It was useless denying it; he had the extraordinary incredulity of his kind. I remembered how I had idolized him as a boy at home.
“Your brother-in-law, my cousin Rooksby, was the very first to believe that I was a pirate. I, a vulgar pirate! I, Carlos Riego! Did he not believe it—and you?” He glanced a little ironically, and lifted a thin white finger towards the great coat-of-arms. “That sort of thing,” he said, “amigo mio, does not allow one to pick pockets.” He suddenly turned a little to one side, and fixed me with his clear eyes. “My friend,” he said, “if I told you that Rooksby and your greatest Kent earls carried smugglers’ tubs, you would say I was an ignorant fool. Yet they, too, are magistrates. The only use I have ever made of these ruffians was to-day, to bring you here. It was a necessity. That O’Brien had gone on to take you when you arrived. You would never have come alive out of Havana. I was saving your life. Once there, you could never have escaped from that man.”
I saw suddenly that this might be the truth. There had been something friendly in Tomas Castro’s desire not to compromise me before the people on board the ship. Obviously he had been acting a part, with a visible contempt for the pilfering that he could not prevent. He had been sent merely to bring me to Rio Medio.
“I never disliked you,” I protested. “I do not understand what you mean. All I know is, that you have used me ill—outrageously ill. You have saved my life now, you say. That may be true; but why did you ever make me meet with that man O’Brien?”
“And even for that you should not hate me,” he said, shaking his head on the silk pillows. “I never wished you anything but well, Juan, because you were honest and young, of noble blood, good to look upon; you had done me and my friend good service, to your own peril, when my own cousin had deserted me. And I loved you for the sake of another. I loved your sister. We have a proverb: ‘A man is always good to the eyes in which the sister hath found favour.’”
I looked at him in amazement. “You loved Veronica!” I said. “But Veronica is nothing at all. There was the Señorita.”
He smiled wearily. “Ah, the Señorita; she is very well; a man could love her, too. But we do not command love, my friend.”
I interrupted him. “I want to know why you brought me here. Why did you ask me to come here when we were on board the Thames?”
He answered sadly, “Ah, then! Because I loved your sister, and you reminded me always of her. But that is all over now—done with for good.... I have to address myself to dying as it becomes one of my race to die.” He smiled at me. “One must die in peace to die like a Christian. Life has treated me rather scurvily, only the gentleman must not repine like a poor man of low birth. I would like to do a good turn to the friend who is the brother of his sister, to the girl-cousin whom I do not love with love, but whom I understand with affection—to the great inheritance that is not for my wasted hands.”
I looked out of the open door of the room. There was the absolutely quiet inner court of the palace, a colonnade of tall square pillars, in the centre the little thread of a fountain. Round the fountain were tangled bushes of flowers—enormous geraniums, enormous hollyhocks, a riot of orange marigolds.