The Tears of Love

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1894-1

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1894“It’s no use, Mama. I cannot sew like you. I shall have to find some sort of employment.”

The woman in the bed gave a little cry.

“No, Cañuela. I cannot have you going out to work. Besides what could you do?”

Cañuela smiled.

“You forget, Mama, that I can speak Spanish, Portuguese and a little Italian. I feel quite certain that I could be a secretary to a businessman.”

Her mother gave another cry of horror.

“It’s impossible! What would your Papa have said?”

Cañuela crossed the room to sit down on a chair beside her mother’s bed.

She put out her hand to lay it gently on the delicate white fingers on top of the sheet.

“Let’s talk about this sensibly,” she suggested in her soft voice.

“I am sure,” her mother said, “I could do at least an hour’s sewing a day.”

“You must do what the doctor told you to do,” Cañuela replied, “and that is nothing.”

Mrs. Arlington gave a deep sigh.

“Is it really impossible to manage on what we have?” she asked in a low tone.

“I am afraid so,” Cañuela answered quietly.

“It’s all my fault,” Mrs. Arlington replied. “Those medicines are so expensive and the extra food. Surely I don’t need so many eggs or so much milk?”

She sighed again.

“I cannot bear to think of you working. There are men who will notice you and you are far too lovely, my dearest.”

She spoke the truth for Cañuela was indeed arrestingly beautiful.

Her features were almost perfect. She had a straight, aristocratic little nose and a heart-shaped face, but when people first saw her they noticed only her enormous grey-green eyes.

Her hair was a strange mixture of gold with touches of red, her lashes were long and dark and her mother was well aware that wherever Cañuela went men were attracted by her.

Ever since they had come back to England, Mrs. Arlington’s health had become progressively worse.

It stemmed not only from her desperate unhappiness over the loss of her husband and the tragedy and adverse publicity that had surrounded his death. But also she and her daughter had been left with practically no money at all.

They had sold the few valuable possessions they had and for the last six months had been subsisting on what money Mrs. Arlington could earn by her exquisite embroidery.

There was a shop in Bond Street that would take as many of the embroidered satin and silk underclothes that she could make.

In fact the demand was far greater than she was able to supply.

While Cañuela could sew the seams, cut out the garments and stitch on the lace, she could not embroider in the same delicate manner as her mother.

What was more she took much longer over it and they were so behind with the orders that the shop was becoming disagreeable.

It seemed to Cañuela that the list of expensive foodstuffs and medicines that her mother required increased week by week.

At the same time Mrs. Arlington appeared to be growing weaker.

She was very thin, she coughed incessantly and there was a flush on her cheeks that looked unnatural against the whiteness of her skin.

“Do you think,” Mrs. Arlington said hesitatingly after a moment, “that people in – England will really require secretaries who can – speak – Spanish?”

“There must be someone somewhere,” Cañuela replied. “I saw in the newspaper the other day that this country is buying more meat from Argentina than ever before.”

She made an expressive gesture before she continued,

“That means that someone here is making contracts, someone is writing to the estancieros in Argentina and we know that most of them can only speak Spanish.”

Mrs. Arlington did not answer for a moment and then she said in a low voice,

“Your father had made such plans for you when you grew up. He always knew that you would be beautiful and he saved so that we could give you a magnificent coming-out ball, elegant gowns and the chance to meet all the eligible bachelors available.”

“Papa at least would have enjoyed the parties,” Cañuela said with a little smile.

“And you would have enjoyed them too,” her mother answered. “What woman does not wish to be admired, fêted and flattered?”

Cañuela was silent.

Then she said without any bitterness in her voice,

“It’s no use crying over spilt milk, as my English Governess used to say.”

“Poor Miss Johnson, I wonder what happened to her?” Mrs. Arlington remarked. “But the person I often think about, Cañuela, is Maria. She was such a dear old woman and she loved us all so much.”

“She worshipped Papa,” Cañuela sighed. “I can remember now all the Italian lullabies she sang to me when I was a baby and she was still singing them when we went back to Buenos Aires.”

She saw the distress on her mother’s face and added quickly,

“We will not talk about it if you would rather not, Mama.”

“I think about it all the time,” Mrs. Arlington said, “of the last years when your Papa was doing so well, when everybody said that for his next post he would be given an Embassy in Europe – and then – ”

She stopped suddenly and closed her eyes so that her daughter would not see the tears in them.

“Then it happened!” Cañuela said in a low voice, “and, whatever anyone else may have said, you and I both know that Papa was innocent!”

“Of course he was innocent,” Mrs. Arlington exclaimed. “Do you really imagine that he would ever have done such a thing?”

She drew a deep breath and her voice was strong as she went on,

“He not only loved England he also loved Argentina. He always said that the country was in his blood and Buenos Aires meant home to him as much as London.”

“I remember Papa saying that,” Cañuela agreed. “He used to say too that when he was away from Argentina he would dream of the Rio de la Plata, the campus and the people who were so warm and friendly towards him.”

“Until the end,” Mrs. Arlington murmured.

Cañuela rose to her feet and walked across the room.

“I will never forgive the Argentines for the way they behaved,” she said. “I hate them! Do you hear me, Mama? I hate them! Just as I hate those so-called friends of his in the British Embassy who did not stand by him when things went wrong.”

“They could not help themselves,” Mrs. Arlington said. “Once a report had been sent to England, your father had to come home to face an enquiry.”

“And what did the Foreign Office expect to discover?” Cañuela asked.

“If only the map had not been missing,” Mrs. Arlington said beneath her breath. “That is what was so damaging. On board ship your father would walk up and down the cabin night after night saying to me, ‘where could it be? What could have happened to it?’”

There was so much distress in her mother’s voice that Cañuela went back to the bed to take both her mother’s hands in hers.

“Don’t torture yourself, Mama. That is something we shall never know and at least Papa died a hero.”

Mrs. Arlington did not reply and both mother and daughter were thinking the same thing.

Lionel Arlington had dived overboard to save a little girl who had fallen into the sea.

He brought her safely to a boat that had been lowered from the ship to pick them up.

Then inexplicably, when he should have been helped aboard, he vanished beneath the waves and was never seen again.

He was a strong swimmer and the sea was not particularly rough.

It was a mystery that, having brought the child to safety, he should then have lost his own life, unless – he had wished to do so.

The newspapers had made the very most of it.

The headlines screamed,

“DIPLOMAT UNDER SUSPICION DIES LIKE A HERO.”

“TRAITOR OR HERO?”

There had been endless articles beginning,

“Has there been a tragic mistake in suspecting one of our most brilliant Diplomats?”

Through the kindness of the Captain of the ship that had brought Mrs. Arlington and Cañuela back to England, they had managed to evade the hordes of reporters waiting for them on the quayside.

They slipped ashore without being noticed.

Then they had vanished.

The Press had tried to find them but without avail.

No one suspected that the quiet Mrs. ‘Gray’, who took a bedsitting room for herself and her daughter in a cheap boarding house in Bloomsbury was the much sought after widow of the dead Diplomat who had occupied the front pages of the newspapers for nearly a week.

No one could have expected such an international storm over an attempt by the United States of America early in 1892 to draw Argentina into the orbit of North American influence.

In March of that year, the British Minister in Buenos Aires had sent a report to the Marquis of Salisbury in England ‘in the strictest confidence’.

It was rumoured, he said, that a Mr. Pitkin had made an offer to supply the Argentinian Government with silver up to the sum of one hundred million dollars.

Before a reply could be received the British Minister went on leave and left Lionel Arlington, as Chargé d’Affaires, with this problem on his hands.

He became so worried about the American-Argentinian negotiations that he sent off the longest ciphered telegram in the history of the British Embassy.

But while in London Statesmen considered the situation in Argentina, where it was impossible to keep a secret, a seething controversy arose, all the fiercer and bitter because it was unofficial.

In London The Times published a brief account of American attempts to obtain a Military base on the River Plate.

This swept aside the secrecy and caused the American Minister to issue a public statement that the assertion was untrue.

The French Minister, however, was satisfied that these discussions had taken place and both he and the Minister of Uruguay agreed that the Americans were endeavouring to buy a Naval base either from Argentina or from Uruguay.

It was at this moment that a minor official, Janson Mandel, in the British Embassy, supported by a dissident Argentinian, sent a secret and confidential report to London.

Lionel Arlington, they alleged, was personally intriguing with the Americans.

It was totally and complete untrue.

The report was activated by jealousy and a personal vendetta as the man in question had insulted Mrs. Arlington at a ball with his attentions and had been knocked down and humiliated by her husband.

The accusations might have been ignored by the Foreign Office because the spectre, so alarming to the British of an American-Argentina alliance, in fact soon disappeared and the Americans embarked on a tariff war.

This provoked the Argentine Government to lay an absolute prohibition on American petroleum, timber and machinery.

Unfortunately Lionel Arlington’s enemies, who should then have been forced to let the whole matter drop, discovered that a secret and highly important plan of the harbour defences of Buenos Aires was missing from the British Embassy.

It had last been seen in Arlington’s hands, which he freely admitted.

But, when asked to produce the map, it had apparently vanished!

In the circumstances there was nothing that the Marquis of Salisbury could do but recall Lionel Arlington to London for an enquiry into what had occurred.

No one knew who gave the story to the Argentine newspapers, but it was not difficult to guess the informer’s name.

Buenos Aires was at any time prepared to attack foreigners in their midst even though the money they invested in Argentina was of great consequence to the country.

For a few weeks another ‘get rid of the foreigners’ wave struck the City and resulted in a certain amount of violent rioting amongst the members of the Union Civica Radical.

Arlington’s name was bandied about as if he was a traitor rather than a man who had given many years of his life to diplomatic relations between his own country and Argentina.

Sensitive, highly cultured, a man of great personality and integrity, he was shattered by the mere idea that anyone could imagine he could have behaved in such a manner.

As they sailed for home, sixteen-year-old Cañuela thought that her father had become an old man overnight.

Now looking at her mother lying back against her pillows with so much of her beauty destroyed by suffering and illness, Cañuela told herself that not only had her father died at sea two years ago but a part of her mother had died aa well.