As though carefully considering his reply, Roddy scowled, but made no answer. In a flash it had at last come to him that what to Peter and to himself had seemed a most fascinating game was to others a struggle, grim and momentous. He recognized that until now General Rojas had never been to him a flesh-and-blood person, that he had not appreciated that his rescue meant actual life and happiness. He had considered him rather as one of the pieces in a game of chess, which Peter and himself were secretly playing against the Commandant of the San Carlos prison. And now, here, confronting him, was a human being, living, breathing, suffering, the daughter of this chessman, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, demanding of the stranger by what right he made himself her father’s champion, by what right he pushed himself into the tragedy of the Rojas family. In his embarrassment Roddy decided desperately to begin at the very beginning, to tell the exact truth, to omit nothing, and then to throw himself upon the mercy of the court.
The gray mist of the morning had lifted. Under the first warm rays of the sun, like objects developing on a photographer’s plate, the cactus points stood out sharp and clear, the branches of the orange trees separated, assuming form and outline, the clusters of fruit took on a faint touch of yellow. From the palace yard in distant Willemstad there drifted toward them the boom of the morning gun.
With his reins over his arm, his sombrero crumpled in his hands, his face lifted to the face of the girl, Roddy stood in the road at attention, like a trooper reporting to his superior officer.
“We were in the tea-house of the Hundred and One Steps,” said Roddy. “We called ourselves the White Mice.”
Speaking quickly he brought his story down to the present moment. When he had finished, Inez, who had been bending toward him, straightened herself in the saddle and sat rigidly erect. Her lips and brows were drawn into two level lines, her voice came to him from an immeasurable distance.
“Then it was a joke?” she said.
“A joke!” cried Roddy hotly. “That’s most unfair. If you will only give us permission we’ll prove to you that it is no joke. Perhaps, as I told it, it sounded heartless. I told it badly. What could I say—that I am sorry? Could I, a stranger, offer sympathy to you? But we are sorry. Ever since Peter proposed it, ever since I saw your father——”
The girl threw herself forward, trembling. Her eyes opened wide.
“You saw my father!” she exclaimed. “Tell me,” she begged, “did he look well? Did he speak to you? When did you—” she stopped suddenly, and turning her face from him, held her arm across her eyes.
“It was four months ago,” said Roddy. “I was not allowed to speak to him. We bowed to each other. That was all.”