Patrañas. Busk Rachel Harriette
by mad genii, and executed by frantic fairies. It might be the laboratory where tints are prepared for rainbows and tropical sunsets, or where the painting of peacocks and butterflies, humming-birds, and exotic flowers is devised. Or it might be the jewel-storehouse of some thrice-rich monarch, to whom emeralds and rubies are plentiful as figs and peaches, and all in cabinets of wrought gold.
Amid all this splendour there is one sad, dark spot, which has outlived the wear of five centuries, to stand a witness of the judgment of Heaven overtaking the tyrant and the oppressor. Pedro the Cruel was the only Christian monarch who ever indulged himself with such a nest; and I fear the life he led within it was not what that of a Christian monarch ought to be. Not to speak of his other faults, his thirst for blood was so great as to be surpassed only by the atrocities ascribed to Nero. Whoever displeased him in any way was summarily put to death, and that sometimes amid cruel tortures, without form of trial.
An old ballad has lately been found, which arranges in rhyming order the whole catalogue of names and qualities of the distinguished people whose lives were forfeited by his hand, or at his behest, which served the people to perpetuate their detestation of his character. There was Don Garcilaso, and his little brothers Don Juan and Don Diego; the Infante of Aragon, his cousin; Don Fernando, a knight of high renown; the noble youth Don Luis de Albuquerque; and Peralvarez Osorio, who had injured him in nothing. Then the Queen of Aragon, to whom his father was brother; and Doña Blanca, his own wife; Doña Juana and Doña Isabel, high ladies both, of the Asturias; and Gutierrez of Toledo, and the Archbishop his brother; Don Iñigo d’Orozco, who fought him in the field; and Don Suero, the good prelate, Archbishop of Santiago, and also Bermejo de Granada. And besides these many more, both hidalgos and caballeros.
Thus at last his wickedness outgrew the people’s patience; and when the good Henry of Trastamare rose up against him, and provoked him to fight, and slew him, they all hailed the act as the execution of the sentence of Divine Justice, and acclaimed Henry as their deliverer and their ruler in his stead; for Alonso, the son of his unblessed union with Maria Padilla, whom he had forced the people to acknowledge for his successor, had been carried off by sudden death soon after; and though the daughter of his lawful marriage had married our own John of Gaunt, all his reputation, and that of the Black Prince his father, could not outweigh their disinclination for a foreign king.
With regard to the mode of Pedro the Cruel’s death, the more credited account is that his end was an episode of the siege of Montiel, where he had sought to hide himself from the victorious pursuit of Henry de Trastamare. Local tradition loves to think it found him out with poetical justice, and left its stain in the very hall which had been the scene of his wanton excesses; where others had fallen at his command, and whence the decree had gone forth for the relentless execution of his victims.
THE ADVENTURES OF DOÑA JOSEFA RAMIREZ Y MARMOLEJO
Doña Josefa Ramirez was the only child of noble parents of Valencia. She grew up in every virtue, and joined the wisdom of a Minerva to the beauty of a Venus. She was hardly eighteen before various noble youths were contending for her good graces; but of them all the only one she favoured was Don Pedro de Valenzuela, who, though of noble lineage, yet did not possess the fortune or position that her parents thought should entitle him who wedded with the descendant of the illustrious houses of Ramirez and Marmolejo.
Little Doña Josefa did not think of all this; she was much attached to her boyish playmate, and hoped that as her parents were very fond of her she would one day win their consent to receive his attentions; in the mean time, she thoughtlessly listened with great delight when he came and sang a love song under her windows, and even, I am afraid, sometimes came to the reja10 to give him a coy look of thanks and encouragement.
One day, as the youthful Don Pedro de Valenzuela was thus pleasantly occupied, he had finished his song and was waiting to see if a pair of bright eyes would not come sparkling behind the reja, when, his thoughts being quite engrossed by this expectation, and his attention abstracted from every thing around him, he suddenly found himself attacked from behind by two men who were wrapt up in their cloaks and masked so that he could not recognize them, nor indeed had he time to think about it, for before he could even draw his sword they had stretched him dead upon the ground; he could only cry out Josefa’s name, and expire.
Doña Josefa was thrilled with dread at the tone in which her name was uttered; it seemed to portend something dreadful, such as she had never known before. She flew to the window, and by what remained of the gloaming light, she saw her lover’s body stretched lifeless on the ground, while the assassins had escaped without leaving a trace behind.
The terrible sight seemed to change Doña Josefa’s nature: all her woman’s weakness was quenched within her, and every thought bound up in the one determination of avenging the precious life which had been so cruelly sacrificed for love of her. She tore off her woman’s gear with the indignation of an enraged lioness, and arrayed herself in a full cavalier’s suit, with a montera11 to cover her head and an ample cloak to hide her from scrutiny. Then she took a belt well furnished with arms, and a sword and blunderbuss to boot; and then a purse with two hundred doubloons; thus accoutred she wandered forth in quest of Don Pedro de Valenzuela’s assassins, making her way in all haste out of Valencia, for she knew the assassins would not long have remained there.
Hiding herself in the mountains by day, and taking the most unfrequented paths by night, she wandered on till she came to Murcia, and there she resolved to take up her abode for some little time to rest, and also to learn what she might chance to hear.
Here, in her cavalier’s dress, she walked about on the promenades, joined knots of speakers in the public plazas, and at night sat down at the card-tables and other places of resort, every where keeping her ears open to drink in any word any one might let fall about her lover’s assassination. One night, as she was sitting at a table carelessly shuffling a pack of cards, she heard two gentlemen talking very earnestly, and some words they dropped made her strain all her attention to catch the thread of their discourse.
“Yes, they are gone on; I am sure of it; and some hours ago,” asseverated the first speaker, as if he had been contradicted before.
“To be sure,” rejoined the other, in a tone of yielding conviction; “it was not likely they should remain in the country. No doubt it is as you say.”
“Excuse me,” said Doña Josefa, approaching the speakers with a courtly bow, for she could restrain her curiosity no longer, “but I think you were speaking of some gentlemen of Seville… I am of Seville, and – ”
“Of Valencia,” politely rejoined the gentleman, fairly caught in the trap. Had Josefa said she was of Valencia, his mouth would have been sealed for fear of betraying secrets.
“Oh, indeed, of Valencia!” she continued, assuming a tone of disappointment; and then, after a moment’s pause, she added, as if indifferent, “I think you spoke as if concerned for some friends in trouble?”
“Oh, not friends,” answered the person addressed, with a slight shudder; “we had but the most distant acquaintance with them; but they called on us yesterday to ask us to help them out of a difficulty.”
“Ah! that is very often the way of the world,” replied Doña Josefa, for she felt she must keep the conversation going till she could get all the information she wanted, though scarcely seeing how to bring it to the right point without exciting suspicions. “I’ll warrant now it was a regular piece of Valencian roguery12; they came with some pitiful pretence, begging, I’ll be bound; and I dare say at this moment are laughing at the ease with which their doleful story loosed your purse-strings; ha, ha, ha!”
The silvery laugh and biting tone of the young cavalier stung the Murcians to the quick; it seemed a point of honour to justify themselves from the censure of having been cajoled. The friend who had all this time remained silent, not quite liking the freedom, but now completely reassured by the noble bearing, fair smooth brow, and perhaps also by the sad but winning glance of the young stranger, here joined in.
“You have a fine knowledge
Ornamented iron-work in front of the lower windows of Spanish houses.
A warm hunting-cap, with flaps to cover the forehead and ears, capable therefore of serving, in some sort, as a disguise.
The Sevillians to the present day give a very bad character to the Valencians.