“You can tell her that the Senorita has grey hair,” said Miss Cheyne, practically.
“That may be,” said the innkeeper, looking at her with his head on one side, and a gravely critical air. “But you still have the air”—he shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his hands—“the air that takes a man's fancy. Who knows?”
Miss Cheyne, who had dealt much with a simple people, accustomed to the statement of simple facts in plain language, only laughed. There is a certain rough purity of thought which vanishes at the advance of civilisation. And cheap journalism, cheap fiction, cheap prudery have not yet reached Spain.
“I know nothing,” went on the man, with a shrewd, upward nod of the head. “But the Senorita has a lover. He may be faithless, he may be absent, he may be dead—but he is there—the God be thanked!”
He touched his broad chest in that part where a deadly experience told him that the heart was to be found, and looked up to Heaven, all with a change of expression and momentary gravity quite incomprehensible to men of northern breed.
Miss Cheyne laughed again without self-consciousness. Uneducated people have a way of arriving at once at those matters that interest rich and poor alike, which is rather refreshing, even to the highly educated.
“But I, who talk like a washerwoman, forget that I am an innkeeper,” said the man, with a truer tact than is often found under fine linen. And he proceeded to wait on her with a grand air, as if she were a queen and he a nobleman.
“If Juanita were about it would be different,” he said, whipping the cloth from the table and shaking the crumbs to the four winds. “And the Senorita would be properly served. But—what will you? the nino is but a fortnight old, and I—I am new at my trade. The Senorita takes coffee?”
Miss Cheyne intimated that she did take coffee.
“And you, perhaps, will take a cup also,” she added, whereupon the man bowed in his best manner. He had that perfect savoir-faire—a certain innate gentlemanliness—which is the characteristic of all Spaniards. His manner indicated an appreciation of the honour, and conveyed at the same time the intimation that he knew quite well how to behave under the circumstances.