeglass glittered in the firelight. An officer from the top of the stairs was shouting urgently. "'Bring them all up, all three!' In the clamour of voices and the rattle of arms, Captain Mitchell made himself heard imperfectly. "'By heavens! The fellow has stolen my watch!' The engineer-in-chief, on the staircase, resisted the pressure long enough to shout. "'What? What did you say?' "'Micronometer!' Captain Mitchell yelled violently at the very moment, of being thrust head foremost through a small door into a sort of cell, perfectly black and so narrow that he fetched up against the opposite wall. The door had been instantly slammed. He knew where they had put him. This was the strong room of the custom house, whence the silver had been removed only a few hours earlier. It was almost as narrow as a corridor, with a small square aperture, barred by a heavy grating at the distant end. Captain Mitchell staggered for a few steps, then sat down on the earthen floor with his back to the wall. Nothing, not even a gleam of light from anywhere, interfered with Captain Mitchell's meditation. He did some hard but not very extensive thinking. It was not of a gloomy cast. The old sailor, with all his small weaknesses and absurdities, was constitutionally incapable of entertaining for any length of time a fear of his personal safety. It was not so much firmness of soul as the lack of a certain kind of imagination. The kind whose undue development caused intense suffering to Senior Hirsch, that sort of imagination which adds the blind terror of bodily suffering and of death, envisaged as an accident to the body alone, strictly, to all the other apprehensions on which the sense of one's existence is based. Unfortunately, Captain Mitchell had not much penetration of any kind, characteristic, illuminating trifles of expression, action, or movement, escaped him completely. He was too pompously and innocently aware of his own existence to observe that of others. For instance, he could not believe that Sotelo had been really afraid of him, and this simply because it would never have entered into his head to shoot anyone except in the most pressing case of self-defense. Anybody could see he was not a murdering kind of man. He reflected quite gravely. Then, why this preposterous and insulting charge, he asked himself. But his thoughts mainly clung around the astounding and unanswerable question, how the devil the fellow got to know that the silver had gone off in the lighter. It was obvious that he had not captured it, and obviously he could not have captured it. In this last conclusion, Captain Mitchell was misled by the assumption drawn from his observation of the weather during his long vigil on the wharf. He thought that there had been much more wind than usual that night in the gulf, whereas, as a matter of fact, the reverse was the case. How in the name of all that's marvelous did that confounded fellow get wind of the affair, was the first question he asked directly after the bang, platter, and flash of the open door, which was closed again almost before he could lift his dropped head, and formed him that he had a companion of captivity. Dr. Moynihan's voice stopped muttering curses in English and Spanish. Is that you, Mitchell? He made an answer, surlyly. I struck my forehead against his confounded wall with enough force to fell an ox. Where are you? Captain Mitchell, accustomed to the darkness, could make out the doctor stretching out his hands blindly. I am sitting here on the floor. Don't fall over my legs. Captain Mitchell's voice announced in, with great dignity of tone. The doctor, and treated not to walk about in the dark, sank down to the ground, too. The two prisoners of Sotelo, with their heads nearly touching, began to exchange confidences. Yes, the doctor related in a low tone to Captain Mitchell's vehement curiosity. We have been nabbed in old Viola's place. It seems that one of the pickets, commanded by an officer, pushed as far as the town gate. They had orders not to enter, but to bring along every soul they could find on the plane. We had been talking in there with the door open, and no doubt they saw the glimmer of our light. They must have been making their approaches for some time. The engineer laid himself on a bench and a recess by the fireplace, and I went upstairs to have a look. I hadn't heard any sound from there in a long time. Old Viola, as soon as he saw me come up, lifted his arm for silence. I stole in on tiptoe. By jove his wife was lying down and had gone to sleep. The woman had actually dropped off to sleep. Senor Doctor, Viola whispers to me, it looks as if her oppression was going to get better. Yes, I said, very much surprised. Your wife is a wonderful woman, Giorgio. Just then a shot was fired in the kitchen, which made us jump in cower as if at a thunderclap. It seems that the party of soldiers had stolen quite close up, and one of them had crept up to the door. He looked in, thought that there was no one there, and, holding his rifle ready, entered quietly. The chief told me that he had just closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he saw the man, already in the middle of the room, peering into the dark corners. The chief was so startled that, without thinking, he made one leap from the recess, right out in front of the fireplace. The soldier, no less startled, up with his rifle and pulls the trigger, deafening and cinching the engineer, but in his flurry, missing him completely. Look what happens. At the noise of the report, the sleeping woman sat up, as if moved by a spring, with her shriek. The children, John Battista, saved the children. I have it in my ears now. It was the truest cry of distress I have ever heard. I stood as if paralyzed, but the old husband ran across the bedside, stretching out his hands. She clung to them. I could see her eyes so glazed. The old fellow lowered her down on the pillows, and then looked around at me. She was dead. All this took less than five minutes. And then I ran down to see what was the matter. It was no use thinking of any resistance. Nothing we two could say availed with the officer, so I volunteered to go up with a couple of soldiers and fetch down Old Viola. He was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking at his wife's face, and did not seem to hear what I said. But after I had pulled the sheet over her head, he got up and followed us downstairs quietly in a sort of thoughtful way. They marched us off along the road, leaving the door open and the candle burning. The chief engineer strode on without a word, but I looked back once or twice at the feeble gleam. After we had gone some considerable distance, the Garibaldino, who was walking by my side, suddenly said, I have buried many men on battlefields on this continent, the priest talk of consecrated ground, Ba, all the earth made by God is holy. But the sea, which knows nothing of kings and priests and tyrants, is the holiest of all. Doctor, I should like to bury her in the sea. No mummies, candles, incense, no holy water mumbled over by priests. The spirit of liberty is upon the waters. Amazing old man! He was saying all this in an undertone as if talking to himself. This, yes, interrupted Captain Mitchell impatiently. Poor old chap! But have you any idea how that ruffian Sotelo obtained his information? He did not get hold of any of our carcadores who helped with the truck, did he? But no, it is impossible. These were picked men we've had in our boats for these five years, and I paid them myself, specially for the job, with instructions to keep out of the way for twenty-four hours at least. I saw them with my own eyes, march on with the Italians to the railway yards. The chief promised to give them rations as long as they wanted to remain there. Well, said the doctor, slowly, I can tell you that you may say good-bye forever to your best lighter, and to the capitals of carcadores. At this, Captain Mitchell scrambled up to his feet in the excess of his excitement. The doctor, without giving him time to exclaim, stated briefly the part played by Hirsch during the night. Captain Mitchell was overcome. Drowned, he muttered, in a bewildered and appalled whisper. Drowned! Afterwards, he kept still, apparently listening, but too absorbed in the news of the catastrophe to follow the doctor's narrative with attention. The doctor had taken up an attitude of perfect ignorance till it last so till it was induced to have Hirsch brought in to repeat the whole story, which was got out of him again with the greatest difficulty, because every moment he would break out into lamentations. At last Hirsch was led away, looking more dead than alive, and shut up in one of the upstairs rooms to be close at hand. Then the doctor, keeping up his character of a man not admitted to the inner councils of the Santa Made Administration, remarked that the story sounded incredible. Of course, he said, he couldn't tell what had been the action of the Europeans as he had been exclusively occupied with his own work in looking after the wounded, and also in attending Don Jose Avelanos. He had succeeded in assuming so well a tone of impartial indifference that Sotela seemed to be completely deceived. Till then a show of regular inquiry had been kept up. One of the officers sitting at the table wrote down the questions and the answers. The others, lounging about the room, listened attentively, at their long cigars and keeping their eyes on the doctor. But at that point Sotela ordered everybody out. End of Part 3, Chapter 2. Part 3, Chapter 3 of Nostromo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Part 3, The Lighthouse. Chapter 3. Directly they were alone, a Colonel's severe official manner changed. He rose and approached the doctor. His eyes shone with rapacity and hope. He became confidential. The silver might have been indeed put on board the lighter, but it was not conceivable that it should have been taken out to sea. The doctor, watching every word, nodded slightly, smoking with a parent relish the cigar which Sotelo had offered him as a sign of his friendly intentions. The doctor's manner of cold detachment from the rest of the Europeans led Sotelo on till, from conjecture to conjecture, he arrived at hinting that in his opinion this was a put up job on the part of Charles Gould in order to get hold of that immense treasure all to himself. The doctor, observant and self possessed, muttered, he is very capable of that. Here Captain Mitchell exclaimed with amazement, amusement, and indignation, you said that of Charles Gould. Disgust and even some suspicion crept into his tone, for to him too as to other Europeans there appeared to be something dubious about the doctor's personality. What on earth made you say that to this watch-stealing scoundrel, he asked? What's the object of an infernal lie of that sort? That confounded pickpocket was quite capable of believing you. He snorted. For a time the doctor remained silent in the dark. Yes, that is exactly what I did say, he uttered at last, in a tone which would have made it clear enough to a third party that the pause was not of a reluctant but of a reflective character. Captain Mitchell thought that he had never heard anything so brazenly impudent in his life. Well, well, he muttered to himself, but he had not the heart to voice his thoughts. They were swept away by others full of astonishment and regret. A heavy sense of discomfortor crushed him. The loss of the silver, the death of Nostromo, which was really quite a blow to his sensibilities, because he had become attached to his capitas as people get attached to their inferiors from love of ease and almost unconscious gratitude. And when he thought of Deku being drowned too, his sensibility was almost overcome by this miserable end. What a heavy blow for that poor young woman. Captain Mitchell did not belong to the species of crab-dold bachelors. On the contrary, he liked to see young men paying attention to young women. It seemed to him a natural and proper thing. Proper especially. As to sailors, it was different. It was not their place to marry, he maintained, but it was on moral grounds as a matter of self-denial. For, he explained, life on board ship is not fit for a woman even at best, and if you leave her on shore, first of all it is not fair, and next she either suffers from it or doesn't care a bit, which, in both cases, is bad. He couldn't have told what upset him most, Charles Gould's immense material loss, the death of Nostromo, which was a heavy loss to himself, or the idea of that beautiful and accomplished young woman being plunged into mourning. Yes, the doctor, who had been apparently reflecting, began again. He believed me right enough. I thought he would have hugged me. C.C., he said, he will write to that partner of his, a rich Americano in San Francisco, that it is all lost. Why not? There is enough to share with many people. But this is perfectly imbecile, cried Captain Mitchell. The doctor remarked that Sotillo was imbecile, and that his imbecility was ingenious enough to lead him completely astray. He had helped him only but a little way. I mentioned, the doctor said, in a sort of casual way, the treasure is generally buried in the earth rather than set afloat upon the sea. At this my Sotillo slapped his forehead. Por Dios, yes, he said, they must have buried it on the shores of this harbor somewhere before they sailed out. Heavens and earth, muttered Captain Mitchell, I should not have believed that anybody could be ass enough. He paused, then went on mournfully. But what's the good of all this? It would have been a clever enough lie if the lighter had been still afloat. It would have kept that inconceivable idiot perhaps from sending out the steamer to cruise in the gulf. That was a danger that worried me no end. Captain Mitchell sighed profoundly. I had an object, the doctor pronounced slowly. Had you, muttered Captain Mitchell? Well, that's luckier also would have thought that you went on fooling him for the fun of the thing. And perhaps that was your object. Well, I must say I personally wouldn't condescend to that sort of thing. It is not to my taste. No, no, blackening a friend's character is not my idea of fun, if it were to fool the greatest blackguard on earth. Had it not been for Captain Mitchell's depression caused by the fatal news, his disgust of Dr. Monaham would have taken a more outspoken shape, but he thought to himself that now it really did not matter what that man, whom he had never liked, would say and do. I wonder, he grumbled, why they have shut us up together, or why so Teo should have shut you up at all, since it seems to me you have been fairly chummy up there. Yes, I wonder, said the doctor grimly. Captain Mitchell's heart was so heavy that he would have preferred for the time being a complete solitude to the best of company, but any company would have been preferable to the doctors, at whom he had always looked as scant as a sort of beachcomber of superior intelligence partly reclaimed from his abased state. That feeling led him to ask, what has that ruffian done with the other two? The chief engineer he would have let go in any case, said the doctor. He wouldn't like to have a quarrel with the railway upon his hands, not just yet at any rate. I don't think, Captain Mitchell, that you understand exactly what so Teo's position is. I don't see why I should bother my head about it, snarled Captain Mitchell. No, assented the doctor, with the same grim composure. I don't see why you should. It wouldn't help a single human being in the world if you thought ever so hard upon any subject whatever. No, said Captain Mitchell, simply and with evident depression. A man locked up in a confounded dark hole is not much use to anybody. As to Old Viola, the doctor continued as though he had not heard, so Teo released him for the same reason he is presently going to release you. Eh, what? exclaimed Captain Mitchell, staring like an owl in the darkness. What is there in common between me and Old Viola? More likely because the old chap has no watch and chain for the pickpocket to steal. And I tell you what, Dr. Monaham, he went on with a rising collar. He will find it more difficult than he thinks to get rid of me. He will burn his fingers over that job yet, I can tell you. To begin with, I won't go without my watch, and as to the rest, we shall see. I daresay it is no great matter for you to be locked up, but Joe Mitchell is a different kind of man, sir. I don't mean to submit tamely to insult and robbery. I am a public character, sir. And then Captain Mitchell became aware that the bars of the opening had become visible, a black grating upon a square of gray. The coming of the day silenced Captain Mitchell as if by the reflection that now in all the future days he would be deprived of the invaluable services of his capitas. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded on his breast, and the doctor walked up and down the whole length of the place with his peculiar hobbling gait as if slinking about on damaged feet. At the end, furthest from the grating, he would be lost altogether in the darkness. Only the slight limping shuffle could be heard. There was an air of moody detachment in that painful prowl kept up without a pause. When the door of the prison was suddenly flung open and his name shouted out, he showed no surprise. He swerved sharply in his walk and passed out at once, as though much depended upon his speed. But Captain Mitchell remained for some time with his shoulders against the wall, quite undecided in the bitterness of his spirit whether it wouldn't be better to refuse to stir a limb in the way of protest. He had half a mind to get himself carried out, but after the officer at the doorage shouted three or four times in tones of remonstrance and surprise he condescended to walk out. So T.O.'s manner had changed. The Colonel's offhand civility was slightly irresolute, as though he were in doubt if civility were the proper course in this case. He observed Captain Mitchell attentively before he spoke from the big armchair behind the table in a condescending voice. I have concluded not to detain you, Senor Mitchell. I am of a forgiving disposition. I make allowances. Let this be a lesson to you, however. The peculiar dawn of Sulaco, which seems to break far away to the westward and creep back into the shade of the mountains, mingled with the reddish light of the candles. Captain Mitchell, in sign of contempt and indifference, let his eyes roam all over the room, and he gave a hard stare to the doctor, perched already on the casement of one of the windows, with his eyelids lowered, careless and thoughtful, or perhaps ashamed. So T.O., ensconced in the vast armchair, remarked, I should have thought that the feelings of a cavallero would have dictated to you an appropriate reply. He waited for it, but Captain Mitchell remaining mute, more from extreme resentment than from reasoned intention, so T.O. hesitated, glanced towards the doctor, who looked up and nodded, then went on with a slight effort. Here, Senor Mitchell, is your watch. Learn how hasty and unjust has been your judgment of my patriotic soldiers. Lying back in his seat, he extended his arm over the table and pushed the watch away slightly. Captain Mitchell walked up with undisguised eagerness, put it to his ear, then slipped it into his pocket, coolly. So T.O. seemed to overcome an immense reluctance. Again he looked aside at the doctor, who stared at him unwinkingly. But as Captain Mitchell was turning away, without as much as a nod or a glance, he hastened to say, You may go and wait downstairs for the senior doctor, whom I am going to liberate, too. You foreigners are insignificant to my mind. He forced a slight discordant laugh out of himself, while Captain Mitchell, for the first time, looked at him with some interest. The law shall take note later on of your transgressions, so T.O. hurried on. But as for me you can live free, unguarded, unobserved. Do you hear, Senor Mitchell? You may depart to your affairs. You are beneath my notice. My attention is claimed by matters of the very highest importance. Captain Mitchell was very nearly provoked to an answer. It displeased him to be liberated insultingly, but want of sleep, prolonged anxieties, a profound disappointment with the fatal ending of the silver-saving business weighed upon his spirits. It was as much as he could do to conceal his uneasiness, not about himself perhaps, but about things in general. It occurred to him distinctly that something underhand was going on. As he went out, he ignored the doctor pointedly. A brute, said T.O. as the door shut. Dr. Monaham slipped off the windowsill, and, thrusting his hands into the pockets of the long gray dustcoat he was wearing, made a few steps into the room. T.O. got up too, and, putting himself in the way, examined him from head to foot. So your countrymen do not confide in you very much, Senor Doctor. They do not love you, eh? Why is that, I wonder? The doctor, lifting his head, answered by a long, lifeless stare in the words, Perhaps because I have lived too long in Costa Juana. Sotillo had a gleam of white teeth under the black mustache. Aha! But you love yourself, he said, encouragingly. If you leave them alone, the doctor said, looking with the same lifeless stare at Sotillo's handsome face, they will betray themselves very soon. Meantime, I may try to make Don Carlos speak. Ah, Senor Doctor, said Sotillo, wagging his head. You are a man of quick intelligence. We were made to understand each other. He turned away. He could bear no longer that expressionless and motionless stare which seemed to have a sort of impenetrable emptiness like the black depth of an abyss. Even in a man utterly devoid of moral sense that remains an appreciation of rascality which, being conventional, is perfectly clear. Sotillo thought that Dr. Monaham, so different from all Europeans, was ready to sell his countrymen and Charles Gould, his employer, for some share of the Santome Silver. Sotillo did not despise him for that. The Colonel's want of moral sense was of a profound and innocent character. It bordered upon stupidity, moral stupidity. Nothing that served his ends could appear to him really reprehensible. Nevertheless, he despised Dr. Monaham. He had for him an immense and satisfactory contempt. He despised him with all his heart because he did not mean to let the doctor have any reward at all. He despised him, not as a man, without faith and honor, but as a fool. Dr. Monaham's insight into his character had deceived Sotillo completely. Therefore he thought the doctor a fool. Since his arrival in Sulaco, the Colonel's ideas had undergone some modification. He no longer wished for a political career in Montero's administration. He had always doubted the safety of that course. Since he had learned from the chief engineer that at daylight most likely he would be confronted by Pedro Montero, his misgivings on that point had considerably increased. The guerrillero brother of the general, the Pedrito of popular speech, had a reputation of his own. He wasn't safe to deal with. Sotillo had vaguely planned seizing not only the treasure but the town itself and then negotiating at leisure, but in the face of facts learned from the chief engineer who had frankly disclosed to him the whole situation. His audacity, never of a very dashing kind, had been replaced by a most cautious hesitation. An army, an army crossed the mountains under Pedrito already, he had repeated, unable to hide his consternation. If it had not been that I am given the news by a man of your position I would never have believed it, astonishing. An armed force corrected the engineer swobbly. His aim was attained. It was to keep Sulaco clear of any armed occupation for a few hours longer to let those whom fear impelled leave the town. In the general dismay there were families hopeful enough to fly upon the road towards Los Atos, which was left open by the withdrawal of the armed rabble under Senores Fuentes en Gamacho, to ring con with their enthusiastic welcome for Pedro Montero. It was a hasty and risky exodus, and it was said that Hernández, occupying with his band the Woods About Los Atos, was receiving the fugitives, that a good many people he knew were contemplating such a flight had been well known to the chief engineer. Father Corbalon's efforts in the cause of that most pious robber had not been altogether fruitless. The political chief of Sulaco had yielded at the last moment to the urgent entreaties of the priest, had signed a provisional nomination appointing Hernández a general, and calling upon him officially in this new capacity to preserve order in the town. The fact is that the political chief, seeing the situation desperate, did not care what he signed. It was the last official document he signed before he left the palace of the Intendencia for the refuge of the OSN company's office. But even had he meant his act to be effective it was already too late. The riot which he feared and expected broke out in less than an hour after Father Corbalon had left him. Indeed, Father Corbalon, who had appointed a meeting with Nostromo in the Dominican convent where he had his residence in one of the cells, never managed to reach the place. From the Intendencia he had gone straight on to the Avianos's house to tell his brother-in-law, and though he stayed there no more than half an hour he had found himself cut off from his ascetic abode. Nostromo, after waiting there for some time, watching uneasily the increasing uproar in the street, had made his way to the offices of the Porvenir and stayed there till daylight as Deku had mentioned in the letter to his sister. Thus the Capotas, instead of riding towards the Los Atos woods as bearer of Hernández's nomination, had remained in town to save the life of the president dictator to assist in repressing the outbreak of the mob, and at last to sail out with the silver of the mine. But Father Corbalon, escaping to Hernández, had the document in his pocket, a piece of official writing turning a bandit into a general in a memorable last official act of the Rivierist Party, whose watchwords were honesty, peace, and progress. Probably neither the priest nor the bandit saw the irony of it. Father Corbalon must have found messengers to send into the town, for early on the second day of the disturbances there were rumors of Hernández being on the road to Los Atos ready to receive those who had put themselves under his protection. A strange-looking horseman, elderly and audacious, had appeared in the town, riding slowly while his eyes examined the fronts of the houses as though he had never seen such high buildings before. Before the cathedral he had dismounted, and, kneeling in the middle of the plaza, his bridle over his arm and his hat lying in front of him on the ground, had bowed his head, crossing himself and beating his breast for some little time. Remounting his horse with a fearless but not unfriendly look round the little gathering formed about his public devotions, he had asked for the Casa Avallanos. A score of hands were extended in answer, with fingers pointing up the Calle de la Constitución. The horseman had gone on with only a glance of casual curiosity upwards to the windows of the Amarilla Club at the corner. His stentorian voice shouted periodically in the empty street, "'Which is the Casa Avallanos?' till an answer came from the scared porter and he disappeared under the gate. The letter he was bringing, written by Father Corbalon with a pencil by the campfire of Hernández, was addressed to Don José, of whose critical state the priest was not aware. Antonia read it, and, after consulting Charles Gould, sent it on for the information of the gentleman garrisoning the Amarilla Club. For herself, her mind was made up. She would rejoin her uncle. She would entrust the last day, the last hours perhaps, of her father's life to the keeping of the bandit, whose existence was a protest against the irresponsible tyranny of all parties alike, against the moral darkness of the land. The gloom of Los Atos Woods was preferable, a life of hardships in the train of a robber band less debasing. Antonia embraced with all her soul her uncle's obstinate defiance of misfortune. It was grounded in the belief in the man whom she loved. In his message the vicar general answered upon his head for Hernández's fidelity. As to his power he pointed out that he had remained unsubdued for so many years. In that letter Dekou's idea of the New Occidental State, whose flourishing and stable condition is a matter of common knowledge now, was for the first time made public and used as an argument. Hernández, ex-bandit in the last general of Ribiara's creation, was confident of being able to hold the tract of country between the Woods of Los Atos and the Coast Range till that devoted patriot Don Martin Dekou could bring General Barrios back to Sulaco for the reconquest of the town. Heaven itself wills it, Providence is on our side, wrote Father Corbalon. There was no time to reflect upon or to contravert his statement, and if the discussion started upon the reading of that letter in the Amarilla Club was violent it was also short-lived. In the general bewilderment of the collapse some jumped at the idea with joyful astonishment as upon the amazing discovery of a new hope. Others became fascinated by the prospect of immediate personal safety for their women and children. The majority caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. Father Corbalon was unexpectedly offering the more refuge from Pedrito Montero with his llaneros allied to señores fuentes en Camacho with their armed rabble. All the latter part of the afternoon an animated discussion went on in the big rooms of the Amarilla Club. Even those members posted at the windows with rifles and carbines to guard the end of the street in case of an offensive return of the populace shouted their opinions and arguments over their shoulders. As dusk fell, Don Juste López, inviting those caballeros who were of his way of thinking to follow him, withdrew into the corridor, where at the little table in the light of two candles he busied himself in composing an address, or rather a solemn declaration to be presented to Pedrito Montero by a deputation of such members of assembly as it elected to remain in town. His idea was to propitiate him in order to save the form at least to parliamentary institutions. Seated before a blank sheet of paper, a goose quill pen in his hand and surged upon from all sides, he turned to the right and to the left, repeating with solemn insistence, Caballeros, a moment of silence, a moment of silence, we ought to make it clear that we bow in all good faith to the accomplished facts. The utterance of that phrase seemed to give him a melancholy satisfaction, the hubbub of voices round him was growing strained and hoarse, and the sudden pauses the excited grimacing of the faces would sink all at once into the stillness of profound dejection. Meantime the exodus had begun. Garretas full of ladies and children rolled swaying across the plaza with men walking or riding by their side. Mounted parties followed on mules and horses, the poorest were setting out on foot, men and women carrying bundles, clasping babies in their arms, leading old people, dragging along the bigger children. When Charles Gould, after leaving the doctor and the engineer at the Casa Viola, entered the town by the harbour gate, all those that had meant to go were gone and the others had barricaded themselves in their houses. In the whole dark street there was only one spot of flickering lights and moving figures, where the Señor Administrador recognized his wife's carriage waiting at the door of the Avianos's house. He rode up, almost unnoticed, and looked on without a word while some of his own servants came out of the gate carrying Don José Avianos, who, with closed eyes and motionless features, appeared perfectly lifeless. His wife and Dantonia walked on each side of the improvised stretcher which was put at once into the carriage. The two women embraced, while from the other side of the landow, Father Corbalon's emissary, with his ragged beard all streaked with grey and high bronze cheekbones stared sitting upright in the saddle. Then Antonia, dry-eyed, got in by the side of the stretcher and, after making the sign of the cross rapidly, lowered a thick veil upon her face. The servants and the three or four neighbours who had come to assist stood back, uncovering their heads. On the box, Ignacio, resigned now to driving all night and to having perhaps his throat cut before daylight, looked back surly over his shoulder. "'Drive carefully,' cried Mrs. Gould in a tremulous voice. "'See carefully, see Ninia,' he mumbled, chewing his lips, his round, leathery cheeks quivering, and the landow rolled slowly out of the light. "'I will see them as far as the Ford,' said Charles Gould to his wife. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk with her hands clasped politely and nodded to him as he followed after the carriage, and now the windows of the Amarilla Club were dark. The last spark of resistance had died out. Turning his head at the corner, Charles Gould saw his wife crossing over to their own gate in the lighted patch of the street. One of their neighbours, a well-known merchant and landowner of the province, followed at her elbow, talking with great gestures. As she passed in, all the lights went out in the street, which remained dark and empty from end to end. The houses of the vast plaza were lost in the night. High up like a star there was a small gleam in one of the towers of the cathedral, and the equestrian statue gleamed pale against the black trees of the Alameda, like a ghost of royalty haunting the scenes of revolution. The rare prowlers they met ranged themselves against the wall. Beyond the last houses, the carriage rolled noiselessly on the soft cushion of dust, and with a greater obscurity, a feeling of freshness seemed to fall from the foliage of the trees bordering the country road. The emissary from Hernandez's camp pushed his horse close to Charles Gould. Gavallero, he said in an interested voice. You are he whom they call the King of Sulaco, the Master of the Mine? Is it not so? Yes, I am the Master of the Mine, answered Charles Gould. The man cantered for a time in silence, then said, I have a brother, a serenio in your service in the Santome Valley. You have proved yourself a just man. There has been no wrong done to anyone since you called upon the people to work in the mountains. My brother says that no official of the government, no oppressor of the Campo, has been seen on your side of the stream. Your own officials do not oppress the people in the Gorge. Doubtless they are afraid of your severity. You are a just man and a powerful one, he added. He spoke in an abrupt, independent tone, but evidently he was communicative with a purpose. He told Charles Gould that he had been a ranchero in one of the lower valleys, far south, a neighbor of Hernandez in the old days, and Godfather to his eldest boy, one of those who joined him in his resistance to the recruiting raid, which was the beginning of all their misfortunes. It was he that, when his compadre had been carried off, had buried his wife and children, murdered by the soldiers. See, senor, he muttered hoarsely. I and two or three others, the lucky ones left at liberty, buried them all in one grave near the ashes of their ranch, under the tree that had shaded its roof. It was to him, too, that Hernandez came after he had deserted, three years afterwards. He had still his uniform on, with the sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, and the blood of his colonel upon his hands and breast. Three troopers followed him, of those who had started in pursuit but had ridden on for liberty. And he told Charles Gould how he and a few friends, seeing those soldiers, lay in ambush behind some rocks ready to pull the trigger on them, when he recognized his compadre and jumped up from cover, shouting his name, because he knew that Hernandez could not have been coming back on an errand of injustice and oppression. Those three soldiers, together with the party who lay behind the rocks, had formed the nucleus of the famous band, and he, the narrator, had been the favorite lieutenant of Hernandez for many, many years. He mentioned proudly that the officials had put a price upon his head, too, but it did not prevent it getting sprinkled with gray upon his shoulders. And now he had lived long enough to see his compadre made a general. He had a burst of muffled laughter. And now, from robbers, we have become soldiers. But look, Caballero, at those who made us soldiers, and him a general, look at these people. Ignacio shouted, the light of the carriage lamps running along the noble hedges that crowned the bank on each side flashed upon the scared faces of people standing aside in the road, sunk deep like an English country lane into the soft soil of the compo. They cowered, their eyes glistened very big for a second, and then the light, running on, fell upon the half-denuded roots of a big tree on another stretch of noble hedge, caught up another bunch of faces glaring back apprehensively. Three women, of whom one was carrying a child, and a couple of men in civilian dress, one armed with a saber and another with a gun, were grouped about a donkey carrying two bundles tied up in blankets. Further on Ignacio shouted again to pass a careta, a long wooden box on two high wheels with the door at the back swinging open. Some ladies in it must have recognized the white mules because they screamed out, is it you, doña Emilia? At the turn of the road the glare of a big fire filled the short stretch vaulted over by the branches meeting overhead. Near the ford of a shallow stream a roadside rancho of woven rushes and a roof of grass had been set on fire by accident, and the flames, roaring viciously, lit up an open space blocked with horses, mules, and a distracted, shouting crowd of people. When Ignacio pulled up several ladies on foot assailed the carriage, begging Antonia for a seat. To their clamor she answered by pointing silently to her father. I must leave you here, said Charles Gould in the uproar. The flames leaped up sky high and in the recoil from the scorching heat across the road the stream of fugitives pressed against the carriage. A middle-aged lady dressed in black silk but with a course manta over her head and a rough branch for a stick in her hand staggered against the front wheel. Two young girls, frightened and silent, were clinging to her arms. Charles Gould knew her very well. Mr. Ricordia, we are getting terribly bruised in this crowd, she exclaimed, smiling up courageously to him. We have started on foot. All our servants ran away yesterday to join the Democrats. We are going to put ourselves under the protection of Father Corbalon of your sainted uncle, Antonia. He has wrought a miracle in the heart of a most merciless robber, a miracle. She raised her voice gradually up to a scream as she was born along by the pressure of people getting out of the way of some carts coming up out of the ford at a gallop, with loud yells and cracking of whips. Great masses of sparks mingled with black smoke flew over the road, the bamboos of the walls detonated in the fire with the sound of an irregular fuselage, and then the bright blaze sank suddenly, leaving only a red dusk crowded with aimless dark shadows drifting in contrary directions. The noise of voices seemed to die away with the flame, and the tumult of heads, arms, quarreling and imprecations passed on fleeing into the darkness. I must leave you now, repeated Charles Gould to Antonia. She turned her head slowly and uncovered her face. The emissary and compadre of Hernandez spurred his horse close up. Has not the master of the mine any message to send to Hernandez the master of the Campo? The truth of the comparison struck Charles Gould heavily. In his determined purpose he held the mine, and the indomitable bandit held the Campo by the same precarious tenure. They were equals before the lawlessness of the land. It was impossible to disentangle one's activity from its debasing contacts. A close meshed net of crime and corruption lay upon the whole country, and immense and weary discouragement sealed his lips for a time. You are a just man, urged the emissary of Hernandez. Look at those people who made my compadre a general and have turned us all into soldiers. Look at those oligarchs fleeing for life with only the clothes on their backs. My compadre does not think of that, but our followers may be wondering greatly, and I would speak for them to you. Listen, senor, for many months now the Campo has been our own. We need to ask no man for anything, but soldiers must have their pay to live honestly when the wars are over. It is believed that your soul is so just that a prayer from you would cure the sickness of every beast like the horizon of the upright judge. Let me have some words from your lips that would act like a charm upon the doubts of our partida, where all are men. Do you hear what he says, Charles Gould said in English to Antonia? Forgive us our misery, she exclaimed hurriedly. It is your character that is the inexhaustible treasure which may save us all yet. Your character, Carlos, not your wealth. I entreat you to give this man your word that you will accept any arrangement my uncle may make with their chief. One word. He will want no more. On the side of the roadside hut there remained nothing but an enormous heap of embers, throwing afar a darkening red glow in which Antonia's face appeared deeply flushed with excitement. Charles Gould, with only a short hesitation, pronounced the required pledge. He was like a man who had ventured on a precipitous path with no room to turn, where the only chance of safety is to press forward. At that moment he understood it thoroughly as he looked down at Don Jose, stretched out, hardly breathing by the side of the erect Antonia, vanquished in a lifelong struggle with the powers of moral darkness, whose stagnant depths breed monstrous crimes and monstrous illusions. In a few words the emissary from Anandes expressed his complete satisfaction. Stoically Antonia lowered her veil, resisting the longing to inquire about D'Cous's escape, but Ignacio leered morosely over his shoulder. Take a good look at the mules, Miyamo, he grumbled, you shall never see them again. CHAPTER IV Charles Gould turned towards the town. Before him the jagged peaks of the Sierra came out all black in the clear dawn. Here and there a muffled lepero whisked round the corner of a grass-grown street before the ringing hoofs of his horse. Dogs barked behind the walls of the gardens, and with the colorless light the chill of the snows seemed to fall from the mountains upon the disjointed pavements and the shuttered houses with broken cornices and the plaster peeling in patches between the flat pilasters of the fronts. The daybreak struggled with the gloom under the arcades on the plaza with no signs of the country people disposing their goods for the day's market. Piles of fruit, bundles of vegetables ornamented with flowers, on low benches under enormous matte umbrellas, with no cheery early morning bustle of villagers, women, children, and bloated donkeys. Only a few scattered knots of revolutionists stood in the vast space, all looking one way from under their slouched hats for some sign of news from Renine Cohn. The largest of those groups turned about like one man as Charles Gould passed and shouted, Viva la libertad, after him in a menacing tone. Charles Gould rode on and turned into the archway of his house. In the patio littered with straw, a practicante, one of Dr. Monagham's native assistants, sat on the ground with his back against the rim of the fountain, fingering a guitar discreetly, while two girls of the lower class standing up before him shuffled their feet a little and waved their arms, humming a popular dance-tune. Most of the wounded during the two days of rioting had been taken away already by their friends and relations, but several figures could be seen sitting up balancing their bandaged heads in time to the music. Charles Gould dismounted. A sleepy mosso coming out of the bakery door took hold of the horse's bridle, the practicante endeavored to conceal his guitar hastily. The girls, unabashed, stepped back smiling, and Charles Gould, on his way to the staircase, glanced into a dark corner of the patio at another group, a mortally wounded cargador with a woman kneeling by his side. She mumbled prayers rapidly, trying at the same time to force a piece of orange between the stiffening lips of the dying man. The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people. The cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavour to attain an enduring solution of the problem. Unlike Dekout, Charles Gould could not play lightly, apart in a tragic farce. It was tragic enough for him in all conscience, but he could see no farcical element. He suffered too much under a conviction of irremediable folly. He was too severely practical and too idealistic to look upon its terrible humours with amusement. As Martin Dekout, the imaginative materialist, was able to do in the dry light of his skepticism. To him as to all of us, the compromises with his conscience appeared uglier than ever in the light of failure. His taciturnity, assumed with a purpose, had prevented him from tampering openly with his thoughts. But the Gould's concession had insidiously corrupted his judgment. He might have known, he said to himself, leaning over the balustrade of the corridor, that reveridism could never come to anything. The mind had corrupted his judgment by making him sick of bribing and intriguing merely to have his work left alone from day to day. Like his father he did not like to be robbed. It exasperated him. He had persuaded himself that, apart from higher considerations, the backing up of Don Jose's hopes of reform was good business. He had gone forth into the senseless fray as his poor uncle whose sword hung on the wall of his study had gone forth, in the defence of the commonest decencies of organised society. Only his weapon was the wealth of the mine. More far-reaching and subtle than an honest blade of steel fitted into a simple brass guard. More dangerous to the wielder, too, this weapon of wealth, double-edged, with the cupidity and misery of mankind steeped in all the vices of self-indulgence as a concoction of poisonous roots, tainting the very cause for which it is drawn, always ready to turn awkwardly in the hand. There was nothing for it now but to go on using it. But he promised himself to see it shattered into small bits before he let it be wrenched from his grasp. After all, with his English parentage and English up- bringing, he perceived that he was an adventurer in Cosagowana, the descendant of adventurers enlisted in a foreign legion of men who had sought fortune in a revolutionary war, who had planned revolutions who had believed in revolutions. For all the uprightness of his character he had something of an adventurer's easy morality which takes account of personal risk in the ethical appraising of his action. He was prepared, if need be, to blow up the whole Santo May mountain sky-high out of the territory of the Republic. This resolution expressed the tenacity of his character, the remorse of that subtle conjugal infidelity through which his wife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts. Something of his father's imaginative weakness and something too of the spirit of a buccaneer, throwing a lighted match into the magazine rather than surrender his ship. Down below in the patio the wounded Cargador had breathed his last. The woman cried out once, and her cry, unexpected and shrill, made all the wounded sit up. The practicante, scrambled to his feet and guitar in hand, gazed steadily in her direction with elevated eyebrows. The two girls, sitting now one on each side of their wounded relative with their knees drawn up and long cigars between their lips, nodded at each other significantly. Charles Gould, looking down over the balustrade, saw three men dressed ceremoniously in black frock coats with white shirts and wearing European round hats, entered the patio from the street. One of them had in shoulders taller than the two others, advanced with marked gravity, leading the way. This was Don Huste Lopez, accompanied by two of his friends, members of assembly, coming to call upon the Administradora of the Santo May Mine at this early hour. They saw him, too, wave their hands to him urgently, walking up the stairs as if in procession. Don Huste, astonishingly changed by having shaved off altogether his damaged beard, had lost with it nine-tenths of his outward dignity. Even at that time of serious preoccupation, Charles Gould could not help noting the revealed ineptitude in the aspect of the man. His companions looked crestfallen and sleepy. One kept on passing the tip of his tongue over his parched lips. The other's eyes strayed dully over the tiled floor of the corredor, while Don Huste, standing a little in advance, harangued the Señor Administradora of the Santo May Mine. It was his firm opinion that forms had to be observed. A new governor is always visited by deputations from the Cabildo, which is the municipal council, from the Consolado, the commercial board, and it was proper that the provincial assembly should send a deputation, too, if only to assert the existence of parliamentary institutions. Don Huste proposed that Don Carlos Gould, as the most prominent citizen of the province, should join the assembly's deputation. His position was exceptional, his personality known through the length and breadth of the whole republic. Official courtesies must not be neglected, if they are gone through with a bleeding heart. The acceptance of accomplished facts may save yet the precious vestiges of parliamentary institutions. Don Huste's eyes glowed dully. He believed in parliamentary institutions and the convinced drone of his voice lost itself in the stillness of the house, like the deep buzzing of some ponderous insect. Charles Gould had turned round to listen patiently, leaning his elbow on the balustrade. He shook his head a little, refusing, almost touched by the anxious gaze of the president of the provincial assembly. It was not Charles Gould's policy to make the Santo May Mine a party to any formal proceedings. My advice, senores, is that you should wait for your fate in your houses. There is no necessity for you to give yourselves up formally into Montero's hounds. Submission to the inevitable, as Don Huste calls it, is all very well. But when the inevitable is called Pedrito Montero, there is no need to exhibit, pointedly, the whole extent of your surrender. The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence and illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction, that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future. Charles Gould stopped before the sad bewilderment of the faces, the wondering, anxious glances of the eyes. The feeling of pity for those men, putting all their trust into words of some sort, while murder and repine stocked over the land, had betrayed him into what seemed empty loquacity. Don Huste murmured, you are abandoning us, Don Carlos. And yet parliamentary institutions. He could not finish from grief. For a moment he put his hand over his eyes. Charles Gould, in his fear of empty loquacity, made no answer to the charge. He returned in silence their ceremonious boughs. His tessiturnity was his refuge. He understood that what they sought was to get the influence of the Santo May Mine on their side. They wanted to go on a conciliating errand to the victor under the wing of the Gould concession. Other public bodies, the Cabildo, the Consulado, would be coming to presently, seeking the support the most stable, the most effective force they had ever known to exist in their province. The doctor, arriving with his sharp, jerky walk, found that the master had retired into his own room with orders not to be disturbed on any account. But Dr. Monagham was not anxious to see Charles Gould at once. He spent some time in a rapid examination of his wounded. He gazed down upon each intern, rubbing his chin between his thumb and forefinger. His steady stare met with out expression their silently inquisitive look. All these cases were doing well. But when he came to the dead Cargador, he stopped a little longer, surveying not the man who had ceased to suffer but the woman kneeling in silent contemplation of the rigid face, with its pinched nostrils and a white gleam in the imperfectly closed eyes. She lifted her head slowly and said in a dull voice, it is not long since he had become a Cargador. Only a few weeks. His worship the Capotas had accepted him after many entreaties. I am not responsible for the great Capotas, muttered the doctor, moving off, directing his course upstairs towards the door of Charles Gould's room. The doctor, at the last moment hesitated, then, turning away from the handle with the shrug of his uneven shoulders, slunk off hastily along the corridor in search of Mrs. Gould's Camerista. Leonardo told him that the senora had not risen yet. The senora had given into her charge the girl's belonging to that Italian posadero. She, Leonardo, had put them to bed in her own room. The fair girl had cried herself to sleep, but the dark one, the bigger, had not closed her eyes yet. She sat up in bed, clutching the sheets right up to her chin and staring before her like a little witch. Leonardo did not approve of the viola children being admitted to the house. She made this feeling clear by the indifferent tone in which she inquired whether their mother was dead yet. As to the senora, she must be asleep. Ever since she had gone into her room after seeing the departure of Donia Antonia with her dying father, there had been no sound behind her door. The doctor, rousing himself out of profound reflection, told her abruptly to call her mistress at once. He hobbled off to wait for Mrs. Gould in the sala. He was very tired, but too excited to sit down. In this great drawing-room now empty in which his withered soul had been refreshed after many arid years, and his outcast spirit had accepted silently the toleration of many sideglances, he wandered haphazard amongst chairs and tables, till Mrs. Gould, enveloped in a morning wrapper, came in rapidly. You know that I never approved of the silver being sent away, the doctor began at once, as a preliminary to the narrative of his night's adventures in association with Captain Mitchell, the engineering chief, and old viola at Sotios headquarters. To the doctor with his special conception of this political crisis, the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill- omened measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The whole lot of ingots might have been concealed somewhere, where they could have been got at for the purpose of staving off the dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould concession. The administrator had acted as if the immense and powerful prosperity of the mine had been founded on the methods of probity, on the sense of usefulness, and it was nothing of the kind. The method followed had been the only one possible. The Gould concession had ransomed its way through all those years. It was a nauseous process. He quite understood that Charles Gould had got sick of it, and had left the old path to back up that hopeless attempt at reform. The doctor did not believe in the reform of Costaguana. And now the mine was back again in its old path, with the disadvantage that henceforth it had to deal not only with the greed provoked by its wealth but with the resentment wakened by the attempt to free itself from its bondage to moral corruption. That was the penalty of failure. What made him uneasy was that Charles Gould seemed to him to have weakened at the decisive moment when a frank return to the old methods was the only chance. Listening to Dekout's wild scheme had been a weakness. The doctor flung up his arms, exclaiming, Dekout! Dekout! He hobbled about the room with slight angry laughs. Many years ago both his ankles had been seriously damaged in the course of a certain investigation conducted in the castle of Santa Marta by a commission composed of military men. Their nomination had been signified to them unexpectedly at the dead of night, with a scowling brow flashing eyes and in a tempestuous voice by Guzman Bento. The old tyrant, maddened by one of his sudden accesses of suspicion, mingled spluttering appeals to their fidelity with imprecations and horrible menaces, the cells and casements of the castle on the hill had been already filled with prisoners. The commission was charged now, with the task of discovering the iniquitous conspiracy against the citizen-savior of his country. Their dread of the raving tyrant translated itself into a hasty ferocity of procedure. The citizen-savior was not accustomed to wait. A conspiracy had to be discovered. The courtyards of the castle resounded with the clanking of leg-ironed sounds of blows, yells of pain, and the commission of high officers labored feverishly, concealing their distress and apprehensions from each other, and especially from their secretary, Father Berron, and Army Chaplain, at that time very much in the confidence of the citizen-savior. That priest was a big round-shouldered man, with an unclean-looking overgrown tonsure on the top of his flat head, of a dingy-yellow complexion softly fat with greasy stains all down the front of his lieutenants' uniform, and a small cross embroidered in white cotton on his left breast. He had a heavy nose and a pendant lip. Dr. Monagham remembered him still. He remembered him against all the force of his will, striving its utmost to forget. Father Berron had been adjoined to the commission by Guzman Bento, expressly for the purpose that his enlightened zeal should assist them in their labours. Dr. Monagham could by no manner of means forget the zeal of Father Berron, or his face, or the pitiless monotonous voice, in which he pronounced the words. Will you confess, now? This memory did not make him shudder, but it had made of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of common decencies something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But not all respectable people would have had the necessary delicacy of sentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and accuracy of vision Dr. Monagham, medical officer of the Santo May Mine, remembered Father Berron, army chaplain, and once a secretary of a military commission. After all these years Dr. Monagham in his rooms, at the end of the hospital building in the Santo May Gorge, remembered Father Berron as distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night sometimes in his sleep. On such nights the doctor waited for daylight with a candle lighted and walking the whole length of his rooms to and fro, staring down at his bare feet, his arms hugging his sides tightly. He would dream of Father Berron, sitting at the end of a long black table behind which in a row appeared the heads, shoulders, and epaulets of the military members nibbling the feather of a quill pen and listening with a weary and impatient scorn to the protestations of some prisoner calling heaven to witness of his innocence till he burst out, what's the use of wasting time over that miserable nonsense? Let me take him outside for a while, and Father Berron would go outside after the clanking prisoner led away between two soldiers. Such interludes happened on many days, many times, with many prisoners. When the prisoner returned he was ready to make a full confession. Father Berron would declare leaning forward with that dull, surfeited look which can be seen in the eyes of gluttonous persons after a heavy meal. The priest's inquisitorial instinct suffered but little from the want of classical apparatus of the inquisition. At no time of the world's history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbor ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice. The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod, a few muskets in combination with a length of hide-rope or even a simple mallet of heavy hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture. The doctor had been a very stubborn prisoner and as a natural consequence of that bad disposition so Father Berron called it. His subjugation had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks were so pronounced. His confessions when they came at last were very complete, too. Sometimes on the nights when he walked the floor he wondered, grinding his teeth with shame and rage at the fertility of his imagination when stimulated by a sort of pain which makes truth, honour, self-respect, and life itself matters of little moment. And he could not forget Father Berron with his monotonous phrase, will you confess, now, reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Berron in the street after all these years, Dr. Monagham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was not to be feared now, Father Berron was dead. But the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monagham from looking anybody in the face. Dr. Monagham had become, in a manner, the slave of a ghost. It was obviously impossible to take his knowledge of Father Berron home to Europe. When making his extorted confessions to the military board, Dr. Monagham was not seeking to avoid death. He longed for it. Sitting half-naked for hours on the wet earth of his prison, and so motionless that the spiders, his companions, attached their webs to his matted hair, he consoled the misery of his soul with acute reasonings that he had confessed to crimes enough for a sentence of death that they had gone too far with him to let him live to tell the tale. But as if by a refinement of cruelty Dr. Monagham was left for months to decay slowly in the darkness of his grave-like prison, it was no doubt hoped that it would finish him off without the trouble of an execution. But Dr. Monagham had an iron constitution. It was Guzman Bento who died, not by the knife thrust of a conspirator, but from a stroke of apoplexy. And Dr. Monagham was liberated hastily. His fatters were struck off by the light of a candle which after months of gloom hurt his eyes so much that he had to cover his face with his hands. He was raised up. His heart was beating violently with the fear of this liberty. When he tried to walk the extraordinary lightness of his feet made him giddy, and he fell down. Two sticks were thrust into his hands and he was pushed out of the passage. It was dusk. Candles glimmered already in the windows of the officer's quarters round the courtyard, but the twilight sky dazed him by its enormous and overwhelming brilliance. A thin poncho hung over his naked bony shoulders. The rags of his trousers came down no lower than his knees. An eighteen months' growth of hair fell in dirty gray locks on each side of his sharp cheekbones. As he dragged himself past the guardroom door, one of the soldiers, lolling outside, moved by some obscure impulse, leaped forward with a strange laugh and rammed a broken old straw hat on his head. And Dr. Monagham, after having tottered, continued on his way. He advanced one stick, then one maimed foot, then the other stick. The other foot followed only a very short distance along the ground, toilfully, as though it were almost too heavy to be moved at all. And yet his legs, under the hanging angles of the poncho, appeared no thicker than the two sticks in his hands. A ceaseless, trembling, agitated, his bent body, all his wasted limbs, his bony head, the conical, ragged crown of the sombrero whose ample flat rim rested on his shoulders. In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr. Monagham go forth to take possession of his liberty, and these conditions seemed to bind him indissolubly to the land of Costa Guana, like an awful procedure of naturalization, involving him deep in the national life, far deeper than any amount of success and honor could have done. They did away with his Europeanism, for Dr. Monagham had made himself an ideal conception of his disgrace. It was a conception eminently fit and proper for an officer and a gentleman. Dr. Monagham, before he went out to Costa Guana, had been a surgeon in one of Her Majesty's regiments of foot. It was a conception which took no account of physiological facts or reasonable arguments. But it was not stupid for all that. It was simple. A rule of conduct resting mainly on severe rejections is necessarily simple. Dr. Monagham's view of what it behoved him to do was severe. It was an ideal view, in so much that it was the imaginative exaggeration of a correct feeling. It was also, in its force, influence and persistency, the view of an eminently loyal nature. There was a great fund of loyalty in Dr. Monagham's nature. He had settled it all on Mrs. Gould's head. He believed her worthy of every devotion. At the bottom of his heart he felt an angry uneasiness before the prosperity of the Santo May Mine because its growth was robbing her of all peace of mind. Costa Guana was no place for a woman of that kind. What could Charles Gould have been thinking of when he brought her out there? It was outrageous. And the doctor had watched the course of events with a grim and distant reserve which he imagined his lamentable history imposed upon him. Loyalty to Mrs. Gould could not, however, leave out of account the safety of her husband. The doctor had contrived to be in town at the critical time because he mistrusted Charles Gould. He considered him hopelessly infected with the madness of revolutions. That is why he hobbled into stress in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould on that morning, exclaiming, de-coud, de-coud, in a tone of mournful irritation. Mrs. Gould, her color heightened and with glistening eyes, looked straight before her at the sudden enormity of that disaster. The fingertips on one hand rested lightly on a low little table by her side and the arm trembled right up to the shoulder. The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all the fullness of its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling snow-edge of Igarota, had precipitated the delicate, smooth, pearly grayness of light in which the town lies steeped during the early hours into sharp-cut masses of black shade and spaces of hot, blinding glare. Three long rectangles of sunshine fell through the windows of the sala, while just across the street, the front of the Avallanos' house, appeared very somber in its own shadow, seen through the flood of light. A voice said at the door, what of de-coud? It was Charles Gould. They had not heard him coming along the corridor. His glance just glided over his wife and struck full at the doctor. He had brought some news, doctor. Dr. Monagham blurted it all out at once, in the rough. For some time after he had done, the administrador of the Santo May Mine remained looking at him without a word. Mrs. Gould sank into a low chair with her hands lying on her lap. A silence reigned between those three motionless persons, then Charles Gould spoke. He must want some breakfast. He still decided to let his wife pass first. She caught up her husband's hand and pressed it as she went out, raising her handkerchief to her eyes. The sight of her husband had brought Antonia's position to her mind, and she could not contain her tears at the thought of the poor girl. When she rejoined the two men in the dining-room after having bathed her face, Charles Gould was saying to the doctor across the table, No, there does not seem to be any room for doubt, and the doctor assented. No, I don't see myself how we could question that wretched hersher's tale. It's only too true, I fear. She sat down desolately at the head of the table and looked from one to the other. The two men, without absolutely turning their heads away, tried to avoid her glance. The doctor even made a show of being hungry. He seized his knife and fork, and began to eat with emphasis as if on the stage. Charles Gould made no pretense of the sort. With his elbows raised squarely, he twisted both ends of his flaming mustaches. They were so long that his hands were quite away from his face. I am not surprised, he muttered, abandoning his mustaches and throwing one arm over the back of the chair. His face was calm with that immobility of expression which betrays the intensity of a mental struggle. He felt that this accident had brought to a point all the consequences involved in his line of conduct, with its conscious and subconscious intentions. There must be an end now of this silent reserve, of that air of impenetrability behind which he had been safeguarding his dignity. It was the least ignoble form of dissembling forced upon him by that parody of civilized institutions which offended his intelligence, his uprightness, and his sense of right. He was like his father. He had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that prevail in this world. They hurt him in his innate gravity. He felt that the miserable death that poor Descoudes took from him is an accessible position of a force in the background. It committed him openly unless he wished to throw up the blame, and that was impossible. The material interests required from him the sacrifice of his aloofness, perhaps his own safety too, and he reflected that Descoudes' separationist plan had not gone to the bottom with the lost silver. The only thing that was not changed was his position towards Mr. Holroyd. The head of silver and steel interests had entered into Costaguana affairs with a sort of passion. Costaguana had become necessary to his existence. In the Santo May Mine he had found the imaginative satisfaction which other mines would get from drama, from art, or from a risky and fascinating sport. It was a special form of the great man's extravagance, sanctioned by a moral intention, big enough to flatter his vanity. Even in this aberration of his genius he served the progress of the world. Charles Gould felt sure of being understood with precision and judged with the indulgence of their common passion. Nothing now could surprise or startle this great man, and Charles Gould imagined himself writing a letter to San Francisco in some such words. The men at the head of the movement are dead or have fled. The civil organization of the province is at an end for the present. The Blanco party in Sulaco has collapsed, inexcusably, but in the characteristic manner of this country. But Barrios, untouched in Qaeda, remains still available. I am forced to take up openly the plan of a provincial revolution as the only way of placing the enormous material interests involved in the prosperity and peace of Sulaco in a position of permanent safety. That was clear. He saw these words as if written in letters of fire upon the wall at which he was gazing abstractedly. Mrs. Gould watched his abstraction with dread. It was a domestic and frightful phenomenon that darkened and chilled the house for her like a thunder-cloud passing over the sun. Charles Gould's fits of abstraction depicted the energetic concentration of a will haunted by a fixed idea. A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous, even if that idea is an idea of justice. For may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head? The eyes of Mrs. Gould, watching her husband's profile filled with tears again, and again she seemed to see the despair of the unfortunate Antonia. What would I have done if Charlie had been drowned while we were engaged? She exclaimed mentally with horror. Her heart turned to ice, while her cheeks flamed up as if scorched by the blaze of a funeral pyre consuming all her earthly affections. The tears burst out of her eyes. Antonia will kill herself! She cried out. This cry fell into the silence of the room with strangely little effect. Only the doctor, crumbling up a piece of bread, with his head inclined on one side, raised his face and the few long hairs sticking out of his shaggy eyebrows stirred in a slight frown. Dr. Monagham thought quite sincerely that Deku was a singularly unworthy object for any woman's affection. Then he lowered his head again with a curl of his lip and his heart full of tender admiration for Mrs. Gould. She thinks of that girl, he said to himself. She thinks of the violet children. She thinks of me, of the wounded, of the miners. She always thinks of everybody who is poor and miserable. On what will she do if Charles gets the worst of it in this infernal scrimmage those confounded avianos have drawn him into? No one seems to be thinking of her. Charles Gould staring at the wall pursued his reflections subtly. I shall write to Holroy that the son to my mind is big enough to take in hand the making of a new state. It'll please him. It'll reconcile him to the risk. But was Bario's really available, perhaps, but he was inaccessible to send off a boat to Qaida was no longer possible since Sotio was master of the harbor and had a steamer at his disposal. And now with all the Democrats in the province up and every Campo township in a state of disturbance, where could he find a man who would make his way successfully overland to Qaida with a message, a ten days' ride at least, a man of courage and resolution who would avoid arrest or murder, and if arrested would faithfully eat the paper? The Capotas de Cargadores would have been just such a man, but the Capotas de Cargadores was no more. And Charles Gould withdrawing his eyes from the wall said gently, What an extraordinary thing! Saved himself by clinging to the anchor, did he? I had no idea that he was still in Sulaco. I thought he had gone back overland to Esmeralda more than a week ago. He came here once to talk to me about his hide business and some other things. I made it clear to him that nothing could be done. He was afraid to start back on account of Hernandez being about remarked the doctor. And but for him we might not have known anything of what has happened, Marvel Charles Gould. Mrs. Gould cried out, Antonia must not know. She must not be told, not now. Nobody's likely to carry the news, remarked the doctor. It's of no one's interest. Moreover, the people here are afraid of Hernandez as if he were the devil. He turned to Charles Gould. It's even awkward, because if he wanted to communicate with the refugees you could find no messenger, when Hernandez was ranging hundreds of miles away from here the Sulaco populace used to shudder that the tales of him roasting his prisoners alive. Yes, murmured Charles Gould. Captain Mitchell's capitas was the only man in town who had seen Hernandez eye to eye. Father Corbillan employed him. He opened the communications first. It is a pity that... His voice was covered by the booming of the great bell of the cathedral. Three single strokes, one after another, burst out explosively, dying away in deep and mellow vibrations. And then all the bells in the tower of every church, event or chapel in town, even those that had remained shut up for years, peeled out together with a crash. In this furious flood of metallic uproar there was a power of suggesting images of strife and violence which blanched Mrs. Gould's cheek. Basilio, who had been waiting at table, shrinking within himself, clung to the sideboard with chattering teeth. It was impossible to hear yourself speak. Shut these windows, Charles Gould yelled at him angrily. All of the other servants terrified what they took for this signal of a general massacre had rushed upstairs tumbling over each other, men and women, the obscure and generally invisible population of the ground floor on the four sides of the patio. The women screaming, Misericordia, ran right into the room and falling on their knees against the walls began to cross themselves convulsively. The staring heads of men blocked the doorway in an instant. Mosos from the sable, gardeners, nondescript helpers living on the crumbs of the munificent house, and Charles Gould beheld all the extent of his domestic establishment even to the gatekeeper. This was a half-paralyzed old man whose long white locks fell down to his shoulders, an heirloom taken up by Charles Gould's familial piety. He could remember Henry Gould, an Englishman and a Costa Guanero of the second generation, chief of the Sulaco province. He had been his personal Mosos years and years ago in peace and war, and had been allowed to attend his master in prison. Had on the fatal morning followed the firing squad and peeping from behind one of the cypresses growing along the wall of the Franciscan convent had seen with his eyes starting out of his head, Don Enrique throw up his hands and fall with his face in the dust. Charles Gould noted particularly the big patriarchal head of that witness in the rear of the other servants, but he was surprised to see a shriveled old hag or two of whose existence within the walls of his house he had not been aware. They must have been the mothers or even the grandmothers of some of his people. There were a few children, too, more or less naked, crying and clinging to the legs of their elders. He had never before noticed any sign of a child in his patio. Even Leonardo, the camerista, came in a fright, pushing through with her spoiled, pouting face of a favorite maid, leading the viola-girls by the hand. The crockery rattled on table and sideboard and the whole house seemed to sway in the deafening wave of sound. End of Chapter 4