Charles’ throat was closed, his words stopped, by the intensity of his feeling; his longing to be identified, lost, in the spirit of General Agramonte and the faithful thirty-five burned into a 83 desperation of unhappiness. Vincente Escobar, it was evident, thought that he wasn’t capable of sustaining such a trust. Still there was nothing to be gained by protests, hot asseverations; with difficulty he suppressed his resentment, and sat, to all appearances, calm, engaged with a cigar and attending Vincente’s irregular vehement speech. Andrés was silent, dark and serious; but the gaze he turned upon Charles was warm with affection and admiration. Nothing, Vincente insisted, could be done now; they must wait and draw into their cause every possible ultimate assistance and understanding. If the truth were known, he repeated again and again, the world would be at their feet.
Finally, his enthusiasm, his power, ebbed; his yellow pinched face sank forward: he was so spent, so delivered to a loose indifference of body, that he might well have been dead. Charles rose with a formal Spanish period voicing the appreciation of the honor that had been his.
“We are all worried about Vincente,” Andrés proceeded, as they were descending the vault-like stairs; “there is a shadow on him like bad luck. But it may be no more than the fever. Our mother thinks he needs only her love and enough wine jelly.” They were again in the 84 drawing-room with the Escobars; and Charles momentarily resumed the seat he had left beside Narcisa.
Domingo and his wife were submerged in gloomy reflection, and Andrés sat with his gaze fixed on the marble, patterned in white and black, of the floor. Suddenly Narcisa raised her head with an air of rebellion. “It’s always like the church,” she declared incredibly. “Everything has got so old that I can’t bear it—Vincente as good as dead and Andrés resembling a Jesuit father! Must all my life go on in this funeral march?” The elder Escobars regarded her in a voiceless amazement; but Andrés said severely:
“You are too young to understand the tragedy of Cuba or Vincente’s heroic spirit. I am ashamed of you—before Charles Abbott.”
Narcisa rose and walked swiftly out upon the balcony. They had been, it seemed to Charles, rather ridiculous with her; it was hard on Narcisa to have been thrust, at her age, into such a serious affair. The Escobars, and particularly Vincente, took their responsibility a little too ponderously. Following a vague impulse, made up both of his own slightly damaged pride and a sympathy for Narcisa, he went out to the balcony where she stood with her hands lightly resting 85 on the railing. Veiled in the night, her youth seemed more mysterious than immature; he was conscious of an unsteady flutter at her unformed breast; her face had an aspect of tears.
“You mustn’t mind them,” he told her; “they are tremendously bothered because they see a great deal farther than you can. The danger to Vincente, too, in Havana, spies—”
She interrupted him, looking away so that he could see only a trace of her cheek against the fragment fall of her hair. “It isn’t that, but what Andrés said about you.”
This admission startled him, and he studied Narcisa—her hands now tightly clasping the iron railing—with a disturbed wonder. Was it possible that she cared for him? At home, ignored by a maturity such as his, she would have been absorbed in the trivial activities of girls of her own age. But Havana, the tropics, was different. It was significant, as well, that he was permitted to be with her, practically alone, beyond the sight and hearing of her mother; the Escobars, he thought, had hopes of such a consummation. It was useless, he was solely wedded to Cuba; he had already pictured the only dramatic accident of the heart that could touch him. Not little Narcisa! She was turned away from 86 him completely: a lovely back, straight and narrow, virginal—Domingo Escobar had said this—as a white rose bud, yet with an impalpable and seductive scent. In other circumstances, a happier and more casual world, she would have been an adorable fate. An increasing awkwardness seized him, a conviction of impotence. “Narcisa,” he whispered at her ear; but, before he could finish his sentence, her face was close to his, her eyes were shut and the tenderness of her lips unprotected.
Charles put an arm about her slim shoulders and pressed his cheek against hers. “Listen,” he went on, in his lowered voice, patching the deficiencies of his Spanish with English words clear in their feeling if not in sound, “nothing could have shown me myself as well as you, for now I know that I can never give up a thought to anything outside what I have promised my life to. A great many men are quite happy with a loving wife and children and a home—a place to go back to always; and, in a way, since I have known you, I envy them. Their lives are full of happiness and usefulness and specially peace; but, dearest Narcisa, I can’t be like that, it isn’t for me. You see, I have chosen to love a country; instead of being devoted only to you, 87 there are thousands of women, rich and poor and black and white, I must give myself for. I haven’t any existence, any rights, of my own; I haven’t any money or time or security to offer. I didn’t choose it, no, it chose me—it’s exactly as though I had been stopped on the street and conscripted. A bugle was blown in my ear. Love, you must realize, is selfish; it would be selfish to take you on a steamer, for myself, and go north. If I did that, if I forgot what I have sworn, I’d die. I should seem to the world to be alive, and I’d walk about and talk and go into the city on some business or other; but, in reality, I should be as dead as dust.