Men Bestriding Their Donkeys
Rode Fearlessly Through The Dust, And One Cleanly-Looking Old Peasant
Woman, Who Sat Hers Plumply
Cushioned and framed in with a chair-back
and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future
Shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.
When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since
suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited
for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the
church door, where she shared in our impartial alms. We were admitted to
the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, who went for one of the
remaining monks to show us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope
of clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself from it only
long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a
picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious to get
back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a church
which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar treasures of painting,
sculpture, especially in wood, costly marble, and precious stones than
any other I remember. According to my custom, I leave it to the
guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics of Spanish art
to celebrate the pictures and statues; it is enough for me that I have
now forgotten them all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by
certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time
when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions of all
other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent. When the monk
had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings (bad as their
subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes fall back upon his newspaper
before the door had well closed upon us.
The beggarmen had waited in their places to give us another chance of
meriting heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old
beggarwoinan. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were
sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper
big-dog in her leathern palm I said, _"Adios, madre."_ Then happened
something that I had long desired. I had heard and read that in Spain
people always said at parting, "Go with God," but up to that moment
nobody had said it to me, though I had lingeringly given many the
opportunity. Now, at my words and at the touch of my coin this old
beggarwoman smiled beneficently and said, "Go with God," or, as she put
it in her Spanish, "_Vaya vested con Dios."_ Immediately I ought to have
pressed another coin in her palm, with a _"Gracias, madre; muchas
gracias,"_ out of regard to the literary climax; but whether I really
did so I cannot now remember; I can only hope I did.
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