Evidently she had not been quite certain whom he was until he spoke. For now, she writhed free from his arms, her face contorted with loathing and wrath.
"So you come sweethearting again, you vile louse of a Busno! Si, seguramente, si—we meet again! But I met with hunger when I was a child, and I met hunger often since, and I like hunger the less at each of our meetings. The same with the cholera! The same with you!"
A cold and haughty tower of ivory, she faced him. Her face was superbly royal with high disdain.
"Go away at once or I will set our scavenger curs on you! Have I not warned you before this never to approach me with your treacle words of love, your kissing lips that turn my blood to vinegar, your caressing arms that make my skin shudder and creep? Go away, you itch, you ringworm! You are not a man; there is nothing masculine, varonil, strong and savage about you. All you can do is to moon and coo and sigh; you are a sot ever thirsty for love; you are a soft, shapeless blubber of passion! And how can you come near me when you know you are one of the order of men who murdered my brother for poisoning a few poor pigs and for stealing a few poor horses?—you, a man of the Guardia Civil, the enemy of my clan and race since time out of mind; our blight, our scourge!"
Beneath the bite and lash of her words, beneath the scorching fire of her scorn-filled eyes, a lesser man than Miguel Alvarado would have shriveled into a smoking black cinder. But never he. Folding his arms across his chest, he waited in a dramatic silence while the wrack and tempest swept over him. Then, slowly, theatrically, he raised his arms above his head, and uplifted his eyes, and addressed himself to the serene heavens—under the circumstances, the obvious and altogether Spanish thing to do.
"Senor Don Dios!" he apostrophized solemnly. "My soul leaps like a flame with love for her—I love her unto death. And she repulses me! What shall I do?"
Go away and leave her victorious in her disdain? Not Miguel Alvarado!
When Pascual Montara finished questioning the Gypsy chieftain and hetman, and came seeking his compañero through the trees, he found them together still—the hot-blooded young policeman and the lithe Paquita of the nut-brown legs. Miguel Alvarado had progressed some way with his bitterly contested love-making. But she still shrugged away from him when impetuously he approached too close.
Having left his horse in a distant quarter of the clearing, on foot through the gloaming came Pascual Montara; and, glimpsing the girl in the shadow of the trees, he halted dead and eyed her with wonder and admiration. She wore a printed calico dress of deep vermilions and flaming saffrons, and a grass-green scarf was wound, in the Gypsy fashion, among her ink-black tresses. There was a string of copper coins upon her bosom and a bangle of copper coins upon one wrist. Her dress came but little more than half-way down her bare, symmetrical and richly polished legs, and it was open at the throat to show glimpses of her small brown breasts and of the swale between.
Letting Miguel Alvarado talk as he willed, she stood watching him out of slow gloomy eyes. His elocution was fluent, full of zest, soul-moving; his words were gorgeous, magnificent, glowing with color and music. One moment he called her a baggage, a jade, a wanton, a thing of ugliness, a soiled and tawdry wench. The next, he called her a virgin most pure, most chaste, most admirable, and endowed her with every beauty and charm ever conceded by a lover's tongue, appraising separately and in sequence her features, her contours, her color, the texture of her skin, the fineness of her hair. With bold, splendid splashes of color and enunciation, he lifted her up, up from the degradation and the mire to which he so lately had debased her, and put her upon the apex of the world, erecting her upon a pedestal above all other women, his words a coronation, a canonization, and an apotheosis. When he had done, she raised a little brown hand to her mouth, and yawned prodigiously. Then she turned away.