It was night when the travellers reached the suburbs of the ancient city
of Tatta; the caravan had been lessened of its numbers during its
progress; those who remained, now dispersed in various directions: the
Inquisitors, instead of proceeding with their charge to a _Caravansera_,
carried him and the Neophyte to a small fortress which belonged to a
Spanish garrison; a guard of soldiers, headed by the two Inquisitors,
who had preceded the caravan, received them at its portals.
The Missionary guessed his fate,--dreadful as it was, he met it not
unprepared: he saw himself surrounded by an armed force; he knew that,
were he inclined to offer it, all resistance would be vain; and he
submitted, with all the grandeur of human dignity, with all the firmness
of religious fortitude, to a destiny now inevitable.
But Luxima still clung to him: the gloomy air of all around her, the
fierce looks of the soldiers, their arms glittering to the dusky light
of a solitary lamp, which hung suspended in the centre of a vast and
desolate guardroom; the black cowls and scowling countenances of the
Inquisitors, all struck terror on the timid soul of the Indian. She cast
round a fearful and terrified glance, and would then have sunk upon the
bosom of her sole protector and friend on earth, but, exposed as they
were to the observation of their persecutors, the Missionary, for her
sake even more than for his own, rejected the impulse of his feelings,
and, turning away his head to conceal the agony of his countenance, he
held her from him.--It was then that the heart of Luxima, sinking within
her bosom, seemed to have received its death wound;--she fixed her
closing eyes on him, who thus almost seemed to resign her to misery and
to suffering, unsupported and unpitied--but she wept not, and one of the
Inquisitors bore her away, unresisting, and almost lifeless, in his
arms. An exclamation of horror burst from the lips of the Missionary;
and, with an involuntary motion, he advanced a few steps to follow her;
betraying, in his wild and haggard looks, the feelings by which his soul
was torn. But the guards interposed--he could not even himself desire,
that she might remain with him; and the Inquisitor, fixing his eyes on
his agitated countenance, with a look of scoffing malignancy, said:
“Fear not for your concubine, she shall be taken care of.”--At these
words, a deep scarlet suffused the cheek of the Missionary; fire flashed
from his dark rolling eye, and he cast a look on his insulting
oppressor, so blasting in its glance, that he seemed to wither beneath
its terrific influence.--“Observe!” he said, with a voice of thunder, “I
repeat it to you, it is a Christian Neophyte, pure, spotless, and
unsullied, which you have now taken under your protection; look
therefore that you consider her as such, as you shall answer it to that
God, to whom she is about to consecrate her sinless life; as you shall
answer it to that Church, whose ministers you are.--Be this remembered
by you as priests; as _men_, forget not _she is a woman_!” Then, turning
to his guards, he said with haughtiness, “Lead on;”--as though he still
commanded, even in obeying; and he was immediately led to a tower in a
remote part of the fortress.
The members of the Inquisitorial Court, into whose power a singular
coincidence of circumstances had thrown the Missionary, were returning
from visiting the Christian institution at Lahore, of whose abuses and
disorders the grand Inquisitor had received secret intelligence, when
the chief of the party, who had been raised to his present dignity by
the low arts of cunning and duplicity, discovered in the supposed lover
of a fugitive Indian, that once infallible man, of whose rigid virtue,
and severe unbending justice, he had been the victim; conscious, that in
detecting and exposing the frailty of one who had “bought golden
opinions, from all sorts of persons,” he should, while he gratified his
own private vengeance, present a grateful victim to the Jesuits and
Dominicans, who equally hated the Franciscan, for his order, his
popularity, and his unrivalled genius,--he soon sought and found
sufficient grounds of accusation, to lay the basis of his future ruin.
With an artifice truly jesuitical, he drew the Missionary into a
conversation, which he obliged one of his brethren to listen to, and
note down; and, from the freedom of those religious opinions he had
induced the Missionary to discuss, and from the tender nature
of the ties which seemed to exist between him and his lovely
associate,--Heresy, and the seduction of a Neophyte, were the crimes to
be alleged against a man, whose disgrace was destined to be commensurate
to the splendour of his triumphs.
On the day following their arrival at Tatta, the Missionary was conveyed
on board a Spanish vessel, which lay in the Indus, and was bound for
Goa. On his way he passed the _litter_ which Luxima, he believed,
occupied; but it was closely covered. He shuddered, and for a moment
the heroism of virtue deserted him--he doubted not that she would be
conveyed in the same vessel with him to Goa; and, as he knew that
supplication would be fruitless, and that in humbling himself to
intreaty he would not effect the purpose for which he stooped, he made
no effort to obtain an interview with her: he believed too that the
insatiable desire of the Jesuits for conversion would render her safety
and preservation an object to them; and that she would owe to the
bigotry of their zeal, that mercy which she could not expect from the
suggestions of their humanity--but that he should never again behold
her, the object of his only love, the companion of his wandering, and
the partner of his sufferings, was an idea dictated by despair, from
which religion withdrew her light, and hope her solace. Placed in a
close and unwholesome confinement, it was in vain he sought to catch the
sound of Luxima’s voice; it was in vain he hazarded an inquiry relative
to her situation: silence and mystery still surrounded him; no beam
shone upon the darkness of his days; no answer was returned to his
inquiries; no pity was given to his sufferings; all was dreary hopeless
gloom! all was the loss of fame, the loss of love! of all that the high
ambition of piety had promised! of all that the exquisite feelings of
nature had bestowed!--Still pursued “by thoughts of lost happiness and
lasting shame,” and joined only in _equal ruin_ with her for whom he
had encountered misery and affliction, and on whose innocent head he
had heaped it,--he now saw that the sufferings of man resulted less from
the constitution of his nature, than from the obstinacy with which he
abandons the dictates of Providence, and devotes himself to those
illusions which the law of human reason, and the impulse of human
affection, equally oppose. He remembered the feelings with which the
Brahmin Priestess and the Christian Missionary had first mutually met;
he contrasted their first interview with their present situations, alike
as they now were _the victims of mistaken_ zeal; and he accused that
misconstruction of the laws of Providence, those false distinctions,
which superstition has erected between the species, as the source of
the severest sufferings to which mankind was condemned. For himself, he
had no hope: he knew the character of his judges, the sentiments they
bore in general to his order, and in particular to him; he knew the
influence of the tribunal at which they presided, he knew that those
whom they intended to destroy, no human power could preserve. But while
he accused himself of relaxation in his zeal, of negligence in his
mission, of suffering a guilty passion to subdue the force of his mind,
and the influence of his religion, he believed his enemies to be but the
blind agents of that Heaven, whose wrath he had justly provoked; for,
still bringing his new-born feelings to the test of his ancient
opinions, he continued to oppose religion to nature, and deemed himself
sunk in guilt, because he had not risen above humanity.
It was on a day bright and sunny as that on which the Apostolic Nuncio
left _Goa_ in all the triumph of superior and unrivalled excellence that
he returned to it a _prisoner_ and in _chains_. His enemies had
determined that his disgrace should be as striking and as public as his
triumph; that the idol of the people should be dashed before their eyes
from the shrine erected to his glory; and that envy and bigotry, under
the guise of religion and justice should gratify the insatiate spirit of
persecution and vengeance. Before the illustrious criminal was permitted
to land the intelligence of his return under circumstances so different
from those his departure had promised, and dark inuendos of the nature
and extent of his fault, were artfully circulated through _Goa_, till
the public mind, soured by the disappointments of its hopes and its
confidence, was prepared to receive the Nuncio with a contempt equal to
the admiration it formerly bestowed on him. At last a guard of Spanish
soldiers, accompanied by the officers of the Holy Office, were sent to
conduct him to the prison of the Inquisition. A multitude of persons had
assembled to see him pass; but they no longer beheld the same creature
whom they had last so loudly greeted with acclamations of reverential
homage, and on whose mild and majestic brow passion had impressed no
trace, whose commanding eye was brightened by holy joy, and whose life
of sinless purity was marked in the seraphic character of his inspired
countenance! His person was now almost as changed as his fate: it was
worn away by suffering, by fatigue, by internal conflicts, and faded by
its exposure to the varying clime; the experience of human frailty in
himself, and of human turpitude in others, marked his brow with traces
of distrust and disappointment;--his enthusiasm was fled! his zeal
subdued by the fatal consequences of its unsuccessful efforts! and love,
and affliction, and shame, and indignation, the opprobrium he endured,
and the innocence he could not establish; the injustice under which he
laboured, and the malignity he despised--all mingled their conflicts in
his soul, all shed over his air and look the sullen grandeur of a proud
despair, superior to complaint, and inaccessible to hope; yet “not all
_lost_ in _loss_ itself,” gleams of his mind’s untarnished glory still
brightened at intervals his look of gloom--and, still appearing little
less than “archangel ruined,” he proceeded, manacled, but lofty and
towering above the guards who surrounded him. An awful silence reigned
on every side; and even those who deemed him culpable, saw him so mighty
in _his fall_, that while they accused him of guilt, they believed him
superior to weakness; respecting while they condemned, and admiring
while they pitied him. As a member of the noble house of _Acugna_,
whatever were the charges brought against him, he could not fail to
excite interest in Goa, where the Portuguese were coalesced by a common
feeling of suffering under the oppression of the Spanish government:
but the terrors which surrounded the most dreadful of all human
tribunals; a tribunal which was seconded, in the hierarchy of Goa, by
all the influence of civil authority; its being invested with the power
of life and death, and superstitiously believed even with that of
salvation itself, awed the boldest heart, and alike silenced the
feelings of patriotism, and stilled the impulse of humanity! Not even a
murmur of resistance was heard; the accused and his guards passed
silently on to the prison of the Holy Office; they reached its gloomy
court; the portals closed upon the victim, and the light of hope was
shut out for ever!
No breath transpired of the dark mysterious deeds which passed within
the mansion of horror and superstition; and its awful investigations
were conducted with a secresy which baffled all inquiry:[13] the
impenetrable cloud which hung over the fate of the Missionary, could
only be cleared up when that dreaded day arrived, upon which the
dungeons of the Inquisition were to yield up their tenants to
punishment, to liberty, or--to death!
At this period a sullen gloom hung over the city of Goa, resembling the
brooding of a distant storm:--it was rumoured, that the power of the
Spanish government in Portugal and its colonies was on the point of
extinction, and it was known by many fatal symptoms, that the Indians
were ripe for insurrection. The arts used by the Dominicans and the
Jesuits for the conversion of the followers of Brahma, the evil
consequences which had arisen by forfeiture of cast, (for many families
had shared the ignominy heaped on the devoted head of the individual
apostate) with the coercive tyranny of the Spanish government, had
excited in the breasts of the mild, patient, and long-enduring Hindus, a
principle of resistance, which waited only for some strong and sudden
impulse to call it into action[14]; and it was observed that this
disposition had particularly betrayed itself on a recent and singular
occasion.
A woman who bore on her forehead the mark of a descendant of Bramah (the
sacred _tellertum_), and round her neck the sacrificial threads or
_dsandam_ of their tutelar god, was seen to enter a convent of
Dominican nuns, led by an officer of the Inquisition, and surrounded by
Dominican and _Jesuit priests_! The faded beauty of her perfect form,
her noble and distinguished air, the agony of her countenance, and the
silent tears which fell from her eyes when she turned them on those of
her own cast and country, who stood near the litter from which she
alighted, awakened a strong and powerful emotion in their feelings; and
it was not decreased, when a Cashmirian, who was present, declared that
the said apostate was Luxima, the Brahmachira and prophetess of
Cashmire. The person who industriously circulated this intelligence, was
the _pundit_ of Lahore, the preceptor of the Missionary. His restless
and unsettled spirit had led him to Goa: some imprudent and severe
observations which he had let fall against the Inquisitorial power, had
nearly proved his destruction, but his talents had extricated him; he
had engaged as secretary and interpreter to the Spanish Viceroy, and
obtained his favour and protection by those arts of conciliation, of
which he was so perfectly the master. His hatred of the Inquisition and
his love of intrigue and of commotion, which gave play to the finesse of
his genius, and the activity of his mind, led him to seize every
opportunity of exciting his compatriots to resist the European power in
Goa; and it was about this period that the arrival of Luxima furnished
him with an event favourable to his views. He had in vain sought to
attract her attention on her way to the Convent of the Dominicans; nor
until her arrival at its portal had he succeeded in catching her eye; he
then effected it by dropping his muntras at her feet. Absorbed as she
appeared to be, this little incident did not escape her attention: she
raised her tear-swollen eyes to his, with a look of sudden recognition,
for she had known him in the days of her glory; but the Cashmirian, with
an almost imperceptible motion of his finger across his lips, implying
silence, carelessly picked up his beads and passed on, as the doors of
the Christian sanctuary shut out from the eyes of the multitude the
priestess of Brahma.
It was on the eve of St. Jago de Compostello, that the usually tranquil
abode of the Dominican sisters exhibited a scene of general
consternation: the _Indian Catechuman_, committed to their pious care,
had mysteriously disappeared a few days after her reception into their
Order. Her conduct had not prepared them for an event so extraordinary
from her: either unable or unwilling to speak their language, they had
not once heard the sound of her voice, save that at sun-set she sung a
few low wild notes, through the bars of the casement of her cell, which
the younger nuns delighted to catch in the garden beneath, believing
that the day was not distant, when a voice so angelic would blend its
melody with the holy strains of the Christian choir; but she appeared in
every other respect docile, unresisting, and timid almost to wildness.
She had suffered them to exchange her Indian dress for the habit of a
novice of St. Dominick; she had unreluctantly accompanied them to their
church, and assisted at their devotions: her looks were indeed wandering
and wild, and seemingly always sent in search of some particular object;
but she made no inquiry, she uttered no complaint, and the secret
disorder of her mind was only visible in her countenance; which wore the
general expression of confirmed melancholy, the sadness of unutterable
affliction. A meekness so saintly, a gentleness so seraphic, excited
hopes in the breast of the abbess and the sisterhood, which were
suddenly destroyed by the miraculous disappearance of the Catechuman.
The convent grounds, the gardens of the Viceroy, which were only divided
from them by a low wall, were vainly searched; and no circumstance
attending her flight could be ascertained, but that she had escaped by
the casement of her cell; one of the bars of which had been removed from
the brick-work. The _Provincial_ of the Order having been made
acquainted with the event, which was placed to the account of _pagan
sorcery_, an order was issued from the Holy Office, offering a reward to
whoever should give up the _relapsed infidel_, and threatening death to
those who should conceal her; but week after week elapsed, and no one
came forward to claim the recompense, or to avert the punishment. The
pagan sorceress was no where to be heard of.[15]