At Maya, Stuart dined with the monks of the Franciscan convent. He had an excellent repast, composed of all the good things which the district could afford. The clergy of every country are certainly ardent lovers of all the good things of this life, however much they may preach and declaim against them. Poor though Spain may be generally, it is within the stout old walls of the gloomy and spacious convento that the richest wines, the most delicate fruits, the most tempting viands, and the most massive plate, are ever to be found. Quite the reverse of the humble, dejected, and mortifying begging friars, from whom they took their name, Ronald found the Franciscans of Maya all very jovial fellows, who could laugh until they almost choked, and could push the can about, and give vent at times to a most unclerical oath. Most of them had been serving in the guerilla bands, and at the peace had resumed the cassock and cope, the mass-book and rosary; but the blustering manners acquired under such leaders as Mina and Julian Sanchez, together with the coarse sentiments of the dissolute and irregular lives they had led, appeared continually through their hypocritical airs and the sombre disguise of the cloister. And such as these are the men who are welcomed to every hearth and home in Spain! who are the advisers of the young, the companions of the old, and the confessors and the spiritual consolers of all, and into whose ears many a female pours the inmost secrets of her heart,—secrets which, perhaps, she would have revealed to no other mortal living!
To pay for his entertainment, Stuart deposited a handful of pesetas at the shrine of the Virgin, whose portrait in the niche, padre Giuseppe informed him, was that of the querida of the padre abbot. The fairest dame in Maya had sat for it, to please the superior, who now never prayed before any other image. Complimenting the abbot on his taste, Stuart mounted and bade the holy fathers adieu, tired alike of their manners and their cloister-scandal.
He was now riding straight on the road for France. After he passed the rock of Maya, every rood of ground became as familiar to him as the scenery of his native glen. The sun was setting as he entered the pass, and as its light waxed more dim and sombre, his thoughts grew sadder and more gloomy; for all the excitement of war had now passed away, and the kindlier feelings had begun to resume their sway in the heart. He felt an unaccountable melancholy stealing over him, but whether it was caused by a presentiment—a prophetic sense of hidden danger, or by recollections awakened by the surrounding scenery, I know not: probably by the latter.
Poor Alister Macdonald was with him the last time he trod that way so merrily to the strain of the pipe. He was now within a few feet of his tomb, and all the memory of their past friendship came gushing upon his remembrance. He stayed his horse, for a short space, to gaze upon the scene of that contest, so fierce and so bloody, where his brave brigade had fought with a spirit of gallantry and chivalric devotion equalling that of Leonidas and his Spartans. Where the roar of so many thousand muskets had once rung like thunder among the hills all was now silent. The stillness was broken only by the scream of the wild bird, as, warned by the falling dew and deepening shadows, it winged its way to its eyrie among the rocks.
"Well may the flowerets bloom, and the grass be verdant here!" thought Stuart. "Every foot of ground has been drenched in the blood of the brave!"
The place presented the appearance of an old church-yard which had been shaken by an earthquake. In some places skeletons lay uncovered, and in others the grass grew long and rank above the mounds.
A green stone, with its head of moss, marked the resting-place of Alister, that looked like one of those solitary old graves which, on the Scottish moors, mark the resting-place of a covenanting warrior. The earth which Evan's hands had heaped over it was now covered with long weeds and nettles, waving sadly in the wind as it whistled down the pass. The remnants of uniform, broken weapons, ammunition-paper, and all the usual appurtenances of an old battle-field, lay strewn about. The great cairn raised by the Gordon Highlanders to mark where their officers were buried, cast a long spectral shadow across the ground, for now the broad disk of the sun was just dipping behind the mountains. The scene was gloomy and terrible, and Stuart was scarcely able to repress a shudder as the recollections of the dead came crowding fast and thick upon him. But, bestowing a last look on romantic Spain, the land of bright eyes, of the mantilla, of the dagger and the guitar, he turned, and rode down the narrow mountain-path to the northward.
CHAPTER IV.
CIFUENTES.
"Let Death come on;
Guilt, guilt alone shrinks back appall'd. The brave
And honest still defy his dart; the wise
Calmly can eye his frown, and Misery
Invokes his friendly aid to end her woes."
The Orphan of China.