“Now my protector forgets himself,” returned the maiden, drawing herself up and bestowing a look on the guide which was quite worthy of an Inca princess—supposing Lawrence to have been right in his conjecture on that point!
“Well, well, please yourself, Manuela,” returned Pedro, with a laugh, in which exasperation slightly mingled, “but do me the justice to tell your father when you meet that I fairly remonstrated with and warned you. After all, nothing would please me better,—if it should ever come about.”
He turned on his heel and went off, with a mingling of expressions on his handsome face, to look after the canoe and make preparations for an early start in the morning.
Canoe travelling appears to be rather slow work while it is going on, even when descending the current of a river. Each point of land seems to be reached and passed so gradually; every vista of the river seems so extensive, and the trees on shore drop so leisurely astern, that when you think of the hundreds of miles which lie in advance, you are apt to feel as if the journey or voyage would never come to an end. But when you forget the present and reflect on the past, when you think how many hundreds of miles now lie behind, although it seems but yesterday that you set out on the journey, then you realise the fact that the “power of littles,” of steady, daily unremitting perseverance, has had too little weight with you in your estimates, and that, just as fast as your starting-point recedes from you, exactly so fast does your goal approach, although those misleading factors, your feelings, may have induced you to think otherwise.
Five days after the occurrence of the events on what we may style Turtle-beach, Lawrence found himself wondering at what appeared to be the far-off-ness of the spot, considering the slowness of the hourly progress, yet at the same time wondering if they should ever traverse the nine hundred or a thousand miles that yet intervened between him and Buenos Ayres.
To do Lawrence Armstrong justice, however, he was by no means impatient. He was quite satisfied that things should go as slowly as they pleased, for was he not travelling through the most interesting of countries, in which the flora and the fauna and the geological features furnished abundant—ay, superabundant—food for the satisfaction of his scientific appetite, while his companions were of the pleasantest character? Pedro, since the opening up of his heart to him, had laid aside much—though not all—of his reserve, and shown himself to be a man of extensive information and profound thought.
Spotted Tiger was a splendid specimen, physically and mentally, of the sons of the soil, in the contemplation of whom he could expend whatever smattering he possessed of ethnological science. Then Quashy—was not that negro the very soul and embodiment of courage, fidelity, and good-humour, the changes of whose April face alone might have furnished rich material for the study of a physiognomist or a Rembrandt.
And as for Manuela—we cannot analyse his thoughts about her. It is probable that he could not have expounded them himself. Take the following sample of them, as overheard by us one day when he had strayed into the wild woods alone, and was seated on the roots of a mighty tree, pencil in hand, attempting unsuccessfully to make a sketch.
“I do believe,” he murmured, with a gesture of impatience—for he had drawn a small convolvulus, hanging from a tree, with such disregard for the rules of linear perspective that it was the proportionate size of an omnibus—“I do believe that that girl has come between me and my wits. Of course it is not love. That is quite out of the question. A white man could not fall in love with a black woman.”
Yes, he did the poor girl the injustice, in his perplexed indignation with himself, to call her black, although it must have been obvious to the most careless observer that she was only reddish-brown, or, to speak more correctly, brownish-red.