Their bags, put off, the rapid incomprehensible speech of the guard, left them, with the train moving doubtfully on, at Cobra. It was, on examination, more dismal than, from the detachment of the compartment, they had realized. The usual baked ground, the dusty underbrush, the blank façades of the low buildings that faced them from either side of the tracks, had—in addition to a supreme ugliness—an indefinably threatening air. The rawness, the machetes hanging about the booted heels of soiled idlers, the presence everywhere of negroes with an unrestrained curiosity in Lee and his companion, filled him with an instinctive antagonism. “Do you think that can be the hotel?” he asked, indicating a long plaster building with a shallow upper porch supported on iron-footed wooden columns. Above its closely-shuttered windows, in letters faded and blistered by the sun, reached the description, “Hotel de Cobra.”
“We can't stay there,” he continued decidedly; “I'll send for Daniel at once.”
Without available help he carried their bags to the entrance of the hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable of understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see Daniel Randon immediately. The proprietor assented, and urged them up a stair. “I won't have you wait out here,” Lee told Savina; “it will be only for an hour or so.” The room into which they were ushered had, at least, the advantage of bareness: there was a wardrobe of mahogany leaning precariously forward, a double bed deeply sagged with a grey-white covering, a wash stand and tin basin and pitcher, and some short sturdy rush-bottomed chairs.
Its principal feature, however, was the blue paint that covered the walls, a blue of a particularly insistent shade which, in the solidity of its expanse, seemed to make all the enclosed space and objects livid. The tall shutters on one side, Lee discovered, opened on the upper porch and a prospect of the tracks beyond. “If I stayed here a night I'd be raving,” Savina declared. “Lee, such a color! And the place, the people—did you notice that carriageful of black women that went by us along the street? There were only three, but they were so loosely fat that they filled every inch. Their faces were drenched with powder and you could see their revolting breasts through their muslin dresses; terrible creatures reeking with unspeakable cologne. They laughed at me, cursed us, I am sure.”
“We'll have to put up with it till Daniel comes,” he observed philosophically; and, on the low straight chairs, they gazed around so disgustedly that they both laughed. “I suppose he is out somewhere in the cane.” Savina asked what they would do if he were away. He might be in Santiago. The company had other estates. “Not now,” Lee decided; “what they call the grinding season has just begun, and every hour is important. The least thing gone wrong might cost thousands of dollars.” The correctness of his assumption was upheld by an announcement unintelligible except for the comforting fact that Daniel was below.
“Perhaps I had better see him first,” Lee suggested diplomatically, and Savina assented.
Daniel Randon was both tall and fat, a slow impressive bulk in white linen with a smooth impassive face and considering brown eyes. “This,” he said unremarkably, “is a surprise. But I am, of course, glad; particularly since Venalez reported that Fanny was with you.”
“She isn't,” Lee replied tersely; there had been no cable from Eastlake, he saw, and he must plunge boldly into what he had to say. “I am sorry to tell you that she is at home. But I'm here, and not by myself.” A slight expression of annoyance twitched at his brother's contained mouth. “No, you are making a mistake. I have left Fanny, Daniel. I thought perhaps you would have heard.”
“Our telegraph system is undependable,” was all that the other, the younger, Randon answered.
“You don't know, then. A Mrs. Grove is with me; but she is that only until the divorces can be arranged; and I counted on you—”