A House of Pomegranates | Page 9

he was but fifteen years of age, and she still
younger. They had been formally betrothed on that occasion by the
Papal Nuncio in the presence of the French King and all the Court, and
he had returned to the Escurial bearing with him a little ringlet of
yellow hair, and the memory of two childish lips bending down to kiss
his hand as he stepped into his carriage. Later on had followed the
marriage, hastily performed at Burgos, a small town on the frontier
between the two countries, and the grand public entry into Madrid with
the customary celebration of high mass at the Church of La Atocha, and
a more than usually solemn auto-da-fe, in which nearly three hundred
heretics, amongst whom were many Englishmen, had been delivered
over to the secular arm to be burned.
Certainly he had loved her madly, and to the ruin, many thought, of his
country, then at war with England for the possession of the empire of
the New World. He had hardly ever permitted her to be out of his sight;
for her, he had forgotten, or seemed to have forgotten, all grave affairs
of State; and, with that terrible blindness that passion brings upon its
servants, he had failed to notice that the elaborate ceremonies by which
he sought to please her did but aggravate the strange malady from
which she suffered. When she died he was, for a time, like one bereft of
reason. Indeed, there is no doubt but that he would have formally
abdicated and retired to the great Trappist monastery at Granada, of
which he was already titular Prior, had he not been afraid to leave the

little Infanta at the mercy of his brother, whose cruelty, even in Spain,
was notorious, and who was suspected by many of having caused the
Queen's death by means of a pair of poisoned gloves that he had
presented to her on the occasion of her visiting his castle in Aragon.
Even after the expiration of the three years of public mourning that he
had ordained throughout his whole dominions by royal edict, he would
never suffer his ministers to speak about any new alliance, and when
the Emperor himself sent to him, and offered him the hand of the lovely
Archduchess of Bohemia, his niece, in marriage, he bade the
ambassadors tell their master that the King of Spain was already
wedded to Sorrow, and that though she was but a barren bride he loved
her better than Beauty; an answer that cost his crown the rich provinces
of the Netherlands, which soon after, at the Emperor's instigation,
revolted against him under the leadership of some fanatics of the
Reformed Church.
His whole married life, with its fierce, fiery-coloured joys and the
terrible agony of its sudden ending, seemed to come back to him to-day
as he watched the Infanta playing on the terrace. She had all the
Queen's pretty petulance of manner, the same wilful way of tossing her
head, the same proud curved beautiful mouth, the same wonderful
smile--vrai sourire de France indeed--as she glanced up now and then at
the window, or stretched out her little hand for the stately Spanish
gentlemen to kiss. But the shrill laughter of the children grated on his
ears, and the bright pitiless sunlight mocked his sorrow, and a dull
odour of strange spices, spices such as embalmers use, seemed to
taint--or was it fancy?--the clear morning air. He buried his face in his
hands, and when the Infanta looked up again the curtains had been
drawn, and the King had retired.
She made a little moue of disappointment, and shrugged her shoulders.
Surely he might have stayed with her on her birthday. What did the
stupid State-affairs matter? Or had he gone to that gloomy chapel,
where the candles were always burning, and where she was never
allowed to enter? How silly of him, when the sun was shining so
brightly, and everybody was so happy! Besides, he would miss the
sham bull-fight for which the trumpet was already sounding, to say
nothing of the puppet-show and the other wonderful things. Her uncle
and the Grand Inquisitor were much more sensible. They had come out

on the terrace, and paid her nice compliments. So she tossed her pretty
head, and taking Don Pedro by the hand, she walked slowly down the
steps towards a long pavilion of purple silk that had been erected at the
end of the garden, the other children following in strict order of
precedence, those who had the longest names going first.
A procession of noble boys, fantastically dressed as toreadors, came out
to meet her, and the young Count of Tierra-Nueva, a wonderfully
handsome lad of about fourteen years of age, uncovering his head with