He listened with an intense concentration, in 119 the careful preliminaries of a difficult act of memory, asking her, when it could not be avoided, to repeat facts or names. They were, now, concerned with the New York Junta, involved tables of costs, and La Clavel was palpably annoyed by the unaccustomed necessity of a strict mental effort. She raised her eyebrows, shot an inviting glance at an interested man of middle age, and shut and opened her fan by an irritable twist of the wrist. Watching, weighing, her mood, Charles abruptly brought her recital to an end.
“That is enough for the present,” he decided.
“My choice infant,” she retorted, “your air of being my director is comic. And I could wish you were not so immaculate, so unworldly—you are tiresome more often than not. I could scream with laughing when I think you are supposed to be my servant of love.” The striking of a silvery bell interrupted her with the necessity for a reverence. The mutter of prayer was instantly lost in echoless space. The genuflexions of the priests and acolytes were rapid. “This secrecy,” she went on, “is against my disposition, unnatural. I am a woman in whom the complete expression of every feeling is not only a good but a necessity. There are times when I must, it seems, give way to my hatred of those 120 perfumed captains. I sit beside Santacilla, with his hand on my knee, and, hidden by my skirt, my fingers are wedded to the knife in my stocking. A turn, a sweep of the arm ... there is a tearing cut I learned in the mountains.”
The prayers, the Latin invocations, grew louder with the symbolized miracle of transubstantiation, the turning back of the bread and wine into the humility and forbearance of Christ.
Charles Abbott was still, pale and remote; and the heat of La Clavel’s words died before the vision of an eternal empire of souls irrevocably judged. She sank forward again, the knotted fringe of her mantón spread out beyond the rug, upon the stone. After a little he told her that her courage, her daring and patience, were magnificent. But she replied that they were cold virtues. “All virtues are cold,” Charles assured her seriously. If that were so, La Clavel whispered, her cheek close to his, she was lost to virtue. Anyhow, she didn’t believe him, he could not, at his age, know so much. Yet not, God comprehended, that he wasn’t both virtuous and cold; any other man in the world, not a heathen, would have flung himself at her. Charles said wearily:
“We have been over this before, and you know 121 that I do not care for women. What I was a few years ago—”
“A baby,” she informed him.
“What I was a few years ago,” he repeated with dignity, “is no longer true of me. I belong body and spirit to the cause of which you are aware. And if I didn’t it would be, in many respects, no different—science and the liberation of a people are all one, selfless.”
“I left the knife out of my present toilet,” she sighed. “It would be a charity to free you from the shape you hate so dearly.”
“I must go back to the San Felipe and write what you told me,” he proceeded. “I understand that Santacilla has gone out on a slaughtering party, and I’ll have to take you around in the evening. There are zarzuelas in the Tacon Theatre this evening, and afterwards, I suppose, dulces upstairs at the Tuileries. It’s no good, though, expecting me for Retreta—I’ve got to have some time to recover and sleep: four o’clock last night, with a pack of imbeciles, and three the night before. The smell of Jamaica rum and limes makes me sick.”