Of anything like political news, much less political discussion, there was seldom a vestige.
But though the Government has succeeded in bridling the tongue of the press, there is abundance of contraband talk in Madrid. No matter with whom you converse, the topic is sure to be of bloody revolutions and retributions unequalled in history. But mention the Royal name, and, whether you are among aristocrats or peasants, you will see dark looks, meaning shrugs of the shoulder, gestures significant of bitterest meaning.
“It must come soon,” people say to you; “and the sooner the better, though dire will be the coming of it. Never in history were such wrongs, such hatred, such tyranny, to be washed out in blood. We can only watch and wait.”
The acquaintance of a day,--nay, of an hour, is sufficient to warrant all sorts of confidences on public matters from a Spaniard, and this incautiousness, or rather candour, makes you forgive even his love of the bull-fight. It is, indeed, a most consolatory fact, that it is but a watching and waiting in Spain, and that underneath a semblance of indifference burns and rages a wholesome desire of liberty.
“We are at the present moment enduring a tyranny of which foreigners have no conception,” said a cultivated Spaniard to me, one day, in English; “and yet, despite of all that is going on secretly among us, no one can say when things will change. Change they must; we shall have the French Revolution acted over again in the streets of Madrid.”[2]
Again: we were taken to see the graves of some young officers of high family who were shot in prison during the disturbances of last year. A respectable man of the lower ranks was standing near, and he said, with tears in his eyes, but half-suppressed curses on his lips,--
“They were as innocent as new-born babes; though, thank God! this murder won’t long want vengeance.”
It would be almost impossible to convey any idea of the bitterness and hatred we found underlying the public mind at this epoch.
People gave us their confidences without any reason for doing so, confidences which all amounted to one and the same thing--contempt of the tyranny and resolutions to overturn the tyrants. “No one can tell how uncomfortable it is to live in Madrid now,” said an English lady to me one day. “It is the old fable of the sheep and the wolves over and over again. We are constantly laying in stores for three or four weeks’ siege; but I’ve done it so often in vain that I have determined never to do it again, and I daresay the consequence will be that a revolution will come and find my larder empty.”