Part 16 (1/2)
”It may not be,” replied the stern old King. ”She dies, I say, and that to-night. When the escutcheon of a king is stained, it matters not whether the blood that washes the blot away be guilty or innocent. Away, and do my behest, or your life shall pay the forfeit.”
Terrified at the thought of a traitor's death, for such an end was more dreaded than any other by the haughty Castilian n.o.bles, Alarcos agreed to abide by the King's decision, and rode homeward in an agony of remorse and despair. The thought that he must be the executioner of the wife whom he dearly loved, the mother of his three beautiful children, drove him to madness, and when at last he met her at the gate of his castle, accompanied by her infants, and displaying every sign of joy at his return, he shrank from her caresses, and could only mutter that he had bad news, which he would divulge to her in her bower.
Taking her youngest babe, she led him to her apartment, where supper was laid. But the Count Alarcos neither ate nor drank, but laid his head upon the board and wept bitterly out of a breaking heart. Then, recalling his dreadful purpose, he barred the doors, and, standing with folded arms before his lady, confessed his sin.
”Long since I loved a lady,” he said. ”I plighted my troth to her, and vowed to love her like a husband. Her father is the King. She claims me for her own, and he demands that I make good the promise. Furthermore, alas that I should say it! the King has spoken your death, and has decreed that you die this very night.”
”What!” cried the Countess, amazed. ”Are these then the wages of my loyal love for you, Alarcos? Wherefore must I die? Oh, send me back to my father's house, where I can live in peace and forgetfulness, and rear my children as those of thy blood should be reared.”
”It may not be,” answered the wretched Count. ”I have pledged mine oath.”
”Friendless am I in the land,” cried the miserable lady. ”But at least let me kiss my children ere I die.”
”Thou mayst kiss the babe upon thy breast,” groaned Alarcos. ”The others thou mayst not see again. Prepare thee.”
The doomed Countess kissed her babe, muttered an Ave, and, rising from her knees, begged her merciless lord to be kind to their children. She pardoned her husband, but laid upon the King and his daughter the awful curse known to the people of the Middle Ages as ”the a.s.size of the Dying,” so often taken advantage of by those who were falsely accused and condemned to die, and by virtue of which the victim summoned his murderers to meet him before the throne of G.o.d ere thirty days were past and answer for their crime to their Creator.
The Count strangled his wife with a silken kerchief, and when the horrid deed had been done, and she lay cold and dead, he summoned his esquires, and gave himself up to a pa.s.sion of woe.
Within twelve days the revengeful Infanta perished in agony. The merciless King died on the twentieth day, and ere the moon had completed her round Alarcos too drooped and died. Cruel and inevitable as Greek tragedy is the tale of Alarcos. But while perusing it and under the spell of its tragic pathos we can scarcely regard it as of the nature of legend, and we know not whom to abhor the most--the revengeful Princess, the cruel King, or the coward husband who sacrificed his innocent and devoted wife to the shadow of that aristocratic 'honour' which has to its discredit almost as great a holocaust of victims as either superst.i.tion or fanaticism.
CHAPTER IX: THE ROMANCEROS OR BALLADS
Iliads without a Homer.
Lope de Vega
The word romancero in modern Spanish is more or less strictly applied to a special form of verse composition, a narrative poem written in lines of sixteen syllables which adhere to one single a.s.sonance throughout. Originally the term was applied to those dialects or languages which were the offspring of the Roman or Latin tongue--the spoken language of old Rome in its modernized forms. Later it came to imply only the written forms of those vernaculars, and lastly the poetic lyrico-narrative form alone, as above indicated. The romancero therefore differs from the romance in that it is written in verse, and it is plain from what has just been said that the name 'romance' was the product of the transition period when the term was intended to describe the written output of the more modern forms of Latin-Castilian, Portuguese, French, and Provencal, whether couched in prose or verse. We have seen that practically all the romances proper, as apart from the cantares de gesta--that is, such compositions as Amadis, Palmerin, and Partenopex--were written in prose. But the romancero was first and last a narrative in verse. Indeed, the three tales recounted in the last chapter are of the romancero type--a form, as we shall see, which gained quite as strong a hold upon the lower cla.s.ses of the Peninsula as the romance proper did upon the affections of the hidalgo and the caballero. In a word, the romancero is the popular ballad of Spain.
In a previous chapter I attempted to outline the several types of the Spanish ballad, or romancero, as follows:
(1) Those of spontaneous popular origin and early date.
(2) Those based upon pa.s.sages in the chronicles or cantares de gesta.
(3) Folk-ballads of a relatively late date.
(4) Those later ballads which were the production of conscious art.
We can thus cla.s.s Spanish ballads more broadly into: