The king was always talking, but Ximena held down her head and seldom gave an answer to anything he said. “It is better sure to be silent than meaningless,” she said.
Fernando el Santo, in succession to Fernando the First, afterwards laid the foundations of the cathedral standing at the base of the hill, and his successors finished it; that gracious sanctuary which rears itself, so pure and white, out of the tawny land. Too ornate and minute perhaps, but lovely all the same—pointed steeples transparent in fine stone-work and open to the sky, an army of statues glistening in the sun up to the spandrels and the dome, and semicircles, colonettes, and arches by the score—every ledge and cornice filled, until the eye turns away fatigued by the prodigality of ornament. Inside the coro a mass of golden entablatures is lighted with ranges of painted windows, filling the nave with a kaleidoscope of colour, and the fourteen chapels which line the walls, each complete in itself—Condestable and Santiago, San Enrique and San Juan, each with carved retablos, a statue or a monument in the midst. That of Condestable, so named from Don Pedro de Velasco, Grand Constable of Spain, where he and his wife are extended on an alabaster tomb in the elaborate costume of the day, necklace, ruff, brocade, and head-dress; even to the tiny curls on the back of the little spaniel lying at the lady’s feet, half hidden by the folds of her dress, in so natural a position one asks oneself what will the little creature do when he wakes and finds his mistress dead?
Outside, the gaily-tinted streets are variegated as in a patchwork of colour, and over against the dried-up banks of the river Arlanzon (where the tournament was held for the marriage of Don Pedro and Queen Blanche), the grand old gothic gateway of Santa Maria appears, from out of which the Cid rode to join the Moors when no one dared to give him a crust of bread in Burgos.
The time is morning, and an unclouded sun has just risen above the horizon. Already the idlest and the most eager are afoot, to secure a good position for the review to be held by King Juan I.
Before the clock has struck ten from the cathedral, the crowd has so increased that the whole plain is alive with horsemen and foot-passengers, cabelleros splendidly mounted, ricoshombres in chariots and portantini, and peasants with sturdy stride: every one muffled up to the eyes, which is the fashion of Castilians, even when it is hot—all making their way, on the grass or by country roads and foot-paths, to the Cartuga de Miraflores seen from afar on the summit of a chalky down, sweet with the perfume of thyme and rosemary, over which the summer clouds strike light shadows. Flourishes of trumpets announce the passage of knights with glistening helmets, and the glitter of gold-embroidered banners, masses of moving horsemen and squadrons of troops, mixed with crescent flags and turbans of many colours, the light Barbary horses caracoling here and there, covered with nets of coins and chains, catching the sunbeams; announcing the presence of an army and the evolutions of many troops, especially of a picked body habited like Berbers, who gallop forward in gallant style, brandishing their scimitars to the rattle of drums and fifes. Anon a mounted figure dashes out from the main body of troops, wearing a suit of light chain armour in which gold is the chief metal, a spiked crown mixing with the feathers of his casque, mounted on a heavy-flanked charger of the old gothic breed so loved by the sovereigns of Spain, which he fiercely urges forward with spur and heel in front of the rapidly riding Berbers, until the unwieldy animal, gored by the sharp rowels of steel, rears and turns aside, dashing the crowned rider onto the ground, where he lies motionless!
A cry of horror rises from the field. The king is wounded! The king is unhorsed; he is dead! Knights in their light panoply are arrested in their charge; courtiers in jewelled mantles on ambling jennets rein up; men-at-arms, young pages with nodding plumes on silken caps, all, all, in one dense mass, gathering around the fallen figure of the king, Juan I., son of Henry of Trastamare (1379), who came out to review some regiments just arrived from Africa habited to represent the Moors, and going through their graceful evolutions with lance and scimitar.
Unhappy king! There he lies, a corpse! He never moved, and is borne off from the field on a trestle hastily formed of gilded lances laid across, covered with the flag of Castile, a melancholy spectacle, his soldiers following with many a moistened eye, to be buried in the cathedral, beneath gorgeous gold panels in the coro.
The race of Trastamare, destined soon to end, brings short and troubled reigns, in which the superstitious may read an ever-present curse in the fratricide of Don Pedro.
The last words of Don Enrique el Caballero were a warning to his son Juan not to follow his footsteps, “but to cherish the followers of Don Pedro, who were faithful in adversity”—a curious glimpse into the idiosyncrasy of his mind at the moment when the crown for which he had sacrificed his honour as a knight and his fealty as a brother is fading from him as he approaches the misty confines of another world. “Verily his sin will find him out,” says the Bible, and so it was with Henry of Trastamare. Juan I., his son, dies a miserable death at thirty-four (A.D. 1390) on a mimic battle-field.
He had none of the bloodthirsty instincts of his family. He fought with English and Portuguese because it was the duty of kings of that day to fight, but with no ferocity of temperament or greed of conquest. He had inherited the softer qualities of the winning Caballero whom all men loved, before the unnatural cruelty of his brother, and the sting of repeated reverses drove him to the commission of a crime which will ever cling to his name.