In One Wilding Place Which Seemed
Set Apart For A Nursery Several Men Were Idly Working With Many Pauses,
But Not So Many As To Make The Spectator Nervous.
As the afternoon waned
and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace
which
Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown
stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic
frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank.
It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft
Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature
loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain other
Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my unadvertised
_Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ and perhaps we ought to think of him
leniently as Peter the Ferocious. He was kind to some people and was
popularly known as the Justiciary; he especially liked the Moors and
Jews, who were gratefully glad, poor things, of being liked by any one
under the new Christian rule. But he certainly killed several of his
half-brothers, and notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in
the Alcazar. That is, if he had no hand in the butchery himself he had
him killed after luring him to Seville for the tournaments and forgiving
him for all their mutual injuries with every caressing circumstance. One
reads that after the king has kissed him he sits down again to his game
of backgammon and Don Fadrique goes into the next room to Maria do
Padilla, the lovely and gentle lady whom Don Pedro has married as much
as he can with a wedded wife shut up in Toledo. She sits there in terror
with her damsels and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique
aware of his danger. But he imagines no harm till the king and his
companions, with their daggers drawn, come to the curtains, which the
king parts, commanding, "Seize the Master of Santiago!" Don Fadrique
tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies through the halls
of the Alcazar, where he finds every door bolted and barred. The king's
men are at his heels, and at last one of them fells him with a blow of
his mace. The king goes back with a face of sympathy to Maria, who has
fallen to the floor.
The treacherous keeping is all rather in the taste of the Italian
Renaissance, but the murder itself is more Roman, as the Spanish
atrocities and amusements are apt to be. Murray says it was in the
beautiful Hall of the Ambassadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but the
other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it was, there is a
blood-stain in the pavement which our Granadan guide failed to show us,
possibly from a patriotic pique that there are no blood-stains in the
Alhambra with personal associations.
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