Читать книгу The Plumed Serpent. Historical Novel - Life and Love after the Mexico Revolution онлайн

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‘But why should I give something to you, if it is a tribute to Quetzalcoatl?’ she stammered.

‘I am Quetzalcoatl’s man, I,’ he replied, with calm effrontery.

‘And if I don’t give you anything?’ she said.

He lifted his shoulders and spread his free hand, staggering a little, losing his footing in the water as he did so.

‘If you wish to make an enemy of the lake — ’ he said, coolly, as he recovered his balance.

And then for the first time he looked straight at her. And as he did so, the demonish effrontery died down again, and the peculiar American tension slackened and left him.

He gave a slight wave of dismissal with his free hand, and pushed the boat gently forward.

‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he said, with a slight insolent jerk of his head sideways, and a faint, insolent smile. ‘We will wait till the Morning Star rises.’

The boatman softly but powerfully pulled the oars. The man in the water stood with the sun on his powerful chest, looking after the boat in half-seeing abstraction. His eyes had taken again the peculiar gleaming far-awayness, suspended between the realities, which, Kate suddenly realized, was the central look in the native eyes. The boatman, rowing away, was glancing back at the man who stood in the water, and his face, too, had the abstracted, transfigured look of a man perfectly suspended between the world’s two strenuous wings of energy. A look of extraordinary, arresting beauty, the silent, vulnerable centre of all life’s quivering, like the nucleus gleaming in tranquil suspense, within a cell.