Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/205

cold and they are themselves; and the cream-brown flesh, like opium, lifted the bosses of his breast, full and smooth.

“Don Cipriano says that white people want peace,” she said, looking up at Ramón with haunted eyes. “Don’t you consider yourselves white people?” she asked, with a slight, deliberate impertinence.

“No whiter than we are,” Ramón. “Not lily-white, at least.”

“And don’t you want peace?” she asked.

“I? I shouldn’t think of it. The meek have inherited the earth, according to prophecy. But who am I, that I should envy them their peace! No, Señora. Do I look like a gospel of peace?—or a gospel of war either? Life doesn’t split down that division, for me.” “I don’t know what you want,” said she, looking up at him with haunted eyes.

“We only half know ourselves,” he replied, smiling with changeful eyes. “Perhaps not so much as half.”

There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which made her wonder, startled, if she had ever realised what real fatherliness meant. The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility, and the vulnerable compassion of man in his separate fatherhood.

“You don’t like people?” he asked her gently.

“I think it is beautiful to look at,” she said. “But”—with a faint shudder—“I am glad I am white.”

“You feel there could be no contact?” he said, simply.

“Yes!” she said. “I mean that.”

“It is as you feel,” he said.

And as he said it, she knew he was more beautiful to her than any blond white man, and that, in a remote, far-off way, the contact with him was more precious than any contact she had known.

But then, though he cast over her a certain shadow, he would never encroach on her, he would never seek any close contact. It was the incompleteness in Cipriano that sought her out, and seemed to trespass on her.

Hearing Ramón’s voice, Carlota appeared uneasily in a doorway. Hearing him speak English, she disappeared again, on a gust of anger. But after a little while, she came