`Has it come, then, ever beloved of my heart?' she whispered. `Is it true?'
`No,' said Nostromo, looking away carelessly. `It was a lie. I love thee as much as ever.'
`Is that true?' she cooed, joyously, her cheeks still wet with tears.
`It is true.'
`True on the life?'
`As true as that; but thou must not ask me to swear it on the Madonna that stands in thy room.' And the Capataz laughed a little in response to the grins of the crowd.
She pouted--very pretty--a little uneasy.
`No, I will not ask for that. I can see love in your eyes.' She laid her hand on his knee. `Why are you trembling like this? From love?' she continued, while the cavernous thundering of the gombo went on without a pause. `But if you love her as much as that, you must give your Paquita a gold-mounted rosary of beads for the neck of her Madonna.'
`No,' said Nostromo, looking into her uplifted, begging eyes, which suddenly turned stony with surprise.
`No? Then what else will your worship give me on the day of the fiesta?'
she asked, angrily; `so as not to shame me before all these people.'
`There is no shame for thee in getting nothing from thy lover for once.'
`True! The shame is your worship's--my poor lover's,' she flared up, sarcastically.
Laughs were heard at her anger, at her retort. What an audacious spitfire she was! The people aware of this scene were calling out urgently to others in the crowd. The circle round the silver-grey mare narrowed slowly.
The girl went off a pace or two, confronting the mocking curiosity of the eyes, then flung back to the stirrup, tiptoeing, her enraged face turned up to Nostromo with a pair of blazing eyes. He bent low to her in the saddle.
`Juan,' she hissed, `I could stab thee to the heart!'
The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went round.
`A knife!' he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the shoulder.
Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo's hand and bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him.
`Stand on my foot,' he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.
`No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame,' he said. `You shall have your present; and so that everyone should know who is your lover today, you may cut all the silver buttons off my coat.'
There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.
The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly towards the harbour. The Juno was just then swinging round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag ran up on the improvised flagstaff erected in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbour entrance.
Half a battery of field guns had been hurried over there from the Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutes for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first official visit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another `historic occasion'. Next time when the `Hope of honest men' was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say:
`It was history--history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir.'
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to another, which could not be classed either as `history' or as `a 'mistake' in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another word for it.
`Sir,' he used to say afterwards, `that was no mistake. It was a fatality.
A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that poor fellow of mine was right in it--right in the middle of it! A fatality, if ever there was one--and to my mind he has never been the same man since.'
