“This,” she replied, blushing. “Suddenly he looked up and in my own tongue asked me of what colour were my eyes. I answered that it depended upon the light in which they might be seen.
“‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘They are always vi-o-let, whether the curtain is drawn or no.’ Now, physician Adams, tell me what is this colour vi-o-let?”
“That of a little wild flower which grows in the West in the spring, O Maqueda—a very beautiful and sweet-scented flower which is dark blue like your eyes.”
“Indeed, Physician,” she said. “Well, I do not know this flower, but what of that? Your friend will live and be sane. A dying man does not trouble about the colour of a lady’s eyes, and one who is mad does not give that colour right.”
“Are you glad, O Child of Kings?” I asked.
“Of course,” she answered, “seeing that I am told that this captain alone can handle the firestuffs which you have brought with you, and, therefore, that it is necessary to me that he should not die.”
“I understand,” I replied. “Let us pray that we may keep him alive. But there are many kinds of firestuffs, O Maqueda, and of one of them which chances to give out violet flames I am not sure that my friend is master. Yet in this country it may be the most dangerous of all.”
Now when she heard these words the Child of Kings looked me up and down angrily. Then suddenly she laughed a little in a kind of silent way that is peculiar to her, and, without saying anything, beckoned to her ladies and left the place.
“Very variegated thing, woman, sir,” remarked Quick, who was watching. (I think he meant to say “variable.”) “This one, for instance, comes up that passage like a tired horse—shuffle, shuffle, shuffle—for I could hear the heels of her slippers on the floor. But now she goes out like a buck seeking its mate—head in air and hoof lifted. How do you explain it, Doctor?”
“You had better ask the lady herself, Quick. Did the Captain take that soup she brought him?”