There was Martinez of San Domingo, yellow as a canary, always sitting with one leg curled under him and holding the back of his head in his knitted fingers against the back of his rocking-chair.  Father, mother, brother, sisters, all, had been massacred in the struggle of ’21 and ’22; he alone was left to tell the tale, and told it often, with that strange, infantile insensibility to the solemnity of his bereavement so peculiar to Latin people.

But, besides these, and many who need no mention, there were two in particular, around whom all the story of the Cafe des Exiles, of old M. D’Hemecourt and of Pauline, turns as on a double centre.  First, Manuel Mazaro, whose small, restless eyes were as black and bright as those of a mouse, whose light talk became his dark girlish face, and whose redundant locks curled so prettily and so wonderfully black under the fine white brim of his jaunty Panama.  He had the hands of a woman, save that the nails were stained with the smoke of cigarettes.  He could play the guitar delightfully, and wore his knife down behind his coat-collar.

The second was “Major” Galahad Shaughnessy.  I imagine I can see him, in his white duck, brass-buttoned roundabout, with his sabreless belt peeping out beneath, all his boyishness in his sea-blue eyes, leaning lightly against the door-post of the Cafe des Exiles as a child leans against his mother, running his fingers over a basketful of fragrant limes, and watching his chance to strike some solemn Creole under the fifth rib with a good old Irish joke.

Old D’Hemecourt drew him close to his bosom.  The Spanish Creoles were, as the old man termed it, both cold and hot, but never warm.  Major Shaughnessy was warm, and it was no uncommon thing to find those two apart from the others, talking in an undertone, and playing at confidantes like two schoolgirls.  The kind old man was at this time drifting close up to his sixtieth year.  There was much he could tell of San Domingo, whither he had been carried from Martinique in his childhood, whence he had become a refugee to Cuba, and thence to New Orleans in the flight of 1809.

It fell one day to Manuel Mazaro’s lot to discover, by sauntering within earshot, that to Galahad Shaughnessy only, of all the children of the Cafe des Exiles, the good host spoke long and confidentially concerning his daughter.  The words, half heard and magnified like objects seem in a fog, meaning Manuel Mazaro knew not what, but made portentous by his suspicious nature, were but the old man’s recital of the grinding he had got between the millstones of his poverty and his pride, in trying so long to sustain, for little Pauline’s sake, that attitude before society which earns respect from a surface-viewing world.  It was while he was telling this that Manuel Mazaro drew near; the old man paused in an embarrassed way; the Major, sitting sidewise in his chair, lifted his cheek from its resting-place on his elbow; and Mazaro, after standing an awkward moment, turned away with such an inward feeling as one may guess would arise in a heart full of Cuban blood, not unmixed with Indian.