“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 parlor; then, holding the door ajar, he said, "Let his Excellency pardon me, I did not hear distinctly his worship's honorable 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, señor," 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 I 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 at tendants 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 nib 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 parlor. 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 'I" 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 honor 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 Ito 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.” p. 393. [illustration] “Don Juan's strong grasp prevented the prior from touching the bell.”
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 favorite 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 favor. 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 I 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 I" 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 Inc.”
“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 honor 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 afterward 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 brothel 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. "Señor and your Excellency, tie 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.