Part 10

"Which is the friend whose little ones you envy? You have made me wish to see them and her?"

"That is Elena--beside Gervasio." She indicated a young woman with soft, patient, brown eyes, the dignity of her race and the sweetness of young motherhood, who would have looked little older than herself had it not been for an already shapeless figure. "I can take you to-morrow to see them if you wish."

She had cast down her eyes and her face was white. Still he groped on.

"Pardon me if I say that I am surprised your parents should permit such a woman as this Rosa to attend you. Why should your happy life be disturbed by the lamentations of an abandoned creature--who can do you no good, and possibly much harm?"

Still Concha did not raise her eyes. "I do not think poor Rosa would do anyone harm. But perhaps it were as well she went elsewhere. We have had her long enough. I have taken a dislike to her. I reproach myself bitterly, but I cannot help it. I should like never to see her again."

"What has she told you?" Concha glanced up swiftly. His eyes were blazing. She felt quite certain that he rolled a Russian oath under his tongue, and she made a slight involuntary motion toward him, her lips trembling apart.

"Nothing," she murmured. "I do not know--I do not know. But I no longer wish her near me. She--life is very strange and terrible, senor. You know it well--I, so little."

Rezanov felt his breath short and his hands cold. For a moment he made no reply. Then he smiled charmingly and said in the conventional tone that was ever at his command: "Of course you know little of life in this Arcadia. One who hopes to be numbered among the best of your friends prays that you never may. Yes, senorita, life is strange--strangely commonplace and disillusionizing--but sometimes picturesque. Believe me when I say that nothing stranger has ever befallen me than to find out here on the lonely brink of a continent nearly twenty thousand versts from Europe, a girl of sixteen with the grand manner, and an intellect without the detestable idiosyncrasies of the fashionable bas bleus I have hitherto had the misfortune to encounter."

She was tapping the table slowly with her fork, and he noted that her soft, childish mouth was set. "No doubt you are quite right to put me off," she said finally, and in a voice as even as his own. "And my intellect would do me little good if it did not teach me to ignore mysteries I can never hope to fathom. There is no such thing as life in your sense in this forgotten corner of the world, nor ever will be in my time. If you come back and visit us twenty years hence you will find me fat and worn like Elena, and busy every minute like my mother--unless, indeed, I marry Don Weeliam Sturgis and become a great lady in Boston. It would not be so mean a fate."

Rezanov darted a look of angry contempt at the pale young man who was eating little and miserably watching the handsome pair at the head of the table. "You will not marry him!" he said briefly.

"I could do far worse." Concha's lashes framed an adorable glance that sent the blood to the hair of the sensitive youth. "You have no idea how clever and good he is. And--Madre de Dios!--I am so tired of California."

"But you are a part of it--the very symbol of its future, it seems to me. I wish I had a sculptor in my suite. I should make him model you, label the statue 'California,' and erect it on the peak of that big island out there."

"That is very poetical, but after all, you are only saying that I am a pretty savage with an education that will be more common in the next generation. It is little consolation for an existence where the most exciting event in a lifetime is the arrival of a foreign ship or the inauguration of a governor." And once more she smiled at Sturgis. He raised his glass impulsively, and she hers in gay response. A moment later she gave the signal to leave the table. Rezanov followed her back to the sala chewing the cud of many reflections.

Concha had eaten no supper. As she entered the sala she clapped her hands, the guests ranged themselves against the wall, the musicians, livelier than ever, flew to their instruments; with the drifting, swaying movement she could assume at will, she went slowly, absently, to the middle of the room. Then she let her head drop backward, as if with the weight of her hair, and Rezanov, vaguely angry, expected one of those appeals to the senses for which Spanish women of another sort were notorious. But Concha, after tapping the floor alternately with the points and the wooden heels of her slippers, for a few moments, suddenly made an imperious gesture to Ignacio Sal. He sprang to her side, took her hand, and once more there was the same monotonous tapping of toes and heels. Then they whirled apart, bent their lithe backs until their brows almost touched the floor in a salute of mock admiration, and danced to and from each other, coquetry in the very tilt of her eyebrows, the bare semblance of masculine indulgence on his eager, passionate face. Suddenly to the surprise of all, she snapped her fingers directly under his nose, waved her hand, turned her back, and made a peremptory gesture to that other enamoured young swain, Captain Antonio Castro of Monterey. Don Ignacio, surprised and discomfited, retired amidst the jeers of his friends, and Concha, with her most vivacious and gracious manner, met Castro half way, and, taking his hand, danced up and down the sala, slowly and with many improvisations. Then, as they returned to the center of the room and stepped lightly apart before joining in a gay whirl, she snapped her fingers under HIS nose, made a gesture of dismissal over her shoulder, and fluttered an uplifted hand in the direction of Sturgis. Again there was a delighted laughter, again a discomforted knight and a triumphant partner.

"Concha always gives us something we do not expect," said Santiago to Rezanov, whose eyes were twinkling. "The other girls dance El Son and La Jota very gracefully--yes. But Conchita dances with her head, and the musicians and the partner, when she takes one, have all they can do to follow. She will choose you, next, senor."

Rezanov turned cold, and measured the distance to the door. "I hope not!" he said. "I should hate nothing so much as to make an exhibition of myself. The dances I know--that is all very well--but to improvise--for the love of heaven help me to get out!"

But Santiago, who was watching his sister intently, replied: "Wait a moment, Excellency. I do not think she will choose another. I know by her feet that she intends to dance El Son--in her own way, of course--after all."

Concha circled about the room twice with Sturgis, lifted him to the seventh heaven of expectancy, dismissed him as abruptly as the others. Lifting her chin with an expression of supreme disdain for all his sex, she stood a moment, swaying, her arms hanging at her sides.

"I am glad she will not dance with Weeliam," muttered Santiago. "I love him--yes; but the Spanish dance is not for the Bostonian."

Rezanov awaited her performance with an interest that caused him some cynical amusement. But in a moment he had surrendered to her once more as a creature of inexhaustible surprise. The musicians, watching her, began to play more slowly. Concha, her arms still supine, her head lifted, her eyes half veiled, began to dance in a stately and measured fashion that seemed to powder her hair and dissolve the partitions before an endless vista of rooms. Rezanov had a sudden vision of the Hall of the Ambassadors in the royal palace at Madrid, where, when a young man on his travels, he had attended a state ball. There he had seen the most dignified beauties of Europe dance at the most formal of its courts. But Concha created the illusion of having stepped down from the throne in some bygone fashion to dance alone for her subjects and adorers.

She raised her arms, barely budding at the top, with a gesture that was not only the poetry of grace but as though bestowing some royal favor; when she curved and swayed her body, again it was with the lofty sweetness of one too highly placed to descend to mere seductiveness. She glided up and down, back and forth, with a dreamy revealing motion as if assisting to shape some vague impassioned image in the brain of a poet. She lifted her little feet in a manner that transformed boards into clouds. There were moments when she seemed actually to soar.

"She is a little genius!" thought Rezanov enthusiastically. "Anything could be made of a woman like that."

It was not her dancing alone that interested him, but its effect on her audience. The young men had begun with audible expressions of approval. They were now shouting and stamping and clapping. Suddenly, as once more she danced back to the very center of the room, her bosom heaving, her eyes like stars, her red lips parted, Don Ignacio, long since recovered from his spleen, invaded his pocket and flung a handful of silver at her feet. It was a signal. Gold and silver coins, chains, watches, jewels, bounced over the floor, to be laughingly ignored. Rezanov looked on in amazement, wondering if this were a part of the performance and if he should follow suit. But after a glance at the faces of the young men, lost to everything but their passionate admiration for the unique and beautiful dancing of their Favorita, and when Sturgis, after wildly searching in his pockets, tore a large pearl from the lace of his stock, he doubted no longer--nor hesitated. Fastened by a blue ribbon to the fourth button of his closely fitting coat was a golden key, the outward symbol of his rank at court. He detached it, then made a sudden gesture that caught her attention. For a moment their eyes met. He tossed her the bauble, and mechanically she lifted her hand and caught it. Then she laughed confusedly, shrugged her shoulders, bowed graciously to her audience, and signalled to the musicians to stop. Rezanov was at her side in a moment.

"You must be tired," he said. "I insist that you come out on the veranda and rest."

"Very well," she said indifferently; "it is quite time we all went out to the air. Santiago mio, wilt thou bring my reboso--the white one?"

Santiago, more flushed than his sister at her triumphs, fetched the long strip of silk, and Rezanov detached her from her eager court and led her without. Elena Castro followed closely, yet with a cavalier of her own that her friend might talk freely with this interesting stranger. The night air was cool and stimulating. The hills were black under the sparks of white fire in the high arch of the California sky. In the Presidio square were long blue shadows that might have been reflections of the smoldering blue beyond the stars. Rezanov and Concha sat on the railing at the end of the "corridor."

"It is a custom--all that very material admiration?" he asked.

"A very old one, but not too often followed. Otherwise we should not prize it. But when some Favorita outdoes herself then she receives the greatest reward that man can think of--gold and silver jewels. We do not dare to return the tributes in common fashion, but they have a way of appearing where they belong as soon as their owners are supposed to have forgotten the incident. As you are not a Californian, senor, I take the liberty of returning this without any foolish subterfuge." She handed him his contribution. "I thank you all the same. It was a spontaneous act, and I am very proud."