The houses are low-roofed and homely, as befits the rough climate of the north; the streets narrow and grey. Red-brown and sepia is the colouring against the sky, with whiffs of chill air from the mountains and the scent of fields and flowers, the shelter of green thickets and verdant banks, sown with tall poplars, beside purling streams.
A homelike and pleasant place, despised by the Moors after the African fantasies of the south, but absolute luxury to the Spaniards, as so much larger and nobler than their late capital, Oviedo.
Alonso, surnamed “the Chaste,” second of that name, passing to the conclusion of a long and prosperous reign, finds much that is congenial to his monkish prejudices and austere life in the simplicity of the nature around.
That Alonso’s habits are more of a friar than of a king may be explained by the aspect of the times. As successor to the pious “Il Diacono,” and as a protest against Mauregato, his kinsman, who, for the assistance given him by the Moors, agreed to pay them what is often mentioned in history as the “Maiden Tribute,” a hundred Christian maidens to be sent to the Caliph at Cordoba for his harem, fifty rich and fifty poor, a shameful agreement faithfully fulfilled until the reign of Ramiro in 866.
This specially develops in Alonso a sentiment of religious protest in the form of a rigid chastity, not only enforced in his own person, but in all those about him. As he grows older these ideas take more and more hold upon him, and increase to such a degree as actually to pervert his judgment. Obviously it is the interest of the Church to encourage them, and for this reason he seeks his companions among priests and monks.
What care his subjects that Alonso is called “the Chaste,” or that his wife, Queen Berta, lives like a nun? The royal claims to sanctity are utterly thrown away upon a sarcastic, laughter-loving court, especially as Doña Ximena, his sister, a buxom dame, with the fair amplitude of her Gothic ancestors, has so far strayed from the fold as to become the mother of a boy!
Imagine the scandal! She is promptly ordered off to a cloister for life, and her lover, the heroic Conde de Saldaña, imprisoned in the castle of Luna, where, more gothicum, he is deprived of sight; Alonso fasting, and scourging himself until nature well-nigh gives way, and Berta, the Queen, bathed in tears, doing nothing but confess, although she has nothing to say except that she has lived in company with such a sinner as Ximena!
But the boy thrives apace, a very lusty and proper child, with no notion of dying or care as to who are his parents, provided he has enough to eat and playmates to amuse him, horses to ride and dogs to follow him about the court, where, with singular inconsistency, Alonso allows him to remain and bear the name of Bernardo del Carpio.
Not that he is acknowledged by the king—heaven forfend! Though one of those secrets known to every one, Bernardo himself was never told how he came into the world, but accepted himself in ignorance as one standing alone, not in arrogance and pride, but out of the simplicity of his heart, which prompted him to be second to none, seeing that he had already given good proofs of his valour in tilts and tourneys and in continual encounters with the Moors, pressing hard on the little Christian kingdom, so narrow against the sea.
It is a gusty morning in the month of June; a mass of black clouds rides up from the west, portending a coming storm. Distant thunder rumbles between snatches of fitful sunshine, lighting up the inner court of the royal palace where the Roman prefects once ruled—a plain edifice, built of stone, with open arcades running round supported by pilasters of coarsely grained marble.