Kitabı oku: «Spanish Highways and Byways», sayfa 20

That one of the Servants of Mary who showed us over the Trappist convent was a bright-eyed Spanish dame of many winters, as natural a chatterbox as ever gossiped with the neighbors in the sun. Her glee in this little opportunity for conversation was enough to wring the heart of any lover of old ladies. She walked as slowly as possible and detained us on every conceivable pretext, reaching up on her rheumatic tiptoes to pluck us red and white camellias, and pointing out, with a lingering garrulity, the hardness of the cots in the bare, cold little cells, the narrowness of the benches in the austere chapel, and, in the cheerless dining room, the floor of deep sand, in which the Bernardines kneel throughout their Friday dinner of bread and water. Longest of all, she kept us in the cemetery, all spick and span, with close-set rows of nameless graves, each with a cross shaped upon it in white seashells. The dear old soul, in her coarse blue gown, with tidy white kerchief and neatly darned black hood and veil, showed us the grave of her own sister, adding, proudly, that her four remaining sisters were all cloistered in various convents of Spain.

"All six of us nuns," she said, "but my brother – no! He has the dowries of us all and lives the life of the world. Just think! I have two nephews in Toledo. I have never seen them. My sister's grave is pretty, is it not? They let me put flowers there. Oh, there are many families in Spain like ours, where all the daughters are put into convents. Spain is a very religious country. The sons? Not so often. Sometimes, when there is a conscription, many young men become priests to escape military service but it is the women who are most devout in Spain."

And after the rustic gate was shut on the sleeping-place of the Bernardines, scarcely more silent and more dead beneath the sod than above it, she still detained us with whispered hints of distinguished Spanish ladies among those ghostly, far-off figures that, pitchfork or pruning knife in hand, would fall instantly upon their knees at the ringing of the frequent bell for prayers. Spanish ladies, too, had given this French convent many of its most costly treasures. We said good-by to our guide near an elaborate shrine of the Madonna, which a bereaved Spanish mother had erected with the graven request that the nuns pray for the soul of her beloved dead.

"Even we Servants of Mary are not allowed to talk much here," said in parting this most sociable of saints, clinging to us with a toil-roughened, brown old hand. "It is a holy life, but quiet – very quiet. I have been here forty-four years this winter. My name is Sister Solitude."

The nun whom I knew best was an exquisite little sister just back from Manila. During several months I went to her, in a Paris convent, twice or three times a week, for Spanish lessons. The reception room in which I used to await her coming shone not as with soap and water, but as with the very essence of purity. The whiteness of the long, fine curtains had something celestial about it. The only book in sight, a bundle of well-worn leaves bound in crimson plush and placed with precision in the centre of the gleaming mahogany table, was a volume of classic French sermons, – the first two being on Demons, and the next on Penance. Further than this I never read; for very punctually the slight figure, in violet skirt and bodice, with a white cross embroidered upon the breast, swept softly down the hall. A heavy purple cord and a large-beaded rosary depended from the waist. In conversation she often raised her hand to press her ring, sign of her sacred espousals, to her lips. Her type of face I often afterward saw in Spain, but never again so perfect. Her complexion was the richest southern brown, the eyes brightening in excitement to vivid, flashing black. The eyebrows, luxuriant even to heaviness, were nevertheless delicately outlined, and the straight line of the white band emphasized their graceful arch. The nose was massive for a woman's face, and there was a slight shading of hair upon the upper lip. The mouth and chin, though so daintily moulded, were strong. Not the meek, religious droop of the eyelids could mask the fire, vigor, vitality, intensity, that lay stored like so much electricity behind the tranquil convent look.

We would go for the lesson to a severe little chamber, whose only ornament was a crucifix of olive wood fastened against the wall. Then how those velvet eyes would glow and sparkle in the eagerness of rushing speech! The little sister loved to tell of her Manila experience, almost a welcome break, I fancied, in the monotonous peace of cloister life. All that Sunday morning, when the battle was on, the nuns maintained their customary services, hearing above their prayers and chants and the solemn diapason of the organ, the boom, boom, boom of our wicked American cannon. For, according to this naive historian, Catholic Spain, best beloved of Our Lady among the nations of the earth, had labored long in the Philippines to Christianize the heathen, when suddenly, in the midst of those pious labors with which she was too preoccupied to think of fitting out men-of-war and drilling gunners, a pirate fleet bore down upon her and overthrew at once the Spanish banner and the Holy Cross. Tears sparkled through flame as the hermanita told of her beautiful convent home, now half demolished. The sisters did not abandon it until six weeks after the battle, but as the nunnery stood outside the city walls, their superior judged it no safe abode for Spanish ladies, and ordered them away. The French consul arranged for their transport to Hongkong on a dirty little vessel, where they had to stay on deck, the twenty-seven of them, during their week's voyage, suffering from lack of proper shelter and especially from thirst, the water supply running short the second day out. But all this was joy of martyrdom.

"Is not Hongkong a very strange city?" I asked. "Did it seem to you more like Manila than like Paris and Madrid?"

The little sister's voice was touched with prompt rebuke.

"You speak after the fashion of the world. All cities look alike to us. Ours is the life of the convent. It matters nothing where the convent stands."

Stimulated by reproof, I waxed impertinent. "Not even if it stands within range of the guns? Now, truly, truly, were you not the least bit frightened that morning of the battle?"

The sunny southern smile was a fleeting one, and left a reminiscent shadow in the eyes.

"Frightened? Oh, no! There were no guns between us and Paradise. From early dawn we heard the firing, and hour after hour we knelt before the altar and prayed to the Mother of God to comfort the souls of the brave men who were dying for la patria; but we were not frightened."

There were strange jostlings of ideas in that cloistered cell, especially when the dusk had stolen in between our bending faces and the Spanish page.

Once we talked of suicide. That morning it had been a wealthy young Parisian who had paid its daily tribute to the Seine.

"What a horror!" gasped the little sister, clasping her slender hands against her breast. "It is a mortal sin. And how foolish! For if life is hard to bear, surely perdition is harder."

"It does not seem to me so strange in case of the poor," I responded, waiving theology. "But a rich man, though his own happiness fails, has still the power of making others happy."

"Ah, but I understand!" cried Little Manila, her eyes like stars in the dimness. "The devil does not see truth as the blessed spirits do, but sees falsehoods even as the world. And so in his blindness he believes the soul of a rich man more precious than the souls of the poor, and tempts the rich man more than others. Yet when the devil has that soul, will he find it made of gold?"

One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America.

"Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat – ah, in fire and blood! Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense."

"And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh.

The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable.

She was of a titled family and had passed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a corrida de toros, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns.

One day a mischievous impulse led me to inquire, in connection with a chat about the Escorial, "And how do you like Philip II?"

The black eyes shot one ray of sympathetic merriment, but the Spaniard and the nun were on their guard.

"He was a very good Catholic," she replied demurely.

"So was Isabel la Católica," I responded. "But don't you think she may have been a trifle more agreeable?"

"Perhaps she was a little more simpática," admitted the hermanita, but that was her utmost concession. She would not even allow that Philip had a sorry end.

"If his body groaned, his soul was communing with the Blessed Saints and paid no heed."

At the corner of the street which led under the great garden wall to the heavily barred gate of the convent was a flower-stand. The shrewd, swift-tongued Madame in charge well knew the look of the unwary, and usually succeeded in selling me a cluster of drooping blossoms at twice the value of the fresh, throwing in an extra leaf or stem at the close of the bargain with an air of prodigal benevolence. The handful of flowers would be smilingly accepted by the little sister, but instantly laid aside nor favored with glance or touch until the close of the visit, when they would be lifted again with a winsome word of acknowledgment and carried away, probably to spend their sweetness at the marble feet of the Virgin. In vain I tried to coax from this scorner of God's earth some sign of pleasure in the flowers themselves.

"Don't you care for tea-roses?" "Ah, el mundo pasa. But their color is exquisite."

Yet her eyes did not turn to the poor posy for the two hours following.

"This mignonette has only the grace of sweetness."

"It is a delicate scent, but it will not last. El mundo pasa."

She held the sprays at arm's length for a moment, and then laid them down on a mantel at the farther end of the room.

"I am sorry these violets are not fresher."

"But no! The touch of Time has not yet found them. Still, it is only a question of to-morrow. El mundo pasa."

"Yes, the world passes. But is it not good while it lasts?"

"The world good! No, no, and a thousand times no. Behold it now at the end of the nineteenth century, – wars and sorrows and bitter discontents, evil deeds and evil passions everywhere. Do you see the peace of Christ in the faces on the Paris streets? The blossoms of this earth, the pleasures of this world, the affections of this life, all have the taste of death. But here in God's own garden we live even now His everlasting life."

"You are always glad of your choice? You never miss the friends of your childhood?"

"Glad, glad, glad. Glad of my choice. Glad to see no more the faces of father and mother. And for them, too, it is great joy. For Catholic parents it is supreme delight to give up their children to the Holy Church. The ways of the world are full of slippery places, but when they leave us here, they know that our feet are set on the very threshold of heaven."

Sometimes the slight form shivered in the violet habit, and the dark foreign face looked out with touching weariness from its frame of soft white folds.

"You are cold? You are tired? Will you take my cloak? Were the children troublesome to-day?"

It was always the same answer: "No importa. No importa. It matters not. Our life is not the life of flesh and blood."

And indeed, as I saw her in the Christmas service among the other Spanish sisters, those lovely figures in white and violet making obeisance before the altar until their veiled foreheads almost touched the pavement, bowing and rising again with the music like a field of lilies swaying in the breeze, I felt that she was already a being of another world, before she had known this. Over her had been chanted the prayers for the dead. The strange ceremony of taking the veil had been her burial rite. The convent seemed a ghost land between earth and heaven.

My hermanita belonged to one of the teaching orders, and despite the strange blanks in her knowledge, for secular lore had been, so far as possible, excluded from her education, she was representative of the finer and more intelligent class of Spanish nuns. In Granada I heard of the nuns chiefly as the makers of those delicious dulces, sugared fruits, which were indispensable to a child's saint-day, and there I was taught the scoffing epitaph: —

 
"Here lies Sister Claribel,
Who made sweetmeats very well,
And passed her life in pious follies,
Such as dressing waxen dollies."
 

To the spinster outside the nunnery Spain has little to offer. Small heed is paid to her except by St. Elias, who, on one day of Holy Week, walks about all Seville with a pen in his hand, peering up at the balconies and making note of the old maids. Since Andalusia expresses the theory of counterparts by saying, "Every one has somewhere in the world his half orange," the spinster can hardly hope for a well-rounded life. Careers are not open to her. There are "advanced women" in Spain, the most eminent being Emelia Pardo Bazan, novelist, lecturer, editor, who advocates for women equal educational and political privileges with men, but who has not yet succeeded in opening the doors. The voice of Spanish women, nevertheless, is sometimes heard by Spanish statesmen, as when delegation after delegation of señoras who had relatives held as prisoners by the Filipinos invaded the senate-house with petitions until they could no longer be ignored.

A more thorough and liberal education for Spanish women is the pressing need to-day. There is, of course, great lack of primary schooling. A girl in her late teens, wearing the prettiest of embroidered aprons and with the reddest of roses in her hair, once appealed to me in Toledo for help. She had been sent from a confectioner's to deliver a tray of wheaten rolls at a given address, and she could read neither the names of streets nor the numbers of houses. But the higher education will carry the lower with it. Spain is degenerate in this regard. The Moors used to have at Cordova an academy for girls, where science, mathematics, and history were taught. Schools for Spanish girls at present impart little more than reading and writing, needle-work, the catechism, the four rules of arithmetic, and some slight notion of geography. French and music, recognized accomplishments, are learned by daughters of the privileged class from their governesses or in the convents. Missionary work in Spain has largely concerned itself with the educational question, and Mrs. Gulick's project for the establishment of a woman's college in Madrid, a college without distinction of creed, is the fruit of long experience. Little by little she has proven the intellectual ability of Spanish girls. She established the International Institute at San Sebastian, secured State examination for her niñas and State recognition of their eminent success, and even won for a few of them admission to the University of Madrid, where they maintained the highest rank throughout the course. All that Spanish girls need is opportunity.

But if the señoritas are so charming now, with their roses and their graces and their fans, why not leave them as they are, a page of mediæval poetry in this strenuous modern world? If only they were dolls outright and did not suffer so! When life goes hard with these high-spirited, incapable creatures, it goes terribly hard. I can see yet the tears scorch in the proud eyes of three undowered sisters, slaving at their one art of embroidery from early till late for the miserable pittance that it brought them. "We shall rest when we are dead," said the youngest. The absolute lack of future for these brave, sensitive girls, well-born, well-bred, naturally as keen as the keenest, but more ignorant, in matters of common education, than the children of our lowest grammar grade, is heart-breaking. If such girls were stupid, shallow, coarse, it would be easier; but the Spanish type is finely strung. Once I saw an impulsive beauty fly into that gust of angry passion which Spaniards term the rabia española. A clumsy, well-intentioned young Austrian had said a teasing word, and in the fraction of a second the girl, overwrought with secret toils and anxieties, was in a tempest of tears; but the wrath that blazed across them burned the offender crimson. The poor fellow sent for his case of choice Asturian cider, cooling in the balcony, read the evening news aloud and discoursed on the value of self-control, but not even these tactful attentions could undo, for that evening at least, the work of his blundering jest. The girl flashed away to her chamber, her handkerchief bitten through and through, and the quick fierce sound of her sobs came to me across the hall deep into the night.

Wandering over Spain I found everywhere these winning, vivid, helpless girls, versed in needlework and social graces, but knowing next to nothing of history, literature, science, all that pertains to intellectual culture. Some were hungry to learn. More did not dream of the world of thought as a possible world for them. Among these it was delightful to meet, scattered like precious seed throughout the Peninsula, the graduates of the International Institute. So far as a stranger could see, education had enhanced in them the Spanish radiance and charm, while arming these with wisdom, power, and resource.

XXII
ACROSS THE BASQUE PROVINCES

 
"The Oak Tree of Guernica
Within its foliage green
Embraces the bright honor
Of all the Basque demesne.
For this we count thee holy,
Our ancient seal and sign;
The fibres of our freedom
Are interlaced with thine.
 
 
"Castile's most haughty tyrants
Beneath thy solemn shade
Have sworn to keep the charter
Our fearless fathers made;
For noble on our mountains
Is he who yokes the ox,
And equal to a monarch
The shepherd of the flocks."
 

– National Song of the Basques.

It did not seem to me historically respectful to take leave of Spain without having made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago. A dauntless friend crossed the sea to bear me company. Hygienic pilgrim that she is, she came equipped not with cockle shells and sandal shoon, but with sleeping bags, coffee, and cereals. Many a morning, in traversing those northern provinces, where the scenery was better than the breakfast, we blessed her boxes of "grape nuts," and many a night, doomed to penitential beds, we were thankful to intrench ourselves against the stings and arrows of outrageous insects in those spacious linen bags, that gather close about the neck, or, when dangers thicken, above the head, leaving only a loophole for the breath.

Our point of departure was that city of nature's fancy-work, San Sebastian. Then, in the early half of July, it was all alive with expectancy, looking every day for the coming of the Court. It is reputed to be the cleanest town of the Peninsula, and is, in truth, as bright as a wave-washed pebble. Nevertheless, it is a favorite waltz hall of the fleas, which shamelessly obtrude themselves even into conversation.

The chief summer industry of San Sebastian is sea-bathing. The soldiers begin it at six o'clock in the morning, marching by regiments down to the Concha, clearing for action, and striking out into the gentle surf, all in simultaneous obedience to successive words of command. Some two hours later teams of oxen draw scores of jaunty bathing cars down near the white lip of this opalescent shell of water, and there the long day through all ages, sizes, and ranks of humanity sport in the curling foam or swim far out into the sparkling bay.

San Sebastian is the capital of Guipúzcoa, one of the three Basque provinces. These lie among the Cantabrian mountains, and are delightfully picturesque with wheat-growing valleys and well-wooded heights. As the train wandered on, in its pensive Spanish fashion, we found ourselves now in Scotland, in a beautiful waste of heather and gorse, now amid the English ivy and hawthorn, hearing the song of the English robin, and now in our own New England, with the hilly reaches of apple orchards and the fields upon fields of tasselled Indian maize.

The Basques are a thrifty folk, and have cultivated their scant acres to the utmost. The valleys are planted with corn, the lower hills are ridged and terraced for a variety of crops. Above are walnuts and chestnuts, and the flintiest summits serve for pasturage. It was curious to see men at work on those steep slopes that had been scooped out into a succession of narrow shelves, and more strange yet to catch glimpses of peasants ploughing the very mountain top, picturesque figures against the sky.

The reaping is of the cleanest. The harvest fields have a neat, scoured look, as if the women had been over them with scrubbing brushes. Yet this utilitarian soil admits of oaks and beeches, ferns and clover, morning glories, dandelions, pimpernel, and daisies.

All that sunny morning the train swung us blithely on from one charm of the eyes to another – from a ruined watch-tower, where red-handed Carlists had crouched, to a bright-kerchiefed maiden singing amid her beehives; from a range of abrupt peaks, cleft by deep gorges, to sycamore-shaded byways and poplar-bordered streams; from a village graveyard, the pathetic little parallelogram enclosed in high gray walls and dim with cypress shadows, to a tumbling, madcap torrent spanned by a time-gnawed Roman arch. Shooting the heart of some black hill, the train would run out on a mere ledge above a valley hamlet, and from pure inquisitiveness, apparently, ramble all around the circle, peering down from every point of view on the cluster of great, patriarchal houses, sometimes of timber and plaster, more often of stone, where whole clans dwell together under the same red-tiled roof. Queer old houses these, occasionally topped with blue chimneys, and now and then with a fantastic coat of arms sculptured over the door, or a fresco of saints and devils blazoned all across the front. Sometimes freshly whitewashed, these Basque houses have more often a weather-worn, dingy look, but, however black the timbers, lines of clean linen flutter airily from roofs and balconies.

They are a decent, self-respecting, prosperous people, these Basque mountaineers, of whose history my companion told me stirring tales. They are supposed, though not without dispute, to be the oldest race in Europe, descendants of those original Iberians whom the westward-trooping Aryans drove into the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. They have their own language, of Asiatic type. They themselves believe that it was spoken in the Garden of Eden. There are some twenty-five dialects of the Vascuense, and it is so difficult for foreigners that even George Borrow spoke it "with considerable hesitation," and one exhausted student, abandoning the struggle, declared that the words were all "written Solomon and pronounced Nebuchadnezzar." The Basques attribute their hardy virtues to the crabbedness of their speech, telling how the devil, after slaving over their vocabulary for seven years, had succeeded in learning only three words, and threw up his lesson in a pet, so that to this day he remains unable to meddle with their peasant piety. What little literature there is in the Basque language is naturally of the popular cast – hero songs, dancing songs, dirges, hymns, and folk-lore.

The Basques are noted for their passionate love of liberty. The sturdy peasant is lord of his own rugged farm, and insists on tilling it in his own primitive way, breaking the soil with rude mattock more often than with plough. An English engineer, laying a railroad through Alava, tried his best to make his men abandon their slow, laborious method of carrying the earth in baskets on their heads. He finally had all the baskets removed by night, and wheelbarrows left in their places. But the unalterable Basques set the loaded wheelbarrows on their heads, and staggered about beneath these awkward burdens until, for very shame, he had to give them back their baskets.

The peasant drives over the mountain roads in a ponderous ox-cart, with two clumsy disks of wood for wheels. The platform is wrought of rough-hewn beams, five or seven, the middle one running forward to serve as pole. All the structure, except the iron tires and nails, is of wood, and the solid wooden wheels, as the massive axle to which they are riveted turns over and over, make a most horrible squeaking. It is a sound dear to the peasantry, for they believe the oxen like it, and, moreover, that it frightens away the devil; but once upon a time a town of advanced views voted a fine of five dollars for any man who should bring this musical abomination within its limits. Thereupon a freeborn Basque rose with the dawn, selected his best carved oaken yoke, draped the red-stained sheepskin a trifle more carefully than usual above the patient eyes of his great smooth oxen, and took his way, "squeakity-squeak, squeakity-squeak," straight to the door of the Ayuntamiento, city hall, where he paid his twenty-five pesetas, and then devoted the rest of the day to driving all about the streets, squeaking out his money's worth. This is no servile temper, and it was not until our own generation that the dearly cherished liberties of the Basques were wrested away.

These warders of the Pyrenees, for the Basques of Navarre and those now known as French Basques must not be forgotten, did good service in helping the Visigoths beat back the northward-pressing Moors and the southward-pressing Franks; but when the Basque provinces of Spain were incorporated with Leon and Navarre, and later with Castile, the mountaineers stood stubbornly for their fuéros, or peculiar rights.

My comrade's lecture had reached this point, when, finding ourselves at Amorebieta, in the Province of Vizcaya, or Biscay, we suddenly descended from the train, and handed our bags to an honest Basque porter, who deposited them on the floor of an open waiting room, in full reach of an honest Basque population. For ourselves, we turned our faces toward the centre of Vizcayan glory, the famous Tree of Guernica. We entered a rustic train, that seemed entirely undecided which way to go. The station agent blew a little tin horn, green meadows and wattled fences began to glide past the car windows, and the interrupted discourse was resumed.

The lawmakers of Vizcaya were duly chosen by their fellow-nobles, for every Basque held the rank of hidalgo, or "son of somebody." The deputies met every two years in the village of Guernica, sitting on stone benches in the open air beneath the sacred oak, and there elected the Señores de Vizcaya. Even the kings of Spain were allowed no grander title, but had to come to the Tree of Guernica, at first in person, later by deputy, and there swear to observe the fuéros. To this green shadow came the peasant from his lonely farm-house, high on the mountainside, to answer before his peers to such charges as might be brought against him; for within the sanctuary of his home the law could lay no hand on him or his.

It was the Carlist wars that changed all this. The fuéros, of which a list dating from 1342 is still extant, granted the Basque provinces a Republican Constitution that almost realized an ideal democracy, with immunity from taxes save for their own needs, and from military service beyond their own boundaries. But when the dynastic strife broke out, the Basques put on the white cap of Don Carlos and bore the brunt of the conflict. We had already passed through Vergara, where, in 1839, Espartero ended the first Carlist war by a treaty which compelled the Basques to lay down their arms. But the cost of this rebellion was paid in blood. Their political status was practically unaffected. At the close of the second Carlist war, in 1876, Alfonso XII signalized his victory by meting out to them a terrible punishment, abrogating the precious fuéros that the Tree of Guernica had guarded for so many centuries. The Government imposed, moreover, its salt and tobacco monopolies, and made the Basques subject to military conscription. At every station we saw Spain's Vizcayan soldiers, red-capped and red-trousered, with blue-belted frock coats, under which beat hearts of doubtful loyalty. The son of Alfonso XII will have to reckon with the Basques, when the third Carlist war shall be declared, but it may be doubted whether the fuéros, which Don Carlos, of course, promises to restore, will ever come home to nest again in the Guernica Oak.

My erudite fellow-vagabond was just pointing out the typical shape of the Basque head, with its broad forehead, long, narrowing face, curved nose, and pointed chin, when we reached Guernica. Such a sweet and tranquil village as it is, set in the beauty of the hills, with the dignity and pathos of its history pervading every hushed, old-fashioned street! The guide, whom two affable ladies, sharers of our carriage in the little picnic train, had taken pains to look up for us at the station, was not, we judged, a favorable specimen of the haughty Basque hidalgo. He was a dull, mumbling, slouchy lad, who sunk his voice to an awed whisper as we passed the escutcheon-carved palace of a count. But he led us by pleasant ways to the modern Casa de Juntas, or Senate House, where we were shown the assembly room, with its altar for mass, the library and other apartments, together with the portraits of the twenty-six first Señores de Vizcaya, from Lope the Pirate, who forced back the invading Galicians in 840, to the Infante Don Juan, under whom the Basque provinces were finally incorporated with Castile.