Old Court Life in Spain; vol. 2

So calm is Blanche and her voice so clear, as she fixes her large eyes steadfastly on the priest, as if looking beyond him into another world, that neither he nor Claire dare trouble her with words.

Then she confesses, kneeling on the stones, and at the conclusion, taking the priest’s hand in hers, she meekly kisses it, and begs to be interred at Xeres.

“For else,” she says, “they may dispute the possession of my body in death as they have done in life, and the king’s mistress, Maria de Padilla, might do some dishonour to it, which is not meet, seeing that I am of royal blood, and the rightful Queen of Castile.”

And even in the agony of her grief Claire wondered to hear Blanche speak with such dignity and judgment, for, up to that time since they had left Toledo, her senses had seemed dulled, and she had said nothing of all that was in her mind.

Anon the low door creaks on its hinges and a figure appears, completely shrouded in black. The head is covered by a cowl with slits for eyes; in one hand is a torch, which throws a glare in the chamber like blood; the other lies concealed in the mantle.

At this horrible sight Blanche loses all her composure. She shrieks aloud, and burying herself in the arms of Claire clings closely to the stone walls.

But the priest exhorting her with holy words, she speedily regains her courage, and turning to the executioner speaks with a gentle voice.

“Friend, I pardon you. You must obey the king, who sends you, as I do in dying here.” And rising to her feet, a kind of glory gathers on her face; all her young beauty comes back to her again, such as she was when, as a happy girl, she left Narbonne a bride.

“I am but eighteen years old, and I am about to die, a virgin, as I have lived. The crown which was put on my head was one of sorrow; I hope to find a better in another world. My father,” turning to the priest, who is bowed down with grief, “if it be possible, commend me to my sister, the Queen of France, and to my father, and tell them I have not disgraced them by any act.”

And with these words upon her lips, she kneels down, the executioner seizes her, and passes the fatal bowstring round her throat.

According to a legend of the time, Blanche of Bourbon was interred in the old cathedral at Xeres, but as an entirely new building was erected in 1695, no record of her burying-place remains.

CHAPTER XVI

Death of Maria de Padilla – Don Juan de Mañara

FOREMOST in the fighting at Toledo, when Don Pedro drove out Don Enrique de Trastamare and took Queen Blanche prisoner, was his favourite, Don Juan de Mañara, an historical profligate of no small fame in poetry and music, and dreaded by husbands and fathers.

Vainly did they lock the gates of their patios and put iron bars over the windows; he penetrated everywhere. The Commendatore whom Don Juan killed in a duel about his daughter Doña Anna, was but one of the many whom he had injured, only the Commendatore cursed him, and the curse cleaved to him, although it is not true that as a statue, he invited him to supper, as he does in Mozart’s opera, and was dragged down to hell.

The stage Don Giovanni is a very elegant señor, with fine feathers, bright clothes, golden chains, velvets, and lace; but the real man clothed himself as plainly as his master, Don Pedro, in a dark doublet, with a leather capa, or head-piece, quite innocent of gew-gaws, and as heavy a mantle as a Castilian can wear.

Living in warlike times, when men rapped out their swords on every occasion, Don Juan was ready for whatever adventure might befall, giving no quarter and receiving none; little given to vanity of any sort, or smoothness of speech in the passages of the duelo or on the battle-field, spending his leisure between the dice-box and the wine flagon.

In person he was dark-featured, too bronzed and weather-beaten for actual beauty, but with plenty of that dash and bravery which please a lady’s eye. Careless, remorseless, sensual, neither God nor devil had terrors for him, but he never shed blood wantonly, and was incapable of butchering women, like his master, or of treacherous assassination or murder of any kind.

How he remained in favour so long, spite of his outspoken comments on Don Pedro, was due to his well-tried devotion. His contempt for the whole family of the Padillas was notorious, specially for Don Garcia, whom he qualified as a base flatterer and parasite, ready to sell Don Pedro like Judas Iscariot.

Don Pedro had few friends; revolt and hatred had thinned his party, and the followers of Enrique de Trastamare were continually increased by the horror of some new crime.

Had the king given heed to Don Juan he would never have sacrificed Doña Bianca or the Grand Master Fadique to the jealous fury of Maria de Padilla. Every mishap which had been foretold by Albuquerque and the queen-mother had followed, as was indeed apparent, after these cruel deeds.

At this time his life and his throne were in jeopardy and he knew it. Not only had the death of Blanche moved France to the core and allied Charles V. with Enrique, but it had so profoundly offended the Castilian sense of honour that a formal remonstrance was drawn up by his own nobles, an insult at which his fierce temper flamed out, and but for the certainty of coming war a bloody punishment would have been the result.

“The throne! the throne!” is the war-cry of El Caballero, who, no longer a fugitive, has constituted himself the avenger of the queen; and word has come to Seville that Aragon and Navarre have declared in his favour, as well as many of the cities in old Castile, and that Blanche’s kinsman, the Comte de la Marche, of the royal blood of St. Louis, has joined Du Guesclin and the Grande Compagnie despatched by the King of France, now marching south to join them.

Hitherto prosperous in his wickedness, since Blanche’s death a curse cleaves to Don Pedro. Has he read her letter and does he know that she has summoned him to appear at the heavenly tribunal, where neither lying nor hypocrisy will avail him? Who can say? Dead or alive, Don Pedro is inscrutable.

At this time Maria de Padilla falls suddenly sick of a mortal malady. Stretched on an Oriental couch of purple stuff, within her golden-walled chamber she lies longing for the return of Don Pedro, far away battling in Aragon. Plunged in the torpor of a sudden fever, her hand vaguely wanders among the meshes of her glossy hair, still sown with the pearls she had placed there overnight. From whom does she shrink, this terrible beauty, gathering herself together until her henna-tipped fingers sinking into her flesh, she cries loudly for Don Pedro, and shriek after shriek comes from her as she flings herself into the arms of her slaves?

It is an evil death, haunted by phantoms. No priest comes to soothe her dying moments. She is held to be a witch, in league with the Evil One. The sacraments of the Church cannot be brought to such as she. But on Don Pedro’s return to Seville she is laid to rest in the cathedral under the dome of the Capilla Real, beside the sovereigns of Castile, and such regal titles as were refused her in life are given to her in death.

The Cortes are assembled, and Don Pedro solemnly proclaims her his lawful wife and her children, one son and three daughters, legitimate. No one believes it, though witnesses are called as having been present at the ceremony, but no one dares to deny it and Maria de Padilla is buried as she has lived – a queen.

Whatever Don Pedro feels at the loss of the woman he loved, he conceals it. This is no time for grief. Furious at the growing success of El Caballero, Don Pedro signs a hasty peace with Aragon, and threatens to attack his ancient allies, the Moors.

Much alarmed, they send an ambassador to Seville, in the person of Mahomed Barbarossa, the Rey Bermejo, charged with rich presents to appease him.

In the midst of a superb procession rides the Red King, the accoutrements of his horse set with jewelled fringes; on his head he wears the green turban of the followers of the Prophet, and in the centre, conspicuous among a galaxy of gems, three enormous rubies are set, the middle one, known as “the Balax,” big as a pigeon’s egg. When he beholds Don Pedro in royal robes, standing on the threshold of his gorgeous portal, surrounded by such of the brilliant Castilians who as yet are true to him, the dusky emir is moved to smile, and as he dismounts to kiss Don Pedro’s hand, the Balax gleaming like fire on his head, his steely blue eyes fix on it greedily, and it is clear to Don Juan who stands behind, that strong passion of some kind moves him.

Long he contemplates in silence the turban of the Moor; then, turning abruptly to Don Juan, he whispers: “What right has the Infidel to wear such gems? While my treasury is empty he comes here to flaunt them in my face. Mark me, amigo mio, I will have that Balax before the day is old. It is worth a king’s ransom and will some day stand me in good stead.”

“I pray your Grace not to contemplate so villainous a project,” is Don Juan’s reply. “You have enemies enough, methinks, without making more. I will not help you. I am willing to second you, as my liege and sovereign, in the field or the duelo, to the death, but by St. Helena or any other male or female saint, I cannot stand by you in a matter of open spoiling of your guest.”

“No, but the gems, the gems,” returns the king in the same whisper. “I never saw the like! I cannot take my eyes from them!”

“That may or may not be. It is no concern of mine, my lord. I am no merchant to adjudge their value; nor do I care for such toys except on the bosom of the fair, where I would be before your Grace in plucking them. Otherwise, let every man and every Moor, I say, possess his own; and if the emir likes to deck himself like a peacock he is free for me.”

As the day falls and the bells of the Giralda tower and of all the towers in the churches of Seville have ceased their clang, a sumptuous banquet is spread in the Hall of the Ambassadors.

Darker and darker grows Don Pedro’s brow as the feast continues, and more and more anxiously his eyes turn towards the entrance leading into the Patio de las Doncellas.

As the innumerable courses of pilaus and curries, conserves and sweetmeats are served in honour of his guests, with the finest wines of Xeres and Malaga, and golden basins with perfumed water and embroidered napkins are offered between each course, Don Pedro can scarcely master his impatience.

A stony silence falls on all the company from the grim humour of the king. Don Juan is absent, but Don Rodrigues with the other familiars are there, and Emanuel El Zapatero, now captain of the body-guard, stands behind his chair, and as if conscious that something is about to happen, never takes his eyes from his master’s face.

But the strangeness of the position reaches its climax when the emir, rising from the gold-embroidered divan on which he is stretched to pledge the king, Don Pedro neither moves nor responds in any way, but sits with his eyes fixed, as if fascinated, on the Balax in his turban.

Suddenly, at some secret sign given by Emanuel, he strikes the table with his fist, and from each of the pillared openings the hall is filled with troops, armed to the teeth, and behind his chair arises, as if by magic, the naked figure of a Nubian slave bearing an axe.

Ere one can draw breath he falls upon the Red King, who, taken unawares, has not even time to draw his dagger. At the same moment each Moorish knight is seized from behind by a Castilian trooper and dragged into the outer court of the Monteria, where he finds his horse, arms, and slave, receiving at the same time stern injunctions to cross the frontier of Castile before sunrise.

Alone in the hall, Don Pedro advances to where the unhappy Red King lies dead upon the floor, hard by the spot where the blood of Don Fadique stains the marble.

“Dog, and son of a dog!” he exclaims, “did you think to come to Seville to rival me? Dead or alive, I will have the rubies,” and, stooping down with his own hand he plucks them from his turban. “Such a stone as this,” he says, reflectively, holding up the Balax to the light, as if unable to detach his eyes from it, “I never saw, though I am cunning in gems. It is unequalled. It may save my crown. Who knows? Till then I will cherish it as a lover does his mistress. In my bosom I will place thee, wondrous stone, next to my heart of hearts.”[1 - The Balax of the Red King was given by Don Pedro after the battle of Navarrete. This is the same “fair ruby, great as a racket ball,” which Queen Elizabeth showed to Melville, the ambassador of Mary Queen of Scots, and which he asked her to bestow on his mistress, which she refused, and it is the identical gem which adorned the centre of the royal crown of Queen Victoria.]

Don Juan, though wholly disapproving these barbarities as useless and uncivilised, instead of falling away from his master like the rest, applies himself to strengthen his cause. To the dissipated and the young he holds out the prospect of unlimited license; to the ambitious, power; to the covetous, domains. Nothing is left undone that can determine the wavering and secure the doubtful. “The ultimate success of the pretender of Trastamare,” he says, “is an event utterly improbable; and even should he come, it would only be to enrich his own followers by a fearful reckoning among those who have opposed him.”

Subtle arguments these, and admirably suited to the temper of the times, when men’s minds were swayed either by venal and selfish motives, or by the terror of ruin and massacre.

Don Juan lives in a narrow street, a stone’s throw from the gate of the Alcazar. His house still remains, a curious monument of the times; a small, low building with a quaint projecting attic and casements guarded by rows of low Saracenic arches.

Of course there is a fountain in the small pillared patio where he received his friends. If it is the same little pillar of spray as in Don Juan’s time hummed and splashed through the long summer days, I cannot say, or if he was served by the identical Leporello we know so well, and scolded by the shrewish wife Doña Elvira, who always sings in “alt.” But it is certain that the low door of his house gave access nightly to crowds of rollicking guests and fair masked señoras, and that the king in disguise often stepped across the street from the Alcazar to take part in the revelry.

The real Don Juan lives in evil times. Seville is growing desperate with the tyranny of the king. The name of Enrique el Caballero is whispered everywhere as a saviour to an oppressed people. It is said indeed that he has again been proclaimed king at Cahorra by his followers, at the head of the Grandes Compagnies, and that Charles V. of France treats with him as friend to friend.

The priests despise Don Pedro because he lies under an interdict, and no masses can be said in the churches; the libertines hate him because he judges them severely and gives such large measure to himself; and the lovers and husbands because no woman is safe.

No two men are of the same mind in this divided city. The houses are barricaded, the towers turned into fortresses, the iron lattices of the windows, where true lovers whisper, into loopholes for pikes and arrows; the black crosses in the plazas are stained with blood, and the dead often lie unburied in the calle. In all these disorders Don Juan is a leader, cutting down the king’s enemies like dogs, and anathematising all rebels to his cause. “Let us make merry ere we die,” is the cry of the Sevillianos, not knowing what may befall; and so they pass the time in the certainty of coming warfare between Don Enrique and the king, in rioting and profligacy.