“The finest manners in the world,” Pemberton agreed.
In the cathedral flickering torches shone on a vast congregation met to hear Eslava’s miserere: matadors, gypsies, nuns, babies, beggars, beauties of court and theatre. Every girl in a mantilla looked a heroine, every lad with a straight back, a hero, in that witchery of light and shadow. From our places neither orchestra nor musicians were in sight, only solemn columns, long aisles, and twinkling lamps before pictured Nativity and Pietá. Two votive candles were burning before Santa Teresa, showing the wax ex-votos of little hands, legs, and feet, hanging from long braids of hair around the shrine. Near the puerta mayor a blaze of glory shone from the white and gold monument over the tomb of Ferdinand Columbus, where the Host had been that morning deposited to remain till the first mass on Saturday morning, surrounded by kneeling monks.
“I fancy,” said Pemberton, “that here, in the cathedral where he was chapel master, Eslava planned his miserere,—caught, while he sat dreaming at the organ, the divine harmonies it repeats.”
The twin organs called and answered each other, the deep notes thrilled and thundered through the aisles. The clear boy voices scaled the heights of song; the mellow altos held the middle ground, the deep basses welded voices, organs, instruments, into a full glorious harmony that swept the soul. The miserere over, one by one the great pasos of the afternoon’s procession, taking on a new and awful beauty in the dim cathedral, swung slowly down the aisle, halting at the monument on the way to their several stations.
“This seems to link Columbus with the fiestas,” said Pemberton, “and makes me feel that I, too, have some part in them,—he is so much more ours than theirs!”
As we came down the steps of the cathedral, we passed the knife grinder of La Mancha. He had taken off his apron, and left his pipe and wheel at home. As he strolled along under the burning stars, he hummed a snatch of the music we had just heard, and hummed it correctly.
“Rich and poor, vagrant and King, there is room for us all in the Heart of Seville,” sighed Pemberton.
Good Friday
That night the King slept in the old palace of the Alcazar. Did he sleep? In the gardens the nightingales were singing to split their throats; palms and orange trees rustled, fountains whispered of things that might well keep a lover awake. Here in the old palace of the Moorish kings lived the beautiful Maria del Padilla, beloved of Pedro the Cruel. Here died the royal Moor, Abu Said, murdered by his host, Don Pedro, for his jewels. The rarest, the great spinel ruby, Pedro gave to Edward, the Black Prince. Henry V wore it in his helmet at Agincourt,—to-day it glows in the front of England’s royal crown. England, always England! How often, for good or evil, the fates of the reigning houses of Spain and England have intertwined!
“Ena,” sang the nightingales; “Ena,” rippled the fountain,—for the King was a lover. If he slept that night it must have been to dream of the yellow hair and the blue eyes of the English princess who, one happy day, shall wander with him through the mazes, gather the roses of that matchless garden of the Alcazar.