“Oh! what a tale to shadow with its gloom
That happy home in England. Idle fear!
Would the winds tell it?”
HEMANS.
THREE years have passed away since Walter Gray so suddenly and strangely forsook his home and his ' friends. During that time he has had his heart's desire—in part, at least. He has seen how the sunlight glistens on the waters of the Spanish main, his foot has pressed the flowery shores of unknown islands, and his hand has borne part, not unworthily, in England's great naval contest with the enemies of her creed and her race.
But for all this he has paid a heavy price. He has taken his own way, and whither has it led him? Haply to an early grave, amongst the shells and sea-weed, fathoms deep below the blue waters he so longed to look upon? Had such been his fate, many might have mourned, but some would have envied him; and certainly, no forebodings of an early, honorable death would have done aught to deter him from the path he had chosen. But the English mariner who in those days dared to invade the Spanish main, the Pope's gift to his favorite son, had to brave dangers far more terrible. The Holy Inquisition stretched its ghastly arm over half the globe, and with a touch, "cold, strong, passionless, like a dead man's clasp," claimed and held every English prisoner that fell into Spanish hands.
Rashly— perhaps too rashly— the English Merchantman measured her strength against a great Spanish galleon and two smaller vessels, with which she fell in off Juan Fernandez. Gallant was the fight maintained by the English ship, but it was too unequal even for that day of marvelous naval achievements. After five hours' hard fighting she was glad to get away, crippled and sorely raked, yet unconquered. But Walter Gray was reported missing. No man saw his face again, after that first mad rush upon the enemies' deck in which he had borne his part so bravely.
And could his comrades have seen his face six months afterward they would not have recognized him. Well would it have been for him had he died of the wound that separated him from his countrymen, and left him a helpless captive in the hands of the Spaniards, and at the mercy of the Holy Inquisition. By that hideous magician the bright-eyed, fair-haired English youth was soon transformed into a gaunt skeleton, old in misery, if still young in years. In pursuance of his sentence at an auto-de-fé in Lima, he took his place on the narrow wooden bench of a Spanish galley, and chained to three other wretches, toiled with them at the task of moving one of its forty great oars.
Here—it is a fellow-sufferer who speaks—his food was a scanty allowance of "coarse black biscuit and water, his lodging was the bare boards and planks of the galley, and hunger, thirst, cold, and stripes he lacked none."
But, it will be asked, had Walter Gray no alternative? Did men come forth from the gates of that gloomy "Santa Casa,” only to take their places in Spanish galleys? Not always. Some there were who wrestled boldly with the Inquisition fiend and overcame him, finding man's worst God's best, and death the gate of glory. But each of these crowned conquerors possessed a talisman, whose marvelous virtue bore them through the fiercest conflict,—even that white stone "wherein is written a new name, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.”
Walter Gray had not this talisman. Yet for the honor of his country, for the remembrance of the lessons learned beside his mother's knee, he had borne much, and with heroic spirit. He knew that the creed he had been taught in childhood was true. But then he did not know that its promises were true for him. Perhaps they were, perhaps they were not; and like far wiser men, Walter Gray found it "hard to die for a perhaps." So at last his heart failed him. He became a Penitent; and he experienced the tender mercies of the Inquisition towards returning penitents. He was sent to the galleys—for twenty years, or for life. He scarcely knew how the sentence ran; and in fact it did not matter.
Here, at first, he breathed rather than lived. He took no note of time, for "his soul was black, and knew no change of night or day." His fettered limbs moved at their hateful task like parts of a machine, and thus he suffered little beyond the mere outward bodily miseries of his lot. He might have died thus erelong; and then, his chains loosed at last, he would have been flung into the sea with no more thought or ceremony than a dead hound. But he was roused at last from his torpor by a slight accidental circumstance.
One day the commissary, or overseer of the slaves, was as usual walking up and down the narrow gangway that separated the two tiers of benches on which the rowers sat. Something was amiss with the handle of the great Manita whip he carried in his hand, and he took out a strong knife to mend it. But the blade snapped across near the haft and fell down amongst the slaves, close to the place where Walter sat. He had often, in a vague, dreamy way, wished himself dead and out of his misery. Now the thought flashed across his mind that with this weapon he could kill himself. He snatched it up, and hid it in the sleeve of his tattered red jerkin. As at that moment the attention of the commissary was diverted to something that was taking place on the other side of the vessel, the action passed unobserved, at least by him.
Walter had now a definite purpose, and his mind awoke from its lethargy to deliberate on the best means of executing it. The desire to die actually helped to bring him back to life. He would kill himself, and be done with all this pain; no further did his thoughts travel. But how to do the deed?
It seemed very easy; now that he was provided with a weapon, it might be done at any moment. But he could not dismiss the fear that his ever-watchful enemies might by some means or other bar even this door of escape from their cruelty; indeed, the instinct of a hunted, baited creature was sufficient in itself to make him conceal his movements. So he determined upon waiting until nightfall, when the miserable slaves, bending over their oars, snatched a few hours of comfortless repose.
Night came at last. All was still on board the galley. Walter looked cautiously around him—then took out his weapon. For one moment, and no more, he hesitated: by this time he was naturalized to horrors, and deliberately and of set purpose "his soul chose death rather than life." But the broken blade hurt his hand; and he lost another moment, in the very act of turning it against his own heart, in trying so to grasp it as to avoid this trifling pain. So ineradicable is the natural instinct of self-preservation.
In that instant his arm was seized somewhat roughly, and the voice of the slave who sat next him whispered in his ear, "Camerado, what are you doing?”
“No harm to you," answered Walter, who had by this time been schooled by hard necessity in the tongue of the stranger. "No good to yourself," rejoined the other; and he wrenched the broken blade from the poor boy's nerveless hand, and flung it overboard.
“Oh! why did you take it from me?" cried Walter. "It was cruel!—I needed it." And leaning over his oar, he gave way to a passionate fit of weeping.
Since he came on board the galley, he had not shed a tear. Nor could he have told anyone why he wept now. He would have said, if asked, that his tears were for the lost fragment of steel, for which he felt an unreasoning, childish regret.
The weather-beaten slave beside him laid a fettered, bony hand on his. The gesture was friendly, but friendly gestures were so strange to Walter now, that he started and sobbed in his alarm, "Do not betray me.”
“God forbid!" replied the other. "I have not spent fifteen years at the oar for nothing. Do not weep, camerado. Pray God to forgive your sin, and go to sleep.”
“I cannot sleep," Walter answered. "Would to God I could die!”
“When your time comes, He will call you. Perhaps tonight. The more need you should ask His forgiveness.”
Walter feared to be drawn into any talk about religion, lest he should implicate himself by some unguarded word, and fall again into the cruel hands of the Inquisition. So he only said, rather sullenly, "I am an Englishman.”
“Englishmen pray to God, and He hears them. I once saw two Englishmen die, and I am very sure God was with them.”
“Where was that?" asked Walter, with some faint stirrings of curiosity, and a strange feeling, half pleasure half pain, at the mention of his countrymen.
“At a great auto-de-fe. They were burned alive—”
“Hush!" Walter interrupted with a shudder. "Don't talk of that.”
“Not if it troubles you, señor." This fellow-slave of Walter's knew him to be a gentleman, and addressed him as such; an attention not without its effect on the mind of the unhappy youth. "Yet that was no worse than this," he added,—"not so bad, as I think sometimes. I was very near proving it too.”
“Why, what have you done?"—Walter had often heard the other slaves talk carelessly, and even boastfully, of their crimes; but he never knew this man to make the slightest allusion to his past history.
“I was thought to have done something which had almost lit the pile for me. I might have shared the fate of those two Englishmen—well if I had shared their hope.”
“Are you not afraid to talk thus?" Walter asked. "Is it not dangerous?”
“You speak of danger!—you, who tried just now to kill yourself! Had you succeeded, where would you be?”
“At least not in the Inquisition," was Walter's murmured answer.
“O camerado! don't you know that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God?”
“I ought to know it," Walter answered sadly. "Has He not sent me here for my sins?" With a long shuddering sigh he thought of his treason to his mother, and his weak denial of his mother's faith. And again he wept—wept and sobbed aloud. For after a long drought the rain-clouds are apt to hang heavily; and it is not the first shower or the second that will clear the sky.
“Weep on," said his comrade. "God has set you two lessons. One—your own sin—you are learning now; the other He will teach you by-and-by.”
But though Walter's right hand neighbor desired him to weep on, his "oar-fellow," who sat on the bench above him, was of another mind. This man, who had been captain of a gang of robbers in the wilds of the Sierra Morena, bestowed a hearty kick and curse on his young comrade. "Hold your peace, English heretic," he said; " else I will call the commissary, and put it to his conscience as a good Catholic, whether it is not penance enough to be beaten all day like a hound, without being kept awake all night like an owl.”
Walter thought it best to take this gentle hint. He rested his weary head upon his oar, the only pillow it had known for months, and tried to sleep.
But sleep would not come to him. Thoughts came instead, crowding thick and fast upon him-thoughts of home, of his mother. No wonder that he wept on still, though noiselessly, lest he should awaken his companions.
At last he raised his head quietly; and through the mild gloom of the tropical night, which was not darkness, he looked cautiously at his right-hand neighbor, or—as in thought he had already begun to call him—his friend.
Doubtful whether the thin gray hair that fell over the oar concealed the face of a sleeper, Walter gently touched the ragged sleeve.
"Quién va?" the Spaniard responded, turning to him at once, with a questioning look in his keen dark eyes, where the fire burned still, undimmed by the sorrows that had turned his raven hair to gray, and worn his stalwart frame to a skeleton.
“That other lesson? What is it? Tell me, camerado.”
For a minute's space the galley-slave was silent. Then, in a voice scarcely raised above a whisper, but so clear and distinct that every word stood out as if read by a lightning flash, he repeated,—"’The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him, He also will hear their cry, and will save them.' Ay, señor, even in the galleys!”