Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado онлайн

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The uncle of the children is the present Duke of Alva, with the wonderful name of James Fitz-James Stuart and the amusing supernumerary title of Duke of Berwick, a tall and slender and haughty grandee who lives a life remote from public haunt, remote enough to-day from the page of history, the Low Countries and the scourge of heretics.

So Carmen of Aragon pinches my ears as we stoop to avoid awnings and sun-screens, and she laughs like a Raphaelesque infant-love, and the yellow parrots from upper windows scold us. Dark women, with nine-inch or foot-long combs standing up from their back hair, and black veils (mantillas) hanging over their heads instead of hats, stare at us and smile. They survey me from my brown boots to my brown mustache, to my red cheeks, to my blue eyes, and they recognize the brood of the pirates. Inglese, Inglese, they whisper.

I have not often been taken for an Englishman, but the Spaniards have no doubt. I may change my attire, I cannot change something. They have seen my like before. Instinctively they don't altogether like me. Instinctively I don't care too much for them, with their bull-like heads and all their somber eyes. There's something in the air which bids me think of thumbscrews. It may be the inherited bad conscience of the Drakes and the Raleighs and the dogs who harried the Plate Fleet four hundred years ago, or it may be the horror in the bones which the association of Spain with human cruelty has bred in the mind.