Romantic Spain: A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. I)O'Shea, John Augustus
History
Romantic Spain: A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. I)
O'Shea, John Augustus
Spain -- Description and travel
betrayed, and one morning, as he was celebrating Divine Service, his
church was entered by a party of soldiers who waited at the foot of the
altar until he had finished the ceremony.
"In the name of the law, follow me," said the officer in command; "I
have a warrant for your arrest from Madrid."
"Very well," said the Cura; "but surely you will allow me to breakfast
first, unless they ordered you to take me captive on an empty stomach."
This was murmured in a tone so dulcet and injured that the officer
hastened to assure the clergyman that he might breakfast, and
accompanied him to the presbytery.
"Sin ceremonia," said the Cura, "will you condescend to share my meal?"
"Thanks, very much."
The priest entered the house; the soldiers waited outside, and argued
that it was an infernal shame and a piece of tyranny on the part of Prim
and the rest to have ordered such a harmless, nice man to be clapped
into gaol. Presently a peasant with a basket of fruit on his head came
out of the house. The soldiers waited long. They waited in vain. The
peasant and the priest were one and the same.
For two years Santa Cruz wandered in the mountains and in France, was
"on his keeping," as they say in Munster, but was finally arrested and
interned at Nantes, by the French authorities. A characteristic story
was related of his arrest. He was stopped on the bridge between St. Jean
de Luz and Cibour by two gendarmes.
"Your papers?" demanded one.
"My papers! Wait till I look for them," answered Santa Cruz, not in the
least disconcerted.
He fumbled in his pockets, turned them inside out, tapped the lining of
his clothes, searched high and low, pretending to be very much
astonished that he could not discover the document; and, suddenly, while
the gendarmes, thrown off their guard, were speaking to one another,
made a spring sideways, and was off like a bolt from a bow, the agents
of authority pounding after him in their clumsy jack-boots. The chase
lasted an hour, to the intense amusement of all the idlers of the town;
but a peasant, not grasping the true state of affairs, clutched the
panting Santa Cruz and held him until the arrival of the gendarmes.
In 1872, when Don Carlos again made appeal to arms, Santa Cruz succeeded
in evading notice, and crossing the frontier, attached himself as
chaplain to the band of Recondo. The Pretendiente himself entered by the
pass of Vera, but was surprised at Oroquieta, in Navarre, by General
Moriones, who defeated him on the 4th of May, and withered his hopes for
that time. The convention of Amorovieta followed, arms were given up by
thousands, and the factions, or partidas, dispersed to their homes.
Santa Cruz returned to France. After a week's interval he re-entered
Spain, and joined a body of the insurgents who still ranged the hills in
Guipúzcoa. One day he missed his companions in a forced march, and fell
into an ambuscade.
"I am Santa Cruz," he said to the soldiers, unquailingly, "do what you
will with me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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