“The boy has learned his part well,” said the Argentino. “He’s not like the little prince Imperial: when the Empress Eugenie threatened to punish him, he made the dreadful counter threat, ‘je ferai des grimaces au peuple’ (I will make faces at the people). There you see the difference between real and upstart royalty!”
The day after the Ambassador’s audience seemed to us the coldest of the winter. The trees in the Recoletos had a wedge of snow down one side, the side that faces north and gets the full force of the wind sweeping down from the snow fields of the Guadarramas. Engracia’s vivid face was tingling with the cold when she blew into the Tower with Don Luis that morning and announced that she had come to take us into the country for the day.
“The motor is at the door;” she declared, “luncheon is ordered. We go first to El Pardo to see the royal hunting chateau, and then on to our own shooting box where my husband joins us.”
From our first meeting at Toledo, not a week had passed without some pleasant incident for which we had to thank Engracia.
The city was soon left behind and we were bowling along a road smooth as a billiard table cut through the heart of a wood. The cool breath of the forest was in our faces, the smell of the woods in our nostrils, a mingled perfume of tree, moss, wild creature, and under all, binding them together like ambergris, the mysterious scent of decay. The air was full of wood noises, the peace and calm of the wilderness lay on either side of us not twenty feet away from a road as good as the Paseo Castellana.
“For the first time,” said Patsy, “I envy Don Alfonzo. I should hate to live in a palace, to have the power of life and death, to pass my life under a microscope, but I must say I should like to own El Pardo.”
“Velasquez often stayed here with King Philip and his brothers,” said Don Luis. “No wonder they all liked it. Court etiquette relaxed, the artist was treated as the friend. One understands why he painted so many portraits of the royalties man and boy, in hunting dress, with gun and dog. They were not only tremendous sports, but caramba! in these woods there was freedom, even for a king, even for a genius!”
Engracia on the front seat scanned the covers with keen eyes.
“Look!” she cried. “There is a deer; if I only had my gun, what an easy shot! There goes a red fox scuttling across the road. Ah! that was a hare.” A bright-eyed furry creature gave us one timid glance, flattened its ears and leapt into the bracken.
At the chateau we were refused admittance. Engracia, used to seeing all doors fly open before her, sent for the official in charge, an old friend of hers.