His first gallantries were with an empress. He
was ten years old, and the empress six hundred.
His father, Don Esteban Ferragut—third
quota of the College of Notaries—had always
had a great admiration for the things of the past.
He lived near the cathedral, and on Sundays and holy
days, instead of following the faithful to witness
the pompous ceremonials presided over by the cardinal-archbishop,
used to betake himself with his wife and son to hear
mass in San Juan del Hospital,—a
little church sparsely attended the rest of the week.
The notary, who had read Walter Scott in his youth,
used to gaze on the old and turreted walls surrounding
the church, and feel something of the bard’s
thrills about his own, his native land. The Middle
Ages was the period in which he would have liked to
have lived. And as he trod the flagging of the
Hospitolarios, good Don Esteban, little, chubby,
and near-sighted, used to feel within him the soul
of a hero born too late. The other churches,
huge and rich, appeared to him with their blaze of
gleaming gold, their alabaster convolutions and their
jasper columns, mere monuments of insipid vulgarity.
This one had been erected by the Knights of Saint
John, who, united with the Templars, had aided King
James in the conquest of Valencia.
Upon crossing the covered passageway leading from
the street to the inner court, he was accustomed to
salute the Virgin of the Conquest, an image of rough
stone in faded colors and dull gold, seated on a bench,
brought thither by the knights of the military order.
Some sour orange trees spread their branching verdure
over the walls of the church,—a blackened,
rough stone edifice perforated with long, narrow,
window-like niches now closed with mud plaster.
From the salient buttresses of its reinforcements
jutted forth, in the highest parts, great fabled monsters
of weather-beaten, crumbling stone.
In its only nave was now left very little of this
romantic exterior. The baroque taste of the seventeenth
century had hidden the Gothic arch under another semi-circular
one, besides covering the walls with a coat of whitewash.
But the medieval reredos, the nobiliary coats of arms,
and the tombs of the Knights of Saint John with their
Gothic inscriptions still survived the profane restoration,
and that in itself was enough to keep up the notary’s
enthusiasm.
Moreover the quality of the faithful who attended
its services had to be taken into consideration.
They were few but select, always the same. Some
of them would drop into their places, gouty and relaxed,
supported by an old servant wearing a shabby lace
mantilla as though she were the housekeeper.
Others would remain standing during the service holding
up proudly their emaciated heads that presented the
profile of a fighting cock, and crossing upon the
breast their gloved hands,—always in black
wool in the winter and in thread in the summer time.
Ferragut knew all their names, having read them in
the Trovas of Mosen Febrer, a metrical composition
in Provencal, about the warriors that came to the
neighborhood of Valencia from Aragon, Catalunia, the
South of France, England and remote Germany.
