FREY LUIS
/Fear/ was an emotion which had never touched the Lady Margaret
Trevanion, because in her twenty-five years of life she had never been
exposed to any source of it. From the first dawn of memory in her
there had been those to obey her, some few to guide, but none to
command her. At Trevanion Chase and along that Cornish countryside,
where she was regarded as the Lady Paramount, her will had prevailed
whenever and wherever it had been exerted. None had ever sought to
thwart or oppose her. None had ever been lacking in respect. This
partly because of the station into which she had been born, but more
because she possessed a generous share of that quality of reserve and
self-seclusion which is usually the result of breeding. That any
should offend her in even the slightest measure was utterly
inconceivable. In this assurance, and in the dignity born of it, a
dignity not merely superficial, but going to the very core of her
being, lay her immunity from all presumptions and even from the
impertinences of fatuously audacious gallantry, to which the unusual
freedom of her life and ways might otherwise have exposed her.
So deep-rooted was her self-assurance, so firmly established by all
past experience, that it did not forsake her even now when she found
herself physically constrained, rudely handled, her head muffled in a
cloak. Astonishment and resentment were her predominant emotions. Fear
did not touch her, because it was incredible to her that she should
have anything to fear, unthinkable that this violence should not be
kept within very definite limits. She refrained from struggling as
much because she realized the futility of a trial of strength with the
arms that held her, as because it was utterly beneath her dignity to
have recourse to physical measures of self-defence.
Quiescent, then, she lay in the sternsheets where she had been placed,
seeking to control the seething indignation which might hamper the
free exercise of her wits. She was not more than half conscious of the
heave of the boat, of the creak of rowlocks and thwarts as the men
strained at the oars, and of an occasional inarticulate sound from one
or the other of her rowers. Beside and immediately above her sat one
whom she sensed to be Don Pedro. His arm was about her shoulders,
either as a measure of repression or protection. It did not trouble
her as at another time it must have done. She did not shrink in
pudicity from that male contact which in another place must have
awakened her resentment. There was a graver violence here to engage
her indignation.
At the end of perhaps a half-hour, that arm was withdrawn from her
shoulders. Hands were busy with the cord which had been employed to
make fast the cloak about her waist. It was unfastened, the muffling
garment was pulled away, and suddenly her head was free to the night
air, her eyes free to take stock of her surroundings: the water about
her, the stars overhead, the dark forms of the sailors heaving
rhythmically on the thwarts, and the man who bent over her, his face a
grey blue in the encompassing gloom. He spoke in the voice of Don
Pedro.
‘You will forgive this rude audacity, Margaret?’ It was a question
softly uttered on a note of pleading.
She found her voice and was almost surprised at its steadiness and
hardness. ‘We will speak of that when you set me ashore again in the
cove below Trevanion Chase.’
She guessed his smile rather than perceived it; that smile of subtle,
mocking self-sufficiency which she knew so well, which she had rather
admired but now found entirely abominable. ‘If I did not hope for
forgiveness before then, I must kill myself with despair. There is no
return, Margaret. You are committed with me to this adventure.’
She attempted to struggle up from the floor of the boat upon which she
was sitting. His arm returned to encircle her shoulders and so repress
her movement.
‘Calm, my dear,’ he urged her. ‘You need fear no indignity, no undue
constraint. You go to the high destiny I have reserved for you.’
‘It is for yourself that you are reserving a high destiny,’ she
answered boldly. ‘Gallows high,’ she explained.
He said no more. With a half-sigh he sank back and was silent. He
judged it better to wait until this mood of indignation should have
passed, as pass he thought it must when she realized more fully how
utterly now she was in his power. That realization should bend her
stubbornness more effectively than any words of his. She was not yet
afraid. Hers was a high spirit, and this manifestation of it but
rendered her the more desirable in his eyes. She was, indeed, a woman
worth the winning, and to win her was worth all the patience he could
command. That he would win her in the end, no doubt was possible to
him. Like her own, his will, too, had been ever paramount.
The boat ploughed on. She looked up at the stars overhead, and at
another yellower star low down on the horizon, a star which seemed to
grow as they advanced. Once she looked back; but her glance failed to
pierce the gloom which now blotted out completely the coastline and
all sign of land. All that it revealed to her was that Don Pedro was
not alone in the sternsheets. Another sat there beside him, grasping
the tiller. One more protest she made, one more imperious demand,
backed by a threat, to this helmsman, to put about and convey her back
to shore. The man, however, did not understand. He said something in
Spanish to Don Pedro and was answered shortly and sharply in the same
tongue.
Thereafter she wrapped herself once more in her angry dignity and was
silent. The yellow star ahead increased in size. It was reflected in a
quivering spear of light across the water. Ultimately it resolved
itself into the poop lantern of a towering ship, and soon they were
bumping and scraping along the black sides of a great galleon, towards
the entrance ladder at the summit of which another lantern was being
held by a human figure silhouetted in black against the light from the
vessel’s waist.
They brought up at the ladder, and her ladyship was invited by Don
Pedro to ascend. She refused. She experienced in that moment her first
wave of panic, and yielded to it. She struggled, resisted, commanded,
and threatened. A rope slid down the ship’s side by the ladder. A
sailor caught the end and made in it a running noose. This was slipped
over her head, and allowed to slide down her body as far as her knees.
Then her arms were raised, and the noose came up again about her until
it reached her armpits and gently tightened there. Another moment and
Don Pedro had caught her up and hoisted her to his shoulder. Thus
burdened, supporting her with his left arm, he grasped the ladder with
his right, and raised his right foot to the lowest rung. He began the
ascent. She realized that if she struggled or attempted to fling
herself from him, she would be suspended by the rope. Of the
alternative indignities, the less was to be borne thus upon his
shoulder.
In the ship’s waist, where a ring of lanterns made a patch of almost
brilliant illumination, he set her down. The rope which had been drawn
up hand over hand in a measure as she was borne aloft, lay like a
snake along the deck at her feet. Don Pedro loosed and widened the
noose until it fell away from her.
At the head of the entrance ladder stood Duclerc, the master, lantern
in hand. By the hatch coamings two others waited: one of them stockily
built and dressed as a gentleman, the other tall and gaunt in the
white habit and black scapulary and mantle of a Dominican friar, his
face lost in the shadows of the pointed cowl which covered his head.
The first of these advanced briskly now, and, bowing low before Don
Pedro, murmured softly. This was Don Diego, the intendant or steward
of the Count of Marcos, he who had fitted the ship for the voyage to
England so soon as word had been brought him of his master’s waiting
there.
The friar remained where he was, immoveable as a statue, his hands
folded within the capacious sleeves of his gown. Don Pedro’s glance
seeming to question his presence, the alert Don Diego explained it
readily. No ship in the service of Catholic Spain could sail without a
spiritual guide. He invited the friar forward and presented him as
Frey Luis Salcedo. Priest and noble bowed to each other with all
outward semblance of mutual deference. As the friar came upright
again, his hands still folded in his sleeves, the gleam of a lantern
momentarily dispelled the shadows cast about his face by the cowl. Her
ladyship had a glimpse of an ascetic countenance, narrow, lean, and
pallid, in which glowed two sombre eyes whose glance struck through
her stout soul the chill of a fear such as nothing in this adventure
had yet occasioned her. In that single glance, so swiftly eclipsed,
she caught something of sinister menace, of active malevolence, before
which her soul shuddered as it might have shuddered in the presence of
a supernatural manifestation.
Then Don Pedro was informing her that the ship’s main cabin was at her
service, and inviting her to follow Don Diego, who would lead the way.
She stood an instant hesitating, her head high, her chin thrust
forward, her glance proud to the point of defiance. At last she turned
and followed the stocky figure of the intendant, being followed in her
turn by Don Pedro. Until resistance could be of some avail, she must
suffer them to have their way with her. This she perceived, and,
perceiving it, submitted, upheld ever by her dignity and assisted by
the persisting incredulity that any real harm could possibly touch
her.
At the entrance to the gangway under the break of the poop, Don Pedro
was arrested by a hand upon his arm.
He turned to find the friar at his elbow. The man had followed him. If
his sandalled feet had made any sound upon the deck, this had been
lost in the noise of general activity aboard as the ship broached to.
There had been a creaking of blocks and halliards, a pattering of
steps, and now, as the helm was put up, the slatting sails filled and
bellied with a succession of thuds like muffled cannon shots. Listing
slightly to larboard under the burden of the breeze, the Demoiselle
out of Nantes with her crew of Spanish sailors slipped away through
the night.
Don Pedro frowned interrogatively into the ascetic face upon which the
light of a lantern swinging just within the gangway was beating fully.
The friar’s thin lips moved. ‘This woman whom your lordship brings
aboard?’ he questioned.
Don Pedro was conscious of a spasm of anger. The impertinence of the
question was aggravated by its contemptuous terseness. But he tempered
the reply which another would have had from him to the quality of his
questioner.
‘This lady,’ he said, with a slow emphasis, ‘is the future Countess of
Marcos. I am glad to have this opportunity of announcing it to you, so
that you may speak of her henceforth with a proper deference.’
He turned on his heel whilst the friar was impassively bowing, and
went on towards the great cabin, damning in his heart Don Diego for
having taken aboard for spiritual guide a brother of the Order of
Saint Dominic. These Dominicans were all alike in their insolence,
swollen with pride of power in the authority they derived from their
inquisitorial functions. From the Inquisitor-General to the meanest
brother, they knew no respect of rank however lofty.
A comprehensive glance at the interior of the cabin dispelled some of
Don Pedro’s irritation. It had been furnished in a manner worthy of
its intended tenants. On the snowy napery of the table crystal and
silver sparkled under the light of the swinging lanterns; cushions of
crimson velvet laced with gold embellished the chairs and dissembled
the rudeness of the long sea-chest ranged under the stern windows of
the coach. A long mirror stood between the doors of the two cabins
opening on this main one on the starboard side and another beside the
door of the single cabin to larboard. A soft Eastern rug of brilliant
reds and blues was spread underfoot and there were tapestries to mask
the bulkheads.
Beside the table, slight and sleek, stood Pablillos, one of Don
Pedro’s own household fetched from his Asturian home to be now his
bodyservant.
Don Diego, in the circumstances and considering the haste, had done
more than well, and deserved the two words of commendation which his
master uttered. Then, dismissing him, Don Pedro waved the lady to a
place at table from which Pablillos now withdrew and held the chair.
She looked at him steadily. Her face was white under a cloud of
red-gold, now slightly dishevelled hair. There was also some disarray
in her dull red bodice, and there was a rent in the lace collar under
which her bosom rose and fell to betray the emotion she desired above
all to dissemble.
‘I have no choice,’ she said, coldly, contemptuously, in protest.
‘Since you will waste your time to my hurt in constraining me, I must
submit. But it is the act of a coward, Don Pedro, and of an ingrate.
You return me evil for good. I should have left you to the fate which
you prove to me that every Spaniard deserves at the hands of honest
men.’
With that she moved slowly forward in frosty dignity and took her
place at table.
Don Pedro stood deathly pale, pain in his eyes and dark shadows under
them. Against the whiteness of his face, his little pointed beard and
upward-flung moustaches looked startlingly black. He betrayed no anger
under the lash of her words: only melancholy. He inclined his head a
little.
‘The rebuke is merited, I know. But even if you deem my action base,
do not blame all Spaniards for the faults of one. And even for these
faults, in judging them, consider the source from which they spring.’
He sat down opposite to her. ‘It is not by his actual deeds that a man
is to be judged, but by the motive which inspires them. A thousand men
of honour might have crossed your path in life and retained your
esteem as men of honour because moved to no action that could diminish
them. I am, I trust, a man of honour…’
She uttered a short, interrupting laugh. He caught his breath, and
flushed a little; but repeated himself and continued. ‘I am, I trust,
a man of honour, as in the past you rightly judged me. I might have
departed leaving you in that persuasion, had not an overmastering, an
overwhelming temptation shattered all preconceptions for me. Knowing
you, Margaret, I came to love you, passionately, desperately,
blindly.’
‘Must you continue?’
‘I must. For I desire you to understand before you judge. This love of
mine, growing to worship, filling me with a sense of adoration,
rendered you so necessary to me that I could not face life without
you.’ He passed a hand wearily across his pallid brow. ‘These things
are not of our own devising. We are the slaves of nature, pawns of
Destiny, who uses us to her purpose, lashing us into obedience of her
peremptory will. I did not ask to love you. I did not even desire it
of my own volition. The desire was planted in me. It came I know not
whence, a behest which there was no disobeying, compelling, utterly
overmastering. In what opinion you held me before to-night I scarcely
know. But I think that you esteemed me. And a woman such as I
unerringly judge you to be could not esteem a man whom she supposed
addicted to banal gallantries, to the pursuit of trivial amours,
making sacrilegiously of love a pastime and a vileness. I am no such
man. This I swear to you by my faith and my honour in the sight of God
and His Holy Mother.’
‘Why trouble to swear or to forswear? All this is naught to me.’
‘Ah, wait! It must be something surely. It must have weight with you
that what I have done has been done in no levity possible to some such
man as I say that I am not. I have abducted you. It is an ugly word.’
‘A proper word to describe an ugly fact, a crime for which you shall
most certainly be brought to answer.’
‘A crime as you say. But it is opportunity that makes the criminal.
There has never been in human man--save One, and He was more than
human--so much inherent virtue that there is no point at which
temptation cannot break it.’ He sighed. ‘Believe me at least that I
should never have done what I have done if in addition to the
temptation provided by my need, my irresistible need of you, the
circumstances themselves had not conspired to force me. Time would not
stand still for me. This ship could not be kept indefinitely in
English waters. Every hour exposed her to the risk of seizure. So I
must make haste. I spoke to you last night of love, timidly,
tentatively. I was rebuffed. It was to have been feared. The
disclosure came too abruptly. It startled you, disturbed you, ruffled
you. In other circumstances I should have paused. I should have
brought an infinite patience to my wooing, sustaining that patience by
the conviction that just as in our first meeting something of you had
gone out to me to mark me for your own as long as I have life, so
something from me must have gone out to you with the same message,
although you might not yet be aware of it. It is impossible that the
emotions which stirred in me should be other than reciprocal. They
were as the spark that is born of the meeting of flint and steel, to
the creation of which both elements are necessary. You were not yet
aware of it; that was all. But in time, in a little time, I must have
awakened you to this awareness. Time, however, was not at my command.
It was impossible that I could protract my stay in England.’ He flung
out an arm in a gesture of passion, and leaned forward a little across
the table. ‘What choice then had I but to resort to this villainy as
you deem it, as the only alternative to the impossibility of
renouncing you?’ He waited for no answer, but swept on. ‘I have
brought you away by force that I may woo you, Margaret, that I may
place at your feet all that I have and all that I am, and crown you
with all the honours won already and all those yet to be won under
your dear inspiration. It is known by now on this ship that I am
taking you to Spain to make you Countess of Marcos, and from this
moment you will be entreated by all with the deference and homage due
to that rank.’
He paused, his melancholy love-lorn glance upon her in humble
supplication. But neither the glance nor his words had produced any
visible impression. The eyes with which she returned his glance were
hard, and there was only scorn in the little smile that tightened her
red lips.
‘I have thought you whilst you spoke sometimes a knave, sometimes a
fool. I perceive you now to be a sorry mixture of both.’
He shrugged and even smiled, an infinite weariness in his eyes. ‘That
is not argument.’
‘Argument? Does it need argument to prick the empty bubble you have
laboured so to blow? By the same arguments there is no vileness in the
world that cannot be justified. The facts are here, Don Pedro: you
have returned evil for good; you have used me with violence and
indignity hoping to constrain me to your will; you have left anxiety
and sorrow behind, in a house which sheltered you in time of stress.
These facts no arguments in the world can ever dispel. The attempt
upon me I tell you now is idle. I’ll be no man’s countess against my
will, and I have no will to be yours and never shall have. If you
would earn a forgiveness you may yet come to need, I ask you again to
give orders to go about and restore me to my home.’
He lowered his eyes and sighed. ‘Let us eat,’ he said, and spoke
rapidly in Spanish to the waiting and wondering Pablillos, who at once
grew busy with the dishes prepared upon a buffet.
In a spirit of admirable philosophic detachment, Don Pedro found
himself admiring the courage which permitted her to answer him so
firmly, to sit before him so upright, and to meet his eye so steadily.
How differently would any other woman he had ever known have borne
herself in this situation! What tears and outcries would not have
deafened and nauseated him! But Margaret was tempered finely as steel.
Not in all the world could he find such another mother for his sons.
What men would she not bear to add lustre and honour to the house of
Mendoza y Luna?
Of her ultimate surrender he was confident. The arguments he had used
were sincere enough; they expressed his utter faith; and in that faith
he could practise patience, a virtue impossible only where there is
doubt.
She ate sparingly; but that she could eat at all was a further proof
of her spirit. She drank, too, a little wine; but was careful to drink
only from the same jug as that which supplied Don Pedro. Observing
this caution, he rated her wit as highly as her spirit. Thus her very
defiances and mistrusts but served to magnify her in his adoring eyes.
The single cabin on the starboard side had been prepared for Don
Pedro, and prepared luxuriously. Informed of it by Pablillos, he
yielded it to her ladyship, and she withdrew to it with the cold
resignation which had marked her every surrender to the force of
circumstances.
Alone there, her demeanour may have altered. In secret she may have
yielded to fear and grief and indignation. Certain it is that when
early on the following morning she sought the deck, where she might
conceive herself less prisoned than in the coach, there was a
haggardness which her countenance had never worn before and a redness
about her eyes which may have been the result of weeping or of
sleeplessness, both new experiences in the life of the Lady Margaret
Trevanion. Apart from those, however, she flew no signals of distress.
She had dressed herself with pains, repairing the disorder which her
garments had suffered and she had tired her hair with care. Her step
was as firm as the canting deck permitted, her manner one of chill
dignity and assurance.
Thus she emerged from the gangway to the waist, which, beheld now in
the morning sunlight, seemed less spacious than yesternight. Her
glance strayed from the square main hatch with its shot-rack to the
boats on the booms amidships and lingered a moment on a sturdy lad,
who, engaged in polishing the brass hoops of a scuttle butt, eyed her
with furtive interest. The wind had freshened with the sunrise, and
there were men aloft taking in sail. Save for the youth at the scuttle
butt, she seemed singularly alone. But as she moved forward along the
weather quarter away from the break of the poop, she saw that there
were men on the quarter-deck above. Duclerc, the sturdy, bearded
French master, leaned on the carved rail, observing her. As she
turned, he doffed his bonnet in salutation. Behind him two sailors
were gazing up into the shrouds, following the operations there of
those aloft.
She crossed the canted deck to the quarter on which she supposed that
land--her England--would last have been. There was no land now in
sight. She had a sense almost that the ship was in the centre of a
vast aqueous globe, for the pellucid morning sky seemed one with the
ocean. A nausea of dismay swept over her, and she steadied herself
against the bulwarks, to become suddenly aware that she was less alone
than she had believed. Against one of the forecastle bulkheads leaned
a tall figure as immoveable as if it had been a caryatid carved to
bear the burden of that forward deck.
It was the friar. His cowl was now thrown back from his tonsured head,
and his face, thus fully revealed in the light of day, announced him
younger than she had supposed him, a man in the middle thirties.
Despite its hungry, almost wolfish look, it was a not unhandsome face,
and one that must anywhere arrest attention. The nose was prominent,
almost Semitic; the cheek-bones thrust forward boldly, seeming to drag
the sallow skin with them and leaving gaunt hollows in the cheeks. His
mouth was wide, but thin of lips and firm, whilst under a jutting brow
two great dark eyes glowed sombrely.
He stood within but a few yards from where she had come to lean, his
finger closed upon his breviary, a string of beads intertwining his
fingers and hanging from his hand; they formed--although she could not
know or guess it--a chaplet brought from the Holy Land, each grain of
which was wrought of camel bone.
Perceiving her regard upon him, he slightly inclined his head in
greeting, but his face remained as impassive as if carved of wood. He
advanced towards her, his great stern eyes upon her, and she grew
conscious of a faint, uneasy quickening of her pulses, such as besets
us at the approach of some creature of a species not known or
understood. To her surprise he greeted her in English. He uttered
commonplaces, but his deep, grave voice and sibilant Spanish accent
seemed to lend them consequence. He expressed a hope that she had
found a ship’s quarters not too uncomfortable, that sleep had been
possible to her in surroundings that must be unaccustomed so that
waking refreshed she had commended herself to the Holy Mother of God,
the natural protectress of all virgins.
She realized that the apparently courteous hope was in reality a
question, although perhaps she scarcely understood the depth to which
it was meant to probe. Indeed, her active wits were already engaged on
other matters. This man was a priest, and although his might be a
creed superficially different from her own, yet in fundamentals it was
essentially the same. Good and Evil wore the same aspect in Roman as
in Lutheran eyes, and he was by his office and his habit a servant of
the Good, an upholder of virtue, a champion of the oppressed. Had he
known no English, he could not have availed her. He must have drawn
his own conclusions touching her presence on that ship, or accept
whatever tale Don Pedro told him. But the fact that she could appeal
to him, tell her own story and be understood, seemed all at once to
dispel her every qualm and open a clear way for her out of her present
difficulties. Let him but know of the violence done her, of how she
was placed, and his assistance must be won; he must stand her friend
and protector, and he a man in authority who could enforce, even upon
so great a gentleman as Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, the need to right
this wrong.
Don Diego had blundered worse than he knew, or Don Pedro yet
suspected, in bringing this Dominican as the ship’s spiritual guide.
The man’s knowledge of English, which was the very ground upon which
Don Diego had chosen him for a voyage to England, was the very ground
upon which, had there been no others, he should have been left in
Spain. But this was all outside her ladyship’s knowledge. All that
mattered was that he spoke her tongue and that he was here beside her
to hear what she had to tell.
The colour flooded to her cheeks, a sparkle came to eyes that a moment
since had been dull with dejection. Her first words were such as must
commend her to him, and almost quiet the doubts concerning her that
were stirring in his mind, doubts which his questioning greeting had
desired to test.
‘God must have sent you to me; God and that Holy Mother whom you
pronounce the protectress of all maids in need. Be you her deputy by
me. For I am sorely in need of protection.’
She saw the stern eyes soften. Compassionate tenderness invested that
ascetic countenance.
‘I am an unworthy servant of the Lord and of those who call upon the
Lord. What is your need, my sister?’
Briefly, with feverish speed, she told him that she had been ravished
from her home and brought by violence aboard this ship in which she
was being carried to Spain in the power and at the mercy of Don Pedro
de Mendoza.
He inclined his head. ‘I know,’ he said quietly.
‘You know? You know?’ There was almost horror in her voice. Was it
possible that this priest was in the plot? Were the hopes vain to
which his presence had but given birth? He knew, and yet bore himself
with such indifference!
‘I also know, if man’s words are to be believed, that Don Pedro means
you honourably.’
‘What is that to the matter?’ she cried out.
‘Something. Something surely that his intentions concerning you are
not villainous or sinful.’
‘Not villainous? Not sinful? To bear me off against my will! To coerce
me!’
‘It is a wrong, a grave and wicked wrong,’ Frey Luis admitted quietly.
‘Yet not so grave or so wicked as it might be, and as first I feared
it was. I feared a mortal sin to imperil the salvation of his soul.
And who voyages in ships should more than another preserve that state
of grace in which to meet his Maker, since at any moment the perils of
sea may summon him to that Dread Presence. But a wrong there is, as I
perceive. You desire me to prevail upon Don Pedro to repair it.
Content you, my sister. In my protection, under God’s, whose servant I
am, rest you assured that no evil shall befall you. Don Pedro either
returns you to your home at once, or you shall be delivered from this
coercion so soon as you touch Spanish soil.’
She could have laughed in her exultation, so easy had it been to
secure the frustration of all Don Pedro’s measures. The voyage no
longer had any peril to daunt her. The mantle of Saint Dominic
protected her, and although she knew little if anything about that
ardent zealous saint who had preached the love of Christ with fire and
sword and warred relentlessly upon all who did not think as he did,
she felt that she would hold his name ever hereafter in reverence and
love.
Frey Luis had passed his beads and breviary into his left hand. He
raised now his right, with three fingers extended, and made the sign
of the cross in the air over her golden head, a murmur of Latin on his
lips.
To the Lady Margaret this was almost as the ritual of some
incantation. Her wide-set generous eyes dilated a little as she looked
at him. Frey Luis read the question of that uncomprehending stare,
observed that golden head held rigid, unbowed, and unresponsive to his
benediction, and his own eyes reflected a sudden doubt which mounted
swiftly to conviction. Dismay overspread the austere face. This thing
which Don Pedro had done went deeper than he could have dishonoured
him by suspecting. It suddenly assumed proportions of wickedness and
evil far exceeding any which he attached to the abduction in itself,
indeed the last wickedness he would have believed of a nobleman of a
family so renowned for piety as Don Pedro’s, a family which had given
Spain a Primate. This abducted woman, whom Don Pedro intended for his
wife and the mother of his children, was a heretic!
Before that horrible discovery Frey Luis recoiled in body as in
spirit. His lips tightened; his expression became mask-like. He folded
his hands within the sleeves of his white woollen habit, and without
another word turned on his sandalled heel and moved slowly away to
excogitate this horror.