“You are saying she ees shock?” said Enriquez, gravely.
I felt I could not conscientiously say that she was shocked, and he saw my hesitation. “Then she have jealousy of the senoritas,” he observed, with insufferable complacency. “You observe! I have already said. It is ever so.”
I could stand it no longer. “Look here, Harry,” I said, “if you must know it, she looks upon you as an acrobat—a paid performer.”
“Ah!”—his black eyes sparkled—“the torero, the man who fights the bull, he is also an acrobat.”
“Yes; but she thinks you a clown!—a GRACIOSO DE TEATRO—there!”
“Then I have make her laugh?” he said coolly.
I don't think he had; but I shrugged my shoulders.
“BUENO!” he said cheerfully. “Lofe, he begin with a laugh, he make feenish with a sigh.”
I turned to look at him in the moonlight. His face presented its habitual Spanish gravity—a gravity that was almost ironical. His small black eyes had their characteristic irresponsible audacity—the irresponsibility of the vivacious young animal. It could not be possible that he was really touched with the placid frigidities of Miss Mannersley. I remembered his equally elastic gallantries with Miss Pinkey Smith, a blonde Western belle, from which both had harmlessly rebounded. As we walked on slowly I continued more persuasively: “Of course this is only your nonsense; but don't you see, Miss Mannersley thinks it all in earnest and really your nature?” I hesitated, for it suddenly struck me that it WAS really his nature. “And—hang it all!—you don't want her to believe you a common buffoon., or some intoxicated muchacho.”
“Intoxicated?” repeated Enriquez, with exasperating languishment. “Yes; that is the word that shall express itself. My friend, you have made a shot in the center—you have ring the bell every time! It is intoxication—but not of aguardiente. Look! I have long time an ancestor of whom is a pretty story. One day in church he have seen a young girl—a mere peasant girl—pass to the confessional. He look her in her eye, he stagger”—here Enriquez wobbled pantomimically into the road—“he fall!”—he would have suited the action to the word if I had not firmly held him up. “They have taken him home, where he have remain without his clothes, and have dance and sing. But it was the drunkenness of lofe. And, look you, thees village girl was a nothing, not even pretty. The name of my ancestor was—”