Part 31 (1/2)

Benicia smiled, a little bitterly. ”Yes,” she said, ”I know that the man who is so rash as to attempt it in this country is usually recalled in disgrace. Still, it is not a thing that happens very frequently. Dom Clemente is to be made the scapegoat.”

”I think,” said the man gravely, ”I may be strong enough to save him that. It is possible, as I have told him, that he will be recalled--but what he has done will stand.”

He spoke at last as a ruler, with authority, and a trace of sternness in his eyes, but his face changed again.

”Senorita,” he said, ”if it happens, I think you will not grudge it, or blame me.”

The girl saw the opportunity she had been waiting for. ”As you have admitted, you owe my father something, and now you have asked something more. Is it not conceivable that you owe me a little, too. I am an influence here--and it would be different in Lisbon if Dom Clemente was sent home again. Besides, sometimes he will listen to me.

Now and then a woman has made a change in a man's policy, and, though it is a little more difficult when the man is one's father, it might be done again.”

”Ah,” said her companion, ”you wish to make a bargain.”

”It would be too great a condescension, Senor,” and Benicia laughed.

”I want a promise that is to be unconditional. Some day, perhaps, I shall ask you to do something for me. Then you will do it whatever it is.”

The man looked up at her with a little dry smile, but, as he admitted, he owed her father a good deal, and he was not too old for gallantry.

Besides that, he had the gift of insight, and a curious confidence in this girl. He felt she would not ask him anything that was not fitting.

”The request,” he said, ”is a little vague, and perhaps, I am a trifle rash, but I almost think I can promise that what you ask shall be done.”

Benicia, reaching out from the hammock, touched him with her fan.

”Now,” she said, ”I know what you think of me. How shall I make my poor acknowledgments? Still, there is another thing. You will discover presently that the brooms of the State are slow. There are two men not among its servants who have commenced the sweeping already. I think Dom Clemente knows this, but you will not mention it to him.”

Her companion glanced at her sharply with a sudden keenness in his eyes, but he said nothing, and the girl smiled again.

”When you hear of them I would like you to remember that they are friends of mine,” she said. ”You will, of course, recognize that n.o.body I said that of could do anything that was really reprehensible.”

”I might admit that it was unlikely,” said her companion.

”Then,” said Benicia, ”when the time comes I would like you to remember it. That is another thing you will promise.”

She flashed one swift glance at her companion, who smiled, and then looked round as Dom Clemente and two of the gunboat's officers came towards them along the deck. She roused herself to talk to them, and succeeded brilliantly, now and then to the momentary embarra.s.sment of the officers, who were young, while the man with the gray hair lay in a deck chair a little apart watching her over his cigar. She was clever, and quick-witted, but he knew also that she was like her father, one who at any cost stood by her friends. At the same time he was a little puzzled, for, in the case of a young woman, friend is a term of somewhat vague and comprehensive significance, and she had mentioned that there were two of them. That appeared to complicate the affair, but he had, at least, made a promise, and it was said of him that when he did so he usually kept it, though it was now and then in a somewhat grim fas.h.i.+on. There were also men in the sweltering towns beside the surf-swept beach the gunboat crawled along who would have felt uneasy had they known exactly why he had been sent out to them.

CHAPTER XXV

DOMINGO APPEARS

The carriers had stopped in a deserted village one morning after a long and arduous march from the mission station, when Ormsgill, lying in the hot white sand, looked quietly at Nares, who sat with his back against one of the empty huts.

”If I knew what the dusky image was thinking I should feel considerably more at ease,” he said. ”Still, I don't, and there's very little use in guessing. After all, we are a long way from grasping the negro's point of view on most subjects yet. They very seldom look at things as we do.”

Nares nodded. ”Anyway, I almost fancy we could consider what he has told us as correct,” he said. ”It's something to go upon.”

The man he referred to squatted close by them, naked to the waist, though a few yards of cotton cloth hung from his hips. An old Snider rifle lay at his side, and he was big and muscular with a heavy, expressionless face. As Ormsgill had suggested, it certainly afforded very little indication of what he was thinking, and left it a question whether he was capable of intelligent thought at all. They had come upon him in the deserted village on the edge of a great swamp an hour earlier, and he had skillfully evaded their questions as to what he was doing there.

It was an oppressively hot morning, and a heavy, dingy sky hung over the vast mora.s.s which they could see through the openings between the scattered huts. It stretched back bare and level, a vast desolation, towards the interior, with a little thin haze floating over it in silvery belts here and there, and streaking the forest that crept up to its edge. The carriers lay half-asleep in the warm sand, blotches of white and blue and ebony, and the man with the rifle appeared vacantly unconcerned. Time is of no value to the negro, and one could have fancied that he was prepared to wait there all day for the white men's next question.

”It's not very much,” said Ormsgill reflectively, referring to his comrade's last observation. ”Domingo, it seems, is up yonder--but there are one or two other facts, which I think have their significance, in our possession. Herrero is coming up behind us, and, though there are no other Portuguese in the neighborhood, we find this village empty. I should very much like to know why the folks who lived in it have gone away, and I fancy our friend yonder could tell us.