oil, as Shylock found out.”
“A murderer, lost among the damned!” murmured Carlota. “The father of my children! The husband of my body! Ah no! It is better for me to call to the Holy Virgin, and die.”
“Call then, and die!” said Cipriano.
“My children!” murmured Carlota.
“It is well you must leave them. With your beggar’s bowl of charity you have stolen their oil and their wine as well. It is good for you to steal from them no more, you stale virgin, you spinster, you born widow, you weeping mother, you impeccable wife, you just woman. You stole the very sunshine out of the sky and the sap out of the earth. Because back again, what did you pour? Only the water of dead dilution into the mixing-bowl of life, you thief. Oh die!—die!—die! Die and be a thousand times dead! Do nothing but utterly die!”
Doña Carlota had relapsed into unconsciousness; even her ghost refused to hear. Cipriano flung his sinisterly-flaming serape over his shoulders and his face, over his nose, till only his black, glittering eyes were visible as he blew out of the room.
Kate sat by the window, and laughed a little. The primeval woman inside her laughed to herself, for she had known all the time about the two thieves on the Cross with Jesus; the bullying, marauding thief of the male in his own rights, and the much more subtle, cold, sly, charitable thief of the woman in her own rights, forever chanting her beggar’s whine about the love of God and the God of pity.
But Kate, too, was a modern woman and a woman in her own rights. So she sat on with Carlota. And when the doctor came, she