“I am convinced, senor doctor,” Antonia said, with the earnest calm of invincible resolution, “that this was from the first poor Martin's intention.”
“Yes, but the material interests will not let you jeopardize their development for a mere idea of pity and justice,” the doctor muttered grumpily. “And it is just as well perhaps.”
The Cardinal-Archbishop straightened up his gaunt, bony frame.
“We have worked for them; we have made them, these material interests of the foreigners,” the last of the Corbelans uttered in a deep, denunciatory tone.
“And without them you are nothing,” cried the doctor from the distance. “They will not let you.”
“Let them beware, then, lest the people, prevented from their aspirations, should rise and claim their share of the wealth and their share of the power,” the popular Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco declared, significantly, menacingly.
A silence ensued, during which his Eminence stared, frowning at the ground, and Antonia, graceful and rigid in her chair, breathed calmly in the strength of her convictions. Then the conversation took a social turn, touching on the visit of the Goulds to Europe. The Cardinal-Archbishop, when in Rome, had suffered from neuralgia in the head all the time. It was the climate—the bad air.
When uncle and niece had gone away, with the servants again falling on their knees, and the old porter, who had known Henry Gould, almost totally blind and impotent now, creeping up to kiss his Eminence's extended hand, Dr. Monygham, looking after them, pronounced the one word—
“Incorrigible!”
Mrs. Gould, with a look upwards, dropped wearily on her lap her white hands flashing with the gold and stones of many rings.