When we anchored, Tomas, beside me in saturnine silence, grunted and spat into the water.
“Look here,” I said. “What is the meaning of it all? What is it? What is at the bottom?”
He shrugged his shoulders gloomily. “If your worship does not know, who should?” he said. “It is not for me to say why people should wish to come here.”
“Then take me to Carlos,” I said. “I must get this settled.”
Castro looked at me suspiciously. “You will not excite him?” he said. “I have known people die right out when they were like that.”
“Oh, I won’t excite him,” I said.
As we were rowed ashore, he began to point out the houses of the notables. Rio Medio had been one of the principal ports of the Antilles in the seventeenth century, but it had failed before the rivalry of Havana because its harbour would not take the large vessels of modern draft. Now it had no trade, no life, no anything except a bishop and a great monastery, a few retired officials from Havana. A large settlement of ragged thatched huts and clay hovels lay to the west of the cathedral. The Casa Riego was an enormous palace, with windows like loopholes, facing the shore. Don Balthasar practically owned the whole town and all the surrounding country, and, except for his age and feebleness, might have been an absolute monarch.
He had lived in Havana with great splendour, but now, in his failing years, had retired to his palace, from which he had since only twice set foot. This had only been when official ceremonies of extreme importance, such as the international execution of pirates that I had witnessed, demanded the presence of someone of his eminence and lustre. Otherwise he had lived shut up in his palace. There was nowhere in Rio Medio for him to go to.
He was said to regard his intendente O’Brien as the apple of his eye, and had used his influence to get him made one of the judges of the Marine Court. The old Don himself probably knew nothing about the pirates. The inlet had been used by buccaneers ever since the days of Columbus; but they were below his serious consideration, even if he had ever seen them, which Tomas Castro doubted.
There was no doubting the sincerity of his tone.