Catalina loved the sea and hated it. To-day she was in no mood to give it anything and turned her back upon it, her eyes travelling from the remote, disdainful beauty of the mountains down over the vineyards and villages, leaning far out to catch a last glimpse of that most characteristic object in a Spanish landscape—a huge and almost circular mass of rock rising abruptly from the plain, brown, barren, its apex set with a fortified castle, an old brown town clinging desperately to the inhospitable sides. The castle may be in ruins, but men and women still crawl lazily up and down the perpendicular streets, too idle or too poor to get away from the soil, with its dust of ancestral blood. The descendants of warriors slept and loafed and begged in the sun, thankful for a tortilla a day and dreading nothing this side of Judgment but the visit of the tax-gatherer. To escape the calls of the remorseless one, many who owned not even a little vineyard on the plain slept in the hollowed side of a hill and made the earth their pillow.
“Brutes!” said Catalina, meaning the government.
“Why don’t they come to America?” asked Lydia, wonderingly. “Look at that old woman out in the field. That is the most shocking thing you see in Europe—women in the fields everywhere.”
Catalina, indolent in some respects, waged eternal war with the one-sided. “Your factories are far worse,” she asserted. “They are really horrible, for the women stand on their feet all day with a ceaseless din tearing at their nerves and never a breath of decent air in their lungs. They are the most ghastly lot I ever saw in my life. These women are always in the fresh air, with the quiet of nature about them, and they rest when they like. I think we are the barbarians—we and the Spanish government.”
“Well, well, don’t argue,” said Mr. Moulton, soothingly. “It is too hot. We have our defects, but don’t forget our many redeeming virtues. And as for Spain, backward, tax-ridden, oppressed as she is, one sees nothing to compare with the horrors that Arthur Young saw in France just before 1789. Spain, no doubt, will have her own revolution in her own time; I am told the peasants are very virile and independent. My love, shall I blow up that bag behind your head?”
He examined the other bags, readjusted them, and there being nothing to claim the eye at the moment, read Baedeker aloud, to the intense but respectful annoyance of his eldest daughter and the barely concealed resentment of Catalina, who hung still farther over the creaking door.
The train walked into a little station of Tordera and stopped.
“Cinco minutos!” said the guard, raising his voice.
“Five!” said Catalina. “That means fifteen. Let us get out and exercise and buy something.”
“Pray be careful!” exclaimed Mrs. Moulton. “I know you will be left. Mr. Moulton, please—please don’t get out.”