As a love-story this is, I think, the saddest that ever was invented by
a romancer intent upon wringing tears from sympathetic hearts. How sad
it is you will realize when I tell you that daily I thank God on my
knees--for I still believe in God, despite what was alleged against me
by the inquisitors of Aragon--that she who inspired this love of which
I am to tell you is now in the peace of death. She died in exile at
Pastrana a year ago. Anne de Mendoza was what you call in France a great
parti. She came of one of the most illustrious families in Spain, and
she was a great heiress. So much all the world knew. What the world
forgot was that she was a woman, with a woman's heart and mind, a
woman's natural instincts to select her mate. There are fools who envy
the noble and the wealthy. They are little to be envied, those poor
pawns in the game of statecraft, moved hither and thither at the will
of players who are themselves no better. The human nature of them is a
negligible appendage to the names and rent-rolls that predetermine their
place upon the board of worldly ambition, a board befouled by blood, by
slobberings from the evil mouth of greed, and by infamy of every kind.
So, because Anne was a daughter of the House of Mendoza, because her
endowments were great, they plucked her from her convent at the age of
thirteen years, knowing little more of life than the merest babe, and
they flung her into the arms of Ruy Gomez, Prince of Eboli, who was
old enough to have been her father. But Eboli was a great man in Spain,
perhaps the greatest; he was, first Minister to Philip II, and between
his House and that of Mendoza an alliance was desired. To establish it
that tender child was sacrificed without ruth. She discovered that life
held nothing of all that her maiden dreamings had foreseen; that it was
a thing of horror and greed and lovelessness and worse. For there was
much worse to come.
Eboli brought his child-princess to Court. He wore her lightly as
a ribbon or a glove, the insignificant appendage to the wealth and
powerful alliance he had acquired with her. And at Court she came
under the eye of that pious satyr Philip. The Catholic King is very
devout--perfervidly devout. He prays, he fasts, he approaches the
sacraments, he does penance, all in proper season as prescribed by
Mother Church; he abominates sin and lack of faith--particularly in
others; he has drenched Flanders in blood that he might wash it clean
of the heresy of thinking differently from himself in spiritual matters,
and he would have done the same by England but that God--Who cannot,
after all, be quite of Philip's way of thinking--willed otherwise. All
this he has done for the greater honour and glory of his Maker, but he
will not tolerate his Maker's interference with his own minor pleasures
of the flesh. He is, as you would say, a Spaniard of Spain.
This satyr's protruding eyes fell upon the lovely Princess of Eboli--for
lovely she was, a very pearl among women. I spare you details. Eboli was
most loyal and submissive where his King was concerned, most complacent
and accommodating. That was but logical, and need not shock you at all.
To advance his worldly ambitions had he taken Anne to wife; why should
he scruple, then, to yield her again that thus he might advance those
ambitions further?
If poor Anne argued at all, she must have argued thus. For the rest,
she was told that to be loved by the King was an overwhelming honour,
a matter for nightly prayers of thankfulness. Philip was something very
exalted, hardly human in fact; almost, if not quite, divine. Who and
what was Anne that she should dispute with those who knew the world, and
who placed these facts before her? Never in all her little life had she
belonged to herself. Always had she been the property of somebody else,
to be dealt with as her owner might consider best. If about the Court
she saw some men more nearly of her own age--though there were not many,
for Philip's Court was ever a gloomy, sparsely peopled place--she took
it for granted that such men were not for her. This until I taught her
otherwise, which, however, was not yet a while. Had I been at Court in
those days, I think I should have found the means, at whatever cost, of
preventing that infamy; for I know that I loved her from the day I saw
her. But I was of no more than her own age, and I had not yet been drawn
into that whirlpool.
So she went to the arms of that rachitic prince, and she bore him a
son--for, as all the world knows, the Duke of Prastana owns Philip for
his father. And Eboli increased in power and prosperity and the favour
of his master, and also, no doubt, in the contempt of posterity. There
are times when the thought of posterity and its vengeances is of great
solace.
It would be some six years later when first I came to Court, brought
thither by my father, to enter the service of the Prince of Eboli as one
of his secretaries. As I have told you, I loved the Princess from the
moment I beheld her. From the gossip of the Court I pieced together
her story, and pitied her, and, pitying her, I loved her the more. Her
beauty dazzled me, her charm enmeshed me, and she had grown by now in
worldly wisdom and mental attainments. Yet I set a mask upon my passion,
and walked very circumspectly, for all that by nature I was as reckless
and profligate as all the world could ever call me. She was the wife of
the puissant Secretary of State, the mistress of the King. Who was I to
dispute their property to those exalted ones?
And another consideration stayed me. She seemed to love the King. Young
and lacking in wisdom, this amazed me. In age he compared favourably
with her husband he was but thirteen years older than herself--but in
nothing else. He was a weedy, unhealthy-looking man, weakly of frame,
rachitic, undersized, with spindle-shanks, and a countenance that was
almost grotesque, with its protruding jaw, gaping mouth, great, doglike
eyes, and yellow tuft of beard. A great king, perhaps, this Philip,
having so been born; but a ridiculous man and an unspeakable lover. And
yet this incomparable woman seemed to love him.
Let me pass on. For ten years I nursed that love of mine in secret.
I was helped, perhaps, by the fact that in the mean time I had
married--oh, just as Eboli himself had married, an arrangement dictated
by worldly considerations--and no better, truer mate did ever a man find
than I in Juana Coello. We had children and we were happy, and for a
season--for years, indeed--I began to think that my unspoken passion for
the Princess of Eboli was dead and done with. I saw her rarely now, and
my activities increased with increasing duties. At twenty-six I was one
of the Ministers of the Crown, and one of the chief supporters of
that party of which Eboli was the leader in Spanish politics. I sat
in Philip's Council, and I came under the spell of that taciturn,
suspicious man, who, utterly unlovable as he was, had yet an uncanny
power of inspiring devotion. From the spell of it I never quite escaped
until after long years of persecution. Yet the discovery that one by
nature so entirely antipathetic to me should have obtained such sway
over my mind helped me to understand Anne's attachment to him.
When Eboli died, in 1573, I had so advanced in ability and Royal favour
that I took his place as Secretary of State, thus becoming all but the
supreme ruler of Spain. I do not believe that there was ever in Spain
a Minister so highly favoured by the reigning Prince, so powerful as
I became. Not Eboli himself in his halcyon days had been so deeply
esteemed of Philip, or had wielded such power as I now made my own.
All Europe knows it--for it was to me all Europe addressed itself for
affairs that concerned the Catholic King.
And with my power came wealth--abundant, prodigious wealth. I was housed
like a Prince of the blood, and no Prince of the blood ever kept greater
state than I, was ever more courted, fawned upon, or flattered. And
remember I was young, little more than thirty, with all the strength and
zest to enjoy my intoxicating eminence. I was to my party what Eboli had
been, though the nominal leader of it remained Quiroga, Archbishop of
Toledo. On the other side was the Duke of Alva with his following.
You must know that it was King Philip's way to encourage two rival
parties in the State, between which he shared his confidence and sway.
Thus he stimulated emulation and enlightened his own views in the
opposing opinions that were placed before him. But the power of my party
was absolute in those days, and Alva himself was as the dust beneath our
feet.
Such eminences, they say, are perilous. Heads that are very highly
placed may at any moment be placed still higher--upon a pike. I am all
but a living witness to the truth of that, and yet I wonder would it so
have fallen out with me had I mistrusted that slumbering passion of
mine for Anne. I should have known that where such fires have once been
kindled in a man they never quite die out as long as life endures. Time
and preoccupations may overlay them as with a film of ashes, but more
or less deeply down they smoulder on, and the first breath will fan them
into flame again.
It was at the King's request I went to see her in her fine Madrid house
opposite Santa Maria Mayor some months after her husband's death. There
were certain matters of heritage to be cleared up, and, having regard
to her high rank, it was Philip's wish that I--who was by now Eboli's
official successor--should wait on her in person.
There were documents to be conned and signed, and the matter took some
days, for Eboli's possessions were not only considerable, but scattered,
and his widow displayed an acquired knowledge of affairs and a natural
wisdom that inspired her to probe deeply. To my undoing, she probed
too deeply in one matter. It concerned some land--a little property--at
Velez. She had been attached to the place, it seemed, and she missed all
mention of it from the papers that I brought her. She asked the reason.
“It is disposed of,” I told her.
“Disposed of!” quoth she. “But by whom?”
“By the Prince, your husband, a little while before he died.”
She looked up at me--she was seated at the wide, carved writing-table,
I standing by her side--as if expecting me to say more. As I left my
utterance there, she frowned perplexedly.
“But what mystery is this?” she asked me. “To whom has it gone?”
“To one Sancho Gordo.”
“To Sancho Gordo?” The frown deepened. “The washerwoman's son? You will
not tell me that he bought it?”
“I do not tell you so, madame. It was a gift from the Prince, your
husband.”
“A gift!” She laughed. “To Sancho Gordo! So the washerwoman's child is
Eboli's son!”
And again she laughed on a note of deep contempt.
“Madame!” I cried, appalled and full of pity, “I assure you that you
assume too much. The Prince--”
“Let be,” she interrupted me. “Do you dream I care what rivals I may
have had, however lowly they may have been? The Prince, my husband, is
dead, and that is very well. He is much better dead, Don Antonio. The
pity of it is that he ever lived, or else that I was born a woman.”
She was staring straight before her, her hands fallen to her lap, her
face set as if carved and lifeless, and her voice came hard as the sound
of one stone beating upon another.
“Do you dream what it can mean to have been so nurtured on indignities
that there is no anger left, no pride to wound by the discovery of yet
another nothing but cold, cold hate? That, Don Antonio, is my case. You
do not know what my life has been. That man--”
“He is dead, madame,” I reminded her, out of pity.
“And damned, I hope,” she answered me in that same cold, emotionless
voice. “He deserves no less for all the wrongs he did to me, the least
of which was the great wrong of marrying me. For advancement he acquired
me; for his advancement he bartered and used me and made of me a thing
of shame.”
I was so overwhelmed with grief and love and pity that a groan escaped
me almost before I was aware of it. She broke off short, and stared at
me in haughtiness.
“You presume to pity me, I think,” she reproved me. “It is my own
fault. I was wrong to talk. Women should suffer silently, that they may
preserve at least a mask of dignity. Otherwise they incur pity--and pity
is very near contempt.”
And then I lost my head.
“Not mine, not mine!” I cried, throwing out my arms; and though that
was all I said, there was such a ring in my choking voice that she rose
stiffly from her seat and stood tense and tall confronting me, almost
eye to eye, reproof in every line of her.
“Princess, forgive me!” I cried. “It breaks my heart in pieces to hear
you utter things that have been in my mind these many years, poisoning
the devotion that I owed to the late Prince, poisoning the very loyalty
I owe my King. You say I pity you. If that were so, none has the better
right.”
“Who gave it you?” she asked me, breathless.
“Heaven itself, I think,” I answered recklessly. “What you have
suffered, I have suffered for you. When I came to Court the infamy was
a thing accomplished--all of it. But I gathered it, and gathering it,
thanked Heaven I had been spared the pain and misery of witnessing it,
which must have been more than ever I could have endured. Yet when I
saw you, when I watched you--your wistful beauty, your incomparable
grace--there was a time when the thought to murder stirred darkly in my
mind that I might at least avenge you.”
She fell away before me, white to the very lips, her eyes dilating as
they regarded me.
“In God's name, why?” she asked me in a strangled voice.
“Because I loved you,” I replied, “always, always, since the day I saw
you. Unfortunately, that day was years too late, even had I dared to
hope--”
“Antonio!” Something in her voice drew my averted eyes. Her lips had
parted, her eyes kindled into life, a flush was stirring in her cheeks.
“And I never knew! I never knew!” she faltered piteously.