________________________________________________
_ "MRS. GOULD was too intelligently sympathetic not to share that
feeling. It made life exciting, and she was too much of a woman
not to like excitement. But it frightened her, too, a little; and
when Don Jose Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go
so far as to say, "Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed; even
if some untoward event were yet to destroy your work--which God
forbid!--you would have deserved well of your country," Mrs.
Gould would look up from the tea-table profoundly at her unmoved
husband stirring the spoon in the cup as though he had not heard
a word.
Not that Don Jose anticipated anything of the sort. He could not
praise enough dear Carlos's tact and courage. His English,
rock-like quality of character was his best safeguard, Don Jose
affirmed; and, turning to Mrs. Gould, "As to you, Emilia, my
soul"--he would address her with the familiarity of his age and
old friendship--"you are as true a patriot as though you had been
born in our midst."
This might have been less or more than the truth. Mrs. Gould,
accompanying her husband all over the province in the search for
labour, had seen the land with a deeper glance than a trueborn
Costaguanera could have done. In her travel-worn riding habit,
her face powdered white like a plaster cast, with a further
protection of a small silk mask during the heat of the day, she
rode on a well-shaped, light-footed pony in the centre of a
little cavalcade. Two mozos de campo, picturesque in great hats,
with spurred bare heels, in white embroidered calzoneras, leather
jackets and striped ponchos, rode ahead with carbines across
their shoulders, swaying in unison to the pace of the horses. A
tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of a thin
brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very near the tail,
legs thrust far forward, the wide brim of his hat set far back,
making a sort of halo for his head. An old Costaguana officer, a
retired senior major of humble origin, but patronized by the
first families on account of his Blanco opinions, had been
recommended by Don Jose for commissary and organizer of that
expedition. The points of his grey moustache hung far below his
chin, and, riding on Mrs. Gould's left hand, he looked about with
kindly eyes, pointing out the features of the country, telling
the names of the little pueblos and of the estates, of the
smooth-walled haciendas like long fortresses crowning the knolls
above the level of the Sulaco Valley. It unrolled itself, with
green young crops, plains, woodland, and gleams of water,
park-like, from the blue vapour of the distant sierra to an
immense quivering horizon of grass and sky, where big white
clouds seemed to fall slowly into the darkness of their own
shadows.
Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen, small on a
boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity itself. The mounted
figures of vaqueros galloped in the distance, and the great herds
fed with all their horned heads one way, in one single wavering
line as far as eye could reach across the broad potreros. A
spreading cotton-wool tree shaded a thatched ranche by the road;
the trudging files of burdened Indians taking off their hats,
would lift sad, mute eyes to the cavalcade raising the dust of
the crumbling camino real made by the hands of their enslaved
forefathers. And Mrs. Gould, with each day's journey, seemed to
come nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure
of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer of the
coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain and people,
suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic
immobility of patience.
She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with a sort of
slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting long, blind
walls and heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures. She was given
the head of the tables, where masters and dependants sat in a
simple and patriarchal state. The ladies of the house would talk
softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the courtyards,
impressing upon her the sweetness of their voices and the
something mysterious in the quietude of their lives. In the
morning the gentlemen, well mounted in braided sombreros and
embroidered riding suits, with much silver on the trappings of
their horses, would ride forth to escort the departing guests
before committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of God
at the boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households
she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives,
ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil
wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though
the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between
bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and
uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found
a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its
nightmarish parody of administration without law, without
security, and without justice.
She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that
power of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there
in some quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of
possession by a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old
Costaguana major--after much display of solicitude for the
delicate lady, had ended by conferring upon her the name of the
"Never-tired Senora." Mrs. Gould was indeed becoming a
Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a knowledge of
true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth of the
people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures
upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white
clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered
the villages by some group of Indian women at the fountain
impressed upon her memory, by the face of some young Indian girl
with a melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware
vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden
porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid wooden wheels of
an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed the
strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall,
slept stretched in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the
conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the
tribute-labour of vanished nations. The power of king and church
was gone, but at the sight of some heavy ruinous pile overtopping
from a knoll the low mud walls of a village, Don Pepe would
interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--
"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres,
nothing for the people; and now it is everything for those great
politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes and thieves."
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the
principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the
estates. The commandantes of the districts offered him
escorts--for he could show an authorization from the Sulaco
political chief of the day. How much the document had cost him
in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between himself, a
great man in the United States (who condescended to answer the
Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort,
with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the
Palace of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on
his culture and Europeanism generally in a rather French style
because he had lived in Europe for some years--in exile, he said.
However, it was pretty well known that just before this exile he
had incautiously gambled away all the cash in the Custom House of
a small port where a friend in power had procured for him the
post of subcollector. That youthful indiscretion had, amongst
other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living for a time
as a cafe waiter in Madrid; but his talents must have been great,
after all, since they had enabled him to retrieve his political
fortunes so splendidly. Charles Gould, exposing his business
with an imperturbable steadiness, called him Excellency.
The provincial Excellency assumed a weary superiority, tilting
his chair far back near an open window in the true Costaguana
manner. The military band happened to be braying operatic
selections on the plaza just then, and twice he raised his hand
imperatively for silence in order to listen to a favourite
passage.
"Exquisite, delicious!" he murmured; while Charles Gould waited,
standing by with inscrutable patience. "Lucia, Lucia di
Lammermoor! I am passionate for music. It transports me. Ha! the
divine--ha!--Mozart. Si! divine . . . What is it you were
saying?"
Of course, rumours had reached him already of the newcomer's
intentions. Besides, he had received an official warning from
Sta. Marta. His manner was intended simply to conceal his
curiosity and impress his visitor. But after he had locked up
something valuable in the drawer of a large writing-desk in a
distant part of the room, he became very affable, and walked back
to his chair smartly.
"If you intend to build villages and assemble a population near
the mine, you shall require a decree of the Minister of the
Interior for that," he suggested in a business-like manner.
"I have already sent a memorial," said Charles Gould, steadily,
"and I reckon now confidently upon your Excellency's favourable
conclusions."
The Excellency was a man of many moods. With the receipt of the
money a great mellowness had descended upon his simple soul.
Unexpectedly he fetched a deep sigh.
"Ah, Don Carlos! What we want is advanced men like you in the
province. The lethargy--the lethargy of these aristocrats! The
want of public spirit! The absence of all enterprise! I, with my
profound studies in Europe, you understand--"
With one hand thrust into his swelling bosom, he rose and fell on
his toes, and for ten minutes, almost without drawing breath,
went on hurling himself intellectually to the assault of Charles
Gould's polite silence; and when, stopping abruptly, he fell back
into his chair, it was as though he had been beaten off from a
fortress. To save his dignity he hastened to dismiss this silent
man with a solemn inclination of the head and the words,
pronounced with moody, fatigued condescension--
"You may depend upon my enlightened goodwill as long as your
conduct as a good citizen deserves it."
He took up a paper fan and began to cool himself with a
consequential air, while Charles Gould bowed and withdrew. Then
he dropped the fan at once, and stared with an appearance of
wonder and perplexity at the closed door for quite a long time.
At last he shrugged his shoulders as if to assure himself of his
disdain. Cold, dull. No intellectuality. Red hair. A true
Englishman. He despised him.
His face darkened. What meant this unimpressed and frigid
behaviour? He was the first of the successive politicians sent
out from the capital to rule the Occidental Province whom the
manner of Charles Gould in official intercourse was to strike as
offensively independent.
Charles Gould assumed that if the appearance of listening to
deplorable balderdash must form part of the price he had to pay
for being left unmolested, the obligation of uttering balderdash
personally was by no means included in the bargain. He drew the
line there. To these provincial autocrats, before whom the
peaceable population of all classes had been accustomed to
tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer caused an
uneasiness which swung to and fro between cringing and
truculence. Gradually all of them discovered that, no matter what
party was in power, that man remained in most effective touch
with the higher authorities in Sta. Marta.
This was a fact, and it accounted perfectly for the Goulds being
by no means so wealthy as the engineer-in-chief on the new
railway could legitimately suppose. Following the advice of Don
Jose Avellanos, who was a man of good counsel (though rendered
timid by his horrible experiences of Guzman Bento's time),
Charles Gould had kept clear of the capital; but in the current
gossip of the foreign residents there he was known (with a good
deal of seriousness underlying the irony) by the nickname of
"King of Sulaco." An advocate of the Costaguana Bar, a man of
reputed ability and good character, member of the distinguished
Moraga family possessing extensive estates in the Sulaco Valley,
was pointed out to strangers, with a shade of mystery and
respect, as the agent of the San Tome mine--"political, you
know." He was tall, black-whiskered, and discreet. It was known
that he had easy access to ministers, and that the numerous
Costaguana generals were always anxious to dine at his house.
Presidents granted him audience with facility. He corresponded
actively with his maternal uncle, Don Jose Avellanos; but his
letters--unless those expressing formally his dutiful
affection--were seldom entrusted to the Costaguana Post Office.
There the envelopes are opened, indiscriminately, with the
frankness of a brazen and childish impudence characteristic of
some Spanish-American Governments. But it must be noted that at
about the time of the re-opening of the San Tome mine the
muleteer who had been employed by Charles Gould in his
preliminary travels on the Campo added his small train of animals
to the thin stream of traffic carried over the mountain passes
between the Sta. Marta upland and the Valley of Sulaco. There are
no travellers by that arduous and unsafe route unless under very
exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland trade did not
visibly require additional transport facilities; but the man
seemed to find his account in it. A few packages were always
found for him whenever he took the road. Very brown and wooden,
in goatskin breeches with the hair outside, he sat near the tail
of his own smart mule, his great hat turned against the sun, an
expression of blissful vacancy on his long face, humming day
after day a love-song in a plaintive key, or, without a change of
expression, letting out a yell at his small tropilla in front. A
round little guitar hung high up on his back; and there was a
place scooped out artistically in the wood of one of his
pack-saddles where a tightly rolled piece of paper could be
slipped in, the wooden plug replaced, and the coarse canvas
nailed on again. When in Sulaco it was his practice to smoke and
doze all day long (as though he had no care in the world) on a
stone bench outside the doorway of the Casa Gould and facing the
windows of the Avellanos house. Years and years ago his mother
had been chief laundry-woman in that family--very accomplished in
the matter of clear-starching. He himself had been born on one of
their haciendas. His name was Bonifacio, and Don Jose, crossing
the street about five o'clock to call on Dona Emilia, always
acknowledged his humble salute by some movement of hand or head.
The porters of both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of
grave intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and to calls
in a spirit of generous festivity upon the peyne d'oro girls in
the more remote side-streets of the town. But he, too, was a
discreet man. _
Read next: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER VIII
Read previous: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER VI
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