Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the
hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the
state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street
had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning.
But I am sure those ladies could have been of noble descent only in
the farthest possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were even
remotely related to the haughty ox-team which blocked the way in front
of the palaces and obliged xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted
round the cart. Our driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver of
the ox-team preserved a calm as perfect as if he had been an hidalgo
interested by the incident before his gate. It delayed us till the
psychological moment when the funeral of the dean was over, and we could
join the formidable party following the sacristan from chapel to chapel
in the cathedral.
We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in
the Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed
by the indecision of certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the
postal cards for sale there. By this time we had suffered much from the
wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or
a silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the
beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of
the Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his
shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic
simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in
payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us.
Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value
received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew
of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted
wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with
its open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated
chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the
procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not
going to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of
its details. No literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or
architecture or sculpture to me: the despised postal card is better for
that; and probably throughout these “trivial fond records” I shall be
found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or
unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the
impossibility of remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the
reader’s own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the
cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of
the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation,
which I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those
picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging
to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into
the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because
I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the
cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a
moment in glad relief.