A younger visitor was Bella Caceras, whose name has appeared in earlier chapters. Seated beside her on a couch in the little parlor this evening was Rosita Dartmoor, whose strong resemblance to her Peruvian mother was as marked as was her younger brother’s resemblance to his American father.
A dinner had preceded the social evening, and the occasion of the gathering was to celebrate Rosita’s fifteenth birthday. One who did not know how rapidly girls mature in these South American countries would have thought her several years older; indeed, in the United States she would readily have passed for a miss of eighteen or nineteen, and so would Bella Caceras, who was Rosita’s age. Both girls wore long skirts, and in Peru they were considered old enough to enter society. This winter would have witnessed their début, had it not been for the circumstances of the times preventing the social entertainments that for years had marked Lima and Callao as gay cities of the West Coast.
Peru, in this November of 1879, was a nation of mourning, a country plunged in despair. Eight months before she had taken up arms against Chile, to prevent the latter’s seizure of land to the south which was rich in nitrate of soda. Entering the contest with a well-equipped army and with a navy that was deemed by many the equal of the enemy’s, she had met a series of reverses that were disheartening, and in this early summer month—the seasons below the equator are the reverse of those to the north—it was evident that the country’s doom was sealed, and that any day a conquering army might move from the south and besiege the capital.
Fate had been unkind to the northern republic. One month after hostilities had commenced, the largest war-ship, the _Independencia_, had been lost on a reef near Iquique while in pursuit of a little Chilean gunboat that was hardly worthy the capture. In October, the _Huascar_, a turret-ship of great power, had been surrounded off Point Angamos, while steaming north, by nearly all the ships of the Chilean fleet and had been captured after a bitter engagement, but not until nearly one-half of her crew had been killed and she had been set on fire in several places.
It was during this engagement that Grau, admiral of the Peruvian navy, had been killed; and that is why Bella Caceras was in mourning, for he was her uncle. The loss of the _Huascar_ had cast a gloom over all Peru, and the despair was heightened a few weeks later by the news that the gunboat _Pilcomayo_ had been captured.