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 Menaya 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 Menaya. 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, senor," 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 Munebraga. 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 Menaya 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 Munebraga, 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 (Munebraga 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 Menaya 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 Munebraga.
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. "Senor 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.