The bull did not drop at once, and there was no applause. He stood as if lost in thought for a few moments, and the espada was forgotten; he had failed. Then the bull turned, wavered, sank slowly to earth. Another door flew open and in rushed a team of four mules abreast, jingling with gala bells. The bull was dragged out at their tails, and his trail of blood covered with fresh sand.
Catalina rose and bent over her duenna. “We will go now, señora,” she said. “But you will remain, of course. I shall be well taken care of.”
The Señora Villéna looked up with polite amazement. “You go? Are you ill, dear señorita? It has only begun. There are many more bulls to kill.”
“I have had enough to last me for the rest of my life. Hasta luego.”
It was not at every bull-fight that the señora sat in a box, and she settled back in her conspicuous seat thankful that the very bourgeois Señor Moulton had accompanied her singular charge.
As they were leaving the box Catalina saw that another picador had entered and stood precisely as his predecessor had done, with the profile of his blindfolded horse towards the door of the toril. Fascinated, she stood rooted to the spot, some deep, savage lust slowly awakening. Again the door of the toril was cautiously opened; again a bull, as if he had been rehearsed for the part, rushed straight at the helpless horse and buried his horns in his side. Catalina fancied she could hear the rip of the hide. But this bull was more powerful than the other. He lifted horse and rider on his horns, and the picador, amid the belated enthusiasm of the multitude, leaped like a monkey over the wall as the torn horse was tossed and fell cracking to the ground.
“Well,” said Over, “have you had enough? They say, you know, that the horror soon passes and the fascination grows.”
“I am glad to know it was not my Indian blood. I can now understand the fascination, but I shall never come again, all the same.”
“We are none of us so far from savagery—Miss Shore, Mrs. Rothe.”
They were in the passage behind the boxes, and Mrs. Rothe, who was pallid with disgust and delighted to express herself to a sympathetic woman—her young husband had sulkily torn himself from the ring—walked out with Catalina anathematizing the Spanish race. As they emerged, Mr. Moulton, green and very silent, disappeared. When he returned he was still pale, but normal once more, and after a speech of five minutes’ duration, in which, ignoring the finer flowers of his working vocabulary, he consigned Spain to eternal perdition—Catalina had driven off with Mrs. Rothe—he was quite restored, and celebrated his recovery by a long pull at a wine-skin.