through its mere rightness; and he had pictured justice as a
condition dropped beneficently from the clouds, wrought with the
thunder of angels' wings. But accomplishment on earth, with men, he
now saw, was neither safe, easy nor assured. It was the result of
bitter struggle, a strife open to the most appalling mischances. A
necessity of the spirit, it must be executed in the flesh, and flesh
was a treacherous, unstable substance; it was capable not only of
traitorous betrayals, but equally of honest, and no less fatal,
failures. With this in his thoughts he went to the door, in answer to
a knock, and received a heavy carefully tied parcel.

He opened it, and, dripping in dazzling color from the wrapping paper,
was La Clavel's manton, the one in which he had first seen her
insolently dancing the jota. Charles, with a stirred heart, searched
carefully for a note, a scrap of revealing paper; but there was none.
She had sent it to him silently, before she had been taken away, in a
sentiment the delicacy of which deeply moved him. He laid the shawl
over the bed, where its cruel brilliancy filled the white-walled room,
darkened against the heat, with flashes of magenta and orange and
burning blue. La Clavel had worn it dancing, where it emphasized her
grace and perversity and stark passion; it had been, in Charles
Abbott's mind, synonymous with her, with the vision she created; but,
suddenly, it lost that significance, and he saw it as the revealed
outspread pattern of his own existence.

The shawl was a map, a representation, of the country of the spirit
through which he passed; such emotions, such heat, and such golden
roses, all had been, were, his against that background of perilous
endeavor. It seemed to float up from the bed and to reach from coast
to coast, from end to end, of Cuba; its flowers took root and grew,
casting about splendor and perfume; the blue widened into the sky, the
tenderness of the clasping sea; the dark greens were the shadows of
the great ceiba trees, the gloom of the jungles, the massed royal
palms of the plains. And not only was it the setting, the country, its
violent dissonances became cries, victorious or hopeless, the sweep of
reddened swords, the explosions of muskets. There was the blood that
had welled into the Laurel Ditch of Cabanas; and, as well, the sultry
mysterious presence of Africa in the West--the buzzing madness of the
music of the danzon, the hysterics of brujeria.

Charles