‘In four days’ time,’ were Byrne’s last words, ‘the ship will stand in and send a boat on shore if the weather permits. If not, you’ll have to make it out on shore the best you can till we come along to take you off.’

‘Right you are, sir,’ answered Tom, and strode on. Byrne watched him step out on a narrow path. In a thick peajacket,^* with a pair of pistols in his belt, a cutlass by his side and a stout cudgel in his hand, he looked a sturdy figure and well able to take care of himself. He turned round for a moment to wave his hand, giving to Byrne one more view of his honest bronzed face with bushy whiskers. The lad in goatskin breeches, looking, Byrne says, like a faun or a young satyr leaping ahead, stopped to wait for him and then went off at a bound. Both disappeared.

Byrne turned back. The hamlet was hidden in a fold of the ground, and the spot seemed the most lonely corner of the earth, and as if accursed in its uninhabited desolate barrenness. Before he had walked many yards, however, there appeared very suddenly from behind a bush the muffled-up diminutive Spaniard. Naturally Byrne stopped short.

The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand peeping from under his cloak. His hat hung very much at the side of his head. ‘Señor,’ he said, without any preliminaries, ‘caution! It is a positive fact that one-eyed Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at this moment a mule in his stable. And why he who is not clever has a mule there? Because he is a rogue, a man without conscience. Because I had to give up the macho^* to him to secure for myself a roof to sleep under and a mouthful of olla^* to keep my soul in this insignificant body of mine. Yet, señor, it contains a heart many times bigger than the mean thing which beats in the breast of that brute connection of mine, of whom I am ashamed, though I opposed that marriage with all my power. Well, the misguided woman suffered enough. She had her purgatory on this earth—God rest her soul.’

Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance of that sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech, that he was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what seemed but a piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme or reason. He was confounded, and at the same time he was impressed by the rapid, forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy, excited loquacity of an Italian. So he stared while the homunculus, letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an immense quantity of snuff out of the hollow of his palm.

‘A mule,’ exclaimed Byrne, seizing at last the real aspect of the discourse. ‘You say he has got a mule? That’s queer! Why did he refuse to let me have it?’

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with great dignity. ‘Quien sabe?’^* he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped shoulders. ‘He is a great politico in everything he does. But one thing your worship may be certain of—that his intentions are always rascally. This husband of my defunta^* sister ought to have been married a long time ago to the widow with the wooden legs.’¹

‘I see. But remember that, whatever your motives, your worship countenanced him in this lie.’

The bright, unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose confronted Byrne without wincing, while with that testiness which lurks so often at the bottom of Spanish dignity: ‘No doubt the señor officer would not lose an ounce of blood if I were stuck under the fifth rib,’ he retorted. ‘But what of this poor sinner here?’ Then changing his tone: ‘Señor, by the necessities of the times I live here in exile, a Castilian,^* and an old Christian, existing miserably in the midst of these brute Asturians, and dependent on the worst of them all, who has less conscience and scruples than a wolf. And being a man of intelligence I govern myself accordingly. Yet I can hardly contain my scorn. You have heard the way I spoke. A caballero^* of parts like your worship might have guessed that there was a cat in there.’

‘What cat?’ said Byrne uneasily. ‘Oh, I see. Something suspicious. No, señor. I guessed nothing. My nation are not good guessers at that sort of thing; and therefore I ask you plainly whether that wine-seller has spoken the truth in other particulars.’