第59章

For a long time he talked into her ear from behind, softly, with a half smile and an air of apologetic familiarity. Her fan lay half grasped on her knees. She never looked at him. His rapid utterance grew more and more insistent and caressing. At last he ventured a slight laugh.

`No, really. You must forgive me. One must be serious sometimes.' He paused. She turned her head a little; her blue eyes glided slowly towards him, slightly upwards, mollified and questioning.

`You can't think I am serious when I call Montero a gran' bestia every second day in the Porvenir ? That is not a serious occupation.

No occupation is serious, not even when a bullet through the heart is the penalty of failure!'

Her hand closely firmly on her fan.

`Some reason, you understand, I mean some sense, may creep into thinking;some glimpse of truth. I mean some effective truth, for which there is no room in politics or journalism. I happen to have said what I thought.

And you are angry! If you do me the kindness to think a little you will see that I spoke like a patriot.'

She opened her red lips for the first time, not unkindly.

`Yes, but you never see the aim. Men must be used as they are. I suppose nobody is really disinterested, unless, perhaps, you, Don Martin.'

`God forbid! It's the last thing I should like you to believe of me.'

He spoke lightly, and paused.

She began to fan herself with a slow movement without raising her hand.

After a time he whispered passionately:

`Antonia!'

She smiled, and extended her hand after the English manner towards Charles Gould, who was bowing before her; while Decoud, with his elbows spread on the back of the sofa, dropped his eyes and murmured, ` Bonjour .'

The Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine bent over his wife for a moment. They exchanged a few words, of which only the phrase, `The greatest enthusiasm,' pronounced by Mrs Gould, could be heard.

`Yes,' Decoud began in a murmur. `Even he!'

`This is sheer calumny,' said Antonia, not very severely.

`You just ask him to throw his mine into the melting-pot for the great cause,' Decoud whispered.

Don Jose had raised his voice. He rubbed his hands cheerily. The excellent aspect of the troops and the great quantity of new deadly rifles on the shoulders of those brave men seemed to fill him with an ecstatic confidence.

Charles Gould, very tall and thin before his chair, listened, but nothing could be discovered in his face except a kind and deferential attention.

Meantime, Antonia had risen, and, crossing the room, stood looking out of one of the three long windows giving on the street. Decoud followed her. The window was thrown open, and he leaned against the thickness of the wall. The long folds of the damask curtain, falling straight from the broad brass cornice, hid him partly from the room. He folded his arms on his breast, and looked steadily at Antonia's profile.

The people returning from the harbour filled the pavements; the shuffle of sandals and a low murmur of voices ascended to the window. Now and then a coach rolled slowly along the disjointed roadway of the Calle de la Constitucion.

There were not many private carriages in Sulaco; at the most crowded hour on the Alameda they could be counted with one glance of the eye. The great family arks swayed on high leathern springs, full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black. And first Don Juste Lopez, the President of the Provincial Assembly, passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a black frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a debate from a high tribune. Though they all raised their eyes, Antonia did not make the usual greeting gesture of a fluttered hand, and they affected not to see the two young people, Costaguaneros with European manners, whose eccentricities were discussed behind the barred windows of the first families in Sulaco. And then the widowed Senora Gavilaso de Valdes rolled by, handsome and dignified, in a great machine in which she used to travel to and from her country house, surrounded by an armed retinue in leather suits and big sombreros, with carbines at the bows of their saddles. She was a woman of most distinguished family, proud, rich, and kind-hearted. Her second son, Jaime, had just gone off on the Staff of Barrios. The eldest, a worthless fellow of a moody disposition, filled Sulaco with the noise of his dissipations, and gambled heavily at the club.

The two youngest boys, with yellow Ribierist cockades in their caps, sat on the front seat. She, too, affected not to see the Senor Decoud talking publicly with Antonia in defiance of every convention. And he not even her novio as far as the world knew! Though, even in that case, it would have been scandal enough. But the dignified old lady, respected and admired by the first families, would have been still more shocked if she could have heard the words they were exchanging.

`Did you say I lost sight of the aim? I have only one aim in the world.'

She made an almost imperceptible negative movement of her head, still staring across the street at the Avellanos's house, grey, marked with decay, and with iron bars like a prison.

`And it would be so easy of attainment,' he continued, `this aim which, whether knowingly or not, I have always had in my heart--ever since the day when you snubbed me so horribly once in Paris, you remember.'

A slight smile seemed to move the corner of the lip that was on his side.

`You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of Charlotte Corday in a schoolgirl's dress; a ferocious patriot. I suppose you would have stuck a knife into Guzman Bento?'

She interrupted him. `You do me too much honour.'

`At any rate,' he said, changing suddenly to a tone of bitter levity, `you would have sent me to stab him without compunction.'

`Ah, par example !' she murmured in a shocked tone.

`Well,' he argued, mockingly, `you do keep me here writing deadly nonsense.

Deadly to me! It has already killed my self-respect. And you may imagine,'