In the Palace of the King | Page 2

Maria
Dolores de Mendoza knew all of fear for the man she loved, that any
woman could know, and much of the hope that is love's early life; but
she knew neither the grief, nor the disappointment, nor the shame for
another, nor for herself, nor any of the bitterness that love may bring.
She did not believe that such things could be wrung from hearts that

were true and faithful; and in that she was right. The man to whom she
had given her heart and soul and hope had given her his, and if she
feared for him, it was not lest he should forget her or his own honour.
He was a man among men, good and true; but he was a soldier, and a
leader, who daily threw his life to the battle, as Douglas threw the
casket that held the Bruce's heart into the thick of the fight, to win it
back, or die. The man she loved was Don John of Austria, the son of
the great dead Emperor Charles the Fifth, the uncle of dead Don Carlos
and the half brother of King Philip of Spain--the man who won glory
by land and sea, who won back Granada a second time from the Moors,
as bravely as his great grandfather Ferdinand had won it, but less
cruelly, who won Lepanto, his brother's hatred and a death by poison,
the foulest stain in Spanish history.
It was November now, and it had been June of the preceding year when
he had ridden away from Madrid to put down the Moriscoes, who had
risen savagely against the hard Spanish rule. He had left Dolores de
Mendoza an hour before he mounted, in the freshness of the early
summer morning, where they had met many a time, on a lonely terrace
above the King's apartments. There were roses there, growing almost
wild in great earthen jars, where some Moorish woman had planted
them in older days, and Dolores could go there unseen with her blind
sister, who helped her faithfully, on pretence of taking the poor girl
thither to breathe the sweet quiet air. For Inez was painfully sensitive of
her affliction, and suffered, besides blindness, all that an over-sensitive
and imaginative being can feel.
She was quite blind, with no memory of light, though she had been
born seeing, as other children. A scarlet fever had destroyed her sight.
Motherless from her birth, her father often absent in long campaigns,
she had been at the mercy of a heartless nurse, who had loved the fair
little Dolores and had secretly tormented the younger child, as soon as
she was able to understand, bringing her up to believe that she was so
repulsively ugly as to be almost a monster. Later, when the nurse was
gone, and Dolores was a little older, the latter had done all she could to
heal the cruel wound and to make her sister know that she had soft dark
hair, a sad and gentle face, with eyes that were quite closed, and a

delicate mouth that had a little half painful, half pathetic way of
twitching when anything hurt her,--for she was easily hurt. Very pale
always, she turned her face more upwards than do people who have
sight, and being of good average woman's height and very slender and
finely made, this gave her carriage an air of dignity that seemed almost
pride when she was offended or wounded. But the first hurt had been
deep and lasting, and she could never quite believe that she was not
offensive to the eyes of those who saw her, still less that she was
sometimes almost beautiful in a shadowy, spiritual way. The blind, of
all their sufferings, often feel most keenly the impossibility of knowing
whether the truth is told them about their own looks; and he who will
try and realize what it is to have been always sightless will understand
that this is not vanity, but rather a sort of diffidence towards which all
people should be very kind. Of all necessities of this world, of all
blessings, of all guides to truth, God made light first. There are many
sharp pains, many terrible sufferings and sorrows in life that come and
wrench body and soul, and pass at last either into alleviation or
recovery, or into the rest of death; but of those that abide a lifetime and
do not take life itself, the worst is hopeless darkness. We call ignorance
'blindness,' and rage 'blindness,' and we say a man is 'blind' with grief.
Inez sat opposite her sister, at the other end of the table, listening. She
knew what Dolores was doing, how during long months her sister had
written a letter, from time to time, in little