Part 9

Don Renaldo, the ex-ofeecial de marina, was waiting to give Patsy and me our lessons in _vero Castellano_. His method was simple; he talked, while we listened. He began by explaining his rusty mourning suit, as he drew off his worn old leather gloves. “It is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of my father,” he spoke slowly, so that we might follow him. “All the masses celebrated to-day in the church of San Sebastian will be applied to the repose of his soul.” Patsy said he would like to hear one of the memorial masses, but it was already too late, they were all over.

“He was the most kind of fathers, the most benevolent of men, his benevolence was the cause of all his misfortunes in this world! To oblige a friend he signed his name to a note, understanding that it was a mere form. With those two strokes of the pen he signed away his fortune.”

“He did not have a benevolent friend!” Patsy ejaculated.

“_Hombré!_ He was a _caballero_, a gentleman of distinction--but--it is the truth, of business he was as ignorant as _mi pobre papa_! The catastrophe that ruined both, killed my papa; his friend died soon after of shame. Then Tio Jorge, my rich uncle, took me and brought me up as if I were his heir. Every year we went to Paris together; we lived with great elegance on the Rue de Rivoli; we had a box at the opera; I had my own carriage; my clothes came from Poole; at that time I was very elegant, and not, people said, bad looking. I am old now, but then!” He sighed and rolled up his eyes at the recollection of his elegant youth.

“You’re not old, you’re in the prime of life,” said Patsy. Though Don Renaldo was not even elderly, he had given up the fight, went shabby and unshaven, with buttons missing from his frayed shirt.

“Suddenly Tio Jorge had a stroke of apoplexy,--I was at Monte Carlo at the time. I hurried to his bedside and took all care of him till he died. It was very sad, but it was my duty to see everything done as he would have wished. His funeral was the most luxurious ever seen in Valladolid. He was followed to the grave by the aristocracy, civil and military authorities, and whole communities of monks and nuns. There was a multitude of carriages, and to every coachman I gave a _propina_ of fifty _pesetas_. After the funeral the will was opened. Well, what do you think he left me?”

“That depends upon whether or not you were the only heir,” Patsy answered soothingly.

“He left me nothing! Money, palace, horses, plate, jewels, everything went to found a home for the widows and daughters of navy officers! the preference always to be given to the handsomest ones. The will was published; there followed ridicule the most painful from half the papers of Europe, from the Argentine, from all over the world. They called Tio Jorge a modern Don Juan Tenorio!”

“The old hunks deserved something worse than to be laughed at. I hope he’s getting it now,” murmured Patsy.

“May be--but that was not true; he was not an immoral man. He believed that beautiful ladies had greater difficulties to contend with than others.”

“He might have left you a life interest,” said Patsy; “the beautiful ladies could wait.” While Don Renaldo did not allow himself to criticise Tio Jorge, our sympathy was as balm to him.

“I gave up my home, I gave up Paris--where I was too well known. I had frequented the best society. I came to Seville where I have no friends, where many travelers come;” he dropped into English. “I offré my service to accompany and visit monuments, gib lessons, recommend the hotels!”

“Everybody is bothered about money one way or the other;” Patsy tried to encourage him; “as long as you live, you either have got to earn the money you spend, or spend money that other people have earned. Brace up, _Amigo_! Think how much more fun it is to earn your own money than to spend money some other fellow has had the fun of earning!”

Don Renaldo looked steadily at him, groping for his meaning. “At first I envied people who have money,” he confessed; “now I envy those who have work that they enjoy.” He took up a book Patsy had told him was written by a friend of ours. “Your friend must be a very rich man.”

“He just makes the two ends meet without lapping!”

“How could he afford to print this book? The binding is elegant, paper, print and engravings, superior; it must have cost a great deal!”

“So the publishers say.”

“_Ojalá!_ If I could only write.”

Poor, pathetic soul, if he could only do any useful thing. A fortune had been spent on his education. He could ride and shoot straight, he could dance, and fence, and play every game under the sun, but his life investment yielded a small, precarious income. His only dividend-bearing stock, all that stood between him and starvation, was a passable knowledge of the French and English languages, part of the accomplishments of his elegant youth.

The lesson over, Don Renaldo gone, Patsy summed up his case. “A spent shot!” he said, “a poor thing, as capable of taking care of himself as a year old baby; more coals to Tio Jorge!”

* * * * *

One happy day, when we had almost given up hope of ever seeing him again, Don Jaime strolled jauntily into the patio, his sombrero gallantly cocked on one side, his worn coat carefully brushed, his trousers newly creased, a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. He was greeted with shrieks and screams of joy. Black coffee and _un poco de ginevra de campagna_ (his only vices) were immediately ordered for him.

“I arrive only at middle night yesterday,” he said, when accused of desertion. “I have made a loose, my brother-in-law, he is daid.” Patsy asked if it was the husband of his sister who had died.

“Ah, no! brother to my woman. Me, my father, my grandfather were all unique childs; I have no sister--only a half a sister, Candalaria,--no brother, no honkle, no haunt; I am a widow and a horphan.” We expressed sympathy for his loss. The Don assured us that his brother-in-law’s death was a release.

“Poor man! he was secluded in--how you say? an insanitorium these long years. When he was daid, he had himself embaumed and transported to Cadiz, where is the pantheon of himself and his wife.”

“We were just starting to drive to Italica,” said J. “You’ll go with us, Don? Where’s your _capa_? You’ll need it; it’s cold this afternoon.”

“Ah, no! I am warm inside, since I drinked the _ginevra_,” he patted his stomach. “Ah well, it is heatier in Sevillia than in Cadiz, where I goed to escort the catafalque of my brother.”

After that J. and Patsy took the Don away from me, and all that afternoon they kept him to themselves. I followed in another carriage with Pemberton. Bursts of riotous laughter came to us from their cab, as they passed us on the Alameda of Hercules. At the foot of that pleasant, shady mall, our coachman drew up under a pair of tall, gray granite columns.

“The old columns are from a Roman temple,” said Pemberton. “These guardians of the town,” he pointed to the battered old statue that stood on either column, “are Hercules the founder, and Julius Cæsar the second founder of Seville. Oh, yes! Hercules was here; he stopped and rested by the river, and founded Seville that time he wandered through the Peninsula, driving the lowing herds of Geyron before him.”

We had crossed the tawny Guadalquiver, and were driving through Triano, the potters’ suburb, named for the Emperor Trajan. An open doorway gave us a glimpse of a man working a wheel with his feet, and holding a newly moulded clay vase in his hands against the swiftly turning wheel.

“They still make the _azulejos_, and the pottery in Seville, as they did in the days of the Moors--how do I know? In the days of the Romans! Remember, when you come to build your house, that the tiles of Triano are the best, cheapest, and handsomest in the world; that Seville is a port; and that they can be shipped to you at a fair price. Shall we stop at the factory and see them? The place supplies the whole of Spain with crockery. Patsy would fall in love with the big garden pots, and the pretty jugs.”

The most interesting thing we saw in the factory was the potter himself. Behind the splendid showrooms, where the fine majolicas and the common wares of the common people are displayed, in a dark, dank little corner, sat a man, half his body out of sight, working the potter’s wheel. He sat on the edge of a square hole in the floor; his legs were hidden, but his feet were busy turning, turning the wheel. He was old and poor. His red hands had been in the wet clay who knows how many hours--how many days? He was spiritless and sad in face and bearing, but oh! the skill of those poor red hands! The shapeless lump of soft wet clay was thumped first upon the revolving stand, then as if by magic, though we saw it with our eyes, it took shape, grew lovely and alive under those hands that looked so sodden, and yet could turn that gray mud into shapes of beauty. A cup for a dying man’s broth, a vase for a bride’s rose, a basin to bathe a new-born child: as each was finished he held it up for a moment for us to see, then laid it down beside him with the others. I put a coin in the red, clayey hand. He gave a little mechanical nod, a word of thanks, and went back to his work. He earns less than an unskilled child would earn at home. It is doubtful if he can read or write. He works from dawn to dark--the sight of him gave me great pangs of homesickness! Pemberton could tell me of no movement to help this man to a freer life, to a day whose working hours do not absorb every heartbeat of power. There is only charity! Bread for the hungry, salve for the sick, almshouse for the worked-out human beast of burden. Oh! that I could help him to pass through the Gate of Hope into the Hospitable Land, where every one has his chance, where the ranks are always open.

Triano was already behind us, and we were out upon the Aracena road that runs to the north. Tramp, tramp, tramp, the sound of marching men came towards us out of a cloud of dust. A little farther on we passed a regiment of small brown soldiers; mere boys, most of them. They all wore sandals; some had stockings, some were without. They must have been on fatiguing work, they looked so tired and footsore. In the fields, a band of peasants were cutting the ruby alfalfa; the air was fragrant with the honey-sweet smell of it. The harsh whetting of scythes, the soft swish of sickles through the clover, the song of the leader of the mowers, an oldish man with a red handkerchief tied round his head, marked the time for the march of those weary soldiers,

_Adiós padre, y adiós madre,_ _adiós iglesia del pueblo,_ _que voy á servir al rey_ _los ochos años que lo debo._

Goodbye father and mother; Goodbye church of the village. I must go and serve the king For the eight years that I owe him.

One of the last of the soldiers, a superb blond man towering above the others, repeated the refrain of the mower’s song:

“I must go and serve the king for the eight years that I owe him!”

“Nothing has changed since Strabo praised this pleasant valley,” said Pemberton. “We still use sickles, and we still take the young men from the work of the fields, and turn them into soldiers, food for gunpowder.”

Coming mysteriously towards us, down the straight white road, were half a dozen little moving heaps of newly cut clover. We could not see, until they were upon us, the legs of the tiny donkey trotting along under each fragrant load.

“In Greece,” said Pemberton, “when they want to say a man is a clever, long-headed chap, they call him an ass. Of all asses, the Spanish is the wisest. The peasants work them hard, abuse them a little, but they love them and treat them like members of the family; that is why they are so intelligent.”

We were passing through gray olive groves, between fields of emerald wheat: golden butterflies hovered about the wild lavender growing by the wayside. Here and there, peeping from orchard and ploughed field, were bits of ruins, all that is left of the once splendid forum, the temples and palaces of the old Roman city of Italica. At the guardian’s hut, where we stopped to inquire the way to the circus, we saw a few poor antiquities, some Roman lamps and fragments of sculpture. The guardian was absent, and we looked in vain for a trace of the fine Roman mosaic pavement discovered a hundred years ago, of which we had heard.

A poor monk, Fray José Moscoso, built a wall round it, hoping to preserve the precious thing, but Soult’s French soldiers destroyed it by turning the enclosure into a goat pen. There is an engraving of this mosaic in the Biblioteca Columbina at Seville. When the archæologists come to Spain,--or rather when the Spanish archæologists carry their work farther,--there will be a rich treasure trove. Very little scientific excavation has been undertaken yet. The soil, so rich in archæological as well as in mineral and agricultural wealth, has hardly been scratched. That is one of the interesting things about Spain,--it has still so much to do. With all its wonderful, romantic past, it is still a young country, with a great future before it. The Spaniards have been so busy keeping the East out of the West, fighting the battles of other nations, keeping those wretched Bourbons on the thrones of Italy where they were not wanted, opening up the New World and making Spanish America, that they have neglected Spain. That was yesterday. To-day all is changed. Spain has pulled on the seven-league boots of the giant Progress, and is striding manfully ahead, making up for lost time.

It is easy enough to turn one’s back upon the great army of ghosts at Seville in Fair time, when life is at the flood and the pulses leap with the thrill of it; in Sevilla Vieja, the old Roman city of Italica, it can’t be done. Here are none but ghosts, and one old gabaloonzy man who acts, in the absence of the true guardian, as our guide; he is a shepherd and his sheep crop the grass that grows over Italica. He stopped his knitting to pick a wild orchid rooted into the crumbling arch of the old Roman amphitheatre.

“_Miré_,” he said; “this is the bee flower. Can you see the bee?”

His needles clicked again, the only sound in the great circus save the noise of the sheep cropping the grass of the arena. In and out of the crimson alfalfa and the wild thyme, buzzed the wild bees gathering honey. They made a soft humming, at first confused, then growing clearer and clearer, till the faint hints of meaning in their song seemed to grow into words:

“Scipio Africanus founded me,” sang the bees, speaking for Italica, “as a refuge for his veterans after the great war with Carthage.”

Out of the shadowy archway leading to the wild beast dens, a stronger shadow fell on the grass. Here, in the city his love and care established for the old soldiers who followed him to victory and immortal glory, I saw magnanimous Scipio, and at his side, a fainter pair, Allutius the Celtiberian prince, with the fair woman both men loved, and whom the Roman, when he learned that she was affianced to Allutius, renounced, refusing all ransom, and asking as his only recompense the friendship of Allutius for the Republic. It was not stranger than all the rest that the shade of the bride looked like Trinidad.

“Three Emperors I gave to Rome,--Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius!” ran the song of the bees, speaking for Italica forsaken.

Trajan--the good emperor of whom Rome still gossips and has so little harm to say? Why, it was only the other day that standing by your tomb in the Eternal City, in your forum, in the shadow of the great column that bears the record of your triumphs, I heard the old story, told and retold by poet, painter and sculptor; how clear it echoes through the ages! As you rode forth to battle, a poor widow stood at your bridle and would not let you pass, crying out for justice for her son, whom your soldiers had ridden down and killed, innocent of ill. You stopped on your triumphant way and gave that justice the poor woman cried out for, then rode on to victory. Five centuries after your death, in the time of Pope Gregory the Great, your skull was found, with the tongue still alive, so the great Gregory was able to hold parley with you.

“Trajan! Trajan! Where art thou?” cried Gregory.

“In hell,” answered the Emperor.

“Why art thou in hell?”

“Because I was not baptized!”

At hearing this the grief of Gregory was so great that he went into the old church of St. Peter, and wept for Trajan in hell. And the tears of Pope Gregory fell down into hell, and quenched the flames of Trajan’s torment.

I tell the tale as it was told to me by Giacomo Boni, at the foot of Trajan’s column in the city of Rome. The spirit of Trajan has laid hold of Boni, even as it laid hold of the great Gregory, and he, too, arises to demand for Trajan the Just the tribute of our love.

When the others came back, I told Pemberton what had happened in the old circus, while they had been hunting for the forum of Ubs Italica.

“You’ll find us dull company after such!” he laughed. “Visits from Scipio Africanus and Trajan are more exciting than one’s neighbors, and much more easily returned.”

“The trouble is such friendships are so one-sided!” Patsy objected. “What can I do for Marcus Aurelius? The greatest Spaniard of them all. He has done so much for me. His ‘Meditations’ made me think for the first time in my life.”

“Haven’t you learned yet that you can never return a real benefit to the person who conferred it? You can only hand it on, pay the debt to the first needy person you meet. Are we not all debtors to Greeks and Barbarians? All we can ever do for the dead is to keep their names from dying; and, what is so much more important, keep alive the flame that was in them, kindle other souls as they kindled yours. The fire Prometheus stole from heaven never goes out; it is carried from soul to soul as one torch is kindled from another, till the whole earth shall be lighted and no dark places left. The shame of shames is to have received that fire, and let the flame of it go out in you!”

A peasant man and woman, evidently strangers, strayed into the arena, and stood staring at the moss-covered stones. The man, a decent fellow with a pleasant smile and no teeth, greeted the knitting shepherd.

“This perhaps is the ruin of some great palace?” he said.

“It is the bull-ring,” the shepherd corrected, “they say there was a city here once; you can see where the streets were; there are also bits of old churches and houses.”

“_Valgame Dios!_” exclaimed the stranger, “perhaps this was an important town, before it was ruined a hundred years ago or more!”

“_No se sabé_,” said the shepherd indifferently. He called his dog, who began to herd the sheep, running round and round them in a circle and barking furiously. The sun was westering; it lacked but an hour of setting; we were five miles from our dinner, and reluctantly we turned our backs on Italica, the buried city, with its twice ten hundred years, and drove back to Seville.

“It is a pestilential trait,--this pulling down old cities to build new;” said Pemberton, as we drove through the wretched village of Santiponce. “They pulled down Italica to get building material for Seville. Only the other day, hardly more than a hundred years ago, they took some of the stone of the old circus to make the road to Badajos. Men build cities as birds build nests; not many birds are satisfied with last year’s nests, not many men with other men’s cities.”

“Have you heard,” called Patsy from the other carriage, as with derisive hoots they passed us on the old Roman road, “Don Jaime goes with us to Cordova.”

“As you please,” said the Don; “or take ship and make a little crusade in the Mediterranean,--to Morocco, if you will.”

The next day we left Seville, stopping on the way to the station for a last look at the cathedral. We entered by way of the Court of Oranges, paused beneath the orange trees laden with fruit and blossoms, and drew long breaths of the delicious fragrance. Here Concepcion and Trinidad joined us. Both wore the mantilla, still _de rigeur_ for early mass. Concepcion had a yellow rose in her curls to match her fan. Trinidad carried a bunch of white rosebuds; she was wearing her own dress to-day; it showed the curves of beauty better than that loose frock of Concepcion’s! Both young women looked fresh as roses with the night dew still on them, and smelt pleasantly of orange-flower water. As we stood gossiping by the old fountain, a pretty altar boy in white and scarlet finery came towards us, swinging a gold censer to keep the coals alight. As he passed he looked at Trinidad, and seemed to swing the censer towards her: for a moment we saw her in a cloud of blue incense smoke.

We made the tour of the cathedral, and took leave of Murillo’s Guardian Angel and his San Antonio. A shaft of sunlight carried the stain of the painted glass, ruby, topaz, emerald, to the columns under the round window of the Assumption. The golden mass bells tinkled; they were saying mass in the

chapel royal before the silver altar where Saint Ferdinand is buried. Alive, he was King Ferdinand III; dead, he became a saint, because with his own hands he had carried fagots to burn heretics. A sound of hammers echoed through the great cathedral.

“The _fiestas_ are over,” said Pemberton; “they are taking down the monument over the tomb of Ferdinand Columbus.”

As we passed out through the Puerta del Lagarte under the great crocodile, the twin organs thundered, the choir sang a deep “Amen,” the bells in the Giralda clanged a parting peal.

“Heavens!” murmured Patsy, as from the train window we looked back at the darling of Andalusia, lying in the fold of Guadalquiver’s arm, “what a beautiful world this is!” He blinked as he said it, as if there were tears in his eyes.

“_Quien no ha vista Sevilla,_ _no ha vista maravilla._”

VII

CORDOVA

_Other towns may be better to live in. None are better to be born in than Cordova._--EL GRAN CAPITAN

“The old Roman engineer who built Cordova Bridge did a good piece of work,” said Patsy. “See, those are his foundations; they are solid still,--it is a good bridge yet! The arches are paltry, modern things beside them; they were put up centuries later by a Moor called As-Sahn. It does not seem fair that his name should be remembered, and the Roman’s forgotten.”

The Roman’s work is not forgotten, and will not be, while Cordova Bridge stands, and while the city arms remain a bridge on water. The weeds push between the great stones, a lovely enamel of orange lichen covers the staunch old piers, around which the amber Guadalquiver laps and murmurs. The white highroad follows the river south to Seville; the way north is barred by a range of purple Sierras.

Not even in Italica is the mark of Rome stronger

than in Cordova; the old bridge, the names of the streets, the memories of the famous Roman citizens who were born here, bring imperial Rome to mind at every moment. The Romans came to Cordova as conquerors carrying the eagles through Spain; they made the city the capital of Hispania Ulterior, and called it the Patrician Colony because so many of the Romans who settled here and married the graceful, dark-eyed Cordovese women were of patrician descent. The Roman rule, harsh at first, grew gentler, for while Rome ruled, Christianity came to Cordova, and pagan slavery softened to a milder form of vassalage.