Romance. Joseph Conrad
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might well have imagined he was a descendant of the Cid Campeador, only to look at him lying there without a quiver of a feature, his face stainlessly white, a little bluish in extreme lack of blood, with all the nobility of death upon it, like an alabaster effigy of an old knight in a cathedral. On the red-velvet hangings of the bed was an immense coat-of-arms, worked in silk and surrounded by a collar, with the golden sheep hanging from the ring. The shield was patched in with an immense number of quarterings – lions rampant, leopards courant, fleurs de lis, castles, eagles, hands, and arms. His eyes opened slowly, and his face assumed an easy, languorous smile of immense pleasure.
“Ah, Juan,” he said, “se bienvenido, be welcome, be welcome.”
Castro caught me roughly by the shoulder, and gazed at me with blazing, yellow eyes.
“You should not speak roughly to him,” he said. “English beast! He is dying.”
“No, I won’t speak roughly to him,” I answered. “I see.”
I did see. At first I had been suspicious; it might have been put on to mollify me. But one could not put on that blueness of tinge, that extra – nearly final – touch of the chisel to the lines round the nose, that air of restfulness that nothing any more could very much disturb. There was no doubt that Carlos was dying.
“Treacheries – no. You had to come,” he said suddenly. “I need you. I am glad, dear Juan.” He waved a thin long hand a little towards mine. “You shall not long be angry. It had to be done – you must forgive the means.”
His air was so gay, so uncomplaining, that it was hard to believe it came from him.
“You could not have acted worse if you had owed me a grudge, Carlos,” I said. “I want an explanation. But I don’t want to kill you..”
“Oh, no, oh, no,” he said; “in a minute I will tell.”
He dropped a gold ball into a silver basin that was by the bedside, and it sounded like a great bell. A nun in a sort of coif that took the lines of a buffalo’s horns glided to him with a gold cup, from which he drank, raising himself a little. Then the religious went out with Tomas Castro, who gave me a last ferocious glower from his yellow eyes. Carlos smiled.
“They try to make my going easy,” he said. “Vamos! The pillow is smooth for him who is well loved.” He shut his eyes. Suddenly he said, “Why do you, alone, hate me, John Kemp? What have I done?”
“God knows I don’t hate you, Carlos,” I answered.
“You have always mistrusted me,” he said. “And yet I am, perhaps, nearer to you than many of your countrymen, and I have always wished you well, and you have always hated and mistrusted me. From the very first you mistrusted me. Why?”
It was useless denying it; he had the extraordinary incredulity of his kind. I remembered how I had idolized him as a boy at home.
“Your brother-in-law, my cousin Rooksby, was the very first to believe that I was a pirate. I, a vulgar pirate! I, Carlos Riego! Did he not believe it – and you?” He glanced a little ironically, and lifted a thin white finger towards the great coat-of-arms. “That sort of thing,” he said, “amigo mio, does not allow one to pick pockets.” He suddenly turned a little to one side, and fixed me with his clear eyes. “My friend,” he said, “if I told you that Rooksby and your greatest Kent earls carried smugglers’ tubs, you would say I was an ignorant fool. Yet they, too, are magistrates. The only use I have ever made of these ruffians was to-day, to bring you here. It was a necessity. That O’Brien had gone on to take you when you arrived. You would never have come alive out of Havana. I was saving your life. Once there, you could never have escaped from that man.”
I saw suddenly that this might be the truth. There had been something friendly in Tomas Castro’s desire not to compromise me before the people on board the ship. Obviously he had been acting a part, with a visible contempt for the pilfering that he could not prevent. He had been sent merely to bring me to Rio Medio.
“I never disliked you,” I protested. “I do not understand what you mean. All I know is, that you have used me ill – outrageously ill. You have saved my life now, you say. That may be true; but why did you ever make me meet with that man O’Brien?”
“And even for that you should not hate me,” he said, shaking his head on the silk pillows. “I never wished you anything but well, Juan, because you were honest and young, of noble blood, good to look upon; you had done me and my friend good service, to your own peril, when my own cousin had deserted me. And I loved you for the sake of another. I loved your sister. We have a proverb: ‘A man is always good to the eyes in which the sister hath found favour.’”
I looked at him in amazement. “You loved Veronica!” I said. “But Veronica is nothing at all. There was the Señorita.”
He smiled wearily. “Ah, the Señorita; she is very well; a man could love her, too. But we do not command love, my friend.”
I interrupted him. “I want to know why you brought me here. Why did you ask me to come here when we were on board the Thames?”
He answered sadly, “Ah, then! Because I loved your sister, and you reminded me always of her. But that is all over now – done with for good… I have to address myself to dying as it becomes one of my race to die.” He smiled at me. “One must die in peace to die like a Christian. Life has treated me rather scurvily, only the gentleman must not repine like a poor man of low birth. I would like to do a good turn to the friend who is the brother of his sister, to the girl-cousin whom I do not love with love, but whom I understand with affection – to the great inheritance that is not for my wasted hands.”
I looked out of the open door of the room. There was the absolutely quiet inner court of the palace, a colonnade of tall square pillars, in the centre the little thread of a fountain. Round the fountain were tangled bushes of flowers – enormous geraniums, enormous hollyhocks, a riot of orange marigolds.
“How like our flowers at home!” I said mechanically.
“I brought the seeds from there – from your sister’s garden,” he said.
I felt horribly hipped. “But all these things tell me nothing,” I said, with an attempt towards briskness.
“I have to husband my voice.” He closed his eyes.
There is no saying that I did not believe him; I did, every word. I had simply been influenced by Rooks-by’s suspicions. I had made an ass of myself over that business on board the Thames. The passage of Carles and his faithful Tomas had been arranged for by some agent of O’Brien in London, who was in communication with Ramon and Rio Medio. The same man had engaged Nichols, that Nova Scotian mate, an unscrupulous sailor, for O’Brien’s service. He was to leave the ship in Kingston, and report himself to Ramon, who furnished him with the means to go to Cuba. That man, seeing me intimate with two persons going to Rio Medio, had got it into his head that I was going there, too. And, very naturally, he did not want an Englishman for a witness of his doings.
But Rooksby’s behaviour, his veiled accusations, his innuendoes against Carlos, had influenced me more than anything else. I remembered a hundred little things now that I knew that Carlos loved Veronica. I understood Rooksby’s jealous impatience, Veronica’s friendly glances at Carlos, the fact that Rooksby had proposed to Veronica on the very day that Carlos had come again into the neighbourhood with the runners after him. I saw very well that there was no more connection between the Casa Riego and the rascality of Rio Medio than there was between Ralph himself and old drunken Rangsley on Hythe beach. There was less, perhaps.
“Ah, you have had a sad life, my Carlos,” I said, after a long time.
He opened his eyes, and smiled his brave smile. “Ah, as to that,” he said, “one kept on. One has to husband one’s voice, though, and not waste it over lamentations. I have to tell you – ah, yes…” He paused and fixed his eyes upon me. “Figure to yourself that this house, this town, an immense part of this island, much even yet in Castile itself, much gold, many slaves, a great name – a very great name – are what I shall leave