nestling within the points of his collar, he devoured her stealthily with his eyes, which, luckily, were round and hard like clouded marbles, and incapable of disclosing his sentiments. His pitying emotion at the marks of time upon the face of that woman, the air of frailty and weary fatigue that had settled upon the eyes and temples of the 'Never- tired Senora' (as Don Pepe years ago used to call her with admiration), touched him almost to tears. 'Don't go yet. To-day is all my own,' Mrs. Gould urged, gently. 'We are not back yet officially. No one will come. It's only to- morrow that the windows of the Casa Gould are to be lit up for a reception.'
The doctor dropped into a chair.
'Giving a tertulia?' he said, with a detached air.
'A simple greeting for all the kind friends who care to come.'
'And only to-morrow?'
'Yes. Charles would be tired out after a day at the mine, and so I——It would be good to have him to myself for one evening on our return to this house I love. It has seen all my life.'
'Ah, yes!' snarled the doctor, suddenly. 'Women count time from the marriage feast. Didn't you live a little before?'
'Yes; but what is there to remember? There were no cares.'
Mrs. Gould sighed. And as two friends, after a long separation, will revert to the most agitated period of their lives, they began to talk of the Sulaco Revolution. It seemed strange to Mrs. Gould that people who had taken part in it seemed to forget its memory and its lesson.
'And yet,' struck in the doctor, 'we who played our part in it had our reward. Don Pepe, though superannuated, still can sit a horse. Barrios is drinking himself to death in jovial company away somewhere on his fundacion beyond the Bolson de Tonoro. And the heroic Father Roman—I imagine the old padre blowing up systematically the San Tome mine, uttering a pious exclamation at every bang, and taking handfuls of snuff between the explosions—the heroic Padre Roman says that he is not afraid of the harm Holroyd's missionaries can do to his flock, as long as he is alive.'
Mrs. Gould shuddered a little at the allusion to the destruction that had come so near to the San Tome mine.
'Ah, but you, dear friend?'
'I did the work I was fit for.'
'You faced the most cruel dangers of all. Something more than death.'
'No, Mrs. Gould! Only death—by hanging. And I am rewarded beyond my deserts.'
Noticing Mrs. Gould's gaze fixed upon him, he dropped his eyes.
'I've made my career—as you see,' said the Inspector-General of State Hospitals, taking up lightly the lapels of his superfine black coat. The doctor's self-respect marked inwardly by the almost complete disappearance from his dreams of Father Beron appeared visibly in what, by contrast with former carelessness, seemed an immoderate cult of personal appearance. Carried out within severe limits of form and colour, and in perpetual freshness, this change of apparel gave to Dr. Monygham an air at the same time professional and festive; while his gait and the unchanged crabbed character of his face acquired from it a startling force of incongruity.
'Yes,' he went on. 'We all had our rewards—the engineer-in-chief, Captain Mitchell——'
'We saw him,' interrupted Mrs. Gould, in her charming voice. 'The poor dear man came up from the country on purpose to call on us in our hotel in London. He comported himself with great dignity, but I fancy he regrets Sulaco. He rambled feebly about 'historical events' till I felt I could have a cry.'
'H'm,' grunted the doctor; 'getting old, I suppose. Even Nostromo is getting older—though he is not changed. And, speaking of that fellow, I wanted to tell you something——'
For some time the house had been full of murmurs, of agitation. Suddenly the two gardeners, busy with rose trees at the side of the garden arch, fell upon their knees with bowed heads on the passage of Antonia Avellanos, who appeared walking beside her uncle.
Invested with the red hat after a short visit to Rome, where he had been invited by the Propaganda, Father Corbelan, missionary to the wild Indians, conspirator, friend and patron of Hernandez the robber, advanced with big, slow strides, gaunt and leaning forward, with his powerful hands clasped behind his back. The first Cardinal- Archbishop of Sulaco had preserved his fanatical and morose air; the aspect of a chaplain of bandits. It was believed that his unexpected elevation to the purple was a counter-move to the Protestant invasion of Sulaco organized by the Holroyd Missionary Fund. Antonia, the beauty of her face as if a little blurred, her figure slightly fuller, advanced with her light walk and her high serenity, smiling from a distance at Mrs. Gould. She had brought her uncle over to see dear Emilia, without ceremony, just for a moment before the siesta.
When all were seated again, Dr. Monygham, who had come to dislike heartily everybody who approached Mrs. Gould with any intimacy, kept aside, pretending to be lost in profound meditation. A louder phrase of Antonia made him lift his head.
'How can we abandon, groaning under oppression, those who have been our countrymen only a few years ago, who are our countrymen now?' Miss Avellanos was saying. 'How can we remain blind, and deaf without pity to the cruel wrongs suffered by our brothers? There is a remedy.'
'Annex the rest of Costaguana to the order and prosperity of Sulaco,' snapped the doctor. 'There is no other remedy.'
'I am convinced, senor doctor,' Antonia said, with the earnest calm of invincible resolution, 'that this was from the first poor Martin's intention.'
'Yes, but the material interests will not let you jeopardize their development for a mere idea of pity and justice,' the doctor muttered grumpily. 'And it is just as well perhaps.'
The Cardinal-Archbishop straightened up his gaunt, bony frame.
'We have worked for them; we have made them, these material interests of the foreigners,' the last of the Corbelans uttered in a deep, denunciatory tone.
'And without them you are nothing,' cried the doctor from the distance. 'They will not let you.'
