Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/80

ised. He ruined his health. And when he was dying, he said to me: Kate, perhaps I’ve let you down. Perhaps I haven’t really helped Ireland. But I couldn’t help myself. I feel as if I’d brought you to the doors of life, and was leaving you there. Kate, don’t be disappointed in life becauce of me, I didn’t really get anywhere. I haven’t really got anywhere. I feel as if I’d made a mistake. But perhaps when I'm dead I shall be able to do more for you than I have done while I was alive. Say you’ll never feel disappointed!”

There was a pause. The memory of the dead man was coming over her again, and all her grief.

“And I don’t feel disappointed,” she went on, her voice beginning to shake. “But I loved him. And it was bitter, that he had to die, feeling he hadn’t—hadn’t.”

She put her hands before her face, and the bitter tears came through her fingers.

Cipriano sat motionless as a statue. But from his breast came that dark, surging passion of tenderness the Indians are capable of. Perhaps it would pass, leaving him indifferent and fatalistic again. But at any rate for the moment he sat in a dark, fiery cloud of passionate male tenderness. He looked at her soft, wet white hands over her face, and at the one big emerald on her finger, in a sort of wonder. The wonder, the mystery, the magic that used to flood over him as a boy and a youth, when he kneeled before the babyish figure of the Santa Maria de la Soledad, flooded him again. He was in the presence of the goddess, white-handed, mysterious, gleaming with a moon-like power and the intense potency of grief.

Then Kate hastily took her hands from her face and with head ducked looked for her handkerchief. Of course she hadn’t got one. Cipriano lent her his, nicely folded. She took it without a word, and rubbed her face and blew her nose.

“I want to go and look at the flowers,” she said in a strangled voice.

And she dashed into garden with his handkerchief in her hand. He stood up and drew aside his chair, to let her pass, then stood a moment looking at the garden, before he sat down, again and lighted a cigarette.