"Santiago!" whispered Concha. "Do not go down to the ship. Take me for a walk. I have much to say."
Santiago, who had not been asked to form one of the escort upon the return of the Russians to the Juno for the night, felt injured and sulky and deigned no reply.
"If you do not, I'll not braid your hair to-mor-row," said his sister, giving his arm a little shake; and he succumbed. The luxuriant tresses of the male Arguellos were combed and braided and tied with a ribbon every morning by the women of the family, and Concha's fingers were the gentlest and deftest. And Concha and Santiago were more inti-mate than even the rest of that united family. They had studied and read together, were equally dis-satisfied with their narrow existence, ambitious for a wider experience. Santiago consoled himself with cards and training roosters for battle, and otherwise as a man may. He was but fifteen, this haughty, severe-looking young hidalgo, but while in some re-spects many years older than his sister, in others he was younger, for he possessed none of her illuminating instinct.
She led him through a postern gate, round the first of the dunes, and they were alone in a waste of sand. She demanded abruptly:
"What do you think of our illustrious visitor?"
"I like him. He would wring your neck if you got in his way, but has a kind heart for those that call him master. I like that sort of a man. I wish he would take me away with him."
"He shall--one of these days. Santiago mio, let me whisper--" She pulled his ear down to her lips. "He will marry me. I feel it. I know it.
He has talked to me the whole day. He has told me grave secrets. Not even to you would I reveal them. So many have loved me--why should not he? I shall live in St. Petersburg, and see all Europe!--thousands of people--Dios mio! Dios mio!"
"Indeed!" Santiago, still unamiable, responded to this confidence with a sneer. "You aspire very high for a little girl of the wilderness, without for-tune, and only half a coat-of-arms, so to speak. Do you know that this Rezanov--Dr. Langsdorff has told us all about him--is a great noble, one of the ten barons of Russia, and a Chamberlain in accord-ance with a decree of Peter the Great that court titles should be bestowed as a reward for distin-guished services alone? He got a fortune in his youth by marriage with a daughter of Shelikov--that Siberian who founded the Russian colonies in America. The wife died almost immediately, but the Baron's influence remained with Shelikov--for his influence at court was even greater--and after the older man's death, with his mother-in-law, who is uncommonly clever. Shelikov's schemes were but little sketches beside Rezanov's, who from merely a courtier and a gay blood about town developed into a great man of business, with an ambition to corre-spond. It was he who got the Imperial ukase that gave the Russian-American Company its power to squeeze all the other fur hunters and traders out of the northeast, and made Rezanov and everybody belonging to it so rich your head would swim if I told you the number of doubloons they spend in a year. Nobody has ever been so clever at managing those old beasts of autocrats as he. They think him merely the accomplished courtier, a brilliant dilet-tante, a condescending patron of art and letters, a devotee of pleasure, and all the time he is pulling their befuddled old brains about to suit himself.
