ADIEU to the tranquillity of Cintra, we shall soon have nothing but hubbub and confusion. The queen is on the point of arriving with all her maids of honour, secretaries of state, dwarfs, negresses and horses, white, black, and pie-bald. Half the quintas around will be dried up, military possession having been taken of the aqueducts, and their waters diverted into new channels for the use of an encampment.
I was walking in a long arched bower of citron-trees, when M—— appeared at the end of the avenue, accompanied by the duke d’Alafoins. This is the identical personage well-known in every part of Europe by the appellation of Duke of Braganza. He has no right however, to wear that illustrious title, which is merged in the crown. Were he called Duchess Dowager, of anything you please, I think nobody would dispute the propriety of his style, he being so like an old lady of the bed-chamber, so fiddle-faddle and so coquettish. He had put on rouge and patches, and though he has seen seventy winters, contrived to turn on his heel and glide about with juvenile agility.
I was much surprised at the ease of his motions, having been told that he was a martyr to the gout. After lisping French with a most refined accent, complaining of the sun, and the roads, and the state of architecture, he departed, (thank heaven!) to mark out a spot for the encampment of the cavalry, which are to guard the queen’s sacred person during her residence in these mountains. M—— was in duty bound to accompany him; but left his son and his nephews, the heirs of the House of Tancos, to dine with me.
In the evening, Verdeil, tired with sauntering about the verandas, proposed a ride to a neighbouring village, where there was a fair. He and Don Pedro mounted their horses, and preceded the young Tancos and me in a garden-chair, drawn by a most resolute mule. The roads are abominable, and lay partly along the sloping base of the Cintra mountains, which in the spring, no doubt, are clothed with a tolerable verdure, but at this season every blade of grass is parched and withered. Our carriage-wheels, as we drove sideling along these slippery declivities, pressed forth the odour of innumerable aromatic herbs, half pulverized. Thicknesse perhaps would have said, in his original quaint style, that nature was treating us with a pinch of her best cephalic. No snuff, indeed, ever threw me into a more violent fit of sneezing.
I could hardly keep up my head when we arrived at the fair, which is held on a pleasant lawn, bounded on one side by the picturesque buildings of a convent of Hieronimites, and on the other by rocky hills, shattered into a variety of uncouth romantic forms; one cliff in particular, called the Pedra d’os Ovos, terminated by a cross, crowns the assemblage, and exhibits a very grotesque appearance. Behind the convent a thick shrubbery of olives, ilex, and citron, fills up a small valley refreshed by fountains, whose clear waters are conducted through several cloisters and gardens, surrounded by low marble columns, supporting fretted arches in the morisco style.
The peasants assembled at the fair were scattered over the lawn; some conversing with the monks, others half intoxicated, sliding off their donkeys and sprawling upon the ground; others bargaining for silk-nets and spangled rings, to bestow on their mistresses. The monks, who were busily employed in administering all sorts of consolations, spiritual and temporal, according to their respective ages and vocations, happily paid us no kind of attention, so we escaped being stuffed with sweetmeats, and worried with compliments.
At sunset we returned to Ramalhaô, and drank tea in its lantern-like saloon, in which are no less than eleven glazed doors and windows of large dimensions. The winds were still; the air balsamic; and the sky of so soft an azure that we could not remain with patience under any other canopy, but stept once more into our curricles and drove as far as the Dutch consul’s new building, by the mingled light of innumerable stars.
It was after ten when we got back to the Marialva villa, and long before we reached it, we heard the plaintive tones of voices and wind instruments issuing from the thickets. On the margin of the principal basin sat the marchioness and Donna Henriquetta, and a numerous group of their female attendants, many of them most graceful figures, and listening with all their hearts and souls to the rehearsal of some very delightful music with which her majesty is to be serenaded a few evenings hence.
It was one of those serene and genial nights when music acquires a double charm, and opens the heart to tender, though melancholy impressions. Not a leaf rustled, not a breath of wind disturbed the clear flame of the lights which had been placed near the fountains, and which just served to make them visible. The waters, flowing in rills round the roots of the lemon-trees, formed a rippling murmur; and in the pauses of the concert, no other sound except some very faint whisperings was to be distinguished, so that the enchantment of climate, music, and mystery, all contributed to throw my mind into a sort of trance from which I was not roused again without a degree of painful reluctance.