for “his soul was black, and knew no change of night or day.” His
fettered limbs moved at their hateful task like parts of a machine,
and thus he suffered little beyond the mere outward bodily miseries of
his lot. He might have died thus erelong; and then, his chains loosed
at last, he would have been flung into the sea with no more thought or
ceremony than a dead hound. But he was roused at last from his torpor by
a slight accidental circumstance.
One day the commissary, or overseer of the slaves, was as usual walking
up and down the narrow gangway that separated the two tiers of benches
on which the rowers sat. Something was amiss with the handle of the
great Manita whip he carried in his hand, and he took out a strong knife
to mend it. But the blade snapped across near the haft and fell down
amongst the slaves, close to the place where Walter sat. He had often,
in a vague, dreamy way, wished himself dead and out of his misery. Now
the thought flashed across his mind that with this weapon he could kill
himself. He snatched it up, and hid it in the sleeve of his tattered red
jerkin. As at that moment the attention of the commissary was diverted
to something that was taking place on the other side of the vessel, the
action passed unobserved, at least by him.
Walter had now a definite purpose, and his mind awoke from its lethargy
to deliberate on the best means of executing it. The desire to die
actually helped to bring him back to life. He would kill himself, and be
done with all this pain; no further did his thoughts travel. But how to
do the deed?
It seemed very easy; now that he was provided with a weapon, it might
be done at any moment. But he could not dismiss the fear that his
ever-watchful enemies might by some means or other bar even _this_ door
of escape from their cruelty; indeed, the instinct of a hunted, baited
creature was sufficient in itself to make him conceal his movements. So
he determined upon waiting until nightfall, when the miserable slaves,
bending over their oars, snatched a few hours of comfortless repose.
Night came at last. All was still on board the galley. Walter looked
cautiously around him—then took out his weapon. For one moment, and no
more, he hesitated: by this time he was naturalized to horrors, and
deliberately and of set purpose “his soul chose death rather than life.”
But the broken blade hurt his hand; and he lost another moment, in the
very act of turning it against his own heart, in trying so to grasp it as
to avoid this trifling pain. So ineradicable is the natural instinct of
self-preservation.
In that instant his arm was seized somewhat roughly, and the voice of
the slave who sat next him whispered in his ear, “Camerado, what are you
doing?”
“No harm to you,” answered Walter, who had by this time been schooled by
hard necessity in the tongue of the stranger.
“No good to yourself,” rejoined the other; and he wrenched the broken
blade from the poor boy’s nerveless hand, and flung it overboard.
“Oh! why did you take it from me?” cried Walter. “It was cruel!—I needed
it.” And leaning over his oar, he gave way to a passionate fit of weeping.
Since he came on board the galley, he had not shed a tear. Nor could he
have told any one why he wept now. He would have said, if asked, that
his tears were for the lost fragment of steel, for which he felt an
unreasoning, childish regret.
The weather-beaten slave beside him laid a fettered, bony hand on his.
The gesture was friendly, but friendly gestures were so strange to Walter
now, that he started and sobbed in his alarm, “Do not betray me.”
“God forbid!” replied the other. “I have not spent fifteen years at the
oar for nothing. Do not weep, camerado. Pray God to forgive your sin, and
go to sleep.”
“I cannot sleep,” Walter answered. “Would to God I could die!”
“When your time comes, He will call you. Perhaps to-night. The more need
you should ask His forgiveness.”
Walter feared to be drawn into any talk about religion, lest he should
implicate himself by some unguarded word, and fall again into the cruel
hands of the Inquisition. So he only said, rather sullenly, “I am an
Englishman.”
“Englishmen pray to God, and He hears them. I once saw two Englishmen
die, and I am very sure God was with them.”
“Where was that?” asked Walter, with some faint stirrings of curiosity,
and a strange feeling, half pleasure half pain, at the mention of his
countrymen.
“At a great auto-da-fé. They were burned alive—”
“Hush!” Walter interrupted with a shudder. “Don’t talk of that.”
“Not if it troubles you, señor.” This fellow-slave of Walter’s knew him
to be a gentleman, and addressed him as such; an attention not without
its effect on the mind of the unhappy youth. “Yet that was no worse than
this,” he added,—“not so bad, as I think sometimes. I was very near
proving it too.”
“Why, what have you done?”—Walter had often heard the other slaves talk
carelessly, and even boastfully, of their crimes; but he never knew this
man to make the slightest allusion to his past history.
“I was thought to have done something which had almost lit the pile for
me. I might have shared the fate of those two Englishmen—well if I had
shared their hope.”
“Are you not afraid to talk thus?” Walter asked. “Is it not dangerous?”
“You speak of danger!—you, who tried just now to kill yourself! Had you
succeeded, where would you be?”
“At least not in the Inquisition,” was Walter’s murmured answer.
“O camerado! don’t you know that it is a fearful thing to fall into the
hands of the living God?”
“I ought to know it,” Walter answered sadly. “Has He not sent me here for
my sins?” With a long shuddering sigh he thought of his treason to his
mother, and his weak denial of his mother’s faith. And again he wept—wept
and sobbed aloud. For after a long drought the rain-clouds are apt to
hang heavily; and it is not the first shower or the second that will
clear the sky.
“Weep on,” said his comrade. “God has set you two lessons. One—your own
sin—you are learning now; the other He will teach you by-and-by.”
But though Walter’s right hand neighbour desired him to weep on, his
“oar-fellow,” who sat on the bench above him, was of another mind. This
man, who had been captain of a gang of robbers in the wilds of the Sierra
Morena, bestowed a hearty kick and curse on his young comrade. “Hold your
peace, English heretic,” he said; “else I will call the commissary, and
put it to his conscience as a good Catholic, whether it is not penance
enough to be beaten all day like a hound, without being kept awake all
night like an owl.”
Walter thought it best to take this gentle hint. He rested his weary head
upon his oar, the only pillow it had known for months, and tried to sleep.
But sleep would not come to him. Thoughts came instead, crowding thick
and fast upon him—thoughts of home, of his mother. No wonder that he wept
on still, though noiselessly, lest he should awaken his companions.
At last he raised his head quietly; and through the mild gloom of the
tropical night, which was not darkness, he looked cautiously at his
right-hand neighbour, or—as in thought he had already begun to call
him—his friend.
Doubtful whether the thin gray hair that fell over the oar concealed the
face of a sleeper, Walter gently touched the ragged sleeve.
“_Quien va?_” the Spaniard responded, turning to him at once, with a
questioning look in his keen dark eyes, where the fire burned still,
undimmed by the sorrows that had turned his raven hair to gray, and worn
his stalwart frame to a skeleton.
“That _other lesson_? What is it? Tell me, camerado.”
For a minute’s space the galley-slave was silent. Then, in a voice
scarcely raised above a whisper, but so clear and distinct that every
word stood out as if read by a lightning flash, he repeated,—“‘The Lord
is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in
truth. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear Him, He also will hear
their cry, and will save them.’ Ay, señor, even in the galleys!”
XXIV.
At the Oar.
“Old faces look upon me,
Old forms go crowding past.”
AYTOUN.
Walter Grey slept at last; weariness of body gaining the victory over
sorrow of heart. He was wakened from a dream of home, more vivid than any
he had known for months, by curses and blows and cries of pain, the usual
matins of the galley-slave.
He put his stiff and weary limbs into the position necessary for their
accustomed toil, and grasped his oar. But he did not escape a rough
admonition from his comrade the bandit, seasoned with a couple of oaths.
“Look alive there, Englishman, and take your own share of the pulling;
else you are pretty likely to take your own share of the lash by-and-by!”
It happened, however, that they received orders to pull gently. There was
no occasion for haste, for the sea was calm, and they were near land. If
he pleased, Walter might look about him as he rowed.
And right glorious was the sight that greeted his dim and tearful eyes.
The water beneath was a sheet of liquid light, silver and rose; and
before him stretched the green and pleasant shore of the Bay of Callao,
with the giant Andes towering far above in the distance, the cold of
their everlasting snows kindled into flame by the magic of the sunrise.
It was long since the crushed heart of Walter Grey had thrilled to the
beauty of earth and sea. But this morning, like the Ancient Mariner, he
“blessed them unawares;” and, like him, he felt the blessing return into
his own bosom.
“Look, camerado!” he whispered to his friend, taking his right hand from
the oar to point to the snowy mountains.
“_Quiton_!” murmured his older and more cautious companion—for the
commissary was near. Too late! The cruel lash swung, quivered, descended.
Walter’s cry of pain rang through the clear morning air, startling his
own ear with its echo, and making him ashamed of his weakness. Next time,
he vowed, he would give no sign.
Already a change had begun in him; he was growing gradually more like his
former self. And as days passed on, life and feeling returned to him,
slowly but surely. It was a fettered hand, like his own, that had plucked
him back from the gates of the grave. And that hand had also pointed
upwards to a star of hope. Again and again did Walter’s pale lips murmur
over those words: “‘He also will hear their cry, and will save them’—even
in the galleys.”
But with hope came memory—fast-thronging memories of the past—of his
home, his mother, his faith. Sharp, sudden stings of remorse followed.
Conscience spoke aloud, and would not be silenced; telling of his home
abandoned—his mother wronged and deceived, perhaps heart-broken—his faith
forsaken, his God denied. Could there be forgiveness for such as he?
For a considerable time the _San Cristofero_ lay quietly at anchor in
the Bay of Callao; so he had leisure enough for thought. Indeed, we are
assured by no less an authority than that of Cervantes, that there was
“plenty of leisure in the galleys of Spain.”
His look of deep dejection, and the tears that often, at this period,
fell silently from his eyes, were not unnoticed by his compassionate
comrade. This man went amongst his companions by the name of the
“Matador;” for almost all the galley-slaves had quaint _sobriquets_,
by which they were distinguished, their real names being rarely known,
and still more rarely used. Nor could Walter help remarking that he was
singularly unlike the rest. He never joined in the revolting blasphemies
with which the rowers’ benches so often resounded; he never tried to
evade his share of the work, but rather exerted himself to shield and
spare his weaker companions; and neither under the blazing tropical sun
nor the drenching rains, neither in toil, in hunger, nor in pain, was
he ever heard to murmur. By degrees Walter began to talk with him, to
confide in him. And one day he abruptly uttered the substance of many a
brooding thought,—
“I hope they think me dead in England!”
“Why hope that, señor?”
“Better dead, than _here_. Better dead twice over, than a slave—and an
apostate.” The last word, it need scarcely be said, was breathed in a low
and cautious whisper.
“That depends,”—the matador replied, with equal caution. Walter felt
sorry he had ventured so far, and held his peace.
But the matador resumed presently, of his own accord, “Life is better
than death, señor.”
“This is not life; it is living death,” Walter answered.
“Not so, my young camerado. It is written, ‘The dead cannot praise Thee.’”
“_Praise_! If you spoke of prayer, I might understand you. But who ever
yet praised God in the galleys?”
“One, at least, señor. A poor man who, long ago, in the depths of his
despair, ‘cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his
troubles.’”
“Do you mean—” Walter stopped and hesitated. “I wish,” he continued,
looking at him with interest, “I wish you would tell me who you are; and
what misfortune—crime I cannot believe it to have been—has brought you
hither.”
“Whereto would that serve, señor? Mine is an humble name, unknown to
fame. And I do not, like you, suffer for my faith. I am here for the
deeds wrought by my own right hand.”
These words destroyed a hope, or rather a surmise, about the matador,
that had of late been growing up silently in the mind of Walter. The old
galley-slave went on,—
“Do you think, my young camerado, that no man save yourself ever cursed
the day of his birth, and sought death and found it not? The first year
I spent at the oar, I would have thanked any man to give me a heave
overboard, or to pass a sword through my body.”
“The first year!” Walter echoed, with a long sigh. “I have been but seven
months here, and they seem a lifetime. More years to follow!—More years!
God help me!”
“Amen. God comfort you, as He has comforted me.”
“How?”
“By showing you Himself, señor Englishman,—Himself, the God of all
comfort, the Saviour from sin and sorrow, the Lord who binds up the
broken in heart;” and the worn, bronzed, weather-beaten face kindled and
glowed at the words.
Walter asked in surprise, “Where—how did you learn all this?”
“Where? Sitting on this bench, chained to this oar. How? Through the
goodness of God in bringing back to me what I heard, but little heeded,
in happier days.”
“Heard, but little heeded,” Walter sighed again. “Just my own case.
But—one thing perplexes me.”
“What is that?”
“From whose lips _you_ can have learned all this.” For Walter believed,
and not unnaturally, that there was only light in the land of Goshen,
the countries of the Reformation, and that all the rest of the world lay
in Egyptian darkness. Of the gleams that here and there illumined that
darkness he had never heard.
The matador smiled, a little sadly. “Perhaps,” he said, “I would scarce
tell you _that_ did I not think my own hour near—my hour of deliverance.
We feel the water calm and calmer under the keel as we draw nigh the
shore. What could not be spoken once, for tears, is easily enough said
now. She taught me, whom I loved best on earth.”
His quiet tones sounded more sorrowfully in Walter’s ears than a burst
of emotion would have done. It may be sadder to walk dryshod over the
deep channel of a great grief passed away and done with, than to cross
the shallow, noisy stream of a present sorrow. “It is bitter,” he said
falteringly, “to be parted for ever from what we love. I too—I—”
“Shall meet the loved again—up yonder,” said the matador, pointing with
his fettered hand to the cloudless azure above them.
“It was all my own folly, my own sin! Ah, you know not how deeply I have
sinned!”
“But God knows. Arise, and go to your Father, and say unto Him, ‘Father,
I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
called Thy son.’”
Walter’s tears flowed too fast to allow him to utter the answer that
trembled on his lips. But eyes and thoughts were raised upwards, and the
cry that reached no mortal ear was heard by Him who bindeth up the broken
in heart, and giveth medicine to heal their sickness.
Some days afterwards the matador seized a quiet moment in which to
whisper to his friend, “I have been asking God to comfort you.—Has He?”
Walter answered with brightening eyes, “Not yet with the best robe, and
the ring, and the fatted calf. But even now with the word, ‘_This, My
son_.’ And that is enough.”
XXV.
The Friend of the Poor.
“We two walk on in our grassy places,
On either marge of the moonlit flood,
With the moon’s own sadness in our faces,
Where joy is withered, blossom and bud.”
JEAN INGELOW.
If mental ability is unequally distributed, so also is that energy of
character without which it is of comparatively little use, and which,
indeed, sometimes supplies its place. Some men are so largely endowed
with this valuable quality, that, after ordering their own affairs,
they have abundance remaining to bestow upon their neighbours; and,
fortunately for society, energy and benevolence are qualities very often
found in combination. But these benevolent persons occasionally violate
the sacred rights of individuality by taking the concerns of others too
unceremoniously into their own hands; consequently it is their trial—and
a very keen and bitter one—to find their excellent arrangements too often
set aside, with or without good reason, by the very persons for whose
benefit they are designed.
Don Fray Tomas de San Martin, prior of the Franciscan Monastery at Lima,
was a man of this temper—at once energetic and benevolent. And it must
be allowed that for such the Church of Rome makes admirable provision.
As the head of a wealthy and influential religious house in the capital
of the New World, Fray Tomas found ample exercise for his gifts; and
eventually they were brought under the notice of his ecclesiastical
superiors during a mission to Spain, which he undertook for the purpose
of obtaining the establishment of a university in Lima. Shortly
afterwards he was appointed to a post calculated to afford them yet
wider exercise—the bishopric of Chiquisaca. This was an onerous charge,
especially in a country that had yet to be reclaimed almost entirely from
heathenism.
It was to his credit that, amidst his preparations for undertaking it,
he found time to recall to memory the pale, fiery-eyed, thoughtful-faced
young monk whom he had sent eight or nine years ago to the heights of
Cerro Blanco. He considered Fray Fernando just the material out of which
a model missionary to the Indians might be moulded. Hence the summons
that awaited the monk at the Franciscan convent in Cuzco.
When Fray Fernando at length presented himself before the prior of his
Order, Fray Tomas received him very cordially, and explained to him,
with much affability and condescension, the important part he intended
him to perform in spreading the faith amongst the Indians of his new
diocese. For this work he conceived him eminently fitted by the zeal and
the talents he had observed in him during his novitiate; and no doubt he
would find the Indian youth, whom he had with so much Christian charity
redeemed from slavery, baptized, and educated, an efficient interpreter.
For the Indians of Chiquisaca had, fortunately, been subjects of the
Inca, so they all spoke the “lengua general.”
He then proceeded to display before the eyes of Fray Fernando a vista of
future usefulness combined with peril and adventure, and showing at the
end some far-off glimpse of a possible crown of martyrdom. If he had been
dealing with a Churchman of an ambitious, worldly temper, he would have
substituted the more material attraction of a bishop’s mitre; but he told
himself that he “knew his man.”
It was soon evident, however, that he did not know his man at all. Fray
Fernando stood before him—paler, more fiery-eyed than ever, and with
some traces in his raven hair of the snows he had dwelt amongst. He was
respectful, for that was his duty; obedient, for he had sworn to obey.
He thanked the prior for his remembrance of him, his commendations,
and his confidence; for he could do no less. But his thanks were too
plainly words of course—withered flowers, out of which the sap was dried
and the colouring faded. He only acquired a little animation of manner
when he went on to say, that while prepared to obey his lord the prior
in everything, he would yet make his very humble supplication that the
duties of a preacher might not be imposed on him, as he did not feel
himself capable of fulfilling them.
“Some scruple of conscience, no doubt,” thought the half-offended but
still patient and considerate Fray Tomas. “Poor man! he has had little
to do on that lonely mountain save to set up scruples and to knock them
down again, else he might have died from sheer inaction. I ought to deal
gently with him.”
Scruples are weeds that luxuriate in the soil of monasticism. It is
full of the elements that minister to their growth—idleness, solitude,
introspection, and the habit of magnifying trifles. Don Fray Tomas was
well acquainted with every variety of the species—foolish scruples,
morbid scruples, honest scruples, and the not uncommon kind that may
truly be called dishonest, since they are used to lead the thoughts away
from some real sin which the heart is not willing to surrender. As he
abounded both in tact and kindness, he was quite an adept in the art of
uprooting these troublesome weeds; and he had no objection to use his
skill in the service of Fray Fernando.
But the younger monk was impervious to his well-meant hints: he would
neither give confidence nor receive consolation. He even turned a deaf
ear to the intimation that his superior would be quite willing to
become his confessor. Fray Fernando had not confessed once for the last
sixteen years without believing that he committed mortal sin by abusing
a sacrament of the Church. He neither wished to do this oftener than he
could help, nor to impose an incomplete and therefore invalid confession
upon a man so astute as the prior.
So the patience of Fray Tomas came to an end at last. He thought Fray
Fernando brain-sick and conceited, both in the old and the modern sense
of the word. He regretted the trouble he had taken in summoning him
from Cerro Blanco, and made up his mind that he would get the Indians
converted without his help. Yet he was too benevolent to send him back,
or to consign him to his monastery under circumstances that might leave a
slur upon his character in the eyes of his brethren. He procured for him
therefore the office of attending to the spiritual wants of the seamen
who frequented the port of Callao; and Fray Fernando, really grateful
for this undeserved kindness, addressed himself to his new duties with
diligence and zeal.
But the extreme heat of the climate—the burning suns, and the heavy
clinging mists—told upon his constitution, now accustomed to a clear
and bracing mountain air. It was not until he had more than once had
the calenture severely, that he yielded to the longing, often felt,
for the presence of his adopted son; and, as we are already aware, the
letter that summoned José to his side lay unclaimed at Cuzco for nearly
a year. When at last the monk and his adopted son met once more, the
Indian youth, according to his character, expressed but little, either
joy or sorrow; yet not the less did he feel profoundly that his father
and teacher was bound, at no distant time, for that far-off, mysterious
Christian heaven, of which he had heard so much and knew so little.
A circumstance that occurred shortly after his arrival confirmed his
forebodings. José never spoke of Coyllur—never even named her, if he
could help it; but he was quite willing to talk about the gentle Sumac,
and to tell Fray Fernando the story of her life and death. He dwelt
especially upon her strong attachment to the Christian faith, and how
that faith had enabled her to die in peace; and with a reverence not
altogether free from superstition, he showed his patron the little book
which had been her dying gift.
Fray Fernando took it from his hand, and looked at it with interest.
“I have heard Fray Constantino preach in the cathedral of Seville,” he
remarked presently; “and a wonderful preacher he was. Pity that his
heart was lifted up within him, and so he fell into the snare of the
devil! He became a heretic, and ended his days in the prison of the
Inquisition.—But lend me this book for a little space, José; I should
like to read it.”