A week later he heard in the town that Dom Diego de Balthasar had been
arrested by the Inquisition for Judaism. The news brought him a more
complex thrill than that shock of horror at the treacherous
persistence of a pestilent heresy which it excited in the breast of
his fellow-citizens. He recalled to mind now that there were
thirty-four traces by which the bloodhounds of the Holy Office scented
out the secret Jew, and that one of the tests ran: "If he celebrates
the Passover by eating bitter herbs and lettuces." But the shudder
which the thought of the Jew had once caused him was, to his own
surprise, replaced by a secret sympathy. In his slowly-matured,
self-evolved scepticism, he had forgotten that a whole race had
remained Protestant from the first, rejecting at any and every cost
the corner-stone of the Christian scheme. And this race--he remembered
suddenly with a leap of the heart and a strange tingling of the
blood--had once been his own! The knowledge that had lurked in the
background of consciousness, like the exiled memory of an ancient
shame, sprang up, strong and assertive. The far-off shadowy figures of
those base-born ancestors of his who had prayed in the ancient
synagogues in the days before the Great Expulsion, shook off the mists
of a hundred years and stood forth solid, heroic, appealing.
And then recalling the dearth of bitter herbs in the market-place on
what he now understood was the eve of Passover, he had a sudden
intuition of a great secret brotherhood of the synagogue ramifying
beneath all the outward life of Church and State; of a society
honeycombed with Judaism that persisted tenaciously and eternally
though persecution and expulsion, not in stray units, such as the
Inquisition ferreted out, but in ineradicable communities. It was
because the incautious physician had mistaken him for a member of the
brotherhood of Israel that he had ventured upon his now transparent
jests. "Good God!" thought Da Costa, sickening as he remembered the
_auto-da-fé_ he had seen at Lisbon in his boyhood, when De la Asunçao,
the Franciscan Jew monk, clothed in the Sanbenito, was solemnly burnt
in the presence of the king, the queen, the court, and the mob. "What
if 'twas my tale to Frei José that led to Dom Diego's arrest! But no,
that were surely evidence too trivial, and ambiguous at the best." And
he put the painful suspicion aside and hastened to shut himself up in
his study, sending down an excuse to his mother and brother by Pedro,
the black slave-boy.
In the beautiful house on the hilltop, built by Gabriel's grandfather,
and adorned with fine panelings and mosaics of many-colored woods from
the Brazils, this study, secluded by its position at the head of the
noble staircase, was not the least beautiful room. The floor and the
walls were of rich-hued tiles, the arched ceiling was ribbed with
polished woods to look like the scooped-out interior of a half-orange.
Costly hangings muffled the noise of the outer world, and large
shutters excluded, when necessary, the glare of the sun. The rays of
Reason alone could not be shut out, and in this haunt of peace the
young Catholic had known his bitterest hours of unrest. Here he now
cast himself feverishly upon the perusal of the Old Testament,
neglected by him, as by the Church.
"This book, at least, must be true," ran his tumultuous thoughts. "For
this Testament do both creeds revere that wrangle over the later." He
had a Latin text, and first he turned to the fifty-third chapter of
Isaiah, and, reading it critically, he seemed to see that all these
passages of prediction he had taken on trust as prognostications of a
Redeemer might prophesy quite other and more intelligible things. And
long past midnight he read among the Prophets, with flushed cheek and
sparkling eye, as one drunk with new wine. What sublime truths, what
aspirations after peace and justice, what trumpet-calls to
righteousness!
He thrilled to the cry of Amos: "Take thou away from me the noise of
thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let
judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
And to the question of Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee but
to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" Ay,
justice and mercy and humbleness--not paternosters and penances. He
was melted to tears, he was exalted to the stars.
He turned to the Pentateuch and to the Laws of Moses, to the tender
ordinances for the poor, the stranger, the beast. "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself." "Thou shalt be unto me a holy people."
Why had his ancestors cut themselves off from this great people, whose
creed was once so sublime and so simple? There had reached down to him
some vague sense of the nameless tragedies of the Great Expulsion when
these stiff-necked heretics were confronted with the choice of
expatriation or conversion; but now he searched his book-shelves
eagerly for some chronicle of those days of Torquemada. The native
historians had little, but that little filled his imagination with
horrid images of that second Exodus--famine, the plague, robbery,
slaughter, the violation of virgins.
And all on account of the pertinacious ambition of a Portuguese king
to rule Spain through an alliance with a Spanish princess--an ambition
as pertinaciously foiled by the irony of history. No, they were not
without excuse, those ancestors of his who had been left behind
clinging to the Church. Could they have been genuine converts, these
Marranos, or New Christians? he asked himself. Well, whatever his
great-grandfathers had felt, his father's faith had been ardent
enough, of that he could not doubt. He recalled the long years of
ritual; childish memories of paternal pieties. No, the secret
conspiracy had not embraced the Da Costa household. And he would fain
believe that his more distant progenitors, too, had not been
hypocrites; for aught he knew they had gone over to the Church even
before the Expulsion; at any rate he was glad to have no evidence for
an ancestry of deceit. None of the Da Costas had been cowards, thank
Heaven! And he--he was no coward, he told himself.