again. Now he was silent, working hard, and now he dropped his hand, threw back his head and talked. He himself made a picture, paly gold of locks, subtle and quick of face, plastered against a blue shield with a willow wreath going around.
I stood so or so, drawing hard upon the net with the fishes. Then at his command I approached more nearly, and he drew full face and three-quarter and profile. It was between these accomplishings that he talked more intimately.
“Seamen go to Italy,” he said. “Were you ever in Milan? But that is inland.”
I answered that I had been from Genoa to Milan.
“It is not likely that you saw a great painter there Messer Leonardo?”
It happened that I had done this, and moreover had seen him at work and heard him put right thought into most right words. I was so tired of lying that after a moment I said that I had seen and heard Messer Leonardo.
“Did you see the statue?”
“The first time I saw him he was at work upon it. The next time he was painting in the church of Santa Maria. The third time he sat in a garden, sipped wine and talked.”
“I hold you,” he said, “to be a fortunate fisherman! Just as this fisher I am painting, and whether it is Andrew or Mark, I do not yet know, was a most fortunate fisherman!” He ended meditatively, “Though whoever it is, probably he was crucified or beheaded or burned.”
I felt a certain shiver of premonition. The day that had been warm and bright turned in a flash ashy and chill. Then it swung back to its first fair seeming, or not to its first, but to a deeper, brighter yet. The Fisherman by Galilee was fortunate. Whoever perceived truth and beauty was fortunate, fortunate now and forever!
We came back to Messer Leonardo. “I spent six months at the court in Milan,” said the fair man. “I painted the Duke and the Duchess and two great courtiers. Messer Leonardo was away. He returned, and I visited him and found a master. Since that time I study light and shadow and small things and seek out inner action.”
He worked in silence, then again began to speak of painters, Italian and Spanish. He asked me if I had seen such and such pictures in Seville.
“Yes. They are good.”
“Do you know Monsalvat?”
I said that I had climbed there one day. “I dream a painting!” he said, “The Quest of the Grail. Now I see it running over the four walls of a church, and now I see it all packed into one man who rides. Then again it has seemed to me truer to have it in a man and woman who walk, or perhaps even are seated. What do you think?”
I was thinking of Isabel who died in my arms twenty years ago. “I would have it man and woman,” I said. “Unless, like Messer Leonardo, you can put both in one.”
He sat still, his mind working, while in a fair inner land Isabel and I moved together; then in a meditative quiet he finished his drawing. He himself was admirable, fine gold and bronze, sapphire-eyed, with a face where streams of visions moved the muscles, and all against the blue and the willow tree.
At last he put away pencil, and at his gesture I came from the boat and the reeds. I looked at what he had drawn, and then he shut book and, the mule following us, we moved back to the road.
“My dear fisherman,” he said, “you are trudging afoot and your dress exhibits poverty. Painters may paint Jove descending in showers of golden pesos and yet have few pesos in purse. I have at present ten. I should like to share them with you who have done me various good turns to-day.”
I said that he was generous but that he had done me good turns. Moreover I was not utterly without coin, and certainly the hour had paid for itself. So he mounted his mule and wished me good fortune, and I wished him good fortune.
“Are you going to Santa Fe?”
“Yes. I have a friend in the camp.”
“I go there to paint her Highness the Queen for his Highness the King. Perhaps we shall meet again. I am Manuel Rodriguez.”
“I guessed that,” I answered, “an hour ago! Be so good, great painter, as not to remember me. It will serve me better.”
The light played again over his face. “The Disguised Hidalgo. Excellent pictures come to me like that, in a great warm light, and excellent names for pictures.—Very good. In a way, so to speak, I shall completely forget you!”
Two on horseback, a churchman and a knight, with servants following, came around a bend of the dusty road and recognizing Manuel Rodriguez, called to him by name. Away he rode upon his mule, keeping company with them. The dozen in their train followed, raising as they went by such a dust cloud that presently all became like figures upon worn arras. They rode toward Santa Fe, and I followed on foot.
CHAPTER IV
SANTA Fe rose before me, a camp in wood, plaster and stone, a camp with a palace, a camp with churches. Built of a piece where no town had stood, built that Majesty and its Court and its Army might have roofs and walls, not tents, for so long a siege, it covered the plain, a city raised in a night. The siege had been long as the war had been long. Hidalgo Spain and simple Spain were gathered here in great squares and ribbons of valor, ambition, emulation, desire of excitement and of livelihood, and likewise, I say it, in pieces not small, herded and brought here without any “I say yes” of their own, and to their misery. There held full flavor of crusade, as all along the war had been preached as a crusade. Holy Church had here her own grandees, cavaliers and footmen. They wore cope and they wore cowl, and on occasion many endued themselves with armor and hacked and hewed with an earthly sword. At times there seemed as many friars and priests as soldiers. Out and in went a great Queen and King. Their court was here. The churchmen pressed around the Queen. Famous leaders put on or took off armor in Santa Fe—the Marquis of Cadiz and many others only less than he in estimation, and one Don Gonsalvo de Cordova, whose greater fame was yet to come. Military and shining youth came to train and fight under these. Old captains-at-arms, gaunt and scarred, made their way thither from afar. All were not Spaniard; many a soldier out at fortune or wishful of fame came from France and Italy, even from England and Germany. Women were in Santa Fe. The Queen had her ladies. Wives, sisters and daughters of hidalgos came to visit, and the common soldiery had their mates. Nor did there lack courtesans.
Petty merchants thronged the place. All manner of rich goods were bought by the flushed soldiers, the high and the low. And there dwelled here a host of those who sold entertainment—mummers and jugglers and singers, dwarfs and giants. Dice rattled, now there were castanets and dancing, and now church bells seemed to rock the place. Wine flowed.
Out of the plain a league and more away sprang the two hills of Granada, and pricked against the sky, her walls and thousand towers and noble gates. Between them and Santa Fe stretched open and ruined ground, and here for many a day had shocked together the Spaniard and the Moor. But now there was no longer battle. Granada had asked and been granted seventy days in which to envisage and accept her fate. These were nearing the end. Lost and beaten, haggard with woe and hunger and pestilence, the city stood over against us, above the naked plain, all her outer gardens stripped away, bare light striking the red Alhambra and the Citadel. When the wind swept over her and on to Santa Fe it seemed to bring a sound of wailing and the faint and terrible odor of a long besieged place.
I came at eve into Santa Fe, found at last an inn of the poorer sort, ate scant supper and went to bed. Dawn came with a great ringing of church bells.
Out of the inn, in the throbbing street, I began my search for Don Enrique de Cerda. One told me one thing and one another, but at last I got true direction. At noon I found him in a goodly room where he made recovery from wounds. Now he walked and now he sat, his arm in a sling and a bandage like a turban around his head. A