Upon the high, black, slaty ledges of the Sierra of Guadarrama, winter descends early. Indeed, Penalara, looking down on the Escorial, keeps his snow-cap all the year. From the Dome of Philip the King, one may see in mid-August the snow-swirls greying his flanks and foot-hills almost to the limits of the convent domain.

It was now October, and along the splendid road which joins the little village of San Ildefonso to the Escorial, a sturdy cavalcade of horses and mules took its way a carriers’ convoy this, a muleteers’ troop, not by any means a raffle of gay cavaliers.

“Ho, the Maragatos! Out of the way the Maragatos!” shouted any that met them, over their shoulders. For that strange race from the flat lands of Astorga has the right of the highway or rather, of the high, the low, and the middle way wherever these exist in Spain. They are the carriers of all of value in the peninsula assurance agents rather stout-built men, curiously arrayed in leathern jerkins, belted broadly about the middle, and wearing white linen bragas a sort of cross between “breeks” and “kilt,” coming a little above the knee. Even bandits think twice before meddling with one of these affiliated Maragatos. For the whole bees’ byke of them would hunt down the robber band. The King’s troops let them alone. The Maragatos have always had the favour of kings, and as often as not carry the King’s own goods from port to capital far more safely than his own troopers. Only they do not hurry. They do not often ride their horses, which carry carry only carry, while their masters stride alongside, with quarter-staff, a two-foot spring-knife, and a pair of holster-pistols all ready primed for any emergency.

But in the midst of this particular cavalcade were two women riding upon mules. They were dressed, so far as the eye of the passer-by could observe, in the costume of all the Maragatas dresses square-cut in the bodice, with chains and half-moons of silver tinkling on neck and forehead, while a long petticoat, padded in small diamond squares, fell to the points of their red Cordovan shoes. These Maragatas sat sideways on their mules and were completely silent.

It was not a warlike party to look at. Nevertheless, gay young cavaliers of the capital on duty at La Granja, who might have sought adventure had the ladies been protected only by guards in mail and plume, drew aside and whispered behind their hands as the Maragatas went by.

Now these women were probably the two fairest in Spain at that moment being by denomination Claire Agnew and Valentine la Nina. In the rear a huge, vaguely misshapen giant in shepherd’s dress fleece-coat and cap of wolf-skin, with the ears sticking out quaintly on either side, herded the entire party. He seemed to be assuring himself that it was not followed or spied upon.

Beneath them, in the grey of the mist, as they turned a corner of the blue-black Sierra, there suddenly loomed up the snow-sprinkled roofs of a vast building palace, monastery, tomb what not. It was the Escorial, built by Philip of Spain to commemorate the famous victory of St. Quentain, and completed just in time to receive, as a cold water baptism, the news of the defeat of his Great Armada.

The pile of the Escorial seemed too huge to be wrought by man a part of the mountain rather, hewn by giant hands into domes and doors and fantastic pinnacles. Indeed, the grey snow-showers, mere scufflings of sleet and hail, drifting low and ponderous, treated it as part of the Sierra, one moment whitening it then, the sun coming out with Spanish fierceness for a few minutes, lo! vast roofs of blue slate would show through, glistening like polished steel.

And a king dwelt there not discrowned, but still the mightiest on the earth. In spite of his defeats, in spite of his solitude, his broken purposes, his doubtful future, his empty exchequer, his ruined health, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death opening before him, there was nothing on earth not pope nor prelate, not unscrupulous queen nor victorious fleet, not even the tempests which had blown his great Armada upon the inhospitable rocks of Ireland that could subdue his stubborn will. He warred for Holy Church against the Pope. He claimed the throne of France from the son of Saint Louis. Once King of England, he held the title to the last, and in defence of it broke his power against the oaken bulwarks of that stiff-necked isle.

In his youth a man of as many marriages, secret and open, as Henry VIII. himself, he had been compelled to imprison and perhaps to suppress his son Don Carlos. The English ambassadors found him a man of domestic virtues. Yet the sole daughter who cherished him he sacrificed in a moment to his dynastic projects. And the other? Well, there is something to be said concerning that other.

Philip II. dwelt in the Escorial as in a fenced city. But Valentine la Nina had a master-key to unlock all doors. The next morning very early for the King rose and donned his monk’s robe in the twilight, stealing to his place in the stalls like any of his Jeronomite fellows the two found their way along the vast corridors to the tiny royal chambers, bare of comfort as monastic cells, but loaded with petitions, reports, and letters from the four corners of the earth.

“Tell the King that Valentine la Nina, Countess of Astorga, would see him!”

And at that word the royal confessor, who had come to interview them, grew suddenly ashen pale in the scant light of a covered morning, as if the granite of the court in which they stood had been reflected in his face.

He made a low reverence and withdrew without a word.

At last the two girls were at the door of the King’s chamber a closet rather than a room. Philip was seated at his desk, his gouty foot on the eternal leg-rest, a ghastly picture of St. Lawrence over his head, and a great crucifix in ivory and silver nailed upon the wall, just where the King’s eyes would rest upon it each time he lifted his head.

Claire took in the outward appearance of the mighty monarch who had been but a name to her up to this moment. He looked not at all like the “Demon of the South” of her imagination.

A little fair man, in appearance all a Flamand of the very race he despised, a Flamand of the Flamands His blue eyes were already rheumy and filmed with age, and when he wished to see anything very clearly he had a trick of covering the right eye with his hand, thrusting his head forward, and peering short-sightedly with the other. His hair, though white, retained some of the saffron bloom which once had marked him in a crowd as the white panache served the Bearnais. His beard, dirty white also, was straggling and tufted, as if in secret hours of sorrow it had been plucked out, Oriental fashion, by the roots.

“My father,” said Valentine la Nina, looking at him straight and fearlessly, “I have come to bid you a good morning. My uncle of Astorga would have come too, but he prays in his canon’s stall in the cathedral of Leon for his near and dear ‘parent,’ your Majesty.”

The King rose slowly from his chair. His glabrous face showed no emotion.

“Aid me, my daughter,” he said, “I would look in your face.”

As he rose, his short-sighted eyes caught the dim silhouette of Claire standing behind. All a-tremble from head to foot, he stopped short in what he was about to say.

“And who may that be?” he demanded, in the thick, half-articulate mumble which so many ambassadors found a difficulty in understanding.

“A maid of Scotland, for whom I have come to ask a favour,” answered Valentine la Nina.

“Ah,” said the King, as one who all his life had had knowledge of such requests. But without further question he took Valentine la Nina by the hand and led her to the window, so that the grey light, half-reflected from the clay-muddy sky, and half from the snowy courtyard, might strike directly upon her face.

“Isabel Osorio’s daughter yes!” he said very low, “herself indeed!”

“The lawful daughter of your lawful wife,” said the girl, “also an obedient daughter. For I have done ever what you wished me save only in one thing. And that that I am now ready to do, on one condition.”

“Ah,” said the King again, pulling at his beard, “now aid me to sit down again, my daughter. We will talk.”

“Aye,” the girl answered, “we will talk you and I. You and I have not talked much in my life. I have always obeyed you my uncle of Astorga Mariana of the Gesù. For that reason I am alive I am free there is still a place for me in the world. But I know you have told me Isabel Osorio’s brother himself has told me, that I too must sacrifice myself for your other and younger children, the sons and daughters of princesses. You have often asked me indeed bidden me to enter a nunnery. The Jesuits have made me great promises. For what? That I might leave the way clear for others I, the King’s eldest-born I, whom you dare not deny of blood as good as your own, a daughter of the Osorio who fought at Clavijo shoulder to shoulder with Santiago himself.”

“I do not deny,” said the King softly, “you have done a good work. But the Faith hath need of you. To it you consecrate your mother’s beauty as I have consecrated my life ”

“Yes,” said the girl, “but first you lived your life you did not yield it up on the threshold unlived.”

Silently Philip crossed himself, raising his thick swollen fingers from the rosary which hung about his neck as low as his waist.

“Then why have you come,” he said, again resuming the steady fingering of his beads, “when you have not thought it fitting to obey, save upon condition? One does not play the merchant with one’s father.”

“I have been too young yes,” she broke out, her voice hurrying in fear of interruption “too like my mother ah, even you cannot reproach me with that! to bury myself under a veil, with eternal walls shutting me in on every side. I have served you well. I have served the Society I have done your will, my father save only in this.”

“And now,” said the King drily, “you have returned to a better mind?”

“I have,” said Valentine, “on conditions!”

“Again I warn you I do not bargain,” said the King, “my will is my will. Refuse or submit. I make no terms.”

The girl flashed into fire at the word.

“Ah, but you must,” she cried. “I am no daughter of Flanders no Caterina de Lainez to be shut up with the Ursulines of Brussels against my will. I am an Osorio of the Osorios. The brother of my mother will protect me. And behind him all Astorga and Leon would rise to march upon Madrid if any harm befell me. I bargain because it is my right because I can stand between your children and their princely thrones because I can prove your marriage no marriage because, without my consent and that of my brothers Pedro and Bernardino, you had never either been King of England nor left children to sit in the seat of Charles your father. But neither they nor I have asked for aught save life from your hands. We have effaced ourselves for the kingdom’s good and yours. A king of Spain may not marry a subject, but you married my mother your friend’s sister. Now will you bargain or no?”

“I will listen,” said Philip grimly; “place my foot-rest a little nearer me, my daughter.”

The calmness of the King immediately reacted on Valentine la Nina.

“Listen, my father,” she said, “there are in your galleys at Tarragona two men one of them the father of this young Scottish girl the other, her her betrothed. Pardon them. Let them depart from the kingdom ”

“Their crime?” interrupted the King.

“They were delivered over by the fathers of the Inquisition,” said Valentine, less certainly.

“Then it is heresy,” said the King. “I can forgive anything but that!”

“For one and the other,” said the girl, “their heresy consists in good honest fighting, outside of your Majesty’s kingdom against the Guisard League. They are not your subjects, and were found in your province of Roussillon only by chance.”

“Ah, in Roussillon?” said Philip thoughtfully. And picking up a long pole like the butt of a fishing-rod furnished with a pair of steel nippers like a finger-and-thumb at the top, he turned half round to an open cabinet of many pigeon-holes, where were bundles innumerable of papers all arranged and neatly tied. The pincers clicked, and the King, with a smile of triumph at his little piece of dexterity, withdrew half-a-dozen folded sheets.

“Yes, I have heard,” he said, “the men you commanded my Viceroy to remove from the galleys and to place in Pilate’s House at Tarragona a young Sorbonnist whom once before you allowed to escape at Perpignan, and the Scottish spy Francis Agnew.”

“My father,” began Claire, catching the name, but only imperfectly understanding the Castilian which they were speaking “my father is ”

But Valentine la Nina stopped her with an imperious gesture of the hand. It was her affair, the movement said.

The King shook his head gravely and a little indulgently.

“My daughter,” he said, “you have taken too much on yourself already. And my Viceroy in Catalonia is also to blame ”

“Pardon me,” cried Valentine la Nina, “and listen. This is what I came to say. There is in your city of Madrid a convent of the Carmélites, the same which Theresa reformed. It is strictly cloistered, the rule serene, austere. Those who enter there have done with life. Give these two men their liberty, escort them to France, and I promise you I will enter it of my own free will. I will take the Black Veil, and trouble neither you nor your heirs more in this world.”

The King did not answer immediately, but continued to turn over the sheaf of papers in his hand.

“And why,” he said at last, “will you do for this maid for the lives of these two men, what no persuasion of family or Church could previously persuade you to do?”

Valentine went hastily up to the King’s side who, dwelling in perpetual fear of assassination, moved a little uneasily, watching her hand. But when she bent and whispered softly, none heard her words but himself. Yet they moved him.

“Yes, I loved her the wife of my youth!” he answered aloud (and as if speaking involuntarily) the whispered question.

“And she loved you?” said Valentine la Nina.

“She loved me yes God be her judge!” said the King. “She died for me!”

“Then,” continued Valentine la Nina slowly, “you understand why for this young man’s sake I am willing to accept death in life! I desire that he shall wed the woman he loves whom he has chosen who loves him!”

But under her breath she added, “Though not as I!”

And Valentine la Nina took the King’s hand in hers, and motioned to
Claire to come near and kiss it.

But Claire, kneeling, kissed that of Valentine la Nina instead.

Then, for the first time in many years, a tear lay upon the cheek of the
King of Spain, wondering mightily at itself.