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Then there was La Clavel's maid, Jobaba, a girl with an alabaster beauty indefinitely tainted by Africa. She was, Charles decided, the most corrupt being he had ever encountered. Her life away from the St. Louis was incredibly, wildly, debauched.
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.
No woman that Howard Gage might dream of could have worn La Clavel's mantón; it would have consumed her like a breath of fire, leaving a white ash hardly more than distinguishable from the present living actuality. Women cast up a prodigious amount of smoke now, a most noisy crackling, but Charles Abbott doubted the blaze within them. Water had been thrown on it.
With this in his thoughts he went to the door, in answer to a knock, and received a heavy carefully tied parcel. He opened it, and, dripping in dazzling color from the wrapping paper, was La Clavel's mantón, the one in which he had first seen her insolently dancing the jota. Charles, with a stirred heart, searched carefully for a note, a scrap of revealing paper; but there was none.
It was conceivable that, in more stable circumstances, she would have grown old, become withered with the peculiar ugliness of aged Spanish women; but that, too, he could not realize. Somehow, La Clavel's being was her dancing, and what had gone before, or what might have followed, were irrelevant, unreal; they were not she.
Disaster had met the body, the flesh; what occurred in the spirit he was unable to grasp; but this, suddenly, breathlessly, he saw: La Clavel's bitter defiance, her mountain-born hatred of oppression, her beaten but undefiled body, had communicated to him something of her own valor. It was as though she had given him a palm, a shielded flame, to add to his own fortitude.
"There is La Clavel," Charles said by way of reply; "she is with Captain Santacilla, and I think, but I can't be sure, the officer Tirso tried to choke to death. What is his name de Vaca, Gaspar Arco de Vaca." "Even that," Andrés answered, "wasn't accomplished. La Clavel's engagement in Havana is over; I suppose it will be Buenos Aires next.
He went, as often as it seemed necessary, to the United States Club on Virtudes Street, where, together with his patriots, but different from them in a hidden contempt, he gambled, moderately and successfully. His luck became proverbial, and, coupled with La Clavel's name, his reputation soon grew into what he intrigued for.
The Spaniard was a model of politeness, of consideration, and he listened, seated with his hands folded about the head of his officer's cane, to La Clavel's determination to go to South America. It was an excellent plan, he agreed; they would welcome her rapturously in Buenos Aires; but hadn't she put off her intention a little too long?
Charles thought of La Clavel's desire to dance in Buenos Aires, for South America. He wondered how old she was; he had never before considered her in any connection with age; she had seemed neither old nor young, but as invested with the timeless quality of her art. She had spoken often of her girlhood, but no picture of her as a girl had formed in his mind.
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