A riotous band still remained about the king for midnight adventure, to spoil churches, sack convents, waylay travellers, fight duels, and guzzle good Val de Peñas within the gilded walls of the Alcazar. But even the terrified nobles by-and-by fall away from Don Pedro, who has hardened into such a tyrant men fly from him as from a fiend. CHAPTER XVII Don Enrique again Crowned King--Flight of Don Pedro The time has now come that Don Pedro knows not where to turn. All Spain is divided by civil war. Seville, his own Seville, is full of conspirators, awaiting the arrival of Don Enrique to declare for him; and the Black Prince, on whom he so confidently reckoned, remains absolutely deaf to his appeals. Even were he willing to repent, he is for ever shut out from salvation in this world and the next. No church is open to him; no priest, however base, dare shrive him for his sins. He is as one accursed. What those words were, traced by the dying hand of Blanche, no man yet knows--not his closest friends, and they are few; but ever since a strange gloom clings to him which never lifts, and in his sleep he wrestles as in throes of agony. Events succeed each other with dramatic rapidity. His ally, Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, alarmed at the passage of the French, breaks the alliance and joins with the King of Aragon against him. Enrique, worshipped by his followers, is again solemnly crowned within the ancient capital of Burgos, in that lovely cathedral, embroidered like a state robe, lately completed, his _padrino_ and godfather being the great warrior Du Guesclin, the first commander of the age, although it is said he can neither read nor write. The Comte de la Marche, cousin of Blanche, and also of the House of Bourbon, represents the King of France, and stands on his right hand on the steps of the high altar, under that glorious window which floods the space with light, along with marshals and generals, Castilian and French, condes and great lords of Aragon, and a lordly show of knights and _caballeros_ from Leon and Andalusia. The troops are, as usual in such levies, mixed in nationalities and wanting in unity and discipline, but commanded by Du Guesclin who dares contemplate defeat? “Remember, most valiant constable,” had said to him his master Charles, the King of France, son of the unfortunate John, prisoner in England, “I shall owe you more than if you gained me a province, if you destroy the murderer of Blanche.” Nor should this command be forgotten in Du Guesclin’s justification later on; Charles was his liege lord; he had issued his orders, and in the feudal spirit of the age, at _any price_ Du Guesclin is bound to obey. * * * * *