In the month of May the Admiral was well enough at last to undertake the journey to Segovia.  He travelled on a mule, and was accompanied by his brother Bartholomew and his son Ferdinand.  When he reached the Court he found the King civil and outwardly attentive to his recitals, but apparently content with a show of civility and outward attention.  Columbus was becoming really a nuisance; that is the melancholy truth.  The King had his own affairs to attend to; he was already meditating a second marriage, and thinking of the young bride he was to bring home to the vacant place of Isabella; and the very iteration of Columbus’s complaints and demands had made them lose all significance for the King.  He waved them aside with polite and empty promises, as people do the demands of importunate children; and finally, to appease the Admiral and to get rid of the intolerable nuisance of his applications, he referred the whole question, first to Archbishop Dea, and then to the body of councillors which had been appointed to interpret Queen Isabella’s will.  The whole question at issue was whether or not the original agreement with Columbus, which had been made before his discoveries, should be carried out.  The King, who had foolishly subscribed to it simply as a matter of form, never believing that anything much could come of it, was determined that it should not be carried out, as it would give Columbus a wealth and power to which no mere subject of a crown was entitled.  The Admiral held fast to his privileges; the only thing that he would consent to submit to arbitration was the question of his revenues; but his titles and territorial authorities he absolutely stuck to.  Of course the council did exactly what the King had done.  They talked about the thing a great deal, but they did nothing.  Columbus was an invalid and broken man, who might die any day, and it was obviously to their interest to gain time by discussion and delay—­a cruel game for our Christopher, who knew his days on earth to be numbered, and who struggled in that web of time in which mortals try to hurry the events of the present and delay the events of the future.  Meanwhile Philip of Austria and his wife Juana, Isabella’s daughter, had arrived from Flanders to assume the crown of Castile, which Isabella had bequeathed to them.  Columbus saw a chance for himself in this coming change, and he sent Bartholomew as an envoy to greet the new Sovereigns, and to enlist their services on the Admiral’s behalf.  Bartholomew was very well received, but he was too late to be of use to the Admiral, whom he never saw again; and this is our farewell to Bartholomew, who passes out of our narrative here.  He went to Rome after Christopher’s death on a mission to the Pope concerning some fresh voyages of discovery; and in 1508 he made, so far as we know, his one excursion into romance, when he assisted at the production of an illegitimate little girl—­his only descendant.  He returned to Espanola under the governorship of his nephew Diego, and died there in 1514 —­stern, valiant, brotherly soul, whose devotion to Christopher must be for ever remembered and honoured with the name of the Admiral.