“By the great horn spoon!” cried Patsy; “it’s the grand order of the Golden Fleece! I would rather own that than be King of Spain.”
The golden toy hung on the young King’s breast just as it hangs in Alonzo Coello’s portrait of Philip II. Beside the King walked his mother—she looks a bigot worthy of Philip’s house—and his sister, the Infanta Maria Teresa, enough like him, in spite of her white mantilla, to be his twin.
Sanchez Lozano, Elder Brother of the Parish Confraternity, José Ponce, the archpriest, and half a dozen other bigwigs met the royalties at the door of San Lorenzo. The bigwigs made oration, long and loud, the King took off his helmet and mopped his crimson face. It was a cruelly hot day for the season.
“They work the boy hard,” said Pemberton. “He was at the cathedral at half past nine, this morning, and led the procession to deposit the Host in the monument. Next he went to the church of San Salvador; this is his third sepulchre. They have walked him all over the place; warm work in that thick uniform. If every Spaniard earned his salt as honestly as Don Alfonzo, Spain would not be where she is to-day.”
Pemberton heard afterwards, from one of the Brothers, what passed in the church while we waited in the plaza. The King, after praying by the sepulchre, a flower-decked, candle-lighted space before the altar, and admiring the pasos of the Virgin of Solitude and the Christ of Great Power, talked with the elder Brother, asked if he too, walked masked in the procession of penitence. Sanchez Lozano said that he did, and reminded Don Alfonzo that Isabel II, the King’s grandmother, and Ferdinand VII, his great grandfather, had been members of this Brotherhood. The King and the Infanta, without more ado, took the oath and signed the articles of the Brotherhood.
“Of course it had all been cut, dried, and smoked beforehand,” Pemberton added. “Royalty does not often have an opportunity to enjoy the unforeseen!”
When they came out of church, the King had faded to a healthy pink; we no longer feared apoplexy for him. The gorgeous, sweating company crossed the plaza, the crowd cheered, the ladies in the balconies clapped hands and waved ’kerchiefs.
“Come,” said Pemberton, “to see beauty, follow in a monarch’s wake. We shall find the handsomest women of Seville inside the church.”
A dozen ladies, their flushed, excited faces reflecting the royal smile, clustered about the sad Virgin. A señorita, in black gauze with pink camelias in her hair and bodice, tapped a silver money tray with a copper coin:
“Did they desire to purchase a photograph of our Lady?” She spoke to me, she looked at Patsy.