The Car of Destiny
docile bodies writhed and bunched with the tremendous effort. Big as they
were, it seemed impossible that two oxen could do for the car, with
passengers and luggage, what its own engine refused to do; nevertheless
the huge thing moved, at first with a shuddering jerk, then with a steady,
if lumbering crawl.
“O-lah!” shouted the boy; “thump” on the thick hide over the straining
muscles fell the goad, and thus the car lurched through the deep snow, all
of us following except Ropes, who having poured melted snow into the
radiator, and let the cooling stream flow through the waterpipes, was
bringing on the Gloria slowly, by her own power. She had now but two
passengers, and not half as much luggage as the Lecomte, which perhaps
explained her prowess; nevertheless I was proud. “Brava, Gloria!” I should
have liked to shout.
I could now have pushed ahead, and keeping pace with Carmona’s car, as the
oxen struggled nobly up the pass, have tried for a word or two with
Monica. But perhaps Lady Vale-Avon expected such a move on the part of the
troublesome young officer; and by way of precaution she had crowded near
to the girl in the tonneau. A conversation worth having would have been
hopeless thus spied upon, and I disappointed the chaperon by making no
such attempt.
To my surprise, Carmona walked with us, instead of forging on beside his
own car. His friendliness puzzled me. Each look directed at my face was
sharp as a gimlet, though his words were genial; but the final shock came
when he announced that he was bound for the Escurial, and asked if we
would like to join his party.
“I know the palace like a book—better than I know most books,” said he;
“and if you’ve never been, I can get you into places not usually shown.”
The Cherub thanked Heaven that he had never been; and far would it be from
him to go to-day or any other day. He had beheld the Escurial from
outside, and had been depressed to the verge of tears. Often since he had
consoled himself for various misfortunes by reflecting that, at worst, he
was not enduring them at the Escurial. But he would sit in the automobile
and compose himself to doze while his dear children and friends were
martyred in the Monastery.
“You’re very good to personally conduct us,” Dick answered the Duke, “but
we’ve no time for the Escurial.”
“It will be worth while to make time,” I hurried to break in, though Dick
glared a warning which said, “You silly ass, don’t you see the man’s
laying a trap, and you’re falling into it?”
I was ready to risk that trap, and realizing that I meant to see the thing
through, Dick urged no further objections.
XVI
A SECRET OF THE KING’S
Pilar said that the oxen were idiotic dears to break their hearts for
nothing, not even a percentage on the twenty pesetas. But four-footed
beasts are tragically conscientious, and these farmyard martyrs
accomplished their task without a groan, while the Gloria crept up close
behind on her own power.
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