Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/77

Cipriano had sat down next to her, smoking a cigarette.

“It is a strange darkness, the Mexican darkness!k"9 she said.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Do you?”

“Yes. Very much. I think I like best the time when the day is falling and the night coming on like something else. Then, one feels more free, don’t you think? Like the flowers that send out their scent at night, but in the daytime they look at the sun and don’t have any smell.”

“Perhaps the night here scares me,” she laughed.

“Yes. But why not? The smell of the flowers at night may make one feel afraid, but it is a good fear. One likes it, don’t you think?”

“I am afraid of fear,” she said.

He laughed shortly.

“You speak such English English,” she said. “Nearly all the Mexicans who speak English speak American English. Even Don Ramón does, rather.”

“Yes. Don Ramón graduated in Columbia University. But I was sent to England, to school in London, and then to Oxford.”

“Who sent you?”

“My god-father. He was an Englishman: Bishop Severn, Bishop of Oaxaca. You have heard of him?”

“No,” said Kate.

“He was a very well-known man. He died only about ten years ago. He was very rich, too, before the revolution. He had a big hacienda in with a very fine library. But they took it away from him in the revolution, and they sold the things, or broke them. They didn’t know the value of them, of course.”

“And did he adopt you?”

“Yes! In a way. My father was one of the overseers on the hacienda. When I was a little boy I came running to my father, when the Bishop was there, with something in my hands—so!”—and he made a cup of his hand. “I don’t remember. This is what they tell me. I was a small child—three or four years of age—somewhere there. What I had in my hands was a yellow scorpion, one of the small ones, very poisonous, no?”

And he lifted the cup of his small, slender, dark hands, as if to show Kate the creature.