“It was from that window that the Sultana Ayxa la Horra, the mother of Boabdil el Chico, let him down to the Darro with a rope made of shawls so that he could escape from Granada before his dreadful old father murdered him,” volunteered Catalina. “But of course you have read all about it—there never was a more delicious book than _The Conquest of Granada_.”
“Never heard of it, and am densely ignorant of the whole thing. You will have to coach me, as usual.”
“Then I suppose you don’t know that we should have no Alhambra to-day—hardly one stone on another—if it hadn’t been for Irving—an American! How do you like that?”
“You know I have no race jealousy, and I had just as lief it had been Irving as any other Johnny. What difference does it make, anyhow? We have the Alhambra. It’s like bothering about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”
“Not a bit. The plays don’t much, for that matter. I’m glad our literature has them, but all that sort of speculation seems to me a crying waste of time and mental energy. Let’s have the lecture. What did you say your black’s name was?”
“Black! Boabdil had beautiful golden hair and blue eyes.” And she sketched the vacillating fate of that ill-starred young monarch while they sat on a bench opposite the great façade of the Alcazaba, that once impregnable citadel swarming with turbaned Moors. To Catalina they were almost visible to-day, so vivid was her historical sense; and, as ever, she caught Over in the rush of her enthusiasm. He always invited these little disquisitions, less for the information, which he usually forgot, than for the pleasure of watching the changing glow on Catalina’s so often immobile face. Moreover, she was invariably amiable when roaming through history. Her voice, in spite of its little Western accent, was soft and rich and lingered in his ear long after she had fallen into a silence which presented a contemptuous front to such masculine artfulness as he possessed.
To-day, after they had passed through the little door of the Alcazaba, she fell abruptly from garrulity into a state of apparent dumbness; but Over walked contentedly beside her in the warm and fragrant silence of the ruin. Except for the ramparts and the two great watch-towers where the Moor had contemplated for so many anxious months the vast army and glittering camp of Ferdinand and Isabella on the vega beyond Granada, and the sheer sides of the rock on which the fortress was built, there was little to suggest that it had once been the warlike guardian of the palace. It rather looked as if it had been the pleasure-gardens of a pampered harem, with its winding walks between terraces of bright flowers, its fountains, overgrown, like the fragments of wall, with ivy, and its grottos, always cool, and of a delicious fragrance; while from every point there was a glimpse of snow mountain or sunburned plain.