"That Segasta is a humbug, you know!"
And with that comprehensive annotation, he adjusted his spectacles, and the Premier's speech in the Cortes began to unwind, syllable by syllable, from under the carpenter's white tobacco-stained mustache:
"Gen-tle-men-of-the-Cham-ber! In-re-ply-to-what-the-Hon-o-ra-ble-De-pu-ty-said-yes-ter-day...."
But before getting to the reply, the carpenter again looked up from his paper and, with a smile of canny superiority, observed to his speechless expectant audience:
"That is a d—— d lie!"
Though the Rector had also spent whole afternoons at the feet of that man of letters, he now failed to notice tio Gori at all. Respectfully and obediently, he advanced, instead, directly toward his uncle, who had gone so far as to take the pipe out of his mouth to call to his nephews with an: "Hey there, boys!" and motion to them to take the chairs he had been keeping for his influential friends. Tonet sat down with his back to his brother and uncle, so as to follow the fast game of dominoes that was rattling in a lively fashion at the next table. At times his eyes would wander off through the smoky atmosphere toward the bar, where the pretty daughter of tio Carabina—for him the principal attraction of the café—was serving drinks under a line of marine chromos.
Señor Mariano el Callao—though no one dared use that last epithet in his hearing—was getting on toward sixty, but was still a muscular and rather handsome man, with a weather-beaten face, blood-shot eyes, a gray mustache as stiff and long and prickly as a tom-cat's whiskers, and the general bullying air of an uneducated lout who had money enough to live on without working. People had dubbed him el Callao because at least a dozen times every day he told the story of that famous battle for the Peruvian seaport—the last that Spain relinquished in South America—which he had witnessed as an ordinary seaman on the Numancia. In these narratives he mentioned the admiral, Mendez Nuñez, in every other sentence,—"and don Casto says to me, says he"—as if the hero had had him for his most intimate friend and right-hand man. What delighted his audiences invariably, however, was his description of the actual combat, with imitations of a broadside from his glorious frigate: boom! boo-oo-oo-oo—m!
In addition tio Mariano was one of the big men about town. He had been a smuggler in the happy days when revenue agents, from Captain of the Port to ordinary patrolman, had hands but never eyes. And even now, when things were not so lax, he would take a passive share in some enterprise of the sort. But his principal activity was doing charity—lending the fishermen, or their wives, advances on their pay at fifty per cent a month; and this had given him a grip on the throats of the poorest elements along shore, so that he could deliver their vote bodily in every election campaign. His nephews could hardly contain their pride when they heard him calling mayors and sheriffs by their first names, or saw him, even, going up to Valencia in his best clothes and a top hat, as member of a committee of leading citizens, to wait on the Governor.
A grasping, heartless Shylock, tio Mariano had a scent for loosening his purse strings at the right moment. He knew the inside workings of every home for miles around. The Rector and Tonet, who owed him nothing but the hope they had of inheriting something when he died, thought him the most respectable and kindly man in the whole village, though very seldom had they been admitted to his pretty house on Queen street, Calle de la Reina, where he lived alone with a good-looking housekeeper, the only person in town who dared talk back to him, and was intimate enough with his affairs even to know where he kept his "pile."
Tio Mariano listened to the Rector with eyes half closed and a vertical line knit between his eyebrows. "Be d—— d, be d—— d! Of course! Not a bad idea at all, not at all!" That's the way he liked people—with some gumption! And he seized the occasion to brag of his own biography as a fool successful in getting rich, telling how he had left the navy without a cent in his pocket, and, to get out of the rut his father and grandfather had been in as fishermen, had started off on the underground route to Gibraltar and Algiers, to do his bit toward keeping business going and to give people something else to smoke besides the stink-weed forced on the public by the government! Thanks to the Lord, who had stood by him through thick and thin, and to his own guts—don't forget that—he had made a little something—enough to keep him from worrying in his old age! But times weren't what they had been! The revenue men were now in charge of young navy officers just off the school-ships, with all sorts of stuck-up ideas in their heads and ears a yard long to catch any talk that was going around; and not a one of them would keep his eyes shut for an hour, if you paid him half his weight in gold. Why, last month they had caught three boats coming from Marseilles with a cargo of cloth! You had to be careful, you had to be careful! Too much blabbing going on all the time. The Q. T., that was the watchword! The Rector had made up his mind? Well, then, straight ahead! His Uncle Mariano would not be the man to throw cold water on an idea like that. He wanted the boys in his family to have ambition and try to get somewhere in the world. Poor old Pascualo would have turned out better if he'd stuck to that business and not gone back to fishing!