Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/79

“You never married?”

“No. I couldn’t marry, because I always felt my god-father was there, and I felt I had promised him to be a priest—all those things, you know. When he died he told me to follow my own conscience, and to remember that Mexico and all the Indians were in the hands of God, and he made me promise never to take sides against God. He was an old man when he died, seventy-five.”

Kate could see the spell of the old bishop’s strong, rather grandiose personality upon the impressionable Indian. She could see the curious recoil into chastity, perhaps characteristic of the savage. And at the same time she felt the intense masculine coupled with a certain male city, in the man’s breast.

“Your husband was James Joachim Leslie, the Irish leader?” he asked her: and added:

“You had no children?”

“No. I wanted Joachim’s children so much, but I didn’t have any. But I have a boy and a girl from my first marriage. My first husband was a lawyer, and I was divorced from him for Joachim.”

“Did you like him—that first one?”

“Yes. I liked him. But I never felt anything very deep for him. I married him when I was young, and he was a good deal older than I. I was fond of him, in a way. But I had never realised that one could be more than fond of a man, till I knew Joachim. I thought that was all one could ever expect to feel—that you just liked a man, and that he was in love with you. It took me years to understand that a woman can’t love a man—at least a woman like I am can’t—if he is only the sort of good, decent citizen. With Joachim I came to realise that a woman like me can only love a man who is fighting to change the world, to make it freer, more alive. Men like my first husband, who are good and trustworthy and who work to keep the world going on well in the same state they found it in, they let you down horribly, somewhere. You feel so terribly sold. Everything is just a sell: it becomes so small. A woman who isn’t quite ordinary herself can only love a man who is for something beyond the ordinary life.”

“And your husband fought for Ireland.”

Yes—for Ireland, and for something he never real-