The Spanish Brothers

XXXVI “The Horrible and Tremendous Spectacle.”[#]

  “All have passed:
The fearful, and the desperate, and the strong.
Some like the barque that rushes with the blast;
Some like the leaf borne tremblingly along;
And some like men who have but one more field
To fight, and then may slumber on their shield—
Therefore they arm in hope.”

—Hemans.

[#] So called by the Inquisitor, De Pegna.

At earliest dawn next morning, Juan established himself in an upper room of one of the high houses which overlooked the gate of the Triana. He had hired it from the owners for the purpose, stipulating for sole possession and perfect loneliness.

At sunrise the great Cathedral bell tolled out solemnly, and all the bells in the city responded. Through the crowd, which had already gathered in the street, richly dressed citizens were threading their way on foot. He knew they were those who, out of zeal for the faith, had volunteered to act as patrinos, or god-fathers, to the prisoners, walking beside them in the procession. Amongst them he recognized his cousins, Don Manuel and Don Balthazar. They were all admitted into the castle by a private door.

Ere long the great gate was flung open. Juan’s eyes were rivetted to the spot. There was a sound of singing, sweet and low, as of childish voices; for the first to issue from those gloomy portals were the boys of the College of Doctrine, dressed in white surplices, and chanting litanies to the saints. Clear and full at intervals rose from their lips the “Ora pro nobis” of the response; and tears gathered unconsciously in the eyes of Juan at the old familiar words.

In great contrast with the white-robed children came the next in order. Juan drew his breath hard, for here were the penitents: pale, melancholy faces, “ghastly and disconsolate beyond what can be imagined;”[#] forms clothed in black, without sleeves, and barefooted—hands carrying extinguished tapers.

[#] Report of De Pegna.

Those who walked foremost in the procession had only been convicted of such minor offences as blasphemy, sorcery, or polygamy. But by-and-by there came others, wearing ugly sanbenitos—yellow, with red crosses—and conical paper mitres on their heads. Juan’s eye kindled with intenser interest; for he knew that these were Lutherans. Not without a wild dream—hope, perhaps—that the near approach of death might have subdued his brother’s fortitude, did he scan in turn every mournful face. There was Luis D’Abrego, the illuminator of church books; there, walking long afterwards, as far more guilty, was Medel D’Espinosa, the dealer in embroidery, who had received the Testaments brought by Juliano. There were many others of much higher rank, with whom he was well acquainted. Altogether more than eighty in number, the long and melancholy train swept by, every man or woman attended by two monks and a patrino. But Carlos was not amongst them.

Then came the great Cross of the Inquisition; the face turned towards the penitent, the back to the impenitent—those devoted to the death of fire. And now Juan’s breath came and went—his lips trembled; all his soul was in his eager, straining eyes Now first he saw the hideous zamarra—a black robe, painted all over with saffron-coloured flames, into which devils and serpents, rudely represented, were thrusting the impenitent heretic. A paper crown, or carroza, similarly adorned, covered the victim’s head. But the face of the wearer was unknown to Juan. He was a poor artizan—Juan de Leon by name—who had made his escape by flight, but had been afterwards apprehended in the Low Countries. Torture and cruel imprisonment had almost killed him already; but his heart was strong to suffer for the Lord he loved, and though the pallor of death was on his cheek, there was no fear there.

But the countenances of those that followed Juan knew too well. Never afterwards could he exactly recall the order in which they walked; yet every individual face stamped itself indelibly on his memory. He would carry those looks in his heart until his dying hour.

No less than four of the victims wore the white tunic and brown mantle of St. Jerome. One of these was an old man—leaning on his staff for very age, but with joy and confidence beaming in his countenance. The white locks, from which Garçias Ariâs had gained the name of Doctor Blanco, had been shorn away; but Juan easily recognized the waverer of past days, now strengthened with all might, according to the glorious power of Him whom at last he had learned to trust. The accomplished Cristobal D’Arellano, and Fernando de San Juan, Master of the College of Doctrine, followed calm and dauntless. Steadfast, too, though not without a little natural shrinking from the doom of fire, was a mere youth—Juan Crisostomo.

Then came one clad in a doctor’s robe, with the step of a conqueror and the mien of a king. As he issued from the Triana he chanted, in a clear and steady voice, the words of the Hundred and ninth Psalm: “Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise; for the mouth of the ungodly, yea, the mouth of the deceitful, is opened upon me: and they have spoken against me with false tongues. They compassed me about also with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause.... Help me, O Lord my God: O save me according to thy mercy; and they shall know how that this is thine hand, and that thou, Lord, hast done it. Though they curse, yet bless thou.” So died away the voice of Juan Gonsalez, one of the noblest of Christ’s noble band of witnesses in Spain.

All these were arrayed in the garments of their ecclesiastical orders, to be solemnly degraded on the scaffold in the Square of St. Francis. But there followed one already in the full infamy, or glory, of the zamarra and carroza, with painted flames and demons;—with a thrill of emotion, Juan recognized his friend and teacher, Cristobal Losada—looking calm and fearless—a hero marching to his last battle, conquering and to conquer.

Yet even that face soon faded from Juan’s thoughts. For there walked in that gloomy death procession six females—persons of rank; nearly all of them young and beautiful, but worn by imprisonment, and more than one amongst them maimed by torture. Yet if man was cruel, Christ, for whom they suffered, was pitiful. Their countenances, calm and even radiant, revealed the hidden power by which they were sustained. Their names—which deserve a place beside those of the women of old who were last at his cross and first beside his open sepulchre—were, Doña Isabella de Baena, in whose house the church was wont to meet; the two sisters of Juan Gonsalez; Doña Maria de Virves; Doña Maria de Cornel; and, last of all, Doña Maria de Bohorques, whose face shone as the first martyr’s, looking up into heaven. She alone, of all the female martyr band, appeared wearing the gag, an honour due to her heroic efforts to console and sustain her companions in the court of the Triana.

Juan’s brave heart well-nigh burst with impotent, indignant anguish. “Ay de mi, my Spain!” he cried; “thou seest these things, and endurest them. Lucifer, son of the morning, thou art fallen—fallen from thy high place amongst the nations.”

It was true. From the man, or nation, “that hath not,” shall be taken “even that which he seemeth to have.” Had the spirit of chivalry, Spain’s boast and pride, been faithful to its own dim light, it might even then have saved Spain. But its light became darkness; its trust was betrayed into the hand of superstition. Therefore, in the just judgment of God, its own degradation quickly followed. Spain’s chivalry lost gradually all that was genuine, all that was noble in it; until it became only a faint and ghastly mockery, a sign of corruption, like the phosphoric light that flickers above the grave.

Absorbed in his bitter thoughts, Juan well-nigh missed the last of the doomed ones—last because highest in worldly rank. Sad and slow, with eyes bent down, Don Juan Ponce de Leon walked along. The flames on his zamarra were reversed; poor symbol of the poor mercy for which he sold his joy and triumph and dimmed the brightness of his martyr crown. Yet surely he did not lose the glad welcome that awaited him at the close of that terrible day; nor the right to say, with the erring restored apostle, “Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee.”

All the living victims had passed now. And Don Carlos Alvarez was not amongst them. Juan breathed a sigh of relief; but not yet did his straining eyes relax their gaze. For Rome’s vengeance reached even to the grave. Next, there were borne along the statues of those who had died in heresy, robed in the hideous zamarra, and followed by black chests containing their bones to be burned.

Not there!—No—not there! At last Juan’s trembling hands let go the framework of the window to which they had been clinging; and, the intense strain over, he fell back exhausted.

The stately pageant swept by, unwatched by him. He never saw, what all Seville was gazing on with admiration, the grand procession of the judges and counsellors of the city, in their robes of office; the chapter of the Cathedral; the long slow train of priests and monks that followed. And then, in a space left empty out of reverence, the great green standard of the Inquisition was borne aloft, and over it a gilded crucifix. Then came the Inquisitors themselves, in their splendid official dresses. And lastly, on horseback and in gorgeous apparel, the familiars of the Inquisition.

It was well that Juan’s eyes were turned from that sight. What avails it for lips white with passion to heap wild curses on the heads of those for whom God’s curse already “waits in calm shadow,” until the day of reckoning be fully come? Curses, after all, are weapons dangerous to use, and apt to pierce the hand that wields them.

His first feeling was one of intense relief, almost of joy. He had escaped the maddening torture of seeing his brother dragged before his eyes to the death of anguish and shame. But to that succeeded the bitter thought, growing soon into full, mournful conviction, “I shall see his face no more on earth. He is dead—or dying.”

Yet that day the deep, strong current of his brotherly love was crossed by another tide of emotion. Those heroic men and women, whom he watched as they passed along so calmly to their doom, had he no bond of sympathy with them? Was it so long since he had pressed Losada’s hand in grateful friendship, and thanked Doña Isabella de Baena for the teaching received beneath her roof? With a thrill of keen and sudden shame the gallant soldier saw himself a recreant, who had flaunted his gay uniform on the parade and at the field-day, but when the hour of conflict came, had stepped aside, and let the sword and the bullet find out braver and truer hearts.

He could not die thus for his faith. On the contrary, it cost him but little to conceal it, to live in every respect like an orthodox Catholic. What, then, had they which he had not? Something that enabled his young brother—the boy who used to weep for a blow—to stand and look fearless in the face of a horrible death. Something that enabled even poor, wild, passionate Gonsalvo to forgive and pray for the murderers of the woman he loved. What was it?

XXXVII

Something Ended and Something Begun.

“O sweet and strange it is to think that ere this day is done.
The voice that now is speaking may be beyond the sun:
For ever and for ever with those just souls and true—
And what is life that we should mourn, why make we such ado?”

—Tennyson

Late in the afternoon of that day, Doña Inez entered her sick brother’s room. A glitter of silk, rose-coloured and black, of costly lace and of gems and gold, seemed to surround her. But as she threw aside the mantilla that partially shaded her face, and almost sank on a seat beside the bed, it was easy to see that she was very faint and weary, if not also very sick at heart.

“Santa Maria! I am tired to death,” she murmured. “The heat was killing; and the whole business interminably long.”

Gonsalvo gazed at her with eager eyes, as a man dying of thirst might gaze on one who holds a cup of water; but for a while he did not speak. At last he said, pointing to some wine that lay near, beside an untasted meal,—

“Drink, then.”

“What, my brother!” said Doña Inez, reproachfully, “you have not touched food to-day! You—so ill and weak?”

“I am a man—even still,” said Gonsalvo with a little bitterness in his tone.

Doña Inez drank, and for a few moments fanned herself in silence, distress and embarrassment in her face.

At last Gonsalvo, who had never withdrawn his eager gaze, said in a low voice,—

“Sister, remember your promise.”

“I am afraid—for you.”

“You need not,” he gasped. “Only tell me all.”

Doña Inez passed her hand wearily across her brow.

“Everything floats before me,” she said. “What with the music, and the mass, and the incense; and the crosses, and banners, and gorgeous robes; and then the taking of the oaths, and the sermon of the faith.”

“Still—you kept my charge?”

“I did, brother.” She lowered her voice. “Hard as it was, I looked at her. If it comforts you to know that, all through that long day, her face was as calm as ever I have seen it listening to Fray Constantino’s sermons, you may take that comfort to your heart When her sentence had been read, she was asked to recant; and I heard her answer rise clear and distinct, ‘I neither can nor will recant.’ Ave Maria Sanctissima! it is all a great mystery.”

There was a silence, then she resumed,—

“And Señor Cristobal Losada—” but the thought of the kind and skilful physician who had watched beside her own sick-bed, and brought back her babe from the gates of the grave, almost overcame her. Turning quickly to other victims, she went on—

“There were four monks of St. Jerome. Think of the White Doctor, that every one believed so good a man, so pious and orthodox! Another of them, Fray Cristobal D’Arellano, was accused in his sentence of some wicked words against Our Lady which, it would seem, he never said. He cried out boldly, before them all, ‘It is false! I never advanced such a blasphemy; and I am ready to prove the contrary with the Bible in my hand.’ Every one seemed too much amazed even to think of ordering him to be gagged: and, for my part, I am glad the poor wretch had his word for the last time. I cannot help wishing they had equally forgotten to silence Doctor Juan Gonzales; for it does not appear that he was speaking any blasphemy, but merely a word of comfort to a poor pale girl, his sister, as they told me. Two of them are to die with him—God help them!—Holy Saints forgive me; I forgot we were told not to pray for them,” and she crossed herself.

“Does my sister really believe that compassionate word a sin in God’s sight?”

“How am I to know? I believe whatever the Church says, of course. And surely there is enough in these days to inspire us with a pious horror of heresy. Pues,” she resumed, “there was that long and terrible ceremony of degrading from the priesthood. And yet that Gonsalez passed through it all as calm and unmoved as though he were but putting on his robes to say mass. His mother and his two brothers are still in prison, it is said, awaiting their doom. Of all the relaxed, I am told that only Don Juan Ponce de Leon showed any sign of penitence. For the sake of his noble house, one is glad to think he is not so hardened as the rest. Ay de mi! Whether it be right or wrong, I cannot help pitying their unhappy souls.”

“Pity your own soul, not theirs,” said Gonsalvo. “For I tell you Christ himself, in all his glory and majesty, at the right hand of the Father, will stand up to receive them this night, as he did to welcome St. Stephen long ago.”

“Oh, my poor brother, what dreadful words you speak! It is a mortal sin even to listen to you. Take thought, I implore you, of your own situation.”

“I have taken thought,” interrupted Gonsalvo, faintly. “But I can bear no more—just now. Leave me, I pray you, alone with God.”

“If you would even try to say an Ave!—But I fear you are ill—suffering. I do not like to leave you thus.”

“Do not heed me; I shall be better soon. And a vow is upon me that I must keep to-day.” Once more he flung the wasted hand across his face to conceal it.

Irresolute whether to go or stay, she stood for some minutes watching him silently. At length she caught a low murmur, and hoping that he prayed, she bent over him to hear. Only three words reached her ear. They were these—“Father, forgive them.”

After an interval, Gonsalvo looked up again. “I thought you were gone,” he said. “Go now, I entreat of you. But so soon as you know the end, spare not to come and tell me. For I wait for that.”

Thus entreated, Doña Inez had no choice but to leave him alone, which she did.

Evening had worn to night, and night was beginning to wear towards daybreak, when at last Don Garçia Ramirez, and those of his servants who had accompanied him to the Prado San Sebastian to see the end, returned home.

Doña Inez sat awaiting her husband in the patio. She looked pale and languid; apparently the great holiday of Seville had been anything but a joyful day to her.

Don Garçia divested himself of his cloak and sword, and dismissed the servants to their beds. But when his wife invited him to partake of the supper she had prepared, he turned upon her with very unusual ill-humour. “It is little like thy wonted wit, señora mia, to bid a man to his breakfast at midnight,” he said. Yet he drank deeply of the Xeres wine that stood on the board beside the venison pasty and the manchet bread.

At last, after long patience, Doña Inez won from his lips what she desired to hear. “Oh yes; all is over. Our Lady defend us! I have never seen such obstinacy; nor could I have believed it possible unless I had seen it. The criminals encouraged each other to the very last. Those girls, the sisters of Gonsalez, repeated their Credo at the stake; whereupon the attendant Brethren entreated them to have so much pity on their own souls as to say, ‘I believe in the Roman Catholic Church.’ They answered, ‘We will do as our brother does.’ So the gag was removed, and Doctor Juan cried aloud, ‘Add nothing to the good confession you have made already.’ But for all that, order was given to strangle them; and one of the friars told us they died in the true faith. I suppose it is not a sin to hope they did.”

After a pause, he continued, in a deeper tone, “Señor Cristobal amazed me as much as any of them. At the very stake, some of the Brethren undertook to argue with him. But seeing that we were all listening, and might hear somewhat to the hurt of our souls, they began to speak in the Latin tongue. Our physician immediately did the same. I am no scholar myself; but there were learned men there who marked every word, and one of them told me afterwards that the doomed man spoke with as much elegance and propriety as if he had been contending for an academic prize, instead of waiting for the lighting of the fire which was to consume him. This unheard-of calmness and composure, whence is it? The devil’s own work, or”——he broke off suddenly and resumed in a different tone, “Señora mia, have you thought of the hour? In Heaven’s name, let us to our beds!”

“I cannot go to rest until you tell me one thing more. Doña Maria de Bohorques?”

“Vaya, vaya! have we not had enough of it all?”

“Nay; I have made a promise. I must entreat you to tell me how Doña Maria de Bohorques met her doom.”

“With unflinching hardihood. Don Juan Ponce tried to urge her to yield somewhat. But she refused, saying it was not now a time for reasoning, and that they ought rather to meditate on the Lord’s death and passion. (They believe in that, it seems.) When she was bound to the stake, the monks and friars crowded round her, and pressed her only to repeat the Credo. She did so; but began to add some explanations, which, I suppose, were heretical. Then immediately the command was given to strangle her; and so, in one moment, while she was yet speaking, death came to her.”

“Then she did not suffer? She escaped the fire! Thank God!”

Five minutes afterwards, Doña Inez stood by her brother’s bed. He lay in the same posture, his face still shaded by his hand.

“Brother,” she said gently—“brother, all is over. She did not suffer. It was done in one moment.”

There was no answer.

“Brother, are you not glad she did not feel the fire? Can you not thank God for it? Speak to me.”

Still no answer.

He could not be asleep! Impossible!—“Speak to me, Gonsalvo!—Brother!”

She drew close to him; she touched his hand to remove it from his face. The next moment a cry of horror rang through the house. It brought the servants and Don Garçia himself to the room.

“He is dead! God and Our Lady have mercy on his soul!” said Don Garçia, after a brief examination.

“If only he had had the Holy Sacrament, I could have borne it!” said Doña Inez; and then, kneeling down beside the couch, she wept bitterly.

So passed the beggar with the King’s sons, through the golden gate into the King’s own presence-chamber. His wrecked and troublous life over, his passionate heart at rest for ever, the erring, repentant Gonsalvo found entrance into the same heaven as D’Arellano, and Gonsalez, and Losada, with their radiant martyr-crowns. In the many mansions there was a place for him, as for those heroic and triumphant ones. He wore the same robe as they—a robe washed and made white, not in the blood of martyrs, but in the blood of the Lamb.

XXXVIII

Nuera Again.

“Happy places have grown holy;
  If ye went where once ye went,
Only tears would fall down slowly.
  As at solemn Sacrament
Household names, that used to flutter
  Through your laughter unawares,
God’s divine one ye can utter
  With less trembling in your prayers.”

—E. B. Browning

A chill and dreary torpor stole over Juan’s fiery spirit after the Auto. The settled conviction that his brother was dead took possession of his mind. Moreover, his soul had lost its hold upon the faith which he once embraced so warmly. He had consciously ceased to be true to his best convictions, and those convictions, in turn, had ceased to support him. His confidence in himself, his trust in his own heart, had been shaken to its foundations. And he was very far from having gained in its stead that strong confidence in God which would have infinitely more than counter-balanced its loss.

Thus two or three slow and melancholy months wore away. Then, fortunately for him, events happened that forced him, in spite of himself, to the exertion that saves from the deadly slumber of despair. It became evident, that if he did not wish to see the last earthly treasure that remained to him swept out of his reach for ever, he must rouse himself from his lethargy so far as to grasp and hold it; for now Don Manuel commanded his ward to bestow her hand upon his rival, Señor Luis Rotelo.

In her anguish and dismay, Beatriz fled for refuge to her kind-hearted cousin, Doña Inez.

Doña Inez received her into her house, where she soothed and comforted her; and soon found means to despatch an “esquelita,” or billet, to Don Juan, to the following effect:—“Doña Beatriz is here. Remember, my cousin, ‘that a leap over a ditch is better than another man’s prayer.’”

To which Juan replied immediately:—

“Señora and my cousin, I kiss your feet. Lend me a helping hand, and I take the leap.”

Doña Inez desired nothing better. Being a Spanish lady, she loved an intrigue for its own sake; being a very kindly disposed lady, she loved an intrigue for a benevolent object. With her active co-operation and assistance, and her husband’s connivance, it was quickly arranged that Don Juan should carry off Doña Beatriz from their house to a little country chapel in the neighbourhood, where a priest would be in readiness to perform the solemn rite which should unite them for ever. Thence they were to proceed at once to Nuera, Don Juan disguising himself for the journey as the lady’s attendant. Doña Inez did not anticipate that her father and brothers would take any hostile steps after the conclusion of the affair—glad though they might have been to prevent it—since there was nothing which they hated and dreaded so much as a public scandal.

All Juan’s latent fire and energy woke up again to meet the peril and to secure the prize. He was successful in everything; the plan had been well laid, and was well and promptly carried out. And thus it happened, that amidst December-snows he bore his beautiful bride home to Nuera in triumph. If triumph it could be called, overcast by the ever-present memory of the one who “was not,” which rested like a deep shadow upon all joy, and subdued and chastened it. Few things in life are sadder than a great, long-expected blessing coming thus;—like a friend from a foreign land whose return has been eagerly anticipated, but who, after years of absence, meets us changed in countenance and in heart, unrecognizing and unrecognized.

Dolores welcomed her young master and his bride with affection and thankfulness. But he noticed that the dark hair, at the time of his last visit still only threaded with silver, had grown white as the mountain snows. In former days Dolores, could not have told which of the noble youths, her lady’s gallant sons, had been the dearer to her. But now she knew full well. Her heart was in the grave with the boy she had taken a helpless babe from his dying mother’s arms. But, after all, was he in the grave? This was the question which she asked herself day by day, and many times a day. She was not quite so sure of the answer as Señor Don Juan seemed to be. Since the day of the Auto, he had assumed all the outward signs of mourning for his brother.

Fray Sebastian was also at Nuera, and proved a real help and comfort to its inmates. His very presence served to shield the household from any suspicions that might have been awakened with regard to their faith. For who could doubt the orthodoxy of Don Juan Alvarez, while he not only contributed liberally to the support of his parish church, but also kept a pious Franciscan in his family, in the capacity of private chaplain? Though it must be confessed that the Fray’s duties were anything but onerous; now, as in former days, he showed himself a man fond of quiet, who for the most part held his peace, and let every one do what was right in his own eyes.

He was now on far more cordial terms with Dolores than he had ever been before. This was partly because he had learned that worse physical evils than ollas of lean mutton, or cheese of goat’s milk, might be borne with patience, even with thankfulness. But partly also because Dolores now really tried to con suit his tastes and to promote his comfort. Many a savoury dish “which the Fray used to like” did she trouble herself to prepare; many a flask of wine from their diminishing store did she gladly produce, “for the kind words that he spake to him in his sorrow and loneliness.”

In spite of the depressing influences around her, Doña Beatriz could not but be very happy. For was not Don Juan hers, all her own, her own for ever? And with the zeal love inspires, and the skill love imparts, she applied herself to the task of brightening his darkened life. Not quite without effect. Even from that stern and gloomy brow the shadows at length began to roll away.

Don Juan could not speak of his sorrow. For weeks indeed after his return to Nuera his brother’s name did not pass his lips. Better had it been otherwise, both for himself and for Dolores. Her heart, aching with its own lonely anguish and its vague, dark surmisings, often longed to know her young master’s true innermost thought about his brother’s fate. But she did not dare to ask him.

At last, however, this painful silence was partially broken through. One morning the old servant accosted her master with an air of some displeasure. It was in the inner room within the hall. Holding in her hand a little book, she said,—“May it please your Excellency to pardon my freedom, but it is not well done of you to leave this lying open on your table. I am a simple woman; still I am at no loss to know what and whence it is. If you will not destroy it, and cannot keep it safe and secret, I implore of your worship to give it to me.”

Juan held out his hand for it. “It is dearer to me than any earthly possession,” he said briefly.

“It had need to be dearer than your life, señor, if you mean to leave it about in that fashion.”

“I have lost the right to say so much,” Juan answered. “And yet, Dolores—tell me, would it break your heart if I sold this place—you know it is mortgaged heavily already—and quitted the country?”

Juan expected a start, if not a cry of surprise and dismay. That Alvarez de Meñaya should sell the inheritance of his fathers seemed indeed a monstrous proposal. In the eyes of the world it would be an act of insanity, if not a crime. What then would it appear to one who loved the name of Santillanos y Meñaya far better than her life?

But the still face of Dolores never changed. “Nothing would break my heart now,” she said calmly.

“You would come with us?”

She did not even ask whither. She did not care: all her thoughts were in the past.

“That is of course, señor,” she answered. “If I had but first assurance of one thing.”

“Name it; and if I can assure you, I will.”

Instead of naming it she turned silently away. But presently turning again, she asked, “Will your Excellency please to tell me, is it that book that is driving you into exile?”

“It is. I am bound to confess the truth before men; and that is impossible here.”

“But are you sure then that it is the truth?”

“Sure. I have read God’s message both in the darkness and in the light I have seen it traced in characters of blood—and fire.”

“But—forgive the question, señor—does it make you happy?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because, Señor Don Juan”—she spoke with an effort, but firmly, and fixing her eyes on his face—“he who gave you yon book found therein that which made him happy. I know it; he was here, and I watched him. When he came first, he was ill, or else very sorrowful, I know not why. But he learned from that book that God Almighty loved him, and that the Lord and Saviour Christ was his friend; and then his sorrow passed away, and his heart grew full of joy, so full that he must needs be telling me—ay, and even that poor dolt of a cura down there in the village—about the good news. And I think”—but here she stopped, frightened at her own boldness.

“What think you?” asked Juan, with difficulty restraining his emotion.

“Well, Señor Don Juan, I think that if that good news be true, it would not be so hard to suffer for it. Blessed Virgin! Could it be aught but joy to me, for instance, to lie in a dark dungeon, or even to be hanged or burned, if that could work out his deliverance? There be worse things in the world than pain or prisons. For where there’s love, señor—— Moreover, it comes upon me sometimes that the Lords Inquisitors may have mistaken his case. Wise and learned they may be, and good and holy they are, of course—’twere sin to doubt it—yet they may mistake sometimes. ’Twas but the other day, my old eyes growing dim apace, that I took a blessed gleam of sunlight that had fallen on yon oak table for a stain, and set to work to rub it off; the Lord forgive me for meddling with one of the best of his works! And, for aught we know, just so may they be doing, mistaking God’s light upon the soul for the devil’s stain of heresy. But the sunlight is stronger than they, after all.”

“Dolores, you are half a Lutheran already yourself,” answered Juan in surprise.

“I, señor! The Lord forbid! I am an old Christian, and a good Catholic, and so I hope to die. But if you must hear all the truth, I would walk in a yellow sanbenito, with a taper in my hand, before I would acknowledge that he ever said one word or thought one thought that was not Catholic and Christian too. All his crime was to find out that the good Lord loved him, and to be happy on account of it. If that be your religion also, Señor Don Juan, I have nothing to say against it. And, as I have said, God granting me, in his great mercy, one assurance first, I am ready to follow you and your lady to the world’s end.”

With these words on her lips she left the room. For a time Juan sat silent in deep thought. Then he opened the Testament, and turned over its leaves until he found the parable of the sower. “‘Some fell upon stony places,’” he read, “‘where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and, because they had no root, they withered away.’ There,” he said within himself, “in those words is written the history of my life, from the day my brother confessed his faith to me in the garden of San Isodro. God help me, and forgive my backsliding! But at least it is not too late to go humbly back to the beginning, and to ask him who alone can do it to break up the fallow ground.”

He closed the book, walked to the window and looked out. Presently his eye was attracted to those dear mystic words on the pane, which both the brothers had loved and dreamed over from their childhood,—

“El Dorado
Yo hé trovado.”

And at that moment the sun was shining on them as brightly as it used to do in those old days gone by for ever.

No vague dream of any good, foreshadowed by the omen to him or to his house, crossed the mind of the practical Don Juan. But he seemed to hear once more the voice of his young brother saying close beside him, “Look, Ruy, the light is on our father’s words.” And memory bore him back to a morning long ago, when some slight boyish quarrel had been ended thus.

Over his stern, handsome face there passed a look that shaded and softened it, and his eyes grew dim—dim with tears.

But just then Doña Beatriz, radiant from a morning walk, and with her hands full of early spring flowers, tripped in, singing a Spanish ballad,—

“Ye men that row the galleys,
  I see my lady fair;
She gazes at the fountain
  That leaps for pleasure there.”

Beatrix was a child of the city; and, moreover, her life hitherto had been an unloved and unloving one. Now her nature was expanding under the wholesome influences of home life and home love, and of simple healthful pleasures. “Look, Don Juan, what pretty things grow in your fields here! I have never seen the like,” she said, breaking off in her song to exhibit her treasures.

Don Juan looked carelessly at them, lovingly at her. “I would fain hear a morning hymn from those sweet, tuneful lips,” he pleaded.

“Most willingly, amigo mio,—

‘Sanctissima—’”

“Hush, my beloved; hush, I entreat of you.” And laying his hand lightly on her shoulder, he gazed in her face with a mixture of fond and tender admiration and of gentle reproach difficult to describe. “Not that. For the sake of all that lies between us and the old faith, not that. Rather let us sing together,—

‘Vexill Regis prodeunt.’

For you know that between us and our King there stands, and there needs to stand, no human mediator. Do you not, my beloved?”

“I know that you are right,” answered Beatrix, still reading her faith in Don Juan’s eyes. “But we can sing afterwards, whatever you like, and as much as you will. I pray you let us come forth now into the sunshine together. Look, what a glorious morning it is!”

XXXIX

Left Behind.

“They are all gone into a world of light.
And I alone am lingering here.”

—Henry Vaughan.

The change of seasons brought little change to those dark cells in the Triana, where neither the glory of summer nor the breath of spring could come. While the world, with its living interests, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, kept surging round them, not even an echo of its many voices reached the doomed ones within, who lay so near, yet so far from all, “fast bound in misery and iron.”

Not yet had the Deliverer come to Carlos. More than once he had seemed very near. During the summer heats, so terrible in that prison, fever had wasted the captive’s already enfeebled frame; but this was the means of prolonging his life, for the eve of the Auto found him unable to walk across his cell. Still he heard without very keen sorrow the fate of his beloved friends, so soon did he hope to follow them.

And yet, month after month, life lingered on. In his circumstances restoration to health was simply impossible. Not that he endured more than others, or even as much as some. He was not loaded with fetters, or buried in one of the frightful subterranean cells where daylight never entered. Still, when to the many physical sufferings his position entailed was added the weight of sickness, weakness, and utter loneliness, they formed together a burden heavy enough to have crushed even a strong heart to despair.

Long ago the last gleam of human sympathy and kindness had faded from him. Maria Gonsalez was herself a prisoner, receiving such payment as men had to give her for her brave deeds of charity. God’s payment, however, was yet to come, and would be of another sort. Herrera, the under-gaoler, was humane, but very timid; moreover, his duties seldom led him to that part of the prison where Carlos lay. So that he was left dependent upon the tender mercies of Caspar Benevidio, which were indeed cruel.

And yet, in spite of all, he was not crushed, not despairing. The lamp of patient endurance burned on steadily, because it was continually fed with oil by an unseen Hand.

It has been beautifully said, “The personal love of Christ to you, felt, delighted in, returned, is actually, truly, simply, without exaggeration, the deepest joy and the deepest feeling that the heart of man or woman can know. It will absolutely satisfy your heart. It would satisfy your heart if it were his will that you should spend the rest of your life alone in a dungeon.”

Just this, nothing else, nothing less, sustained Carlos throughout those long slow months of suffering, which had now come to “add themselves and make the years.” It proved sufficient for him. It has proved sufficient for thousands—God’s unknown saints and martyrs, whose names we shall learn first in heaven.

Those who still occasionally sought access to him, in the hope of transforming the obstinate heretic into a penitent, marvelled greatly at the cheerful calm with which he was wont to receive them and to answer their arguments.

Sometimes he would even brave all the wrath of Benevidio, and raising his voice as loud as he could, he would make the gloomy vaults re-echo to such words as these: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Or these: “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”

But still it was not in Christ’s promise, nor was it to be expected, that his prisoner should never know hours of sorrow, weariness, and heart-sinking. Such hours came sometimes. And on the very morning when Don Juan and Doña Beatriz were going forth together into the spring sunshine through the castle gate of Nuera, Carlos, in his dungeon, was passing through one of the darkest of these. He lay on his mat, his face covered with his wasted hands, through which tears were slowly falling. It was but very seldom that he wept now; tears had grown rare and scarce with him.

The evening before, he had received a visit from two Jesuits, bound on the only errand which would have procured their admission there. Irritated by his bold and ready answers to the usual arguments, they had recourse to declamation. And one of them bethought himself of mentioning the fate of the Lutherans who suffered at the two great Autos of Valladolid. “Most of the heretics,” said the Jesuit, “though when they were in prison they were as obstinate as thou art now, yet had their eyes opened in the end to the error of their ways, and accepted reconciliation at the stake. At the last great Act of Faith, held in the presence of King Philip, only Don Carlos de Seso—” Here he stopped, surprised at the agitation of the prisoner, who had heard their threatenings against himself so calmly.

“De Seso! De Seso! Have they murdered him too!” moaned Carlos, and for a few brief moments he gave way to natural emotion. But quickly recovering himself, he said, “I shall only see him the sooner.”

“Were you acquainted with him?” asked the Jesuit.

“I loved and honoured him. My avowing that cannot hurt him now,” answered Carlos, who had grown used to the bitter thought that any name would be disgraced, and its owner imperilled, by his mentioning it with affection.

“But if you will do me so much kindness,” he added, “I pray you to tell me anything you know of his last hours. Any word he spoke.”

“He could speak nothing,” said the younger of his two visitors. “Before he left the prison he had uttered so many horrible blasphemies against Holy Church and Our Lady that he was obliged to wear the gag during the whole ceremony, ‘lest he should offend the little ones.’”[#]

[#] A genuine Inquisitorial expression.

This last cruel wrong—the refusal of leave to the dying to speak one word in defence of the truths he died for—stung Carlos to the quick. It wrung from lips so patient hitherto words of indignant threatening. “God will judge your cruelty,” he said. “Go on, fill up the measure of your guilt, for your time is short. One day, and that soon, there will be a grand spectacle, grander than your Autos. Then shall you, torturers of God’s saints, call upon the mountains and rocks to cover you, and to hide you from the wrath of the Lamb.”

Once more alone, his passionate anger died away. And it was well. Surrounded as he was on every side by strong, cold, relentless wrong and cruelty, if his spirit had beaten its wings against those bars of iron, it would soon have fallen to the ground faint and helpless, with crushed pinions. It was not in such vain strivings that he could find, or keep, the deep calm peace with which his heart was filled; it was in the quiet place at his Saviour’s feet, from whence, if he looked at his enemies at all, it was only to pity and forgive them.

But though anger was gone, a heavy burden of sorrow remained. De Seso’s noble form, shrouded in the hideous zamarra, his head crowned with the carroza, his face disfigured by the gag,—these were ever before his eyes. He well-nigh forgot that all this was over now—that for him the conflict was ended and the triumph begun.

Could he have known even as much as we know now of the close of that heroic life, it might have comforted him.

Don Carlos de Seso met his doom at the second of the two great Autos celebrated at Valladolid during the year 1559. At the first, the most steadfast sufferers were Francisco de Vibero Cazalla, one of a family of confessors; and Antonio Herezuelo, whose pathetic story—the most thrilling episode of Spanish martyrology—would need an abler pen than ours.

During his lingering imprisonment of a year and a half, De Seso never varied in his own clear testimony to the truth, never compromised any of his brethren. Informed at last that he was to die the next day, he requested writing materials. These being furnished him, he placed on record a confession of his faith, which Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, thus describes:—“It would be difficult to convey an idea of the uncommon vigour of sentiment with which he filled two sheets of paper, though he was then in the presence of death. He handed what he had written to the Alguazil, with these words: ‘This is the true faith of the gospel, as opposed to that of the Church of Rome, which has been corrupted for ages. In this faith I wish to die, and in the remembrance and lively belief of the passion of Jesus Christ, to offer to God my body, now reduced so low.’”

All that night and the next morning were spent by the friars in vain endeavours to induce him to recant. During the Auto, though he could not speak, his countenance showed the steadfastness of his soul—a steadfastness which even the sight of his beloved wife amongst those condemned to perpetual imprisonment failed to disturb. When at last, as he was bound to the stake, the gag was removed, he said to those who stood around him, still urging him to yield, “I could show you that you ruin yourselves by not following my example; but there is no time. Executioners, light the fire that is to consume me.”

Even in the act of death it was given him, though unconsciously, to strengthen the faith of another. In the martyr band was a poor man, Juan Sanchez, who had been a servant of the Cazallas, and was apprehended in Flanders with Juan de Leon. He had borne himself bravely throughout; but when the fire was kindled, the ropes that bound him to the stake having given way, the instinct of self-preservation made him rush from the flames, and, not knowing what he did, spring upon the scaffold where those who yielded at the last were wont to receive absolution. The attendant monks at once surrounded him, offering him the alternative of the milder death. Recovering self-possession, he looked around him. At one side knelt the penitents, at the other, motionless amidst the flames, De Seso stood,

“As standing in his own high hall.”

His choice was made. “I will die like De Seso,” he said calmly; and then walked deliberately back to the stake, where he met his doom with joy.

Another brave sufferer at this Auto, Don Domingo de Roxas, ventured to make appeal to the justice of the King, only to receive the memorable reply, never to be read without a shudder,—“I would carry wood to burn my son, if he were such a wretch as thou!”

All these circumstances Carlos never heard on this side of the grave. But in the quiet Sabbath-keeping that remaineth for the people of God, there will surely be leisure enough to talk over past trials and triumphs. At present, however, he only saw the dark side—only knew the bare and bitter facts of suffering and death. He had not merely loved De Seso as his instructor; he had admired him with the generous enthusiasm of a young man for a senior in whom he recognizes his ideal—all that he himself would fain become. If the Spains had but known the day of their visitation, he doubted not that man would have been their leader in the path of reform. But they knew it not; and so, instead, the chariot of fire had come for him. For him, and for nearly all the men and women whose hands Carlos had been wont to clasp in loving brotherhood. Losada, D’Arellano, Ponce de Leon, Doña Isabella de Baena, Doña Maria de Bohorques,—all these honoured names, and many more, did he repeat, adding after each one of them, “At rest with Christ.” Somewhere in the depths of those dreary dungeons it might be that the heroic Juliano, his father in the faith, was lingering still; and also Fray Constantino, and the young monk of San Isodro, Fray Fernando. But the prison walls sundered them quite as hopelessly from him as the River of Death itself.

Earlier ties sometimes seemed to him only like things he had read or dreamed of. During his fever, indeed, old familiar faces had often flitted round him. Dolores sat beside him, laying her hand on his burning brow; Fray Sebastian taught him disjointed, meaningless fragments from the schoolmen; Juan himself either spoke cheerful words of hope and trust, or else talked idly of long-forgotten trifles.

But all this was over now: neither dream nor fancy came to break his utter, terrible loneliness. He knew that he was never to see Juan again, nor Dolores, nor even Fray Sebastian. The world was dead to him, and he to it. And as for his brethren in the faith, they had gone “to the light beyond the clouds, and the rest beyond the storms,” where he would so gladly be. Why, then, was he left so long, like one standing without in the cold? Why did not the golden gate open for him as well as for them? What was he doing in this place?—what could he do for his Master’s cause or his Master’s honour? He did not murmur. By this time his Saviour’s prayer, “Not my will, but thine be done,” had been wrought into the texture of his being with the scarlet, purple, and golden threads of pain, of patience, and of faith. But it is well for His tried ones that He knows longing is not murmuring. Very full of longing were the words—words rather of pleading than of prayer—that rose continually from the lips of Carlos that day,—“And now, Lord, what wait I for?”

XL

“A Satisfactory Penitent.”

“How long in thralldom’s grasp I lay
I knew not; for my soul was black,
And knew no change of night or day.”

—Campbell.

Carlos was sleeping tranquilly in his dungeon on the following night, when the opening of the door aroused him. He started with sickening dread, the horrors of the torture-room rising in an instant before his imagination. Benevidio entered, followed by Herrera, and commanded him to rise and dress immediately. Long experience of the Santa Casa had taught him that he might as well make an inquiry of its doors and walls as of any of its officials. So he obeyed in silence, and slowly and painfully enough. But he was soon relieved from his worst fear by seeing Herrera fold together the few articles of clothing he had been allowed to have with him, preparatory to carrying them away. “It is only, then, a change of prison,” he thought; “and wherever they bring me, heaven will be equally near.”

His limbs, enfeebled by two years of close confinement, and lame from the effects of one terrible night, were sorely tried by what he thought an almost interminable walk through corridors and down narrow winding stairs. But at last he was conducted to a small postern door, which, greatly to his surprise, Benevidio proceeded to unlock. The kind-hearted Herrera took advantage of the moment when Benevidio was thus occupied to whisper,—

“We are bringing you to the Dominican prison, señor; you will be better used there.”

Carlos thanked him by a grateful look and a pressure of the hand. But an instant afterwards he had forgotten his words. He had forgotten everything save that he stood once more in God’s free air, and that God’s own boundless heaven, spangled with ten thousand stars, was over him, no dungeon roof between. For one rapturous moment he gazed upwards, thanking God in his heart. But the fresh air he breathed seemed to intoxicate him like strong wine. He grew faint, and leaned for support on Herrera.

“Courage, señor; it is not far—only a few paces,” said the under-gaoler, kindly.

Weak as he was, Carlos wished the distance a hundred times greater. But it proved quite long enough for his strength. By the time he was delivered over into the keeping of a couple of lay brothers, and locked by them into a cell in the Dominican monastery, he was scarcely conscious of anything save excessive fatigue.

The next morning was pretty far advanced before any one came to him; but at last he was honoured with a visit from the prior himself. He said frankly, and with perfect truth,—

“I am glad to find myself in your hands, my lord.”

To one accustomed to feel himself an object of terror, it is a new and pleasant sensation to be trusted. Even a wild beast will sometimes spare the weak but fearless creature that ventures to play with it: and Don Fray Ricardo was not a wild beast; he was only a stern, narrow, conscientious man, the willing and efficient agent of a terrible system. His brow relaxed visibly as he said,—

“I have always sought your true good, my son.”

“I am well aware of it, father.”

“And you must acknowledge,” the prior resumed, “that great forbearance and lenity have been shown towards you. But your infatuation has been such that you have deliberately and persistently sought your own ruin. You have resisted the wisest arguments, the gentlest persuasions, and that with an obstinacy which time and discipline seem only to increase. And now at last, as another Auto-da-fé may not be celebrated for some time, my Lord Vice-Inquisitor-General, justly incensed at your contumacy, would fain have thrown you into one of the underground dungeons, where, believe me, you would not live a month. But I have interceded for you.”

“I thank your kindness, my lord. But I cannot see that it matters much how you deal with me now. Sooner or later, in one form or other, it must be death; and I thank God it can be no more.”

While a man might count twenty, the prior looked silently in that steadfast sorrowful young face. Then he said,—

“My son, do not yield to despair; for I come to thee this day with a message of hope. I have also made intercession for thee with the Supreme Council of the Holy Office; and I have succeeded in obtaining from that august tribunal a great and unusual grace.”

Carlos looked up, a sudden flush on his cheek. He hoped this unusual grace might be permission to see some familiar face ere he died; but the prior’s next words disappointed him. Alas! it was only the offer of escape from death on terms that he might not accept. And yet such an offer really deserved the name the prior gave it—a great and unusual grace. For, as has been already intimated, by the laws of the Inquisition at that time in force, the man who had once professed heretical doctrines, however sincerely he might have retracted them, was doomed to die. His penitence would procure him the favour of absolution—the mercy of the garotte instead of the stake; that was all.

The prior went on to explain to Carlos, that upon the ground of his youth, and the supposition that he had been led into error by others, his judges had consented to show him singular favour. “Moreover,” he added, “there are other reasons for this course of action, upon which it would be needless, and might be inexpedient, to enter at present; but they have their weight, especially with me. For the preservation, therefore, both of your soul and your body—upon which I take more compassion than you do yourself—I have, in the first place, obtained permission to remove you to a more easy and more healthful confinement, where, besides other favours, you will enjoy the great privilege of a companion, constant intercourse with whom can scarcely fail to benefit you.”

Carlos thought this last a doubtful boon; but as it was kindly intended, he was bound to be grateful. He thanked the prior accordingly; adding, “May I be permitted to ask the name of this companion?”

“You will probably find out ere long, if you conduct yourself so as to deserve it,”—an answer Carlos found so enigmatical, that after several vain endeavours to comprehend it, he gave up the task in despair, and not without some apprehension that his long imprisonment had dulled his perceptions. “Amongst us he is called Don Juan,” the prior continued. “And this much I will tell you. He is a very honourable person, who had many years ago the great misfortune to be led astray by the same errors to which you cling with such obstinacy. God was pleased, however, to make use of my poor instrumentality to lead him back to the bosom of the Church. He is now a true and sincere penitent, diligent in prayer and penance, and heartily detesting his former evil ways. It is my last hope for you that his wise and faithful counsels may bring you to the same mind.”

Carlos did not particularly like the prospect. He feared that this vaunted penitent would prove a noisy apostate, who would seek to obtain the favour of the monks by vilifying his former associates. Nor, on the other hand, did he think it honest to accept without protest kindnesses offered him on the supposition that he might even yet be induced to recant. He said,—

“I ought to tell you, señor, that my mind will never change, God helping me. Rather than lead you to imagine otherwise, I would go at once to the darkest cell in the Triana. My faith is based on the Word of God, which can never be overthrown.”

“The penitent of whom I speak used such words as these, until God and Our Lady opened his eyes. Now he sees all things differently. So will you, if God is pleased to give you the inestimable benefit of his divine grace; for it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy,” said the Dominican, who, like others of his order, ingeniously managed to combine strong predestinarian theories with the creed of Rome.

“That is most true, señor,” Carlos responded.

“But to resume,” said the prior; “for I have yet more to say. Should you be favoured with the grace of repentance, I am authorized to hold out to you a well-grounded hope, that, in consideration of your youth, your life may even yet be spared.”

“And then, if I were strong enough, I might live out ten or twenty years—like the last two,” Carlos answered, not without a touch of bitterness.

“It is not so, my son,” returned the prior mildly. “I cannot promise, indeed, under any circumstances, to restore you to the world. For that would be to promise what could not be performed; and the laws of the Holy Office expressly forbid us to delude prisoners with false hopes.[#] But this much I will say, your restraint shall be rendered so light and easy, that your position will be preferable to that of many a monk, who has taken the vows of his own free will. And if you like the society of the penitent of whom I spoke anon, you shall continue to enjoy it.”

[#] But these laws were often broken or evaded.

Carlos began to feel a somewhat unreasonable antipathy to this penitent, whose face he had never seen. But what mattered the antipathies of a prisoner of the Holy Office? He only said, “Permit me again to thank you, my lord, for the kindness you have shown me. Though my fellow-men cast out my name as evil, and deny me my share of God’s free air and sky, and my right to live in his world, I still take thankfully every word or deed of pity and gentleness they give me by the way. For they know not what they do.”

The prior turned away, but turned back again a moment afterwards, to ask—what for the credit of his humanity he ought to have asked a year before—“Do you stand in need of any thing? or have you any request you wish to make?”

Carlos hesitated a moment. Then he said, “Of things with in your power to grant, my lord, there is but one that I care to ask. Two brethren of the Society of Jesus visited me the day before yesterday. I spoke hastily to one of them, who was named Fray Isodor, I think. Had I the opportunity, I should be glad to offer him my hand.”

“Now, of all mysterious things in heaven or earth,” said the prior, “a heretic’s conscience is the most difficult to comprehend. Truly you strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. But as for Fray Isodor, you may rest content. For good and sufficient reasons, he cannot visit you here. But I will repeat to him what you have said. And I know well that his own tongue is a sharp weapon enough when used in the defence of the faith.”

The prior withdrew; and shortly afterwards one of the monks appeared, and silently conducted Carlos to a cell, or chamber, in the highest story of the building. Like the cells in the Triana, it had two doors—the outer one secured by strong bolts and bars, the inner one furnished with an aperture through which food or other things could be passed.

But here the resemblance ceased. Carlos found himself, on entering, in what seemed to him more like a hall than a cell; though, indeed, it must be remembered that his eye was accustomed to ten feet square. It was furnished as comfortably as any room needed to be in that warm climate; and it was tolerably clean, a small mercy which he noted with no small gratitude. Best perhaps of all, it had a good window, looking down on the courtyard, but strongly barred, of course. Near the window was a table, upon which stood an ivory crucifix, and a picture of the Madonna and child.

But even before his eye took in all these objects, it turned to the penitent, whose companionship had been granted him as so great a boon. He was utterly unlike all that he had expected. Instead of a fussy, noisy pervert, he saw a serene and stately old man, with long white hair and beard, and still, clearly chiselled, handsome features. He was dressed in a kind of mantle, of a nondescript colour, made like a monk’s cowl without the hood, and bearing two large St. Andrew’s crosses, one on the breast and the other on the back; in fact, it was a compromised sanbenito.

As Carlos entered, he rose (showing a tall, spare figure, slightly stooped), and greeted his new companion with a courteous and elaborate bow, but did not speak.

Shortly afterwards, food was handed through the aperture in the door; and the half-starved prisoner from the Triana sat down with his fellow-captive to what he esteemed a really luxurious repast. He had intended to be silent until obliged to speak, but the aspect and bearing of the penitent quite disarranged his preconceived ideas. During the meal, he tried once and again to open a conversation by some slight courteous observation.

All in vain. The penitent did the honours of the table like a prince in disguise, and never failed to bow and answer, “Yes, señor,” or “No, señor,” to everything Carlos said. But he seemed either unable or unwilling to do more.

As the day wore on, this silence grew oppressive to Carlos; and he marvelled increasingly at his companion’s want of ordinary interest in him, or curiosity about him. Until at length a probable solution of the mystery dawned upon his mind. As he considered the penitent an agent of the monks deputed to convert him, very likely the penitent, on his side, regarded him in the light of a spy commissioned to watch his proceedings.

But this, if it was true at all, was only a small part of the truth. Carlos failed to take into account the terrible effect of long years of solitude, crushing down all the faculties of the mind and heart. It is told of some monastery, where the rules were so severe that the brethren were only allowed to converse with each other during one hour in the week, that they usually sat for that hour in perfect silence: they had nothing to say. So it was with the penitent of the Dominican convent. He had nothing to say, nothing to ask; curiosity and interest were dead within him—dead long ago, of absolute starvation.

Yet Carlos could not help observing him with a strange kind of fascination. His face was too still, too coldly calm, like a white marble statue; and yet it was a noble face. It was, although not a thoughtful face, the face of a thoughtful man asleep. It did not lack expressiveness, though it lacked expression. Moreover, there was in it a look that awakened dim, undefined memories—shadowy things, that fled away like ghosts whenever he tried to grasp them, yet persistently rose again, and mingled with all his thoughts.

He told himself many times that he had never seen the man before. Was it, then, an accidental likeness to some familiar face that so fixed and haunted him? Certainly there was something which belonged to his past, and which, even while it perplexed and baffled, strangely soothed and pleased him.

At each of the canonical hours (which were announced to them by the tolling of the convent bells), the penitent did not fail to kneel before the crucifix, and, with the aid of a book and a rosary, to read or repeat long Latin prayers, in a half audible voice. He retired to rest early, leaving his fellow-prisoner supremely happy in the enjoyment of his lamp and his Book of Hours. For it was two years since the eyes of the once enthusiastic young scholar had rested on a printed page, or since the kindly gleam of lamp or fire had cheered his solitude. The privilege of refreshing his memory with the passages of Scripture contained in the Romish book of devotion now appeared an unspeakable boon to him. And although, accustomed as he was to a life of unbroken monotony, the varied impressions of the day had produced extreme weariness of mind and body, it was near midnight before he could prevail upon himself to close the volume, and lie down to rest on the comfortable pallet prepared for him.

He was just falling asleep, when the midnight bell tolled out heavily. He saw his companion rise, throw his mantle over his shoulders, and betake himself to his devotions. How long these lasted he could not tell, for the stately kneeling figure soon mingled with his dreams—strange dreams of Juan as a penitent, dressed in a sanbenito, and with white hair and an old man’s face, kneeling devoutly before the altar in the church at Nuera, but reciting one of the songs of the Cid instead of De Profundis.

XLI

More about the Penitent.

“Ay, thus thy mother looked,
With such a sad, yet half-triumphant smile.
All radiant with deep meaning.”

—Hemans

A slight incident, that occurred the following morning, partially broke down the barrier of reserve between the two prisoners. After his early devotions, the penitent laid aside his mantle, took up a besom made of long slips of cane, and proceeded, with great deliberation and gravity, to sweep out the room. The contrast that his stately figure, his noble air, and the dignity of all his movements, offered to the menial occupation in which he was engaged, was far too pathetic to be ludicrous. Carlos could not but think that he wielded the lowly implement as if it were a chamberlain’s staff of office, or a grand marshal’s baton. He himself was well accustomed to such tasks; for every prisoner of the Santa Casa, no matter what his rank might be, was his own servant. And it spoke much for the revolution that had taken place in his ideas and feelings, that though taught to look on all servile occupations as ineffably degrading, he had never associated a thought of degradation with anything laid upon him to do or to suffer as the prisoner of Christ.

And yet he could not endure to see his aged and stately fellow-prisoner thus occupied. He rose immediately, and earnestly entreated to be allowed to relieve him of the task, pleading that all such duties ought to devolve on him as the younger. At first the penitent resisted, saying that it was part of his penance. But when Carlos continued to urge the point, he yielded; perhaps the more readily because his will, like his other faculties, was weakened for want of exercise. Then, with more apparent interest than he had shown in any of his previous proceedings, he watched the rather slow and difficult movements of his young companion.

“You are lame, señor,” he said, a little abruptly, when Carlos, having finished his work, sat down to rest.

“From the pulley,” Carlos answered quietly; and then his face beamed with a sudden smile, for the secret of the Lord was with him, and he tasted the sweet, strange joy that springs out of suffering borne for Him.

That look was the wire that drew an electric flash of memory from the clouds that veiled the old man’s soul. What that sudden flash revealed was a castle gate, at which stood a stately yet slender form robed in silk. In the fair young face tears and smiles were contending; but a smile won the victory, as a little child was held up, and made to kiss a baby-hand in farewell to its father.

In a moment all was gone; only a vague trouble and uneasiness remained, accompanied by that strange sense of having seen or felt just the same thing before, with which we are most of us familiar. Accustomed to solitude, the penitent spoke aloud, perchance unconsciously.

“Why did they bring you here?” he said, in a half fretful tone. “You hurt me. I have done very well alone all these years.”

“I am sorry to incommode you, señor,” returned Carlos. “But I did not come here of my own will; neither, unhappily, can I go. I am a prisoner, like yourself; but, unlike you, I am a prisoner under sentence of death.”

For several minutes the penitent did not answer. Then he rose, and taking a step or two towards the place where Carlos sat, gravely extended his hand. “I fear I have spoken uncourteously,” he said. “So many years have passed since I have conversed with my fellows, that I have well-nigh forgotten how I ought to address them. Do me the favour, señor and my brother, to grant me your pardon.”

Carlos warmly assured him no offence had been given; and taking the offered hand, he pressed it reverently to his lips. From that moment he loved his fellow-prisoner in his heart.

There was an interval of silence, then the penitent of his own accord resumed the conversation. “Did I hear you say you are under sentence of death?” he asked.

“I am so actually, though not formally,” Carlos replied. “In the language of the Holy Office, I am a professed impenitent heretic.”

“And you so young!”

“To be a heretic?”

“No; I meant so young to die.’

“Do I look young—even yet? I should not have thought it. To me the last two years seem like a long life-time.”

“Have you been two years, then, in prison? Poor boy! Yet I have been here ten, fifteen, twenty years—I cannot tell how many. I have lost the account of them.”

Carlos sighed. And such a life was before him, should he be weak enough to surrender his hope. He said, “Do you really think, señor, that these long years of lonely suffering are less hard to bear than a speedy though violent death?”

“I do not think it matters, as to that,” was the penitent’s not very apposite reply. In fact, his mind was not capable, at the time, of dealing with such a question; so he turned from it instinctively. But in the meantime he was remembering, every moment more and more clearly, that a duty had been laid upon him by the authority to which his soul held itself in absolute subjection. And that duty had reference to his fellow-prisoner.

“I am commanded,” he said at last, “to counsel you to seek the salvation of your soul, by returning to the bosom of the one true Catholic and Apostolic Church, out of which there is no peace and no salvation.”

Carlos saw that he spoke by rote; that his words echoed the thought of another, not his own. It seemed to him, under the circumstances, scarcely generous to argue. He spared to put forth his mental powers against the aged and broken man, as Juan in like case would have spared to use his strong right arm.

After a moment’s thought, he replied,—

“May I ask of your courtesy, señor and my father, to bear with me for a little while, that I may frankly disclose to you my real belief?”

Appeal could never be made in vain to that penitent’s courtesy. No heresy, that could have been proposed, would have shocked him half so much as the supposition that one Castilian gentleman could be uncourteous to another, upon any account. “Do me the favour to state your opinions, señor,” he responded, with a bow, “and I will honour myself by giving them my best attention.”

Carlos was little used to language such as this. It induced him to speak his mind more freely than he had been able to do for the last two years. But, mindful of his experience with old Father Bernardo at San Isodro, he did not speak of doctrines, he spoke of a Person. In words simple enough for a child to understand, but with a heart glowing with faith and love, he told of what He was when he walked on earth, of what He is at the right hand of the Father, of what He has done and is doing still for every soul that trusts him.

Certainly the faded eye brightened; and something like a look of interest began to dawn in the mournfully still and passive countenance. For a time Carlos was aware that his listener followed every word, and he spoke slowly, on purpose to allow him so to do. But then there came a change. The listening look passed out of the eyes; and yet they did not wander once from the speaker’s face. The expression of the whole countenance was gradually altered, from one of rather painful attention to the dreamy look of a man who hears sweet music, and gives free course to the emotions it is calculated to awaken. In truth, the voice of Carlos was sweet music in his fellow-captive’s ear; and he would willingly have sat thus for ever, gazing at him and enjoying it.

Carlos thought that if this was their reverences’ idea of “a satisfactory penitent,” they were not difficult to satisfy. And he marvelled increasingly that so astute a man as the Dominican prior should have put the task of his conversion into such hands. For the piety so lauded in the penitent appeared to him mere passiveness—the submission of a soul out of which all resisting forces had been crushed. “It is only life that resists,” he thought; “the dead they can move whithersoever they will.”

Intolerance always sets a premium on mental stagnation. Nay, it actually produces it; it “makes a desert, and calls it peace.” And what the Inquisition did for the penitent, that it has done also for the penitent’s fair fatherland. Was the resurrection of dead and buried faculties possible for him? Is such a resurrection possible for it?

And yet, in spite of the deadness of heart and brain, which he doubted not was the result of cruel suffering, Carlos loved his fellow-prisoner every hour more and more. He could not tell why; he only knew that “his soul was knit” to his.

When Carlos, for fear of fatiguing him, brought his explanations to a close, both relapsed into silence; and the remainder of the day passed without much further conversation, but with a constant interchange of little kindnesses and courtesies. The first sight that greeted the eyes of Carlos when he awoke the next morning, was that of the penitent kneeling before the pictured Madonna, his lips motionless, his hands crossed on his breast, and his face far more earnest with feeling—it might be thought with devotion—than he had ever seen it yet.

Carlos was moved, but saddened. It grieved him sore that his aged fellow-prisoner should pour out the last costly libation of love and trust left in his desolated heart before the shrine of that which was no god. And a great longing awoke within him to lead back this weary and heavy-laden one to the only Being who could give him true rest.

“If, indeed, he is one of God’s chosen, of his loved and redeemed ones, he will be led back,” thought Carlos, who had spent the past two years in thinking out many things for himself. Certain aspects of truth, which may be either strong cordials or rank poisons, as they are used, had grown gradually clear to him. Opposed to the Dominican prior upon most subjects, he was at one with him upon that of predestination. For he had need to be assured, when the great water floods prevailed, that the chain which kept him from drifting away with them was a strong one. And therefore he had followed it up, link by link, until he came at last to that eternal purpose of God in which it was fast anchored. Since the day that he first learned it, he had lived in the light of that great centre truth, “I have loved thee”—thee individually. But as he lay in the gloomy prison, sentenced to die, something more was revealed to him. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee.” The value of this truth, to him as to others, lay in the double aspect of that word “everlasting;” its look forward to the boundless future, as well as backward on the mysterious past. The one was a pledge and assurance of the other. And now he was taking to his heart the comfort it gave, for the penitent as well as for himself. But it made him, not less, but more anxious to be God’s fellow-worker in bringing him back to the truth.

In the meantime, however, he was quite mistaken as to the feelings with which the old man knelt before the pictured Virgin and Child. His heart was stirred by no mystic devotion to the Queen of Heaven, but by some very human feelings, which had long lain dormant, but which were now being gradually awakened there. He was thinking not of heaven, but of earth, and of “earth’s warm beating joy and dole.” And what attracted him to that spot was only the representation of womanhood and childhood, recalling, though far off and faintly, the fair young wife and babe from whom he had been cruelly torn years and years ago.

A little later, as the two prisoners sat over the bread and fruit that formed their morning meal, the penitent began to speak more frankly than he had done before. “I was quite afraid of you, señor, when you first came,” he said.

“And perhaps I was not guiltless of the same feeling towards you,” Carlos answered. “It is no marvel. Companions in sorrow, such as we are, have great power either to help or to hurt one another.”

“You may truly say that,” returned the penitent. “In fact, I once suffered so cruelly from the treachery of a fellow-prisoner, that it is not unnatural I should be suspicious.”

“How was that, señor?”

“It was very long ago, soon after my arrest. And yet, not soon. For weary months of darkness and solitude, I cannot tell how many, I held out—I mean to say, I continued impenitent.”

“Did you?” asked Carlos with interest. “I thought as much.”

“Do not think ill of me, I entreat of you, señor,” said the penitent anxiously. “I am reconciled. I have returned to the bosom of the true Church, and I belong to her. I have confessed and received absolution. I have even had the Holy Sacrament; and if ill, or in danger of death, it is promised I shall receive ’su majestad’[#] at any time. And I have abjured and detested all the heresies I learned from De Valero.”

[#] “His Majesty,” the ordinary term applied by Spaniards to the Host.

“From De Valero? Did you learn from him?” The pale cheek of Carlos crimsoned for a moment, then grew paler than before. “Tell me, señor, if I may ask it, how long have you been here?”

“That is just what I cannot tell. The first year stands out clearly; but all the after years are like a dream to me. It was in that first year that the caitiff I spoke of anon, who was imprisoned with me—you observe, señor, I had already asked for reconciliation. It was promised me. I was to perform penance; to be forgiven; to have my freedom. Pues, señor, I spoke to that man as I might to you, freely and from my heart. For I supposed him a gentleman. I dared to say that their reverences had dealt somewhat hardly with me, and the like. Idle words, no doubt—idle and wicked. God knows, I have had time enough to repent them since. For that man, my fellow-prisoner, he who knew what prison was, went forth straightway and delated me to the Lords Inquisitors for those idle words—God in heaven forgive him! And thus the door was shut upon me—shut—shut for ever. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!”

Carlos heard but little of this speech. He was gazing at him with eager, kindling eyes. “Were there left behind in the world any that it wrung your heart to part from?” he asked, in a trembling voice.

“There were. And since you came, their looks have never ceased to haunt me. Why, I know not. My wife, my child!” And the old man shaded his face, while in his eyes, long unused to tears, there rose a mist, like the cloud in form as a man’s hand, that foretold the approach of the beneficent rain, which should refresh and soften the thirsty soil, making all things young again.

“Señor,” said Carlos, trying to speak calmly, and to keep down the wild tumultuous throbbing of his heart—“señor, a boon, I entreat of you. Tell me the name you bore amongst men. It was a noble one, I know.”

“True. They promised to save it from disgrace. But it was part of my penance not to utter it; if possible, to forget it.”

“Yet, this once. I do not ask idly—this once—have pity on me, and speak it,” pleaded Carlos, with intense tremulous earnestness.

“Your face and your voice move me strangely; it seems to me that I could not deny you anything. I am—I ought to say, I was—Don Juan Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya.”

Before the sentence was concluded, Carlos lay senseless at his feet.

XLII

Quiet Days.

“I think that by-and-by all things
  Which were perplexed a while ago
And life’s long, vain conjecturings,
  Will simple, calm, and quiet grow,
Already round about me, some
  August and solemn sunset seems
Deep sleeping in a dewy dome,
  And bending o’er a world of dreams.”

—Owen Meredith.

The penitent laid Carlos gently on his pallet (he still possessed a measure of physical strength, and the worn frame was easy to lift); then he knocked loudly on the door for help, as he had been instructed to do in any case of need. But no one heard, or at least no one heeded him, which was not remarkable, since during more than twenty years he had not, on a single occasion, thus summoned his gaolers. Then, in utter ignorance what next to do, and in very great distress, he bent over his young companion, helplessly wringing his hands.

Carlos stirred at last, and murmured, “Where am I? What is it?” But even before full consciousness returned, there came the sense, taught by the bitter, experience of the last two years, that he must look within for aid—he could expect none from any fellow-creature. He tried to recollect himself. Some bewildering, awful joy had fallen upon him, striking him to the earth. Was he free? Was he permitted to see Juan?

Slowly, very slowly, all grew clear to him. He half raised himself, grasped the penitent’s hand, and cried aloud, “My father?”

“Are you better, señor?” asked the old man with solicitude. “Do me the favour to drink this wine.”

“Father, my father! I am your son. I am Carlos Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya. Do you not understand me, father?”

“I do not understand you, señor,” said the penitent, moving a little away from him, with a mixture of dignified courtesy and utter amazement in his manner strange to behold. “Who is it that I have the honour to address?”

“O my father, I am your son—your very son Carlos!”

“I have never seen you till—ere yesterday.”

“That is quite true; and yet—”

“Nay, nay,” interrupted the old man; “you are speaking wild words to me. I had but one boy—Juan—Juan Rodrigo. The heir of the house of Alvarez de Meñaya was always called Juan.”

“He lives. He is Captain Don Juan now, the bravest soldier, and the best, truest-hearted man on earth. How you would love him! Would you could see him face to face! Yet no; thank God you cannot.”

“My babe a captain in His Imperial Majesty’s army!” said Don Juan, in whose thoughts the great Emperor was reigning still.

“And I,” Carlos continued, in a broken, agitated voice—“I, born when they thought you dead—I, who opened my young eyes on this sad world the day God took my mother home from all its sin and sorrow—I am brought here, in his mysterious providence, to comfort you, after your long dreary years of suffering.”

“Your mother! Did you say your mother? My wife, Costanza mia. Oh, let me see your face!”

Carlos raised himself to a kneeling attitude, and the old man laid his hand on his shoulder, and gazed at him long and earnestly. At length Carlos removed the hand, and drawing it gently upwards, placed it on his head. “Father,” he said, “you will love your son? you will bless him, will you not? He has dwelt long amongst those who hated him, and never spoke to him save in wrath and scorn, and his heart pines for human love and tenderness.”

Don Juan did not answer for a while; but he ran his fingers through the soft fine hair. “So like hers,” he murmured dreamily. “Thine eyes are hers too—zarca.[#] Yes, yes; I do bless thee—But who am I to bless? God bless thee, my son!”

[#] Blue; a word applied by the Spaniards only to blue eyes.

In the long, long silence that followed, the great convent bell rang out. It was noon. For the first time for twenty years the penitent did not hear that sound.

Carlos heard it, however. Agitated as he was, he yet feared the consequences that might follow should the penitent omit any part of the penance he was bound by oath to perform. So he gently reminded him of it. “Father—” (how strangely sweet the name sounded!)—“father, at this hour you always recite the penitential psalms. When you have finished, we will talk together. I have ten thousand things to tell you.”

With the silent, unreasoning submission that had become a part of his nature, the penitent obeyed; and, going to his usual station before the crucifix, began his monotonous task. The fresh life newly awakened in his heart and brain was far from being strong enough, as yet, to burst the bonds of habit. And this was well. Those bonds were his safeguard; but for their wholesome restraint, mind or body, or both, might have been shattered by the tumultuous rush of new thoughts and feelings.

But the familiar Latin words, repeated without thought, almost without consciousness, soothed the weary brain like a slumber.

Meanwhile, Carlos thanked God with a full heart. Here, then—here, in the dark prison, the very abode of misery—had God given him the desire of his heart, fulfilled the longing of his early years. Now the wilderness and the solitary place were glad; the desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. Now his life seemed complete, its end answering its beginning; all its meaning lying clear and plain before him. He was satisfied.

“Ruy, Ruy, I have found our father!—Oh, that I could but tell thee, my Ruy!”—was the cry of his heart, though he forced his lips to silence. Nor could the tears of joy, that sprang unbidden to his eyes, be permitted to overflow, since they might perplex and trouble his fellow-captive—his father.

He had still a task to perform; and to that task his mind soon bent itself; perhaps instinctively taking refuge in practical detail from emotions that might otherwise have proved too strong for his weakened frame. He set himself to consider how best he could revive the past, and make the present comprehensible to the aged and broken man, without overpowering or bewildering him.

He planned to tell him, in the first instance, all that he could about Nuera. And this he accomplished gradually, as he was able to bear the strain of conversation. He talked of Dolores and Diego; described both the exterior and interior of the castle; in fact, made him see again the scenes to which his eye had been accustomed in past days. With special minuteness did he picture the little room within the hall, both because it was less changed since his father’s time than the others, and because it had been his favourite apartment “And on the window,” he said, “there were some words, written with a diamond, doubtless by your hand, my father. My brother and I used to read them in our childhood; we loved them, and dreamed many a wondrous dream about them. Do you not remember them?”

But the old man shook his head.

Then Carlos began,—

“‘El Dorado—’”

“‘Yo hé trovado.’

Yes, I remember now,” said Don Juan promptly.

“And the golden country you had discovered—was it not the truth as revealed in Scripture?” asked Carlos, perhaps a little too eagerly.

The penitent mused a space; grew bewildered; said at last sorrowfully, “I know not. I cannot now recall what moved me to write those lines, or even when I wrote them.”

In the next place, Carlos ventured to tell all he had heard from Dolores about his mother. The fact of his wife’s death had been communicated to the prisoner; but this was the only fragment of intelligence about his family that had reached him during all these years. When she was spoken of, he showed emotion, slight in the beginning, but increasing at every succeeding mention of her name, until Carlos, who had at first been glad to find that the slumbering chords of feeling responded to his touch, came at last to dread laying his hands upon them, they were apt to moan so piteously. And once and again did his father say, gazing at him with ever-increasing fondness, “Thy face is hers, risen anew before me.”

Carlos tried hard to awaken Don Juan’s interest in his first-born. It is true that he cherished an almost passionate love for Juanito the babe, but it was such a love as we feel for children whom God has taken to himself in infancy. Juan the youth, Juan the man, seemed to him a stranger, difficult to conceive of or to care about. Yet, in time, Carlos did succeed in establishing a bond between the long-imprisoned father and the brave, noble, free-hearted son, who was so like what that father had been in his early manhood. He was never weary of telling of Juan’s courage, Juan’s truthfulness, Juan’s generosity; often concluding with the words, “He would have been your favourite son, had you known him, my father.”

As time wore on, he won from his father’s lips the principal facts of his own story. His past was like a picture from which the colouring, once bright and varied, has faded away, leaving only the bare outlines of fact, and here and there the shadows of pain still faintly visible. What he remembered, that he told his son; but gradually, and often in very disjointed fragments, which Carlos carefully pieced together in his thoughts, until he formed out of them a tolerably connected whole.

Just three-and-twenty years before, on his arrival in Seville, in obedience to what he believed to be a summons from the Emperor, the Conde de Nuera had been arrested and thrown into the secret dungeons of the Inquisition. He well knew his offence: he had been the friend and associate of De Valero; he had read and studied the Scriptures; he had even advocated, in the presence of several witnesses, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Nor was he unprepared to pay the terrible penalty. Had he, at the time of his arrest, been led at once to the rack or the stake, it is probable he would have suffered with a constancy that might have placed his name beside that of the most heroic martyrs.

But he was allowed to wear out long months in suspense and solitude, and in what his eager spirit found even harder to bear, absolute inaction. Excitement, motion, stirring occupation for mind and body, had all his life been a necessity to him. In the absence of these he pined—grew melancholy, listless, morbid. His faith was genuine, and would have been strong enough to enable him for anything in the line of his character; but it failed under trials purposely and sedulously contrived to assail that character through its weak points.

When already worn out with dreary imprisonment, he was beset by arguments, clever, ingenious, sophistical, framed by men who made argument the business of their lives. Thus attacked, he was like a brave but unskilful man fencing with adepts in the noble science. He knew he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought he could have proved it. But they assured him they proved the contrary; nor could he detect a flaw in their syllogisms when he came to examine them. If not convinced, then surely he ought to have been. They conjured him not to let pride and vain-glory seduce him into self-opinionated obstinacy, but to submit his private judgment to that of the Holy Catholic Church. And they promised that he should go forth free, only chastised by a suitable and not disgraceful penance, and by a pecuniary fine.

The hope of freedom burned in his heart like fire; and by this time there was sufficient confusion in his brain for his will to find arguments there against the voice of his conscience. So he yielded, though not without conflict, fierce and bitter. His retractation was drawn up in as mild a form as possible by the Inquisitors, and duly signed by him. No public act of penance was required, as strict secrecy was to be observed in the whole transaction.

But the Inquisitor-General, Valdez, felt a well-grounded distrust of the penitent’s sincerity, which was quickened perhaps by a desire to appropriate to the use of the Holy Office a larger share of his possessions than the moderate fine alluded to. Probably, too, he dreaded the disclosures that might have followed had the Count been restored to the world. He had recourse, therefore, to an artifice often employed by the Inquisitors, and seriously recommended by their standard authorities. The “fly” (for such traitors were common enough to have a technical name as well as a recognized existence) reported that the Conde de Nuera railed at the Holy Office, blasphemed the Catholic faith, and still adhered in his heart to all his abominable heresies. The result was a sentence of perpetual imprisonment.

Don Juan’s condition was truly pitiable then. Like Samson, he was shorn of the locks in which his strength lay, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to his enemies. Because he could not bear perpetual imprisonment he had renounced his faith, and denied his Lord. And now, without the faith he had renounced, without the Lord he had denied, he must bear it. It told upon him as it would have told on nine men out of ten, perhaps on ninety-nine out of a hundred. His mind lost its activity, its vigour, its tone. It became, in time, almost a passive instrument in the hands of others.

And then the Dominican monk, Fray Ricardo, brought his powerful intellect and his strong will to bear upon him. He had been sent by his superiors (he was not prior until long afterwards) to impart the terrible story of her husband’s arrest to the Lady of Nuera, with secret instructions to ascertain whether her own faith had been tampered with. In his fanatical zeal he performed a cruel task cruelly. But he had a conscience, and its fault was not insensibility. When he heard the tale of the lady’s death, a few days after his visit, he was profoundly affected. Accustomed, however, to a religion of weights and balances, it came naturally to him to set one thing against another, by way of making the scales even. If he could be the means of saving the husband’s soul, he would feel, to say the least, much more comfortable about his conduct to the wife.

He spared no pains upon the task he had set himself; and a measure of success crowned his efforts. Having first reduced the mind of the penitent to a cold, blank calm, agitated by no wave of restless thought or feeling, he had at length the delight of seeing his own image reflected there, as in a mirror. He mistook that spectral reflection for a reality, and great was his triumph when, day by day, he saw it move responsive to every motion of his own.

But the arrest of his penitent’s son broke in upon his self-satisfaction. It seemed as though a dark doom hung over the family, which even the father’s repentance was powerless to avert. He wished to save the youth, and he had tried to do it after his fashion; but his efforts only resulted in bringing up before him the pale accusing face of the Lady of Nuera, and in interesting him more than he cared to acknowledge in the impenitent heretic, who seemed to him such a strange mixture of gentleness and obstinacy. Surely the father’s influence would prevail with the son, originally a much less courageous and determined character, and now already wrought upon by a long period of loneliness and suffering.

Perhaps also—monk, fanatic, and inquisitor though he was—the pleasantness of trying the experiment, and cheering thereby the last days of the pious and docile penitent, his own especial convert, weighed a little with him; for he was still a man. Moreover, like many hard men, he was capable of great kindness towards those whom he liked. And, with the full approbation of his conscience, he liked his penitent; whilst, rather in spite of his conscience, he liked his penitent’s son.

Carlos did not trouble himself overmuch about the prior’s motives. He was too content in his new-found joy, too engrossed in his absorbing task—the concern and occupation of his every hour, almost of his every moment. He was as one who toils patiently to clear away the moss and lichen that has grown over a memorial stone; that he may bring out once more, in all their freshness, the precious words engraven upon it. The inscription was there, and there it had been always (so he told himself); all that he had to do was to remove that which covered and obscured it.

He had his reward. Life returned, first through love for him, to the heart; then, through the heart, to the brain. Not rapidly and with tingling pain, as it returns to a frozen limb, but gradually and insensibly, as it comes to the dry trees in spring.

But, in the trees, life shows itself first in the extremities; it is slowest in appearing in those parts which are really nearest the sources of all life. So the penitent’s interest in other subjects, and his care for them, revived; yet in one thing, the greatest of all, these seemed lacking still. There did not return the spiritual light and life, which Carlos could not doubt he had enjoyed in past days. Sometimes, it is true, he would startle his son by unexpected reminiscences, disjointed fragments of the truth for which he had suffered so much. He would occasionally interrupt Carlos, when he was repeating to him passages from the Testament, to tell him “something Don Rodrigo said about that, when he expounded the Epistle to the Romans.” But these were only like the rich flowers that surprise the explorer amidst the tangled weeds of a waste ground, showing that a carefully tended garden has flourished there once—very long ago.

“It is not that I desire him above all things to hold this doctrine or that,” thought Carlos; “I desire him to find Christ again, and to rejoice in his love, as doubtless he did in the old days. And surely he will, since Christ found him—chose him for his own even before the foundation of the world.”

But in order to bring this about, perhaps it was necessary that the faded colours of his soul should be steeped in the strong and bitter waters of a great agony, that they might regain thereby their full freshness.

XLIII

El Dorado Found Again.

“And every power was used, and every art,
To bend to falsehood one determined heart,
Assailed, in patience it received the shock,
Soft as the wave, unbroken as the rock.”

—Crabbe

“What are you doing, my father?” Carlos asked one morning.

Don Juan had produced from some private receptacle a small ink-horn, and was moistening its long-dried contents with water.

“I was thinking that I should like to write down somewhat,” he said.

“But whereto will ink serve us without pen and paper?”

The penitent smiled; and presently pulled out from within his pallet a little faded writing-book, and a pen that looked—what it was—more than twenty years old.

“Long ago,” he said, “I used to be weary, weary of sitting idle all the day; so I bribed one of the lay brothers with my last ducat to bring me this, only that I might set down therein whatever happened, for pastime.”

“May I read it, my father?”

“And welcome, if thou wilt;” and he gave the book into the hand of his son. “At first, as you see, there be many things written therein. I cannot tell what they are now; I have forgotten them all;—but I suppose I thought them, or felt them—once. Or sometimes the brethren would come to visit me, and talk, and afterwards I would write what they said. But by degrees I set down less and less in it. Many days passed in which I wrote nothing, because nothing was to write. Nothing ever happened.”

Carlos was soon absorbed in the perusal of the little book. The records of his father’s earlier prison life he scanned with great interest and with deep emotion; but coming rather suddenly upon the last entry, he could not forbear a smile. He read aloud:

“‘A feast day. Had a capon for dinner, and a measure of red wine.’”

“Did I not judge well,” asked the father, “that it was time to give over writing, when I could stoop low enough to record such trifles? Yes; I think I can recall the bitterness of heart with which I laid the book aside. I despised myself for what I wrote therein; and yet I had nothing else to write—would never have anything else, I thought. But now God has given me my son. I will write that down.”

Looking up, after a little while, from his self-imposed task, he asked, with an air of perplexity,—

“But when was it? How long is it since you came here, Carlos?”

Carlos in his turn was perplexed. The quiet days had glided on swiftly and noiselessly, leaving no trace behind.

“To me it seems to have been all one long Sabbath,” he said. “But let me think. The summer heats had not come; I suppose it must have been March or April—April, perhaps. I remember thinking I had been just two years in prison.”

“And now it is growing cool again. I suppose it may have been four months—six months ago. What think you?”

Carlos thought it nearer the latter period than the former.

“I believe we have been visited six times by the brethren,” he said. “No; only five times.”

These visits of inspection had been made by command of the prior—himself absent from Seville on important business during most of the time—and the result had been duly reported to him. The monks to whom the duty had been deputed were aged and respectable members of the community; in fact, the only persons in the monastery who were acquainted with Don Juan’s real name and history. It was their opinion that matters were progressing favourably with the prisoners. They found the penitent as usual—docile, obedient, submissive, only more inclined to converse than formerly; and they thought the young man very gentle and courteous, grateful for the smallest kindness, and ready to listen attentively, and with apparent interest, to everything that was said.

For more definite results the prior was content to wait: he had great faith in waiting. Still, even to him six months seemed long enough for the experiment he was trying. At the end of that time—which happened to be the day after the conversation just related—he himself made a visit to the prisoners.

Both most warmly expressed their gratitude for the singular grace he had shown them. Carlos, whose health had greatly improved, said that he had not dreamed so much earthly happiness could remain for him still.

“Then, my son,” said the prior, “give evidence of thy gratitude in the only way possible to thee, or acceptable to me. Do not reject the mercy still offered thee by Holy Church. Ask for reconciliation.”

“My lord,” replied Carlos, firmly, “I can but repeat what I told you six months agone—that is impossible.”

The prior argued, expostulated, threatened—in vain. At length he reminded Carlos that he was already condemned to death—the death of fire; and that he was now putting from him his last chance of mercy. But when he still remained steadfast, he turned away from him with an air of deep disappointment, though more in sorrow than in anger, as one pained by keen and unexpected ingratitude.

“I speak to thee no more,” he said. “I believe there is in thy father’s heart some little spark, not only of natural feeling but of the grace of God. I address myself to him.”

Whether Don Juan had never fully comprehended the statement of Carlos that he was under sentence of death, or whether the tide of emotion caused by finding in him his own son had swept the terrible fact from his remembrance, it is impossible to say; but it certainly came to him, from the lips of the prior, as a dreadful, unexpected blow. So keen was his anguish that Fray Ricardo himself was moved; and the rather, because it was impossible to the aged and broken man to maintain the outward self-restraint a younger and stronger person might have done.

More touched, at the moment, by his father’s condition than by all the horrors that menaced himself, Carlos came to his side, and gently tried to soothe him.

“Cease!” said the prior, sternly. “It is but mockery to pretend sympathy with the sorrow thine own obstinacy has caused. If in truth thou lovest him, save him this cruel pain. For three days still,” he added, “the door of grace shall stand open to thee. After that term has expired, I dare not promise thy life.” Then turning to the agitated father—“If you can make this unhappy youth hear the voice of divine and human compassion,” he said, “you will save both his body and his soul alive. You know how to send me a message. God comfort you, and incline his heart to repentance.” And with these words he departed, leaving Carlos to undergo the sharpest trial that had come upon him since his imprisonment.

All that day, and the greater part of the night that followed it, the two wills strove together. Prayers, tears, entreaties, seemed to the agonized father to fall on the strong heart of his son like drops of rain on the rock. He did not know that all the time they were falling on that heart like sparks of living fire; for Carlos, once so weak, had learned now to endure pain, both of mind and body, with brow and lip that “gave no sign.” Passing tender was the love that had sprung up between those two, so strangely brought together. And now Carlos, by his own act, must sever that sweet bond—must leave his newly-found father in a solitude doubly terrible, where the feeble lamp of his life would soon go out in obscure darkness. Was not this bitterness enough, without the anguish of seeing that father bow his white head before him, and teach his aged lips words of broken, passionate entreaty that his son—his one earthly treasure—would not forsake him thus?

“My father,” Carlos said at last, as they sat together in the moonlight, for their light had gone out unheeded—“my father, you have often told me that my face is like my mother’s.”

“Ay de mi!” moaned the penitent—“and truly it is. Is that why it must leave me as hers did? Ay de mi, Costanza mia! Ay de mi, my son!”

“Father, tell me, I pray you, to escape what anguish of mind or body would you set your seal to a falsehood told to her dishonour?”

“Boy, how can you ask? Never!—nothing could force me to that.” And from the faded eye there shot a gleam almost like the fire of old days.

“Father, there is One I love better than ever you loved her. Not to save myself, not even to save you, from this bitter pain, can I deny him or dishonour his name. Father, I cannot!—Though this is worse than the torture,” he added.

The anguish of the last words pierced to the very core of the old man’s heart. He said no more; but he covered his face, and wept long and passionately, as a man weeps whose heart is broken, and who has no longer any power left him to struggle against his doom.

Their last meal lay untasted. Some wine had formed part of it; and this Carlos now brought, and, with a few gentle, loving words, offered to his father. Don Juan put it aside, but drew his son closer, and looked at him in the moonlight long and earnestly.

“How can I give thee up?” he murmured.

As Carlos tried to return his gaze, it flashed for the first time across his mind that his father was changed. He looked older, feebler, more wan than he had done at his coming. Was the newly-awakened spirit wearing out the body? He said,—

“It may be, my father, that God will not call you to the trial. Perhaps months may elapse before they arrange another Auto.”

How calmly he could speak of it;—for he had forgotten himself. Courage, with him, always had its root in self-forgetting love.

Don Juan caught at the gleam of hope, though not exactly as Carlos intended. “Ay, truly,” he said, “many things may happen before then.”

“And nothing can happen save at the will of Him who loves and cares for us. Let us trust him, my beloved father. He will not allow us to be tempted above that we are able to bear. For he is good—oh, how good!—to the soul that seeketh him. Long ago I believed that; but since he has honoured me to suffer for him, once and again have I proved it true, true as life or death. Father, I once thought the strongest thing on earth—that which reached deepest into our nature—was pain. But I have lived to learn that his love is stronger, his peace is deeper, than all pain.”

With many such words—words of faith, and hope, and tenderness—did he soothe his weary, broken-hearted father. And at last, though not till towards morning, he succeeded in inducing him to lie down and seek the rest he so sorely needed.

Then came his own hour; the hour of bitter, lonely conflict. He had grown accustomed to the thought, to the expectation, of a silent, peaceful death within the prison walls. He had hoped, nay, certainly believed, that in the slow hours of some quiet day or night, undistinguished from other days and nights, God’s messenger would steal noiselessly to his gloomy cell, and heart and brain would thrill with rapture at the summons, “The Master calleth thee.”

Now, indeed, it was true that the Master called him. But he called him to go to Him through the scornful gaze of ten thousand eyes; through reproach, and shame, and mockery; the hideous zamarra and carroza; the long agony of the Auto, spun out from daybreak till midnight; and, last of all, through the torture of the doom of fire. How could he bear it? Sharp were the pangs of fear that wrung his heart, and dread was the struggle that followed.

It was over at last. Raising to the cold moonlight a steadfast though sorrowful face, Carlos murmured audibly, “What time I am afraid I will put my trust in thee. Lord, I am ready to go with thee, whithersoever thou wilt; only—with thee.”

He woke, late the following morning, from the sleep of exhaustion to the painful consciousness of something terrible to come upon him. But he was soon roused from thoughts of self by seeing his father kneel before the crucifix, not quietly reciting his appointed penance, but uttering broken words of prayer and lamentation, accompanied by bitter weeping. As far as he could gather, the burden of the cry was this, “God help me! God forgive me! I have lost it!” Over and over again did he moan those piteous words, “I have lost it!” as if they were the burden of some dreary song. They seemed to contain the sum of all his sorrow.

Carlos, yearning to comfort him, still did not feel that he could interrupt him then. He waited quietly until they were both ready for their usual reading or repetition of Scripture; for Carlos, every morning, either read from the Book of Hours to his father, or recited passages from memory, as suited his inclination at the time.

He knew all the Gospel of John by heart. And this day he began with those blessed words, dear in all ages to the tried and sorrowing, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” He continued without pause to the close of the sixteenth chapter, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Then once more Don Juan uttered that cry of bitter pain, “Ay de mi! I have lost it!”

Carlos thought he understood him now. “Lost that peace, my father?” he questioned gently.

The old man bowed his head sorrowfully.

“But it is in Him. ‘In me ye might have peace.’ And Him you have,” said Carlos.

Don Juan drew his hand across his brow, was silent for a few moments, then said slowly, “I will try to tell you how it is with me. There is one thing I could do, even yet; one path left open to my footsteps in which none could part us.—What hinders my refusing to perform my penance, and boldly taking my stand beside thee, Carlos?”

Carlos started, flushed, grew pale again with emotion. He had not dreamed of this, and his heart shrank from it in terror. “My beloved father!” he exclaimed in a trembling voice. “But no—God has not called you. Each one of us must wait to see his guiding hand.”

“Once I could have done it bravely, nay, joyfully,” said the penitent. “Not now.” And there was a silence.

At last Don Juan resumed, “My boy, thy courage shames my weakness. What hast thou seen, what dost thou see, that makes this thing possible to thee?”

“My father knows. I see Him who died for me, who rose again for me, who lives at the right hand of God to intercede for me.”

“For me?”

“Yes; it is this thought that gives strength and peace.”

“Peace—which I have lost for ever.”

“Not for ever, my honoured father. No; you are his, and of such it is written, ‘Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.’ Though your tired hand has relaxed its grasp of him, his has never ceased to hold you, and never can cease.”

“I was at peace and happy long ago, when I believed, as Don Rodrigo said, that I was justified by faith in him.”

“Once justified, justified for ever,” said Carlos.

“Don Rodrigo used to say so too, but—I cannot understand it now,” and a look of perplexity passed over his face.

Carlos spoke more simply. “No! Then come to him now, my father, just as if you had never come before. You may not know that you are justified; you know well that you are weary and heavy laden. And to such he says, ‘Come.’ He says it with outstretched arms, with a heart full of love and tenderness. He is as willing to save you from sin and sorrow as you are this hour to save me from pain and death. Only, you cannot, and he can.”

“Come—that is—believe?”

“It is believe, and more. Come, as your heart came out to me, and mine to you, when we knew the great bond between us. But with far stronger trust and deeper love; for he is more than son or father. He fulfils all relationships, satisfies all wants.”

“But then, what of those long years in which I forgot him!”

“They were but adding to the sum of sin; sin that he has pardoned, has washed away for ever in his blood.”

At that point the conversation dropped, and days passed ere it was renewed. Don Juan was unusually silent; very tender to his son, making no complaint, but often weeping quietly. Carlos thought it best to leave God to deal with him directly, so he only prayed for him and with him, repeated precious Scripture words, and sometimes sang to him the psalms and hymns of the Church.

But one evening, to the affectionate “Good-night” always exchanged by the son and father with the sense that many more might not be left to them, Don Juan added, “Rejoice with me, my son; for I think that I have found again the thing that I lost—

‘El Dorado
Yo hé trovada.’”

XLIV

One Prisoner Set Free.

“All was ended now, the hope and the fear, and the sorrow;
All the aching of heart, the restless unsatisfied longing,
All the dull deep pain, and constant anguish of patience.”

—Longfellow.

The winter rain was pouring down in a steady continuous torrent It was long since a gleam of sunshine had come through the windows of the prison-room. But Don Juan Alvarez did not miss the sunlight. For he lay on his pallet, weak and ill, and the only sight he greatly cared to look upon was the loving face that was ever beside him.

It is possible, by means of the embalmer’s art, to enable buried forms to retain for ages a ghastly outward similitude to life. Tombs have been opened, and kings found therein clothed in their royal robes, stern and stately, the sceptre in their cold hands, and no trace of the grave and its corruption visible upon them. But no sooner did the breath of the upper air and the finger of light touch them than they crumbled away, silently and rapidly, and dust returned to dust again. Thus, buried in the chill dark tomb of his seclusion, Don Juan might have lived for years—if life it could be called—or, at least, he might have lingered on in the outward similitude of life. But Carlos brought in light and air upon him. His mind and heart revived; and, just in proportion, his physical nature sank. It proved too weak to bear these powerful influences. He was dying.

Tender and thoughtful as a woman, Carlos, who himself knew so well all the bitterness of unpitied pain and sickness, ministered to his father’s wants. But he did not request their gaolers to afford him any medical aid, though, had he done so, it would have been readily granted.

He had good reason for seeking no help from man. The daily penance was neglected now; the rosary lay untold; and never again would “Ave Maria Sanctissima” pass the lips of Don Juan Alvarez. Therefore it was that Carlos, after much thought and prayer, said quietly to him one day, “My father, are you afraid to lie here, in God’s hands, and in his alone, and to take whatever he pleases to send us?”

“I am not afraid.”

“Do you desire any help they can give, either for your soul or for your body?”

“No,” said the Conde de Nuera, with something like the spirit of other days. “I would not confess to them; for Christ is my only priest now. And they should not anoint me while I retained my consciousness.”

A look of resolution, strange to see, passed over the gentle face of Carlos. “It is well said, my father,” he responded. “And, God helping me, I will let no man trouble you.”

“My son,” said Don Juan one evening, as Carlos sat beside him in the twilight, “I pray you, tell me a little more of those who learned to love the truth since I walked amongst men. For I would fain be able to recognize them when we meet in heaven.”

Then Carlos told him, not indeed for the first time, but more fully than ever before, the story of the Reformed Church in Spain. Almost every name that he mentioned has come down to us surrounded by the mournful halo of martyr glory. With special reverential love, he told of Don Carlos de Seso, of Losada, of D’Arellano, and of the heroic Juliano Hernandez, who, as he believed, was still waiting for his crown. “For him,” he said, “I pray even yet; for the others I can only thank God, Surely,” he added, after a pause, “God will remember the land for which these, his faithful martyrs, prayed and toiled and suffered! Surely he will hear their voices, that cry under the altar, not for vengeance, but for forgiveness and mercy; and one day he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him?”

“I know not,” said the dying man despondingly. “The Spains have had their offer of God’s truth, and have rejected it. What is there that is said, somewhere in the Scriptures, about Noah, Daniel, and Job?”

Carlos repeated the solemn words, “‘Though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness.’ Do you fear that such a terrible doom has gone forth over our land, my father? I dare to hope otherwise. For it is not the Spains that have rejected the truth. It is the Inquisition that is crushing it out.”

“But the Spains must answer for its deeds, since they consent to them. They heed not. There are brave men enough, with weapons in their hands,” said the soldier of former days, with a momentary return to old habits of thought and feeling.

“Yet God may give our land another trial,” Carlos continued. “His truth is sometimes offered twice to individuals, why not to nations?”

“True; it was offered twice to me, praised be his name.” After an interval of silence, he resumed, “My son always speaks of others, never of himself. Not yet have I learned how it was that you came to receive the Word of God so readily from Juliano.”

Then in the dark, with his father’s hand in his, Carlos told, for the first and last time, the true story of his life.

Before he had gone far, Don Juan started, half-raised him self, and exclaimed in surprise, “What, and you!—you too—once loved?”

“Ay, and bitter as the pain has been, I am glad now of all except the sin. I am glad that I have tasted earth’s very best and sweetest; that I know how the wine is red and gives its colour in the cup of life he honours me to put aside for him.” His voice was low and full of feeling as he said this. Presently he resumed. “But the sin, my father! Especially my treachery in heart to Juan; that rankled long and stung deeply. Juan, my brave, generous brother, who would have struck down any man who dared to hint that I could do, or think, aught dishonourable! He never knew it; and had he known it, he would have forgiven me; but I could not forgive myself. I do not think the self-scorn passed away until—that which happened after I had been nigh a year in prison. O my father, if God had not interposed to save me by withholding me from that crime, I shudder to think what my life might have been. I am persuaded I should have sunk lower, lower, and ever lower. Perhaps, even, I might have ended in the purple and fine linen, and the awful pomp and luxury of the oppressors and persecutors of the saints.”

“Nay,” said Don Juan, “that would never have been possible to thee, Carlos. But there is a question I have often longed to ask thee. Does Juan, my Juan Rodrigo, know and love the Word of God?”

He had asked that question before; but Carlos had contrived, with tact and gentleness, to evade the answer. Up to this hour he had not dared to tell his father the truth upon this important subject. Besides the terrible risk that in some moment of fear or forgetfulness the prior or his agents might draw an incautious word from the old man’s lips, there was a haunting dread of listeners at key-holes, or secret apertures, quite natural in one who knew the customs of the Holy Office. But now he bent down close to the dying man, and spoke to him in a long earnest whisper.

“Thank God,” murmured Don Juan. “I would have no earthly wish unsatisfied now—if only you were safe. But still,” he added, “it seemeth somewhat hard to me that Juan should have all, and you nothing.”

“I nothing!” Carlos exclaimed; and had not the room been in darkness his father would have seen that his eye kindled, and his whole countenance lighted up. “My father, mine has been the best lot, even for earth. Were it to do again, I would not change the last two years for the deepest love, the brightest hope, the fairest joy life has to offer. For the Lord himself has been the portion of my cup, my inheritance in the land of the living.”

After a silence, he continued, “Moreover, and beside all, I have thee, my father. Therefore to me it is a joy to think that my beloved brother has also something precious. How he loved her! But the strangest thing of all, as I ponder over it now, is the fulfilment of our childhood’s dream. And in me, the weak one who deserved nothing, not in Juan the hero who deserved everything. It is the lame who has taken the prey. It is the weak and timid Carlos who has found our father.”

“Weak—timid?” said Don Juan, with an incredulous smile. “I marvel who ever joined such words with the name of my heroic son. Carlos, have we any wine?”

“Abundance, my father,” answered Carlos, who carefully treasured for his father’s use all that was furnished for both of them. Having given him a little, he asked, “Do you feel pain to-night!”

“No—no pain. Only weary; always weary.”

“I think my beloved father will soon be where the weary are at rest”—“and where the wicked cease from troubling,” he added mentally, not aloud.

He would fain have dropped the conversation then, fearing to exhaust his father’s strength. But the sick man’s restlessness was soothed by his talk. Ere long he questioned, “Is it not near Christmas now?”

Well did Carlos know that it was; and keenly did he dread the return of the season which ought to bring “peace upon earth.” For it would certainly bring the prisoners a visit; and almost certainly there would be the offer of special privileges to the penitent, perhaps sacramental consolation, perhaps permission to hear mass. He shuddered to think what a refusal to avail himself of these indulgences might entail. And once and again did he breathe the fervent prayer, that whatever came upon him, neither violence, insult, nor reproach might be allowed to touch his father.

Moreover, amongst the great festivities of the season, it was more than likely that a solemn Auto-da-fé might find place. But this was a secret inner thought, not often put into words, even to himself. Only, if it were God’s will to call his father first!

“It is December,” he said, in answer to Don Juan’s question; “but I have lost account of the day. It may be perhaps the twelfth or fourteenth. Shall I recite the evening psalms for the twelfth, ‘Te dicet hymnus’?”

As he did so, the old man fell asleep, which was what he desired. Half in the sleep of exhaustion, half in weary restlessness, the next day and the next night wore on. Once only did Don Juan speak connectedly.

“I think you will see my mother soon,” said Carlos, as he bore to his lips wine mingled with water.

“True,” breathed the dying man; “but I am not thinking of that now. Far better—I shall see Christ.”

“My father, are you still in peace, resting on him?”

“In perfect peace.”

And Carlos said no more. He was content; nay, he was exceeding glad. He who in all things will have the pre-eminence, had indeed taken his rightful place in the heart of the dying, when even the strong earthly love that was “twisted with the strings of life” had paled before the love of him.

And in the last watch of the night, when the day was breaking, he sent his angel to loose the captive’s bonds. So gentle was the touch that freed him, that he who sat holding his hand in his, and watching his face as we watch the last conscious looks of our beloved, yet knew not the exact moment when the Deliverer came. Carlos never said “He is going!” he only said “He is gone!” And then he kissed the pale lips and closed the sightless eyes—in peace.

None ever thanked God for bringing back their beloved from the gates of the grave more fervently than Carlos thanked him that hour for so gently opening unto his those gates that “no man can shut.” “My father, thy rest is won!” he said, as he gazed on the calm and noble countenance. “They cannot touch thee now. Not all the malice of men or of fiends can give one pang. A moment since so fearfully in their power; now so completely beyond it! Thank God! thank God!”

The rain was over, and ere long the sun arose, in his royal robes of crimson and purple and gold—to the prisoner from the dungeon of the Triana an ever fresh wonder and joy. Yet not even that sight could win his eyes to-day from the deeper beauty of the still and solemn face before him. And as the soft crimson light fell on the pallid cheek and brow, the watcher murmured, with calm thankfulness,—“‘To him sun and daylight are as nothing, for he sees the glory of God.’”

XLV

Triumphant.

“For ever with the Lord!
Amen! to let it be!”

—Montgomery.

Carlos was still sitting beside that couch, with scarcely more sense of time than if he had been already where time exists no longer, when the door of his cell was opened to admit two distinguished visitors. First came the prior; then another member of the Table of the Inquisition.

Carlos rose up from beside his dead, and said calmly, addressing the prior, “My father is free!”

“How? what is this?” cried Fray Ricardo, his brow contracting with surprise.

Carlos stood aside, allowing him to approach and look. With real concern in his stern countenance, he stooped for a few moments over the motionless form. Then he asked,—

“But why was I not summoned? Who was with him when he departed?”

“I,—his son,” said Carlos.

“But who besides thee?” Then, in a higher key, and with more hurried intonation,—“Who gave him the last rites of the Church?”

“He did not receive them, my lord, for he did not desire them. He said that Christ was his priest; that he would not confess; and that they should not anoint him while he retained consciousness.”

The Dominican’s face grew white with anger, even to the lips.

“Liar!” he cried, in a voice of thunder. “How darest thou tell me that he for whom I watched, and prayed, and toiled, after years and years of faithful penance, has gone down at last, unanointed and unassoiled, to hell with Luther and Calvin?”

“I tell thee that he has gone home in peace to his Father’s house.”

“Blasphemer! liar, like thy father the devil! But I understand all now. Thou, in thy hatred of the Faith, didst refuse to summon help—didst let his spirit pass without the aid and consolations of the Church. Murderer of his soul—thy father’s soul! Not content even with that, thou canst stand there and slander his memory, bidding us believe that he died in heresy! But that, at least, is false—false as thine own accursed creed!”

“It is true; and you believe it,” said Carlos, in calm, clear, quiet tones, that contrasted strangely with the Dominican’s outburst of unwonted rage.

And the prior did believe it—there was the sharpest sting. He knew perfectly well that the condemned heretic was incapable of falsehood: on a matter of fact he would have received his testimony more readily than that of the stately “Lord Inquisitor” now standing by his side. In the momentary pause that followed, that personage came forward and looked upon the face of the dead.

“If there be really any proof that he died in heresy,” he said, “he ought to be proceeded against according to the laws of the Holy Office provided for such cases.”

Carlos smiled—smiled in calm triumph.

“You cannot hurt him now,” he said. “Look there, señor. The King immortal, invisible, has set his own signet upon that brow, that the decree may not be reversed nor the purpose changed concerning him.”

And the peace of the dead face seemed to have passed into the living face that had gazed on it so long. Carlos was as really beyond the power of his enemies as his father was that hour. They felt it; or at least one of them did. As for the other, his strong heart was torn with rage and sorrow: sorrow for the penitent, whom he truly loved, and whom he now believed, after all his prayers and efforts, a lost soul; rage against the obstinate heretic, whom he had sought to befriend, and who had repaid his kindness by snatching his convert from his grasp at the very gate of heaven, and plunging him into hell.

“I will not believe it,” he reiterated, with pale lips, and eyes that gleamed beneath his cowl like coals of fire. Then, softening a little as he turned to the dead—“Would that those silent lips could utter, were it only one word, to say that death found thee true to the Catholic faith!—Not one word! So end the hopes of years. But at least thy betrayer shall be with thee amongst the dead to-morrow.—Heretic!” he said, turning fiercely to Carlos, “we are here to announce thy doom. I came, with a heart full of pity and relenting, to offer counsel and comfort, and such mercy as Holy Church still keeps for those who return to her bosom at the eleventh hour. But now, I despair of thee. Professed, impenitent, dogmatizing heretic, go thine own way to everlasting fire!”

“To-morrow! Did you say to-morrow?” asked Carlos, standing motionless, as one lost in thought.

The other Inquisitor took up the word.

“It is true,” he said. “To-morrow the Church offers to God the acceptable sacrifice of a solemn Act of Faith. And we come to announce to thee thy sentence, well merited and long delayed—to be relaxed to the secular arm as an obstinate heretic. But if even yet thou wilt repent, and, confessing and deploring thy sins, supplicate restoration to the bosom of the Church, she will so effectually intercede for thee with the civil magistrate that the doom of fire will be exchanged for the milder punishment of death by strangling.”

Something like a faint smile played round the lips of Carlos; but he only repeated, “To-morrow!”

“Yes, my son,” said the Inquisitor, promptly; for he was a man who knew his business well. He had come there to improve the occasion; and he meant to do it. “No doubt it seems to thee a sudden blow, and but a brief space left thee for preparation. But, at the best, our life here is only a span; ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.’”

Carlos did not look as if he heard; he still stood lost in thought, his head sunk upon his breast. But in another moment he raised it suddenly.

“To-morrow I shall be with Christ in glory!” he exclaimed, with a countenance as radiant as if that glory were already reflected there.

Some faint feeling of awe and wonder touched the Inquisitor’s heart, and silenced him for an instant. Then, recovering himself, and falling back for help upon wonted words of course, he said,—

“I entreat of you to think of your soul.”

“I have thought of it long ago. I have given it into the safe keeping of Christ my Lord. Therefore I think no more of it; I only think of him.”

“But have you no fear of the anguish—the doom of fire?”

“I have no fear,” Carlos answered. And this was a great mystery, even to himself. “Christ’s hand will either lift me over it or sustain me through it; which, I know not yet. And I am not careful; he will care.”

“Men of noble lineage, such as you are—of high honour and stainless name, such as you were,” said the Inquisitor—“ofttimes dread shame more than agony. You, who were called Alvarez de Meñaya, what think you of the infamy, the loathing of all men, the scorn and mockery of the lowest rabble—the zamarra, the carroza?”

“I shall joyfully go forth with Him without the camp, bearing his reproach.”

“And stand at the stake beside a vile caitiff, a miserable muleteer, convicted of the same crimes?”

“A muleteer? Juliano Hernandez?” Carlos questioned eagerly.

“The same.”

A softer light played over the features of Carlos. Then he should see that face once more—perhaps even grasp that hand! Truly God was giving him everything he desired of him. He said,—

“I am glad to stand, here to the last, at the side of that faithful soldier and servant of Christ. For when we go in there together, I dare not hope to be so highly honoured as to take a place beside him.”

At this point the prior broke in. “Señor and my brother, your words are wasted. He is given over to the power of the evil one. Let us leave him.” And drawing his mantle round him, he turned to go, without looking again towards Carlos.

But Carlos came forward. “Pardon me, my lord; I have a few words yet to say to you;” and, stretching out his hand to detain him, he unconsciously touched his arm with it.

The prior flung it off with a gesture of angry scorn. There was contamination in that touch. “I have heard too many words from your lips already,” he said.

“To-morrow night my lips will be dust, my voice silent for ever. So you may well bear with me for a little while to-day.”

“Speak then; but be brief.”

“It gives me the last pang I think to know on earth, to part thus from you; for you have shown me true kindness. I owe you, not forgiveness as an enemy, but gratitude as a sincere though mistaken friend. I shall pray for you—”

“An impenitent heretic’s prayers—”

“Will do my lord the prior no harm; and there may come a day when he will not be sorry he had them.”

There was a short pause. “Have you anything else to say?” asked the prior rather more gently.

“Only one word, señor.” He turned and looked at the dead. “I know you loved him well. You will deal gently with his dust, will you not? A grave is not much to ask for him. You will give it; I trust you.”

The stern set face relaxed a little before that pleading look. “It is you who have sought to rob him of a grave,” said the prior—“you who have defamed him of heresy. But your testimony is invalid; and, as I have said, I believe you not.”

With this declaration of purely official disbelief, he left the room.

His colleague lingered a moment. “You plead for the senseless dust that can neither feel nor suffer,” he said; “you can pity that. How is it you cannot pity yourself?”

“That which you destroy to-morrow is not myself. It is only my garment, my tent. Yet even over that Christ watches. He can raise it glorious from the ashes of the Quemadero as easily as from the church where the bones of my fathers sleep. For I am his, soul and body—the purchase of his blood. And why should it be a marvel in your eyes that I rejoice to give my life for him who gave his own for me?”

“God grant thee even yet to die in his grace!” answered the Inquisitor, somewhat moved. “I do not despair of thee. I will pray for thee, and visit thee again to-night.” So saying, he hastened after the prior.

For a season Carlos sat motionless, his soul filled to overflowing with a calm, deep tide of awed and wondering joy. No room was there for any thought save one—“I shall see His face; I shall be with Him for ever.” Over the Thing that lay between he could spring as joyously as a child might leap across a brook to reach his father’s outstretched hand.

At length his eye fell, perhaps by accident, on the little writing-book which lay near. He drew it towards him, and having found out the place where the last entry was made, wrote rapidly beneath it,—

---

“To depart and to be with Christ is far better. My beloved father is gone to him in peace to-day. I too go in peace, though by a rougher path, to-morrow. Surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

“CARLOS ALVAREZ DE SANTILLANOS Y MENAYA.”

And with a strange consciousness that he had now signed his name for the last time, he carefully affixed to it his own especial “rubrica,” or sign-manual.

Then came one thought of earth—only one—the last. “God, in his great mercy, grant that my brother may be far away! I would not that he saw my face to-morrow. For the pain and the shame can be seen of all; while that which changes them to glory no man knoweth, save he that receiveth it. But, wherever thou art, God bless thee, my Ruy!” And drawing the book towards him again, he added, as if by a sudden impulse, to what he had already written, “God bless thee, my Ruy!”

Soon afterwards the Alguazils arrived to conduct him back to the Triana. Then, turning to his dead once more, he kissed the pale forehead, saying, “Farewell, for a little while. Thou didst never taste death; nor shall I. Instead of thee and me, Christ drank that cup.”

And then, for the second time, the gate of the Triana opened to receive Don Carlos Alvarez. At sunrise next morning its gloomy portals were unlocked, and he, with others, passed forth from beneath their shadow. Not to return again to that dark prison, there to linger out the slow and solitary hours of grief and pain. His warfare was accomplished, his victory was won. Long before the sun had arisen again upon the weary blood-stained earth, a brighter sun arose for him who had done with earth. All his desire was granted, all his longings were fulfilled. He saw the face of Christ, and he was with Him for ever.

XLVI

Is it too Late?

“Death upon his face
Is rather shine than shade;
A tender shine by looks beloved made:
He seemeth dying in a quiet place.”

—E. B. Browning.

The mountain-snow lay white around the old castle of Nuera; but within there was light and warmth. Joy and gladness were there also, “thanksgiving and the voice of melody;” for Doña Beatrix, graver and paler than of old, and with the brilliant lustre of her dark eyes subdued to a kind of dewy softness, was singing a cradle-song beside the cot where her first-born slept.

The babe had just been baptized by Fray Sebastian. With a pleading, wistful look had Dolores asked her lord, the day before, what name he wished his son to bear. But he only answered, “The heir of our house always bears the name of Juan.” Another name was far dearer to memory; but not yet could he accustom his lips to utter it, or his ear to bear the sound.

Now he came slowly into the room, holding in his hand an unsealed letter. Doña Beatriz looked up. “He sleeps,” she said.

“Then let him sleep on, señora mia.”

“But will you not look? See, how pretty he is! How he smiles in his sleep! And those dear small hands—”

“Have their share in dragging me further than you wot of, my Beatriz.”

“Nay; what dost thou mean? Do not be grave and sad to-day—not to-day, Don Juan.”

“My beloved, God knows I would not cloud thy brow with a single care if I could help it. Nor am I sad. Only we must think. Here is a letter from the Duke of Savoy (and very gracious and condescending too), inviting me to take my place once more in His Catholic Majesty’s army.”

“But you will not go? We are so happy together here.”

“My Beatriz, I dare not go. I would have to fight”—(here he broke off, and cast a hasty glance round the room, from the habit of dreading listeners)—“I would have to fight against those whose cause is just the cause I hold dearest upon earth, I would have to deny my faith by the deeds of every day. But yet, how to refuse and not stand dishonoured in the eyes of the world, a traitor and a coward, I know not.”

“No dishonour could ever touch thee, my brave and noble Juan.”

Don Juan’s brow relaxed a little. “But that men should even think it did, is what I could not bear,” he said. “Besides”—and he drew nearer the cradle, and looked fondly down at the little sleeper—“it does not seem to me, my Beatriz, that I dare bring up this child God has given me to the bitter heritage of a slave.”

“A slave!” repeated Doña Beatriz, almost with a cry. “Now Heaven help us, Don Juan; are you mad? You, of noblest lineage—you, Alvarez de Meñaya—to call your own first-born a slave!”

“I call any one a slave who dares not speak out what he thinks, and act out what he believes,” returned Don Juan sadly.

“And what is it that you would do then?”

“Would to God that I knew! But the future is all dark to me. I see not a single step before me.”

“Then, amigo mio, do not look before you. Let the future alone, and enjoy the present, as I do.”

“Truly that baby face would charm many a care away,” said Juan, with another fond glance at the sleeping child. “But a man must look before him, and a Christian man must ask what God would have him to do. Moreover, this letter of the duke demands an answer, Yea or Nay.”

“Señor Don Juan, I desire to speak with your Excellency,” said the voice of Dolores at the door.

“Come in, Dolores.”

“Nay, señor, I want you here.” This peremptory sharpness was very unlike the wonted manner of Dolores.

Don Juan came forth immediately. Dolores signed to him to shut the door. Then, not till then, she began,—“Señor Don Juan, two brethren of the Society of Jesus have come from Seville, and are now in the village.”

“What then? Surely you do not fear that they suspect anything with regard to us?” asked Juan, in some alarm.

“No; but they have brought tidings.”

“You tremble, Dolores. You are ill. Speak—what is it?”

“They have brought tidings of a great Act of Faith, to be held at Seville, upon a day not yet fixed when they left the city, but towards the end of this month.”

For a moment the two stood silent, gazing in each other’s faces. Then Dolores said, in an eager breathless whisper, “You will go, señor?”

Juan shook his head. “What you are thinking of, Dolores, is a dream—a vain, wild dream. Long since, I doubt not, he rests with God.”

“But if we had the proof of it, rest might come to us,” said Dolores, large tears gathering slowly in her eyes.

“It is true,” Juan mused; “they may wreak their vengeance on the dust.”

“And for the assurance that would give that nothing more was left them, I, a poor woman, would joyfully walk barefoot from this to Seville and back again.”

Juan hesitated no longer. “I go,” he said. “Dolores, seek Fray Sebastian, and send him to me at once. Bid Jorge be ready with the horses to start to-morrow at daybreak. Meanwhile, I will prepare Doña Beatriz for my sudden departure.”

---

Of that hurried winter journey, Don Juan was never afterwards heard to speak. No one of its incidents seemed to have made the slightest impression on his mind, or even to have been remembered by him.

But at last he drew near Seville. It was late in the evening, however, and he had told his attendant they should spend the night at a village eight or nine miles from their destination.

Suddenly Jorge cried out. “Look there, señor, the city is on fire.”

Don Juan looked. A lurid crimson glow paled the stars in the southern sky. With a shudder he bowed his head, and veiled his face from the awful sight.

“That fire is without the gate,” he said at last. “Pray for the souls that are passing in anguish now.”

Noble, heroic souls! Probably Juliano Hernandez, possibly Fray Constantino, was amongst them. These were the only names that occurred to Don Juan’s mind, or were breathed in his fervent, agitated prayer.

“Yonder is the posada, señor,” said the attendant presently.

“Nay, Jorge, we will ride on. There will be no sleepers in Seville to-night.”

“But, señor,” remonstrated the servant, “the horses are weary. We have travelled far to-day already.”

“Let them rest afterwards,” said Juan briefly. Motion, just then, was an absolute necessity to him. He could not have rested anywhere, within sight of that awful glare.

Two hours afterwards he drew the rein of his weary steed before the house of his cousin Doña Inez. He had no scruple in asking for admission in the middle of the night, as he knew that, under the circumstances, the household would not fail to be astir. His summons was speedily answered, and he was conducted to a hall opening on the patio.

Thither, after a brief interval, came Juanita, bearing a lamp in her hand, which she set down on the table. “My lady will see your Excellency presently,” said the girl, with a shy, frightened air, which was very unlike her, but which Juan was too preoccupied to notice. “But she is much indisposed. My lord was obliged to accompany her home from the Act of Faith before it was half over.”

Juan expressed the concern he felt, and desired that she would not incommode herself upon his account. Perhaps Don Garçia, if he had not yet retired to rest, would converse with him for a few moments.

“My lady said she must speak with you herself,” answered Juanita, as she left the room.

After a considerable time Doña Inez appeared. In that southern climate youth and beauty fade quickly; and yet Juan was by no means prepared for the changed, worn, haggard face that gazed on him now. There was no pomp of apparel to carry off the impression. Doña Inez wore a loose dark dressing-robe; and a hasty careless hand seemed to have untwined the usual ornaments from her black hair. Her eyes were like those of one who has wept for hours, and then only ceased for very weariness.

She stretched out both her hands to Juan—“O Don Juan, I never meant it! I never meant it!”

“Señora and my cousin, I have but just arrived here. I do not understand you,” said Juan, rising to greet her.

“Santa Maria! Then you know not!—Horrible!”

She sank into a seat Juan stood gazing at her eagerly, almost wildly. “Yes; I understand all now,” he said at last. “I suspected it.”

He saw in imagination a black chest, with a little lifeless dust within it; a rude shapeless figure, robed in the hideous zamarra, and bearing in large letters the venerated name, “Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya.” While she saw a living face, that would never cease to haunt her memory until death shadowed all things.

“Let me speak,” she gasped; “and I will try to be calm. I did not wish to go. It was the day of the last Auto, you remember, that my poor brother died, and altogether—— But Don Garçia insisted. He said everybody would talk, and especially when the taint had touched our own house. Besides, Doña Juana de Bohorques, who died in prison, was to be publicly declared innocent, and her property restored to her heirs. Out of regard to the family, it was thought we ought to be present. O Don Juan, if I had but known! I would rather have put on a sanbenito myself than have gone there. God grant it did not hurt him!”

“How could it possibly hurt him, my tender-hearted cousin?”

“Hush! Let me go on now, while I can speak of it; or I shall never, never tell you. And I must. He would have wished—— Well, we were seated in what they called good places; very near the condemned; in fact, the scaffold opposite was plain to us as you are to me now. But that last time, and Doña Maria’s look, and Dr. Cristobal’s, haunted me, so that I did not dare to raise my eyes to where they sat;—not until long after the mass had begun. And I knew besides there were so many women there—eight on that dreadful top bench, doomed to die. But at last a lady who sat near me bade me look at one of the relaxed, a little man, who was pointing upwards and making signs to his companions to encourage them. ‘Do not look, señora,’ said Don Garçia, quickly—but too late. O Don Juan, I saw his face!”

“His LIVING face? Not his living face?” cried Juan, with a shudder that convulsed his strong frame from head to foot And the Name—the one awful Name that rises to all human lips in moments of supreme emotion—broke from his in a wail of anguish.

Doña Inez tried to speak; but in vain. Thoroughly broken down, she wept and sobbed aloud. But the sight of the rigid, tearless face before her checked her tears at last. She gained power to go on. “I saw him. Worn and pale, of course; yet not changed so greatly, after all. The same dear, kind, familiar face I had seen last in this room, when he caressed and played with my child. Not sad, not as though he suffered. Rather as though he had suffered long ago; but was beyond it all, even then. A still, patient, fearless look, eyes that saw everything; and yet nothing seemed to trouble him. I bore it until they were reading the sentences, and came to his. But when I saw the Alguazil strike him—the blow that relaxed to the secular arm—I could endure no more. I believe I cried aloud. But in fact I know not what I did. I know nothing more till Don Garçia and my brother Don Manuel were carrying me through the crowd.”

“No word! Was there no word spoken?” asked Juan wildly.

“No; but I heard some one near me say that he talked with that muleteer in the court of the Triana, and spoke words of comfort to a poor woman amongst the penitents, whom they called Maria Gonsalez.”

All was told now. Maddened with rage and anguish, Juan rushed from the room, from the house; and, without being conscious of any settled purpose, in five minutes found himself far on his way to the Dominican convent adjoining the Triana.

His servant, who was still waiting at the gate, followed him to ask for orders, and with difficulty overtook him, and arrested his steps.

Juan sternly silenced his faltering, agitated question as to what was wrong with his lord. “Go to rest,” he said, “and meet me in the morning by the great gate of San Isodro.” Nothing was clear to him; but that he must shake off as soon as possible the dust of the wicked, cruel city from his feet. And San Isodro was the only trysting-place without its walls that happened at the moment to occur to his bewildered brain.

XLVII

The Dominican Prior.

“Oh, deep is a wounded heart, and strong
A voice that cries against mighty wrong!
And full of death as a hot wind’s blight.
Doth the ire of a crushed affection light.”

—Hemans.

“Tell the prior Don Juan Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya desires to speak with him, and that instantly,” said Juan to the drowsy lay brother who at last answered his impatient summons, lantern in hand.

“My lord has but just retired to rest, and cannot now be disturbed,” answered the attendant, looking with some curiosity, not to say surprise, at the visitor, who seemed to think three o’clock of a winter morning a proper and suitable hour to demand instant audience of a great man.

“I will wait,” said Juan, walking into the court.

The attendant led him to a parlour; then, holding the door ajar, he said, “Let his Excellency pardon me, I did not hear distinctly his worship’s honourable name.”

“Don Juan Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya. The prior knows it—too well.”

It was evident from his face that the poor lay brother knew it also. And so that night did every man, woman, and child in Seville. It had become a name of infamy.

With a hasty “Yes, yes, señor,” the door was closed, and Juan was left alone.

What had brought him there? Did he mean to accuse the Dominican of his brother’s murder, or did he only intend to reproach him—him who had once shown some pity to the captive—for not saving him from that horrible doom? He himself scarcely knew. He had been driven thither by a wild, unreasoning impulse, an instinct of passionate rage, prompting him to grasp at the only shadow of revenge that lay within his reach. If he could not execute God’s awful judgments against the persecutors, at least he could denounce them. A poor substitute, but all that remained to him. Without it his heart must break.

Yet that unreasoning impulse had a kind of unconscious reason in it, since it led him to seek the presence of the Dominican prior, and not that of the far more guilty Munebrãga. For who would accuse a tiger, reproach a wolf? Words would be wasted upon such. For them there is no argument but the spear and the bullet. A man can only speak to men.

To do Fray Ricardo justice, he was so much of a man that sleep did not visit his eyes that night. When at length his attendants thought fit to inform him that Don Juan desired to see him, he was still kneeling, as he had knelt for hours, before the crucifix in his private oratory. “Saviour of the world, so much didst thou suffer,” this was the key-note of his thoughts; “and shall I weakly pity thine enemies, or shrink from seeing them suffer what they have deserved at thy hands and those of thy holy Church?”

“Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya waits below!” Just then Don Fray Ricardo would rather have held his right hand in the fire than have gone forth to face one bearing that name. But, for that very reason, no sooner did he hear that Don Juan awaited him than he robed himself in his cowl and mantle, took a lamp in his hand (for it was still dark), and went down to meet the visitor. For that morning he was in the mood to welcome any form of self-torture that came in his way, and to find a strange but real relief in it.

“Peace be with thee, my son,” was his grave but courteous salutation, as he entered the parlour. He looked upon Juan with mournful compassion, as the last of a race over which there hung a terrible doom.

“Let your peace be with murderers like yourselves, or with slaves like those that work your will; I fling it back to you in scorn,” was the fierce reply.

The Dominican recoiled a step—only a step, for he was a brave man, and his face, pale with conflict and watching, grew a shade paler.

“Do you think I mean to harm you?” cried Juan in yet fiercer scorn. “Not a hair of your tonsured head. See there!” He unbuckled his sword, and threw it from him, and it fell with a clang on the floor.

“Young man, you would consult your own safety as well as your own honour by adopting a different tone,” said the prior, not without dignity.

“My safety is little worth consulting. I am a bold, rough soldier, used to peril and violence. Would it were such, and such alone, that you menaced. But, fiends that you are, would no one serve you for a victim save my young, gentle, unoffending brother; he who never harmed you nor any one? Would nothing satisfy your malice but to immure him in your hideous dungeons for two-and-thirty long slow months, in what suffering of mind and body God alone can tell; and then, at last, to bring him forth to that horrible death? I curse you! I curse you! Nay, that is nothing; who am I to curse? I invoke God’s curse upon you! I give you up into God’s hands this hour! When He maketh inquisition for blood—another inquisition than yours—I pray him to exact from you, murderers of the innocent, torturers of the just, every drop of blood, every tear, every pang of which he has been the witness, as he shall be the avenger.”

At last the prior found a voice. Hitherto he had listened spell-bound, as one oppressed by nightmare, powerless to free himself from the hideous burden. “Man!” he cried, “you are raving; the Holy Office—”

“Is the arch-fiend’s own contrivance, and its ministers his favourite servants,” interrupted Juan, reckless in his rage, and defying all consequences.

“Blasphemy! This may not be borne,” and Fray Ricardo stretched out his hand towards a bell that lay on the table.

But Juan’s strong grasp prevented his touching it. He could not shake off that as easily as he had shaken off a pale thin hand two days before. “I shall speak forth my mind this once,” he said. “After that, what you please.—Go on. Fill your cup full to the brim. Immure, plunder, burn, destroy. Pile up, high as heaven, your hecatomb of victims, offered to the God of love. At least there is one thing that may be said in your favour. In your cruelties there is a horrible impartiality. It can never be spoken of you that you have gone out into the highways and hedges, taken the blind and the lame, and made of them your burnt sacrifice. No. You go into the closest guarded homes; you take thence the gentlest, the tenderest, the fairest, the best, and of such you make your burnt-offering. And you—are your hearts human, or are they not? If they are, stifle them, crush them down into silence while you can; for a day will come when you can stifle them no longer. That will begin your punishment. You will feel remorse.”

“Man, let me go!” interrupted the indignant yet half-frightened prior, struggling vainly to free himself from his grasp. “Cease your blasphemies. Men only feel remorse when they have sinned; and I serve God and the Church.”

“Yet, servant of the Church (for God’s servant I am not profane enough to call you), speak to me this once as man to man, and tell me, did a victim’s pale face never haunt you, a victim’s agonized cry never ring in your ears?”

For just an instant the prior winced, as one who feels a sharp sudden pain, but determines to conceal it.

“There!” cried Juan—and at last he released his arm and flung it from him—“I read an answer in your look. You, at least, are capable of remorse.”

“You are false there,” the prior broke in. “Remorse is not for me.”

“No? Then all the worse for you—infinitely the worse. Yet it may be. You may sleep and rise, and go to your rest again untroubled by an accusing conscience. You may sit down to eat and drink with the wail of your brother’s anguish ringing in your ears, like Munebrãga, who sits feasting yonder in his marble hall, with the ashes yet hot on the Quemadero. Until you go down quick into hell, and the pit shuts her mouth upon you. Then, THEN shall you drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and you shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb.”

“Thou art beside thyself,” cried the prior; “and I, scarce less mad than thou, to listen to thy ravings. Yet hear me a moment, Don Juan Alvarez. I have not merited these insane reproaches. To you and yours I have been more a friend than you wot of.”

“Noble friendship! I thank you for it, as it deserves.”

“You have given me, this hour, more than cause enough to order your instant arrest.”

“You are welcome. It were shame indeed if I could not bear at your hands what my gentle brother bore.”

The last of his race! The father dead in prison; the mother dead long ago (Fray Ricardo himself best knew why); the brother burned to ashes. “I think you have a wife, perhaps a child?” asked the prior hurriedly.

“A young wife, and an infant son,” said Juan, softening a little at the thought.

“Wild as your words have been, I am yet willing, for their sakes, to show you forbearance. According to the lenity which ministers of the Holy Office—”

“Have learned from their father the devil,” interrupted Juan, the flame of his wrath blazing up again. “After what the stars looked down on last night, dare to mock me with thy talk of lenity!”

“You are in love with destruction,” said the prior. “But I have heard you long enough. Now hear me. You have been, ere this, under grave suspicion. Indeed, you would have been arrested, only that your brother endured the Question without revealing anything to your disadvantage. That saved you.”

But here he stopped, struck with astonishment at the sudden change his words had wrought.

A man stabbed to the heart makes no outcry, he does not even moan or writhe. Nor did Juan. Mutely he sank on the nearest seat, all his rage and defiance gone now. A moment before he stood over the shrinking Inquisitor like a prophet of doom or an avenging angel; now he cowered crushed and silent, stricken to the soul. There was a long silence. Then he raised a changed, sad look to the prior’s face. “He bore that for me,” he said, “and I never knew it.”

In the cold gray morning light, now filling the room, he looked utterly forlorn and broken. The prior could even afford to pity him. He questioned, mildly enough, “How was it you did not know it? Fray Sebastian Gomez, who visited him in prison, was well aware of the fact.”

In Juan’s present mood every faculty was stimulated to unnatural activity. This perhaps enabled him to divine a truth which in calmer moments might have escaped him. “My brother,” he said, in a low tone of deep emotion, “my heroic, tender-hearted brother must have bidden him conceal it from me.”

“It was strange,” said the prior, and his thoughts ran back to other things which were strange also—to the uniform patience and gentleness of Carlos; to the fortitude with which, whilst acknowledging his own faith, he had steadily refused to compromise any one else; to the self-forgetfulness with which he had shielded his father’s last hours from disturbance. Granted that the heretic was a wild beast, “made to be taken and destroyed,” even the hunter may admire unblamed the grace and beauty of the creature who has just fallen beneath his relentless weapon. Something like a mist rose to the eyes of Fray Ricardo, taking him by surprise.

Still, the interests of the Faith were paramount with him. All that had been done had been well done; he would not, if he could, undo any part of it. But did his duty to the Faith and to Holy Church require that he should hunt the remaining brother to death, and thus “quench the coal that was left”? He hoped not; he thought not. And, although he would not have allowed it to himself, the words that followed were really a peace-offering to the shade of Carlos.

“Young man, I am willing, for my own part, to overlook the wild words you have uttered, regarding them as the outpourings of insanity, and making moreover due allowance for your natural fraternal sorrow. Still you must be aware that you have laid yourself open, and not for the first time, to grave suspicion of heresy. I should not only sin against my own conscience, but also expose myself to the penalties of a grievous irregularity, did I take no steps for the vindication of the Faith and your just and well-merited punishment. Therefore give ear to what I say. This day week I bring the matter before the Table of the Holy Office, of which I have the honour to be an unworthy member. And God grant you the grace of repentance, and his forgiveness.”

Having said this, Fray Ricardo left the room. He disappears also from our pages, where he occupied a place as a type of the less numerous and less guilty class of persecutors—those who not only thought they were doing God service (Munebrãga may have thought that, but he was only willing to do God such service as cost him nothing), but who were honestly anxious to serve him to the best of their ability. His future is hidden from our sight. We cannot even undertake to say whether, when death drew near,—if the name of Alvarez de Meñaya occurred to him at all,—he reproached himself for his sternness to the brother whom he had consigned to the flames, or for his weakness to the brother to whom he had generously given a chance of life and liberty.

It is not usually the most guilty who hear the warning voice that denounces their crimes and threatens their doom. Such words as Don Juan spoke to Fray Ricardo could not, by any conceivable possibility, have been uttered in the presence of Gonzales de Munebrãga.

Soon afterwards a lay brother, the same who had admitted Don Juan, entered the room and placed wine on the table before him. “My lord the prior bade me say your Excellency seemed exhausted, and should refresh yourself ere you depart,” he explained.

Juan motioned it away. He could not trust himself to speak. But did Fray Ricardo imagine he would either eat bread or drink water beneath the roof that sheltered him?

Still the poor man lingered, standing before him with the air of one who had something to say which he did not exactly know how to bring out.

“You may tell your lord that I am going,” said Juan, rising wearily, and with a look that certainly told of exhaustion.

“If it please your noble Excellency—” and the lay brother stopped and hesitated.

“Well?”

“Let his Excellency pardon me. Could his worship have the misfortune to be related, very distantly no doubt, to one of the heretics who—”

“Don Carlos Alvarez was my brother,” said Juan proudly.

The poor lay brother drew nearer to him, and lowered his voice to a mysterious whisper. “Señor and your Excellency, he was here in prison for a long time. It was thought that my lord the prior had a kindness for him, and wished him better used than they use the criminals in the Santa Casa. It happened that the prisoner whose cell he shared died the day before his—removal. So that the cell was empty, and it fell to my lot to cleanse it. Whilst I was doing it I found this; I think it belonged to him.”

He drew from beneath his serge gown a little book, and handed it to Juan, who seized it as a starving man might seize a piece of bread. Hastily taking out his purse, he flung it in exchange to the lay brother; and then, just as the matin bells began to ring, he buckled on his sword and went forth.

XLVIII

San Isodro Once More.

“And if with milder anguish now I bear
To think of thee in thy forsaken rest;
If from my heart be lifted the despair,
The sharp remorse with healing influence pressed.
It is that Thou the sacrifice hast blessed,
And filled my spirit, in its inmost cell,
With a deep chastened sense that all at last is well.”

—Hemans

The cloudless sky above him, the fresh morning air on his cheek, the dew-drops on his feet, Don Juan walked along. The river—his own bright Guadalquivir—glistened in the early sunshine; and soon his pathway led him amidst the gray ruins of old Italica, while among the brambles that half hid them, glittering lizards, startled by his footsteps, ran in and out. But he saw nothing, felt nothing, save the passionate pain that burned in his heart. During his interview with Fray Ricardo he had been, practically and for the time, what the prior called him, insane—mad with rage and hate. But now rage was dying out for the present, and giving place to anguish.

Is the worst pang earth has to give that of witnessing the sufferings of our beloved? Or is there yet one keener, more thrilling? That they should suffer alone; no hand near to help, no voice to speak sympathy, no eye to look “ancient kindness” on their pain. That they should die—die in anguish—and still alone,—

“With eyes turned away,
And no last word to say.”

Don Juan was now drinking that bitter cup to its very dregs. What the young brother, his one earthly tie, had been to him, need not here be told; and assuredly he could not have told it. He had been all his life a thing to protect and shield—as the strong protect the weak, as manhood shields womanhood and childhood. Had God but taken him with his own right hand, Juan would have thought it a light matter, a sorrow easily borne. But, instead, He stood afar off—He did not help; whilst men, cruel as fiends from the bottomless pit, did their worst, their very worst, upon him. And with refined self-torture he went through all the horrible details, as far as he knew or could guess them. Nor did he spare to stab his own heart with that keenest weapon of all—“It was for me; for me he endured the Question.” The cry of his brother’s anguish—anguish borne for him—seemed to sound in his ears and to haunt him: he felt that it would haunt him evermore.

Of course, there was a well of comfort near, which a child’s hand might have pointed out to him: “All is over now; he suffers no longer—he is at rest.” But who ever stoops to drink from that well in the parching thirst of the first hour of such a grief as his? In truth, all was over for Carlos; but all was not over for Juan. He had to pass through his dark hour as really as Carlos had passed through his.

Again the agony almost maddened him; again wild hatred and rage against his brother’s torturers rose and surged like a flood within him. And with these were mingled thoughts, too nearly rebellious, of Him whom that brother trusted so firmly and served so faithfully; as if he had used his servant hardly, and forsaken him in his hour of sorest need.

He shrank with horror from every wayfarer he chanced to meet, imagining that his eyes might have looked on his brother’s suffering. But at last he came unawares upon the gate of San Isodro. Left unbarred by some accident, it yielded to his touch, and he entered the monastery grounds. At that very spot, three years ago, the brothers parted, on the day that Carlos avowed his change of faith. Yet not even that remembrance could bring a tear to the hot and angry eyes of Juan. But just then he happened to recollect the book he had received from the lay brother. He took it from its place of concealment, and eagerly began to examine it. It was almost filled with writing; but not, alas! from that beloved hand. So he flung it aside in bitter disappointment. Then becoming suddenly conscious of bodily weakness, he half sat down, half threw himself on the ground. His vigorous frame and his strong nerves saved him from swooning outright: he only lay sick and faint, the blue sky looking black above him, and a strange, indistinct sound, as of many voices, murmuring in his ears.

By-and-by he became conscious that some one was holding water to his lips, and trying, though with an awkward, trembling hand, to loose his doublet at the throat. He drank, shook off his weakness, and looked about him. A very old man, in a white tunic and brown mantle, was bending over him compassionately. In another moment he was on his feet; and having briefly thanked the aged monk for his kindness, he turned his face to the gate.

“Nay, my son,” the old man interposed; “San Isodro is changed—changed! Still the sick and weary never left its gates unaided; and they shall not begin now—not now. I pray you come with me to the house, and refresh and rest yourself there.”

Juan was not reckless enough to refuse what in truth he sorely needed. He entered the monastery under the guidance of poor old Fray Bernardo, who had been passed by, perhaps in scorn, by the persecutors: and so, after all, he had his wish—he should die and be buried in peace where he had passed his life from boyhood to extreme old age. Yet there was something sad in the thought that the storm that swept by had left untouched the poor, useless, half-withered tree, while it tore down the young and strong and noble oaks, the pride of the now desolated forest.

The few cowed and terrified monks who had been allowed to remain in the convent received Don Juan with great kindness. They set food and wine before him: food he could not touch, but wine he accepted with thankfulness. And they almost insisted on his endeavouring to take some rest; assuring him that when his servant and horses should arrive, they would see them properly cared for, until such time as he might be able to resume his journey.

His journey would not brook delay, as he knew full well. That his young wife might not be a widow and his babe an orphan, he “charged his soul to hold his body strengthened” for the work that both had to do. Back to Nuera for these dear ones as swiftly as the fleetest horses would bear him, then to Seville again, and on board the first ship he could meet with bound for any foreign port,—would the term of grace assigned him by the Inquisitor suffice for all this? Certainly not a moment should be lost.

“I will rest for an hour,” he said. “But I pray you, my fathers, do me one kindness first. Is there a man here who witnessed—what was done yesterday?”

A young monk came forward. Juan led him into the cell which had been prepared for him to rest in, and leaning against its little window, with his face turned away, he murmured one agitated question. Three words comprised the answer,—

“Calmly, silently, quickly.”

Juan’s breast heaved and his strong frame trembled. After a long interval he said, still without looking,—

“Now tell me of the others. Name him no more.”

“No less than eight ladies died the martyr’s death,” said the monk, who cared not, before this auditor, to conceal his own sentiments. “One of them was Señora Maria Gomez; your Excellency probably knows her story. Her three daughters and her sister died with her. When their sentences were read, they embraced on the scaffold, and bade each other farewell with tears. Then they comforted each other with holy words about our Lord and his passion, and the home he was preparing for them above.”

Here the young monk paused for a few moments; then went on, his voice still trembling: “There were, moreover, two Englishmen and a Frenchman, who all died bravely. Lastly, there was Juliano Hernandez.”

“Ah! tell me of him.”

“He died as he had lived. In the morning, when brought out into the court of the Triana, he cried aloud to his fellow-sufferers,—‘Courage, comrades! Now must we show ourselves valiant soldiers of Jesus Christ. Let us bear faithful testimony to his truth before men, and in a few hours we shall receive the testimony of his approbation before angels, and triumph with him in heaven.’ Though silenced, he continued throughout the day to encourage his companions by his gestures. On the Quemadero, he knelt down and kissed the stone upon which the stake was erected; then thrust his head among the fagots to show his willingness to suffer. But at the end, having raised his hands in prayer, one of the attendant priests—Dr. Rodriguez—mistook the attitude for a sign that he would recant, and made intercession with the Alguazils to give him a last opportunity of speaking. He confessed his faith in a few strong, brief words; and knowing the character of Rodriguez, told him he thought the same himself, but hid his true belief out of fear. The angry priest bade them light the pile at once. It was done; but the guards, with kind cruelty, thrust the martyr through with their lances, so that he passed, without much pain, into the presence of the Lord whom he served as few have been honoured to do.”

“And—Fray Constantino?” Juan questioned.

“He was not, for God took him. They had only his dust to burn. They have sought to slander his memory, saying he raised his hand against his own life. But we knew the contrary. It has reached our ears—I dare not tell you how—that he died in the arms of one of our dear brethren from this place—poor young Fray Fernando, who closed his eyes in peace. It was from one of the dark underground cells of the Triana that he passed straight to the glory of God.”[#]

[#] At the Auto they produced his effigy, of the size of life, clad in his canon’s robe, and with the arms stretched out in the gesture he had been wont to use in preaching; but it caused such a demonstration of feeling among the people, that they were obliged hastily to withdraw it.

It was at this Auto that Maria Gonsalez was sentenced to receive two hundred lashes, and to be imprisoned for ten years, for the kindnesses she had shown the prisoners. An equally severe punishment was awarded to the under-gaoler Herrera for the offence of having allowed a mother and three daughters, who were imprisoned in separate cells, an interview of half an hour; while the many cruelties and peculations of the infamous Benevidio were only chastised by the loss of his situation and lit advantages, and banishment from Seville.

“I thank you for your tidings,” said Juan, slowly and faintly. “And now I pray of you to leave me.”

After a considerable time, one of the monks softly opened the door of their visitor’s cell. He sat on the pallet prepared for him, his head buried in his hands.

“Señor,” said the monk, “your servant has arrived, and begs you to excuse his delay. It may be there are some instructions you wish him to receive.”

Juan roused himself with an effort.

“Yes,” he said; “and I thank you. Will you add to your kindness by bidding him immediately procure for us fresh horses, the best and fleetest that can be had?” He sought his purse; but, remembering in a moment what had become of it, drew a ring from his finger to supply its loss. It was the diamond ring that the Sieur de Ramenais had given him. A keen pang shot through his heart. “No, not that; I cannot part with it.” He took two others instead—old family jewels. “Bid him bring these,” he said, “to Isaac Ozorio, who dwells in La Juderia[#]—any man there will show him the house; take for them whatever he will give him, and therewith hire fresh horses—the best he can—from the posada where he rested, leaving our own in pledge. Let him also buy provisions for the way; for my business requires haste. I will explain all to you anon.”

[#] The Jewish Quarter of Seville.

While the monk did the errand, Don Juan sat still, gazing at the diamond ring. Slowly there came back upon his memory the words spoken by Carlos on the day when the sharp facets cut his hand, unfelt by him: “If He calls me to suffer for him, he may give me such blessed assurance of his love, that in the joy of it pain and fear will vanish.”

Could it be possible He had done this? Oh, for some token, to relieve his breaking heart by the assurance that thus it had been! And yet, wherefore seek a sign? Was not the heroic courage, the calm patience, given to that young brother, once so frail and timid, as plain a token of the sunlight of God’s peace and presence as is the bow in the cloud of the sun shining in the heavens? True; but not the less was his soul filled with passionate longing for one word—only one word—from the lips that were dust and ashes now. “If God would give me that,” he moaned, “I think I could weep for him.”

It occurred to him then that he might examine the book more carefully than he had done before. Don Juan, of late, had been no great reader, except of the Spanish Testament. Instead of glancing rapidly through the volume with a practised eye, he carefully began at the beginning and perused several pages with diligence, and with a kind of compelled and painful attention.

The writer of the diary with which the book seemed filled had not prefixed his name. Consequently Juan, who was without a clue to the authorship, saw in it merely the effusions of a penitent, with whose feelings he had but little sympathy. Still, he reflected that if the writer had been his brother’s fellow prisoner, some mention of his brother would probably reward his persevering search. So he read on; but he was not greatly interested, until at length he came to one passage which ran thus:—

“Christ and Our Lady forgive me, if it be a sin. Ofttimes, even by prayer and fasting, I cannot prevent my thoughts from wandering to the past. Not to the life I lived, and the part I acted in the great world, for that is dead to me and I to it; but to the dear faces my eyes shall never see again. My Costanza!”—(“Costanza!” thought Juan with a start, “that was my mother’s name!”)—“my wife! my babe! O God, in thy great mercy, still this hungering and thirsting of the heart!”

Immediately beneath this entry was another. “May 21. My Costanza, my beloved wife, is in heaven. It is more than a year ago, but they did not tell me till to-day. Does death only visit the free?”

Yet another entry caught the eye of Juan. “Burning heat to-day. It would be cool enough in the halls of Nuera, on the breezy slope of the Sierra Morena. What does my orphaned Juan Rodrigo there, I wonder?”

“Nuera! Sierra Morena! Juan Rodrigo!” reiterated the astonished reader. What did it all mean? He was stunned and bewildered, so that he had scarcely power left even to form a conjecture. At last it occurred to him to turn to the other end of the book, if perchance some name, affording a clue to the mystery, might be inscribed there.

And then he read, in another, well-known hand, a few calm words, breathing peace and joy, “quietness and assurance for ever.”

He pressed the loved handwriting to his lips, to his heart. He sobbed over it and wept; blistering it with such burning tears as scarcely come from a strong man’s eyes more than once in a lifetime. Then, flinging himself on his knees, he thanked God—God whom he had doubted, murmured against, almost blasphemed, and who yet had been true to his promise—true to his tried and suffering servant in the hour of need.

When he rose, he took up the book again, and read and reread those precious words. All but the first he thought he could comprehend. “My beloved father is gone to Him in peace.” Would the preceding entries throw any light upon that saying!

Once more, with changed feelings and quickened perceptions, he turned back to the records of the penitent’s long captivity. Slowly and gradually the secret they revealed unfolded itself before him. The history of the last nine months of his brother’s life lay clearly traced; and the light it shed illumined another life also, longer, sadder, less glorious than his.

One entry, almost the last, and traced with a trembling hand, he read over and over, till his eyes grew too dim to see the words.

“He entreats of me to pray for my absent Juan, and to bless him. My son, my first-born, whose face I know not, but whom he has taught me to love, I do bless thee. All blessings rest upon thee—blessings of heaven above, blessings of the earth beneath, blessings of the deep that lieth under! But for thee, Carlos, what shall I say? I have no blessing fit for thee—no word of love deep and strong enough to join with that name of thine. Doth not He say, of whose tenderness thou tellest me ours is but the shadow, ‘He will be silent in his love’? But may he read my heart in its silence, and bless thee, and repay thee when thou comest to thy home, where already thy heart is.”

It might have been two hours afterwards, when the same friendly monk who had narrated to Don Juan the circumstances of the Auto-da-fé, came to apprise him that his servant had fulfilled his errand, and was waiting with the horses.

Don Juan rose and met him. His face was sad; it would be a sad face always; but there was in it a look as of one who saw the end, and who knew that, however dark the way might be, the end was light everlasting. “Look here, my friend,” he said, for no concealment was necessary there; truth could hurt no one. “See how wondrously God has dealt with me and mine. Here is the record of the life and death of my honoured father. For three-and-twenty years he lay in the Dominican monastery, a prisoner for Christ’s sake. And to my heroic martyr brother God has given the honour and the joy of unravelling the mystery of his fate, and thus fulfilling our youthful dream. Carlos has found our father!”

He went forth into the hall, and bade the other monks a grateful farewell. Old Fray Bernardo embraced and blessed him with tears, moved by the likeness, now discerned for the first time, between the stately soldier and the noble and gentle youth, whose kindness to him, during his residence at the monastery three years before, he well remembered.

Then Don Juan set his face towards Nuera, with patient endurance, rather sad than stern, upon his brow, and in his heart “a grief as deep as life or thought,” but no rebellion, and no despair. Something like resignation had come to him; already he could say, or at least try to say, “Thy will be done.” And he foresaw, as in the distance, far off and faintly, a time when he might even be able to share in spirit the joy of the crowned and victorious one, to whom, in the dark prison, face to face with death, God had so wondrously given the desire of his heart, and not denied him the request of his lips.

XLIX

Farewell.

  “My country is there;
Beyond the star pricked with the last peak of snow.”

—E. B. Browning.

About a fortnight afterwards, a closely veiled lady, dressed in deep mourning, leaned over the side of a merchant vessel, and gazed into the sapphire depths of the Bay of Cadiz. A respectable elderly woman was standing near her, holding her pretty dark-eyed babe. They seemed to be under the protection of a Franciscan friar; and of a stately, handsome serving-man, whose bearing and appearance were rather out of keeping with his supposed rank. It was said amongst the crew that the lady was the widow of a rich Sevillian merchant, who during a residence in London some years before had married an Englishwoman. She was now going to join her kindred in the heretical country, and much compassion was expended on her, as she was said to be very Catholic and very pious. It was a signal proof of these dispositions that she ventured to bring with her, as private chaplain, the Franciscan friar, who, the sailors thought, would probably soon fall a martyr to his attachment to the Faith.

But a few illusions might have been dispelled, if the conversation of the party, when for a brief space they had the deck to themselves, could have been overheard.

“Dost thou mourn that the shores of our Spain are fading from us?” said the lady to the supposed servant.

“Not as I should once have done, my Beatriz; though it is still my fatherland, dearest and best of all lands to me. And you, my beloved?”

“Where thou art is my country, Don Juan. Besides,” she added softly, “God is everywhere. And think what it will be to worship him in peace, none making us afraid.”

“And you, my brave, true-hearted Dolores?” asked Don Juan.

“Señor Don Juan, my country is there, with those that I love best,” said Dolores, with an upward glance of the large wistful eyes, which had yet, in their sorrowful depths, a look of peace unknown in past days. “What is Spain to me—Spain, that would not give to the noblest of them all a few feet of her earth for a grave?”

“Do not let us stain with one bitter thought our last look at those shores,” said Don Juan, with the gentleness that was growing upon him of late. “Remember that they who denied a grave to our beloved, are powerless to rob us of one precious memory of him. His grave is in our hearts; his memorial is the faith which every one of us now standing here has learned from him.”

“That is true,” said Doña Beatriz. “I think that not all thy teaching, Don Juan, made me understand what ’precious faith’ is, until I learned it by his death.”

“He gave up all for Christ, freely and joyfully,” Juan continued. “While I gave up nothing, save as it was wrenched from my unwilling hand. Therefore for him there is the ‘abundant entrance,’ the ‘crown of glory.’ For me, at the best, ‘Seekest thou great things for thyself, seek them not. But thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest.’”

Fray Sebastian drew near at the moment, and happening to overhear the last words, he asked, “Have you any plan, señor, as to whither you will go?”

“I have no plan,” Don Juan answered. “But I think God will guide us. I have indeed a dream,” he added, after a pause, “which may, or may not, come true eventually. My thoughts often turn to that great New World, where, at least, there should be room for truth and liberty. It was our childhood’s dream, to go forth to the New World and to find our father. And the lesser half of it, comparatively worthless as it is, may fitly fall to my lot to fulfil, another worthier than I having done the rest.” His voice grew gentler, his whole countenance softened as he continued,—“That the prize was his, not mine, I rejoice. It is but an earnest of the nobler victory, the grander triumph, he enjoys now, amongst those who stand evermore before the King of kings—CALLED, CHOSEN, AND FAITHFUL.”

Historical Note.

It may be asked by some thoughtful reader who has followed the narrative of the foregoing pages, How much is fact, how much fiction? As the writer’s sole object is to reveal, to enforce, and to illustrate Truth, an answer to the question is gladly supplied. All is fact, except what concerns the personal history of the Brothers and their family. Whatever relates to the rise, progress, and downfall of the Protestant Church in Spain, is strictly historical. Especially may be mentioned the story of the two great Autos at Seville. But much of interest on the subject remains untold, as nothing was taken up but what would naturally amalgamate with the narrative and it was not designed to supersede history, only to stimulate to its study. Except in the instance of a conversation with Juliano Hernandez, another with Don Carlos de Seso, and a few words required by the exigencies of the tale from Losada, the glorious martyr names have been left untouched by the hand of fiction. It was a sense of their sacredness which led the writer to choose for hero a character not historical, but typical and illustrative. But nothing is told of him which did not occur over and over again, if we except the act of mercy which is supposed to have shed a brightness over his last days. He is merely a given example, a specimen of the ordinary fate of such prisoners of the Inquisition as were enabled to remain faithful to the end; and, thank God, these were numerous. He is even a favourable specimen; for the conditions of art require that in a work of fiction a veil should be thrown over some of the worst horrors of persecution. Those who accuse Protestant writers of exaggeration in these matters, little know what they say. Easily could we show greater abominations than these; but we forbear.

As for the joy and triumph ascribed to the steadfast martyr at the close of his career, we have a thousand well-authenticated instances that such has been really given. These embrace all classes and ages, and all varieties of character, and range throughout all time, from the day that Stephen saw Christ sitting on the right hand of God, until the martyrs of Madagascar sang hymns in the fire, and “prayed as long as they had any life; and then they died, softly, gently.”

It is not fiction, but truest truth, that He repays his faithful servants an hundred-fold, even in this life, for anything they do or suffer for his name’s sake.