House of Torment Part 38

It was very hot.

Commendone stood in the ante-chamber of the torturers.

He wore the garment of black linen, the hood of the same, with the two circular orifices for his eyes.

John Hull kept touching him with an almost caressing movement--John Hull, a grotesque and terrible figure also in his torturer's dress.

Alonso moved about the place hurriedly, putting this and that to rights, looking after his instruments, but with a flitting, bird-like movement, showing how deeply he was excited.

The room was a long, low place. The ceiling but just above their heads.

A glowing fire was at one end, and shelves all round the room. At one side of the fire was a portable brazier of iron, glowing with coals, and on the top of it a shape of white-hot metal was lying.

Alonso came up to Commendone, a dreadful black figure, a silently moving figure, with nothing humanly alive about him save only the two slits through which his eyes might be seen.

"Courage, Senor," he whispered, "it will not be long now."

Johnnie, unaware that he himself was an equally hideous and sinister figure, nodded, and swallowed something in his throat.

John Hull, short, broad, and dreadful in this black disguise, sidled up to him.

"Master," he whispered, "it will soon be over, and we shall win away. We have been in a very evil case before, and that went well. Now that we are dressed in these grave-clothes and must do bitter business, we must make up our minds to do it. 'Tis for the sake of Mistress Elizabeth, whom we love--Jesus! what is that h.e.l.l-hound doing?"

The broad figure shuddered, and into the kindly English voice came a note of horror.

Johnnie turned also, and saw that the torturer was tumbling several long-handled pincers into a wooden tray. Then the torturer took one of them up, and turned the glowing _something_ in the brazier, quietly, professionally, though the red glow that fell upon his horrible black costume gave him indeed the aspect of a devil from the pit--the b.l.o.o.d.y pantomime which was designed!

The two Englishmen stood shoulder to shoulder and shuddered, as they saw this figure moving about the glowing coals.

Johnnie took a half-step forward, when Hull pressed him back.

"G.o.d's death, master," Hull said. "_We_ look like that; we are even as he is in aspect; we have to do our work--now!"

A door to the right suddenly swung open. Two steps led up to it, and a face peeped round. It was the face of a bearded man, with heavy eyebrows and very white cheeks. Upon the head was a biretta of black velvet.

The head nodded. "We are ready," came the voice from it. The door fell to again.

Then Alonso came up to Johnnie. "The work begins," he said, in a gruff voice, from which all respect had gone with design. "You and Juan will carry in that brazier of coals."

He went to the door, mounted the two stone steps, and held it open.

Johnnie and Hull bore in the brazier up the steps, and into a large room lit, but not very brightly, with candles set in sconces upon the walls.

Following the directions of Alonso, they placed the brazier in a far corner, and stood by it, waiting in silence.

They were in a big, arched dungeon, far under ground, as it seemed. At one end of it there was an alcove, brilliantly lit. In the alcove was a das, or platform. On the platform was a long table draped with black, and set with silver candlesticks. On the wall behind was a great crucifix of white and black--the figure of the Christ made of plaster, or white painted wood, the cross of ebony. In the centre of the long table sat Don Diego Deza. On one side of him was a man in a robe of velvet and a flat cap. On the other, the person who had peeped through the door into the room of the torturers.

There came a beating, a heavy, m.u.f.fled knock, upon a door to the left of the alcove.

Alonso left the others and hurried to the door. With some effort he pulled back a lever which controlled several ma.s.sive bolts. The door swung open, there was a red glare of torches, and two dark figures, piloted by the torturer, half-led, half-carried the bound figure of a man into the room.

They placed this figure upon an oak stool with a high back, a yard or two away from the das, and then quietly retired.

As the door leading to the prison closed, Alonso shot the bolts into their place, and, returning, stood by the stool on which was the figure.

The notary came down from the platform, followed by the physician. In his hand was a parchment and a pen; while a long ink-horn depended from his belt. Father Deza was left alone at the table above.

"I have read thy depositions," the Inquisitor said, speaking down to the man, "wherein thou hast not refuted in detail the terrible blasphemies of Servetus, and therefore, Luis Mercader, I thank the Son of G.o.d, Who deputeth to me the power to sentence thee at the end of this thy struggle between Holy Church and thine own obstinate blasphemies. In accordance with justice of my brother inquisitors, I now sign thy warrant for death, which is indeed our right and duty to execute a blasphemous person after a regular examination. Thou art to be burnt anon at the forthcoming Act of Faith. Thou art to be delivered to the secular arm to suffer this last penalty. Thy blood shall not be upon our heads, for the Holy Office is ever merciful. But before thou goest, in our kindness we have ordained that thou shalt learn something of the sufferings to come. For so only, between this night and the day of thy death, shalt thou have opportunity to reason with thyself, perchance recant thy errors, and make thy peace with G.o.d."

He had said this in a rapid mutter, a monotone of vengeance. As he concluded he nodded to the black figure by the prisoner's chair.

Alonso turned round. With shaking footsteps, Hull and Johnnie came up to him, carrying ropes.

There was a quick whisper.

"Tie him up--_thus_--_yes, the hands behind the back of the stool_; the left leg bound fast--it is the right foot upon which we put the _trampezo_."

They did it deftly and quietly. Under the long linen garments which concealed them, their hearts were beating like drums, their throats were parched and dry, their eyes burnt as they looked out upon this dreadful scene.

The notary went back to the das, and sat beside Father Deza. The surgeon took Alonso aside. Johnnie heard what he said....

"It will be all right; he can bear it; he will not die; in any case the _auto da fe_ will be in three days; he _must_ endure it; have the water ready to bring him back if he fainteth."

The chirurgeon went back to the alcove and sat on the other side of the Inquisitor.

"Bring up the brazier," Alonso said to Commendone.

Together Johnnie and Hull carried it to the chair.

"Now send Juan for the pincers...."

There came a long, low wail of despair from the broken, motionless figure on the stool. The long pincers, like those with which a blacksmith pulls out a shoe from the charcoal, were produced....

The torturer took the glowing _thing_ on the top of the brazier, and pulled it off, scattering the coals as he did so.

Close to the foot of the bound figure he placed the glowing shoe. Then he motioned to Hull to take up the other side of it with his pincers, and put it in place so that the foot of the victim should be clamped to it and burnt away.

John Hull took up the long pincers, and caught hold of one side of the shoe.

Johnnie turned his head away; he looked straight through his black hood at the three people on the das.

The notary was quietly writing. The surgeon was looking on with cool professional eye; but Don Deza was watching the imminent horror below him with a white face which dripped with sweat, with eyes dilated to two rims, gazing, gazing, _drinking the sight in_. Every now and again the Inquisitor licked his pallid lips with his tongue. And in that moment of watching, Johnnie knew that Cruelty, for the sake of Cruelty, the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its most hideous forms, was the hidden vice, the true nature, of this priest of Courts.

At the moment, and doubtless at many other moments in the past, Father Deza was compensating, and had compensated, for a life of abstinence from sensual indulgence. He was giving scope to the deadlier vices of the heart, pride, bigotry, intolerance, and horrid cruelty--those vices far more opposed to the hope of salvation, and far more extensively mischievous to society, than anything the sensualist can do.

The bitterness of it; the horror of it--this was the wine the brilliant priest was drinking, had drunk, and would ever drink. Into him had come a devil which had killed his soul, and looked out from his narrow twitching eyes, rejoicing that it saw these things with the symbol of G.o.d's pain high above it, with the cloak of G.o.d's Church upon his shoulders.

As Johnnie watched, fascinated with an unnameable horror, he heard a loud shout close to his ear. He saw a black-hooded, thick figure pa.s.s him and rush towards the das.

In the hands of this figure was a long pair of blacksmith's pincers, and at the end of the pincers was a shoe of white-hot metal.