"'El Dorado--'"
"'Yo he trovado.'
Yes, I remember now," said Don Juan promptly.
"And the golden country you had discovered--was it not the truth as
revealed in Scripture?" asked Carlos, perhaps a little too eagerly.
The penitent mused a space; grew bewildered; said at last sorrowfully,
"I know not. I cannot now recall what moved me to write those lines, or
even when I wrote them."
In the next place, Carlos ventured to tell all he had heard from Dolores
about his mother. The fact of his wife's death had been communicated to
the prisoner; but this was the only fragment of intelligence about his
family that had reached him during all these years. When she was spoken
of, he showed emotion, slight in the beginning, but increasing at every
succeeding mention of her name, until Carlos, who had at first been glad
to find that the slumbering chords of feeling responded to his touch,
came at last to dread laying his hands upon them, they were apt to moan
so piteously. And once and again did his father say, gazing at him with
ever-increasing fondness, "Thy face is hers, risen anew before me."
Carlos tried hard to awaken Don Juan's interest in his first-born. It is
true that he cherished an almost passionate love for Juanito the babe,
but it was such a love as we feel for children whom God has taken to
himself in infancy. Juan the youth, Juan the man, seemed to him a
stranger, difficult to conceive of or to care about. Yet, in time,
Carlos did succeed in establishing a bond between the long-imprisoned
father and the brave, noble, free-hearted son, who was so like what that
father had been in his early manhood. He was never weary of telling of
Juan's courage, Juan's truthfulness, Juan's generosity; often concluding
with the words, "_He_ would have been your favourite son, had you known
him, my father."
As time wore on, he won from his father's lips the principal facts of
his own story. His past was like a picture from which the colouring,
once bright and varied, has faded away, leaving only the bare outlines
of fact, and here and there the shadows of pain still faintly visible.
What he remembered, that he told his son; but gradually, and often in
very disjointed fragments, which Carlos carefully pieced together in his
thoughts, until he formed out of them a tolerably connected whole.
Just three-and-twenty years before, on his arrival in Seville, in
obedience to what he believed to be a summons from the Emperor, the
Conde de Nuera had been arrested and thrown into the secret dungeons of
the Inquisition. He well knew his offence: he had been the friend and
associate of De Valero; he had read and studied the Scriptures; he had
even advocated, in the presence of several witnesses, the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. Nor was he unprepared to pay the terrible
penalty. Had he, at the time of his arrest, been led at once to the
rack or the stake, it is probable he would have suffered with a
constancy that might have placed his name beside that of the most heroic
martyrs.
But he was allowed to wear out long months in suspense and solitude, and
in what his eager spirit found even harder to bear, absolute inaction.
Excitement, motion, stirring occupation for mind and body, had all his
life been a necessity to him. In the absence of these he pined--grew
melancholy, listless, morbid. His faith was genuine, and would have
been strong enough to enable him for anything _in the line of his
character_; but it failed under trials purposely and sedulously
contrived to assail that character through its weak points.
When already worn out with dreary imprisonment, he was beset by
arguments, clever, ingenious, sophistical, framed by men who made
argument the business of their lives. Thus attacked, he was like a
brave but unskilful man fencing with adepts in the noble science. He
_knew_ he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought he
could have proved it. But they assured him they proved the contrary; nor
could he detect a flaw in their syllogisms when he came to examine them.
If not convinced, then surely he ought to have been. They conjured him
not to let pride and vain-glory seduce him into self-opinionated
obstinacy, but to submit his private judgment to that of the Holy
Catholic Church. And they promised that he should go forth free, only
chastised by a suitable and not disgraceful penance, and by a pecuniary
fine.
The hope of freedom burned in his heart like fire; and by this time
there was sufficient confusion in his brain for his will to find
arguments there against the voice of his conscience. So he yielded,
though not without conflict, fierce and bitter. His retractation was
drawn up in as mild a form as possible by the Inquisitors, and duly
signed by him. No public act of penance was required, as strict secrecy
was to be observed in the whole transaction.
But the Inquisitor-General, Valdez, felt a well-grounded distrust of the
penitent's sincerity, which was quickened perhaps by a desire to
appropriate to the use of the Holy Office a larger share of his
possessions than the moderate fine alluded to. Probably, too, he dreaded
the disclosures that might have followed had the Count been restored to
the world. He had recourse, therefore, to an artifice often employed by
the Inquisitors, and seriously recommended by their standard
authorities. The "fly" (for such traitors were common enough to have a
technical name as well as a recognized existence) reported that the
Conde de Nuera railed at the Holy Office, blasphemed the Catholic faith,
and still adhered in his heart to all his abominable heresies. The
result was a sentence of perpetual imprisonment.
Don Juan's condition was truly pitiable then. Like Samson, he was shorn
of the locks in which his strength lay, bound hand and foot, and
delivered over to his enemies. Because he could not bear perpetual
imprisonment he had renounced his faith, and denied his Lord. And now,
without the faith he had renounced, without the Lord he had denied, he
must bear it. It told upon him as it would have told on nine men out of
ten, perhaps on ninety-nine out of a hundred. His mind lost its
activity, its vigour, its tone. It became, in time, almost a passive
instrument in the hands of others.
And then the Dominican monk, Fray Ricardo, brought his powerful
intellect and his strong will to bear upon him. He had been sent by his
superiors (he was not prior until long afterwards) to impart the
terrible story of her husband's arrest to the Lady of Nuera, with secret
instructions to ascertain whether her own faith had been tampered with.
In his fanatical zeal he performed a cruel task cruelly. But he had a
conscience, and its fault was not insensibility. When he heard the tale
of the lady's death, a few days after his visit, he was profoundly
affected. Accustomed, however, to a religion of weights and balances,
it came naturally to him to set one thing against another, by way of
making the scales even. If he could be the means of saving the
husband's soul, he would feel, to say the least, much more comfortable
about his conduct to the wife.
He spared no pains upon the task he had set himself; and a measure of
success crowned his efforts. Having first reduced the mind of the
penitent to a cold, blank calm, agitated by no wave of restless thought
or feeling, he had at length the delight of seeing his own image
reflected there, as in a mirror. He mistook that spectral reflection
for a reality, and great was his triumph when, day by day, he saw it
move responsive to every motion of his own.
But the arrest of his penitent's son broke in upon his
self-satisfaction. It seemed as though a dark doom hung over the
family, which even the father's repentance was powerless to avert. He
wished to save the youth, and he had tried to do it after his fashion;
but his efforts only resulted in bringing up before him the pale
accusing face of the Lady of Nuera, and in interesting him more than he
cared to acknowledge in the impenitent heretic, who seemed to him such a
strange mixture of gentleness and obstinacy. Surely the father's
influence would prevail with the son, originally a much less courageous
and determined character, and now already wrought upon by a long period
of loneliness and suffering.
Perhaps also--monk, fanatic, and inquisitor though he was--the
pleasantness of trying the experiment, and cheering thereby the last
days of the pious and docile penitent, his own especial convert, weighed
a little with him; for he was still a man. Moreover, like many hard men,
he was capable of great kindness towards those whom he liked. And, with
the full approbation of his conscience, he liked his penitent; whilst,
rather in spite of his conscience, he liked his penitent's son.
Carlos did not trouble himself overmuch about the prior's motives. He
was too content in his new-found joy, too engrossed in his absorbing
task--the concern and occupation of his every hour, almost of his every
moment. He was as one who toils patiently to clear away the moss and
lichen that has grown over a memorial stone; that he may bring out once
more, in all their freshness, the precious words engraven upon it. The
inscription was there, and there it had been always (so he told
himself); all that he had to do was to remove that which covered and
obscured it.
He had his reward. Life returned, first through love for him, to the
heart; then, through the heart, to the brain. Not rapidly and with
tingling pain, as it returns to a frozen limb, but gradually and
insensibly, as it comes to the dry trees in spring.
But, in the trees, life shows itself first in the extremities; it is
slowest in appearing in those parts which are really nearest the sources
of all life. So the penitent's interest in other subjects, and his care
for them, revived; yet in one thing, the greatest of all, these seemed
lacking still. There did _not_ return the spiritual light and life,
which Carlos could not doubt he had enjoyed in past days. Sometimes, it
is true, he would startle his son by unexpected reminiscences,
disjointed fragments of the truth for which he had suffered so much. He
would occasionally interrupt Carlos, when he was repeating to him
passages from the Testament, to tell him "something Don Rodrigo said
about that, when he expounded the Epistle to the Romans." But these
were only like the rich flowers that surprise the explorer amidst the
tangled weeds of a waste ground, showing that a carefully tended garden
has flourished there once--very long ago.
"It is not that I desire him above all things to hold this doctrine or
that," thought Carlos; "I desire him to find Christ again, and to
rejoice in his love, as doubtless he did in the old days. And surely he
will, since Christ found him--chose him for his own even before the
foundation of the world."
But in order to bring this about, perhaps it was necessary that the
faded colours of his soul should be steeped in the strong and bitter
waters of a great agony, that they might regain thereby their full
freshness.