The houses were about forty yards away, under brilliant electric light. Sard saw a big, muscular priest walk with the air of a king up the steps of the central house. He turned at the door to survey the Plaza below him. Even at that distance his attitude and gesture gave the idea of domination. He seemed to dilate there. He looked like a lion conscious of supremacy. His pose seemed to say, “You canaille exist and die and rot, but I am above these things.”
There was something familiar in the man’s presence, strange as it was. That pride and power of bearing seemed familiar to Sard: he felt that he had seen it before. As the priest entered the house, Sard thought that he reminded him of Father Garsinton, who had begged a passage in the Pathfinder.
“He was like that Father Garsinton,” he thought. “And it is strange. . . . Sailors would say that it was the sky-pilot who brought her on the Snappers. I did not hear about Garsinton at the office. Waycock never mentioned him, though of course he would not concern Waycock in any way.”
“Tiene,” he said to the waiter, “that priest who entered, do you know his name?”
“No, Señor; nor himself. A poor sort of people live in those houses. Without the priest they would be poor indeed. ‘They have but birth and death,’ as we say; with a priest, these will suffice a man.”
“Do you know of any people called Garsinton in that house?”
“I know no one there, Señor.”
“After all,” Sard thought to himself, “it can hardly be Garsinton. He will be coming here in the Recalde with the rest on a Consul’s order. He can hardly be here yet. Even if it were Garsinton, his story of the wreck would probably be worthless. I suppose Pompey or Dorney will lose his ticket over this wreck, but the fault will be with myself and my dreams.”
He ordered more coffee. He talked to the waiter about events in Santa Barbara. The man said, as Waycock had said, that there was a little rum-smuggling from the western coast, in that immensely remote part known as “beyond Caliente.” He said that “things” were settled now in Santa Barbara. “Revolution, Señor,” he said, “what is it? A grand name for bad manners. What overcomes all revolution? Art. And art Don Manuel brings here. Regard the cathedral . . . the western front not faultless, but what spirit . . . . Then, too, the opera. I, a poor man, have my fill of opera, I sing in opera . . . in certain choruses. . . . All this Don Manuel makes possible. Great things are shared by all here; this gives security.”
Sard presently rose, thinking that he would take a turn about the Plaza and then to bed. It seemed to him that to work in a city like that, where great things were shared by all, would be happier than working against the sea, which shares nothing, permits little and surely takes all in the end. “I must make a new start somewhere,” he said, “on a new foundation since the old has come to grief. Since the old ends here, the new had better begin here.”