“Fine. I’ll be waiting here. What a sorry idiot this boy is,” thought Mingote. “He really imagines that I’m going to give him fifty duros. The fool!”
An hour went by; then another. No Manuel was forthcoming.
“Can the idiot have been myself?” exclaimed Mingote. “No doubt about it. Can that damned kid have fooled me?”
While Mingote stood there waiting, the baroness and Manuel had taken the train.
They reached Cogolludo and the baroness was bitterly disappointed. She had thought that the town would be a sort of gipsy hamlet, and instead she found an ugly village in the midst of a plain.
The house she had rented was on the outskirts of the village; it was spacious, with a blue door, three tiny windows peeping on to the road, and a poultry-yard in the rear. It must have been standing vacant for the past ten years. On the day after they arrived the baroness and Manuel swept and cleaned and dusted. The poor woman bitterly lamented her action.
“Oh, God in heaven, what a house!” she wailed. “What ever in the world did we come here for? And such a village! I had caught a passing glimpse of one or more towns in Spain, but in the North, where there are trees. This is so dry, so barren!”
Manuel was in his glory; the land near the house produced only nettles and dwarf elders, but he imagined that he could transform that patch of earth, so parched and stifled with noxious growths, into a flourishing garden. He set to work with a right good will.
First he weeded the ground and then burned all the grass of the garden.