“I believe I am quite demoralized,” he said, cheerfully; and then, in company with Over and young Rothe—whose wife had amiably bade him stay—he returned to the ring.
XVII
“I saw that horse standing in the middle of the arena every time my mind was off guard!” said Catalina. “I woke up suddenly in the night with the hideous vision painted on the dark. I thought it was a judgment on me for going—that I should be haunted by it for the rest of my life. I believe it was Velasquez that banished it, but now I see it only at intervals.”
“Perhaps,” said Over, “we were wiser in going back. Our savagery was glutted and the imagination blunted. I was never so bored in my life as at the end of two hours of it, and I haven’t thought of it since.”
They were down in the crypt of the Escorial, in the Pantheon de los Reyes. Mrs. Rothe had offered to chaperon Catalina, and after two days of sight-seeing in Toledo had returned to Madrid to prepare for the trip south. She had seen the Escorial, and Catalina had come out alone with Over to the grim mass of masonry growing out of the Guadarrama Mountains, which from a distance looks like a phantom casino for dead pleasures. They had wandered over it leisurely, lingering in the cell, with its scant leather furniture, where Philip II. in his monastic arrogance had received the ambassadors of Europe, and peering through the little window of the inner cell upon the same sight that had held his dying gaze as he lay where they, as a great concession, were permitted to stand—a high-mass in the chapel beyond. Then they had descended the fifty-nine steps into the black-and-gold vault where lies the dust of Charles V. and his successors to the throne of Spain, together with the queens who reigned, or mothered kings.
It is an octagonal apartment, with eight rows of niches, the kings on the right of the altar opposite the entrance, the queens on the left. Every sarcophagus, wrought in precisely the same elaborate pattern, is of black marble heavily encrusted with gold. The handful of dust that once was chief of the Holy Roman Empire is in the sarcophagus on a level with the top of the altar, and below him is Philip II. There is none of the picturesque confusion, the vagaries of different epochs, nor the lingering scent of death of the Kaisergruft in Vienna. It might have been built yesterday, but it has the sombre richness, the lofty dignity of Spain itself.
There were only two empty niches, and the guide informed his patrons that they awaited the young king and the late Queen Isabella.
“Where is she now?” asked Catalina. “Why is she not here?”
“Oh, she must remain in the Pudridero for ten years,” said the guide, indifferently. “It is the custom. For some it is only five years, but she was very fat.”