Part 6

"Reuben had gradually made her the chief end of his existence, and she certainly merited this absolute concentration of her father's love. But, notwithstanding that at this time Jews and Christians dwelt together unmolested by the Mohammedan rule, the inborn hostility between these two orders underwent no abatement. Intercourse between them was sedulously avoided by each, and the springing up of any shy flower of love between man and maid of such hostile races was sure to be followed by deadly blight and ruin. Nevertheless--and how it happened who can say?--Raquel, already ripened by the rich sun of her native land into a perfected womanhood, fell in love with a young Christian cavalier, who had himself surrendered to her silent and distant beauty as it shone upon him, while passing, from her grated window in Reuben's stately mansion. He learned her name, and spoke it to her from the street--'Raquel!'--at twilight. So trembling and brimming with mutual love were they, that this one word, like the last o'erflowing drop of precious liquid from a vase, was enough to reveal to her what filled his heart. As she heard it she blushed as though it had been a kiss that he had reverently impressed upon her cheek; and this was answer enough--their secret and perilous courtship had begun. Thereafter they met often at night in the great garden attached to the house, making their rendezvous at the low-walled well that stood in a thicket of fragrant greenery. At last, through the prying of an aged friend, his daughter's passion came to the knowledge of old Reuben, who had never till then even conceived of such disgrace as her being enamoured of a Christian. His course was prompt and terrible. Concealing himself one evening behind a tree-trunk close to the well, he awaited the coming of the daring cavalier, sprung upon him, and after a short, noiseless struggle bore him down with a poniard in his breast!

"The stealthy opening of a door into the garden warned him of Raquel's approach. He hastened again into concealment. She arrived, saw her fallen lover, dropped at his side in agonies of terror, and sought to revive him. Then she saw and by the moonlight recognized her father's dagger in the breathless bosom of the young man, and knew what had happened. Moved by sudden remorse, Reuben came out with words of consolation ready. But she knew him not, she heard him not; from that instant madness was in her eyes and brain. Many months she haunted the spot at night, calm but hopelessly insane, and weeping silently at the margin of the well, into whose waters her salt tears descended. At length there came a night when she did not return to the house. She had thrown herself into the well and was found there--dead!

"Never again could any one drink its waters, which had been famous for their quality. Raquel's tears of sorrow had turned them bitter."

The other legend is still more marvellous: "In the reign of Enrique IV. of Spain there was fierce rivalry between two Toledan families, the Silvas and the Ayalas, which in 1467 led to open warfare. The Silvas threw themselves into the castle, and the Ayalas held the cathedral--the blood shed in their combats staining the very feet of its altars. During this struggle of hatred there was also a struggle of love going on between two younger members of the embroiled families. Diego de Ayala, setting at naught the pride of his house, had given his heart to Isabel, the daughter of a poor hidalgo; but it so happened that his enemy, Don Lope de Silva, had resolved to win the same maiden, though receiving no encouragement from her. One night when the combatants were resting on their arms, and the whole city was in disorder, Don Lope succeeded in entering Isabel's house with several of his followers and carried her off--trusting to the general confusion to prevent interruption. As they were bearing her away across a little square in front of the Church of San Justo, Don Diego, on his way to see Isabel, encountered them.

"'Leave that woman, ye cowards, and go your way!' he commanded, with drawn sword. And at that instant, by the light of the lamp which burned before the pictured Christ of Compassion on the church wall, he recognized Isabel and Don Lope.

"Making a bold dash, he succeeded in freeing Isabel and getting her into the shelter of an angle in the wall, just below the holy figure. But being there hemmed in by his adversaries, he felt himself, after a sharp fight in which he dealt numerous wounds, fainting from the severe thrusts he had himself received. Fearing that he was mortally hurt, he raised his eyes to the shrine and prayed: 'O God, not for me, but for her, manifest thy pity! I am willing to die, but save her!'

"Then a marvellous brilliance streamed out from the thorn-crowned head, and instantly, propelled by some unseen force, Diego found himself and Isabel pushed through the solid wall behind them, which opened to receive them into the sanctuary, and closed again to keep out the assassins. Don Lope rushed forward in pursuit, and in his rage hacked the stones with his sword as if to cut his way through. The marks made in the stone by his weapon are still to be seen there." The compassionate face still looks down from the shrine, and little sign-boards announce indulgences to those who pray there: "Señor Don Luis Maria de Borbon, most Illustrious Señor Bishop of Carista, grants forty days' indulgence to all who with grief for their sins say, 'Lord have mercy on me!' or make the acts of Faith, Charity, and Hope before this image, praying for the necessities of the Church."

Altogether I computed that a good Catholic could by a half-hour's industry secure immunity for two hundred and twenty days, or nearly two-thirds of a year. It is to be feared that the Toledans are too lazy to profit even by this splendid chance.

The majority of people here who can command a daily income of ten cents will do no work. Numbers of the inhabitants are always standing or leaning around drowsily, like animals who have been hired to personate men, and are getting tired of the job. Every act approaching labor must be done with long-drawn leisure. Men and boys slumber out-of-doors even in the hot sun, like dogs; after sitting meditatively against a wall for a while, one of them will tumble over on his nose--as if he were a statue undermined by time--and remain in motionless repose wherever he happens to strike. Business with the trading class itself is an incident, and resting is the essence of the mundane career.

Nevertheless, the place has fits of activity. When the mid-day siesta is over there is a sudden show of doing something. Men begin to trot about with a springy, cat-like motion, acquired from always walking up and down hill, which, taken with their short loose blouses, dark skins, and roomy canvas slippers, gives them an astonishing likeness to Chinamen.[5] The slip and scramble of mule hoofs and donkey hoofs are heard on the steep pavements, and two or three loud-voiced, lusty men, with bare arms, carrying a capacious tin can and a dipper, go roaring through the torrid streets, "Hor-cha-ta!" Then the cathedral begins wildly pounding its bells, all out of tune, for vespers. The energy which has broken loose for a couple of hours is discovered to be a mistake, and another interval of relaxation sets in, lasting through the night, and until the glare of fiery daybreak, greeted by the shrill whistling of the remorseless pet quail, sets the insect-like stir going again for a short time in the forenoon. Because of such apathy, and of a more than the usual Latin disregard for public decency, the streets and houses are allowed to become pestilential, and drainage is unknown. Enervating luxury of that sort did well enough for the Romans and Moors, but is literally below the level of Castilian ideas. In the midst of the most sublime emotion aroused by the associations or grim beauty of Toledo, you are sure to be stopped short by some intolerable odor.

The primate city was endowed with enough of color and quaintness almost to compensate for this. We never tired of the graceful women walking the streets vestured in garments of barbaric tint and endlessly varied ornamentation, nor of the men in short breeches split at the bottom, who seemed to have splashed pots of vari-colored paint at hap-hazard over their clothes, and insisted upon balancing on their heads broad-brimmed, pointed hats, like a combination of sieve and inverted funnel. There was a spark of excitement, again, in the random entry of a "guard of the country," mounted on his emblazoned donkey-saddle, with a small arsenal in his waist sash, and a couple of guns slung behind on the beast's flanks, ready for marauders. Even now in remembrance the blots on Toledo fade, and I see its walls and towers throned grandly amid those hills that were mingled of white powder and fire at noon-tide, but near evening cooled themselves down to olive and russet citron, with burning rosy shadows resting in the depressions.

One of the first spectacles that presented itself to us will remain also one of the latest recollections. Between San Juan de los Reyes and the palace of Roderick we met unexpectedly a crowd of boys and girls, followed by a few men, all carrying lighted candles that glowed spectrally, for the sun was still half an hour high in the west. A stout priest, with white hair and a vinous complexion, had just gone down the street, and this motley group was following the same direction. Somewhat in advance walked a boy with a small black and white coffin, held in place on his head by his upraised arm, as if it were a toy; and in the midst of the candle-bearers moved a light bier like a basket-cradle, carried by girls, and containing the small waxen form of a dead child three or four years old, on whose impassive, colorless face the orange glow of approaching sunset fell, producing an effect natural yet incongruous. A scampering dog accompanied the mourners, if one may call them such, for they gave no token of being more impressed, more touched by emotion, than he. The cradle-bier swayed from side to side as if with a futile rockaby motion, until the bearers noticed how carelessly they were conveying it down the paved slope; and the members of the procession talked to each other with a singular indifference, or looked at anything which caught their random attention. As the little rabble disappeared through the Puerta del Cambron, with their long candles dimly flaming, and the solemn, childish face in their midst, followed by the poor unconscious dog, it seemed to me that I beheld in allegory the departure from Toledo of that spirit of youth whose absence leaves it so old and worn.

_CORDOVAN PILGRIMS._

I.

The House of Purification, as the great mosque at Cordova was called, used to be a goal of pilgrimage for the Moors in Spain, as Mecca was for Mohammedans elsewhere. Their shoes no longer repose at its doors, but other less devout pilgrims now come in a straggling procession from all quarters of the globe to rest a while within its fair demesne--hallowed, perhaps, as much by the unique flowering of a whole people's genius in shapes of singular loveliness as by the more direct religious service to which it has been dedicated and re-dedicated under conflicting beliefs.

It was with peculiar eagerness, therefore, that we set out on our way. An American who was following the same route had joined us--a man with ruddy, bronzed cheeks and iron-gray hair, whom I at first should have taken for the great-grandson of a Spanish Inquisitor, if such a thing were possible. His iron persistence and the intensity of his prejudices were in keeping with that character--the only trouble being that the prejudices were all on the wrong side. Whetstone (as he was called) shared our eagerness in respect of Cordova, though from different motives. He hailed each new point in his journey with satisfaction, because it would get him so much nearer the end; for the reason he had come to Spain was, apparently, to get out of it again. "I don't see what I came to Spain for," Whetstone would observe to us, dismally; and, for that matter, we could not see either. "If there ever _was_ a God-forsaken country--Why, look at the way a whole parcel of these men at the dinner-table get out their cigarettes and smoke right there, without ever asking a lady's leave! I'd like to see 'em try it on at home! Wouldn't they be just snaked out of that room pretty quick?" He had under his care a young lady of great sensibility, a relative by marriage, accompanied by her maid; and the maid was a colored woman of the most pronounced pattern. Altogether our pilgrim party embraced a good deal of variety. The young American girl, being a Catholic, was really a palmer faring from shrine to shrine. Rarely a convent or a chapel escaped her; she sipped them all as if they had been flower-cups and she a humming-bird, and managed to extract some unknown honey of comfort from their bitterness. It was like having a novice with us.

The night journeys by rail, so much in vogue in Spain, have their advantages and their drawbacks. At Castillejo, a junction on the way to Cordova, we had to wait four hours in the evening at a distance of twenty miles from the nearest restaurant. The country around was absolutely desolate except for tufts of the _retamé_--a sort of broom with slim green and silvered leaves, which grows wild, and, after drying, is used by the peasants as a substitute for rye or wheat flour. Only two or three houses were in sight. The tracks with cars standing on them, and the unfinished look of the whole place, made us feel as if we had by mistake been carried off to some insignificant railroad station in Illinois or Missouri. The only resource available for dinner was a _cantineria_, or drinking-room, where a few blocks of tough bread lent respectability to a lot of loaferish wine-bottles, and some uninviting sausages were hung in gloomy festoons, with a suspicious air of being a permanent architectural fixture intended as a perch for flies. The Spaniards invent little rhymed proverbs about many of their villages, and of one insignificant Andalusian hamlet, Brenes, the saying is,

"If to Brenes thou goest, Take with thee thy roast."

But Castillejo seems to be an equally good subject for this warning. We recalled how lavishly, on the way to Toledo, we had presented bread, meat, and strawberries to some country folk who were not in the habit of eating, and how ardently they had thanked us. As we passed their house in returning it was closed and lifeless, and we were convinced that they had died of a surfeit. How willingly would we now have undone that deed! However, after making some purchases from an extremely deaf old woman who presided over such poor supplies as the place afforded, we asked her if she could have coffee prepared. "If there is enough in the house," she replied to our interrogatory shrieks. Accordingly, we carried a table out under some trees on the gravel platform, to eat _al fresco_.

When we found ourselves in this way for the first time thrown back on the Spanish sausage, we resisted that unsympathetic substance with all the vigor of despair. But, aided by some bad wine, an interesting conversation with the Novice, and the glow of a sunset sky that looked as if strewn with fading peony petals, we recovered from the shock caused in the beginning by a mingled flavor of garlic, raisins, and pork. In truth, there was something enjoyable about this wild supper around which our quartette gathered in the dry, dewless twilight. An ancient female, resembling a broken-down Medea, came out and kindled a fire of brushwood beyond the track, swung a kettle there, and cooked our coffee, bending over the flame-light the while with her scattered gray tresses, and wailing out doleful _peteneras_, the popular songs of Spain. The songs, the fire, the wine, the strange scene, were so stimulating that we were surprised to find all at once the dark vault overhead full of stars, the comet staring at us in its flight above the hills, and our ten-o'clock train nearly due.

The next morning we were in a region totally unlike anything we had seen before, excepting for the ever-present mountain ranges wild as the Pyrenees or Guadaramas. The light of dawn on these barren Spanish mountain-sides, drawn up into peaks as sharp as the points of a looped-up curtain, produces effects indescribable except on canvas and by a subtle colorist. The bare surfaces of rock or dry grass and moss, and the newly reaped harvest fields lower down, blend the tints of air and earth in a velvet-smooth succession of madder and faint yellow, olive and rose and gray, fading off into a reddish-violet at greater distances.

These eminences are a part of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote achieved some of his most noteworthy feats--the liberation of the galley-slaves, the descent into the Cave of Montesinos, the capture of Mambrino's helmet, and the famous penance. So weird is the aspect of these desolate hills, enclosing silent valleys in which narrow tracts of woods are harbored, that I suspected it would be easy to breed a few Don Quixotes of reality there. Craziness would become a necessary diversion to relieve the monotony of existence.

A winding river-bed near by was bordered by tufted copses of oleander in full flower, and hedges of huge serrated aloe guarded the roads. On the hill-sides a round corral for herds would occasionally be seen. In the fields the time-honored method of threshing out grain by driving a sort of heavy board sledge in a circle over the cut crop, and of winnowing by tossing up shovelfuls of the grain-dust into the breezy air, was in active operation. By-and-by the olive orchards began. As far as we could see they stretched on either side their ranks of round dusty green tree-heads. Thousands of acres of them--one grove after another: we travelled through fifty miles of almost unbroken olive plantations, until we fancied we could even smell the fruit on the boughs, and our eyes were sick and weary with the sameness of the sight. Then the river, which from time to time had shown its muddy current in curves and sweeps, moving through the land at the bottom of what might have been an enormous drain, turned out to be the famous Guadalquivir, which, as Ford vividly puts it, "eats its dull way through loamy banks." At last Cordova, seated in an ample plain--Cordova, in vanished ages the home of Seneca, Lucan, Averroës, and the poet Juan de Mena--Cordova, white in the dry and gritty sun-dazzled air, with square, unshadowed two-story houses, overlooked by the bell-tower of its incomparable Mezquita Cathedral: a cheerful Southern city, maintaining large gardens, abounding in palms and myrtles and orange and lemon trees; possessing, moreover, clean streets of perceptible width.

After the "interpreter," or hotel guide, the beggar: such is the order in these Spanish towns, and not seldom the guide is merely a bolder kind of beggar. Two or three of the most frantically miserable and loathsome charity-seekers I ever saw surrounded our omnibus as we awaited our baggage, and stuffed their hideous heads in at the windows and door, concentrating on us their fire of appeals. Velveteen had heard that the sovereign remedy for these pests was to treat them with consummate politeness and piety. "Pardon me, brother, for God's sake!" was the deprecatory formula which had been recommended, and he now proceeded to recite this, book in hand. Unfortunately it took him about five minutes to get it launched in good style and pure Spanish, during which time the beggars had an opportunity entirely to miss the sense. A few grains of tobacco dropped into the hat of one of them were more efficacious, for they had the result of mystifying him and hopelessly paralyzing his analytical powers. Finally the guide, coming with the baggage, recognized his rivals, and drove them off.

At several places on the way we had seen our twin military persecutors waiting for us, sometimes with white havelocks, and again in glazed hat-covers and capes. "Are they disguising themselves, so as to fall upon us unawares?" I asked my friend. We determined not to be deceived, however, by the subtle device. These Spanish police-soldiers go through more metamorphoses in the linen and water-proof line than any troops I know. It must be excessively inconvenient to run home and make the change every time a slight shower threatens; and invariably, as soon as they get on their storm-cover, the sun begins to shine again. On our arrival they seemed to have made up their minds to arrest us at once; they came striding along toward us in duplicate, one the fac-simile of the other, and we gave ourselves up for lost. But just as they were within a few paces, their unaccountable policy of delay caused them to deviate suddenly, and march on as if they hadn't seen us. "One more escape!" sighed Velveteen, fervently.

Strangely enough, the languor which we had left in the middle of the kingdom, at Toledo, was replaced in this more tropical latitude by great activity. The shop streets presented a series of rooms entirely open to the view, where men and women were busily engaged in all sorts of small manufacture--shoes, garments, tin-work, carpentering. They were happy and diligent, as if they had been animated writing-book maxims, and sung or whistled at their tasks in a most exemplary manner.