"There were. And since you came, their looks have never ceased to haunt me. Why, I know not. My wife, my child!" And the old man shaded his face, while in his eyes, long unused to tears, there rose a mist, like the cloud in form as a man's hand, that foretold the approach of the beneficent rain, which should refresh and soften the thirsty soil, making all things young again.
"Señor," said Carlos, trying to speak calmly, and to keep down the wild tumultuous throbbing of his heart – "señor, a boon, I entreat of you. Tell me the name you bore amongst men. It was a noble one, I know."
"True. They promised to save it from disgrace. But it was part of my penance not to utter it; if possible, to forget it."
"Yet, this once. I do not ask idly – this once – have pity on me, and speak it," pleaded Carlos, with intense tremulous earnestness.
"Your face and your voice move me strangely; it seems to me that I could not deny you anything. I am – I ought to say, I was– Don Juan Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya."
Before the sentence was concluded, Carlos lay senseless at his feet.
XLII.
Quiet Days
"I think that by-and-by all things
Which were perplexed a while ago
And life's long, vain conjecturings,
Will simple, calm, and quiet grow.
Already round about me, some
August and solemn sunset seems
Deep sleeping in a dewy dome,
And bending o'er a world of dreams."
Owen Meredith.
The penitent laid Carlos gently on his pallet (he still possessed a measure of physical strength, and the worn frame was easy to lift); then he knocked loudly on the door for help, as he had been instructed to do in any case of need. But no one heard, or at least no one heeded him, which was not remarkable, since during more than twenty years he had not, on a single occasion, thus summoned his gaolers. Then, in utter ignorance what next to do, and in very great distress, he bent over his young companion, helplessly wringing his hands.
Carlos stirred at last, and murmured, "Where am I? What is it?" But even before full consciousness returned, there came the sense, taught by the bitter experience of the last two years, that he must look within for aid – he could expect none from any fellow-creature. He tried to recollect himself. Some bewildering, awful joy had fallen upon him, striking him to the earth. Was he free? Was he permitted to see Juan?
Slowly, very slowly, all grew clear to him. He half raised himself, grasped the penitent's hand, and cried aloud, "My father!"
"Are you better, señor?" asked the old man with solicitude. "Do me the favour to drink this wine."
"Father, my father! I am your son. I am Carlos Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya. Do you not understand me, father?"
"I do not understand you, señor," said the penitent, moving a little away from him, with a mixture of dignified courtesy and utter amazement in his manner strange to behold. "Who is it that I have the honour to address?"
"O my father, I am your son – your very son Carlos."
"I have never seen you till – ere yesterday."
"That is quite true; and yet – "
"Nay, nay," interrupted the old man; "you are speaking wild words to me. I had but one boy – Juan – Juan Rodrigo. The heir of the house of Alvarez de Meñaya was always called Juan."
"He lives. He is Captain Don Juan now, the bravest soldier, and the best, truest-hearted man on earth. How you would love him! Would you could see him face to face! Yet no; thank God you cannot."
"My babe a captain in His Imperial Majesty's army!" said Don Juan, in whose thoughts the great Emperor was reigning still.
"And I," Carlos continued, in a broken, agitated voice – "I, born when they thought you dead – I, who opened my young eyes on this sad world the day God took my mother home from all its sin and sorrow – I am brought here, in his mysterious providence, to comfort you, after your long dreary years of suffering."
"Your mother! Did you say your mother? My wife, Costanza mia. Oh, let me see your face!"
Carlos raised himself to a kneeling attitude, and the old man laid his hand on his shoulder, and gazed at him long and earnestly. At length Carlos removed the hand, and drawing it gently upwards, placed it on his head. "Father," he said, "you will love your son? you will bless him, will you not? He has dwelt long amongst those who hated him, and never spoke to him save in wrath and scorn, and his heart pines for human love and tenderness."
Don Juan did not answer for a while; but he ran his fingers through the soft fine hair. "So like hers," he murmured dreamily. "Thine eyes are hers too —zarca.34 Yes, yes; I do bless thee – But who am I to bless? God bless thee, my son!"
In the long, long silence that followed, the great convent bell rang out. It was noon. For the first time for twenty years the penitent did not hear that sound.
Carlos heard it, however. Agitated as he was, he yet feared the consequences that might follow should the penitent omit any part of the penance he was bound by oath to perform. So he gently reminded him of it. "Father – (how strangely sweet the name sounded!) – "father, at this hour you always recite the penitential psalms. When you have finished, we will talk together. I have ten thousand things to tell you."
With the silent, unreasoning submission that had become a part of his nature, the penitent obeyed; and, going to his usual station before the crucifix, began his monotonous task. The fresh life newly awakened in his heart and brain was far from being strong enough, as yet, to burst the bonds of habit. And this was well. Those bonds were his safeguard; but for their wholesome restraint, mind or body, or both, might have been shattered by the tumultuous rush of new thoughts and feelings. But the familiar Latin words, repeated without thought, almost without consciousness, soothed the weary brain like a slumber.
Meanwhile, Carlos thanked God with a full heart. Here, then —here, in the dark prison, the very abode of misery – had God given him the desire of his heart, fulfilled the longing of his early years. Now the wilderness and the solitary place were glad; the desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. Now his life seemed complete, its end answering its beginning; all its meaning lying clear and plain before him. He was satisfied.
"Ruy, Ruy, I have found our father! – Oh, that I could but tell thee, my Ruy!" – was the cry of his heart, though he forced his lips to silence. Nor could the tears of joy, that sprang unbidden to his eyes, be permitted to overflow, since they might perplex and trouble his fellow-captive —his father.
He had still a task to perform; and to that task his mind soon bent itself; perhaps instinctively taking refuge in practical detail from emotions that might otherwise have proved too strong for his weakened frame. He set himself to consider how best he could revive the past, and make the present comprehensible to the aged and broken man, without overpowering or bewildering him.
He planned to tell him, in the first instance, all that he could about Nuera. And this he accomplished gradually, as he was able to bear the strain of conversation. He talked of Dolores and Diego; described both the exterior and interior of the castle; in fact, made him see again the scenes to which his eye had been accustomed in past days. With special minuteness did he picture the little room within the hall, both because it was less changed since his father's time than the others, and because it had been his favourite apartment. "And on the window," he said, "there were some words, written with a diamond, doubtless by your hand, my father. My brother and I used to read them in our childhood; we loved them, and dreamed many a wondrous dream about them. Do you not remember them?"
But the old man shook his head.
Then Carlos began, —
"'El Dorado – '"
"'Yo hé trovado.'
Yes, I remember now," said Don Juan promptly.
"And the golden country you had discovered – was it not the truth as revealed in Scripture?" asked Carlos, perhaps a little too eagerly.
The penitent mused a space; grew bewildered; said at last sorrowfully, "I know not. I cannot now recall what moved me to write those lines, or even when I wrote them."
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 passionate love for Juanito the babe, but it was such a love as we feel for children whom God 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, noble, 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 principal 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 associate 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 assail 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 noble science. He knew he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought he could have proved it. But they assured 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 passive 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 over-much 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 passages 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;
Assailed, 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 passed 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 God 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 gratitude 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 gratitude 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. But when he still remained steadfast, he turned away from him with an air of deep disappointment, though more in sorrow than in anger, as one pained by keen and unexpected ingratitude.
"I speak to thee no more," he said. "I believe there is in thy father's heart some little spark, not only of natural feeling, but of the grace of God. I address myself to him."
Whether Don Juan had never fully comprehended the statement of Carlos that he was under sentence of death, or whether the tide of emotion caused by finding in him his own son had swept the terrible fact from his remembrance, it is impossible to say; but it certainly came to him, from the lips of the prior, as a dreadful, unexpected blow. So keen was his anguish that Fray Ricardo himself was moved; and the rather, because it was impossible to the aged and broken man to maintain the outward self-restraint a younger and stronger person might have done.
More touched, at the moment, by his father's condition than by all the horrors that menaced himself, Carlos came to his side, and gently tried to soothe him.
"Cease!" said the prior, sternly. "It is but mockery to pretend sympathy with the sorrow thine own obstinacy has caused. If in truth thou lovest him, save him this cruel pain. For three days still," he added, "the door of grace shall stand open to thee. After that term has expired, I dare not promise thy life." Then turning to the agitated father – "If you can make this unhappy youth hear the voice of divine and human compassion," he said, "you will save both his body and his soul alive. You know how to send me a message. God comfort you, and incline his heart to repentance." And with these words he departed, leaving Carlos to undergo the sharpest trial that had come upon him since his imprisonment.
All that day, and the greater part of the night that followed it, the two wills strove together. Prayers, tears, entreaties, seemed to the agonized father to fall on the strong heart of his son like drops of rain on the rock. He did not know that all the time they were falling on that heart like sparks of living fire; for Carlos, once so weak, had learned now to endure pain, both of mind and body, with brow and lip that "gave no sign." Passing tender was the love that had sprung up between those two, so strangely brought together. And now Carlos, by his own act, must sever that sweet bond – must leave his newly-found father in a solitude doubly terrible, where the feeble lamp of his life would soon go out in obscure darkness. Was not this bitterness enough, without the anguish of seeing that father bow his white head before him, and teach his aged lips words of broken, passionate entreaty that his son – his one earthly treasure – would not forsake him thus?
"My father," Carlos said at last, as they sat together in the moonlight, for their light had gone out unheeded – "my father, you have often told me that my face is like my mother's."
"Ay de mi!" moaned the penitent – "and truly it is. Is that why it must leave me as hers did? Ay de mi, Costanza mia! Ay de mi, my son!"
"Father, tell me, I pray you, to escape what anguish of mind or body would you set your seal to a falsehood told to her dishonour?"
"Boy, how can you ask? Never! – nothing could force me to that." And from the faded eye there shot a gleam almost like the fire of old days.
"Father, there is One I love better than ever you loved her. Not to save myself, not even to save you, from this bitter pain, can I deny him or dishonour his name. Father, I cannot! – Though this is worse than the torture," he added.
The anguish of the last words pierced to the very core of the old man's heart. He said no more; but he covered his face, and wept long and passionately, as a man weeps whose heart is broken, and who has no longer any power left him to struggle against his doom.
Their last meal lay untasted. Some wine had formed part of it; and this Carlos now brought, and, with a few gentle, loving words, offered to his father. Don Juan put it aside, but drew his son closer, and looked at him in the moonlight long and earnestly.
"How can I give thee up?" he murmured.
As Carlos tried to return his gaze, it flashed for the first time across his mind that his father was changed. He looked older, feebler, more wan than he had done at his coming. Was the newly-awakened spirit wearing out the body? He said, —
"It may be, my father, that God will not call you to the trial. Perhaps months may elapse before they arrange another Auto."
How calmly he could speak of it; – for he had forgotten himself. Courage, with him, always had its root in self-forgetting love.
Don Juan caught at the gleam of hope, though not exactly as Carlos intended. "Ay, truly," he said, "many things may happen before then."
"And nothing can happen save at the will of Him who loves and cares for us. Let us trust him, my beloved father. He will not allow us to be tempted above that we are able to bear. For he is good – oh, how good! – to the soul that seeketh him. Long ago I believed that; but since he has honoured me to suffer for him, once and again have I proved it true, true as life or death. Father, I once thought the strongest thing on earth – that which reached deepest into our nature – was pain. But I have lived to learn that his love is stronger, his peace is deeper, than all pain."
With many such words – words of faith, and hope, and tenderness – did he soothe his weary, broken-hearted father. And at last, though not till towards morning, he succeeded in inducing him to lie down and seek the rest he so sorely needed.
Then came his own hour; the hour of bitter, lonely conflict. He had grown accustomed to the thought, to the expectation, of a silent, peaceful death within the prison walls. He had hoped, nay, certainly believed, that in the slow hours of some quiet day or night, undistinguished from other days and nights, God's messenger would steal noiselessly to his gloomy cell, and heart and brain would thrill with rapture at the summons, "The Master calleth thee."
Now, indeed, it was true that the Master called him. But he called him to go to Him through the scornful gaze of ten thousand eyes; through reproach, and shame, and mockery; the hideous zamarra and carroza; the long agony of the Auto, spun out from daybreak till midnight; and, last of all, through the torture of the doom of fire. How could he bear it? Sharp were the pangs of fear that wrung his heart, and dread was the struggle that followed.
It was over at last. Raising to the cold moonlight a steadfast though sorrowful face, Carlos murmured audibly, "What time I am afraid I will put my trust in thee. Lord, I am ready to go with thee, whithersoever thou wilt; only – with thee."