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 colourless 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 country people disposing their goods
for the day's market, piles of fruit, bundles of vegetables
ornamented with flowers, on low benches under enormous
mat umbrellas; with no cheery early morning
bustle of villagers, women, children, and loaded 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 Rincon.
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. Monygham'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.

    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 Decoud, Charles Gould could not play
lightly a part 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 Decoud, the imaginative materialist,
was able to do in the dry light of his scepticism.
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 Concession had insidiously corrupted his judgment.
He might have known, he said to himself, leaning
over the balustrade of the corredor, that Ribierism
could never come to anything. The mine had corrupted
his judgment by making him sick of bribing and

    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
in 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
upbringing, he perceived that he was an adventurer in
Costaguana, 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 count of personal risk in the
ethical appraising of his action. He was prepared, if
need be, to blow up the whole San Tomé 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

    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,
enter the patio from the street. One of them, head and
shoulders taller than the two others, advanced with
marked gravity, leading the way. This was Don Juste
Lopez, accompanied by two of his friends, members of
Assembly, coming to call upon the Administrador of the
San Tomé mine at this early hour. They saw him, too,
waved their hands to him urgently, walking up the
stairs as if in procession.

    Don Juste, 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 pre-occupation 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 Juste, standing a little in advance,
harangued the Señor Administrador of the San
Tomé mine. It was his firm opinion that forms had to
be observed. A new governor is always visited by

    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 San Tomé
mine a party to any formal proceedings.

    "My advice, señores, 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 hands.
Submission to the inevitable, as Don Juste 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
in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction -- that,
señores, 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

    "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 bows. His
taciturnity was his refuge. He understood that what
they sought was to get the influence of the San Tomé
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, too, presently, seeking the
support of 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.
Monygham 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 in turn,
rubbing his chin between his thumb and forefinger; his
steady stare met without 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 Capataz had accepted
him after many entreaties."

    "I am not responsible for the great Capataz," 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 a
shrug of his uneven shoulders, slunk off hastily along the
corredor in search of Mrs. Gould's camerista.

    Leonardo told him that the señora had not risen yet.
The señora had given into her charge the girls belonging
to that Italian posadero. She, Leonarda, 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 under her chin and staring before her like a
little witch. Leonarda 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
señora, she must be asleep. Ever since she had gone
into her room after seeing the departure of Doña
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
side-glances, he wandered haphazard amongst the
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

    The doctor flung up his arms, exclaiming, "Decoud!
Decoud!" 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 Sta. Marta by a

    Their dread of the raving tyrant translated itself into
a hasty ferocity of procedure. The Citizen-Saviour was
not accustomed to wait. A conspiracy had to be discovered.
The courtyards of the castle resounded with
the clanking of leg-irons, sounds of blows, yells of pain;
and the commission of high officers laboured feverishly,
concealing their distress and apprehensions from each
other, and especially from their secretary, Father Beron,
an army chaplain, at that time very much in the confidence
of the Citizen-Saviour. 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 lieutenant's uniform, and a small
cross embroidered in white cotton on his left breast. He
had a heavy nose and a pendant lip. Dr. Monygham
remembered him still. He remembered him against all
the force of his will striving its utmost to forget. Father
Beron had been adjoined to the commission by Guzman
Bento expressly for the purpose that his enlightened zeal
should assist them in their labours. Dr. Monygham could
by no manner of means forget the zeal of Father Beron,
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. Monygham,
medical officer of the San Tomé mine, remembered
Father Beron, army chaplain, and once a secretary of
a military commission. After all these years Dr.
Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the hospital
building in the San Tomé gorge, remembered Father
Beron 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 Beron
sitting at the end of a long black table, behind which,
in a row, appeared the heads, shoulders, and epaulettes
of the military members, nibbling the feather of a quill
pen, and listening with 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 Beron
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 Beron 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 instincts suffered but little
from the want of classical apparatus of the Inquisition

    And he could not forget Father Beron 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 Beron in the street after all these years Dr.
Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him.
This contingency was not to be feared now. Father

    Dr. Monygham. had become, in a manner, the slave of
a ghost. It was obviously impossible to take his knowledge
of Father Beron home to Europe. When making
his extorted confessions to the Military Board, Dr.
Monygham 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. Monygham
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. Monygham 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.
Monygham was liberated hastily. His fetters 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 officers' 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'

    In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr.
Monygham go forth to take possession of his liberty.
And these conditions seemed to bind him indissolubly
to the land of Costaguana like an awful procedure of
naturalization, involving him deep in the national life,
far deeper than any amount of success and honour could
have done. They did away with his Europeanism; for
Dr. Monygham had made himself an ideal conception of
his disgrace. It was a conception eminently fit and
proper for an officer and a gentleman. Dr. Monygham,
before he went out to Costaguana, had been 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. Monygham'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

    There was a great fund of loyalty in Dr. Monygham'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 San Tomé mine, because its growth was
robbing her of all peace of mind. Costaguana 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 in distress in the drawing-room of the
Casa Gould on that morning, exclaiming, "Decoud,
Decoud!" in a tone of mournful irritation.

    Mrs. Gould, her colour heightened, and with glistening
eyes, looked straight before her at the sudden
enormity of that disaster. The finger-tips 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 fulness of
its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling
snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate,
smooth, pearly greyness 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

    A voice said at the door, "What of Decoud?"

    It was Charles Gould. They had not heard him
coming along the corredor. His glance just glided over
his wife and struck full at the doctor.

    "You have brought some news, doctor?"

    Dr. Monygham blurted it all out at once, in the rough.
For some time after he had done, the Administrador of
the San Tomé 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 --

    "You must want some breakfast."

    He stood aside 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 any room for doubt."

    And the doctor assented.

    "No, I don't see myself how we could question that
wretched Hirsch'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
pretence of the sort; with his elbows raised squarely, he
twisted both ends of his flaming moustaches -- they were
so long that his hands were quite away from his face.

    "I am not surprised," he muttered, abandoning
his moustaches and throwing one arm over the back
of his 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 safe-
guarding 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 of
that poor Decoud took from him his inaccessible position
of a force in the background. It committed him openly
unless he wished to throw up the game -- and that was
impossible. The material interests required from him
the sacrifice of his aloofness -- perhaps his own safety
too. And he reflected that Decoud's 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 San Tomé mine he had found the
imaginative satisfaction which other minds 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

    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 Charley 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.
Monygham thought quite sincerely that Decoud 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 Viola children; she thinks of me; of the
wounded; of the miners; she always thinks of everybody
who is poor and miserable! But what will she do if
Charles gets the worst of it in this infernal scrimmage
those confounded Avellanos 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 Holroyd that the San Tomé mine 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 Barrios really available? Perhaps. But he
was inaccessible. To send off a boat to Cayta was no
longer possible, since Sotillo was master of the harbour,
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
Cayta 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 Capataz de Cargadores would have been just such
a man. But the Capataz of the Cargadores was no
more.

    And Charles Gould, withdrawing his eyes from the

    "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," marvelled 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 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 you 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 at the tales of him
roasting his prisoners alive."

    "Yes," murmured Charles Gould; "Captain Mitchell's
Capataz was the only man in the town who had
seen Hernandez eye to eye. Father Corbelàn 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, convent, or chapel in town, even those
that had remained shut up for years, pealed out together
with a crash. In this furious flood of metallic

    "Shut these windows!" Charles Gould yelled at him,
angrily. All the other servants, terrified at what they
took for the 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 -- mozos from the stable,
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 Costaguanero
of the second generation, chief of the Sulaco
province; he had been his personal mozo years and
years ago in peace and war; 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 shrivelled
old hag or two, of whose existence within the walls of his
house he had not been aware. They must have been the