No one goes to Spain to see the future. Many go there to see the past, sticking out as it were through the present. And so with me—to make a sentimental journey and trail an idea geographically across the world. I should like to see Columbus again, see him in the midst of the courtiers and mocked by them, and see upon him the smile or frown of Ferdinand and Isabella. My eyes would like to feast on the cloth of gold of the grandees of Spain—go back four centuries and yet be in to-day, and see as it were in a vision the gold of Old Spain and the gold of the Indies, the beautiful bright gold that may be sacrificed but must never be worshiped.
So I am pleased to go to the Royal Palace at Madrid on Maundy Thursday and see the King and Queen and the Court in the gorgeous ceremony of the washing and the feeding of the poor. Once every year it is done; the Queen tends twelve poor women, the King tends twelve poor men. They are usually all blind. It has been done for centuries. Ferdinand and Isabella did it also, and Columbus must have watched them in his day, saying of those who mocked him—"They are the blind; wash them and feed them also."
As we stand in an interior court of the palace behind a row of halberdiers in quilted coats the chime of eleven o'clock seems to blend with Southern sunshine, and there breaks out from a hidden orchestra mysterious Eastern music heralding the approach of to-day's King and Queen. Searching, questing strains tell of mystery, of aching loneliness and hidden loveliness—the haunting introit of Milpager's "Jerusalem." Erect stand the stately halberdiers in their scarlet coats, holding at arm's length their bright halberds of Toledo steel. And along the corridors of the palace come carelessly and as it were at random, in twos and threes, talking together, the Duke of Alva, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Duke of San Fernando, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, the Marquis of Torrecilla, and other nobles, all dressed in gold-embroidered coats and wearing orders and insignia and medals. They are the grandees of to-day, and their faces peer out strangely from the midst of their grandeur—peering out, as it were, from their family trees, from time itself.
Come the King and the Queen, and the King is wearing the uniform of an infantry captain, for this King is democratic, but over his shoulders hangs the magnificent collar of the Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece. I wonder if the Emperor Charles Fifth, Cortes' Emperor, instituting this order of the Golden Fleece, thought first of his Spaniards as the Argonauts of the age, the youth of Spain aflame with a vision of gold. The golden collar hung in a long V on the King's back and seemed to have worked on it some noble history, reminding me there in the midst of the crush of the palace, of that perfect Spencerian verse,
Yt framèd was of precious ivory,
That seemed a work of admirable witt;
And therein all the famous history
Of Jason and Medea was ywritt;
Her mighty charms, her furious loving fitt;