Already he has dismounted to kiss his father’s hand, already he clasps his mailed gauntlet and looks into his face. Great God! It is the livid countenance of a corpse! The dead weight of Bernardo’s hand causes the body to swerve and fall forward upon the saddle-bow. Alonso has kept his word, the Count of Saldaña is given free into his hands, but he has been secretly murdered in prison, and it is his dressed-up body that appears before his son. A cry of agony comes from Bernardo. “O father, Don Sancho Diaz,” are his words, as he reverently replaces the body on the saddle, “in an evil hour did you beget me; I have given everything for you, and now I have lost all.” * * * * * To his stronghold, the castle of Carpio, Bernardo carries his father’s corpse, and places it in the centre of the chapel before the altar. Beside it he kneels, a broken-hearted man. There lies the parent he has so long sought in vain, and whose existence was a mystery to him from his birth. Dead he is, and yet to this lonely man something tangible is before him even in his corpse--something with which he can commune as with his own. After a while rising up, his eyes fixed on the bier, Bernardo unsheathes the sword with which he slew Roland and saved the king at Roncesvalles. “O sword!” he cries, “my trusted blade. In my hand you have drunk the blood of France, be strong for my revenge! Never in a more sacred cause was weapon drawn. My father thirsts for your sure stroke, and his son can wield it. Go up, go up, thou blessed spirit, into the hands of God,” and he stoops to kiss the dead man’s hand, “and fear not that the blood flowing in Bernardo’s veins shall be spared in vengeance on Alonso.” * * * * * Here the _romanceros_ leave him. He did not kill the king, but he made good his promise of joining the Moors in revenge for his father’s murder, and died fighting against the king. CHAPTER XXII _El Conde de Castila_ Castile formed no part of the new kingdom of Leon and was governed by its own lord. And here we come on a noticeable history of how the lion was added to the castle on the arms of Spain by the last Conde de Castila, Fernan Goncalze, the founder of the line of the present dynasty, as distinguished from that of the early Gothic kings, who died out in the person of Bernardo the Third, the last descendant of Pelayo, A.D. 999. Now King Sancho the Fat, King of Leon, A.D. 955, noticeably a heavy and lazy man, leaving much in the hands of his mother, Doña Teresa, is jealous of the power of Castila, and has joined with her brother, the King of Navarre, in a conspiracy to divide it between them, for which purpose the count is invited to Leon to attend the Cortes, where vital matters concerning that never-ending strife between the Christians and the Moors are to be considered.