SCYLLA
/So/ deeply perturbed by his discovery was Frey Luis that he required
time to recover from the shock and to rehearse the measures by which
he was to combat Satan for the imperilled soul of Don Pedro de Mendoza
y Luna. The holy man prayed long and fervently for guidance and for
strength. As one who sincerely regarded the world and its honours as
trivial evanescences to be crossed on the path to eternity, he stood
in no awe of the great, acknowledged no superiority in any nobility
that was not rooted in zeal for the Faith. He would serve no king who
was not himself a servant of God; acknowledge no king who did not
acknowledge himself that. Worldly power, which himself he had spurned
when he assumed the habit of Saint Dominic, became a contemptible
mockery in his eyes, a thing of scorn, from the moment that it ceased
to be employed first and foremost in the service of the Faith. It
follows from all this, which was not without its unperceived leaven of
arrogance and the deadly sin of pride, that Frey Luis was no respecter
of persons or of rank. Yet, whilst despising worldly rank, he must
acknowledge it. It was necessary to reckon with it. Evil could be
wrought by it. Because self-seeking men were sycophantic to it, great
strength was often necessary to stand against it and thwart it where
it addressed itself to unholy ends.
For this strength prayed Frey Luis, and it was not until the following
afternoon that he felt himself sufficiently equipped and inspired for
his struggle with the Devil.
Don Pedro took the air--crisp and sharp despite the sunlight--upon the
poop. He was distressed and moody, when Frey Luis approached him, but
because it was some time before the Dominican’s words showed whither
he was travelling, Don Pedro offered no interruptions, betrayed no
impatience.
Frey Luis went a long way round, so as completely to disguise his
approaches; so as to say all that mattered, all that should germinate
in the soul of Don Pedro, before Don Pedro, discerning the friar’s
real aim, should be tempted to set a term to his discourse. It
amounted to little less than a sermon.
He began by speaking of Spain, of her glory first and then of her
difficulties. Her glories he described as the mark of divine favour
upon her. God made it manifest that the Spaniards were to-day his
chosen people, and woe unto Spain should she ever grow negligent of
the stupendous grace vouchsafed her.
Don Pedro permitted himself to wonder was the scattering of the Armada
by the hosts of Heaven a manifestation of this grace.
The doubt inflamed Frey Luis. Not the hosts of Heaven, but the powers
of darkness had been responsible for that. God had permitted it as a
warning to a people against the deadly sin of pride--one of Satan’s
most artful snares--which might betray them into supposing that their
glories were the result of their own puny endeavours. It was necessary
to remind men, lest they perished, that without the favour of Heaven
nothing was to be achieved on earth.
There were a dozen answers which suggested themselves to the logical
mind of Don Pedro, who had first known doubt on that morning when he
awakened in the cove below Trevanion Chase. But he offered none of
them, knowing already how they would be met.
Frey Luis passed on to speak of his country’s difficulties: the
jealous enemies without, and the insidious enemies within; the latter
inspired and sustained by the former. Because Spain, under God’s
favour and protection, was unconquerable in direct and honourable
warfare, Satan sought to undermine the religious unity which rendered
her invulnerable by insinuating sectarian disorders into her bosom. To
wound her in her faith was to bleed her of her strength. The Jews,
those enemies of the Cross, those armies of the powers of darkness,
had been driven out. But the New Christians remained with their
frequent Judaizings. Gone were those other legionaries of hell, the
followers of Mahomet. But the Moriscos remained and their frequent
lapses into the abominations of Islam continued a defilement. And,
after all, the taint of Jew and Moor was in many a man of lineage. Not
every nobleman of Spain was as clean of blood as Don Pedro de Mendoza
y Luna. But not even clean blood was nowadays a sufficient safeguard,
since it assured no immunity from the poison of heresy, a poison which
once introduced into the body laboured there until it had destroyed it
utterly. And there were signs of it, more than signs of it in Spain
already. Frey Luis became lugubrious. Valladolid was a hotbed of
Lutheranism. Salamanca was little better than a heretical seminary.
The disciples of Luther and Erasmus became daily bolder. Even a
Primate of Spain, Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, had been guilty
of Lutheranizing in his catechism.
Upon this climax of exaggeration, Don Pedro interrupted him. ‘The
Archbishop was acquitted of the charge.’
The Dominican’s eyes flashed with holy wrath. ‘That acquittal shall be
atoned for in hell by those who betrayed their God in pronouncing it.
For seventeen years Carranza lay in the prisons of the Holy Office,
defending himself with sophistries which the Devil inspired in him for
his self-preservation. He should have left them for the fire. In such
matters there is no room for arguments or casuistries; whilst men
talk, the evil grows; it grows even from their disputations. What is
needed is that we extirpate these buboes of heretical pestilence, that
we cauterize them once for all with the purifying flame. To the fire
with all these putrescences! And so Amen!’ He flung up one of his long
arms in a gesture of denunciation almost terrifying in its remorseless
vehemence.
‘Amen, indeed!’ Don Pedro echoed.
The Dominican’s lean, feverish hand clawed the nobleman’s arm in its
black velvet sleeve. His eyes glowed with eagerness and saintly zeal.
‘That is the response I expected from you, the response worthy of your
nobility, of your clean blood and of the representative of the great
House of Mendoza, which has laboured ever to the glory of God and of
Spain.’
‘What other response could have been possible? I am, I hope, a
faithful son of Mother Church.’
‘Not merely faithful, but active; a member of the Militia Christi. Are
you not in some sort my brother, my spiritual brother, in the great
fraternity of Saint Dominic? Are you not a lay tertiary of the order,
and so consecrated to uphold the purity of the Faith and to expunge
heresy wherever you shall find it?’
Don Pedro began to frown at so much vehemence. ‘Why do you question
me, Frey Luis?’
‘To test you, whom I find upon the brink of a precipice. To assure
myself that your faith is strong enough to keep you from the vertigo
that may hurl you down into the depths.’
‘I am on the brink of a precipice? I? You give me news, brother.’ And
Don Pedro laughed with a flash of white teeth behind his black beard.
‘You stand in danger of defiling the purity of your blood which
hitherto has been without taint. You have announced to me that you
will give your children a heretic for their mother.’
Don Pedro understood, though truth to tell the thing took him by
surprise. The fact was, although he dared not admit it to this zealot,
that swept headlong by the stream of passion he had given no thought
to this side of the matter.
For an instant he stood appalled. He was a devout and faithful son of
the Church, as he had announced; and he was dismayed to discover how
reckless he had been of matters which should have claimed his first
attention. But the dismay was momentary. The same high confidence that
he would win the Lady Margaret to be a willing bride assured him that
he would have no difficulty in bringing her within the fold of the
True Faith. He said so, and by the confident assurance entirely
changed the current of the friar’s thoughts. Frey Luis was uplifted
like a man who suddenly perceives the light where all before him had
been darkness.
‘Blessed be God!’ he exclaimed piously. ‘Woe me for the weakness of my
own faith! I failed to see, my brother, that you were chosen to be the
instrument of her salvation.’
He enlarged upon this theme. In his view it justified all that Don
Pedro had done, the very violence he had used in abducting this lady.
Here was no question of any yielding to carnal lusts such as the friar
had shuddered to his soul in contemplating. Don Pedro was snatching a
brand from the burning, carrying off not so much a fair smooth body
cast in the Satanic mould of loveliness for man’s corruption, but
rather a soul that was in peril of damnation. The friar would be his
ally now in this worthy work. He would bear the light of the True
Faith to this damsel for whom such high temporal destinies were
reserved. He would labour in the holy work of delivering her from the
heretical abominations absorbed in the abominably heretical country of
her birth, and by converting her to the True Faith render her a fit
bride for the Count of Marcos, a fit mother for future Mendozas.
Even if Don Pedro had possessed the inclination, he would not have
dared to oppose Frey Luis in this. But it was what he himself desired;
what, now that he came to consider it, he perceived must happen before
he could dare take Margaret to wife.
And so Frey Luis was granted charter to preach conversion to the Lady
Margaret.
He went about it with an infinite caution, patience, and zeal,
labouring assiduously for three days to break down the earthworks
which he clearly perceived to have been thrown up about her by Satan.
But the more he laboured, the more did those Satanic ramparts grow to
frustrate the gallant zeal of his attacks.
At first the Lady Margaret had been interested in his expositions.
Perhaps even because of her interest, she had come to interrupt him
with questions. How did he know this? What was his authority for that?
And when he answered her, behold her presenting him with embarrassing
rejoinders straight from Scripture, begging him to reconcile this or
that of his statements with these passages from Holy Writ.
To her it was an engrossing game, a Heaven-sent pastime to beguile the
tedium of those days upon that ship, to take her mind from distracting
activities upon the past and the future. But to him it was an
appalling torment. There was a simplicity about her which was
devastating, a directness of question and a lucidity of statement that
at moments reduced him to despair.
Frey Luis had never met her equal. This need not surprise us. His
inquisitorial dealings had chiefly been concerned with Judaizers and
relapsed Moriscos. His knowledge of English had brought him into touch
with some English and other mariners consigned for heresy to the
prisons of the Holy Office. But they had been ignorant men, even when
shipmasters, in religious matters. They had clung stubbornly to
certain fundamental tenets of the heretical creed in which they had
been reared; but they had attempted no argument or answers to the
arguments which in the performance of his holy duty he had placed
before them.
The Lady Margaret Trevanion’s was a very different case. Here was a
woman who had read and reread the Scriptures, largely for lack of
other reading matter, until she knew--whilst scarcely aware of it--a
deal of them by heart. Add to this that she was gifted with a clear
intelligence, a ready wit, and a high courage and that she had been
reared in the habit of expressing herself with the utmost frankness.
These matters which Frey Luis came so assiduously to expound had never
greatly exercised her mind in the past. Her father was not a religious
man, and sentimentally his leanings had been rather to the old Romish
Faith. He had been careless of his daughter’s religious training, and
had left her to pursue it for herself. But if she had never yet
exercised herself upon it in the past, she was ready enough to
exercise herself upon it now when in a sense she found herself
challenged to do so. The ease with which she found herself embarked in
polemical argument, the readiness with which quotations came to her
hand as required, surprised her very self.
It more than surprised Frey Luis. It brought him to a raging despair.
It proved to him how right were the fathers of the Church to forbid
the translation and diffusion of the Sacred Writings, and what a lure
of Satan’s it was to place those books in the hands of those who,
because they could not understand them, must of necessity pervert
their meaning. Thus by the wiles of the Devil the very means of
salvation were transformed into instruments of corruption.
When he said so in furious denunciation, she laughed at him, laughed
like a Delilah or a Jezebel, flaunting her white beauty as it seemed
to him before his eyes as if to take him in the lure of it, as she had
taken Don Pedro. He covered his face with his hands.
‘_Vade retro, Sathanas!_’ he cried aloud, whereat she but laughed the
more.
‘So, sir friar,’ she rallied him, ‘I am become Satan now, and I am to
get behind you! You’re ungallant, which is no doubt very proper in a
priest, however distressing in a man. But behind you I will not get.
I’ll face you out, sir, until one of us goes down in defeat.’
He uncovered his face to stare at her with eyes of horror. He took
that rallying phrase in its literal sense. ‘Until one of us goes down
in defeat?’ he echoed. Then his voice soared passionately. ‘Until
Satan triumphs, you mean! Woe me!’ And on that he fled from the great
cabin where the atmosphere had grown stifling, to seek breath and
sanity on the open deck with the salt tang of the sea in his nostrils.
That happened on the third day of his efforts of conversion, and it
was fateful. Her words pursued him. ‘I’ll face you out until one of us
goes down in defeat.’ It was a threat; a threat of Satan’s spoken
through those fair false lips. He perceived it now. Out here under
God’s sky, it came to him that he had stood in direst peril. He, the
hunter, had begun to be the hunted. There were moments, as he now
perceived, when his own faith had momentarily faltered under the
specious arguments, the glib answers with which she had
counter-assailed him, moments when he had stood in doubt of what
actually was the teaching of the Church, bewildered by a sudden
confrontation with some text of Scripture which seemed to give the lie
to what he had last said. And this had happened to him, a man learned
in these matters, at the hands of a woman, a girl, an untutored child!
It was unthinkable, preposterous, that she should be able to do this
of her own wit. Whence had she the power? Whence? It must be that she
was possessed, a subject of unholy inspiration.
The conviction grew, and something beside the thought of her polemics
came to strengthen it. The image of her was solid before his eyes. He
beheld her concrete, almost palpable before him even now: the lissom
form on the cushions of the sea-chest with the glowing horn panes of
the stern windows behind her, her head thrown back in laughter and
lending her an air of wantonness; the red-gold hair that seemed at
moments to flame in the sunlight, the blue eyes so full of a false
alluring candour, the white throat, so fully revealed by the wanton
cut of her corsage and the swelling curve of breast below, along which
his eyes had unduly lingered. They lingered now upon the image of it
all, even though he pressed his palms against his eyeballs as if to
crush them, revolted, terrified, to find that image evoking an unholy
thrill in his starved virility.
‘_Vade retro, Sathanas!_’ he muttered again, and piteously from the
depths of his soul cried out for help against the terrible lure of the
flesh, so long and fiercely repressed and now rising up to destroy
him. ‘_Vade retro, Sathanas!_’
A hand touched his shoulder. He started as if a red-hot iron had been
pressed against him. Beside him as he sat there on the hatch coaming
to which he had sunk, stood the slight, elegant figure of Don Pedro
observing him with a half-smile.
‘With what devil do you wrestle, Frey Luis?’
Frey Luis looked up at him with haunted eyes. ‘That is what I desire
to know,’ he answered. ‘Sit here beside me,’ he invited, and the great
gentleman obeyed.
There was a silence, at the end of which the Dominican began to
discourse. He spoke of witchcraft and demonology in a fevered manner
and with a leaning to impure things--not necessarily in itself impure.
He expounded the origin and nature of the Devil; alluded to many
weapons and snares of which the Devil avails himself, and the dangers
created by the illusions in which these are veiled. Antichrist, he
asserted, was to be fathered by an incubus, even as the accursed
heresiarch Luther had been fathered.
The discourse dragged on. It was obscure, and Don Pedro wearied of it.
‘What have I to do with all this?’ he ventured.
The friar swung to him, and laid a hand heavily upon his shoulder.
Solemnly he put a question.
‘Would you prefer a crumb of ephemeral and poisoned pleasure to the
banquet of infinite and everlasting bliss which is offered to you in
heaven?’
‘God help me! Of course not.’
‘Then be warned in time, my brother.’
‘Of what?’
Frey Luis answered obliquely. ‘God hath set woman in the world to put
man to the proof. Woe unto him that fails!’
‘If you said it in Greek, I might understand you better,’ was the
impatient answer.
‘This woman…’ the friar was beginning.
‘If you mean the Lady Margaret Trevanion, you’ll speak of her
differently or not at all.’
Don Pedro got up stiffly, breathing noisily through his nostrils. But
Frey Luis was not to be abashed.
‘Words are naught. It is the fact they express that signifies. This
lady, my lord, is beyond conversion.’
Don Pedro looked at him, and fingered his beard. ‘Beyond such arts of
it as yours, you mean.’
‘Beyond all arts. She is possessed.’
‘Possessed?’
‘Of a devil. She has recourse to witchcraft. She…’
Leaning over him, Don Pedro hissed an interruption. ‘Silence, madman!
Is your vanity so monstrous, your pride so egregious, that because you
have not the wit to persuade her, you must assume the Devil speaks
with her tongue? Why, what a paltry tale, and how often has it not
served an incompetent man of God?’
The friar, however, untouched by offence, slowly shook his head.
‘There’s more to it than that. God’s grace has revealed to me that
which I should have had the wit to perceive before with my earthly
senses. For I hold the proof of it. The proof, do you hear? As you
might hold it if she had not caught you in her spells, trammelled you
in her evil web.’
‘No more!’ Don Pedro stood stern and fierce. ‘You push presumption to
amazing lengths, sir friar. Do not push it so far that in my just
resentment I should forget the habit that you wear.’
The friar rose, too, and stood close beside him, half a head taller,
stern, indomitable in his holy zeal. ‘No threats will silence one who
knows himself within his rights to speak, as I am.’
‘Are you so?’ Don Pedro had dropped all outward signs of anger. He was
his habitual mocking self, mocking and something sinister. ‘Remember
that I too have rights here on this ship, and these include the right
to have you flung overboard if you become importunate.’
Frey Luis recoiled, not in fear of the threat, but in horror of the
spirit that prompted it.
‘You say this to me? You threaten sacrilege, no less? You are so lost
already that you would raise your hand against an anointed priest?’
‘Begone!’ Don Pedro bade him. ‘Go preach of hell to those poor devils
in the forecastle.’
Frey Luis folded his hands under his scapulary, assuming an outward
impassivity. ‘I have sought to warn you. But you will not be warned.
Sodom and Gomorrah would not be warned. Beware their fate!’
‘I am neither Sodom nor Gomorrah,’ was the biting answer. ‘I am Don
Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, Count of Marcos and Grande of Spain, and my
word is paramount aboard this ship; my wish the only law upon these
decks. Remember it unless you are prepared to take your chance of
travelling home like Jonah.’
For a moment Frey Luis stood considering him with inscrutable,
hypnotic eyes. Then he raised his hands and drew the cowl over his
head. There was almost a symbolism in the act, as if he intended to
express the completeness of his withdrawal.
Yet he went without malice of any kind in his piteous heart; for
piteous he was to the core and marrow of him. He went to pray that the
divine grace might descend upon Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna to deliver
him from the snares of an enchantress inspired by Satan to destroy his
soul. That fact was now crystal-clear to Frey Luis Salcedo. As he had
said, he held the proof of it.