“What do you suppose Don Alfonzo’s maxima culpa is?” murmured Patsy. “I don’t believe he has had much chance to commit one. Villegas might say it is his not liking to pose. Some old fogy might say it was his habit of riding his horse up the palace stairs. I would not give a fig for a young man in his position who didn’t do that; it is a time-honored custom of gay young princes! It wasn’t his fault that he was born a king; he can’t be expected to forfeit all the fun he might otherwise have enjoyed as heir to the throne!”
While the Archbishop knotted the white satin scarf, symbol of the marriage tie, about the young couple’s shoulders, Don Jaime hurried us down to the gallery to see the cortége pass from the chapel to the private apartments. Our halberdier, Pedro, had kept us a place opposite the chapel door. The gallery was lined with these superb guards. They stood shoulder to shoulder, their steel halberds flashing in the sunlight that streamed through the glass sides of the gallery.
“The alabardaros,” Don Jaime explained, “are a particularity, all must be of so great length.” He added that they all held rank two grades below what they had held in the army; that the soldiers had been sergeants and the general formerly a field marshal.
The fateful music of Mendelssohn’s march thrilled through the gallery, the waiting crowd behind the halberdiers swayed at the sound as wind-flowers shaken by the wind.
The wedding party came out of the chapel behind four mace bearers, stalwart men in black velvet, with gold maces over their shoulders.
“The Infanta Isabel, the King’s aunt, es muy Española!” she is very Spanish—whispered Jaime as a gray-haired, hearty-looking woman passed, bowing and smiling.
“I like her,” said Patsy; “she looks a thoroughly good sort; she has twice been heir to the throne, before the birth of her brother Alfonzo XII, and again after his death, before our Don Alfonzo was born. Trying, wasn’t it? She seems to be the most popular of the elder members of the family.”
The Infanta Eulalia is not so well known as her sister, the Infanta Isabel, because she has been little in Spain and prefers to live in Paris. She looked very much as she did when she was in Chicago, at the time of the World’s Fair, very elegant, very graceful, more cosmopolitan, less Española than her sister.
The Queen walked with Don Alfonzo. She wore a long ash colored dress, a white lace mantilla, a diamond diadem, and the finest pearls I ever saw. She neither bowed nor smiled.
In the clear sunlight of the gallery, at a range of ten feet, one saw the dreadful look of suffering in her face. It must have been a trying day for her. Her eldest daughter, Princess of the Asturias, had died only a year before, leaving four little children: her marriage had been so unpopular that it nearly caused a revolution, and there had been none of the rejoicing and merrymaking her sister, the Infanta Maria, was enjoying. Besides this recent grief, what bitter memories must have surged up in the Queen’s heart. Her own marriage and all of the tragedy and suffering that it held. Hers had been a state marriage; her bridegroom met her at the altar with a heart still sore for his adored Mercedes, his first wife dead in the first year of their marriage. Then came her husband’s early death, after a cruel, lingering illness; the summoning together of the ministers, to whom she announced that there was still hope of an heir, for besides her three daughters, she was again with child: the birth of that child, Alfonzo XIII, one of the very few who have been born King, twenty years of passionate devotion to the care of the delicate boy’s health, his education, his religious training. Twenty years of intense, unresting effort to keep the throne for her son,—all this among a people to whom she was ever “the Austrian,” is still the Outlander. And now, after all that she has done, another woman is to usurp her place. Her son will marry within the year a woman who has been bred a Protestant.