THE following morning Webster informed Dolores fully of his interview with her brother and his confrères the night before, concealing from her only the fact that he was financing the revolution and his reasons for financing it. He was still depressed, and Dolores, observing his mood, forbore to intrude upon it. Intuitively she realized that when a man is worried and harassed by matters he cannot or dares hot divulge, he dislikes being talked to, but prefers to be alone and wrestle with them in silence. Accordingly she claimed the prerogative of her sex—a slight headache—and retreated to her room, In the privacy of which she was suddenly very much surprised to find herself weeping softly because John Stuart Webster was unhappy and didn't deserve to be.
It was impossible, however, for Webster long to remain impervious to the note of ridiculousness underlying the forthcoming tragic events. Here was a little two-by-four poverty-stricken hot-bed of ignorance and intrigue calling itself a republic, a little stretch of country no larger than a couple of big western counties, about to indulge in the national pastime of civil war and unable to do it except by grace of an humble citizen of a sister republic!
Five thousand ignorant, ill-equipped, ill-drilled semi-brigands calling themselves soldiers, entrusted with the task of enabling one of their number to ride, horse and dog, over a million people!
How farcical! No wonder Ricardo, with his northern viewpoint, approached his patriotic task with gayety, almost with contempt. And when Webster recalled that the about-to-be-born provisional government had casually borrowed from him the sum of forty thousand dollars in order to turn the trick—borrowing it, forsooth, in much the same spirit as a commuter boarding his train without the necessary fare hails a neighbour and borrows ten cents—his natural optimism asserted itself and he chuckled as in fancy he heard himself telling the story to Neddy Jerome and being branded a liar for his pains.
“Well, I've had one comfort ever since I first saw that girl,” he reflected philosophically. “While I've never been so unhappy in all my life before, or had to tear my soul out by the roots so often, things have been coming my way so fast from other directions that I haven't had much opportunity to dwell on the matter. And for these compensating offsets, good Lord, I thank thee.”
He was John Stuart Webster again when Dolores saw him next; during the succeeding days his mood of cheerfulness and devil-may-care indifference never left him. And throughout that period of marking time Dolores was much in his society, a condition which he told himself was not to his liking but which, nevertheless, he could not obviate without seeming indifferent to her happiness. And to permit his friend's fiancee to languish in loneliness and heart-break did not appear to John Stuart Webster as the part of a true friend or a courtly gentleman—and he remembered that she had once called him that.
They rode together in the cool of the morning; they drove together on the Malecon in the cool of the evening; chaperoned by Don Juan Cafetéro and a grinning Sobrantean, they went shark-fishing in Leber's launch; they played dominoes together; they discussed, throughout the long, lazy, quiet afternoons, when the remainder of their world retired for the siesta, books, art, men, women, and things.
And not once, throughout those two weeks of camaraderie, did the heart-racked Webster forget for a single instant that he was the new friend, destined to become the old friend; never, to the girl's watchful eyes, did he betray the slightest disposition to establish their friendly relations on a closer basis.
Thus did the arrival of The Day find them. Toward sunset they rode out together along the bay shore and noted far out to sea the smear of smoke that marked the approach of La Estrellita—on schedule time. As they jogged homeward in the dusk, her red and green side-lights were visible as she crept into the harbour; above the sobbing murmur of the Caribbean wavelets they heard the scream of her winches and the rattle of chain as her anchor bit the bottom.
“You will go aboard her to-night,” Webster said very quietly to Dolores.