Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/204

“And then what does he want?” said Kate.

“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to be a very big man, and master all the people.”

“Then why doesn’t he?” said Kate.

He lifted his shoulders.

“And you,” he said to her. “You seem to me like that morning I told you about.”

“I am just forty years old,” she laughed shakily.

Again he lifted his shoulders.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is the same. Your body seems to me like the stem of the flower I told you about, and in your face it will always be morning, of the time of the rains.”

“Why do you say that to me?” she said, as an involuntary strange shudder shook her.

“Why not say it!” he replied. “You are like the cool morning, very fresh. In Mexico, we are the end of the hot dry day.”

He watched her, with a strange desire in his black eyes, and what seemed to her a curious, lurking sort of insolence. She dropped her head to from him, and rocked in her chair.

“I would like to marry you,” he said; “if ever you will marry. I would like to marry you.”

“I don’t think I shall ever marry again,” she flashed, her bosom heaving like suffocation, and a dark flush suffusing over her face, against her will.

“Who knows!” said he.

Ramón was coming down the terrace, his fine white serape folded over his naked shoulder, with its blue-and-dark pattern at the borders, and its long scarlet fringe dangling and swaying as he walked. He leaned against one of the pillars of the terrace, and looked down at Kate and Cipriano. Cipriano glanced up with that peculiar glance of primitive intimacy.

“I told the Señora Caterina,” he said, “if ever she wanted to marry a man, she should marry me.”

“It is plain talk,” said Ramón, glan0ing at Cipriano with the same intimacy, and smiling.

Then he looked at Kate, with a slow smile in his brown eyes, and a shadow of curious knowledge on his face. He folded his arms over his breast, as the natives do when it is