 force and precision to any mere civilian his
titles to a sum of 10,000 dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed
upon a gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould knew that
very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for better times. But to be
robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his
imagination. Mr. Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious and
honourable character: he attached too much importance to form. It is a failing
common to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There was for him in
that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock,
attacked his vigorous physique. »It will end by killing me,« he used to affirm
many times a day. And, in fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever,
from liver pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything
else. The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the profound
subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould's letters to his fourteen-year-old boy
Charles, then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of
practically nothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, the
persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition
of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from every
point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the
apparently eternal character of that curse. For the Concession had been granted
to him and his descendants for ever. He implored his son never to return to
Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was
tainted by the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to
forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in Europe. And each
letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in that
cavern of thieves, intriguers, and brigands.
    To be told repeatedly that one's future is blighted because of the
possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a matter of prime
importance as to its main statement; but in its form it is calculated to excite
a certain amount of wonder and attention. In course of time the boy, at first
only puzzled by the angry jeremiads, but rather sorry for his dad, began to turn
the matter over in his mind in such moments as he could spare from play and
study. In about a year he
