Finally came dusk, time of the first stars in the sky and lighted lamps in men"s houses. And, bringing him infinite relief, a tap at his door and the gentle voice of Rosita saying:
"La Senorita invites Senor Kendric, if he has rested sufficiently, to join her and her other guests at table."
He followed the little maid to the great dim dining-room.
Purple-shaded lamps created an atmosphere which impressed him as a little weird; the long table was set forth elaborately with much rich silver and sparkling gla.s.s; several men servants stood ready to place chairs and serve; there were rare white flowers in tall vases, looking a bluish-white under the lamps. As Kendric came to the threshold wide double doors across the room opened and Zoraida"s other "guests"
entered. They were Bruce, stiff and uncomfortable, seeming to be doing his best to unbend toward Betty; Betty herself, flushed and excited; Barlow, morose because of the arm he wore in a sling or because of a day not pa.s.sed to his liking; and Ruiz Rios, suave and immaculate in white flannels.
When they were all in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow"s look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night"s friendliness but an aloofness which might have been compounded of scorn and distrust; Bruce appeared not to notice him.
"Oh, well," was Kendric"s inward comment. "The devil take the lot of them."
Zoraida did not keep them waiting. One of the servants, as though he had had some signal, threw open still another door and Zoraida, a splendid, vivid and vital Zoraida, burst upon their sight. She was gowned as though she had on the instant stepped from a fashionable Paris salon. And as though, on her swift way hither, she had stopped only an instant in some barbaric king"s treasure house to s.n.a.t.c.h up and bedeck herself with his most resplendent jewels. Her arms were bare save for scintillating stones set in broad gold bands; long pendants, that seemed to live and breathe with their throbbing rubies, trembled from the tiny lobes of her sh.e.l.l-pink ears. Her throat was bare, her gown so daringly low cut at breast and back that Betty stared and flushed and turned away from the sight of her.
At her best was Zoraida tonight. Life stood high in her blood; zest shone like a bright fire in her eyes. A moment she poised, looking the queen which she meant to become, which already in her heart she felt herself. The inclination of her head as she greeted them, the graciousness which the moment drew from her, were regal.
Even the heavy arm-chair at the head of the table had the look of a throne. Two men drew it back for her, moved it into place when she was seated. Then she looked to her guests, smiled and nodded and in silence each accepted the place given him. Thus Jim Kendric sat at the other end of the table in a chair like Zoraida"s. At his right was Betty who, since she averted her face from both him and Zoraida, kept her eyes on her plate. At his left was Ruiz Rios. To right and left of Zoraida sat Bruce and Barlow.
"I am afraid," said Zoraida lightly, embracing them all with her quick smile, "that I have seemed to lack in courtesy to my friends today!
But here, _amigos_, when you come to know our land of the sun, you will understand that the long hot days are for rest and solitude in shady places while it is during the nights that one lives." A goblet of wine as yellow as b.u.t.ter stood at her hand having just been poured from an ancient misshapen earthen bottle. She lifted it and held it while the other gla.s.ses were filled. "I drink with you, my friends, to many golden nights!"
She scarcely more than touched the yellow wine with her lips and looked to the others. Barlow, still surly, tossed off his drink at a gulp.
Bruce drank slowly, a little, and set his gla.s.s down. Betty did not lift her eyes and kept her hands in her lap. Ruiz tasted eagerly and his eyes sparkled and widened. Kendric mechanically set his gla.s.s to his lips, drank sparingly and marveled. For never had he tasted vintage like this. Its fragrance in his nostrils rose with strange pleasant sensation to his brain; a drop on his palate seemed to pa.s.s directly into his blood and electrically thrill throughout his whole body. The draft was like a magic brew; potent and seductive it soothed and at the same time set a delicious unrest in the blood, like that vaguely stirring unrest of youth in springtime.
Barlow, the sullen, alone had drunk deeply. And in a flash Barlow was another man. A warm color crept into his weathered cheeks, he drew himself up in his chair, his eyes shone. Zoraida, looking from face to face, laughed softly.
"What say you, my guests, to Zoraida"s wine?" she said happily. "Made for Zoraida a full four hundred years ago, treasured for her in the vaults of the ancient Montezumas, distilled from the olden moonberry which no longer do men know where to find or how to grow! None but the Montezumas themselves and the priests of the great G.o.d Quetzel ever drank of it, and they only on great feast days of rejoicing. A taste, Miss Pansy Blossom, would bring back the roses to your pale cheeks.
And see my friend Barlow!" Lightly, laughing, she laid her hand for a fleeting instant on his arm. "Already has the moonberry made his heart swell and blossom and filled it with dream stuff like honey!"
Something--the golden liquor in his veins or Zoraida"s touch or the look in her eyes--emboldened the sea-faring man. He clamped his big hairy hand down over her slim fingers and cried out, half starting from his chair:
"It"s in my mind, Zoraida, that the old Montezumas left more than bottled moonshine after them. To be taken by them that have the hearts for the job. Maybe for you--Yes, and for me!"
Zoraida drew her hand away but the laughter did not die in her eyes or pa.s.s away from her scarlet lips. Barlow, holding himself stiff, shot a look that was open challenge at Kendric who returned it wonderingly.
Rios touched up the ends of his black mustachios and appeared highly good humored.
"Who knows?" said Zoraida softly, with a sidelong look at Kendric. "At least, spoken like a man, friend Barlow!"
Her mood was one of intense exhilaration. The movements of her supple body in her ample chair were quick and graceful and sinuous, like a slender snake"s; she seemed a-thrill and glowing; it was as though for the moment life was for her as a great dynamo to which she had drawn close so that it sent its mighty pristine and vigorous current dancing through her. She lifted her gla.s.s and sipped while she still smiled; she saw Barlow"s empty goblet and impulsively emptied into it half of her own. Though her back for the time was upon Bruce she seemed to feel his quick jealous frown, for she turned swiftly from Barlow, and her fingers fluttered to Bruce"s shoulder. Kendric saw her eyes as she gave them to Bruce in a look that was like a kiss. The boy flushed and when she made further amends by holding to his lips her own gla.s.s, he touched it almost reverently.
Kendric, sickening with disgust at what he chose to consider a compet.i.tion in a.s.sininity between his two old friends, turned from them to Betty with some trivial remark. As he spoke he was contrasting her with the splendid Zoraida and had he voiced the comparison Zoraida must have whitened with anger and mortification while Betty flushed up, startled. He would have said; "One is like a poison serpent and the other like a flower." But instead of that he merely said:
"And how have you spent the long day, Miss Betty?"
Betty raised her head and looked at him steadily. A flower? Quickly, even before she spoke, he amended that. A girl, rather; a girl with a mind of her own and a sorching [Transcriber"s note: scorching?] hot temper and her utterly human moments of unreasonableness. Her glance meant to cut and did cut. Her voice was serene, cool and contemptuous.
"I do not require to be amused, thank you," she said.
"Amused?" demanded Kendric, puzzled equally by words and expression.
"I am here against my will," she explained. "You are among your chosen friends. To entertain me you need not deny yourself the pleasure of their delightful conversation."
"You know better than that," he said sharply. "If you don"t care to talk with me----"
"I don"t," said Betty.
Kendric reddened angrily. He opened his lips for the retort he meant to make; then instead gulped down his wine and sat back glowering.
After having been fool enough to worry over her all day long to be told to hold his tongue now set him to forming sweeping and denunciatory generalizations concerning her entire s.e.x. Well, he wanted matters simplified and here came the desired solution. Betty could forage for herself, could go to the devil if she liked, he told himself bluntly.
Before the night pa.s.sed he meant to make a break for the open and, thank G.o.d, he"d go alone. As a man should, with no woman around his neck. Because a girl had hurt him he chose now to pretend to himself that he was glad to be rid of her.
After that, during the meal, both Jim and Betty sat for the most part silent and Rios, nursing his mustache and watching all that went forward, had little to say. On the other hand Zoraida and Bruce and Barlow made the dinner hour lively with their talk. Skilled in her management of men, Zoraida had never shown greater genius for holding two red blooded, ardent men in leash. She threw favors to each side of her; a tumbled rose from her hair was loot for the sailorman who at the moment was of a mood to forget other greater and more golden loot for the scented, wilting petals; a bracelet coming undone was for Bruce"s eager fingers to fasten. And always when she looked at one man with a kiss in her oblique eyes her head was turned so that the other man might not see. Kendric she ignored.
"The same old story of good men gone wrong," philosophized Kendric.
"Let a man get a woman in his head and he"s no earthly good." And, in his turn, he ignored Betty. Or at least a.s.sured himself that he did so. But Betty, being Betty, though for the most part her eyes seemed downcast, knew that the man at her side thought of little but her own exasperating self. She did a good bit of speculating upon Jim Kendric; she was perplexed and uncertain; when he was not observing she shot many a curious sidelong look at him.
"Miss Zoraida is about due to overreach herself," thought Kendric.
"She can"t drive Barlow and Bruce tandem."
But Zoraida appeared to feel no uneasiness. As the meal went on and meats and fruits were served and other vintages poured and coffee set bubbling over a tiny alcohol flame on the table, her spirits rose and she dared anything. She was sure of herself and of her destiny and of her dominance over the pleasureable situation. Bruce"s eyes and Barlow"s clashed like knives, but when they met hers softened and worshiped.
At the end of the meal, when they rose, Zoraida cried: "Wait!" At her signal her servants swiftly lifted the table and carried it out through the double doors. Another smaller table was brought in; a man came to Zoraida with a small steel box. She took it laughing, and laughing spilled its contents out upon the table so that gold pieces rolled jingling across the polished top and some fell to the floor. With her own hands she carelessly divided the gold into four nearly equal piles.
"For my guests!" she told them lightly. She took from the servant"s hands a deck of cards and tossed it down among the minted gold. "I would watch such men as you four play for the whole stake. And," she added more slowly, her burning look embracing them all but lingering upon Jim Kendric, "I have a curiosity to know who of you in my house is the most favored of the G.o.ds!"
"There"s a goodly pile there, Senorita," said Barlow who could never look upon gold without hungering. "You mean it all goes to the man who wins? And you don"t play?"
"All that," she answered him steadily, "goes to the man who wins. With perhaps much more? Who knows?"
Bruce stepped eagerly to the table where already Barlow was before him with a heap of the gold drawn up to his hand. Ruiz Rios took his place indifferently, affecting a look of ennui. Kendric held back. Betty, aloof from them all, looked about her as though to escape. But at each door, as though forbidding exit, stood one of Zoraida"s men.
"You yourself do not play?" Barlow asked of Zoraida.
"This time, my friend," she replied, "I am content to watch."
Content rather, thought Kendric, to amuse herself by stirring up more bad blood among friends. For the look he saw on her face was one of pure malicious mischief. It occurred to him that she had sorrowed not at all over the taking off of Escobar at Rios"s hand; he had the suspicion that in her cleverness she discerned looming trouble as a result of encouraging the infatuations of two men like Bruce and Barlow, and that before she would let herself be destroyed by an inevitable jealous rage she meant to set them at each other"s throats.
Such an act he deemed entirely germane to Zoraida"s dark methods.
"Senor Jim does not care to play?" she asked quietly.
Had not Betty chosen to look at him then Kendric"s answer would have been a blunt, "No." But Betty did look, and the glance was as eloquent as a gush of stinging words. Without a clue to the girl"s thoughts, he merely set her down as the most illogical, impertinent and irritating creature it had ever been his bad lot to encounter. For her eyes told him that he was an animal of some sort of a crawling species which she abhorred. This after he had put in long troubled hours seeking the way to be of service to her!
"Bah," he said in his heart, staring coldly at her until she averted her eyes, "they"re all the same." And to Zoraida, "I"ll play but I play with my own money."
Zoraida only laughed. His open rudeness seemed unmarked.
"Barlow," said Kendric, "I want a word with you first."
Barlow did not turn or lift his eyes.