The Spanish Brothers Part 49

In the next place, Carlos ventured to tell all he had heard from Dolores about his mother. The fact of his wife's death had been communicated to the prisoner; but this was the only fragment of intelligence about his family that had reached him during all these years. When she was spoken of, he showed emotion, slight in the beginning, but increasing at every succeeding mention of her name, until Carlos, who had at first been glad to find that the slumbering chords of feeling responded to his touch, came at last to dread laying his hands upon them, they were apt to moan so piteously. And once and again did his father say, gazing at him with ever-increasing fondness, "Thy face is hers, risen anew before me."

Carlos tried hard to awaken Don Juan's interest in his first-born. It is true that he cherished an almost pa.s.sionate love for Juanito the babe, but it was such a love as we feel for children whom G.o.d has taken to himself in infancy. Juan the youth, Juan the man, seemed to him a stranger, difficult to conceive of or to care about. Yet, in time, Carlos did succeed in establishing a bond between the long-imprisoned father and the brave, n.o.ble, free-hearted son, who was so like what that father had been in his early manhood. He was never weary of telling of Juan's courage, Juan's truthfulness, Juan's generosity; often concluding with the words, "_He_ would have been your favourite son, had you known him, my father."

As time wore on, he won from his father's lips the princ.i.p.al facts of his own story. His past was like a picture from which the colouring, once bright and varied, has faded away, leaving only the bare outlines of fact, and here and there the shadows of pain still faintly visible.

What he remembered, that he told his son; but gradually, and often in very disjointed fragments, which Carlos carefully pieced together in his thoughts, until he formed out of them a tolerably connected whole.

Just three-and-twenty years before, on his arrival in Seville, in obedience to what he believed to be a summons from the Emperor, the Conde de Nuera had been arrested and thrown into the secret dungeons of the Inquisition. He well knew his offence: he had been the friend and a.s.sociate of De Valero; he had read and studied the Scriptures; he had even advocated, in the presence of several witnesses, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Nor was he unprepared to pay the terrible penalty. Had he, at the time of his arrest, been led at once to the rack or the stake, it is probable he would have suffered with a constancy that might have placed his name beside that of the most heroic martyrs.

But he was allowed to wear out long months in suspense and solitude, and in what his eager spirit found even harder to bear, absolute inaction.

Excitement, motion, stirring occupation for mind and body, had all his life been a necessity to him. In the absence of these he pined--grew melancholy, listless, morbid. His faith was genuine, and would have been strong enough to enable him for anything _in the line of his character_; but it failed under trials purposely and sedulously contrived to a.s.sail that character through its weak points.

When already worn out with dreary imprisonment, he was beset by arguments, clever, ingenious, sophistical, framed by men who made argument the business of their lives. Thus attacked, he was like a brave but unskilful man fencing with adepts in the n.o.ble science. He _knew_ he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought he could have proved it. But they a.s.sured him they proved the contrary; nor could he detect a flaw in their syllogisms when he came to examine them.

If not convinced, then surely he ought to have been. They conjured him not to let pride and vain-glory seduce him into self-opinionated obstinacy, but to submit his private judgment to that of the Holy Catholic Church. And they promised that he should go forth free, only chastised by a suitable and not disgraceful penance, and by a pecuniary fine.

The hope of freedom burned in his heart like fire; and by this time there was sufficient confusion in his brain for his will to find arguments there against the voice of his conscience. So he yielded, though not without conflict, fierce and bitter. His retractation was drawn up in as mild a form as possible by the Inquisitors, and duly signed by him. No public act of penance was required, as strict secrecy was to be observed in the whole transaction.

But the Inquisitor-General, Valdez, felt a well-grounded distrust of the penitent's sincerity, which was quickened perhaps by a desire to appropriate to the use of the Holy Office a larger share of his possessions than the moderate fine alluded to. Probably, too, he dreaded the disclosures that might have followed had the Count been restored to the world. He had recourse, therefore, to an artifice often employed by the Inquisitors, and seriously recommended by their standard authorities. The "fly" (for such traitors were common enough to have a technical name as well as a recognized existence) reported that the Conde de Nuera railed at the Holy Office, blasphemed the Catholic faith, and still adhered in his heart to all his abominable heresies. The result was a sentence of perpetual imprisonment.

Don Juan's condition was truly pitiable then. Like Samson, he was shorn of the locks in which his strength lay, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to his enemies. Because he could not bear perpetual imprisonment he had renounced his faith, and denied his Lord. And now, without the faith he had renounced, without the Lord he had denied, he must bear it. It told upon him as it would have told on nine men out of ten, perhaps on ninety-nine out of a hundred. His mind lost its activity, its vigour, its tone. It became, in time, almost a pa.s.sive instrument in the hands of others.

And then the Dominican monk, Fray Ricardo, brought his powerful intellect and his strong will to bear upon him. He had been sent by his superiors (he was not prior until long afterwards) to impart the terrible story of her husband's arrest to the Lady of Nuera, with secret instructions to ascertain whether her own faith had been tampered with.

In his fanatical zeal he performed a cruel task cruelly. But he had a conscience, and its fault was not insensibility. When he heard the tale of the lady's death, a few days after his visit, he was profoundly affected. Accustomed, however, to a religion of weights and balances, it came naturally to him to set one thing against another, by way of making the scales even. If he could be the means of saving the husband's soul, he would feel, to say the least, much more comfortable about his conduct to the wife.

He spared no pains upon the task he had set himself; and a measure of success crowned his efforts. Having first reduced the mind of the penitent to a cold, blank calm, agitated by no wave of restless thought or feeling, he had at length the delight of seeing his own image reflected there, as in a mirror. He mistook that spectral reflection for a reality, and great was his triumph when, day by day, he saw it move responsive to every motion of his own.

But the arrest of his penitent's son broke in upon his self-satisfaction. It seemed as though a dark doom hung over the family, which even the father's repentance was powerless to avert. He wished to save the youth, and he had tried to do it after his fashion; but his efforts only resulted in bringing up before him the pale accusing face of the Lady of Nuera, and in interesting him more than he cared to acknowledge in the impenitent heretic, who seemed to him such a strange mixture of gentleness and obstinacy. Surely the father's influence would prevail with the son, originally a much less courageous and determined character, and now already wrought upon by a long period of loneliness and suffering.

Perhaps also--monk, fanatic, and inquisitor though he was--the pleasantness of trying the experiment, and cheering thereby the last days of the pious and docile penitent, his own especial convert, weighed a little with him; for he was still a man. Moreover, like many hard men, he was capable of great kindness towards those whom he liked. And, with the full approbation of his conscience, he liked his penitent; whilst, rather in spite of his conscience, he liked his penitent's son.

Carlos did not trouble himself overmuch about the prior's motives. He was too content in his new-found joy, too engrossed in his absorbing task--the concern and occupation of his every hour, almost of his every moment. He was as one who toils patiently to clear away the moss and lichen that has grown over a memorial stone; that he may bring out once more, in all their freshness, the precious words engraven upon it. The inscription was there, and there it had been always (so he told himself); all that he had to do was to remove that which covered and obscured it.

He had his reward. Life returned, first through love for him, to the heart; then, through the heart, to the brain. Not rapidly and with tingling pain, as it returns to a frozen limb, but gradually and insensibly, as it comes to the dry trees in spring.

But, in the trees, life shows itself first in the extremities; it is slowest in appearing in those parts which are really nearest the sources of all life. So the penitent's interest in other subjects, and his care for them, revived; yet in one thing, the greatest of all, these seemed lacking still. There did _not_ return the spiritual light and life, which Carlos could not doubt he had enjoyed in past days. Sometimes, it is true, he would startle his son by unexpected reminiscences, disjointed fragments of the truth for which he had suffered so much. He would occasionally interrupt Carlos, when he was repeating to him pa.s.sages from the Testament, to tell him "something Don Rodrigo said about that, when he expounded the Epistle to the Romans." But these were only like the rich flowers that surprise the explorer amidst the tangled weeds of a waste ground, showing that a carefully tended garden has flourished there once--very long ago.

"It is not that I desire him above all things to hold this doctrine or that," thought Carlos; "I desire him to find Christ again, and to rejoice in his love, as doubtless he did in the old days. And surely he will, since Christ found him--chose him for his own even before the foundation of the world."

But in order to bring this about, perhaps it was necessary that the faded colours of his soul should be steeped in the strong and bitter waters of a great agony, that they might regain thereby their full freshness.

XLIII.

El Dorado Found Again.

"And every power was used, and every art, To bend to falsehood one determined heart, a.s.sailed, in patience it received the shock, Soft as the wave, unbroken as the rock."--Crabbe

"What are you doing, my father?" Carlos asked one morning.

Don Juan had produced from some private receptacle a small ink-horn, and was moistening its long-dried contents with water.

"I was thinking that I should like to write down somewhat," he said.

"But whereto will ink serve us without pen and paper?"

The penitent smiled; and presently pulled out from within his pallet a little faded writing-book, and a pen that looked--what it was--more than twenty years old.

"Long ago," he said, "I used to be weary, weary of sitting idle all the day; so I bribed one of the lay brothers with my last ducat to bring me this, only that I might set down therein whatever happened, for pastime."

"May I read it, my father?"

"And welcome, if thou wilt;" and he gave the book into the hand of his son. "At first, as you see, there be many things written therein. I cannot tell what they are now; I have forgotten them all;--but I suppose I thought them, or felt them--once. Or sometimes the brethren would come to visit me, and talk, and afterwards I would write what they said.

But by degrees I set down less and less in it. Many days pa.s.sed in which I wrote nothing, because nothing was to write. Nothing ever happened."

Carlos was soon absorbed in the perusal of the little book. The records of his father's earlier prison life he scanned with great interest and with deep emotion; but coming rather suddenly upon the last entry, he could not forbear a smile. He read aloud:

"'A feast day. Had a capon for dinner, and a measure of red wine.'"

"Did I not judge well," asked the father, "that it was time to give over writing, when I could stoop low enough to record such trifles? Yes; I think I can recall the bitterness of heart with which I laid the book aside. I despised myself for what I wrote therein; and yet I had nothing else to write--would never have anything else, I thought. But now G.o.d has given me my son. I will write that down."

Looking up, after a little while, from his self-imposed task, he asked, with an air of perplexity,--

"But when was it? How long is it since you came here, Carlos?"

Carlos in his turn was perplexed. The quiet days had glided on swiftly and noiselessly, leaving no trace behind.

"To me it seems to have been all one long Sabbath," he said. "But let me think. The summer heats had not come; I suppose it must have been March or April--April, perhaps. I remember thinking I had been just two years in prison."

"And now it is growing cool again. I suppose it may have been four months--six months ago. What think you?"

Carlos thought it nearer the latter period than the former.

"I believe we have been visited six times by the brethren," he said.

"No; only five times."

These visits of inspection had been made by command of the prior--himself absent from Seville on important business during most of the time--and the result had been duly reported to him. The monks to whom the duty had been deputed were aged and respectable members of the community; in fact, the only persons in the monastery who were acquainted with Don Juan's real name and history. It was their opinion that matters were progressing favourably with the prisoners. They found the penitent as usual--docile, obedient, submissive, only more inclined to converse than formerly; and they thought the young man very gentle and courteous, grateful for the smallest kindness, and ready to listen attentively, and with apparent interest, to everything that was said.

For more definite results the prior was content to wait: he had great faith in waiting. Still, even to him six months seemed long enough for the experiment he was trying. At the end of that time--which happened to be the day after the conversation just related--he himself made a visit to the prisoners.

Both most warmly expressed their grat.i.tude for the singular grace he had shown them. Carlos, whose health had greatly improved, said that he had not dreamed so much earthly happiness could remain for him still.

"Then, my son," said the prior, "give evidence of thy grat.i.tude in the only way possible to thee, or acceptable to me. Do not reject the mercy still offered thee by Holy Church. Ask for reconciliation."

"My lord," replied Carlos, firmly, "I can but repeat what I told you six months agone--that is impossible."

The prior argued, expostulated, threatened--in vain. At length he reminded Carlos that he was already condemned to death--the death of fire; and that he was now putting from him his last chance of mercy.