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 Sun 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.