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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
had evolved from the lecture of the letters a definite conviction
that there was a silver mine in the Sulaco province of the Republic of
Costaguana, where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great
many years before. There was also connected closely with that mine a
thing called the "iniquitous Gould Concession," apparently written on
a paper which his father desired ardently to "tear and fling into the
faces" of presidents, members of judicature, and ministers of State.
And this desire persisted, though the names of these people, he noticed,
seldom remained the same for a whole year together.
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