Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado онлайн

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The mind leaps from that romantic time back to ours, with those wars and quarrels from which the Spain of to-day prefers to stand aloof. The gold which men got in quest of El Dorado, the gold which they piled on ships and guided past English and French pirates, gold which was the royal fifth, gold of the Plate Fleet, gold that was private fortune, the repairing of the splendor of the impoverished nobles of Castile, has been melted down and become national treasure, or currency, or personal adornment, or war-indemnity, or war-chest, or reparations. Some of it has been in the Treasure Tower of Spandau, some is in the vaults of Washington. All men have had their hands in it. Only a little remains in Spain, gilding altar-screens, making showy merchants' chains, weighing in the treasures of the Escurial. Rapacity for gold killed Spain, we are told, and yet Spain has survived in a quiet, old-fashioned, dignified mode of life, and cares less to-day for gold than the rest of the nations.

That, however, concerns very little my Carmen of Aragon, who will pass through life without ever knowing anything of reality, marrying some prodigiously polite grandee and not a bluff and cantankerous English Henry. She laughs, she imitates all I do or say, she walks away, and Chippy takes one of my hands in his and leads me to his mother, quiet and simple and pious and demure, all in dull black velvet. To-morrow I shall go to the Palace and see the King and Queen and the grandees and their ladies wait on twenty-four of the poor of Madrid.