Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/35

 “His frailty and his aestheticism are both bad signs, to me," said Kate ominously.

“And the youth. Surely that’s another!" said Owen, wih a dead laugh.

But Villiers only gave a little snort of cold, pleased amusement.

Someone was calling Miss Leslie on the telephone, said the Mexican chambermaid. It was the only person Kate knew in the capital—or in the Distrito Federal—a Mrs Norris, widow of an English embassador of thirty years ago. She had a big, ponderous old house out in the village of Tlacolula.

“Yes! Yes! This is Mrs Norris. How are you? That’s right, that’s right. Now, Mrs Leslie, won’t you come out to tea this afternoon and see the garden? I wish you would. Two friends are coming in to see me, two Mexicans: Don Ramón Carrasco and General Viedma. They are both men, and Don Ramón is a great scholar. I assure you, they are both entirely the exception among Mexicans. Oh, but the exception! So now, my Mrs Leslie, won’t you come with your cousin? I wish you would.”

Kate remembered the little general; he was a good deal smaller than herself. She remembered his erect, alert little figure, something birdlike, and the face with eyes slanting under arched eyebrows, and the little black tuft of an imperial on the chin: a face with a peculiar Chinese suggestion, without being Chinese in the least, really. An odd, detached, yet cocky little man, a true little Indian, speaking Oxford English in a rapid, low, musical voice, with extraordinarily gentle intonation. Yet those black, inhuman eyes!

Till this minute she had not really been able to recall him to herself, to get any sharp impression. Now she had it. He was an Indian pure and simple. And in Mexico, she knew, there were more generals than soldiers. There had been three generals in the Pullman coming down from El Paso, two, more or less educated, in the "drawing-room,” and the third, a real peasant Indian, travelling with a frizzy half-white woman who looked as if she bad fallen into a flour-sack, her face was so deep in powder, and her frizzy hair and her brown silk dress so douched with the white dust of it. Neither this "general" nor this woman had ever been in a