DOMINI CANES
/For/ two days the Lady Margaret was left to meditate in the solitude
and discomfort of her prison. Her fears having been aroused by the
parting words of the Fiscal Advocate, it was supposed that these might
now be left to the work of sapping her resistance and obduracy.
Her meditations, however, took a turn which the Inquisitors of the
Faith were very far from expecting, and this she revealed when next
she was brought to audience before them.
There had been a change meanwhile in the constitution of the court.
Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo remained to preside, and the Diocesan Ordinary
was the same rubicund and humorous-looking man whom last she had seen
on the inquisitor’s right hand. But instead of the former Fiscal
Advocate, another had been found who understood English well and spoke
it tolerably, a man this of terrifying aspect with a thin hawk-nose, a
cruel, almost lipless mouth, and close-set, ungenerous eyes which
looked as if no pitying glance had ever issued from them. The notary,
too, had been changed, and his place was taken by another Dominican
with sufficient knowledge of English to interpret for himself what
might transpire in the course of the examination he was to record.
Frey Luis was again present.
The audience was taken up by the inquisitor at the point where it was
last suspended. He began by once more entreating the accused to enable
the court to use her with clemency by a full and frank confession of
her sin.
If, on the one hand, the Lady Margaret had been weakened by fear and
by distress, on the other, she had been strengthened by indignation at
the discovery which she believed that her meditations had brought her.
To this indignation she now gave the full expression which she had
prepared.
‘Would it not better become your priestly office to depart from
subterfuge?’ she asked Frey Juan. ‘Since you claim to stand for the
truth in all things, were it not better that you allow the truth to
raise its head?’
‘The truth! What truth?’
‘Since you ask me, I will tell you. It is always possible, however
improbable, that it may have escaped you. Men sometimes overlook the
thing under their very feet. Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna is a Grande
of Spain, a very great gentleman in this great kingdom. His actions
are those of a villain, for which the civil courts--the secular
courts, you call them--should punish him. They are also such as to
render his faith suspect. Besides, as I understand it, he has
committed sacrilege in threatening violence to a priest and
sacrilegious murder in shedding the blood of men employed by the Holy
Office. For these well-attested offences your courts of the
Inquisition should punish him. There would appear to be no escape for
him. But because he is a great gentleman…’
She was interrupted by the notary, who had been writing feverishly in
his endeavour to keep pace with her. ‘Not so fast, my sister!’
Deliberately she paused, to give him time. Indeed, she desired as
ardently as did he and every member of the court that her words should
be recorded. Then she resumed more slowly:
‘But because he is a great gentleman, and there are inconveniences in
punishing a great gentleman, who commands no doubt high influence, it
becomes necessary to shift the blame, to find a scapegoat. It becomes
necessary to discover that he was not responsible for his villainies
temporal or spiritual, that he was in fact bewitched at the time by an
English heretic whose wicked and perverse will plunged him into this
course for the purpose of destroying him in this world and the next.’
This time it was the Fiscal Advocate who interrupted her, his voice
rasping harshly.
‘You increase your infamy by a suggestion so infamous.’
The mild inquisitor raised a hand to silence him. ‘Do not interrupt
her,’ he begged.
‘I have done, sirs,’ she announced. ‘The thing is clear, as clear and
simple as it is pitiful, mean, and cruel. If you persist in it, you
will have to answer for it sooner or later. Be sure of that. God will
not permit such wickedness to go unpunished. Nor do I think will man!’
Frey Juan waited until the notary had ceased to write. His
compassionate eyes pondered her very solemnly.
‘It is perhaps natural, reared as you have been, and ignorant as you
are of us and of our sincerity, that you should attribute to us
motives so worldly and so unworthy. Therefore, we do not resent it, or
allow it to weigh against you. But we deny it. There is no thought in
our minds to spare any man, however high placed, who shall have
offended against God. Princes of the blood royal have done penance for
offences of which the Holy Office has convicted them without
hesitation or fear of their power and influence. We are above such
things. We will go to the fire ourselves sooner than fail in our
sacred duty. Take my assurance of that, my sister, and return to your
cell, further to meditate upon the matter, and I pray that God’s grace
may help you to a worthier view. It is clear that your mood is not yet
such as would enable us profitably to continue our endeavours on your
behalf.’
But she would not be dismissed. She begged to be heard a moment yet in
her own defence.
‘What can you have to add, my sister?’ wondered Frey Juan. ‘What can
you have to urge against the evidence of the facts?’ Nevertheless, he
waved back the familiars who had already advanced for the purpose of
removing her.
‘The evidence is not one of facts, but of inferences drawn from facts.
No one can prove this witchcraft with which you so fantastically
charge me by the direct evidence of having seen me distilling
philtres, or murmuring incantations, or raising devils, or doing any
of those things which witches are notoriously reputed to do. From
certain effects observed in one who to my distress and dismay has been
associated with me, and because this person is a great gentleman
towards whom it is desired to practise leniency, inferences are drawn
to inculpate me and at the same time to exculpate him. Commonest
justice, then, should admit inferences to be similarly drawn in my
defence.’
‘If they can so be drawn,’ Frey Juan admitted.
‘They can, as I shall hope to show.’
Her firmness, her candour, her dignity were not without effect upon
the inquisitor. In themselves these things seemed almost, by the
evidence of character contained in them, to rebut the charge of
sorcery. But Frey Juan reminded himself that appearances can be
terribly deceptive, that an air of purity and sanctity is the
favourite travesty used by Satan for his evil ends. He allowed her to
proceed because the rules of the tribunal expressly prescribed that an
accused should be encouraged to talk, since thus frequently many
matters that must otherwise remain hidden were inadvertently
disclosed. Calmly she posed the first of the questions she had
considered and prepared in the solitude of her cell.
‘If it is true that I used the arts of sorcery upon Don Pedro with the
object of inducing him to take me to wife and the further object of
luring him into the ways of Lutheranism which you account the ways of
damnation, why did not I keep him in England, where I could in perfect
safety have carried out my evil designs?’
Frey Juan turned to the Fiscal, inviting him to answer her, as his
duty was. A contemptuous smile curled the man’s thin lips. ‘Worldly
considerations would suffice to influence you there. The Count of
Marcos is a gentleman of great position and wealth, which you would
naturally desire to share. The position would be forfeited, the wealth
confiscated, once it were known that he remained in England as a
result of a heretical marriage. For that offence he would have been
sentenced to the fire. Because contumaciously absent, he would have
been burnt in effigy, to be burnt in his proper person later and
without further trial at any time when he should come within reach of
the arm of the Holy Inquisition.’ He smiled again, satisfied with the
completeness of his reply, and fell silent.
‘You are answered,’ Frey Juan informed her.
She had gone white in her dismay. ‘You account this piling of
absurdity upon absurdity an answer?’ It was a cry almost of despair.
Then she recovered. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let us test elsewhere this
net which you have drawn about me. Have I your leave to interrogate my
accuser?’
Frey Juan questioned with his eyes first the Diocesan, then the
Fiscal. The first by a shrug and a grunt implied that the matter was
of no great consequence. The second assented sharply in his rasping
voice.
‘Why not? Let her question by all means--_ut clavus clavo
retundatur_.’
Permitted, then, she turned her gaze full upon Frey Luis where he sat
beside the industriously writing notary.
‘Amongst all that you overheard when you listened at the cabin door to
Don Pedro’s talk with me, you heard him, whilst urging me to become
his wife, inform me that there was a priest on board the ship who
would marry us at once?’
‘It is set down in my memorial,’ he answered shortly, his great eyes
almost malevolent.
‘Do you remember what answer I returned him?’
‘You returned him no answer,’ said Frey Luis emphatically.
‘But if I had bewitched him for the purpose of becoming his wife,
should I have left such a proposal as that unanswered?’
‘Silences are not to be construed as negatives,’ the Fiscal cut in.
She looked at the priestly advocate, and a wan smile momentarily
flitted across her face.
‘Let us by all means come to speech then.’ And once more she turned to
Frey Luis. ‘On the following morning when first I met you on deck,
what did I say to you?’
Frey Luis made an gesture of impatience, turning to the presiding
inquisitor.
‘The answer to this is already in my memorial. I have there set down
that she informed me that she had been brought aboard by force, that
Don Pedro sought to coerce her into marriage, and she appealed to me
for protection.’
‘If I had bewitched Don Pedro so as to induce him to marry me, should
I have made such a complaint or should I have appealed to
anyone--particularly to a priest--for protection?’
Frey Luis delivered his answer violently, the malevolence deepening in
his eyes. ‘Have I anywhere said that you bewitched him to the end that
he should marry you? How should I know the purpose of such as you? I
say only that you bewitched him, else it is impossible that a
God-fearing, pious son of Mother Church could have thought of marriage
with a heretic, that he could have threatened sacrilegious violence to
a priest, or have sacrilegiously shed the blood of men discharging the
sacred functions of apparitors of the Holy Office.’
‘If all this proves him to have been bewitched--as well it may, for I
do not understand these things--how does it prove that I bewitched
him?’
‘How?’ echoed Frey Luis, and remained staring at her with glowing eyes
until prodded into answering by the inquisitor.
‘Ay. Answer that, Frey Luis,’ said Frey Juan in a tone which, although
quiet, startled his assessors.
The truth is that--as he was subsequently to confess--a doubt had been
set astir in the mind of Frey Juan Arrenzuelo. It was a vague doubt
which had been started by her assertion that the whole accusation
against her was made with the object of rendering her a scapegoat for
the offences of Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. It was upon the utterance
of this accusation that he had sought to dismiss her, so that before
proceeding with her examination he might have leisure to make an
examination of conscience and assure himself completely that there was
no ground for the thing she imputed, be it in himself or in her
accuser. Since then, however, her firm demeanour which it seemed
impossible to associate with any but a quiet conscience, and the
strong inferential arguments contained in her questions, had served to
increase his doubt.
So now he insisted upon an answer from Frey Luis to a question which
he suddenly perceived that the memorial itself, to have been complete,
should have raised and answered.
The Dominican’s answer now took the shape of counter-questions. But he
addressed himself to the court. He found it impossible to support the
glance of those clear, challenging eyes of hers. ‘Is it upon this
alone that I base my accusation of witchcraft? Have I not set forth in
detail the satanical subtlety of the answers with which she met my
endeavours to convert her to the True Faith? I have not dared confess,
but I confess it now and cast myself upon the mercy of this sacred
tribunal, that there were moments when I was in danger of coming under
her infernal spells, moments when I, myself, began to doubt of truths
in Holy Writ so subtly did she pervert their meaning. It was then I
knew her for a servant of the Evil One; when she mocked me and the
holy words I spoke, with wicked, wanton laughter.’ Passion inflamed
him, and lent a warmth of rhetoric to his denunciation, at which his
hearers were inflamed. ‘It is not upon this thing or upon that that my
conviction rests, the solemn conviction upon which I have based my
accusation; but upon the aggregate of all, a sum utterly overwhelming
in its terrible total.’ He stood tense and taut, his great dark eyes
looking now straight before him into infinity, seeming to them a man
inspired. ‘I have set down what I have clearly seen with the eyes of
my soul by the heavenly light vouchsafed them.’
Abruptly he sat down, and took his head in his hands, trembling from
head to foot. At the last moment his courage had failed him. He had
not dared to add that to him the crowning proof of her evil arts lay
in the spell which she had cast over him, to assail him in the very
stronghold of his hitherto invulnerable chastity. He dared not tell
them of the haunting vision of her white throat and curving breast
which had first assailed him as he sat on the hatch coamings of the
Demoiselle, and which had constantly tormented him since then, so much
so that more than once he had faltered in his duty as her accuser, had
actually considered neglecting it on the morning that he landed at
Santander, had since been tempted to fling down the pen, to deny the
truth which he had written, and to imperil his immortal soul by lies
to save her lovely body from the fire to which injustice it was
inevitably doomed. Because her beauty assailed his senses with all the
power of some pungent, overmastering perfume, because he writhed in
longing for the sight of her and in agony for the thought of the just
doom that must overtake her, he could entertain no single doubt of her
guilt. That her spells could so beat down the ramparts of purity which
years of self-denial and piety had built so solidly about his soul was
to him the crowning proof of the abominations which she practised, of
the arts by which she went to work to weaken him whose duty it was to
destroy her. Not until that fair body, which Satan used as a lure for
the perdition of men’s souls, should have been broken by the tormentor
and finally reduced to ashes at the stake would Frey Luis account
performed the duty which his conscience imposed upon him.
He heard Frey Juan quietly asking her if she was answered, and he
heard her firm reply.
‘I have heard a whirl of meaningless words, protestations of
convictions of Frey Luis’s own, which can hardly be accounted proof of
anything. He says that I argued with subtlety in matters of religion.
I argued out of such teaching in these matters as I have received. Is
that proof of witchcraft? Then every Lutheran, it follows, is a
witch?’
This time Frey Juan made no rejoinder. He dismissed her, announcing
the audience suspended.
But when she had been removed by the familiars, he turned to Frey
Luis. To ease the disquietude of his conscience, he now subjected Frey
Luis to an examination so minute and searching that in the end the
Fiscal Advocate remonstrated with him that in his hands the accuser
seemed to have become the accused.
Frey Juan met the remonstrance with a stern reminder. ‘It is not
merely lawful, but desirable, to examine a delator closely; especially
when, as in this instance, there is no evidence other than his own.’
‘There is the evidence of the facts,’ the Fiscal replied, ‘the
evidence of words used by Don Pedro, which the woman herself admits to
have been correctly reported, and there is what Don Pedro himself
cannot deny.’
‘And,’ ventured Frey Luis, with the fierce vehemence of righteous
exasperation, ‘there is her own heresy which she has admitted. To a
heretic all things are possible.’
‘But because all things are possible,’ he was quietly answered, ‘we
are not to convict a heretic of all things beside heresy, unless we
have abundant proof.’
‘To ease your mind, Frey Juan, were it not best to put her to the
question at once?’ suggested the Fiscal Advocate. And Frey Luis, swept
by his emotions, made echo to that.
‘The question, ay! The question. Let torture wring the truth from her
evil stubbornness. Thus shall you have the confirmation that you need
for sentence.’
Frey Juan’s countenance was stern; all compassion, all wistfulness had
departed from his eyes. He turned them almost angrily upon the Fiscal.
‘To ease my mind?’ he echoed. ‘Do I sit here in this seat of judgment
to ease my mind? What is my ease of mind, what my torment of mind,
compared with the service of the Faith? The truth of these matters
shall be reached in the end, however long we labour to extract it. But
we shall extract it for the greater honour and glory of God and not
for my ease of mind or the ease of mind of any living man.’ He rose
abruptly, leaving the Fiscal Advocate silenced and abashed. Frey Luis
would have interrupted again. But he was sternly reminded that he was
not a member of that court, nor entitled to speak there save when
bidden as a witness.
In the silence that followed, Frey Juan took up the notes which the
notary had made. He read them carefully. ‘Let copies be sent to the
Inquisitor-General this evening, as he has required.’
Now the special interest in this case of the Inquisitor-General of
Castile, Gaspar de Quiroga, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, was sprung
from the fact that Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, as we know, was his
own nephew, his only sister’s child, cherished by him in the place of
the son which his vows denied him. This fact, notorious throughout
Spain, it was which had rendered the inquisitors of Oviedo fearful of
dealing with Don Pedro’s case and had brought them to the decision of
referring it to Toledo where it would be under the eye of the
Inquisitor-General himself.
The Cardinal was profoundly distressed and perturbed. Whatever the
outcome, and however much of the blame a scapegoat might be made to
bear, the fact remained that Don Pedro had grievously offended. It
would be held that he could not have so offended had he not lapsed
from grace by some action of his own, and for this it was impossible
that he should escape punishment. Some heavy penance he would
certainly have to perform to satisfy the requirements of a tribunal
which had not hesitated in its time to impose penances upon princes of
the blood. Short of that it would be said that his uncle made an
unworthy use of his mighty and sacred office to favour his own
relatives and to relieve them of the payment of their just dues.
Obstacles enough were placed already in the path of the
Inquisitor-General by a King who with difficulty curbed his jealousy
of any usurpation of power in his dominions, by a Pope who could
hardly be said to approve the lengths to which the Holy Office carried
its ardour in Spain, and by the Jesuits who missed few opportunities
of marking their resentment of the interferences and even persecutions
which they had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.
Nor would Don Pedro by his conduct, whether before the court appointed
to examine him or in the private audiences to which his uncle summoned
him from the prison of the Holy House where he was meanwhile confined,
do anything to lighten the task before the Inquisitor-General.
He laughed to furious scorn the charge of witchcraft levelled against
Margaret, refused utterly to avail himself of the escape which such an
accusation against her offered him, denounced himself for a scoundrel
in his dealings with her, and regarded his present difficulties as the
natural and proper punishment which he had brought upon himself. He
would accept it, he announced, with fortitude and resignation but for
the knowledge that his own villainy and the stupid bigotry of his
judges had implicated Margaret with him and placed her in a position
of danger, of the full terrors of which she would herself be scarcely
aware as yet.
To his uncle in private and, what was infinitely worse, to the
inquisitors deputed by his uncle to examine him in the court over
which Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo presided, he persisted in the assertion
that, because of his rank and his relationship with the
Inquisitor-General, it was sought to spare him the consequences of his
acts by a trumped-up tale of his having been bewitched. The Lady
Margaret, he assured his judges, hectoring them boldly and angrily,
had practised against him no magic but the magic of her beauty, her
virtue, and her charm. If these were arts of sorcery, then half the
young women in the world might be sent to the stake, for at some time
or other and against some man or other they had all exercised them.
It was bad enough to have Don Pedro thus insisting upon incriminating
himself, and saying no word that helped forward the incrimination of
the heretical woman who was at the root of all this distressing
business. To insist, almost as if attempting to persuade him, that his
very words and demeanour were but proofs that the sorcery was still
working briskly in his veins, was merely to render him ribald and
offensive in his exasperation. He called the inquisitors dolts, asses
in stupidity, and mules in obstinacy, and did not even hesitate to
tell them on one occasion that he believed it was they who were
possessed of devils, so infernally did they corrupt all things to
their own predetermined ends, so damnably did they corrupt truth into
falsehood.
‘The truth to you, sirs, is what you desire to think it is, not what
every sane evidence may reveal it. You desire no evidence save that
which will confirm your egregious preconceptions. There is no animal
in the world so hot on a false scent and so persistent as you
Dominicans. _Domini canes!_’ Deliberately he broke the word into two,
and saw by their resentful eyes that they had caught the insult he
intended. He repeated it again and yet again, rendering it each time
more clearly an invective, and finally translating it into Spanish for
them to make quite sure that his meaning did not elude them. ‘Dogs of
the Lord! Hounds of God! That is what you call yourselves. I wonder
what God calls you.’
The audience was immediately suspended, and word was sent to Cardinal
Quiroga of his nephew’s extravagant words and indecent conduct, which
left little doubt now in the mind of any of his examiners that he was
indeed the victim of arts of witchcraft. But Frey Juan now added a
note to the effect that, however persuaded they might be of this, yet
the evidence was hardly sufficient to justify sentence of the woman
Margaret Trevanion upon the charge of sorcery, wherefore he submitted
to the Inquisitor-General that this accusation against her should be
abandoned, and that the court should proceed upon the charge of heresy
alone. If she was, indeed, a witch, she would still suffer for it in
suffering for the offence which was provable against her.
A grand Auto de Fé was preparing in Toledo for the following
Thursday, the 26th of October--Frey Juan wrote on Thursday the
19th--and the charge of heresy could be disposed of so that the
accused should suffer then, whilst Don Pedro should at the same time
purge his offence by some penance in that Auto which the inquisitors
would determine and lay before His Eminence for approval.