It was death. Bedient had known it from the first instant of entering, but he was not prepared. He could not speak—only look into the tender, glowing smile. Captain Carreras finally turned his eyes into the morning:
"You know it was very foolish of me—very—to think I could make you happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly, but very low, as if he had saved strength for what he wished to say…. "You were a long time coming, but I knew you would come—knew it would be just like this—in your arms. Queer, isn't it? And all the waiting years, I kept piling up lands and money, saying: 'This shall be his when he comes.'… It was a little hard at first to know you didn't care—you couldn't care—that one, and ten, were all the same to you. And last night, I saw it all again. Had I brought you word that Celestino Rey had the government and that confiscation of these lands were inevitable, you would never have compared it in importance with finding that part of the symphony. It's all right. I wouldn't have it changed…."
Andrew listened with bowed head, patting the Captain's shoulder gently, as he sustained.
"But I have given you more than money, boy. And this you know—as a man, who knew money better, could never understand. I have given you an old man's love for a son—but more than that, too,—something of the old man's love for the mother of his son…. I thought only women had the delicacy and fineness—you have shown me, sir…. It is all done, and you have made me very glad for these years—since the great wind failed to get us—"
Then he mingled silences with sentences that finally became aimless—seas, ships, cooks, and the boy who had nipped him from the post he meant to hold—and a final genial blending of goats and symphonies, on the borders of the Crossing. Then he nestled, and Bedient felt the hand he had taken, try to sense his own through the gathering cold…. It was very easy and beautiful—and so brief that Bedient's arm was not even tired.
An hour afterward, Falk came in for orders—and withdrew.
Bedient had merely nodded to him from the depths of contemplation…. At last, he heard the weeping of the house-servants. And there was one low wailing tone that startled him with the memory of the Sikh woman who had wept for old Gobind.
EIGHTH CHAPTER
THE MAN FROM THE PLEIAD
Bedient drew from Falk a few days afterward that the Captain had planned almost exactly as it happened. Since the beginnings of unrest in Equatoria, he had transferred his banking to New York; so that in the event of defeat in war, only the lands and hacienda would revert, upon the fall of the present government. Falk could not remember (and his services dated back fifteen years, at which time he left Surrey with the Captain) when the master did not speak of Bedient's coming.