DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS
[Ill.u.s.tration: DONNA ISABELLA ANGELICA Y BANANAS
_From the portrait by Baloona (early Spanish)_]
Spain has ever been the home of romance and beauty and fiery pa.s.sion, but never in its whole history has it bred such a tremulously beautiful love story as that of Donna Isabella Angelica y Bananas. A romance of two pa.s.sionate hearts in such a vivid setting cannot but fail to make the eye kindle and the pulses throb. Compared to it, Lancelot and Elaine become cardboard puppets, Dante and Beatrice figures of clay utterly devoid of life, while Paolo and Francesca appear merely idiotic.
Picture to yourself, if you will, the Spain of the Middle Ages; if you can"t, it doesn"t matter. Isabella Angelica was born at Seville in 1582, the daughter of Don Juan de Cabarajal and Maria his wife. Don Juan owned the Castello del Hurtado, having been left it by his infamous but regal uncle, Don Lopez a Basastos.
The Castello lay surrounded in the foreground by turrets and moats, in the middle distance by orange groves and extraordinarily verdant meadows; while in the background the majestic Pyrenees, rearing their snowy peaks in serried ranks of symmetrical splendour, imparted to the whole thing the semblance of rugged grandeur which is the birthright of every true Spaniard. Isabella Angelica"s childhood dawned and waned in these exquisite surroundings: she would play with her tutors various games, some of them traditional, such as "catch orange" and "_raralara_,"[19] and now and then frolics of her own invention, for history tells us she was ever a merry little trickster. It was not until she was seventeen that the true radiance of her beauty became apparent.
Her mother had been wiser to guard the child more closely than she did, for do we not read in Dr. Polata"s "From Girl to Woman" that between the ages of nineteen and twenty she was constantly seen mounting the Pyrenees in a daring fashion and entirely unattended? But still, doubtless owing to her charming nature, which was a sweet composition of mischief and kindliness, she remained unspoilt by this undesirable contact with a rude world which should, until her marriage, have been outside her girlish ken.
When she reached the age of twenty--"the very threshold of womanhood,"
as Fernando Lope so beautifully puts it--she was betrothed to Pedro y Bananas, a n.o.ble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the Court at Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or pa.s.sion, she consented without hesitation, being but a tool in the hands of her parents, and a few months later the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the Cathedral at Seville.
After the ceremony the bride and bridegroom repaired to the Palazza Bananas, the country seat of Pedro, who, though poor himself, had had many costly estates handed down to him.
Here, so report tells us, after subjecting Isabella Angelica for three years to the vilest insults and utmost cruelty, Pedro left her temporarily and returned to the Court, now at Castille. Poor Isabella Angelica! This was the gay world she had dreamed of--the ecstatic life she had hoped and fully expected to live!
Then suddenly with the departure of her husband, she found peace--peace in the rocky solitudes, in the scented gardens and rolling foothills; and here this poor, lonely woman found fulfilment of all her maiden dreams--"Love!"
No one knows the authentic story of her first meeting with Enrique Baloona. Some say he was fishing for _bolawallas_[20] and she came graciously up and asked him the time; others aver that he was pa.s.sing beneath her lattice and she dropped a fluted hair-tidy at his feet. But anyhow, from the time they first met they never parted until it was absolutely necessary. They pursued the course of their love through the long, tranquil summer days and nights--every word they uttered one to the other was sheer poetry. Enrique, who was a fully qualified academician, painted the portrait reproduced on page 124. It is alas!
the only one in existence, all the others having been destroyed by the Inquisition.
But alack! as is the way with all beauty, it is but short-lived. The end of their peaceful pa.s.sion came with the announcement of Pedro"s return from the Court, now at Aragon. Isabella Angelica, history relates, was beside herself with misery. Enrique also was considerably upset.
Together the doomed couple arranged a plan of escape. They flew together to the Villa Morla, a notorious abode of illicit lovers. It was here that the enraged Pedro caught up with them and killed Enrique with a look. Isabella Angelica was then taken against her will to join the Court. At last at Madrid. For two years, Dr. Polata tells us, her heart was numb with anguish; then gradually the life at Court, still at Madrid, began to take effect on her malleable character. She became intensely vicious: much of the sweetness portrayed in Enrique"s portrait vanished, leaving her expression cross and occasionally even sullen. All the world knows of her meeting with the Infanta, so we will not dwell upon it. One day her husband died unexpectedly. Cruel-minded courtiers suspected Isabella Angelica, but she was so obviously crushed that their suspicions were allayed. Her heart exulted--she had killed him with a poisoned pen-wiper. No one knew. Poor Isabella Angelica! Her tragic love affair had indeed transformed her from the appealing girl of yesterday to the recklessly unhappy woman of to-day, forced on to the path of cruelty and vice by unlooked-for circ.u.mstances. She performed this deed and that with almost mechanical diabolicism; some say she knew not one day from another. In 1597 she was offered an exceedingly good position by the Inquisition, which she immediately accepted. It was, she felt, her only chance of happiness--to have the opportunity of inventing a few good tortures would comfort her; and why not? People of to-day, narrow and unsympathetic, may censure her as being spiteful and unkind, but in those days things were--oh, so different!
She sent for her little brother and had him burnt; this eased the pain at her heart a little. Then her aunt was conveyed to her from Majorca, and on arrival was pierced by several bodkins and ultimately buried in hot tar. Isabella Angelica almost gave vent to a wan smile.
She supervised her father"s death, the actual work being performed by her colleagues of the Inquisition. He was cut in moderate-sized snippets and toasted on one side only.
It says much for Isabella Angelica"s charm and personality that the populace, in spite of their knowledge of her deeds, one and all adored her--to the end of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all who came in contact with her was hers irretrievably.
It was during the personal mutilation of her third cousin that she caught the influenza cold which cost her her life. Poor, doomed Isabella Angelica: her death-bed was surrounded by heart-broken mourners who had flocked from all parts of sunny Spain to pay tribute to the dying beauty; the Inquisition issued an edict that no eyes were to be put out for a whole week in honour of her.
She died peacefully, clasping an ivory rosary and a faded miniature on elephant"s hide, portraying a handsome, debonair young man. Could it have been Enrique Baloona?
Thus lived and died one of Spain"s most entrancing specimens of feminine beauty.
MAGGIE McWHISTLE
Born in an obscure Scotch manse of Jacobite parents, Maggie McWhistle goes down to immortality as perhaps the greatest heroine of Scottish history; and perhaps not. We read of her austere Gallic beauty in every record and tome of the period--one of the n.o.ble women whose paths were lit for them from birth by Destiny"s relentless lamp. What did Maggie know of the part she was to play in the history of her country? Nothing.
She lived through her girlhood unheeding; she helped her mother with the baps and her father with the haggis; occasionally she would be given a new plaidie--she who might have had baps, haggis, and plaidies ten thousandfold for the asking. A word must be said of her parents. Her father, Jaimie, known all along Deeside as Handsome Jaimie--how the light-hearted village girls mourned when he turned minister: he was high, high above them. Of his meeting with Janey McToddle, the Pride of Bonny Donside, very little is written. Some say that they met in a snowstorm on Ben Lomond, where she was tending her kine; others say that they met on the high road to Aberdeen and his collie Jeannie bit her collie Jock--thus cementing a friendship that was later on to ripen into more and more--and even Maggie. Some years later they were wed, and Jaimie led his girl-bride to the little manse which was destined to be the birthplace of one of Scotland"s saviours. History tells us little of Maggie McWhistle"s childhood: she apparently lived and breathed like any more ordinary girl--her griddle cakes were famous adown the length and breadth of Aberdeen. Gradually a little path came to be worn between the manse and the kirk, seven miles away, where Maggie"s feet so often trod their way to their devotions. She was intensely religious.
One day a stranger came to Aberdeen. He had braw, braw red knees and bonnie, bonnie red hair. History tells us that on first seeing Maggie in her plaidie he smiled, and that the second time he saw her he guffawed, so light-hearted was he.
One day he called at the manse, chucked Maggie under the chin, and ate one of her baps. Eight years later he came again, and, after tweaking her nose, ate a little haggis. By then something seemed to have told her that he was her hero.
One dark night, so the story runs, there came a hammering on the door.
Maggie leapt out of her truckle, and wrapping the plaidie round her, for she was a modest girl, she ran to the window.
"Wha is there?" she cried in Scotch.
The answer came back through the darkness, thrilling her to the marrow:
"Bonnie Prince Charlie!"
Maggie gave a cry, and, running down-stairs, opened the door and let him in. She looked at him in the light shed by her homely candle. His brow was amuck with sweat: he was trembling in every limb; his ears were scarlet.
"What has happened?"
"I am pursued," he replied, hoa.r.s.e with exertion and weariness. "Hide me, bonnie la.s.sie, hide me, hide me!"
Quick as thought, Maggie hid him behind the door, and not a moment too soon. Then she displayed that strength of will and courage which was to stamp her as a heroine for all time. There came a fresh hammering on the door. Maggie opened it defiantly, and never flinched at the sight of so many brawny men; she only wrapped her plaidie more tightly round her.
"We want Bonnie Prince Charlie," said the leader, in Scotch.
Then came Maggie"s well-known answer, also in Scotch.
"Know you not that this is a manse?"
History has it that the man fell back as though struck, and one by one, awed by the still purity of the white-faced girl, the legions departed into the night whence they had come. Thus Maggie McWhistle proved herself the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie for the first time.
There were many occasions after that in which she was able to prove herself a heroine for his sake. She would conceal him up the chimney or in the oven at the slightest provocation. Soon there were no trees for thirty miles round in which she had not hidden him at some period or another.[21]
Poor Maggie--perchance she is finding in heaven the peaceful rest which was so lacking in her life on earth. For legend hath it that she never had two consecutive nights" sleep for fifteen years, so busy was she saving Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Then came that great deed which even now finds an exultant echo in the heart of every true Scotsman--that deed which none but a bonnie, hardy Highland la.s.sie could have got away with.... You all know of the ma.s.sing of James" troops at Carlisle, and later at Glasgow, and later still at Aberdeen. Poor Prince Charlie--so sonsie and braw, a fugitive in his own land--he fled to Loch Morich, followed by Maggie McWhistle in her plaidie, carrying some haggis and baps to comfort him in his exile.
History is rather hazy as to exactly what happened; but anyhow, Maggie, with the tattered banner of her country fast unfurling in her heart, decided to save her hero for the last time; and it was well she did not tarry longer, for he was sore pressed. History relates that two tears fell from his eyes on to the sh.o.r.e.[22] Then Maggie, with a brave smile, handed him a bap.
"Eat," she said in Scotch; "you are probably very hungry."
These simple words, spoken straight from her heart, had the effect, so chroniclers inform us, of pulling him together a bit.
"Where can I hide?" he asked.
Maggie looked at him fearlessly for a moment.
"You shall hide in a tree," she cried, with sudden inspiration.
Bonnie Prince Charlie fell on his braw red knees.
"Please," he cried pleadingly, "could it be an elm? I"m so tired of gnarled oaks."