In 1474, a year abounding in divine favours for all Christendom, when King Henry IV. reigned in Castile, there came to live in the city of Segovia, where he had inherited a dwelling-house and garden, a youthful knight of untainted lineage and comely appearance named Don Ruy de Cardenas.

 

This house, which had been bequeathed to him by his uncle, an Archdeacon and Master of Canon Law, lay at the side and{2} in the silent shadow of the Church of Our Lady of the Pillar; and facing it, across the square, where the three spouts of an ancient fountain sang their song, stood the dark and grated palace of Don Alonso de Lara, a nobleman of great wealth and surly manners, who, in a ripe and grey old age, had espoused a young lady famed throughout Castile for her white skin, her hair the colour of the sun’s rays and her neck like that of a royal heron.

Now Don Ruy, at his birth, had had Our Lady of the Pillar for Godmother, and ever remained her devout and loyal servitor, though, as he was a man of high spirit and gay, he loved arms, the chase, gallant regales, and even, now and then, a noisy night in a tavern with cards and tankards of wine. Love, and his convenient nearness to the holy place,{3} had led him to adopt the pious practice since his arrival in Segovia of visiting his divine Godmother each morning at the hour of Prime and begging in three Ave Maria’s her blessing and graces. Again, as darkness came on, even after a hard run over field and mountain with harriers or falcon, he was wont to return and murmur sweetly a Salve Regina at the Vesper salutation; while, every Sunday, he bought of a Moorish flower-woman in the square a spray of jonquils or pinks or simple roses, and spread them with tenderness and gallant care in front of Our Lady’s altar.

Now to this venerated Church of the Pillar came also each Sunday Donna Leonor, the famous and beautiful wife of the Lord of Lara, accompanied by a surly attendant with eyes harder and wider open{4} than those of an owl, and by two powerful lackeys, who guarded her on either side like towers. So jealous was Don Alonso, that he only permitted this fugitive visit because his confessor had strictly enjoined it on him, and for fear of offending Our Lady his neighbour, and he greedily noted their every step and their loitering from between the iron bars of a latticed window.

Donna Leonor spent the whole of the lingering days of the lingering week secluded in the grated mansion of black granite; and all she had for recreation and air, even in the summer heats, were the depths of a dark green garden surrounded by such lofty walls that nothing could be seen emerging from them save here and there the top of some melancholy cypress. But this short visit of hers to Our Lady of the Pillar sufficed for Don Ruy to fall{5} madly in love with her on the May morning when he saw her kneeling before the altar in a radiance of sunlight, haloed by her golden hair, with her long lashes hanging over a Book of Hours, her rosary falling from between her delicate fingers, all elegant, gentle and white, with the whiteness of a lily blooming in the shade, looking yet whiter amid her black lace and the black satin gown that broke round her graceful form in hard folds over the chapel flags, the ancient flags of burying-places. When, after a moment of confusion and delicious wonder, he knelt, it was less to the Virgin of the Pillar, his divine Godmother, than to that mortal apparition; her name and life he knew not, but only that he would give his life and name for her if she would yield herself for so uncertain a price.{6}

Murmuring in a graceless prayer the three Ave Maria’s with which he saluted Mary each morning, he picked up his sombrero, lightly descended the resounding nave, and stopped in the porch, waiting for her among the leprous beggars who were lousing themselves in the sun. But when, after a lapse of time, during which Don Ruy felt his heart beat with unaccustomed anxiety and fear, Donna Leonor passed and paused to moisten her fingers in the marble holy-water stoup, either from timidity or inattention, she did not raise her eyes to him under her drawn veil. With her attendant of the staring eyes glued to her side, and between the two lackeys as between twin towers, she leisurely crossed the square, stone by stone, enjoying, doubtless, as prisoners do, the expanse of air and the free sun{7} that bathed it, and Don Ruy was astonished when she penetrated into the sombre arcade, with its stout pillars which supported the palace, and she disappeared through a narrow door all covered with iron-work. This then was the famous Donna Leonor, the lovely and............