The schoolmaster smiled, thinking perhaps of that other Cristofero Colon and the east wind that blew him to immortal fame.
“And Caterina,” he asked. “What does she think of it?”
“I don't know.”
The schoolmaster looked at his companion with an upward jerk of the head. It was evident that he thought him a dull fellow. But that assuredly was Caterina's affair. It was, on the other hand, distinctly the affair of Caterina's father to remember those five beasts of the Mule's, than which there were none better in the country-side—to recollect that the Mule himself had a good name at his trade, and was trusted by the authorities. There was no match so good in all the valley, and certainly none to compare with this dull swain in the accursed village of San Celoni. The schoolmaster never spoke of the village without a malediction. He had been planted there in his youth with a promise of promotion, and promotion had never come. For a man of education it was exile—no newspapers, no passing travellers at the Cafe. The nearest town was twenty miles away over the Sierra Nevada, and Malaga—the paved Paradise of his rural dreams—forty rugged miles to the south. No wonder he was a democrat, this disappointed man. In a Republic, now, such as his father had schemed for in the forties, he would have succeeded. A Republic, it must be remembered, being a community in which every man is not only equal, but superior to his neighbour.
“You don't know?”
“No,” answered the Mule, with a dull look of shame at his own faint-heartedness. Moreover, he was assuredly speaking an untruth. The man who fears to inquire—knows.
As a matter of fact, he had hardly spoken to Caterina. Conversation was not the Mule's strong point. He had exchanged the usual greetings with her at the fountain on a fiesta day. He had nodded a good morning to her, gruff and curt (for the Mule had no manners), more times than he could count. And Caterina had met his slow glance with those solemn eyes of hers, and that, so to speak, had settled the Mule's business. Just as it would have settled the business of five out of six men. For Caterina had Moorish eyes—dark and solemn and sad, which said a hundred things that Caterina had never thought of—which seemed to have some history in them that could hardly have been Caterina's history, for she was only seventeen. Though, as to this, one cannot always be sure. Perhaps the history was all to come. Of course, the Mule knew none of these things. He was a hard-working, open-air Andalusian, and only knew that he wanted Caterina, and, as the saying is, could not live without her. Meantime he lived on from day to day without that which he wanted, and worked—just as the reader may be doing. That, in fact, is life—to live on without something or other, and work. Than which there is one thing worse, namely, to live on and be idle.
“But—” said the schoolmaster, slowly, for Andalusian tongues are slow, if the knives are quick—“but one may suppose that you would make her a good husband.”
And a sudden gruff laugh was the answer. A woman would have understood it; but Caterina had no mother. And the schoolmaster was thinking of the five beasts and the postal appointment. The muleteer's face slowly sank back into stolidity again. The light that had flashed across it had elevated that dull physiognomy for a moment only.
“Yes,” said the Mule slowly, at length.