“But I’ll bet you twenty doblons you can’t break one,” he added.
Santacilla replied that he was considering having Charles Abbott deported.
“You are so dangerous,” he explained, with the grimace that served him as a smile. “I often consult with our Captain-General. ‘This Abbott,’ he says; ‘Agramonte is nothing, but I am afraid of him. He is wise, he is deep.’ And then we think what can be done with you—a tap on the head, not too hard and not far from the ear, would make you as gentle as a kitten. I have had it done; really it is a favor, since then you would forget all your trouble, the problems of state. You’d cry if I raised a finger at you.” La Clavel interrupted him to swear at his degraded imagination. “And the figure in the jota!” he turned to her. “You know that the Spaniards of birth have, as well as their own, the blood of the Moriscos. What they were, 127 what the East is, with women, I beg you to remember.
“This new treatment of women is very regrettable. I am a little late for absolute happiness; too late, for example, to fasten your tongue with a copper wire to the tongue across the table from you. Lovers, you see, joined at last.” He talked while he ate, in a manner wholly delicate, minute fragile dulces, cakes, glazed in green and pink, and ornamental confections of almond paste. Unperturbed, La Clavel found him comparable to a number of appalling objects and states. Coarse, was all that he replied.
“You are a peasant, a beast, and what you say is merely stupid. There this Abbott is your superior—he has a trace, a suspicion, of blood. I am wondering,” he was addressing Charles again. “It seems impossible that you are as dull as you appear; there is more, perhaps, than meets the eye. Your friendship with the Escobars broke up very suddenly; and you never see Floret and Quintara with his borrowed French airs. They are nothing, it is true, yet they have a little Castilian, they are better than the avaricious fools at the United States Club. Of course, if you are in love with this cow gone mad, a great deal is accounted for.” He wiped his fingers first on a 128 serviette and then on a sheer web of linen marked with a coronet and his cipher.
“Pah!” he exclaimed, looking at the dancer, “your neck is dirty again.”
Sick with disgust, his blood racing with a passionate detestation, Charles Abbott laughed loudly. But he was relieved that Santacilla’s attention had been shifted from him. Another officer, a major of the Isabel regiment, tall and dark and melancholy, joined them. He ignored Charles completely, and talked to La Clavel about her dances—the Arragonese jota and those of the other provinces of Spain. He had, it developed, written an opera on the subject of de Gama and a fabulous Florida. Santacilla grew restive at this and gazed about the room maliciously. Then, suddenly, he rose and walked to the table where a young Cuban exquisite was sitting with a girl slender and darkly lovely. Santacilla leaned over, with his hands planted on their table, and made a remark that drove the blood in a scarlet tide to the civilian’s face. Then the Spaniard amazingly produced from his sleeve a ball of lamb’s wool such as women use to powder their faces, and touched the girl’s nose lightly. He went to another table and repeated his act, to another and another, brushing all the feminine 129 noses, and returned, unchallenged, to his place.
“If I had been with any of those women,” he related comfortably, “and the King had done that, there would have been a new king and a new infanta.”
The musical Spaniard, inappropriately in uniform, remonstrated, “A lot of them will kill you some night in the Paseo de Valdez or on the quays.”
Santacilla agreed with him. “No doubt it will overtake me—if not here, then on the Peninsula. A hundred deaths, all distressing, have been sworn upon me.” Charles Abbott’s expression was inane, but, correcting that statement, he said to himself, “A hundred and one.”