That one thing was not the nature of the people nor their revolutionary outbursts, for I may as well own that commerce or property had little hold upon my thoughts until I found how necessary the latter was for my success. My sole thought in those early days, and the one thing that troubled me, was the constant presence of my uncle’s wealthy neighbour, Pablo Garcia.
It was plain enough that he had been for months past a visitor, and that he had been looked upon as a suitor for Lilla’s hand; but I could not discover whether she favoured him or no, for after meeting him a few times his very presence, with his calm, supercilious treatment of one whom he evidently hated from the bottom of his soul, was so galling to me, that upon his appearance I used to go out and ramble away for hours together, seeking the wilder wooded parts, and the precipitous spurs of the mountains, climbing higher and higher, till more than once in some lonely spot I came upon some trace of a bygone civilisation—ruined temple, or palace of grand proportions, but now overthrown and crumbling into dust, with the dense vegetation of the region springing up around, and in many places so covering it that it was only by accident that I discovered, in the darkened twilight of the leafy shade, column or mouldering wall, and then sat down to wonder and try and think out of the histories of the past who were the people that had left these traces of a former grandeur, and then over some carven stone light would spring to my understanding—a light that brought with it a thrill of hope. Then I would return, as night threatened to hide the track, back to my uncle’s, to be treated coldly, as I thought, by Lilla, while more than once it seemed that my uncle gazed upon me in a troubled way.
Chapter Fourteen.
Tom speaks his Mind.
A couple of months soon glided away—a time of mingled misery and pleasure. At one time I was light-hearted and happy, at another low-spirited and depressed; for I could not see that there was the slightest prospect of my hopes ever bearing fruit. I was growing nervous, too, about Garcia; not that I feared him, but his manner now betokened that he bore me ill-will of the most intense character.
As for Lilla, the longer I was at the hacienda the more plain it became that she feared him, shuddering at times when he approached—tokens of dislike that made his eyes flash, and for which it was very evident that he blamed me.
But his blame was unjust; he had credited me with having made known the cowardly part he had played on the river; but though my uncle and aunt were ignorant of it, the news reached Lilla’s ears, the medium being Tom Bulk.
Tom had settled down very comfortably at the hacienda, taking to smoking and hanging about the plantation sheds, and doing a little here or there as it pleased him, but none the less working very hard; and many a time I had come across him glistening with perspiration as he tugged at some heavy bag with all an Englishman’s energy when all around were sluggishly looking on. He studiously avoided the woods, though, save when he saw me off upon a ramble; and it was one day when I was standing by Lilla’s side at an open window, previous to taking a long walk, that our attention was taken up by high words in the yard close at hand.