Gaspar Arco de Vaca, Santacilla's closest
companion, observed toward Charles an air of profound civility, and
his pretence was more galling than Santacilla's morbid threats and
exposed contempt. De Vaca was, in temperament and appearance, purely
Iberian: he was of middle height, he carried his slender body with an
assured insulting grace, and had a narrow high-boned face, a bigoted
nose and a moustache like a scrolling of India ink on a repressed and
secretive mouth. Charles often encountered him in the Fencing School
on the Prado, across from the Villa Nueva Theatre. The officers of
Isabella congregated there late in the afternoon, where they occupied
all the chairs and filled the bare room with the soft stamp of their
heels and the harsh grinding of engaged buttoned steel. The foils,
however, were not always covered: there had been some fatalities from
duelling in the sala de Armas since Charles Abbott had been in Havana;
a Cuban gentleman past sixty had been slain by a subaltern of
seventeen; two officers, quarreling over a crillo girl, had sustained
punctured lungs, from which one had bled to death.

The Cubans, it was made evident, were there by sufferance, and the
fencing master, Galope Hormiguero, an officer who had been retired
from a Castilian regiment under the shadow of an unprovoked murder,
made little effort to conceal his disdain of the Islanders. Charles he
regarded without interest: he was a faithful student, and made all the
required passes, engaged the other beginning students, with
regularity; but even he saw that he would never be notably skilful
with the foil or rapier or broadsword. Charles had a delicate sense of
touch, he bore himself firmly, his eye was true; he had the appearance
of mastery, but the essence of it was not in him. His heart,
Hormiguero frequently told him, was like a sponge; he wasn't tempered
to the commanding of death.

He agreed, silently, that he wasn't a butcher; and as for his
heart--time would show its material. Meanwhile he kept up the waist
and forearm exercises, the indicated breathing, gaining, if not a
different spirit, a harder and cured body. The room was large, with
the usual high windows on a balcony, and strips of coco-matting over
the tiled floor. A light wooden partition provided dressing space, the
chairs were carried about hither and there, and the racks of foils
against the walls reflected the brightness of day in sudden long
shivers like other and immater