Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

I remember a similar experience in Cadiz. I had driven out with one of my Spanish hostesses to the large seaside cemetery, a mile beyond the gate. This is arranged in nine successive patios, planted with palms and cypresses. In the niches, seashells play a prominent part. The little angel images, as gay as ever, with their pink girdles and their purple wings, may be seen swinging in shells, sleeping in shells, and balancing on the edge of shells to play their golden flutes. Near by is an English and German cemetery, with green-turfed mounds and a profusion of blossoming shrubs and flower beds. Not sure of the direction, as we were leaving the Catholic enclosure I asked a bandy-legged, leather-visaged old sexton, who might have been the very one that dug Ophelia's grave, if the "Protestant cemetery" was at our right. He laid down his mattock, peered about among the mausolea to see if we were quite alone, winked prodigiously, and, drawing a bunch of keys from the folds of his black sash, started briskly down a by-path and signed to us to follow. He led us through stony passages out beyond the sanctified ground into a dreary, oblong space, a patch of weeds and sand, enclosed by the lofty sepulchral walls, but with a blessed strip of blue sky overhead.

"Here they are!" he chuckled. "They wouldn't confess, they died without the sacraments, and here they are."

Some names lettered on the wall seemed to be those of Dutch and Norwegian sailors, who had perhaps died friendless in this foreign port. There were pebble-strewn graves of Jews, and upright marbles from which the dead still seemed to utter voice: "I refuse the prayers of all the saints, and ask the prayers of honest human souls. I believe in God." And another, "God is knowledge." And another, "God is All that works for Wisdom and for Love."

"Are there burial services for these?" I inquired.

If the Church of England could have seen that crooked old sexton go through his gleeful pantomime!

"There's one that comes with some, and they call him Pastor! And he scrapes up a handful of dirt—so! And he flings it at the coffin—so! And then he stands up straight and says, 'Dust to dust!' I've heard him say it myself."

"God of my soul!" cried the Spanish lady in horror, and to express her detestation of such a heathenish rite, she spat upon the ground.

The monarchs of Spain do not mingle their ashes. Who knows where Roderick sleeps? Or does that deathless culprit still lurk in mountain caverns, as tradition has it, wringing his wasted hands and tearing his white beard in unavailing penitence? The "Catholic kings," Ferdinand and Isabella, lie, not where they had planned, in that beautiful Gothic church of Toledo, San Juan de los Reyes, on whose outer walls yet hang the Moorish chains struck from the limbs of Christian captives, but in Granada, the city of their conquest, where they slumber proudly, although their coffins are of plainest lead and their last royal chamber a small and dusky vault. Pedro the Cruel is thrust away in a narrow wall-grave beneath the Capilla Real of Seville cathedral. His brother, the Master of Santiago, whom he treacherously slew in one of the loveliest halls of the Alcázar, is packed closely in on his left, and Maria de Padilla, for whose sake he cut short the hapless life of Queen Blanche, on his right. Pleasant family discussions they must have at the witching hour of night, when they drag their numb bones out of those pigeon-holes for a brief respite of elbow room! San Fernando, the Castilian conqueror of Castile, canonized "because he carried fagots with his own hands for the burning of heretics," is more commodiously accommodated in a silver sarcophagus in the chapel above, where Alfonso the Learned also has long leisure for thought. Another Alfonso and another Fernando, with another wife of Pedro the Cruel, keep their state in Santiago de Compostela, and still another Alfonso and two Sanchos have their splendid tombs in the Capilla Mayor of Toledo cathedral, while in its Capilla de los Reyes Nuevos, a line descended from that brother whom Pedro murdered, sleeps the first John, with the second and third Henrys.