“What on earth is the matter with the man?” queried Tia Marta.
“There is something I would say to you before we come to the city,” faltered Pedrillo.
“Say it now,” bade Tia Marta briskly. “Of what art afraid, heart of butter?”
“My mother’s son has no wife,” ventured Pedrillo wistfully. “I know,” he went on to say, with his old twinkle, “that choosing a wife is as risky as choosing a melon. I know that there is in heaven a cake kept for husbands who never repented of their choice, and into which, up to this day, no one has ever set tooth—”
“Bah!” interrupted Tia Marta. “That is because no husbands ever went to heaven.”
“My house is only a cottage,” pursued Pedrillo humbly, “and Don Manuel’s house is large and fine. It was a pilgrim inn once and still has the sacred shell of St. James carved over the door. But ‘little bird, little nest.’ ”
“And what would I be in Don Manuel’s grand house?” asked Tia Marta bitterly. “A cook of cabbage broth, without a place of my own to scold in or anybody of my own to scold, not even allowed to keep for myself this child as harmless as a crust of bread, this innocent as pure as a water-jar.”
And she kissed the baby head that nestled so confidingly against her shoulder.
“There will always be room in my cottage and in my heart for Juanito,” promised Pedrillo.
Tia Marta, dropping her look to Capitana’s inquisitive, pricked-up ears, made answer in an Andalusian copla: