"Assuredly."
"How can we induce Savrola to speak? He is incorruptible."
"There is another method."
"I tell you physical force is not to be thought of."
"There is another method."
"And that," said the President, "I directed you not to speak of again."
"Precisely," said the Secretary, and resumed his writing.
The garden into which Molara walked was one of the most beautiful and famous in a country where all vegetation attained luxuriant forms. The soil was fertile, the sun hot, and the rains plentiful. It displayed an attractive disorder. The Lauranians were no admirers of that peculiar taste which finds beauty in the exact arrangement of an equal number of small trees of symmetrical shape in mathematical designs, or in the creation of geometrical figures by means of narrow paths with box-hedges. They were an unenlightened people, and their gardens displayed a singular contempt for geometry and precision. Great blazes of colour arranged in pleasing contrasts were the lights, and cool green arbours the shades of their rural pictures. Their ideal of gardening was to make every plant grow as freely as if directed by nature, and to as high perfection as if cultivated by art. If the result was not artistic, it was at least beautiful.
The President, however, cared very little for flowers or their arrangement; he was, he said, too busy a man to have anything to do with the beauties of colour, harmony, or line. Neither the tints of the rose nor the smell of the jasmine awakened in him more than the rudimentary physical pleasures which are natural and involuntary. He liked to have a good flower garden, because it was the right thing to have, because it enabled him to take people there and talk to them personally on political matters, and because it was convenient for afternoon receptions. But he himself took no interest in it. The kitchen garden appealed to him more; his practical soul rejoiced more in an onion than an orchid.
He was full of thought after his conversation with Miguel, and turned down the shady path which led to the fountains with long, hasty strides. Things were looking desperate. It was, as Miguel had said, a question of time, unless,—unless Savrola were removed or discredited. He refrained from precisely formulating the idea that had taken possession of his mind. He had done many things in the rough days of the war when he was a struggling man, the memory of which was not pleasant. He remembered a brother officer, a rising man, the colonel of a regiment, who had been a formidable rival; at a critical moment he had withheld the supports, and left it to the enemy to remove one obstacle from his path. Then another tale came into his mind which also was not a pretty one, a tale of a destroyed treaty, and a broken truce; of men, who had surrendered to terms, shot against the wall of the fort they had held so long. He also recalled with annoyance the methods he had adopted to extract information from the captured spy; five years of busy life, of success and fortune, had not obscured the memory of the man's face as it writhed in suffering. But this new idea seemed the most odious of all. He was unscrupulous, but like many men in history or modern life, he had tried to put away a discreditable past. Henceforth, he had said when he obtained power, he would abandon such methods: they would no longer be necessary; and yet, here was the need already. Besides, Lucile was so beautiful; he loved her in his hard way for that alone; and she was such a consort, so tactful, so brilliant, that he admired and valued her from a purely official standpoint. If she ever knew, she would never forgive him. She never should know, but still he hated the idea.