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 ameasure of physical strength, and the worn frame was easy to lift); thenhe knocked loudly on the door for help, as he had been instructed to doin 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 hadnot, on a single occasion, thus summoned his gaolers. Then, in utterignorance what next to do, and in very great distress, he bent over hisyoung companion, helplessly wringing his hands.
Carlos stirred at last, and murmured, "Where am I? What is it?" Buteven before full consciousness returned, there came the sense, taught bythe bitter, experience of the last two years, that he must look withinfor aid--he could expect none from any fellow-creature. He tried torecollect 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, senor?" asked the old man with solicitude. "Do me thefavour to drink this wine."
"Father, my father! I am your son. I am Carlos Alvarez de Santillanosy Menaya. Do you not understand me, father?"
"I do not understand you, senor," said the penitent, moving a littleaway from him, with a mixture of dignified courtesy and utter amazementin his manner strange to behold. "Who is it that I have the honour toaddress?"
"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 Alvarezde Menaya was always called Juan."
"He lives. He is Captain Don Juan now, the bravest soldier, and thebest, truest-hearted man on earth. How you would love him! Would youcould see him face to face! Yet no; thank God you cannot."
"My babe a captain in His Imperial Majesty's army!" said Don Juan, inwhose thoughts the great Emperor was reigning still.
"And I," Carlos continued, in a broken, agitated voice--"I, born whenthey thought you dead--I, who opened my young eyes on this sad world theday God took my mother home from all its sin and sorrow--I am broughthere, in his mysterious providence, to comfort you, after your longdreary 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 hishand on his shoulder, and gazed at him long and earnestly. At lengthCarlos removed the hand, and drawing it gently upwards, placed it on hishead. "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 neverspoke to him save in wrath and scorn, and his heart pines for human loveand tenderness."
Don Juan did not answer for a while; but he ran his fingers through thesoft fine hair. "So like hers," he murmured dreamily. "Thine eyes arehers too--_zarca_.[#] Yes, yes; I do bless thee--But who am I to bless?God bless thee, my son!"
[#] Blue; a word applied by the Spaniards only to blue eyes.
In the long, long silence that followed, the great convent bell rangout. It was noon. For the first time for twenty years the penitent didnot hear that sound.
Carlos heard it, however. Agitated as he was, he yet feared theconsequences that might follow should the penitent omit any part of thepenance he was bound by oath to perform. So he gently reminded him ofit. "Father--" (how strangely sweet the name sounded!)--"father, atthis hour you always recite the penitential psalms. When you havefinished, we will talk together. I have ten thousand things to tellyou."
With the silent, unreasoning submission that had become a part of hisnature, the penitent obeyed; and, going to his usual station before thecrucifix, began his monotonous task. The fresh life newly awakened inhis heart and brain was far from being strong enough, as yet, to burstthe bonds of habit. And this was well. Those bonds were his safeguard;but for their wholesome restraint, mind or body, or both, might havebeen shattered by the tumultuous rush of new thoughts and feelings.
But the familiar Latin words, repeated without thought, almost withoutconsciousness, soothed the weary brain like a slumber.
Meanwhile, Carlos thanked God with a full heart. Here, then--_here_, inthe dark prison, the very abode of misery--had God given him the desireof his heart, fulfilled the longing of his early years. Now thewilderness and the solitary place were glad; the desert rejoiced andblossomed as the rose. Now his life seemed complete, its end answeringits beginning; all its meaning lying clear and plain before him. He wassatisfied.
"Ruy, Ruy, I have found our father!--Oh, that I could but tell thee, myRuy!"--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, bepermitted to overflow, since they might perplex and trouble hisfellow-captive--_his father_.
He had still a task to perform; and to that task his mind soon bentitself; perhaps instinctively taking refuge in practical detail fromemotions that might otherwise have proved too strong for his weakenedframe. He set himself to consider how best he could revive the past,and make the present comprehensible to the aged and broken man, withoutoverpowering or bewildering him.
He planned to tell him, in the first instance, all that he could aboutNuera. And this he accomplished gradually, as he was able to bear thestrain of conversation. He talked of Dolores and Diego; described boththe exterior and interior of the castle; in fact, made him see again thescenes to which his eye had been accustomed in past days. With specialminuteness did he picture the little room within the hall, both becauseit was less changed since his father's time than the others, and becauseit had been his favourite apartment "And on the window," he said, "therewere some words, written with a diamond, doubtless by your hand, myfather. My brother and I used to read them in our childhood; we lovedthem, and dreamed many a wondrous dream about them. Do you not rememberthem?"
But the old man shook his head.
Then Carlos began,--
"'El Dorado--'"
"'Yo he trovado.'
Yes, I remember now," said Don Juan promptly.
"And the golden country you had discovered--was it not the truth asrevealed 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, oreven when I wrote them."
In the next place, Carlos ventured to tell all he had heard from Doloresabout his mother. The fact of his wife's death had been communicated tothe prisoner; but this was the only fragment of intelligence about hisfamily that had reached him during all these years. When she was spokenof, he showed emotion, slight in the beginning, but increasing at everysucceeding mention of her name, until Carlos, who had at first been gladto 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 moanso piteously. And once and again did his father say, gazing at him withever-increasing fondness, "Thy face is hers, risen anew before me."
Carlos tried hard to awaken Don Juan's interest in his first-born. It istrue 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 tohimself in infancy. Juan the youth, Juan the man, seemed to him astranger, difficult to conceive of or to care about. Yet, in time,Carlos did succeed in establishing a bond between
the long-imprisonedfather and the brave, noble, free-hearted son, who was so like what thatfather had been in his early manhood. He was never weary of telling ofJuan's courage, Juan's truthfulness, Juan's generosity; often concludingwith the words, "_He_ would have been your favourite son, had you knownhim, my father."
As time wore on, he won from his father's lips the principal facts ofhis own story. His past was like a picture from which the colouring,once bright and varied, has faded away, leaving only the bare outlinesof fact, and here and there the shadows of pain still faintly visible.What he remembered, that he told his son; but gradually, and often invery disjointed fragments, which Carlos carefully pieced together in histhoughts, until he formed out of them a tolerably connected whole.
Just three-and-twenty years before, on his arrival in Seville, inobedience to what he believed to be a summons from the Emperor, theConde de Nuera had been arrested and thrown into the secret dungeons ofthe Inquisition. He well knew his offence: he had been the friend andassociate of De Valero; he had read and studied the Scriptures; he hadeven advocated, in the presence of several witnesses, the doctrine ofjustification by faith alone. Nor was he unprepared to pay the terriblepenalty. Had he, at the time of his arrest, been led at once to therack or the stake, it is probable he would have suffered with aconstancy that might have placed his name beside that of the most heroicmartyrs.
But he was allowed to wear out long months in suspense and solitude, andin what his eager spirit found even harder to bear, absolute inaction.Excitement, motion, stirring occupation for mind and body, had all hislife been a necessity to him. In the absence of these he pined--grewmelancholy, listless, morbid. His faith was genuine, and would havebeen strong enough to enable him for anything _in the line of hischaracter_; but it failed under trials purposely and sedulouslycontrived to assail that character through its weak points.
When already worn out with dreary imprisonment, he was beset byarguments, clever, ingenious, sophistical, framed by men who madeargument the business of their lives. Thus attacked, he was like abrave but unskilful man fencing with adepts in the noble science. He_knew_ he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought hecould have proved it. But they assured him they proved the contrary; norcould 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 himnot to let pride and vain-glory seduce him into self-opinionatedobstinacy, but to submit his private judgment to that of the HolyCatholic Church. And they promised that he should go forth free, onlychastised by a suitable and not disgraceful penance, and by a pecuniaryfine.
The hope of freedom burned in his heart like fire; and by this timethere was sufficient confusion in his brain for his will to findarguments there against the voice of his conscience. So he yielded,though not without conflict, fierce and bitter. His retractation wasdrawn up in as mild a form as possible by the Inquisitors, and dulysigned by him. No public act of penance was required, as strict secrecywas to be observed in the whole transaction.
But the Inquisitor-General, Valdez, felt a well-grounded distrust of thepenitent's sincerity, which was quickened perhaps by a desire toappropriate to the use of the Holy Office a larger share of hispossessions than the moderate fine alluded to. Probably, too, he dreadedthe disclosures that might have followed had the Count been restored tothe world. He had recourse, therefore, to an artifice often employed bythe Inquisitors, and seriously recommended by their standardauthorities. The "fly" (for such traitors were common enough to have atechnical name as well as a recognized existence) reported that theConde de Nuera railed at the Holy Office, blasphemed the Catholic faith,and still adhered in his heart to all his abominable heresies. Theresult was a sentence of perpetual imprisonment.
Don Juan's condition was truly pitiable then. Like Samson, he was shornof the locks in which his strength lay, bound hand and foot, anddelivered over to his enemies. Because he could not bear perpetualimprisonment he had renounced his faith, and denied his Lord. And now,without the faith he had renounced, without the Lord he had denied, hemust bear it. It told upon him as it would have told on nine men out often, perhaps on ninety-nine out of a hundred. His mind lost itsactivity, its vigour, its tone. It became, in time, almost a passiveinstrument in the hands of others.
And then the Dominican monk, Fray Ricardo, brought his powerfulintellect and his strong will to bear upon him. He had been sent by hissuperiors (he was not prior until long afterwards) to impart theterrible story of her husband's arrest to the Lady of Nuera, with secretinstructions to ascertain whether her own faith had been tampered with.In his fanatical zeal he performed a cruel task cruelly. But he had aconscience, and its fault was not insensibility. When he heard the taleof the lady's death, a few days after his visit, he was profoundlyaffected. Accustomed, however, to a religion of weights and balances,it came naturally to him to set one thing against another, by way ofmaking the scales even. If he could be the means of saving thehusband's soul, he would feel, to say the least, much more comfortableabout his conduct to the wife.
He spared no pains upon the task he had set himself; and a measure ofsuccess crowned his efforts. Having first reduced the mind of thepenitent to a cold, blank calm, agitated by no wave of restless thoughtor feeling, he had at length the delight of seeing his own imagereflected there, as in a mirror. He mistook that spectral reflectionfor a reality, and great was his triumph when, day by day, he saw itmove responsive to every motion of his own.
But the arrest of his penitent's son broke in upon hisself-satisfaction. It seemed as though a dark doom hung over thefamily, which even the father's repentance was powerless to avert. Hewished 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 paleaccusing face of the Lady of Nuera, and in interesting him more than hecared to acknowledge in the impenitent heretic, who seemed to him such astrange mixture of gentleness and obstinacy. Surely the father'sinfluence would prevail with the son, originally a much less courageousand determined character, and now already wrought upon by a long periodof loneliness and suffering.
Perhaps also--monk, fanatic, and inquisitor though he was--thepleasantness of trying the experiment, and cheering thereby the lastdays of the pious and docile penitent, his own especial convert, weigheda 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, withthe 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. Hewas too content in his new-found joy, too engrossed in his absorbingtask--the concern and occupation of his every hour, almost of his everymoment. He was as one who toils patiently to clear away the moss andlichen that has grown over a memorial stone; that he may bring out oncemore, in all their freshness, the precious words engraven upon it. Theinscription was there, and there it had been always (so he toldhimself); all that he had to do was to remove that which covered andobscured it.
He had his reward. Life returned, first through love for him, to theheart; then, through the heart, to the brain. Not rapidly and withtingling pain, as it returns to a frozen limb, but gradually andinsensibly, as it comes to the dry trees in spring.
But, in the trees, life shows itself first in the extremities; it isslowest in appearing in those parts which are really nearest the sourcesof all life. So the penitent's interest in other subjects, and his carefor them, revived; yet in one thing, the greatest of all, these seemedlacking still. There did _not_ return the spiritual light and life,which Carlos could not doubt he had enjoyed in past days. Sometimes, itis true, he would startle his son by unexpected reminiscences,disjointed fragments of the truth for which he had suffered so much. Hewould occasionally interrupt Carlos, when he was repeating to himpassages from the Testament, to tell him "something Don Rodrigo saidabout that, when he expounded the Epistle to th
e Romans." But thesewere only like the rich flowers that surprise the explorer amidst thetangled weeds of a waste ground, showing that a carefully tended gardenhas flourished there once--very long ago.
"It is not that I desire him above all things to hold this doctrine orthat," thought Carlos; "I desire him to find Christ again, and torejoice in his love, as doubtless he did in the old days. And surely hewill, since Christ found him--chose him for his own even before thefoundation of the world."
But in order to bring this about, perhaps it was necessary that thefaded colours of his soul should be steeped in the strong and bitterwaters of a great agony, that they might regain thereby their fullfreshness.
The Spanish Brothers: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century Page 42