act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying Susan he had
acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage, and partly from a
sense of religious duty. In counting later the cost to himself, he
cursed the folly of his rage, and began to wonder if such strict
observance of religious duty was really worth while to a man who had
his way to make in the world. In short, he was in the throes of
reaction. But now, in her unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She
need never know. The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the
score of deletions—since to do otherwise might be to discourage
delators—and there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such
as took place in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de Ataud
better pleased with the world than he had been since morning.
On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a servant
announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his hopes, and
thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he received from her
a letter which made him the most ample amends:
“Rodrigo,—There is a matter on which we must come early to an
understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and
sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated, since as
the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit. For myself I
care little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo, since if in spite of
what has happened you would still wish to make me your wife, as you
declared on Monday, it would be my wish to come to you well dowered.
Now the inheritance which would be confiscated by the Holy Office from
the daughter of a heretic might not be so confiscated from the wife of
a gentleman of Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide
as your heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to
me.
“Isabella.”
She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His fortune
was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it seemed,
Rodrigo was given the chance to make his own by marrying the beautiful
Isabella at once, before sentence came to be passed upon her father.
The Holy Office might impose a fine, but would not go further where the
inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of clean lineage was concerned. He
was swayed between admiration of her shrewdness and amazement at his
own good fortune. Also his vanity was immensely flattered.
He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his resolve to
marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in person, as she had
bidden him, to carry out the resolve.
She received him in the mansion’s best room, a noble chamber furnished
with a richness such as no other house in Seville could have boasted.
She had arrayed herself for the interview with an almost wanton cunning
that should enhance her natural endowments. Her high-waisted gown,
low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice, was of cloth of gold, edged
with miniver at skirt and cuffs and neck. On her white bosom hung a
priceless carcanet of limpid diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of
her bronze-coloured hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never
had Don Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure
and glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now
his olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms, kissing
her cheek, her lips, her neck.
“My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!” he murmured, rapturously. Then added
the impatient question: “The priest? Where is the priest that shall
make us one?”
Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance.
Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a
smile that maddened him.
“You love me, Rodrigo—in spite of all?”
“Love you!” It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost inarticulate
ejaculation. “Better than life—better than salvation.”
She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. “Oh, I am
glad—so glad—that your love for me is truly strong. I am about to put
it to the test, perhaps.”
He held her very close. “What is this test, beloved?”
“It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
indissoluble save by death.”
“Why, so do I,” quoth he, who had so much to gain.
“And, therefore, because after all, though I profess Christianity,
there is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a marriage that must
satisfy even my father when he regains his freedom, as I believe he
will—for, after all, he is not charged with any sin against the faith.”
She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his
ardour.
“What do you mean?” he asked her, and his voice was strained.
“I mean—you’ll not be angry with me?—I mean that I would have us
married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner,
but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish
rites.”
Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their
grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
“Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you’ll
not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife
you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish
blood.”
His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads
of sweat stood out upon his brow.
“My God!” he groaned. “What do you ask? I... I can’t. It were a
desecration, a defilement.”
She thrust him from her in a passion. “You regard it so? You protest
love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you
will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the
faith that was my forbears’, if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you,
else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave
me.”
Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he
sought to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own.
He ranted torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as
earlier she had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of
his love. He could go his ways.
The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration,
a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million
maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished.
There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his
condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement
of the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear
remained where Christian scruples were already half-effaced.
“You do not realize,” he cried. “If it were known that I so much as
contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of
apostasy, and send me to the fire.”
“If that were your only objection it were easily overcome,” she
informed him coldly. “For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi
who is waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life’s sake betray us,
and who else will ever know?”
“You can be sure of that?”
He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his
turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had
begotten in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this
Jewish marriage that filled him with such repugnance.
And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in
which the conspirators had met.
“Where is the Rabbi?” he asked impatiently, looking round that empty
room.
“I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him.”
“Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?”
“No,” she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. “Yet I would not
have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to this.” They were
odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He was hardly master of the
wits which in themselves were never of the brightest. “I require you to
declare that it is your own desire that our marriage should be
solemnized in accordance with the Jewish rites and the law of Moses.”
And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing done and
ended, made answer hastily:
“Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be so
married—in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law of Moses.
And now, where is the Rabbi?” He caught a sound and saw a quiver in the
tapestries that masked the door of the alcove. “Ah! He is here, I
suppose....”
He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his hands
in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside, and forth
stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt man, stooping
slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white habit and black cloak
of the order of St. Dominic, his face lost in the shadows of a black
cowl. Behind him stood two lay brothers of the order, two armed
familiars of the Holy Office, displaying the white cross on their sable
doublets.
Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those terribly
damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood blankly at gaze a
moment, not even seeking to understand how this dread thing had come to
pass.
The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the
tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey Tomas de
Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful came the voice of
that deeply sincere and saintly man.
“My son, I was told this of you—that you were a Judaizer—yet before I
could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in one of your
lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses. Oh, my poor child,
by what wicked counsels have you been led so far astray?” The sweet,
tender eyes of the inquisitor were luminous with unshed tears.
Sorrowing pity shook his gentle voice.
And then Don Rodrigo’s terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He
flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation.
“It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this.
It was a trap she baited for my undoing.”
“It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I
was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the
trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you
could not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers.”
“Father! Hear me, I implore you!” He flung down upon his knees, and
held out shaking, supplicating hands.
“You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man
unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told
that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be
so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your
soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good
and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed
for you. Yet that you should Judaize—that you should be bound in
wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism—Oh!” The melancholy voice broke
off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his
hands—long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. “Pray now, my
child, for grace and strength,” he exhorted. “Offer up the little
temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error,
and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall
deserve salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall
have my prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence.”
On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first
Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his
fellow-conspirators, and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented
but little of the ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these
proceedings. But the essentials were already present.
In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of
the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two by
two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the
familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand,
barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by
halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral,
where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by the
stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the
meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.
Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra,
avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness
the instrument of her father’s ruin.
For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But
she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she
returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the
cloister denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed
that her skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the
Calle de Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And
there the fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for
close upon four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when
Buonaparte’s legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty
which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne,
the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son
of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King
Philip II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state
who was more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the
dazzling career of Anne’s own father; but for natural daughters—and
especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of
cadency—there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a
class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that
spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate
with princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so.
Therefore, since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them,
it was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities
beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might
aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to
the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence to
the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was
foreordained that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She
had youth, and youth’s hunger of life, and not even the repressive
conditions in which she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing
her high spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she was
beautiful. On the threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle’s
will was to be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have
beheld the inscription, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate!” she
made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear
witness that she did not go of her own free will.
But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip’s was,
under God’s, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the
sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one
of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges
unusual to members of religious communities: he granted her a little
civil list—two ladies-in-waiting and two grooms—and conferred upon her
the title of Excellency, which she still retained even when after her
hurried novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She
submitted where to have striven would have been to have spent herself
in vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected
body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to
make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is
as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the
year lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its
subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and
fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life loses all purpose and
object, and sterilizes itself into preparation for death.
Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained
unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her;
in time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey
spirit of the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she
must nourish her caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses
caught in passing of the bright, active, stirring world without; and
where memory stopped she had now beside her a companion to regale her
with tales of high adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats,
which served but to feed and swell her yearnings.
This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the
order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the
great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above
all he loved to talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with whom
he had been intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant,
fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty had led
the disastrous overseas expedition against the Infidel, which had been
shattered on the field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants he
had seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was embarking
with crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights and men-at-arms,
the array of German and Italian mercenaries, the young king in his
bright armour, bare of head—an incarnation of St. Michael—moving
forward exultantly amid flowers and acclamations to take ship for
Africa. And she would listen with parted lips and glistening eyes, her
slim body bending forward in her eagerness to miss no word of this
great epic. Anon when he came to tell of that disastrous day of
Alcacer-el-Kebir, her dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale
of it was hardly truthful. He did not say that military incompetence
and a presumptuous vanity which would listen to no counsels had been
the cause of a ruin that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal, and
finally the very kingdom itself. He represented the defeat as due to
the overwhelming numbers of the Infidel, and dwelt at length upon the
closing scene, told her in fullest detail how Sebastian had scornfully
rejected the counsels of those who urged him to fly when all was lost,
how the young king, who had fought with a lion-hearted courage,
unwilling to survive the day’s defeat, had turned and ridden back alone
into the Saracen host to fight his last fight and find a knightly
death. Thereafter he was seen no more.
It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and
more deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with
questions touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning
his ways of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the
crown of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served
but to engrave more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of
the knightly king. Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent
girl, his empanoplied figure haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid
that her waking senses would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon
the memory of someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up
the memory of the dream—words he had uttered, words it would seem
begotten of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a
kind not calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She
was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth,
a mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She
mourned him with a fond widow’s mourning; prayed daily and nightly for
the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost
impatiently for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the
thought that she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent
the maidenhood that had been imposed upon her.
One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.
“Is it so certain that he is dead?” she asked. “When all is said, none
actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by
Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not
possible that he may have survived?”
The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
“In Portugal,” he answered slowly, “it is firmly believed that he
lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver
his country from the thrall of Spain.”
“Then... then...”
Wistfully, he smiled. “A people will always believe what it wishes to
believe.”
“But you, yourself?” she pressed him.
He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his
ascetic face. He half turned from her—they were standing in the shadow
of the fretted cloisters—and his pensive eyes roamed over the wide
quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground. Out
there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously
pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to the
elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of
rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and
mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of
the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King
Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as
claustral conditions would permit.
At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
“Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to
preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted one
who had been Don Sebastian’s preacher, I was warned by a person of
eminence to have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only
was he alive, but he would be secretly present at the Requiem.”
He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted lips.
“But that,” he added, “was fifteen years ago, and since then I have had
no sign. At first I thought it possible... there was a story afloat
that might have been true... But fifteen years!” He sighed, and shook
his head.
“What... what was the story?” She was trembling from head to foot.
“On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the gates of
the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid guard refused to
open to them, they announced that one of them was King Sebastian, and
so won admittance. One of the three was wrapped in a cloak, his face
concealed, and his two companions were observed to show him the
deference due to royalty.”
“Why, then...” she was beginning.
“Ah, but afterwards,” he interrupted her, “afterwards, when all
Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied that
King Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was affirmed to have
been no more than a ruse of those men’s to gain the shelter of the
city.”
She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to draw from
him the admission that it was possible denial and explanation obeyed
the wishes of the hidden prince.
“Yes, it is possible,” he admitted at length, “and it is believed by
many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-spirited.
The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon him that he
preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a throne of which he
now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal believes it so, and waits and
hopes.”
When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the clear
conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who hoped more
fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or yearned more
passionately to acclaim him should he show himself. And that was much
to think, for the yearning of Portugal was as the yearning of the slave
for freedom.