CHAPTER XVII
With a horse to travel on, and my arm so much better that the sling supporting it was worn rather for ornament than use, there was nothing except that promise not to run away immediately to detain me longer in the pleasant retreat of the Casa Blanca; nothing, that is, had I been a man of gutta-percha or cast-iron; being only a creature of clay—very impressionable clay as it happened—I could not persuade myself that I was quite well enough to start on that long ride over a disturbed country. Besides, my absence from Montevideo had already lasted so long that a few days more could not make much difference one way or the other; thus it came to pass that I still stayed on, enjoying the society of my new friends, while every day, every hour in fact, I felt less able to endure the thought of tearing myself away from Dolores.
Much of my time was spent in the pleasant orchard adjoining the house. Here, growing in picturesque irregularity, were fifty or sixty old peach, nectarine, apricot, plum, and cherry trees, their boles double the thickness of a man's thigh; they had never been disfigured by the pruner's knife or saw, and their enormous size and rough bark, overgrown with grey lichen, gave them an appearance of great antiquity. All about the ground, tangled together in a pretty confusion, flourished many of those dear familiar Old World garden flowers that spring up round the white man's dwelling in all temperate regions of the earth. Here were immemorial wallflowers, stocks and marigolds, tall hollyhock, gay poppy, brilliant bachelor's button; also, half hid amongst the grass, pansy and forget-me-not. The larkspur, red, white, and blue, flaunted everywhere; and here, too, was the unforgotten sweet-william, looking bright and velvety as of yore, yet, in spite of its brightness and stiff, green collar, still wearing the old shame-faced expression, as if it felt a little ashamed of its own pretty name. These flowers were not cultivated, but grew spontaneously from the seed they shed year by year on the ground, the gardener doing nothing for them beyond keeping the weeds down and bestowing a little water in hot weather. The solstitial heats being now over, during which European garden flowers cease to bloom for a season, they were again in gayest livery to welcome the long second spring of autumn, lasting from February to May. At the farther end of this wilderness of flowers and fruit trees was an aloe hedge, covering a width of twenty to thirty yards with its enormous, disorderly, stave-like leaves. This hedge was like a strip of wild nature placed alongside of a plot of man's improved nature; and here, like snakes hunted from the open, the weeds and wildings which were not permitted to mix with the flowers had taken refuge. Protected by that rude bastion of spikes, the hemlock opened feathery clusters of dark leaves and whitish umbels wherever it could reach up to the sunshine. There also grew the nightshade, with other solanaceous weeds, bearing little clusters of green and purple berries, wild oats, fox-tail grass, and nettles. The hedge gave them shelter, but no moisture, so that all these weeds and grasses had a somewhat forlorn and starved appearance, climbing up with long stringy stems among the powerful aloes. The hedge was also rich in animal life. There dwelt mice, cavies, and elusive little lizards; crickets sang all day long under it, while in every open space the green epeiras spread their geometric webs. Being rich in spiders, it was a favourite hunting-ground of those insect desperadoes, the mason-wasps, that flew about loudly buzzing in their splendid gold and scarlet uniform. There were also many little shy birds here, and my favourite was the wren, for in its appearance and its scolding, jerky, gesticulating ways it is precisely like our house-wren, though it has a richer and more powerful song than the English bird. On the other side of the hedge was the potrero, or paddock, where a milch-cow with two or three horses were kept. The manservant, whose name was Nepomucino, presided over orchard and paddock, also to some extent over the entire establishment. Nepomucino was a pure negro, a little old round-headed, blear-eyed man, about five feet four in height, the short lumpy wool on his head quite grey; slow in speech and movements, his old black or chocolate-coloured fingers all crooked, stiff-jointed, and pointing spontaneously in different directions. I have never seen anything in the human subject to equal the dignity of Nepomucino, the profound gravity of his bearing and expression forcibly reminding one of an owl. Apparently he had come to look upon himself as the sole head and master of the establishment, and the sense of responsibility had more than steadied him. The negrine propensity to frequent explosions of inconsequent laughter was not, of course, to be expected in such a sober-minded person; but he was, I think, a little too sedate for a black, for, although his face would shine on warm days like polished ebony, it did not smile. Everyone in the house conspired to keep up the fiction of Nepomucino's importance; they had, in fact, conspired so long and so well, that it had very nearly ceased to be a fiction. Everybody addressed him with grave respect. Not a syllable of his long name was ever omitted—what the consequences of calling him Nepo, or Cino, or Cinito, the affectionate diminutive, would have been I am unable to say, since I never had the courage to try the experiment. It often amused me to hear Doña Mercedes calling to him from the house, and throwing the whole emphasis on the last syllable in a long, piercing crescendo: “Ne—po—mu—ci—no—o.” Sometimes, when I sat in the orchard, he would come, and, placing himself before me, discourse gravely about things in general, clipping his words and substituting r for l in the negro fashion, which made it hard for me to repress a smile. After winding up with a few appropriate moral reflections he would finish with the remark: “For though I am black on the surface, señor, my heart is white”; and then he would impressively lay one of his old crooked fingers on the part where the physiological curiosity was supposed to be. He did not like being told to perform menial offices, preferring to anticipate all requests of that kind and do whatever was necessary by stealth. Sometimes I would forget this peculiarity of the old black, and tell him that I wanted him to polish my boots. He would ignore the request altogether, and talk for a few minutes of political matters, or on the uncertainty of all things mundane, and by and by, glancing at my boots, would remark incidentally that they required polishing, offering somewhat ostentatiously to have them done for me. Nothing would make him admit that he did these things himself. Once I tried to amuse Dolores by mimicking his speech to her, but quickly she silenced me, saying that she loved Nepomucino too well to allow even her best friend to laugh at him. He had been born when blacks were slaves in the service of her family, had carried her in his arms when she was an infant, and had seen all the male members of the house of Zelaya swept away in the wars of Reds and Whites; but in the days of their adversity his faithful, dog-like affection had never failed them. It was beautiful to see her manner towards him. If she wanted a rose for her hair or dress she would not pluck it herself or allow me to get it for her, but Nepomucino must be asked to get it. Then every day she would find time to sit down in the garden by his side to tell him all the news of the village and of the country at large, discuss the position of affairs with him, and ask his advice about everything in the house.
Indoors or out I generally had Dolores for a companion, and I could certainly not have had a more charming one. The civil war—though the little splutter on the Yí scarcely deserved that name yet—was her unfailing theme. She was never weary of singing her hero Santa Coloma's praises—his dauntless courage and patience in defeat; his strange romantic adventures; the innumerable disguises and stratagems he had resorted to when going about in his own country, where a price was set on his head; ever labouring to infuse fresh valour into his beaten, disheartened followers. That the governing party had any right to be in power, or possessed any virtue of any kind, or were, in fact, anything but an incubus and a curse to the Banda Orientál, she would not for one moment admit. To her mind her country always appeared like Andromeda bound on her rock and left weeping and desolate to be a prey to the abhorred Colorado monster; while ever to the deliverance of this lovely being came her glorious Perseus, swift as the winds of heaven, the lightnings of terrible vengeance flashing from his eyes, the might of the immortals in his strong right arm. Often she tried to persuade me to join this romantic adventurer, and it was hard, very hard, to resist her eloquent appeals, and perhaps it grew harder every day as the influence of her passionate beauty strengthened itself upon my heart. Invariably I took refuge in the argument that I was a foreigner, that I loved my country with an ardour equal to hers, and that by taking arms in the Banda Orientál I should at once divest myself of all an Englishman's rights and privileges. She scarcely had patience to listen to this argument, it seemed so trivial to her, and when she demanded other better reasons I had none to offer. I dare not quote to her the words of sulky Achilles:
The distant Trojans never injured me, for that argument would have sounded even weaker to her than the former one. She had never read Homer in any language, of course, but she wouldhave quickly made me tell her about Achilles, and when the end came, with miserable Hector dragged thrice round the walls of besieged Troy—Montevideo was called Modern Troy, she knew—then she would have turned my argument against me and bidden me go and serve the Uruguayan President as Achilles served Hector. Seeing me silent, she would turn indignantly away only for a moment, however; the bright smile would quickly return, and she would exclaim, “No, no, Richard, I shall not forget my promise, though I sometimes think you try to make me do so.”
It was noon: the house was quiet, for Doña Mercedes had retired after breakfast to take her unfailing siesta, leaving us to our conversation. In that spacious, cool room where I had first reposed in the house, I was lying on the sofa smoking a cigarette. Dolores, seating herself near me with her guitar, said, “Now let me play and sing you to sleep with something very soft.” But the more she played and sang the further was I from un-needed slumber.
“What, not sleeping yet, Richard!” she would say, with a little laugh after each song.
“Not yet, Dolores,” I would reply, pretending to get drowsy. “But my eyes are getting heavy now. One more song will send me to the region of dreams. Sing me that sweet favourite—-
Desde aquel doloroso momento.”
At length, finding that my sleepiness was all pretence, she refused to sing any more, and presently we drifted once more into the old subject.