He confronted his wife with a firm, concentrated gaze, which Mrs. Gould returned with a brave assumption of fearlessness before she went out, closing the door gently after her.
In contrast with the white glaring room the dimly lit corredor had a restful mysteriousness of a forest glade, suggested by the stems and the leaves of the plants ranged along the balustrade of the open side. In the streaks of light falling through the open doors of the reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and pale lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the vividness of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that chequer the gloom of open glades in the woods. The stones in the rings upon her hand pressed to her forehead glittered in the lamplight abreast of the door of the sala.
'Who's there?' she asked, in a startled voice. 'Is that you, Basilio?' She looked in, and saw Martin Decoud walking about, with an air of having lost something, amongst the chairs and tables.
'Antonia has forgotten her fan in here,' said Decoud, with a strange air of distraction; 'so I entered to see.'
But, even as he said this, he had obviously given up his search, and walked straight towards Mrs. Gould, who looked at him with doubtful surprise.
'Senora,' he began, in a low voice.
'What is it, Don Martin?' asked Mrs. Gould. And then she added, with a slight laugh, 'I am so nervous to-day,' as if to explain the eagerness of the question.
'Nothing immediately dangerous,' said Decoud, who now could not conceal his agitation. 'Pray don't distress yourself. No, really, you must not distress yourself.'
Mrs. Gould, with her candid eyes very wide open, her lips composed into a smile, was steadying herself with a little bejewelled hand against the side of the door.
'Perhaps you don't know how alarming you are, appearing like this unexpectedly—'
'I! Alarming!' he protested, sincerely vexed and surprised. 'I assure you that I am not in the least alarmed myself. A fan is lost; well, it will be found again. But I don't think it is here. It is a fan I am looking for. I cannot understand how Antonia could—Well! Have you found it, amigo?'
'No, senor,' said behind Mrs. Gould the soft voice of Basilio, the head servant of the Casa. 'I don't think the senorita could have left it in this house at all.'
'Go and look for it in the patio again. Go now, my friend; look for it on the steps, under the gate; examine every flagstone; search for it till I come down again. . . . That fellow'—he addressed himself in English to Mrs. Gould—'is always stealing up behind one's back on his bare feet. I set him to look for that fan directly I came in to justify my reappearance, my sudden return.'
He paused and Mrs. Gould said, amiably, 'You are always welcome.' She paused for a second, too. 'But I am waiting to learn the cause of your return.'
Decoud affected suddenly the utmost nonchalance.
'I can't bear to be spied upon. Oh, the cause? Yes, there is a cause; there is something else that is lost besides Antonia's favourite fan. As I was walking home after seeing Don Jose and Antonia to their house, the Capataz de Cargadores, riding down the street, spoke to me.'
'Has anything happened to the Violas?' inquired Mrs. Gould.
'The Violas? You mean the old Garibaldino who keeps the hotel where the engineers live? Nothing happened there. The Capataz said nothing of them; he only told me that the telegraphist of the Cable Company was walking on the Plaza, bareheaded, looking out for me. There is news from the interior, Mrs. Gould. I should rather say rumours of news.'
'Good news?' said Mrs. Gould in a low voice.
'Worthless, I should think. But if I must define them, I would say bad. They are to the effect that a two days' battle had been fought near Sta. Marta, and that the Ribierists are defeated. It must have happened a few days ago—perhaps a week. The rumour has just reached Cayta, and the man in charge of the cable station there has telegraphed the news to his colleague here. We might just as well have kept Barrios in Sulaco.'
'What's to be done now?' murmured Mrs. Gould.
'Nothing. He's at sea with the troops. He will get to Cayta in a couple of days' time and learn the news there. What he will do then, who can say? Hold Cayta? Offer his submission to Montero? Disband his army—this last most likely, and go himself in one of the O.S.N. Company's steamers, north or south—to Valparaiso or to San Francisco, no matter where. Our Barrios has a great practice in exiles and repatriations, which mark the points in the political game.'
Decoud, exchanging a steady stare with Mrs. Gould, added, tentatively, as it were, 'And yet, if we had could have been done.'
'Montero victorious, completely victorious!' Mrs. Gould breathed out in a tone of unbelief.
'A canard, probably. That sort of bird is hatched in great numbers in such times as these. And even if it were true? Well, let us put things at their worst, let us say it is true.'
'Then everything is lost,' said Mrs. Gould, with the calmness of despair.
Suddenly she seemed to divine, she seemed to see Decoud's tremendous excitement under its cloak of studied carelessness. It was, indeed, becoming visible in his audacious and watchful stare, in the curve, half-reckless, half- contemptuous, of his lips. And a French phrase came upon them as if, for this Costaguanero of the Boulevard, that had been the only forcible language—
'
It electrified Mrs. Gould out of her benumbed attitude, and she said, vivaciously—
'What would you think of doing?'
But already there was something of mockery in Decoud's suppressed excitement.
