She sat down on the rustic bench with the engineer by her side but, although still wearing a provocative smile, she seemed a trifle uneasy. Canterac seized both her hands, and leaned over towards her mouth. Elena, on her guard, eluded him, and struggled to free herself from his grasp.
This struggle was going on when Pirovani appeared at the entrance to the bower. But neither of its two occupants could see him. The contest continued, Canterac bent on reaching the marquesa’s lips, Elena, unmindful now of her coquettish pruderies, violently repulsing him.
“This isn’t fair,” she panted. “And my hair will be all disarranged! You are going to spoil my hat.... Do please stop! If you don’t I shall leave you!”
She was defending herself so energetically that Pirovani thought it the moment to intervene. He resolutely stepped into the “shrine.” At sight of him Canterac let go his hold of Elena and stood up. While the marquesa picked up her hair pins and straightened her hat, the two men glared at one another. Finally the Italian spoke.
“You seem in great haste,” he remarked sarcastically, “to collect your pay for what the party has cost you.”
To Canterac it seemed so incredible that the contractor should dare insult him to his face, and in the costly park that was his own invention, that he remained speechless for several seconds. Then his anger, the anger of the man accustomed to commanding and receiving obedience, broke out in a cold blinding flash.
“What right have you to speak to me?... I ought to have known better than to have invited as my guest an ignorant immigrant, who has made his money God knows how....”
Pirovani became furious, raging at receiving such an insult, and before Elena. And, as the hot violence within him clamored for satisfaction, by way of reply he threw himself upon the engineer and struck him a heavy blow. In a flash the two men had come to grips and were bending backwards and forwards in desperate attempts to gain the advantage; and Elena, her serenity quite gone, was crying in alarm.
There was a general rush towards the bower, Robledo and Watson arriving first, and together. The engineer and the contractor, tightly grasping one another, were rolling on the floor, breaking down as they did so a part of the “shrine.”
Pirovani, heavier and more powerful than Canterac, was crushing the latter with his weight. Rage had made the contractor forget all the Spanish he knew, and in Italian he was hurling out blasphemies alluding to the Virgin and most of the inhabitants of Heaven, and imploring those who were trying to separate him from the Frenchman to let him devour his adversary’s “gizzard.” In a few seconds he had reverted to the years of his adolescence when in some “gin shop” of the Genoese waterfront, he would knock down some one of his companions in poverty, and roll on the ground with him, pommelling him, and hurling epithets even more violent than his blows.