People who didn’t know Cæsar intimately used to ask one another: “What purpose could Moncada have had in getting elected Deputy? He never speaks, he takes no part in the big debates.”
His name appeared from time to time on some committee about Treasury affairs; but that was all.
His life was completely veiled; he was not seen at first nights, or in salons, or on the promenade; he was a man apparently forgotten, lost to Madrid life. Sometimes on coming out of the Chamber he would see Amparito in an automobile; she would look for him with her eyes, and smile; he would take his hat off ostentatiously, with a low bow.
Among a very small number of persons Cæsar had the reputation of an intelligent and dangerous man. They suspected him of great personal ambition. It would not have been logical to think that this cold unexpansive man was, in his heart, a patriot who felt Spain’s decadence deeply and was seeking the means to revive her.
“No pleasures, no middle-class satisfactions,” he thought; “but to live for a patriotic ideal, to shove Spain forward, and to form with the flesh of one’s native land a great statue which should be her historic monument.”
That was his plan. In Congress Cæsar kept silence; but he talked in the corridors, and his ironic, cold, dispassionate comments began to be quoted.
He had formed relations with the Minister of the Treasury, a man who passed for famous and was a mediocrity, passed for honourable and was a rogue. Cæsar was much in his company.
The famous financier realized that Moncada knew far more than he did about monetary questions, and among his friends he admitted it; but he gave them to understand that Cæsar was only a theorist, incapable of quick decision and action.
Cæsar’s friendship was a convenience to the Minister, and the Minister’s to Cæsar. In his heart the Minister hated Cæsar, and Cæsar felt a deep contempt for the famous financier.
Nobody seeing them in a carriage talking affectionately together could have imagined that there existed such an amount of hatred and hostility between them.