For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the tyranny
of the rigid principles governing the sale of her influence in high
places. Then, significantly, and with a touch of impatience, "_Allez_,"
she added, "_et dites bien a votre bonhomme--entendez-vous?--qu'il faut
avaler la pilule_."
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and pay.
Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it had been
compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain. He
became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read in light literature
it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his
shoulders. He also began to dream of vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated
to himself the disadvantages of his new position, because he viewed it
emotionally. His position in Costaguana was no worse than before. But
man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty
of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody
around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that
played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of
Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that, however short
the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, no gang in
possession of the Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to
suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext. The first casual
colonel of the barefooted army of scarecrows that came along was able to
expose with force and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum
of 10,000 dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a
gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould knew that
very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for better times. But
to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to
his imagination. Mr. Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious
and honourable character: he attached too much importance to form. It is
a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There
was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by
means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. "It will end
by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day. And, in fact, since
that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly
from a worrying inability to think of anything else. The Finance
Minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his
revenge. Even Mr. Gould's letters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles,
then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of
practically nothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, the
persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the
exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that
mine from every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words
of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the
Concession had been granted to him and his descendants for ever. He
implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any
part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous
Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to forget that
America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in Europe. And each
letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in
that cavern of thieves, intriguers, and brigands.
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