Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/453

Rh San Martin looked coldly on, evidently pre-occupied with thoughts of a much more serious nature. At one he called his aide-de-camp, Guido, to him, and said:—

"Let us go; I cannot stand this riot." Bolívar had already taken leave of him; a chamberlain showed them out by a private door, and accompanied them to the landing place. An hour afterwards the Macedonia was under way.

The next day San Martin rose early and was silent and pre-occupied. After breakfast, as he was walking the deck, he exclaimed:—

"The Liberator has been too quick for us."

On reaching Callao he commissioned General Cruz to write to O'Higgins:—

"The Liberator is not the man we took him to be;" words which are a compendium of the results of the interview. Of what passed between them no account was published, but at that time there were only two questions which could be discussed between them: the conclusion of the war, and the political organization of the new States.

What occurred at the famous conference at Tilsit is as well known as though all the world had been there to listen; the interview at Guayaquil is still more easy to reproduce, illuminated as the subject is by later disclosures from the pen of San Martin himself.

The unsteady glance and ill-concealed vanity of Bolívar produced repulsion in San Martin, who read his character at once, but Bolívar, full of himself, failed to penetrate the calm exterior of San Martin; he learned nothing of his ideas, and looked upon him as one who owed his victories to fortune more than to genius.

Bolívar had in his head a confused plan for the consolidation of America, in which everything was to hinge upon his own personality. San Martin, who had no personal ambition, said of him:—

"His feats of arms entitle him to be considered the most extraordinary character that South America has produced; of a constancy to which difficulties only add strength."