A great feature in the fonda was Constantine, the hall-porter, a tall swarthy man, who was as fluent a linguist as an Alexandria dragoman. He was Greek by birth, but had a strain of English blood on the mother's side. His sire may have been a South Sea cannibal or a South African lion-slayer for aught I remember; but that there was something phenomenally bold in him I am certain. Constantine's instincts were predatory, and his manners morose. There was a tradition that he had been a bandit in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, or an innkeeper by the Marseilles docks—much about the same thing, and that he was prepared to do little jobs of human carving for a consideration. However, these may have been fables got up by travellers in search of excitement to invest Constantine with an interesting air of romance. He was very civil to me and did not cheat me more than I chose. I never had occasion to ask him to kill anybody.
From my windows I could command the mid-basin in the Plaza, more for use than ornament, and as great a rendezvous of the quidnuncs as a village-pump. The panorama of life lounged or moved or bustled beneath—shifting groups of cloaked disputants, veiled women tripping gracefully along, stately Civil Guards in three-cornered hats, sombre priests with Don Basilio head-gear, the various moulds of human nature from the grandee to the mendicant, and above all that brood with which I soon grew familiar, and for which I conceived an invincible disgust—the sallow, peering, prating, importunate brood of hungry place-hunters, impatient to dip their fingers into the Government pie. Cabriolets passed to and fro, tram-cars with such sleek well-conditioned mule-teams jolted on the rails; here a horse-soldier trotted by with clattering accoutrements, there a water-carrier sturdily trudged; and in a sheltered angle a long-locked vendor of a magic hair-restorer vaunted his wondrous balm in sonorous patter, and occasionally curtained his face with his thick mane brought over from his back as tangible testimony to the fertilizing properties of the balm. In short, from those windows I could take in the cardiac pulsing of Madrid. Below me, as I sat and smoked my cigarette, the beginning of change or crux, accident or riot, the initial whims or humours of the populace, the formation of a procession or the overture of a pronunciamiento, were within my ken. And at one corner of the Puerta were the General Post Office and Telegraphic Bureau, a matter of great convenience to me, if only they were properly managed. However, it was far easier to collect news than to send it to the desired destination. The post was as unsafe as in those days in another land when Mr. Richard Turpin, highwayman, and his comrogues intercepted his Majesty's mails. As for messages by wire, I was not long in learning that no important information was allowed to be sent; true, the money for its transmission was taken, but—delayed, or forwarded, or suppressed even—the strict rule in that establishment was "no money returned." Vain were complaints. The Special Correspondent had no resource but that of the negro suffering from toothache; 'twas his to grin and bear it. The idea of ever again seeing the colour of the coin which has passed into the palm of a Spanish functionary is laughable in its pastoral innocence. As well expect to handle last year's snow. The system of ignorant espionage still obtained in the Peninsula, as I was forced reluctantly to observe: the word "Cuba" or "Carlos" on the telegraphic form at once aroused the scruples and suspicions of the official, and led to the confiscation of the message. In the end, I discovered how to facilitate the despatch of news; but as that is my secret I keep it to myself. Suffice it that in my bill of expenses the item "sundries" was elastic.
There are some valuable guide-books to Spain, and to them I refer the reader if he desire to be crammed with curious knowledge about churches and picture-galleries, museums of arms, and the beautiful upholstery of the Duke of Sixty-Blazons' palace. My behest was with living not dead Spain, as investigated during the throes of a political convulsion. I made my notes on the Madrileños without bias, and without bias I give them. I spent five weeks in constant and free intercourse with all classes of the inhabitants. During that time I did not detect one Belleville face; I did not catch the glitter of a knife except at a dinner-table, nor remark a single drunkard staggering along the streets. Yet I was in every quarter of the town, to the lowest, at all hours. There are parts of London where the foreign visitor could not penetrate and come back with the same story. The Madrileños are indolent—granted; but they are frugal, temperate, and well-conducted. Occasionally a poniard is slipped into the ribs of an enemy, but mistakes will occur in the best-regulated families. If this be a vindictive and blood-sucking people, the vampirism is adroitly concealed; the dirty linen must be washed in the dark corner where the charcoal is stored, so that Paul Pry may not be gratified with the sight. There is no working population at Madrid; there are no large manufactories, no thriving centres of employment. That is one reason why Madrid is orderly compared to other and livelier cities. Prosperous Barcelona swarms with mechanics and artisans, and that is one reason why Barcelona is disorderly. The rights-of-man agitators generally find favour there. The International has its ramifications in the Catalonian capital. In Madrid, the International is a pigmy failure. Its emissaries came once and laboured zealously to stir up the son of toil to a proper consciousness of his dignity. After months of propagandism they succeeded in persuading Figaro to shake a rebellious pole and fiercely flourish his lathering-brush.
"Know, ye smooth-lipped minions of the despot Capital," quoth the barbers in an indignant round-robin, "we shall no longer submit to the gross tyranny of shaving you before eight of the morning!"
But Figaro was defeated; Madrid let its beard grow.
The sudden departure of the Italian-bred monarch had apparently plunged the politicians into a pit of bewilderment. They did not know how they stood. Amadeus after his reign of five-and-twenty months had perchance left few partisans behind him, but assuredly no enemies. His principal fault, but that was fatal, consisted in his being a foreigner. It was universally vouchsafed that he was very brave, a true hidalgo in that respect, and if he had been removed in the orthodox method by revolution or the assassin, his name would have been garlanded with rosemary for remembrance. But Spanish pride was nettled to the quick at the cavalier way he had tossed back, with a shrug of the shoulders, the gift of a crown when he had tired of it. He had looked upon the throne of Castile as a gewgaw to be surrendered with indifference, and steamed contentedly to Italy to enjoy his comparatively obscure Dukedom and rank of General in preference. He had chosen the wiser and happier part, but to those he had abandoned it was mortifying in the extreme. Still, he was an unquailing chevalier, almost fit to be a Spaniard, this son of Victor Emmanuel. He had disarmed hostility, and compelled the praise of the envious, the very day he entered Madrid, forty-eight hours after the funeral of Prim, when he spurred ahead of his escort and offered his breast undismayed to the aim of any or all assassins.
That entry of Amadeus could not have inspired him with much of the buoyancy of a bright expectation. There was in it more of sanguinary suggestiveness than sanguine hope. The ghostly presence at the King's first dinner in the palace could not be denied—that of the slaughtered "Paladino," no longer fiery and strenuous, but a figure, inert, waxen, blood-bolstered, a bullet-riddled flesh-target It was most unpropitious of entries. There was an odour of cerecloth in the tapestry, the yellow hue of immortelles in the épergnes, a sediment of bitterness in the wine-cup, a strain of melancholy in the music. And yet there was some semblance of gaiety, for with all his austere stateliness your Spaniard is very like unto the Irishman:
| "With one auspicious, and one dropping eye, |
| With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, |
| In equal scale weighing delight and dole." |
There were sundry plots to take the life of Amadeus, but Providence protected him, and he made it a point, after each attempt or threat, to show himself in public with the ostentation of a reckless courage. He rode or walked about with a single aide-de-camp, which was a crime with those monarchists who set store by the pageantry of state. On one occasion, as he was returning to the palace, the horse in a hackney-coach with a fat bourgeois inside took fright, and started off at break-neck speed, overtaking the King's carriage. The King's coachman whipped up his team, but the wheels of the two vehicles had locked in each other, and the horses galloped frantically side by side. The aide-de-camp, fearing a new and daring experiment in regicide, snatched his rapier from the sheath and began furiously prodding through the window of the hackney-coach. The fat bourgeois shrunk and flattened himself into a corner, drew in his breath, and dodged the lunges of the searching steel. When the palace-gates were reached, and the animals were stopped, the unfortunate citizen was extricated from his hazardous position more dead than alive. He was glistening with the wetness of fright, trembled like an aspen, and blubbered as he begged for mercy. The panelling was pierced, and the cushion ripped into rags; but by some extraordinary luck the poor man, who was a harmless dealer in provisions, had escaped without a scratch. But he owned that he never before had five minutes of such violent exercise complicated with vile terror. During the scene Amadeus kept his seat tranquilly, and relaxed into a smile as he discovered the mistake of his too-zealous companion.
The conspiracies of the saloons were more successful, as efforts to annoy without contravening law always are. They are not so readily met. And the malicious ingenuity of woman, when she lays herself out to be offensive, is remarkably inventive and diabolically persistent. Some of the grand dames of Madrid had the impish inspiration to put the Royal couple into Coventry. There is a fashionable carriage-drive in the capital corresponding much to ours between Hyde Park Corner and Queen's Gate. Whenever Amadeus and his spouse went there for an airing, the blue-blooded of the opposition significantly trotted off. Once an immense procession of the aristocratic families made its appearance, and slowly and perseveringly "took the dust." Such a turn-out of gala equipages had not been witnessed for years. All the ladies were arrayed in the ancient Spanish costume; the fan and veil with high comb and carnation in the hair in every case replaced the Parisian bonnet and parasol. It was a protest against the foreign dynasty, and was clearly meant as a demonstration of insult. One of the Royal household was equal to the provocation; whether Spaniard or Italian I am not sure, but the latter I think, so subtle was his revenge. He went round to all the houses of ill-fame in the capital that night, and entered into conversation, burnished with duros, with their female occupants. The next evening Madrid was afforded the spectacle in its most fashionable drive of a parade of courtesans, in ancient Spanish costumes, fanning themselves, and smirking at their acquaintances from the vantage of luxurious chariots. It was a scandal, but Madrid grinned, and the patricians of the antediluvian stem confessed themselves beaten.