Hours in the Velasquez room slip by unnoticed. The portrait of the sculptor Montañés was of more interest now that we had seen his polychrome statues in Seville, those especially memorable ones of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Borgia in the University Church. The hidalgo heads by El Greco, the flesh tints, alas, turned to a deathly green, called up Professor Domenech's words on the grave Spanish gentlemen in their ruffs—"sad with the nostalgia for a higher world, the light in their eyes holds memories of a fairer age that will not return; images of the last warrior ascetics." This eccentric artist has in the Prado a striking study of St. Paul, an intensity in his face on the verge of fanaticism, a true Israelite, such as only a semi-oriental like El Greco could seize. Another picture that struck me with even profounder admiration than before was Titian's Charles V on horseback. And again I studied long the portraits of the pale Philip II, of his dainty little daughters, his sisters, his most lovely mother, and that pathetic English wife of his. Probably no northerner can see fairly both sides of Philip's strange character, just as I suppose no Spaniard can judge Elizabeth Tudor as does an Englishman. Nevertheless, there is a trait in Philip that all can admire—his filial loyalty.
We could have lingered in Madrid for weeks just for this gallery, but we had to tear ourselves away. A journey south to Murcia and Valencia had been planned, but the necessity of passing a cold night on the train made us decide now against it. Those two provinces, with Navarre, are the gaps of our tour in Spain: health and weather will change the firmest of plans. We left Madrid for Aragon, pausing in a couple of the Castilian cities to the east.
In the capital the parks had been bursting into leaf, but it was still chill winter outside on the plains. Treeless and verdureless Alcalá, the city of Ximenez and birthplace of Cervantes, looked far from inviting. When we left the train at Guadalajara, the landscape was so depressing that its Arab name, "river of stones," seemed dismally appropriate. Again, as at Segovia in the autumn, a wind de todos los demonios was blowing over the land,—raging would be the more exact word. The town was melancholy, so was the weather, and we had a distressing personal experience. When the diligence set us down at the inn, we were told there was not a bed to be had that night in all Guadalajara, for it was the election, and even the hotel corridors would be used; we would have to go on to Sigüenza by the night train. The wind and the cold made the prospect a dismal one; early spring travel in northern Spain is not a bed of roses.
We went out to explore Guadalajara and its chief lion, the Mendoza palace, built by the Mæcenas family of the Peninsula whose history has been called the history of Spain for four hundred years, so prominent were they as statesmen, clerics, and writers. The palace is in the Mudéjar style, the exterior studded with projecting knobs; the inner courtyard is coarsely carved with lions and scrolls, capriciously extravagant and yet within bounds enough to be effective. The Duke del Infantado entertained Francis I here, and surely the French king with memories of Blois and the chaster styles which his race follows, must have examined with curiosity this very different architecture of his neighbor, the intense individuality of whose conceptions could almost silence criticism. The Mendoza palace is now a school for the orphans of officers, and when the little nun, happy and fond of laughter as the cloistered usually are, showed us about, we saw pleasant circles of young girls sewing under the forgotten gorgeousness of the artesonado ceilings.
Then at midnight, wind howling and rain pelting, we crossed the muddy square that lay between the Sigüenza station and the town's most primitive inn. There they did the best they were able for us, but nothing could lessen the glacial damp of those linen sheets: the illness begun at Alcántara went on increasing. With chattering teeth and beating our frozen hands together to put some sensation into them, we realized we were back again on the truncated mountain which is central Spain, thousands of feet above the roses and oranges of Seville.
The following day was Sunday, with a sacred concert of stringed instruments in the Cathedral, a good Gothic church, noticeably rich in sepulchers. In one chapel especially, that dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury by an English bishop who accompanied Queen Eleanor to Spain, when you stand among the tombs of those warriors, bishops, and knights of Santiago, you feel the thrill of the past. Cardinal Mendoza, "Tertius Rex," was at one time bishop of this Cathedral, having for vicar-general the priest Ximenez: Don Quixote's friend, the delightful cura, was "hombre docto graduado en Sigüenza."
The chill, little city was far from stimulating; at another time it may appear differently, impressions are so dependent on weather and health. The peasants wrapped in their blankets had a beggarly aspect after the dandy majo of Andalusia. I daresay were Seville three thousand feet above the sea, the bolero would be worn less jauntily. The Cathedral visited, there was little to detain us, so we bade a ready farewell to glacial sheets and ice-crusted water pitchers to continue the route to Aragon, west past Medinaceli, where a Roman arch stood boldly on the edge of its hill.
The semi-royal family of Cerda, Dukes of Medinaceli, has possessions all over the country: forests near Avila, the Casa de Pilatos in Seville, lands near Cordova, a castle at Zafra, and vast tracts in Catalonia. It descends from Alfonso el Sabio, whose eldest son, called la Cerda, from a tuft of hair on his face, was married to a daughter of St. Louis of France, and left two infant sons, who were dispossessed by their uncle, Sancho el Bravo. For generations they continued to put forward their claims on every fresh coronation.
After entering Aragon the climate grew warmer. We were descending gradually, and soon fruit trees in blossom, and vineyards, appeared among the broken, irregular hills. Calatayud, birthplace of the Roman poet Martial, was extremely picturesque, with castle and steeples. The long hours of the journey were whiled away watching the Sunday crowds in the stations, many of the men and women in the astonishingly original costume of the province. By the time we had reached Saragossa we had descended to about five hundred feet altitude, and it was pleasantly warm.