He succeeded in reaching her before the people had made their way into her apartment, and telling her of her danger, urged her to fly. But, loth to lose her high position, she refused, calling on her guards to defend her. The Castilian guards, however, refused to draw on their countrymen in defence of a Jewess. Meantime the people streamed in, and rushed upon her.
“Stay,” said García, “stain not the bright steel of your Toledan blades with blood which belongs only to the sword of the executioner.”
And his voice acted for a moment like the spell upon them.
But they were determined not again to leave it in her power to trample on their ancient institutions, and once more turned to slay her.
Then Alvar Fañez drew from his hiding-place behind the throne, a trembling Jew, who had been Raguel’s minister in her elevation, but had not the courage to defend her now, and compelled him to be her executioner.
The king, hastily recalled from the chase, arrived but in time to see her expire. In the first burst of grief and fury he would have steeped his sword deep in the blood of his subjects; but once more the good García interposed, and by his temperate counsels recalled him to reason. When the violent throbbing of his agony had subsided, he acknowledged that his people had acted as a wise surgeon, that he alone had been in fault, that his punishment was deserved, and once more he was hailed as
[1] The soil of the bed of the Tagus is a yellow sand, which gives its water rather a muddy appearance. Poets, however, see things with a different eye from ordinary mortals, and have turned it to gold in their verses: “el dorado Tajo,” the golden Tagus, is their common appellation for it. [↑]