"Man!" he exclaimed—so loudly that Rosa, his housekeeper, imagined that something was going wrong again with the painting—"Man! all the dollars you will ever earn would buy nothing more than her stone! If you want her, you will have to marry her."
"Oh, don't look so chopfallen!" he went on, scornfully, when Paul blinked. "I mean marriage as she counts it. You will have to court her for a couple of months—flowers, little gifts, small courtesies, that sort of thing; then, if she likes you, she will come and keep your house. When, later, you feel like settling down in the bosom of respectability, there won't be a shred of law to hold you."
Now if Paul lacked wit to analyze and apply to his own government a moral law that has evolved from the painful travail of the generations, it does not follow that he was too stupid to feel irony. Reddening, he put forth the usual declaimer of honorable intention with the glib tongue of passion. He meant well by the girl! Would give her a good home, find her better than she had ever been found in her life! As for marrying? He was not of the marrying kind! Never would! and so on, finishing with a vital question—did Bachelder know where she lived?
His color deepened under the artist's sarcastic glance. "So that's what you're after? I wondered why you picked me for a father confessor. Well, I don't, but you won't have any trouble in finding her. All the women sell something; she's sure to be on the market in the morning. You will get her quite easily. The girls seem to take pride in keeping a Gringo's house—I don't know why, unless it be that they are so dazzled by the things we have that they cannot see us for what we are."
***
A thousand crimson figures were weaving in and out the market's chrome pillars when Paul entered next morning, but though it was hard to single one person from the red confusion, luck led him almost immediately to where Andrea stood, a basket of tortillas at her feet. Lacking customers, just then, she leaned against a pillar, her scarlet flaming against its chrome, thoughtful, pensive, as Bachelder painted her for "The Enganchada," the girl sold for debt. Her shawl lay beside her basket, so her hair, that had flown loose since the morning bath, fell in a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save when feeling shot them with tawny flashes—as waving branches filter mottled sunlight on brown waters—her eyes were dark as the pools of Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later, he fed her entire stock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black, brown or white women are alike sensitive to the language of flowers, and the lilies he left in her basket served him more sweetly than could his stammering tongue. Next morning, curiosity replaced hostility in her glance, and when he left the market, her brown gaze followed him beyond the portals. Needs not, however, to linger over the courtship. Sufficient that color of skin does not affect the feminine trait that forgiveness comes easier when the offense was provoked by one's own beauty; the story goes on from the time that Andrea moved into his house with a stock of household gear that extorted musical exclamations from all her girl friends.
To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home. Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay, saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences, watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him, negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother gives her son.
Yet, under even this mood, her laughter lay close to the surface, and nothing tapped its merry flow quicker than Paul's Spanish. Picking up the language haphazard, he had somehow learned to apply the verb tumblar to describe the pouring out of coffee, and he clung to it after correction with a persistence that surely inhered in his dogged German blood. "Tumbarlo el café!" he would say, and she would repeat it, faithfully mimicking his accent.
"Tumble out the coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts at English.
These, few and simple, were learned of Bachelder's woman, and sprung on Paul as surprises on his return from visiting the mining properties, which required his frequent presence. For instance, slipping to his knee on one such occasion, with the great heart of her pulsing against him, she sighed: "I love thee, lovest thou me?"