At length, after a long pause, he spoke. He had detected a movement, made by Caterina and instantly restrained, to withdraw from the touch of his hand, and this had set his slow brain thinking. He had dealt with animals more than with men, and was less slow to read a movement than to understand a word.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is it that you are sorry you married me?”
And Caterina, who belonged to a people saying yea, yea, and nay, nay, nodded her head.
“Why?” asked the Mule, with a deadly economy of words. And she did not answer him. “Is it because—there is another man?”
It was known in the valley that the Mule had never used his knife, not even in self-defence. Caterina did not dare, however, to answer him. She only whispered a prayer to the Virgin.
“Is it Pedro Casavel?” asked the Mule; and the question brought her to her feet, facing him with white cheeks.
“No—no—no!” she cried. “What made you think that? Oh—no!”
Woman-like, she thought she could fool him. The Mule turned away from her and sat down again. Woman-like, she had forgotten her own danger at the mere thought that Casavel might suffer.
“And he—in the mountains,” said the Mule, thinking aloud. He was beginning to see now, at last, when it was too late, as better men than he have done before, and will continue to do hereafter. Caterina could not have held out as an objection to her marriage the fact that she loved a man who was in the mountains. The schoolmaster was not one to listen to such an argument as that, especially from a girl who could not know her own mind. For the schoolmaster was, despite his radical tendencies, bigoted in his adherence to the old mistakes.
Caterina might have told the Mule, perhaps, if he had asked her; for she knew that he was gentle even with the stubborn Cristofero Colon. But he had not asked her, failing the necessary courage to face the truth.