La Clavel's face was as blanched as the officer's was dark, her eyes were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her countenance, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical fate, the figure from a shield, from an emblem, dragging him to death.
Then, suddenly, in an inadequate muffled voice burdened with a shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla's face. The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window. He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely helpless, pathetically stricken.
"The air," he whispered; "hot as wine." He pitched abruptly face forward upon the floor.
La Clavel tried to speak against the labored heaving of her breast, but what she attempted to say was unintelligible. Charles, slipping back the broken bolt with a finger in its orifice, listened intently at the door. The Hotel St. Louis was wrapped undisturbed in its siesta; no alarm had been created. Santacilla lay as he had fallen, an arm loosely outspread, a leg doubled unnaturally under its fellow. He bore the laxness, the emptiness, of death. He had spoken truly that it wasn't in his star to be killed by a man. Finding that he was still holding the chair, Charles put it softly down. "Well," he said, "the revolution is through with him."
He glanced suddenly at La Clavel. She was drooping, disheveled and hideous; her hair lay on her bare shoulders in coarse strands; her face was swollen with bruises. Now, he realized, she would never see the Argentine; she would never again hear the shouted olés that greeted, rewarded, the brilliancy of her jota. His thoughts shifted to Cuba and himself--if it were a crime of passion that had been committed in her room, the cause, there, would be freed from suspicion. He had, as customary, come directly, unostentatiously, to her room, and he was certain that he had not been observed. A duty, hard in the extreme, was before him.