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If I bet on the black, it turns up; and when I choose the red, affairs are red." Santacilla's uneasy eyes shifted over him suspiciously. "Blood and death, that is what black and red are," he said. "But you are not the dispenser of fate." The peak of his cockaded hat threw a shadow over his sanguine face to the chin. "A camarone," he repeated, "a stalk of celery.
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.
It was so unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla's face. The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window. He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely helpless, pathetically stricken.
These facts she gathered through the unguarded moments of Ceaza y Santacilla's talk he was close to the Captain-General and had important connections at Madrid and, at prolonged parties, from the conversation of his intimates.
The chambermaid who attended La Clavel's room had lost a lover with the forces of General Agramonte, and was of use to Charles; without knowledge of the hidden actuality she yet brought him, unread, communications for the patriotic party; and she warned him of Santacilla's presence and uncertain humors.
In an uncolored voice he begged the dancer to excuse them; and, sweeping off their hats, they were leaving when Santacilla's companion stepped forward in a flash of ungoverned anger like an exposed knife: "I've noticed you before," he addressed Tirso, "hanging and gabbling around the cafés and theatres, and it's my opinion you are an insurrectionist.
The other Spanish officer, Gaspar Arco de Vaca, Santacilla's closest companion, observed toward Charles an air of profound civility, and his pretence was more galling than Santacilla's morbid threats and exposed contempt.
His thoughts shifted to Cuba and himself if it were a crime of passion that had been committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty, hard in the extreme, was before him. "Why did you bring about Santacilla's death?" he demanded.
And it was no part of his intention to be cut in half by bullets behind a fortress wall. He could only delay, discover as soon as possible what was behind Santacilla's deceiving patience and good humor. Upon that he would have to act without hesitation and with no chance of failure. The regiment should, the dancer complained, send her maid back to her.
But he was relieved that Santacilla's attention had been shifted from him. Another officer, a major of the Isabel regiment, tall and dark and melancholy, joined them. He ignored Charles completely, and talked to La Clavel about her dances the Arragonese jota and those of the other provinces of Spain. He had, it developed, written an opera on the subject of de Gama and a fabulous Florida.
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