第175章

Linda Viola stood up suddenly with a finger on her lip. He loved neither her nor her sister. The whole thing seemed so objectless as to frighten her, and also give her some hope. Why did he not carry her off? What prevented him? He was incomprehensible. What were they waiting for? For what end were these two lying and deceiving? Not for the ends of their love. There was no such thing. The hope of regaining him for herself made her break her vow of not leaving the tower that night. She must talk at once to her father, who was wise, and would understand. She ran down the spiral stairs.

At the moment of opening the door at the bottom she heard the sound of the first shot ever fired on the Great Isabel.

She felt a shock, as though the bullet had struck her breast. She ran on without pausing. The cottage was dark. She cried at the door, `Giselle!

Giselle!' then dashed round the corner and screamed her sister's name at the open window, without getting an answer; but as she was rushing, distracted, round the house, Giselle came out of the door, and darted past her, running silently, her hair loose, and her eyes staring straight ahead. She seemed to skim along the grass as if on tiptoe, and vanished.

Linda walked on slowly, with her arms stretched out before her. All was still on the island; she did not know where she was going. The tree under which Martin Decoud spent his last days, beholding life like a succession of senseless images, threw a large blotch of black shade upon the grass.

Suddenly she saw her father, standing quietly all alone in the moonlight.

The Garibaldino -- big, erect, with his snow-white hair and beard --had a monumental repose in his immobility, leaning upon a rifle. She put her hand upon his arm lightly. He never stirred.

`What have you done?' she asked, in her ordinary voice.

`I have shot Ramirez -- infame !' he answered, with his eyes directed to where the shade was blackest. `Like a thief he came, and like a thief he fell. The child had to be protected.'

He did not offer to move an inch, to advance a single step. He stood there, rugged and unstirring, like a statue of an old man guarding the honour of his house. Linda removed her trembling hand from his arm, firm and steady like an arm of stone, and, without a word, entered the blackness of the shade. She saw a stir of formless shapes on the ground, and stopped short. A murmur of despair and tears grew louder to her strained hearing.

`I entreated you not to come tonight. Oh, my Giovanni! And you promised.

Oh! Why -- why did you come, Giovanni?'

It was her sister's voice. It broke on a heartrending sob. And the voice of the resourceful Capataz de Cargadores, master and slave of the San Tome treasure, who had been caught unawares by old Giorgio while stealing acorss the open towards the ravine to get some more silver, answered careless and cool, but sounding startlingly weak from the ground.

`It seemed as though I could not live through the night without seeing thee once more -- my star, my little flower.'

The brilliant tertulia was just over, the last guests had departed, and the Senor Administrador had gone to his room already, when Dr Monygham, who had been expected in the evening but had not turned up, arrived driving along the wood-block pavement under the electric-lamps of the deserted Calle de la Constitucion, and found the great gateway of the casa still open.

He limped in, stumped up the stairs, and found the fat and sleek Basilio on the point of turning off the lights in the sala . The prosperous majordomo remained open-mouthed at this late invasion.

`Don't put out the lights,' commanded the doctor. `I want to see the senora .'

`The senora is in the Senor Administrador's cancillaria ,'

said Basilio, in an unctuous voice. `The Senor Administrador starts for the mountain in an hour. There is some trouble with the workmen to be feared, it appears. A shameless people without reason and decency. And idle, senor .

Idle.'

`You are shamelessly lazy and imbecile yourself,' said the doctor, with that faculty for exasperation which made him so generally beloved. `Don't put the lights out.'

Basilio retired with dignity. Dr Monygham, waiting in the brilliantly lighted sala , heard presently a door close at the farther end of the house. A jingle of spurs died out. The Senor Administrador was off to the mountain.

With a measured swish of her long train, flashing with jewels and the shimmer of silk, her delicate head bowed as if under the weight of a mass of fair hair, in which the silver threads were lost, the `first lady of Sulaco', as Captain Mitchell used to describe her, moved along the lighted corridor, wealthy beyond great dreams of wealth, considered, loved, respected, honoured, and as solitary as any human being had ever been, perhaps, on this earth.

The doctor's `Mrs Gould! One minute!' stopped her with a start at the door of the lighted and empty sala . From the similarity of mood and circumstance, the sight of the doctor, standing there all alone amongst the groups of furniture, recalled to her emotional memory her unexpected meeting with Martin Decoud; she seemed to hear in the silence the voice of that man, dead miserably so many years ago, pronounce the words, `Antonia left her fan here.' But it was the doctor's voice that spoke, a little altered by his excitement. She remarked his shining eyes.