THE ROYAL ADVENTURE
There are halting-places in the lives of most men when for a period the
individual desire must give place to some great national need. We each
live our little story through, but at times we find ourselves dragged
from the narrow way into the great high road, where the history of the
world blunders to an end which cannot even yet be dimly discerned.
When Marcos rode into Saragossa after nightfall he found the streets
filled by groups of anxious men. The nerves of civilisation were at a
great tension at this time. Sedan was past. Paris was already besieged.
All the French-speaking people thought that the end of the world must
needs be at hand. The Pope had been deprived of his temporal power. The
great foundations of the world seemed to tremble beneath the onward tread
of inexorable history.
In Spain itself, no man knew what might happen next. There seemed no
depth to which the land of ancient glory might not be doomed to descend.
Cuba was in wild revolt. Thousands of lives had been uselessly thrown
away. Already the pride of the proudest nation since Rome, had been
humbled by the just interference of the United States. A kingdom without
a king, Spain had hawked her crown round Europe. For a throne, as for
humbler posts, it is easy enough to find second-rate men who have no
special groove, nor any capacity to delve one, but the first-rate men
are, one discovers, nearly always occupied elsewhere. They are never
waiting for something to turn up.
Spain, with her three crowns in her hand, had called at every Court in
Europe. She had thrown two nations into the greatest war of civilised
ages. She was still looking for a king, still calling hopelessly to the
second-rate royalties. Leopold of Hohenzollern would have accepted had
not France arisen to object, only to receive a sound thrashing for her
pains. Thus, for the second time in the world's history, Spain was the
means of bringing a French empire to the dust.
Ferdinand of Portugal, a cousin to the Queen of England, himself a
Coburg, finally declined the honour. And Spain could not wait. There was
a certain picturesqueness in Prim, the usual ornamental General through
whose hands Spain has passed and repassed during the last century. He was
a hard man, and the men of Spain, unlike the French, understand a
martinet. But Spain could not wait. She must have a king; for the regency
was wearisome. It was weary of itself, like an old man ready to die.
There was no money in the public coffers. The Cortes was a house of
words. Here eloquence reigned supreme; and eloquence never yet made an
empire.
Half a dozen different parties made speeches at each other, but Spain,
owing to a blessed immunity from the cheap newspaper, was spared these
speeches. She was told that Castelar was the eloquent orator of the age.
She looked at Castelar, who was a fat little man with a big moustache and
a small forehead, and she said: "Let us have a king!"
Prim was better. He was a man at all events, and not a word-spinner. He
was from Cataluña, where they make hard men with clear heads. And he knew
his own mind. And he also said: "Let us have a king."
One cried for Don Carlos, and another for Espartero. Cataluña said there
was no living with Andalusia. Aragon wanted her own king and wished
Valencia would go hang. Navarre was all for Don Carlos.
And when Marcos de Sarrion rode into Saragossa they were calling in the
streets that only a republic was possible now.
He went home to that grim palace between the Cathedral and the Ebro and
found his father gone. A brief note told him that Sarrion had gone to
Madrid where a meeting of notables had been hastily summoned--and that
he, Marcos, must hurry back to Torre Garda--that the Carlists were up for
their king.
Marcos returned the same night to Pampeluna, and the next day rode to
Torre Garda by the high road that winds up the valley of the Wolf. In his
own small kingdom be soon made his iron hand felt. And these people who
would pay no taxes to king or regent remained quiet amid the anarchy that
reigned all over Spain.
Thus a week passed and rumours of strange doings at Madrid reached the
quiet valley. All over the country, bands of malcontents calling
themselves Carlists had risen in obedience to the voice of Don Carlos'
grandson, the son of that Don Juan who had renounced a hopeless cause. To
meet a soldier with his cap worn right side foremost was for the time
unusual in the cities of the north. For the army no longer knew a master;
and the Spanish soldier has a naïve and simple way of notifying this
condition by wearing the peak of his cap behind.
Marcos heard nothing of his father at Madrid, but surmised that there the
talkers still held sway. The postal service of Spain is still almost
mediæval. In the principal cities the post-offices are to-day only
opened for business during two hours of the twenty-four. In the year of
the Franco-Prussian war there was no postal service at all to the
disaffected parts of the northern provinces.
At the end of a week, Marcos rose at three o'clock and rode sixty miles
before sunset to keep his word with Juanita. He did not trust the
railway, which indeed was in constant danger of being cut by Carlist or
Royalist, but performed the distance by road where he met many friends
from Navarre and one or two from the valley of the Wolf. A thousand
reports, a hundred rumours and lies innumerable, were on the roads also,
traveling hither and thither over Spain. And Marshall Prim seemed to be
the favoured god of the moment.
Marcos was at his post outside the convent school wall at seven o'clock.
He heard the clock of San Fernando strike eight. In these Southern
latitudes the evenings are not much longer in summer than in winter. It
was quite dark by eight o'clock when Marcos rode away. He was not given
to a display of emotion. He was an eminently practical man. Juanita would
have come if she could, he reflected. Why could she not keep her
appointment?
He rode to the main gate and asked if he could see Sor Teresa--known in
the world as Dolores Sarrion--for the monastic life was forbidden by law
at this time in Spain, and this was no nunnery; though, as in all such
places, certain mediaeval follies were carefully fostered.
"Sor Teresa is not here," was the reply through the grating.
"Then where is she?"
But there was no reply to this plain question.
"Has she gone to Pampeluna?"
The little shutter behind the grating was softly closed. And Marcos
turned his horse's head with a quiet smile. His face, beneath the shadow
of his wide hat, was still and hard. He had ridden sixty miles since
morning, but he sat upright in his saddle. This was a man, as Juanita had
observed, not to say things, but to do them.
It was not difficult for him to find out during the next few weeks that
Juanita had been sent to Pampeluna, whither also Sor Teresa had been
commanded to go. Saragossa has a playful way of sacking religious houses,
which the older-world city of Navarre would never permit. In Pampeluna
the religious habit is still respected, and a friar may carry his shaven
head high in the windy streets.
Pampeluna, it was known, might at any moment be in danger of attack, but
not of bombardment by the Carlists, who had many friends within the
walls. Juanita was as safe perhaps in Pampeluna as anywhere in Northern
Spain. So Marcos went back to Torre Garda and held his valley in a quiet
grip. The harvests were gathered in, and starvation during the coming
winter was, at all events, avoided.
The first snow came and still Marcos had no news of Juanita. He knew,
however, that both she and Sor Teresa were still at Pampeluna in the
great yellow house in the Calle de la Dormitaleria, nearly opposite the
Cathedral gate, from whence there is constant noiseless traffic of
sisters and novices hurrying across, with lowered eyes, to the sanctuary,
or back to their duties, with the hush of prayer still upon them.
In November Marcos received a letter from his father, sent by hand all
the way from the capital. Prim had re-established order, he wrote. There
was hope of a settlement of political differences. A king had been found,
and if he accepted the crown all might yet go well with Spain.
A week later came the news that Amedeo of Savoy, the younger son of that
brave old Victor Emmanuel, who faced the curse of a pope, had been
declared King of Spain.
Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Aosta, was not a second-rate man. He was brave,
honest, and a gentleman--qualities to which the throne of Spain had been
stranger while the Bourbons sat there.
Sarrion summoned Marcos to Madrid to meet the new king. The wise men of
all parties knew that this was the best solution of the hopeless
difficulties into which Spain had been thrust by the Bourbons and the
tonguesters. A few honest politicians here and there set aside their own
interests in the interest of the country, which action is worth
recording--for its rarity. But the country in general was gloomy and
indifferent. Spain is slow to learn, while France is too quick; and her
knowledge is always superficial.
"Give us at all events a Spaniard," muttered those who had cried "Down
with liberty," when that arch-scoundrel, Fernando the Desired, returned
to his own.
"Give us money and we will give you Don Carlos," returned the cassocked
canvassers of that monarch in a whisper.
It was evening when Marcos arrived at Madrid, and the station, like all
the trains, was crowded. All who could were traveling to Madrid to meet
the king--for one reason or another.
Marcos was surprised to see his father on the platform among those
waiting for the train from the capitals of the North.
"Come," said Sarrion, "let us go out by the side door; I have the
carriage there, the streets are impassable. No one knows where to turn.
There is no head in Spain now; they assassinated him last night."
"Whom?" asked Marcos.
"Prim. They shot him in his carriage, like a dog in a kennel--five of
them--with guns. One has no pride in being a Spaniard now."
Marcos followed his father through the crowd without replying.
There seemed nothing, indeed, to be said; nothing to be added to the
simple observation that it was a humiliation for a man to have to admit
in these days that he was a Spaniard.
"He was a Catalonian to the last," said Sarrion, when they were seated in
their carnage. "He walked dying up his own stairs, so that his wife might
be spared the sight of seeing him carried in. Stubborn and brave! One of
the best men we have seen."
"And the king?"
"The king lands at Carthagena to-day--lands with his life in his hand. He
carries it in his hand wherever he goes, day and night, in Spain, he and
his wife. Without Prim he cannot hope to stand. But he will try. We must
do what we can."
The carriage was making its careful way across the Puerta del Sol, which
had been cleared by grape-shot more than once in Sarrion's recollection.
It looked now as if only artillery could set order there.
"Viva el Rey! viva Don Carlos!" a loafer shouted, and waved his hat in
Sarrion's grim and smiling face.
"I do not understand," he said to Marcos, as they passed on, "why the
good God gives the Bourbons so many chances."
"I cannot understand why the Bourbons never take them," answered Marcos.
For he was not a pushing man, but one of those patient waiters on
opportunity who appear at length quietly at the top, and look down with
thoughtful eyes at those who struggle below. The sweat and strife of some
careers must tarnish the brightest lustre.
Father and son drove together to the apartment in a street high above the
town, near the church of San José where the Sarrions lived when in
Madrid, and there Sarrion gave Marcos further details of that strange
adventure which Amedeo of Spain was about to begin.
In return Marcos vouchsafed a brief account of affairs in the valley of
the Wolf. He never had much to say and even in these stirring times told
of a fine harvest; of that brilliant weather which marked the year of the
Napoleonic downfall.
"And Juanita?" inquired Sarrion at length.
"Is at Pampeluna. They cannot get her away from there without my knowing
it. She is well ... and happy."
"You have not written to her?"
"No," answered Marcos.
"We must remember," said Sarrion, with a nod of approval, "that we are
dealing with the cleverest men in the world, and the greediest----"
"And the hardest pressed," added Marcos.
"But you have not written to her?"
"No."
"Nor heard from her?"
"I had a note from her at Saragossa, before they moved her to Pampeluna,"
answered Marcos with a smile. "It was rather badly spelt."
"And...?" asked Sarrion.
Marcos did not reply to this comprehensive interrogation.
"You have come to some decision?" Sarrion suggested.
"I have come to the usual decision that you are quite right in your
suspicions. They want that money, and they intend to get it by forcing
her into religion and inducing her to sign the usual testament made by
nuns, conferring all their earthly goods upon the order into which they
are admitted."
Then Sarrion went back to his original question.
"And...?"
"As soon as we see signs of their being likely to succeed I propose to
see Juanita again."
"You can do it despite them?"
"Yes, I can do it."
"And...?"
"I shall explain the position to her--that her bad fortune has given her
choice of two evils."
"That is one way of putting it."
"It is the only honest way."
Sarrion shrugged his shoulders.
"My friend," he said, "I do not think that love and honesty are much in
sympathy."