'To tell that would be to disclose myself.'
'Tie a ribbon to my lance-head, thou dear one, and I shall dip it in the blood of him I have vowed to slay.'
She did so, saying in the spirit of the age:
'Rival, if you can, the Cid Rodrigo, who has been known to meet ten knights in arms, and unhorse them all; who, with his sword, slew that giant Moor, the Caliph of Cordova, and released six Christian maidens.'
The knight laughed lightly.
'Dios guarde à ustéd, mi querida!' he exclaimed, gathering up his reins, and spurring his horse—the Babieca of so many ballads and romances—for sooth to say, he was the identical Cid Rodrigo of whom she spoke; and waving a farewell to 'the sweet face at the window,' he rode off with lance and helmet flashing in the sun, and she watched him till he disappeared in the direction of Miranda—watched him departing on his deadly mission with less anxiety, perhaps, than a girl of the present day would see her lover start by express train.
The Convent of Miraflores, with its garden and vineyard, formed a kind of oasis in the long sweeping plain at the foot of the rugged Sierra; shy bustards stalked about there in the loneliness amid the silent scenery, for silent it is in Spain, where there are no singing birds. A train of mules crossing the waste, where the wild mignonette grows still in sheets of green; a solitary horseman in mail, with lance-head glittering in the sun, or a friar jogging along on a mule, alone were seen from time to time from the convent windows.
Gentle and soft in disposition, the fair pensionaria had a deal of pent-up tenderness at her disposal. Hitherto it had been bestowed upon pet birds and flowers, mingled with many prayers in chapel and much musing and reverie at the projecting window, where she would sit for hours in that non-literary age, when there were no books, no Berlin wool-work, and no pianos, gazing at the sparkling stars of the summer night or at the morning sun, as he tipped the transparent foliage of the myrtle groves and lit up the current of the Ebro; till a day came when she was roused and excited by finding a gallant hawk, hooded and plumed, flirting with the merlin on her wrist, and saw its owner, the young mailed horseman, below the window regarding her with pleasure and admiration; and as he had some trouble in luring back his bird, a secret acquaintance, that ripened into love, began between these two. The girl—for she was but a girl, and very young too—loved with all her newly-awakened woman's heart and with a wild yearning, very different, perhaps, from that of a young woman of the present day, for her life was one of intense seclusion, and he rapidly became (like Romeo) 'the god of her idolatry' in the unreasoning enthusiasm of those days of romance and chivalry.
How little could she dream that her lover was the Cid Rodrigo of Bivar, with the fame of whose exploits all Spain resounded now!
He was born at Burgos, where his father, Don Diego Lainez, was a powerful noble, and his mother was Donna Teresa, 'daughter of the Conde Don Nuno Alvarez,' as the inscription on her tomb bears now in the church of San Pedro de Cordova, near Burgos.