University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.

The historians have described Egilona, the queen of Roderick, in brilliant colors
of romance. Poetry, indeed, would fail to make her lovelier than she appears in the
pages of history. Living at a period and in a country in which so little was the regard
paid to virtue that vice deigned not even to wear the garments of hypocrisy, and
all was gross and audacious in the vulgar and vicious indulgences of court and people,
Egilona not merely maintained the dignity of the queen, but the unapproachable
purity of a faithful wife and a superior woman. In her presence licentiousness was
rebuked and quieted; and Roderick himself, though not sufficiently refined in his nature,
to accommodate himself to those restraints which he esteemed in her, yet felt
their influences upon him sufficiently to forbear in many cases where his tumultuous
passions and indomitable pride would otherwise have prompted him to brave the eye
of the public, and prove his vices to be not less audacious than they were gross and
selfish. Add to this, that Egilona did not merely maintain her virtue, but, subsequently,
her religion also. Her piety was exemplary; and, though she became the spoil
of the Moorish conqueror, she yielded nothing of her faith; but, with a womanly tenacity,
when she had become the wife of the misbeliever, after the death of Roderick,
she exacted such concessions from her Moorish lord to the Christian forms of worship,
that she is supposed by many to have converted him. One of her arts to compel
at least his external acknowledgment to the images of the Saviour and the Virgin,
is worth recording. She had the doors of her apartments in which she kept
them, made so low that he was always compelled to stoop upon entering. “She
was,” says Rasis, the Moor, “a right worthy dame, right beautiful, and of a great
lineage.” When Bilazin, the Moor, the son of Muza, whose captive she had become,
proposed to her to become one of his wives—his law allowing him seven—
she replied: “Sir, offer me no violence, but let me live as a Christian;” and he
married her; and, through her influence, his sway over the Christians became mild
and gentle as her own character, and the faith which she professed.

But we anticipate. These are events which belong to other chronicles. At this
time, the lovely Egilona dreamed not, any more than her vicious lord, of the trials
which were before them, and the destiny which was to abase the latter, and change,
if it did not abase, her own fortunes. She was a Christian, but not a prophet; and
meekly regarding present events, she had but very little solicitude about the future.

When, in the fierceness of his merriest mood—having extorted from the archbishop
a large amount of the money of the church—Roderick informed her of what he had
done, her reproaches were fearlessly uttered. She had beheld with pain the treatment
which the lord Oppas had undergone at the trial of Egiza, as she neither suspected
nor believed in any connection between the former and the meditated crime of
the latter. Her gentle nature even prompted her to plead, as we have seen, for the
indulgence of time which had been granted to the criminal; and though she did not
pray for his pardon—for she regarded his crime with too much religious not less
than personal horror to prompt her to such an extreme of charity—yet her pleadings
had not been spared to procure for him every indulgence which might have been
supposed not inconsistent with the doom before him. That he was spared the
torture, might even be ascribed to her presence at the trial; for Roderick's curiosity
to ascertain the secret of the person who had braved him, was only restrained by the
dread that she might hear that from the lips of the prisoner which, licentious as the
monarch was, he would willingly have kept from her knowledge, though perhaps
indifferent to its exposure to all beside. Feeling as she did toward the Christian
faith and toward its professors, her sympathy took an active direction when she
heard from Roderick of his morning spoliations. She well knew that any effort to
make her rapacious lord disgorge his plunder would be made in vain; and resolute
to do all in her power to amend the injustice and atone for the wrong, she sent for
the archbishop to her private apartments. To these apartments Oppas had never
come without experiencing a strange mingling of painful and pleasurable sentiments;
and even now, with mingled doubts and hopes, and not untroubled by goading fears,
he prepared to obey the summons with sensations which he loved too well entirely
to suppress. He had the passions of the man, which his profession could not quell;
he had the tastes of a courtier, and more than a courtier's ambition; and, in the beauty
of Egilona and we may add in her very virtue, there was a hopeful prompter to his passion,
which encouraged him to dream of enjoyments not merely inconsistent with the
profession which he taught, but hostile to the very virtue which he so much admired.
When the command was brought him to wait upon the queen, his heart bounded within
him, his pulse beat with increased quickness, and he felt the warm glow rise to his
cheek from the over-full fountain within his bosom. With a feeling and a thought
rather of the vain boy than of the religious and venerable man, he proceeded to make
his toilet with the care of one about to go before a person in whose eyes he desired
to seem well; and never did youthful lover arrange his dress with more precise and
elaborate care than did the archbishop. The imposing garb of the church accorded
well with his strong and majestic figure; and as the lord Oppas moved before the
polished steel plate which reflected back his person and brought it distinctly out, as
if it had been chiseled in the blue metal of Damascus, his eye remarked with unconcealed
satisfaction the vigorous and stately tread of his person—the manly and muscular
fulness of every limb, seeming more like that of a warrior king preparing with
heavy mace for approaching battle than that of the humble servant of God, solicitous
of favor only in the eyes of a Supreme Master. For a moment, while engaged
in this survey of his own person, such seemed to be his thought. He paused before
the mirror, and his right arm was involuntarily extended. He would have grasped
the sceptre at that moment, and his conscious soul seemed to bound and pant with
the haughty and the fond idea.

“Will it be?” he said, musingly; “Will it be? Will it not be?” he exclaimed
with more energy; “Or do I but dream? Is the strife—is the hope—is the toil that
I have had, for nothing? Will the proud boy, Pelayo, triumph without my aid, and
requite my assistance but in the idle acknowledgment, which is the common recompense!

No! These serve not me! I labor not for him; nor yet for the lovesick
and feeble Egiza. They think me their ally—their willing friend—their creature.
Fools! they are mine. The hour is ripening—the church is strengthening amongst
the people, and, if the pope will but heed my prayer, it shall have its own armies!
And who shall lead those armies? Who?”

His question was answered by himself, as, lifting the crosier from the table, he
bore it aloft with his extended arm, as if that moment he grasped the mace of the
soldier rather than the sign of peace; and his eye gleamed with the fierce desire of
battle which was working in his soul, as the strong thirst of his ambition led him to
regard this theatre as that which was preliminary and essential to his full and complete
success.

“Ay, the crosier shall become a sword—and the sword”—

The archbishop paused. He did not venture to conclude the sentence, even to
himself. The sceptre was still something of which he might dream, but not speak.
There were still uncertainties to overcome, and seas to cross, and church prejudices
and popular prejudices to be worked down, by the gradual attrition of events, before
the cowled head could surrender to the Gothic horns. The laurels alone could conceal
the shaven crown, and make it worthy of the coronet he coveted; and these
were yet to be gathered on the field of strife. These thoughts, and the doubts that
came with them, oppressed him, and he turned away to the contemplation of other
objects. His toilet was completed, and, bidding his groom provide for him a favorite
steed, he set forth on his way to the palace.