Again Seyd refused to dash her hope, but he was not quite convinced, and when they entered the big living-room where Don Luis stood with Paulo in waiting his dark gravity cast its shadow over the girl’s glad face. His immobility afforded no clue to the feeling that lay behind the stereotyped greeting, “The house, señor, is yours.
“I am the more pleased to see you,” he went on, “because Paulo reminded me an hour ago of a matter of business that lies between us. Such things stick not in my memory. But I believe it concerns some money.”
“Señor!” Her face flaming with the scarlet of shame, Francesca was moving forward.
He stopped her with a shake of his heavy head. “This is between me and—your husband. The papers, Paulo. Hand them to the señor.”
It was a legal process, signed and sealed according to Mexican law, and before opening it Seyd knew it for the end. More out of curiosity than for information, he rapidly scanned the terms which had taken Santa Gertrudis and its mined riches forever out of his hands. While he read, Don Luis studied his face. If he looked for signs of deep hurt there were none to be seen, for in the long game between them Seyd was confronted for the first time by the expected. He looked up, squaring his shoulders.
“The victory is yours, señor.”
To Francesca’s anxious eyes it seemed that the old man’s gravity lightened by a shade. “You will concede, señor, that I warned you—that no gringo would ever force himself in on my lands?”
“Yes, and I did my best to disprove it. For my partner’s sake I am sorry. For my own”—he looked at his wife—“I am glad.”
“Well spoken, señor.” The shadow of a smile illumined the old man’s dark reserve. “But if I warned you, it does not follow that I have not watched with some sympathy your struggle. In watching, too, my old eyes have been opened upon truths that I had refused to see, though they lay under my nose. We are an old people, señor, we Mexicans. The old blood of Spain added no effervescence to the Aztec strains that were grown stagnant long before Cortez landed, and when a people ages nature removes it to make way for younger stock. Si, though I refused to acknowledge it, I have known many years that just as the Moors overran Spain, and the Spanish overran the Aztecs, so will your people overrun Mexico from the Northern Sierras to the Gulf.