‘Courts, secular and ecclesiastical, have their forms of law upon which it is lawful and proper to insist. Theirs it is to judge only of torts between man and man. But this Holy Tribunal is above and apart, since its function is to judge of the torts man does to God. Here the ordinary forms of law do not weigh at all. We have our own forms, and we proceed, under God’s guidance and by God’s grace, as seems best to his holy service.’ He paused, then added, in his gentle voice, ‘I tell you this, my sister, so that you may dismiss any hope of sheltering yourself behind anything which may have only an accidental connection with your case.’
Still there was no sign of dismay in those clear eyes. The frown of impatience between them grew more marked. ‘However contemptuous you may be of forms, and whatever the accusations you may hold against me, there yet remains a proper form of procedure, and this must compel you first to hear the accusation which I have to lodge, since the offence committed against me occurred before any offence for which it can be shown I am answerable. When you have heard this accusation, to the truth of which Frey Luis Salcedo there is a witness, and when you have redressed the wrong, whether or not you punish the offender, you will find that in redressing it all occasion for any charges against me will have disappeared. This because, as I understand you, my only offence lies in that being a Lutheran I am in Spain. I repeat that I did not come to Spain of my own will, and the righting of the wrong of which I complain will itself remove me from Spain, so that I shall cease to contaminate its saintly soil.’
Frey Juan frowned and slowly shook his head. ‘Sister, you mock!’ he sadly reproved her.
‘Sometimes it is only by mockery that the truth may be rendered apparent.’ Then she raised her voice, and admonished them almost sternly. ‘Sirs, you are wasting time and abusing your powers. I am not a subject of the King of Spain, and I am not within his dominions of my own choice. England has no envoy at present in Madrid. But the Envoy of France will serve my case, and I desire to appeal to him and to place myself under his protection. You cannot deny me this. You know it.’
‘Place yourself under God’s protection, my sister. For there is no other protection can avail you now.’ Frey Juan grew more and more pitiful in manner, and sincerely, for he was profoundly touched to see this misguided creature using such vain pleas to battle against the holy toils in which she was taken. It was like watching the futile struggles of a netted bird, a thing to touch the heart of any compassionate man.
He conferred with his fellows; told them of her obduracy and perversity. The Fiscal Advocate thereafter spoke at length. The Ordinary added a word or two of approbation. Frey Juan inclined his head, and turned to her once more. The notary wrote briskly meanwhile.
‘We are of opinion that to cut short and end all argument, we should take you upon your own ground. Your Lutheranism you have now admitted. Of this we may take a merciful view, since it is an error in which you were reared. We may also, since mercy is our norm and guide, take a merciful view of your other errors, since they are the more or less natural fruits of the first. But if you desire at our hands the mercy we are so ready to dispense, it is necessary that you earn it by a contrite spirit, and a full and frank confession of the sins of which you are accused.’
She would have interrupted him here; but his fine hand suddenly raised gave her pause. It would save time perhaps if she let him have his way and heard him out.
‘The plea that you are not in Spain of your own free will cannot avail you. You are in Spain as a result of the practices of which you are accused. So that the responsibility for your presence here lies as much with you as if of your own free will you had journeyed hither.’
This moved her scorn and disgust. ‘I have heard my father say that there is no distortion of facts beyond the power of casuistical argument. I begin to perceive how shrewdly that was said.’
‘You do not ask of what you are accused?’
‘Of carrying off Don Pedro de Mendoza, I suppose,’ she mocked him.
His countenance remained gently impassive. ‘It comes to that; it might be so expressed.’
Her eyes grew round as she stared at him. Frey Luis was whispering swift interpretations to the notary, whose quill scratched briskly. For some moments it was the only sound. Then Frey Juan resumed:
‘You are accused of having exercised the damnable arts of sorcery against Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, of having bewitched him, so that false to the Faith of which he has ever been a valiant champion, false to his honour and his God, he proposed to take a heretic to wife. You are also accused of blasphemy, which is to be sought in the case of one who has abandoned herself to these diabolical practices. Do you confess your guilt?’
‘Do I confess? Confess to being a witch?’ It was too much for her fortitude even. She pressed her hand to her brow. ‘Lord! I begin to think myself in Bedlam!’
‘What is that? Bedlam?’ Frey Juan looked from her to Frey Luis, who explained the allusion.
Frey Juan shrugged, and continued as if she had not spoken. ‘So that, if the accusation is true, your plea that you are here because a gentleman of Spain has offended against you must fail. Your claim to appeal to the secular courts through the Envoy of France or another must also fail. You are here because of an offence committed by you against a Spanish noble, entailing an infinitely greater offence against the Faith and the majesty of God which brings you within the jurisdiction of this Holy Tribunal. You will understand now how vain was your plea, since before any secular tribunal may hear your accusation against Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, it will be necessary that you clear yourself of the accusation against yourself.’
She answered promptly, having by now recovered her self-command. ‘That should not be difficult, provided that there is any common-sense in Spain. Who is my accuser? Is it Don Pedro? Does he shelter himself behind this grotesque falsehood to escape the consequences of his evil? Is it not clear to you that the testimony of such a man in such a case is not to be believed, that it would not be admissible before any tribunal having the flimsiest sense of justice?’
The inquisitor did not answer until again he had interpreted her question, and taken the feeling of his coadjutors, and also, in this instance, of Frey Luis.
‘All that,’ he said then, ‘is as clear to us as to you, and Don Pedro is not your accuser. The accusation rests upon independent testimony, and that of a man well qualified by his learning to draw conclusions.’ He paused a moment. ‘It is not the custom of this tribunal to disclose delators to an accused. But we depart from our rule, lest you should feel that you are receiving less than justice. Your accuser is Frey Luis Salcedo.’
She turned her golden head to look at the friar, where he sat beside the notary. Their glances met, and the stern, glowing eyes of the Dominican firmly bore the scorn of her clear regard. Slowly her glance returned to the wistful, compassionate face of Frey Juan.
‘It was to Frey Luis that I appealed for protection at a time when I perceived myself to lie in the worst danger that may threaten a virtuous woman. Is that his evidence that I have practised witchcraft?’
The inquisitor asked a question of his coadjutors. They bowed, the Fiscal rapping out a dozen words in his harsh voice, and turning as he did so to the notary. From among his papers, the notary selected a document which he handed to the Fiscal. The Fiscal glanced at it, and passed it on to Frey Juan.
‘You shall hear the actual terms of the accusation,’ said the inquisitor. ‘We show you every patience and consideration.’ He began to read.
And now her ladyship learnt how, on the evening of her first being carried aboard the Demoiselle, Frey Luis had listened at the cabin door whilst Don Pedro had talked to her, and afterwards had written down what he had overheard, a deal of it in the actual words that Don Pedro had employed. The reading of the document revived her memories of that interview; what Frey Luis had set down corresponded with those memories. It was an accurate, a scrupulously accurate report.
Amongst other of Don Pedro’s sayings on that occasion to which her attention was now drawn, the following was particularly stressed by the beautifully modulated voice of the inquisitor: ‘I did not ask to love you. I did not even desire it of my own volition. The desire was planted in me. It came I know not whence, a behest which there was no disobeying, compelling, overmastering.’
That quotation closed the lengthy charge, seeming to supply the crowning proof and confirmation of the arguments by which Frey Luis proceeded with his accusation. In its beginnings the accusation almost appeared to be levelled at Don Pedro. It stated how he had boarded the ship which had gone to fetch him from England, bearing with him a woman whom it subsequently transpired he was abducting. Frey Luis alluded to Don Pedro’s antecedents; the virtuous, honourable ways of his life; the piety that had ever marked his actions and led him to enrol himself as a lay tertiary of the Order of Saint Dominic, a member of the Militia Christi; the clean, untainted blood that flowed in his veins. He pointed out his difficulty in believing that such a man should be spontaneously guilty of the offence which he found him in the act of committing. His relief to discover that Don Pedro included marriage in his intentions towards this woman was changed to stark horror when he discovered her to be a heretic. If it was difficult to believe that Don Pedro should have gone to such lengths of violence for the gratification of carnal lusts, it was impossible to believe that he should contemplate with equanimity the infinitely greater sin which was now disclosed. His replies to the remonstrances of Frey Luis showed that he had not given the matter a proper consideration, or even ascertained what were the religious beliefs of the woman he was proposing to make his wife. This in itself betrayed a culpable negligence amounting in all the circumstances to a sin. He recognized it to the extent of permitting Frey Luis to proceed to preach conversion to this woman. But it appeared to Frey Luis that the permission was given, not out of such zeal for the Faith as men would have looked for in such a noble as Don Pedro, but merely out of expediency.
Followed in great detail an account of the friar’s efforts at conversion, of their failure, of the blasphemous pleasantries and demoniacal arguments with which his endeavours were met by this heretical Englishwoman, who quoted Scripture freely and perverted it to her own ends as glibly as Satan was notoriously in the habit of doing.
It was then that he perceived the hellish source of her inspiration, and first conceived the true explanation of Don Pedro’s conduct to lie in the fact that he was bewitched. This was now abundantly confirmed. There were Don Pedro’s sacrilegious threats to himself in utter disregard of his sacred office and the habit which he wore; there was his violent resistance to the officers of the Inquisition at Santander and the sacrilegious shedding of blood before he was taken; but chiefly, and entirely conclusive, there was the admission of Don Pedro himself—in the words quoted—that in the matter of his unholy love for the prisoner he was driven, against his own will and desires, by a force outside of himself, whose source he did not know, whose impulse he had not the strength to resist.
What, asked Frey Luis in conclusion, could this force be, when all the circumstances were considered, but the agency of Satan, exercised by a woman who had abandoned herself to the exercise of these unholy arts? What purpose was here to be served but to introduce the corrupting poison of heresy into Spain through the bewitched person of Don Pedro and the offspring of this terrible union which he contemplated?
The reading ceased. The inquisitor set down the last sheet before him, and his piteous eyes were levelled on her ladyship across the intervening table.
‘You know now both your accuser and the precise terms of the accusation. Do you deny anything that is here set down?’
She was very still and white; there was no longer any challenge in her eyes or any shadow of smile upon her lips. She began to perceive something of the terrible toils which prejudice, superstition, and fanatical reasoning had woven for her. But she made nevertheless a brave effort to defend herself.
‘I deny none of the facts set down,’ she answered steadily. ‘They have been recorded with a scrupulous accuracy, such as I should have expected in a man of truth and honour. In fact they are as true as the reasoning from them is untrue and as the deductions from them are false and fantastic.’
Frey Luis translated, and the notary recorded her reply. Then Frey Juan took up the matter with her.
‘To what force, other than the force here assumed, could Don Pedro possibly have been alluding in his words to you?’
‘How should I know that? Don Pedro spoke in imagery, I think, seeking in fanciful terms to palliate his monstrous offence. His explanation was false, as false as are your inferences from it. It is all falsehood built on falsehood. Unreason growing from unreason. God of Mercy, it is all a nightmare! Maddening!’
Distress lent her a momentary vehemence of tone and even of gesture.
Still the inquisitor showed only a saintly patience.
‘But unless you had practised some such arts upon him, how are we to explain Don Pedro’s betrayal of his honour, of his piety, of his duty, and of all those things which birth and rearing are known to have rendered sacred to him? You may not know the history of the great House of Mendoza, a house unfailingly devoted to the service of God and the King, or you would understand how impossible all this would be to one of its members who had not gone mad.’
On that she answered swiftly: ‘I do not say that he has not gone mad. Indeed, it seems the only explanation of his conduct. I have heard that men go mad for love. Perhaps…’
But the inquisitor gently interrupted her. He was smiling wistfully.
‘You are quick to make a point.’
‘Satan lends her all his subtlety,’ growled Frey Luis by way of interjection.
‘You are quick to make a point,’ Frey Juan repeated, ‘and to seize on an explanation that will serve instead of the correct one. But…’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘It is to waste time, my sister.’ He changed his tone. He leaned forward, setting his elbows on the table, and spoke with quiet, persuasive earnestness.
‘We who are to judge you,’ he said, ‘are also to help and serve you; and this is the greater of our functions towards you. The expiation of your offence is worthless unless it is sincere. And it cannot be sincere unless it is accompanied by an abjuration of the abominable arts to which the Devil has seduced you. For the Lutheran heresy which you practise we must pity rather than blame you, since this is the result of the error of your teachers. For the rest, we must also pity you, since but for the heretical teaching behind it, this would not have been possible to you. But if we are to render effective our pity, and employ it as is our duty to rescue your mind from error and your soul from the terrible peril of damnation, you, my sister, must coöperate with us by a full and frank confession of the offence with which you are charged.’
‘Confess?’ she cried. ‘Confess to this abominable nonsense, to these false inferences?’ She laughed short and mirthlessly. ‘I am to confess that the Lady Margaret Trevanion practises witchcraft? God help me, and God help you! You’ll need more evidence, I think, than this before you can establish so grotesque a charge.’
It was the Fiscal who, being informed of her words, delivered the reply that became his office, requesting Frey Luis to interpret it to her.
‘The further evidence that we may need for your conviction we look to you to furnish us, and we conjure you to do it, so that your soul may be saved from everlasting hell. If contrition itself, if a sincere repentance of your faults will not suffice to draw confession from you, the Holy Office has means at its command that will lead the most recalcitrant to avow the truth.’
She went cold with horror at those words so coldly uttered by Frey Luis. For a moment they robbed her of the power of speech. She was conscious of those three cowled forms immediately facing her, and the pitiful face of Frey Juan Arrenzuelo out of which two eyes regarded her with a compassion almost divine in its apparent limitlessness.
He raised a hand in dismissal of her. One of the familiars touched her shoulder. The audience was at an end—suspended, in the inquisitorial term.
Mechanically she rose, and, knowing fear at last in fullest measure, she suffered herself to be led back along the chill dark corridor to her cell.
For two days the Lady Margaret was left to meditate in the solitude and discomfort of her prison. Her fears having been aroused by the parting words of the Fiscal Advocate, it was supposed that these might now be left to the work of sapping her resistance and obduracy.
Her meditations, however, took a turn which the Inquisitors of the Faith were very far from expecting, and this she revealed when next she was brought to audience before them.
There had been a change meanwhile in the constitution of the court. Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo remained to preside, and the Diocesan Ordinary was the same rubicund and humorous-looking man whom last she had seen on the inquisitor’s right hand. But instead of the former Fiscal Advocate, another had been found who understood English well and spoke it tolerably, a man this of terrifying aspect with a thin hawk-nose, a cruel, almost lipless mouth, and close-set, ungenerous eyes which looked as if no pitying glance had ever issued from them. The notary, too, had been changed, and his place was taken by another Dominican with sufficient knowledge of English to interpret for himself what might transpire in the course of the examination he was to record. Frey Luis was again present.
The audience was taken up by the inquisitor at the point where it was last suspended. He began by once more entreating the accused to enable the court to use her with clemency by a full and frank confession of her sin.
If, on the one hand, the Lady Margaret had been weakened by fear and by distress, on the other, she had been strengthened by indignation at the discovery which she believed that her meditations had brought her. To this indignation she now gave the full expression which she had prepared.
‘Would it not better become your priestly office to depart from subterfuge?’ she asked Frey Juan. ‘Since you claim to stand for the truth in all things, were it not better that you allow the truth to raise its head?’
‘The truth! What truth?’
‘Since you ask me, I will tell you. It is always possible, however improbable, that it may have escaped you. Men sometimes overlook the thing under their very feet. Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna is a Grande of Spain, a very great gentleman in this great kingdom. His actions are those of a villain, for which the civil courts—the secular courts, you call them—should punish him. They are also such as to render his faith suspect. Besides, as I understand it, he has committed sacrilege in threatening violence to a priest and sacrilegious murder in shedding the blood of men employed by the Holy Office. For these well-attested offences your courts of the Inquisition should punish him. There would appear to be no escape for him. But because he is a great gentleman…’
She was interrupted by the notary, who had been writing feverishly in his endeavour to keep pace with her. ‘Not so fast, my sister!’
Deliberately she paused, to give him time. Indeed, she desired as ardently as did he and every member of the court that her words should be recorded. Then she resumed more slowly:
‘But because he is a great gentleman, and there are inconveniences in punishing a great gentleman, who commands no doubt high influence, it becomes necessary to shift the blame, to find a scapegoat. It becomes necessary to discover that he was not responsible for his villainies temporal or spiritual, that he was in fact bewitched at the time by an English heretic whose wicked and perverse will plunged him into this course for the purpose of destroying him in this world and the next.’
This time it was the Fiscal Advocate who interrupted her, his voice rasping harshly.
‘You increase your infamy by a suggestion so infamous.’
The mild inquisitor raised a hand to silence him. ‘Do not interrupt her,’ he begged.
‘I have done, sirs,’ she announced. ‘The thing is clear, as clear and simple as it is pitiful, mean, and cruel. If you persist in it, you will have to answer for it sooner or later. Be sure of that. God will not permit such wickedness to go unpunished. Nor do I think will man!’
Frey Juan waited until the notary had ceased to write. His compassionate eyes pondered her very solemnly.
‘It is perhaps natural, reared as you have been, and ignorant as you are of us and of our sincerity, that you should attribute to us motives so worldly and so unworthy. Therefore, we do not resent it, or allow it to weigh against you. But we deny it. There is no thought in our minds to spare any man, however high placed, who shall have offended against God. Princes of the blood royal have done penance for offences of which the Holy Office has convicted them without hesitation or fear of their power and influence. We are above such things. We will go to the fire ourselves sooner than fail in our sacred duty. Take my assurance of that, my sister, and return to your cell, further to meditate upon the matter, and I pray that God’s grace may help you to a worthier view. It is clear that your mood is not yet such as would enable us profitably to continue our endeavours on your behalf.’
But she would not be dismissed. She begged to be heard a moment yet in her own defence.
‘What can you have to add, my sister?’ wondered Frey Juan. ‘What can you have to urge against the evidence of the facts?’ Nevertheless, he waved back the familiars who had already advanced for the purpose of removing her.
‘The evidence is not one of facts, but of inferences drawn from facts. No one can prove this witchcraft with which you so fantastically charge me by the direct evidence of having seen me distilling philtres, or murmuring incantations, or raising devils, or doing any of those things which witches are notoriously reputed to do. From certain effects observed in one who to my distress and dismay has been associated with me, and because this person is a great gentleman towards whom it is desired to practise leniency, inferences are drawn to inculpate me and at the same time to exculpate him. Commonest justice, then, should admit inferences to be similarly drawn in my defence.’
‘If they can so be drawn,’ Frey Juan admitted.
‘They can, as I shall hope to show.’
Her firmness, her candour, her dignity were not without effect upon the inquisitor. In themselves these things seemed almost, by the evidence of character contained in them, to rebut the charge of sorcery. But Frey Juan reminded himself that appearances can be terribly deceptive, that an air of purity and sanctity is the favourite travesty used by Satan for his evil ends. He allowed her to proceed because the rules of the tribunal expressly prescribed that an accused should be encouraged to talk, since thus frequently many matters that must otherwise remain hidden were inadvertently disclosed. Calmly she posed the first of the questions she had considered and prepared in the solitude of her cell.
‘If it is true that I used the arts of sorcery upon Don Pedro with the object of inducing him to take me to wife and the further object of luring him into the ways of Lutheranism which you account the ways of damnation, why did not I keep him in England, where I could in perfect safety have carried out my evil designs?’
Frey Juan turned to the Fiscal, inviting him to answer her, as his duty was. A contemptuous smile curled the man’s thin lips. ‘Worldly considerations would suffice to influence you there. The Count of Marcos is a gentleman of great position and wealth, which you would naturally desire to share. The position would be forfeited, the wealth confiscated, once it were known that he remained in England as a result of a heretical marriage. For that offence he would have been sentenced to the fire. Because contumaciously absent, he would have been burnt in effigy, to be burnt in his proper person later and without further trial at any time when he should come within reach of the arm of the Holy Inquisition.’ He smiled again, satisfied with the completeness of his reply, and fell silent.
‘You are answered,’ Frey Juan informed her.
She had gone white in her dismay. ‘You account this piling of absurdity upon absurdity an answer?’ It was a cry almost of despair. Then she recovered. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Let us test elsewhere this net which you have drawn about me. Have I your leave to interrogate my accuser?’
Frey Juan questioned with his eyes first the Diocesan, then the Fiscal. The first by a shrug and a grunt implied that the matter was of no great consequence. The second assented sharply in his rasping voice.
‘Why not? Let her question by all means—ut clavus clavo retundatur.’
Permitted, then, she turned her gaze full upon Frey Luis where he sat beside the industriously writing notary.
‘Amongst all that you overheard when you listened at the cabin door to Don Pedro’s talk with me, you heard him, whilst urging me to become his wife, inform me that there was a priest on board the ship who would marry us at once?’
‘It is set down in my memorial,’ he answered shortly, his great eyes almost malevolent.
‘Do you remember what answer I returned him?’
‘You returned him no answer,’ said Frey Luis emphatically.
‘But if I had bewitched him for the purpose of becoming his wife, should I have left such a proposal as that unanswered?’
‘Silences are not to be construed as negatives,’ the Fiscal cut in.
She looked at the priestly advocate, and a wan smile momentarily flitted across her face.
‘Let us by all means come to speech then.’ And once more she turned to Frey Luis. ‘On the following morning when first I met you on deck, what did I say to you?’
Frey Luis made an gesture of impatience, turning to the presiding inquisitor.
‘The answer to this is already in my memorial. I have there set down that she informed me that she had been brought aboard by force, that Don Pedro sought to coerce her into marriage, and she appealed to me for protection.’
‘If I had bewitched Don Pedro so as to induce him to marry me, should I have made such a complaint or should I have appealed to anyone—particularly to a priest—for protection?’
Frey Luis delivered his answer violently, the malevolence deepening in his eyes. ‘Have I anywhere said that you bewitched him to the end that he should marry you? How should I know the purpose of such as you? I say only that you bewitched him, else it is impossible that a God-fearing, pious son of Mother Church could have thought of marriage with a heretic, that he could have threatened sacrilegious violence to a priest, or have sacrilegiously shed the blood of men discharging the sacred functions of apparitors of the Holy Office.’
‘If all this proves him to have been bewitched—as well it may, for I do not understand these things—how does it prove that I bewitched him?’
‘How?’ echoed Frey Luis, and remained staring at her with glowing eyes until prodded into answering by the inquisitor.
‘Ay. Answer that, Frey Luis,’ said Frey Juan in a tone which, although quiet, startled his assessors.
The truth is that—as he was subsequently to confess—a doubt had been set astir in the mind of Frey Juan Arrenzuelo. It was a vague doubt which had been started by her assertion that the whole accusation against her was made with the object of rendering her a scapegoat for the offences of Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. It was upon the utterance of this accusation that he had sought to dismiss her, so that before proceeding with her examination he might have leisure to make an examination of conscience and assure himself completely that there was no ground for the thing she imputed, be it in himself or in her accuser. Since then, however, her firm demeanour which it seemed impossible to associate with any but a quiet conscience, and the strong inferential arguments contained in her questions, had served to increase his doubt.
So now he insisted upon an answer from Frey Luis to a question which he suddenly perceived that the memorial itself, to have been complete, should have raised and answered.
The Dominican’s answer now took the shape of counter-questions. But he addressed himself to the court. He found it impossible to support the glance of those clear, challenging eyes of hers. ‘Is it upon this alone that I base my accusation of witchcraft? Have I not set forth in detail the satanical subtlety of the answers with which she met my endeavours to convert her to the True Faith? I have not dared confess, but I confess it now and cast myself upon the mercy of this sacred tribunal, that there were moments when I was in danger of coming under her infernal spells, moments when I, myself, began to doubt of truths in Holy Writ so subtly did she pervert their meaning. It was then I knew her for a servant of the Evil One; when she mocked me and the holy words I spoke, with wicked, wanton laughter.’ Passion inflamed him, and lent a warmth of rhetoric to his denunciation, at which his hearers were inflamed. ‘It is not upon this thing or upon that that my conviction rests, the solemn conviction upon which I have based my accusation; but upon the aggregate of all, a sum utterly overwhelming in its terrible total.’ He stood tense and taut, his great dark eyes looking now straight before him into infinity, seeming to them a man inspired. ‘I have set down what I have clearly seen with the eyes of my soul by the heavenly light vouchsafed them.’
Abruptly he sat down, and took his head in his hands, trembling from head to foot. At the last moment his courage had failed him. He had not dared to add that to him the crowning proof of her evil arts lay in the spell which she had cast over him, to assail him in the very stronghold of his hitherto invulnerable chastity. He dared not tell them of the haunting vision of her white throat and curving breast which had first assailed him as he sat on the hatch coamings of the Demoiselle, and which had constantly tormented him since then, so much so that more than once he had faltered in his duty as her accuser, had actually considered neglecting it on the morning that he landed at Santander, had since been tempted to fling down the pen, to deny the truth which he had written, and to imperil his immortal soul by lies to save her lovely body from the fire to which injustice it was inevitably doomed. Because her beauty assailed his senses with all the power of some pungent, overmastering perfume, because he writhed in longing for the sight of her and in agony for the thought of the just doom that must overtake her, he could entertain no single doubt of her guilt. That her spells could so beat down the ramparts of purity which years of self-denial and piety had built so solidly about his soul was to him the crowning proof of the abominations which she practised, of the arts by which she went to work to weaken him whose duty it was to destroy her. Not until that fair body, which Satan used as a lure for the perdition of men’s souls, should have been broken by the tormentor and finally reduced to ashes at the stake would Frey Luis account performed the duty which his conscience imposed upon him.
He heard Frey Juan quietly asking her if she was answered, and he heard her firm reply.
‘I have heard a whirl of meaningless words, protestations of convictions of Frey Luis’s own, which can hardly be accounted proof of anything. He says that I argued with subtlety in matters of religion. I argued out of such teaching in these matters as I have received. Is that proof of witchcraft? Then every Lutheran, it follows, is a witch?’
This time Frey Juan made no rejoinder. He dismissed her, announcing the audience suspended.
But when she had been removed by the familiars, he turned to Frey Luis. To ease the disquietude of his conscience, he now subjected Frey Luis to an examination so minute and searching that in the end the Fiscal Advocate remonstrated with him that in his hands the accuser seemed to have become the accused.
Frey Juan met the remonstrance with a stern reminder. ‘It is not merely lawful, but desirable, to examine a delator closely; especially when, as in this instance, there is no evidence other than his own.’
‘There is the evidence of the facts,’ the Fiscal replied, ‘the evidence of words used by Don Pedro, which the woman herself admits to have been correctly reported, and there is what Don Pedro himself cannot deny.’
‘And,’ ventured Frey Luis, with the fierce vehemence of righteous exasperation, ‘there is her own heresy which she has admitted. To a heretic all things are possible.’
‘But because all things are possible,’ he was quietly answered, ‘we are not to convict a heretic of all things beside heresy, unless we have abundant proof.’
‘To ease your mind, Frey Juan, were it not best to put her to the question at once?’ suggested the Fiscal Advocate. And Frey Luis, swept by his emotions, made echo to that.
‘The question, ay! The question. Let torture wring the truth from her evil stubbornness. Thus shall you have the confirmation that you need for sentence.’
Frey Juan’s countenance was stern; all compassion, all wistfulness had departed from his eyes. He turned them almost angrily upon the Fiscal.
‘To ease my mind?’ he echoed. ‘Do I sit here in this seat of judgment to ease my mind? What is my ease of mind, what my torment of mind, compared with the service of the Faith? The truth of these matters shall be reached in the end, however long we labour to extract it. But we shall extract it for the greater honour and glory of God and not for my ease of mind or the ease of mind of any living man.’ He rose abruptly, leaving the Fiscal Advocate silenced and abashed. Frey Luis would have interrupted again. But he was sternly reminded that he was not a member of that court, nor entitled to speak there save when bidden as a witness.
In the silence that followed, Frey Juan took up the notes which the notary had made. He read them carefully. ‘Let copies be sent to the Inquisitor-General this evening, as he has required.’
Now the special interest in this case of the Inquisitor-General of Castile, Gaspar de Quiroga, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, was sprung from the fact that Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, as we know, was his own nephew, his only sister’s child, cherished by him in the place of the son which his vows denied him. This fact, notorious throughout Spain, it was which had rendered the inquisitors of Oviedo fearful of dealing with Don Pedro’s case and had brought them to the decision of referring it to Toledo where it would be under the eye of the Inquisitor-General himself.
The Cardinal was profoundly distressed and perturbed. Whatever the outcome, and however much of the blame a scapegoat might be made to bear, the fact remained that Don Pedro had grievously offended. It would be held that he could not have so offended had he not lapsed from grace by some action of his own, and for this it was impossible that he should escape punishment. Some heavy penance he would certainly have to perform to satisfy the requirements of a tribunal which had not hesitated in its time to impose penances upon princes of the blood. Short of that it would be said that his uncle made an unworthy use of his mighty and sacred office to favour his own relatives and to relieve them of the payment of their just dues. Obstacles enough were placed already in the path of the Inquisitor-General by a King who with difficulty curbed his jealousy of any usurpation of power in his dominions, by a Pope who could hardly be said to approve the lengths to which the Holy Office carried its ardour in Spain, and by the Jesuits who missed few opportunities of marking their resentment of the interferences and even persecutions which they had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.
Nor would Don Pedro by his conduct, whether before the court appointed to examine him or in the private audiences to which his uncle summoned him from the prison of the Holy House where he was meanwhile confined, do anything to lighten the task before the Inquisitor-General.
He laughed to furious scorn the charge of witchcraft levelled against Margaret, refused utterly to avail himself of the escape which such an accusation against her offered him, denounced himself for a scoundrel in his dealings with her, and regarded his present difficulties as the natural and proper punishment which he had brought upon himself. He would accept it, he announced, with fortitude and resignation but for the knowledge that his own villainy and the stupid bigotry of his judges had implicated Margaret with him and placed her in a position of danger, of the full terrors of which she would herself be scarcely aware as yet.
To his uncle in private and, what was infinitely worse, to the inquisitors deputed by his uncle to examine him in the court over which Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo presided, he persisted in the assertion that, because of his rank and his relationship with the Inquisitor-General, it was sought to spare him the consequences of his acts by a trumped-up tale of his having been bewitched. The Lady Margaret, he assured his judges, hectoring them boldly and angrily, had practised against him no magic but the magic of her beauty, her virtue, and her charm. If these were arts of sorcery, then half the young women in the world might be sent to the stake, for at some time or other and against some man or other they had all exercised them.
It was bad enough to have Don Pedro thus insisting upon incriminating himself, and saying no word that helped forward the incrimination of the heretical woman who was at the root of all this distressing business. To insist, almost as if attempting to persuade him, that his very words and demeanour were but proofs that the sorcery was still working briskly in his veins, was merely to render him ribald and offensive in his exasperation. He called the inquisitors dolts, asses in stupidity, and mules in obstinacy, and did not even hesitate to tell them on one occasion that he believed it was they who were possessed of devils, so infernally did they corrupt all things to their own predetermined ends, so damnably did they corrupt truth into falsehood.
‘The truth to you, sirs, is what you desire to think it is, not what every sane evidence may reveal it. You desire no evidence save that which will confirm your egregious preconceptions. There is no animal in the world so hot on a false scent and so persistent as you Dominicans. Domini canes!’ Deliberately he broke the word into two, and saw by their resentful eyes that they had caught the insult he intended. He repeated it again and yet again, rendering it each time more clearly an invective, and finally translating it into Spanish for them to make quite sure that his meaning did not elude them. ‘Dogs of the Lord! Hounds of God! That is what you call yourselves. I wonder what God calls you.’
The audience was immediately suspended, and word was sent to Cardinal Quiroga of his nephew’s extravagant words and indecent conduct, which left little doubt now in the mind of any of his examiners that he was indeed the victim of arts of witchcraft. But Frey Juan now added a note to the effect that, however persuaded they might be of this, yet the evidence was hardly sufficient to justify sentence of the woman Margaret Trevanion upon the charge of sorcery, wherefore he submitted to the Inquisitor-General that this accusation against her should be abandoned, and that the court should proceed upon the charge of heresy alone. If she was, indeed, a witch, she would still suffer for it in suffering for the offence which was provable against her.
A grand Auto de Fé was preparing in Toledo for the following Thursday, the 26th of October—Frey Juan wrote on Thursday the 19th—and the charge of heresy could be disposed of so that the accused should suffer then, whilst Don Pedro should at the same time purge his offence by some penance in that Auto which the inquisitors would determine and lay before His Eminence for approval.
At the very hour at which the Inquisitor-General in Toledo was considering the vexatious matters contained in Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo’s communication, Sir Gervase Crosby was seeking audience of King Philip II at the Escurial.
Fifteen days had been spent between Greenwich and Madrid, fifteen days of ageing torment during which impatience at the slowness of their progress had almost made him mad. Whilst his Margaret in her peril was so instantly needing him, he found himself crawling like a slug across the spaces of the earth to reach her. The voyage was a nightmare. It had the effect of transmuting the buoyant, light-hearted lad into a man who was stern of countenance and of heart, with a sternness which was never thereafter quite to leave him.
They came at last into the Bay of Santander, six days after the Demoiselle had cast anchor there. Contrary winds had delayed them. In making the port of Santander they had no thought of following in the track of the vessel in which her ladyship had been carried off. They made it because it was the first port of consequence and the most convenient whence to continue the journey to Madrid, which was Sir Gervase’s goal. Idle to seek to ascertain whither the Lady Margaret had been taken; idle to attempt to follow her until armed with those powers which he hoped to wring from the King of Spain. Therefore it was the King of Spain, that fabulously mighty prince, whom he must seek in the first instance.
The Rose of the World flew no flag to announce her nationality as she came to anchor in those Spanish waters. If Sir Oliver Tressilian was fearless, he was also prudent. He would face whatever perils might be thrust upon him. But he would not go about the world inviting peril by any unnecessary jactancy.
Yet the lack of a flag had much the same effect to have been expected from the display of one belonging to a hostile nation. Within an hour of casting anchor in the bay, two great black barges came alongside the Rose of the World. They were filled with men in steel caps and shimmering corselets, armed with pikes and musketoons, and the first of them bore the Regidor of Santander in person, who came to inquire the nationality and business of this vessel, which with a row of cannon thrusting their noses from her open ports had much the appearance of a fighting craft.
Sir Oliver ordered the ladder to be lowered, and invited the Regidor to come aboard, nor made any objection when six soldiers followed him as a guard of honour.
To the King’s representative in Santander, a short, pompous gentleman inclining, although still young, to corpulence, Sir Gervase made known in the execrable but comprehensible Spanish which he had been at pains to learn during his voyage with Drake, that he was a courier from the Queen of England with letters for King Philip of Spain. In confirmation of this he displayed the package with its royal seals and royal superscription.
This earned him black looks together with courteous words from the Regidor, Don Pablo de Lamarejo. Royal messengers he knew were sacred, even when they happened to be English and heretics ripe for damnation and deserving on that and other accounts no mercy or even consideration from any God-fearing man. He supposed that the vessel and crew employed to bring the messenger were to lie under the same protecting ægis of international custom, and he even undertook, in response to Sir Oliver’s request, to send out supplies of fresh water and provisions.
Sir Gervase went ashore alone in the Regidor’s barge. He had requested to land a couple of men of his own to accompany him as servants. But the Regidor, with the utmost outward suavity, had insisted upon supplying Sir Gervase with a couple of Spaniards for the purpose, who would be so much more useful to him by virtue of their knowledge of the country and the language. Sir Gervase perfectly understood the further intention, which was that they should act as his guards. Whilst the Regidor did not in any way dare to hinder him, at the same time he deemed it prudent to take such measures as should make this Queen’s messenger virtually a prisoner during the sojourn in Spain or until the King’s Majesty should expressly decree otherwise.
This to Sir Gervase was a matter of no account. So that he reached the King with the least delay, he cared not in what circumstances he reached him. They could have carried him to Madrid bound hand and foot had they so chosen.
Sir Oliver Tressilian was to remain at Santander to await his return. Should he not have returned within exactly one month, nor sent any message, Sir Oliver was to assume failure and go home to report it to the Queen. On that understanding the friends parted, and Sir Gervase, whose countenance, pallid under its sunburn, was become almost that of a Spaniard in colour and in gravity, set out for Madrid with his two alguaziles who pretended to be grooms. They made as good speed as the mountainous country and the infrequent change of horses would permit. They travelled by way of Burgos, famous as having been the birthplace of the Cid, and of Roman Segovia on its rocky summit with its Flavian aqueduct. But for these and other marvels of man and of nature, Sir Gervase had no thought or care. The eyes of his soul were set feverishly ahead, towards that Madrid, where he should find an end to his torturing suspense, and perhaps—if God were very good to him—find healing for his despair.
Six days did that land journey consume. And even then it was not ended. The King was at the Escurial, that vast monastery palace on the slopes of the Guadarrama Mountains lately completed for him by artists and craftsmen whom he had hampered at every turn by the intrusion of his own abominable tastes and opinions in matters of architecture and decoration.
It was late evening when Gervase and his companions reached the capital, and so they were forced to lie there until the morrow. Thus the circle of a full week on Spanish soil had been completed before Sir Gervase beheld the enormous palace which contained the monarch of half the world. Grey, austere, forbidding stood that edifice, built, it was said, upon the plan of the gridiron upon which Saint Lawrence suffered martyrdom. The skies were themselves grey that morning, and may have heightened the illusion which made the granite mass seem almost a part of the Guadarrama Mountains that were its background, made it appear to have been planted there by Nature rather than by man.
Afterwards, in retrospect, that noontide seemed to him a dream, leaving vague and misty impressions. There was a great courtyard, where magnificently equipped soldiers paraded; a wide staircase of granite by which an officer to whom he announced his errand conducted him to a long vaulted gallery, whose small windows overlooked the quadrangle of the royal wing. Here a throng moved and hummed: courtiers in rich black, captains in steel, prelates in purple and in scarlet, and monks in brown, in grey, in white, and in black.
They stood in groups or sauntered there, and the subdued murmur of their voices filled the place. They looked askance at this tall young man with his haggard eyes and cheeks that were grown swarthy under a mane of crisp auburn hair, outlandishly dressed in clothes that were stained by travel and with long boots on which the dust lay thickly.
But it was soon seen that he had some greater claim to audience than any of those who had been waiting there since Mass, for without delay came an usher to sweep him from that gallery, and conduct him by way of an anteroom, where he was relieved of his weapons, into the royal presence.
Sir Gervase found himself in a small room of a monastic severity, where his nostrils were assailed by the nauseous smell of medicinal unguents. The walls were whitewashed and without decoration beyond that supplied by a single picture representing an infernal zodiac made up of the whirling, flaming figures of demons and of damned.
In the room’s middle stood a square table of dark oak, plain and unadorned, such as might be seen in any abbot’s refectory. It bore a little heap of parchments, an inkstand, and some quills.
In a Gothic wooden chair of monastic plainness, beside this table, his right elbow resting upon the edge of it, sat the greatest monarch of his day, the lord of half the world.
To behold him was to experience in extreme measure the shock which the incongruous must ever produce. It is probably common to all men to idealize the wielders of royal power and royal dignity, to confound in imagination the man with the office which he holds. The great title this man bore, the great dominions over which his word was law, so fired men’s fancy that the very name of Philip II conjured a vision of superhuman magnificence, of quasi-divine splendour.
Instead of some such creation of his fancy, Sir Gervase beheld a small, sickly, shrivelled old man, with a bulging forehead and pale blue, almost colourless eyes set fairly close to a pinched aquiline nose. The mouth was repulsive, with its under jaw thrusting grotesquely forward, its pallid lips which gaped perpetually to reveal a ruin of teeth. A tuft of straggling, fulvid beard sprouted from his elongated chin, a thin bristle of moustache made an untidy fringe above. His hair, once thick and golden, hung now in thin streaks that were of the colour of ashes.
He sat with his left leg, which was gouty and swathed, stretched across a cushioned stool. He was dressed entirely in black, and for only ornament wore the collar and insignia of the Golden Fleece about his narrow ruff. Quill in hand, he was busily annotating a document, and in this occupation continued for some moments after Sir Gervase’s admission, entirely ignoring his presence. At length he passed the document to a slim man in black who stood on his left. This was Santoyo, his valet, who received it, and dusted the wet writing with sand, whilst the King, still ignoring Gervase’s presence, took up another parchment from the pile at his elbow, and proceeded to deal with it in the same way.
In the background, against the wall, two writing-tables were ranged, and at each of these sat a secretary, writing busily. It was to one of these, a little hairy, black-bearded fellow, that the valet delivered the document he had received from the royal hand.
Behind the King, very tall and straight, stood a middle-aged man in the black habit and long mantle of a Jesuit. This, as Sir Gervase was presently to discover, was Father Allen, who might be regarded as the ambassador at the Escurial of the English Catholics, and who stood high in the esteem of King Philip. In the deep embrasure of one of the two windows by which the chamber was abundantly lighted stood Frey Diego de Chaves, Prior of Santa Cruz, a heavily built man of jovial countenance.
The royal pen scratched and spluttered on the margin of the document. Sir Gervase waited as immoveable and patient as the officer who had conducted him, who remained a few paces behind him now. As he waited, he continued in increasing wonder to consider this mean, insignificant embodiment of the hereditary principle, and there surged in his mind the image of some unclean spider seated in the very heart of his great web.
At last the second document was passed to Santoyo, and the ice-cold eyes under that bulging brow flashed a fleeting, furtive glance upon the stalwart, dignified gentleman who stood so patiently before him. The pallid lips moved, and from between them issued a voice, low of pitch, dead-level of tone, and very rapid of speech. This utterance, which so commonly exasperated foreign envoys by its elusiveness, sounded like nothing so much as the heavy hum of an insect in that quiet room. His Majesty had spoken in Spanish. As ill-educated and unlettered as he was cruel, pusillanimous, and debauched, this lord of half the world spoke no language but his own, could read no language but his own, save only a little schoolboy’s Latin.
Sir Gervase had a knowledge of Spanish sufficient for ordinary purposes. But of the King’s speech he had caught no single word. He stood undecided a moment until Father Allen acting as interpreter revealed his own English origin.
‘His Majesty says, sir, that he understands you to be the bearer of letters from the Queen of England.’
Sir Gervase plucked the sealed package from the bosom of his doublet, and advanced to proffer it.
‘Kneel, sir!’ the Jesuit commanded, sharp and sternly.
Sir Gervase obeyed, going down on one knee before the monarch.
Philip of Spain put forth a hand that was like the hand of a corpse. It was of the colour and transparency of wax. He took the package, seemed to weigh a moment whilst he read the superscription in the unmistakeable writing of Elizabeth of England. Then he turned it over, and considered the seals. His lips writhed into a sneer, and again there came from him that rapid dead-level murmur of speech, the import of which this time eluded all present.
At last with a half-shrug he broke the seals, spread the sheet before him, and read.
Sir Gervase, who had risen again and stepped back, watched the royal countenance with anxious, straining interest. He saw the frown gradually descend to the root of the predatory nose, saw the lips writhe again, and the hand that held the sheet tremble violently as if suddenly palsied. If he thought and hoped that this reflected fear, he was soon disillusioned. The King spoke again, and this time for all the rapidity of his utterance rage lent a power to his voice to make it audible throughout the chamber. Sir Gervase heard his words clearly, and understood them as clearly.
‘The insolent bastard heretic!’ was what he said, and saying it, crumpled the offending letter in his lean hand, as he would have crumpled the writer could that same hand have encompassed her.
The scratching of the secretaries’ pens was suddenly suspended. Santoyo at his master’s elbow, Father Allen behind his chair, and Frey Diego in the window embrasure stood immoveable and appeared to have ceased to breathe. A deathly stillness followed that explosion of royal wrath from a prince who rarely suffered any outward sign of emotion to escape him.
At the end of a long pause, in which he resumed his icy composure, the King spoke again. ‘But is it possible that I am mistaken; that I do not understand; that I misinterpret?’ He smoothed the crumpled sheet again. ‘Allen, do you read it for me; translate it to me,’ he commanded. ‘Let me lie under no error.’
The Jesuit took the letter, and as he read currently translated its message into Spanish in a voice of increasing horror.
Thus was it that Sir Gervase became acquainted with the precise tenour of the Queen’s message.
Elizabeth of England had in her time written many letters that her counsellors must have accounted terrible; but never a letter more terrible than this one. It was terrible in its very brevity and lucidity, considering the message it conveyed. She had chosen to write in Latin, and in this she informed her brother-in-law, King Philip the Second of Spain and First of Portugal, that a subject of his, a gentleman of his nobility, named Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, who, being shipwrecked upon her shores, had received shelter and comfort in an English house, had repaid the hospitality by forcibly carrying off the daughter of that house, the Lady Margaret Trevanion. The bearer would give His Majesty further details of this if he desired them. She passed on to remind the Majesty of Spain that in her prison of the Tower of London lay under her hand the Spanish Admiral Don Pedro Valdez and seven noble Spanish gentlemen, besides others, taken with him on the Andalusian flagship; and she warned His Majesty, taking God to witness, that unless the Lady Margaret Trevanion were returned safe and scatheless to her home, and unless the bearer of this letter, Sir Gervase Crosby and his companions, who were going to Spain so as to serve as escort to the lady, were afforded safe-conduct and offered no least injury of any sort, she would send her brother King Philip the heads of Don Pedro Valdez and his seven noble companions, and this in despite of all usages of war and practices of nations that he might urge.
Utter silence followed the reading for a moment. Then the King broke it by a laugh, a short, horrible cackle of scorn.
‘I read aright, it seems.’ Then in another tone, raising his voice to an unusual pitch: ‘How long, O Lord, will you suffer this Jezebel?’ he cried out.
‘How long, indeed!’ echoed Father Allen.
In the window embrasure Frey Diego seemed turned to stone. His florid countenance had become grey.
King Philip sat huddled, musing. Presently he made a gesture of contempt. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a puerile insolence! An idle threat! Such a thing could not be. Her own barbarous people would not permit such a barbarity. It is an attempt to frighten me with shadows. But I, Philip of Spain, do not start at shadows.’
‘Your Majesty will find it no shadow when those eight heads are delivered to you.’
It was Gervase who had spoken, with a temerity that spread consternation in the room.
The King looked at him and looked away again. It was not in King Philip’s power to look any man steadily in the face.
‘You spoke, I think?’ he said softly. ‘Who bade you speak?’
‘I spoke what seemed necessary,’ said Gervase, unintimidated.
‘What seemed necessary, eh? So that necessity is the excuse? I am learning, sir. I am learning. I never weary of learning. There are some other things you might tell me since you are so eager to be heard.’ The menace of his cold, rapid voice, and his dead, reptilian gaze were terrible. They seemed to suggest endless resources and utter remorselessness in their employment. He half-turned his head, to summon one of the secretaries. ‘Rodriguez! Your tablets. Note me his replies.’ Then he glanced at Sir Gervase again. ‘You have companions, this letter tells me. Where are these companions?’
‘At Santander, awaiting my return on board the ship that brought me.’
‘And if you do not return?’
‘If I am not on board by the thirteenth of November, they sail for England to report to Her Majesty that you prefer to receive the heads of your eight gentlemen rather than administer in your own realm the justice which decency demands.’
The King sucked in his breath. From behind him Father Allen admonished this daring man in English.
‘Sir, bethink you to whom you speak! I warn you in your own interests.’
The King made a gesture to silence him. ‘What is the name of the ship that is waiting in Santander?’
There was contemptuous defiance in the readiness with which Sir Gervase answered.
‘The Rose of the World, out of the Fal River. She is commanded by Sir Oliver Tressilian, an intrepid gentleman who understands the art of sea-fighting. She carries twenty guns, and a good watch is kept on board.’
The King smiled at the veiled threat. Its insolence was of a piece with the rest. ‘We may test the intrepidity of this gentleman.’
‘It has been tested already, Your Majesty, and by your own subjects. It is likely if they test it again that they will do so to their own cost as heretofore. But if it should happen that the Rose of the World is prevented from sailing and is not home by Christmas, the heads will come to you for a New Year’s gift.’
Thus in rough, ungrammatical, but perfectly comprehensible Spanish did Sir Gervase bait the lord of half the world. It inflamed his rage that this almost inhuman prince should be concerned here only with the hurt to his own dignity and vanity, and should give no thought to the misdeed of Don Pedro de Mendoza, and the horrible suffering caused an innocent lady.
But now, having drawn forth what knowledge he required, King Philip changed his tone.
‘As for you, you English dog, who match in insolence the evil woman who sent you on this audacious errand, you, too, have something to learn before we finally dismiss you.’ He raised a quivering hand. ‘Take him away, and keep him fast, until I need him again.’
‘My God!’ cried Gervase in horror, as the officer’s hand closed upon his shoulder. And because of his tone, and of a movement that he made, the officer’s grip tightened, and he plucked a dagger from his girdle. But Gervase, heedless of this, was appealing in his own tongue to Father Allen.
‘You, sir, who are English, and who seem to have influence here, can you remain indifferent when an English woman, a noble English lady, has been carried off in this manner by a Spanish satyr?’
‘Sir,’ the Jesuit coldly answered him, ‘you have done your cause a poor service by your manner.’
The officer pulled him forcibly back. ‘Let us go!’ he said.
But still Sir Gervase protested. He appealed now in Spanish to the King. ‘I am a messenger, and my person should be sacred.’
The King sneered at him. ‘A messenger? Impudent buffoon!’ And by a cold wave of the hand he put an end to the matter.
Raging, but impotent, Sir Gervase went. From the doorway, over his shoulder whilst the officer was forcibly thrusting him out, he called back to the Majesty of Spain:
‘Eight noble Spanish heads, remember! Eight heads which your own hands will have cut off!’
At last he was outside, and men were being summoned to take charge of him.
You have beheld an unusual spectacle. That of King Philip II of Spain acting upon impulse and under the sway of passion. It was conduct very far from his habit. Patience was the one considerable—perhaps the only—virtue in his character, and to his constant exercise of it he owed such greatness as he had won.
‘God and Time and I are one,’ was his calm boast, and sometimes he asserted that like God he moved against his enemies with leaden feet, but smote with iron hands.
It was not by any means the only matter in which he perceived a likeness between God and himself, but it is the only one with which at the moment we need be concerned. For here, for once, you behold him departing from it, yielding to an impulse of rage provoked by the outrageous tone of that message from the detestable Elizabeth.
This letter, with its cold threat of perpetrating an abomination revolting to all equity and humanity, he must regard as an impudent attempt to intimidate and coerce him. And further to incense him there had been added to the incredible insolence of the letter, the even more incredible insolence of its bearer.
As he presently informed Father Allen, it was as if, having slapped his face with that impudent communication, she had entrusted its delivery to a messenger who was to administer a kick on his own behalf. In all his august career he could not remember to have had a man stand before his face with such contumely and so little awe of his quasi-divinity. Is it any wonder that this demigod accustomed only to incense should have found his nostrils irritated by that dose of pepper, and that under this irritation he should have become so human as to sneeze?
He was certainly the wrong man with whom such liberties could be taken, and of all moments in his life the present was certainly the moment in which his temper could least brook them. At another time he might have sustained his patience by the conviction of a heavy reckoning to be presented to that arrogant bastard who usurped the throne of England; he might have smiled at these stings of a gnat which in his own good time his mighty hand should crush. But now, in the season of his humiliation, his great fleet dispersed and shattered, with scarcely a noble house in Spain that did not mourn a son, his strength so exhausted that it would hardly be in his own lifetime that the King of Spain would recover sufficiently to make himself feared again upon the seas, he was denied even this consolation. To the shattering blow delivered to his consequence in the world were added now such personal insults as these, which he could only punish by petty vengeances upon worthless underlings.
He bethought him of other letters which Elizabeth of England had written him, defiant, mocking letters, now bitter-sweet, now caustically sarcastic. He had smiled his patient, cruel smile as he read them. He could afford to smile then, in his assurance that the day of reckoning would surely come. But now that by some incomprehensible malignity of fortune he was cheated of that assurance, now that the day of reckoning was overpast, having brought him only shame and failure, he could smile no longer at her insults, could bear them no longer with the dignified calm that becomes a monarch.
But if weakened, he was not yet so weak that he could with impunity be mocked, coerced, and threatened.
‘She shall learn,’ he said to Father Allen, ‘that the King of Spain is not to be moved by threats. This insolent dog who was here and those others with him on that ship at Santander, heretics all, like her pestilent, heretical self, are the concern of the Holy Office.’ He turned to the bulky figure in the window-embrasure. ‘Frey Diego, this becomes your affair.’
Frey Diego de Chaves stirred at last to life again, and moved slowly forward. His dark eyes under bushy grey eyebrows were preternaturally solemn. He delivered himself now of some common-sense in a deep rich voice.
‘It is not Your Majesty who is threatened so much as those unfortunate gentlemen who have served you well and who languish now in an English prison awaiting the ransoms that are being sent from Spain.’
The King blinked his pale eyes. Sullenly, impatiently he corrected the Prior’s statement.
‘They are being threatened only in their lives. I am threatened in my dignity and honour, which are the dignity and honour of Spain.’
Frey Diego had come to lean heavily upon the heavy oaken table. ‘Will the honour of Spain be safe if she suffers this threat to be executed upon her sons?’
The King gave him one of his furtive glances; whereupon the Dominican continued:
‘The nobility of Spain has been bled white in this disastrous enterprise against England. Can Your Majesty afford to add to the blood that has been already shed, that of so great and valuable a servant as Valdez, the greatest of your surviving admirals; that of Ortiz, of the Marquis of Fuensalida, of Don Ramon Chaves, of…’
‘Your brother, eh?’ the King snapped to interrupt him. ‘Behold your impulse! A family concern.’
‘True,’ said the friar gravely. ‘But is it not a family concern also for Your Majesty? Does not all Spain compose the family of the King, and are not her nobles the first-born of that family? This insolent Englishman who was lately here and his shipmates at Santander, what are they to set in the balance against those Spanish gentlemen in London? You may fling them to the Holy Office for heretics as is your right, indeed, almost your duty to the Faith, but how will that compensate for the eight noble heads—eight truncated, bleeding heads—which the Queen of England will cast into Your Majesty’s lap?’
His Majesty started visibly, appalled by the vivid phrase. It was as if he beheld those bleeding heads in his lap already. But he recovered instantly.
‘Enough!’ he rapped. ‘I do not yield to threats.’ But the source of his strength of spirit was revealed by what he added: ‘They are threats which that woman will not dare to execute. It would earn her the execration of the whole world.’ He swung to the Jesuit. ‘Am I not right, Allen?’
The Englishman avoided a direct answer. ‘You are dealing, Majesty, with a Godless, headstrong woman, a female antichrist, without regard for any laws of God or man.’
‘But this!’ cried the King, clinging to the belief in what he hoped.
‘Execrable as it would be, it is no more execrable than the murder of the Queen of Scots. That, too, was a deed that all the world believed she would never dare.’
Here was a blow to the faith he built on Elizabeth’s fear of the world’s judgment. It brought him to doubt whether, indeed, he might not be building upon sand. It was a doubt that angered him. That he should yield to that detestable woman’s threats was a draught too bitter for his lips. He could not, would not swallow it, however men might seek to press the cup upon him. He said so harshly, and upon that dismissed both the Jesuit and the Dominican.
But when they were gone, he found it impossible to resume, as he had intended, work upon those documents awaiting his attention. He sat there, shivering with anger as he read again the offensive letter or recalled again the offensive bearing of the messenger.
At long last his mind came to the matter which had provoked the threat. In his wrath at the effect, he had hitherto neglected to cast so much as a glance upon the cause. He pondered it now. What tale was this? Was it even true? The Concepción which Don Pedro de Mendoza had commanded had been definitely reported lost with all hands. How then came Don Pedro alive? The letter, itself, told him. He had been sheltered in an English household. He had escaped, then. And according further to this letter, he had returned to Spain bringing with him the daughter of the house in question. But if so, how came it that there was no word of this return, that Don Pedro had not come to report himself and pay his duty to his King?
One man might know: The Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo who was Don Pedro’s uncle.