The Purple Land Part 28

After landing we put our small luggage into a fly and were driven to an hotel in Calle Lima, an out-of-the-way place kept by a German; but I knew the house to be a quiet, respectable one and very moderate in its charges.

About five o'clock in the afternoon we were together in the sitting-room on the first floor, looking down on the street from the window, when a well-appointed carriage with a gentleman and two young ladies in it drew up before the door.

"Oh, Richard," exclaimed Paquita in the greatest excitement, "it is Don Pantaleon Villaverde with his daughters, and they are getting out!"

"Who is Villaverde?" I asked.

"What, do you not know? He is a Judge of First Instance, and his daughters are my dearest friends. Is it not strange to meet them like this? Oh, I must see them to ask for _papa_ and _mamita!_" and here she began to cry.

The waiter came up with a card from the Senor Villaverde requesting an interview with the Senorita Peralta.

Demetria, who had been trying to soothe Paquita's intense excitement and infuse a little courage into her, was too much amazed to speak; and in another moment our visitors were in the room. Paquita started up tearful and trembling; then her two young friends, after staring at her for a few moments, delivered a screech of astonishment and rushed into her arms, and all three were locked together for some time in a triangular embrace.

When the excitement of this tempestuous meeting had spent itself, Senor Villaverde, who stood looking on with grave, impressive face, spoke to Demetria, telling her that his old friend, General Santa Coloma, had just informed him of her arrival in Buenos Ayres and of the hotel where she was staying. Probably she did not even know who he was, he said; he was her relation; his mother was a Peralta, a first cousin of her unhappy father, Colonel Peralta. He had come to see her with his daughters to invite her to make his house her home during her stay in Buenos Ayres. He also wished to help her with her affairs, which, his friend the General had informed him, were in some confusion. He had, he concluded, many influential friends in the sister city, who would be ready to a.s.sist him in arranging matters for her.

Demetria, recovering from the nervousness she had experienced on finding that Paquita's great friends were her visitors, thanked him warmly and accepted his offer of a home and a.s.sistance; then, with a quiet dignity and self-possession one would hardly expect from a girl coming amongst fashionable people for the first time in her life, she greeted her new-found relations and thanked them for their visit.

As they insisted on taking Demetria away with them at once, she left us to make her preparations, while Paquita remained conversing with her friends, having many questions to ask them. She was consumed with anxiety to know how her family, and especially her father, who made the domestic laws, now, after so many months, regarded her elopement and marriage with me. Her friends, however, either knew nothing or would not tell her what they knew.

Poor Demetria! she had, with no time given her for reflection, taken the wise course of at once accepting the offer of her influential and extremely dignified kinsman; but it was hard for her to leave her friends at such short notice, and when she came back prepared for her departure the separation tried her severely. With tears in her eyes she bade Paquita farewell, but when she took my hand in hers, for some time her trembling lips refused to speak. Overcoming her emotions by a great effort, she at length said, addressing her visitors, "For my escape from a sad and perilous position and for the pleasure of finding myself here amongst relations, I am indebted to this young friend who has been a brother to me."

Senor Villaverde listened and bowed towards me, but with no softening in his stern, calm face, while his cold grey eyes seemed to look straight through me at something beyond. His manner towards me made me feel a kind of despair, for how strong must have been his disapproval of my conduct in running off with his friend's daughter--how great his indignation against me, when it prevented him from bestowing one smile or one kind word on me to thank me for all I had done for his kinswoman!

Yet this was only the reflected indignation of my father-in-law.

We went down to the carriage to see them off, and then, finding myself for a moment by the side of one of the young ladies, I tried to find out something for myself. "Pray tell me, senorita," I said, "what you know about my father-in-law. If it is very bad, I promise you my wife shall not hear a word of it; but it is best that I should know the truth before meeting him."

A cloud came over her bright, expressive face, while she glanced anxiously at Paquita; then, bending towards me, she whispered, "Ah, my friend, he is implacable! I am so sorry, for Paquita's sake." And then, with a smile of irrepressible coquetry, she added, "And for yours."

The carriage drove away, and Demetria's eyes, looking back at me, were filled with tears, but in Senor Villaverde's eyes, also glancing back, there was an expression that boded ill for my future. His feeling was natural, perhaps, for he was the father of two very pretty girls.

Implacable, and I was now divided from him by no silver or brick-coloured sea! By returning I had made myself amenable to the laws I had broken by marrying a girl under age without her father's consent.

The person in England who runs away with a ward in Chancery is not a greater offender against the law than I was. It was now in his power to have me punished, to cast me into prison for an indefinite time, and if not to crush my spirit, he would at least be able to break the heart of his unhappy daughter. Those wild, troubled days in the Purple Land now seemed to my mind peaceful, happy days, and the bitter days with no pleasure in them were only now about to begin. Implacable!

Suddenly looking up, I found Paquita's violet eyes, full of sad questioning, fixed on my face.

"Tell me truly, Richard, what have you heard?" she asked.

I forced a smile, and, taking her hand, a.s.sured her that I had heard nothing to cause her any uneasiness. "Come," I said, "let us go in and prepare to leave town to-morrow. We will go back to the point we started from--your father's _estancia_, for the sooner this meeting you are thinking about so anxiously is over the better will it be for all of us."

APPENDIX

HISTORY OF THE BANDA ORIENTaL

The country, called in this work the Purple Land, was discovered by Magellan in the year 1500, and he called the hill, or mountain, which gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He described it as a hat-shaped mountain; and it is probable that, four centuries ago, the tall, conical hat, which is worn to this day by women in South Wales, was a common form in Spain and Portugal.

In due time settlements were made; but the colonists of those days loved gold and adventure above everything, and, finding neither in the Banda, they little esteemed it. For two centuries it was neglected by its white possessors, while the cattle they had imported continued to multiply, and, returning to a feral life, overran the country in amazing numbers.

The heroic period in South American history then pa.s.sed away. El Dorado, the Spaniard's New Jerusalem, has changed into a bank of malarious mist and a cloud of mosquitoes, Amazons, giants, pigmies.

"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders,"

when closely looked for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type which varied but little throughout the entire vast continent. Wanderers from the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink into flowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolation where the splendid empire of the Children of the Sun had so lately flourished. The acc.u.mulated treasures had been squandered. The cruel crusades of the Paulists against the Jesuit missions had ceased for the inhuman slave-hunters had utterly destroyed the smiling gardens in the wilderness. A remnant of the escaped converts had gone back to a wild life in the woods, and the Fathers, who had done their Master's work so well, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken hearts.

Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion was complete, Spain woke up to the fact that in the temperate part of the continent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new bright little Spain worth cultivating. About the same time, Portugal discovered that the acquisition of this pretty country, with its lovely Lusitanian climate, would nicely round off her vast possessions on the south side.

Forthwith these two great colonising powers fell to fighting over the Banda, where there were no temples of beaten gold, or mythical races of men, or fountains of everlasting youth. The quarrel might have continued to the end of time, so languidly was it conducted by both parties, had not great events come to swallow up the little ones.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English invasion burst like a sudden terrible thunderstorm on the country. Montevideo on the east and Buenos Ayres on the west side of the sea-like river were captured and lost again. The storm was soon over, but it had the effect of precipitating the revolution of 1810, which presently ended in the loss to Spain of all her American possessions. These changes brought only fresh wars and calamities to the long-suffering Banda. The ancient feud between Spain and Portugal descended to the new Brazilian Empire and the new Argentine Confederation, and these claimants contended for the country until 1828, when they finally agreed to let it govern itself in its own fashion. After thus acquiring its independence, the little Belgium of the New World cast off its pretty but hated appellation of Cisplatina and resumed its old joyous name of Banda Oriental. With light hearts the people then proceeded to divide themselves into two political parties--Whites and Reds. Endless struggles for mastery ensued, in which the Argentines and Brazilians, forgetting their solemn compact, were for ever taking sides. But of these wars of crows and pies it would be idle to say more, since, after going on for three-quarters of a century, they are not wholly ended yet. The rambles and adventures described in the book take us back to the late 'sixties or early 'seventies of the last century, when the country was still in the condition in which it had remained since the colonial days, when the ten years' siege of Montevideo was not yet a remote event, and many of the people one met had had a part in it.