The Nuns Came Beautifully Dressed To Hear Mass At The Grilles Giving
Into The Chapel Adjoining The Church; The Tourist
May have his glimpse
of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may have his guess of
their
Cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues the tradition
of repose which the name of the old garden grounds implies. These lady
nuns must be of patrician lineage and of fortune enough to defray their
expense in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was
founded eight hundred years ago by Alfonso VIII. "to expiate his sins
and to gratify his queen," who probably knew of them. I wish now I had
known, while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had once had
the power of life and death in the neighborhood, and could hang people
if she liked; I cannot think just what good it would have done me, but
one likes to realize such things on the spot. She is still one of the
greatest ladies of Spain, though perhaps not still "lady of ax and
gibbet," and her nuns are of like dignity. In their chapel are the tombs
of Alfonso and his queen, whose figures are among those on the high
altar of the church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of our
Henry II., and was very fond of Las Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest
for her in the far-off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in the
eleventh century we Americans were still English, under the heel of the
Normans, as not the fiercest republican of us now need shame to own.
In a sense of this historical unity, at Las Huelgas we felt as much at
home as if we had been English tourists, and we had our feudal pride in
the palaces where the Gastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as we
returned to the town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen after
you pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy
road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood.
The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem
obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the
south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost
preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps
it was not more utterly outdated than the residences of the nobles who
had once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as
irrevocably merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.
VI
Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the
hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the
state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street
had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning.
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