"Why you need that gold?"
"Gold is generally useful, isn't it?" smiled Dane. "It would help me to earn a little more than my bread when I go back to England."
Bonita Castro laughed, and then grew serious. There was a light in her dark eyes, and her voice grew deeper; and it was only because it appeared necessary that Dane afterward told his comrade part of what followed. Indeed, there was little to relate, but much to be imagined.
"Is there no other place than England, when all the world is good?" she said. "Is not this much better than your mud and snow, and the sight of the men with anxious faces groping through the fog? Vaya! You men of the English cities, you not know how to live."
The speaker pointed out through the open window, and most men would have agreed with her in a measure. If the beauty of the fever coast is that of a whited sepulcher, it is a sufficiently alluring region, and Dom Pedro's factory stood high and healthily upon the summit of a bluff. Tall palms swaying about it before the sea breeze tossed their emerald traceries against transparent blue. In the cottonwoods' shadow beyond them tall white lilies grew, and the rollers of the southern ocean, flaming dazzlingly, dissolved into spouts of incandescence upon a crescent of silver sand below. The whole scene was flooded with light and color, and permeated by the languorous spell of the tropics, which it is not good for white men to linger under.
"It is all very beautiful," he said; "but I have my bread to win."
"You are very modest, Don Ilton. Is there no place for such as you in Africa? Now I know one who would give much—even a share in the profits of several factories—for the help of two men he could trust. There will be more gold to win than you will ever find in the Leopards' country; and there will be the excitement you hunger for. The man who needs the assistance has a cunning enemy. Will you not listen when again he speaks to you?"
Miss Castro leaned slightly forward.
"It is the life you English long for. There would be adventure; much profit, I think, too, and—for that you like also—an enemy. He is bad enemy of—me. This England of yours is far off, and the wise man he—is it not so?—takes gratefully what the good saints send him. Is it not enough, Don Ilton?"
Dane was not a vain man, but there was a subtle inflection in the woman's voice which suggested an amplification of the meaning of her last words. England certainly seemed very far away, Maxwell's project a mad one; and Dane remembered that the woman for whose sake he had joined in it had been ready to think ill of him. His companion was very alluring, he was weak in mind and body, very grateful to one who had saved his life for him, and loath to resume the burden which was part of his birthright as a civilized Englishman. A word, even a gesture, would, it seemed, smooth out many difficulties, and, shaking off responsibility, he might henceforward live for the day only; but though intoxicated by the spell of the tropics and the eyes of his companion, Dane had a memory, and he realized that he stood on the brink of a declivity. He had seen the end of other Britons who, selling their birthright for a few years' indulgence, sank beyond the level of the beasts. The face of a countrywoman, no longer cold and disdainful, but innocent and gentle, rose up before him; and the struggle ended.