Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/183
a powerful will. There was a certain strength in his presence. They all cheered up a bit.
“You didn’t know my husband had become one of the people—a real peon—a Señor Peon, like Count Tolstoy became a Señor Moujik?” said Doña Carlota, with an attempt at raillery.
“Anyway it suits him,” said Kate.
“There!” said Don Ramón. “Give the devil his dues.”
But there was something unyielding, unbending about him. He laughed and spoke to the women only from a surface self. Underneath, powerful and inscrutable, he made no connection with them.
So it was at lunch. There was a flitting conversation, with intervals of silence. It was evident that Ramón was thinking in another world, in the silence. And the ponderous stillness of his will, working in another sphere, made the women feel overshadowed.
“The Señora is like me, Ramón,” said Doña Carlota. “She cannot bear the sound of that drum. Must it play any more this afternoon?”
There was a moment’s pause, he answered:
“After four o’clock only.”
“Must we have that noise to-day?” Carlota persisted.
“Why not to-day like other days!” he said. But a certain darkness was on his brow, and it was evident he wanted to leave the presence of the two women.
“Because the Señora is here: and I am here: and we neither of us like it. And to-morrow the Señora will not be here, and I shall be gone back to Mexico. So why not spare us to-day! Surely you can show us this consideration.”
Ramón looked at her, and then at Kate. There was anger in his eyes. And Kate could almost feel, in his powerful chest, the big heart swelling with a suffocation of anger. Both women kept mum. But it pleased them, anyhow, that they could make him angry.
“Why not row with Mrs Leslie on the lake!” he said, with quiet control.
But under his dark was a level, indignant anger.
“We may not want to,” said Carlota.
Then he did what Kate had not known anyone to do before. He withdrew his consciousness away from them as they all three sat at table, leaving the two women, as it