We waited till the audience was over, watched the Ambassador and his suite drive away in the same state as they had come, and a little later the halberdiers march out of the palace and down the Calle Bailen to their barracks.
“There goes Pedro,” murmured Patsy, as the halberdier who had made room for us at the Infanta’s wedding swung by. “The soldiers on duty in the yard looked like any other soldiers. These chaps could only be Spanishers. The fire in the eye, the haughtiness, are perfectly colossal!”
“And the fierce curl of the bigotes. You know what bigote means? When the Spanish soldiers were in the Low countries, they fell in with the English—you remember Uncle Toby says ‘our army swore terribly in Flanders.’ Every time the British soldier swore he twisted his moustache and said ‘by God!’ The Spanish imitated him, twirled his moustachios and cried ‘bigote.’ By and by he connected the action with the words, imagined the oath had something to do with the moustache; to this day the Spaniard calls his moustache a bigote in memory of that swearing English army in Flanders—or, some people say, of the swearing German soldiers of Charles V.”
We lingered after the other spectators had gone, and the chicos had begun their game again; palace and plaza had a strong fascination for us. We looked through the arches of the peristyle across the bare Castilian plain to the snow-capped Guadarramas.
“The Escorial lies in that direction,” said the Argentino. “On clear days it can be seen from the palace. Do you suppose when he looks out of window, Don Alfonzo ever thinks about that black marble sarcophagus waiting for him over there?”
That seventh wonder of the world, the Escorial, palace, monastery and mausoleum all in one, was built by Philip II. It is a proper monument to a man who is remembered as having laughed rarely, and loudest when he heard of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew. The Escorial expresses Philip’s dour personality as no other building that I know expresses any other man’s. From the moment you catch sight of the gloomy pile, built in the shape of a gridiron, in memory of Saint Lawrence, you feel if ever place was haunted, the ghost of Philip haunts that gray grim tragedy in stone.
“I am glad,” said Patsy, “that I saw the Escorial; I shall be glad never to see it again. The places where people have lived for me, rather than those where they are buried. This palace is a thousand times more interesting than the Escorial. Think how much we know about the people who have lived here! When Napoleon first saw this palace, he said to his brother Joseph—he had just casually made him King of Spain: “You will be better lodged than I.”
(Poor Joseph did not enjoy the lodging long; he was glad to escape from it alive and fly to Bordentown, New Jersey, where he lived in semi-royal state at Point Breeze. Here, an old letter preserves the fact, my grandmother Ward dined with him, and wore an “embroidered cambric dress and a lilac turban.”)
“We are interested not only in the people who have lived here, but in those who live here now,” Patsy went on, as a closed carriage drawn by four black mules dashed by. “There go the King’s nieces and nephews.”
The little Prince of the Asturias, the heir to the throne, bowed, smiled and waved his tiny hand in quaint mechanical greeting to whoever might be looking. The youngest child, still happily unconscious of his rank, wriggled in the English nurse’s arms like any other baby out for its airing.