The White Mice

by Richard Harding Davis

Each felt that there was nothing she could not do, no sacrifice she would not make, if once more she could sit beside him, holding his hand, waiting in silence for the joy of hearing him speak. And of the younger girl the sacrifice has been required. At least a way in which she could assist the cause that would lead to the freedom of her father had been presented to her. From Paris, Pino Vega had written her mother, requesting permission to ask Inez to be his wife.

To the girl, of all the men she knew in Venezuela, Pino was the most attractive. They both had lived for years outside of their own country and, in consequence, had much in common. He was thirty-seven, older than she by fourteen years, but, as has already been pointed out, in appearance, in manner, in spirits, he seemed much younger than his years. To his detriment nothing could be said that could not have been said of the other young men of his class in his country. But the girl was not in love with the young man of that class, nor with her country.

Her brother had been sacrificed in what to her had seemed but a squalid struggle for place between two greedy politicians; her father, for the very reason that he had served his country loyally, faithfully, and was, in consequence, beloved by the people, had been caged like a wild animal. She had no love for her native land. She distrusted and feared it.

Night after night, as she paced the walk along the cliff where the waves broke at her feet, she shuddered to think of returning to that land, only sixty miles from her, that had robbed her of so much that had made life beautiful; of all, up to the present, that had made it happy. She wished never to see it again. Could her father have been returned to her she would have rejoiced that they were exiles. And, as she distrusted the country, she distrusted the men of the country, at least those of the class to which Vega belonged. She knew them well, the born orators, born fighters, born conspirators. To scheme, to plot, to organize against the authority of the moment was in their blood.

If she thought of a possible husband, and, in a country where a girl marries at fifteen, and where her first, if not her only duty in life, is to marry, it would have been surprising if she had not, the man she considered as a husband was not a Venezuelan. For their deference to women, for their courtesy to each other, for their courage as shown in their campaigns, for their appreciation of art, of letters, of music, she greatly admired her countrymen; but that they themselves created nothing, that they scorned labor and all those who labored, made them, to Inez, intolerable.

That she was half an American of the North was to her a source of secret pride. With satisfaction she remembered young men she had known during the summers on the North Shore and Cape Cod, the young men who, during the first of the week, toiled and sweltered in their offices, and who, when the week-end came, took their pleasures strenuously, in exercise and sport. She liked to remember that her American and English devotees had treated her as a comrade, as an intelligent, thinking creature. They had not talked to her exclusively of the beauty of her eyes, her teeth and hair.

She preferred their breathless, “Well played, partner!” to the elaborate, “I saw the Señorita at mass this morning. As she raised her eyes to Heaven—the angels grew jealous.”

When the mother told Inez that Colonel Vega had written, proposing on his return to pay his addresses to her, the girl was in genuine distress. She protested earnestly.

In thirty years Señora Rojas unconsciously had assimilated the thoughts, the habits, the attitude of mind of the women of her adopted country, and, when Inez had finished her protest, her mother, seeing the consequence from her own point of view, was greatly disturbed. “It is most unfortunate,” she said. “Pino is selfish; when he learns you will not listen to him he will be very angry and he will be less eager to help your father. He will think only of himself. If you only could have cared——”

“Pino could not be so cruel,” said the girl. But she spoke as though she were arguing against her own conviction. “He cannot be so vain—so spoiled,” she protested, “that because one woman fails to fall on her knees to him, he must punish her.”