Part 30

I thanked the patron saint of cow creation when the straining brutes got to the top. The summit of the pass was crowned by a lion on a granite pedestal; a lion with a cold air of pride in his mission of marking the limit between Old Castile and New. For me also he marked something for which I owed him gratitude; my deeper advance into the heart of my own land.

Close to our resting-place at the top of the pass there was a rude hut, and one or two wagons which had strained up from the other side were halting their smoking teams. Here, seated in the car again, as we waited to see the oxen unyoked and the boy paid, a girl came out from the little house with a large volume, in which she asked us to sign our names. The Cherub scrawled something; and as Dick was scribbling, Carmona strolled across, to see whether or no I entrusted my name to the book. I had meant not to do so, but now I would have changed my mind had not Colonel O’Donnel stopped me. “I wrote your name, Cristóbal,” said he, in his ambrosial voice; and the situation was saved. Carmona made some commonplace remark to account for his approach, and walked away with a self-conscious back, as Pilar’s glance and Monica’s crossed the distance between the two automobiles and met mischievously.

The grey car took the lead again, and at a turn of the road it seemed that the whole world lay at our feet; yet it was not even all of Old Castile, so vast a country is my Spain.

Far as the eye could travel spread the fair land, green with the tender green of spring, yellow with patches of golden sand, darkly tufted with woods; struck with flying shafts of light, ringed in with ethereal blue.

Nothing could steal from me this illuminated missal of memories, and were I to be banished to-morrow, I should have Spain to keep in my heart, I said, as we rushed down the steep, winding way that serpentined along the southern slope of the Guadarrama. A breakneck road it was, but nobly engineered, twisting back upon itself in many coils, letting us fly with the speed of a bird to lower levels; and it seemed that scarcely had we sunk over the brink of the mountain than we were at the turn on the right which would lead to the Escurial.

Straight before us, rising out of the bare mountain side and seeming a part of it, towered and stretched a building vaster than any I had seen even in the limitless spaces of dreamland. Were it not for its cold regularity, I should have thought myself approaching another desert of giants who made toys of monoliths and obelisks; but these appalling domes and towers could be the work of man alone. There was no toying here; all was forbidding and gloomy; for this was the Escurial—immense, sinister, as if fashioned from the grim product of those iron mines which gave its name.

I could imagine the fanatical satisfaction Philip’s dry mind had found in planning this monument to represent the gridiron on which Saint Lawrence was martyred. He who was to stand in history as the great Inquisitor, must build his monastery and palace in honour of a martyr! But Philip was the last man to have a sense of humour; and it was like him to appease an injured saint by giving him a church a thousand times bigger than the one destroyed on Saint Lawrence’s own day, in the battle of San Quentin.

“Wouldn’t the Escurial be hideous if it were anywhere else but just here?” asked Pilar.

She was right; for on the Sierra it seemed an expression of the Sierra; and in spite of Philip rather than because of him, it was splendid in the melancholy strength which made it a brother of mountains.

We lunched on extremely Spanish food at a fonda opposite the Escurial; and when the time came for sightseeing—a time for us, but not for the public—the Duke began by marshalling us all, except the weary Duchess and the lazy Cherub, through the great door guarded by Saint Lawrence. Once within, we saw the treasures, as a bird in flight sees the beauties of a town over which he swoops; but we did see them, and once I had three words and one look from Monica, before it occurred to Lady Vale-Avon to link an arm in her daughter’s, in a sudden overflow of maternal affection.

Carmona had made a point of the “influence” which could open for us doors that, for others, would remain shut; and he did smuggle us into the Library of Manuscripts, the Queen’s Oratory, and the Capilla Mayor to see the royal tombs. But after we had stopped longer than he wished in the church, and the Choir, where Philip learned that Lepanto had saved Europe from the Turks, and listened to the sad music of Mary Stuart’s requiem, the Duke promised something still better, in the palace. “What you shall see there,” he said, “is a secret. It was a secret of King Philip’s—so great a secret that even the writers of guide-books know nothing of it; while, if a tourist should have heard a rumour and asked a question, the attendants would say, ‘There’s no such thing in existence.’ Only the Royal Family know, a few privileged people about the Court, and the guardians of the Escurial. As for me, I was told by someone here—someone whom I myself placed in the palace.”

My curiosity was excited; and even Dick, who resented this expedition, looked interested as we arrived at the palace—the great gridiron’s handle. At the entrance Carmona separated himself from the rest of the party, saying that he must have a few words in private with the attendant who would show the rooms of Philip the Second. He walked ahead, engaged the brown-liveried guide in low-voiced conversation, and seemed to ask a question with some eagerness.

Observing the pantomime from a distance, I fancied that, for some reason, Carmona was to be denied the privilege of which he had boasted; but, apparently, he did not intend to accept defeat without a struggle. He and the guide moved on, then stopped again to argue—this time with their backs to us; but, from the action of Carmona’s elbows, I judged that he put his hand into his pocket. Five or six minutes later he returned, to announce that after some difficulty he had succeeded in getting his own way. We might go, unattended, into the private apartments of Philip the Second; and while we were there, other visitors would be kept out. “If there are any, they’ll be taken another round,” said Carmona, “and won’t be ready to come into the King’s rooms until we’re ready to come out.”

The guide led us down the narrow staircase to the outer door of Philip’s suite, then slipped away, shutting the door behind him. Lady Vale-Avon and Monica (the mother still clasping her daughter’s arm), Pilar, Dick, Carmona, and I were now alone between the gloomy walls behind which the bigot and despot had lived his miserable life and died his miserable death.

There was a chill in the sombre place which froze the spirit; yet I, for one, did not feel sad. I was conscious only of an excited expectancy, as if I were waiting for something to happen.

We let our imagination set the meagre form of Philip in his chair, or by the desk at which he used to write; examined the grim relics of his monk-like existence; and finally moved to the death-chamber, set like a stage-box at the theatre, beside the high altar of the chapel.

So small was the room that it was filled by our little party of six; yet I felt there another presence which none of us could see—a grey ghost agonising for his sins, through a bleak eternity.

Monica felt it too, for she shivered, and exclaimed, “Let us go. This room seems haunted with evil. I can’t breathe in it.”

“But now for the secret,” said Carmona. “Would you guess at any hidden opening in these walls?”

We stared critically about, and I began to test the wainscot, but the Duke stopped me. “You’d never find the place,” he said; “and I promised the person who told me not to give away the secret; but that doesn’t prevent me from showing you what’s behind the door.”

He moved close to the wall, stood for an instant, then stepped back, as we heard a slight clicking sound, like the snap of a spring on an old box-lid. At the same time a part of the wainscoting rolled away, leaving a narrow aperture.

It was dark on the other side, but Carmona took a gold match-box from his pocket and struck a bunch of little wax fosforos.

“Philip had this cell made for a place of penance and self-torture,” he said, “and it’s just as it used to be during his lifetime, before he was too ill to go in any more. His twisted wire scourge is there, with his blood on it, his horsehair shirt, and a girdle bristling with small, sharp spikes. Will you have a look, Lady Vale-Avon? I can’t go with you, for the cell isn’t big enough for two, but I’ll hold the matches at the door.”

Lady Vale-Avon is of the type of woman who enjoys seeing such things as these; and though she would not have tortured herself had she lived in feudal days, I am sure she would have dined calmly over an underground dungeon where an enemy—an inconvenient wretch like me, for instance—suffered the pangs of starvation.

She squeezed into the cell, descending a couple of steps, remained for two or three minutes, and came out, pronouncing it extremely interesting.

“Now, Lady Monica, it’s your turn,” said Carmona; but Monica drew back, “I hate seeing torture-things,” said she, “and blood, even wicked old blood like Philip’s, which I used to think, when I read about him in history, I’d love to shed. No, I won’t go in, thank you.”

Pilar also refused, for if she went she would certainly have a nightmare and dream she was walled up; thus there remained only the three men to inspect the hidden horrors.

Carmona held his match-box to me, saying that when we had seen the place he would look in to refresh his recollections. But Dick calmly helped himself to several fosforos and took first turn, probably suspecting something in the way of an oubliette, especially prepared for me.