“But it is now early. I have to rise early to a special Mass at our friends of Santa Alba yonder. I shall have but a short watch below. Come, then, Harker mio, to coffee with me at seven, at the palacio; you will have thought, then, what we may do together. So, then, I shall expect you.”
He took Sard’s hands and shook them; then he stood back, as though stepping away from the life that he enjoyed into the loneliness of monarchy. Majesty seemed to come upon him like a garment; for the purple, like other habits, may be assumed. His guards clicked, saluted, and fell in. They were all men from Encarnacion, from the old Encinitas estate, where they showed as relics a hoof of Alvarado’s horse, set in silver, the sword of Vasco Nuñez, and a piece of the script of the Gospel of St. John.
They passed down the marble stairs, uttering the cries which Sard had heard as they came up.
“They cheer the dead, Señor,” the waiter explained, “they cheer the Heroic Five and Señora Jennings and the Pobrecita, whose images they pass.”
The bells chimed for one in the morning: all shops and cafés in the Plaza closed. The waiters came from within, dressed in their old coats, with turned-up collars; their feet passed away, some to the old town, some to the north, till the town was almost silent. A cat or two went stealthily or swiftly across the Plaza. A little brown owl flew across crying a note that was querulous and sad. Out in the harbour, some watchman whose clock was slow made two bells.
Sard stayed in his chair, wondering.
He had no wish to sleep: he only wanted a new direction for his life. He was going to strike at life until he found one. “I will stay here,” he thought, “till I can see what I can do.”
He had thought of many ways of life as desirable, after he had once held command at sea. Now his old desire of command was gone. He wanted no more of the sea, but to come ashore and begin anew, without any dreams to mislead him, nothing but the work to do and the honour to earn from it. Why should he not come ashore, to bear a hand under Don Manuel? Great things were being done there: a great state was rising.
Thinking over all this, he had the fancy that someone, or rather not someone, something, was watching him from the central House of Sorrow. It became more than fancy with him that something evil, like a vast black cat, was watching him there. He turned to the house, to face it, whatever it was, but could see nothing there, save the green verandah, the windows blank and sightless, the walls morphewed with scaling. Then the central door opened, a man came out, locked the door behind him and then stood surveying the Plaza. As Sard was the only person there, he stared at Sard, who stared back. He was a shortish, very strongly made man, with the rangey boss movement of a young bull on pasture.
There was something dangerous about him. He tossed his head back, which flashed his earrings and emphasised the raffish sideways cock of his hat. There was something familiar about him: he reminded Sard of that “flash townee,” Sumecta, who had sat with Mr. Wiskey at the boxing-match.