He watched the sack to its completion. He could tell from the looks on people’s faces what their politics were, and his heart went out to the under dogs, the Whites, who were outnumbered there, and dared not show all that they felt. “Rosa is a White,” he thought, “I’ll get her to tell me what is going on.”
* * * * * * *
He was just about to lunch at his hotel, when a negro waiter, who seemed impressed by something, came to tell him, chiefly by signs, that he was wanted in the foyer. Wondering what he could have done wrong, or what could cause the negro’s manner, he went out to the foyer, where a footman, in a green and white livery, very politely told him, in Spanish and pantomime, that there was something very important for him, seemingly outside the doors. Looking as the footman’s signs directed, he saw an old carriage, in which two ladies sat, beneath green parasols. “Rosa,” he thought, “Rosa and her mother.”
One of the ladies was old, with white hair; she sat upright with an absorbed look as though she were praying. The other was Rosa, but changed indeed from the Rosa of the Foliats; this creature was painted into a kind of purple mask with high lights of white powder on her nose. Over her eyes, arches of plainly false eyebrows had been put in with the brow-stick. Great gold ear-rings, enclosing green stones, hung from her ears, her mouth was scarlet. He had never seen a more raddled-looking baggage, yet this was the Rosa of four months before, who had galloped hatless astraddle before breakfast with him. Both ladies turned to him at once with an air which made him feel ashamed that he had no hat to take off to them and very thankful that he hadn’t. The old lady was more subtly made up than her daughter, but even she seemed to wear a mask or glaze of enamel. “I suppose it’s the fashion here,” he thought.
Glaze or not, they were plainly great ladies here, conferring incredible honour upon the hotel. Half the staff was there to attend their pleasure already. The Señora held her hand for Hi to kiss (his good angel guarded him from shaking it), she bade him welcome in English. He had not seen her since he was a little child, but he remembered her clearly, as Donna Emilia, a lady who held herself very straight and was always praying. “She needed not to have made up,” Hi thought. “There is something very beautiful in her face.”
“Welcome,” she said; “your father has been a good friend to us. You and yours have been good friends to Rosa. I hope that all your household was well when you left England. Let me see you, Highworth. You are liker your mother than your father. But my eyes are failing, I cannot be sure of this. Come now, with us, will you, to spend some hours at our house?”
“I should love to,” Hi said.
“Go and get your hat, then, and put it on,” Rosa said. “Never, never come out without a hat again. Put it on at once, or this sun will skin you. It doesn’t come through a watery envelope as it does in England. That is your vanity, wanting to look brown. You wouldn’t look brown, you’d crack, and all your poor little brains would pop.”
They drove down the water-front, past the Viceroy’s garden, to the gate. Several houses on the water-front were displaying the scarlet banners, starred with gold, which Lopez had declared to be the national flag.
“Is there to be some sort of celebration?” Hi asked.