“ ‘So has my mercy to the Whites been,’ he said. ‘But let them beware or I will fill that fountain with their blood and their daughters shall come to see it play. If they call too much upon God to help them, God shall reveal Himself. If you have any White friend, tell him that. I am as patient as God. But tell them that.’
“All the time that he spoke his two great negroes stood behind his throne, each holding his sword. They were naked to the waist. People mistook them sometimes for bronzes. That disgusting creature, his son, Don José, stood at another window, killing flies. He was a languid-looking youth, sickly and vicious, with a face of exquisite features, showing neither intellect nor will, nothing but depravity. He turned to me as his father ceased speaking.
“ ‘There will be a baptism of blood,’ he said, ‘to the sound of flutes.’
“It was time at that moment for the Dictator to ride abroad. His Indians entered with his riding costume, a golden head-dress and a tunic of gold chain-mail all set about with the plumes of the scarlet-crested dill-birds.
“ ‘See,’ he said, ‘this is what they force me to wear. I, who am God, the father of this land, have to wear gold mail, lest I be assassinated. Let them see to it.’
“When he had put this on, he looked, as he always did, magnificent beyond description. I understood how it was that his Indians worshipped him as God. They decked him with a scarlet serape and led him out to his horse. It was a white stallion, which he was afterwards said to have fed with human flesh. He and his bodyguard of Indians set out at a gallop. They always galloped at this time from this fear of assassination, which had become an obsession to him. I must say that I was glad when he had gone.
“One of his two negroes, the one with the knife, said, ‘He ride the White horse; that show the Whites he ride them. He ride with spur, too: you see.’ ”
Bill Ridden was an English gentleman who comes a little into this story. In his youth he spent some years in Santa Barbara, where he made a good deal of money in the copper boom at Matoche. He was a very good friend to the Piranhas at this time (and later in the copper crisis). He was a man of strong affections; he kept in touch with his friends in Santa Barbara long after he had returned to England and settled down. He married in 1857. His wife was Sarah Ocle, a loud, fresh-coloured, robust mare of a woman, by whom, as he put it, he “sired some colts and fillies, as well as a darned pup I might have drowned.” This “pup” was his youngest son, Highworth Foliat Ridden, born in 1869, who was not quite eighteen when this tale begins. It was at Bill Ridden’s house that Rosa Piranha spent her year in England.
This house was the Foliats, in Berkshire, where Bill’s mother’s people, the Foliats, had lived. It was a small, red-brick Queen Anne house, with a racing stable at the back and the Downs behind the racing stable. Here Bill bred steeplechasers and rode much to hounds. Bill was an ugly devil, foul-mouthed and rude, something between a publican and a horse-coper in appearance, yet strangely gentle with women and horses. He had a Judge Jeffreys manner on the bench of magistrates. He loved his daughter Bell and hated his youngest son. “If he had been a pup,” he used to say, “I could have drowned him; if he had been a trout, I could have put him back; but being this, by God, there is nothing that I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he’s got guts enough not to sink.”
His wife, Sarah Ridden, was fond of this son, but wished that he would be like others boys, “not always messing about with cog-wheels.” Her children had gone from her into the world, with the exception of her daughter Bell, a year older than the boy. She found life easier with the boy out of the house, “not putting my old man’s back up.” Quiet life, the Liverpool Spring Meeting and asparagus were the things she loved best; but she was a fine rider and understood horses.