All this time the bevy of dogs keep up such a chorus of barking that they can hardly hear themselves speak, closing round them as if determined for an attack.
“Let them bark,” says the king, carelessly, fronting one savage old hound with fiery eyes and tail erect, about to leap on him.
Martos and the page, seriously alarmed, rush to his rescue with sticks and stones.
“Better this noise than silence. The dogs after all are doing their duty, which my servants are not. Perhaps their barking will bring out some one to stable our horses. See how wet the flanks of the poor beasts are and how they tremble. Look to them well, Juanito,” to the page, who, doffing his plumed cap, bows to the ground, “I would not have Zulema take any harm for half the kingdom I do NOT rule. We have ridden hard and long; let us hope that a good repast awaits us. I have a keen appetite.”
“I do not see where it is to come from,” answers Garcia, following the king over the drawbridge into the patio.
It was a lovely place, this Moorish patio, shut in by walls delicately embroidered and diapered in stone, supported by ranges of horseshoe arches, light as a dream, grouped on double pillars as white as snow, the central space traversed by walks paved with coloured tiles, followed by rustic arches cut in yew in fanciful devices of pyramids and crowns, from which hung coloured lanterns in the summer nights when the harem made holiday here long ago, a bubbling fountain in the midst, cutting tiny canals edged with flowers.
“Here I could live and die!” exclaims the young king, standing entranced in the centre, the sound of many waters flowing from jets and tunnels mingling with the songs of birds emboldened by the stillness and fluttering in the boughs. “Give me my zither and lute, I should never care to return to Burgos. Come, Garcia,” turning to his companion, “let us explore the interior of this fair mansion.”
But Garcia, not at all poetical by nature, and who is growing every moment more indignant at the absence of the jefe and the lack of every preparation, follows him in silence under a colonnade from which the various apartments open out through doors of cedar wood into an Arab hall—a blaze of gorgeous colour.
“This passes all belief!” cried Garcia, looking round, unable any longer to suppress his feelings. “It is high time that your Grace emancipates yourself. If this insult leads to the fall of the Regents (and you are already sixteen, and competent to reign), it will satisfy me better than the choicest meal ever served to mortal, though I confess I am as hungry as a wolf.”
“But, our Lady defend us!” he cried, as he suddenly caught sight of the dismal face of Martos, “what brings you with such a woful countenance? Speak, man! Have the dogs bitten you?”