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Seated, it might be, quietly against the wall, outside the immediate circle about La Clavel, the officers, the Spanish grandees in Cuba for pleasure or for the supervision of their copper mines at Cobra, Charles would watch, study, Ceaza y Santacilla, finding in him the epitome of the Spain he himself hated.
Santacilla, undisturbed, remained seated, smiling while his fingers played with the plaited loop of his cane. "This infatuation," he indicated them with a wave, "while it convinced Havana, never entirely satisfied me. I have been watching you, Jobaba has been listening, for days. You were very cunning, but, in the end, you failed; you were neither skilful nor patient enough.
Santacilla addressed the dancer aggressively with the query of why she misspent her evening with the cursed Cuban negroes. La Clavel made no reply, but tended her empty glass to Andrés; then she glanced indifferently at the captains. "Their manners," she said, "are very pretty; and as for the negro " she shrugged her delectable shoulders.
Her years of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a strength and litheness now tearing at the weight, the masculinity, of Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes ripped across her sinuous back.
Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it wasn't in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. "Well," he said, "the revolution is through with him." He glanced suddenly at La Clavel.
He will have a busy time, and a hatful of challenges there, where beauty is appreciated to the full." Charles said, with an appearance of sullenness, that he hadn't been invited to go farther south; and Santacilla replied that, as a matter of fact, it might be necessary for him to remain, perhaps forever, in Havana.
It had been hardest at first Santacilla, who pretended to find Charles under his feet like a dog, threatened, if he didn't stay away from the St. Louis, to fling him down the long flight of stairs descending from the dancer's room. This, Charles wholly realized, was not an idle boasting.
No, La Clavel knew nothing, she was simply adopting another method in her task of getting information for Santacilla. At this, remembering the adoration of his circle for her, he was brushed by a swift sorrow. For them she had been the symbol, the embodiment, of beauty; the fire and grace of her dancing had intensified, made richer, their sense of life.
That, until he had known Santacilla, had been incomprehensible a page of old history; but now Charles understood: he could see the heavy figure with a darkly suffused face hacking with a sword. He was insane, Charles Abbott told himself; in other circumstances he'd be soon convicted of a sensational murder, quickly hanged or put in an asylum.
Yes, here, in the West, he was Spain, the old insufferable despotism, and Charles thought of Santacilla's necessary end as coldly as though the soldier were no more than a figment of the doomed old injustice. La Clavel was seated with Charles Abbott in the upper room of the Tuileries, when Santacilla slid into an unoccupied chair beside them.
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