Long Odds by Harold Bindloss — Read

A silver lamp burned on the little table where two diminutive cups of bitter coffee were set out, but its indifferent light was scarcely needed in the open-fronted upper room of Dom Clemente's house. A full moon hung above the Atlantic, and the clear radiance that rested on the glittering harbor streamed in between the fretted arches and slender pillars. Throughout tropical Africa all there is of grace and beauty in man's handiwork bears the stamp of the unchanging East, and one finds something faintly suggestive of the art of olden days where the eye rests with pleasure on any of its sweltering towns, which is, however, not often the case. It is incontrovertible that most of the towns are characterized by native squalor and that some of them are unpleasantly filthy, but, after all, filth and squalor are usual in the East, and serve by contrast to enhance the elusive beauty of its cities.

It was almost cool that evening, and Ormsgill, looking down between the slim pillars across the white walls and flat roofs, though some were ridged and tiled, towards the blaze of moonlight on the harbor, was well content to be where he was after his journey through the steamy bush and across the sun-scorched littoral. He had arrived that afternoon, and had spent the last hour with Benicia Figuera, who had shown herself gracious to him. She lay not far away from him in a big Madeira chair, loosely draped in diaphanous white attire which enhanced the violet depths of her eyes and the duskiness of her hair, and her face showed in the moonlight the clear pallor of ivory. Ormsgill fancied that her attendant the Senora Castro sat in the room behind them from which a soft light streamed out through quaintly patterned wooden lattices, though he had seen nothing of the latter lady since the comida had been cleared away.