The Spanish Brothers Part 42

x.x.xVI.

"The Horrible and Tremendous Spectacle."[#]

"All have pa.s.sed: The fearful, and the desperate, and the strong.

Some like the barque that rushes with the blast; Some like the leaf borne tremblingly along; And some like men who have but one more field To fight, and then may slumber on their s.h.i.+eld-- Therefore they arm in hope."--Hemans.

[#] So called by the Inquisitor, De Pegna.

At earliest dawn next morning, Juan established himself in an upper room of one of the high houses which overlooked the gate of the Triana. He had hired it from the owners for the purpose, stipulating for sole possession and perfect loneliness.

At sunrise the great Cathedral bell tolled out solemnly, and all the bells in the city responded. Through the crowd, which had already gathered in the street, richly dressed citizens were threading their way on foot. He knew they were those who, out of zeal for the faith, had volunteered to act as _patrinos_, or G.o.d-fathers, to the prisoners, walking beside them in the procession. Amongst them he recognized his cousins, Don Manuel and Don Balthazar. They were all admitted into the castle by a private door.

Ere long the great gate was flung open. Juan's eyes were rivetted to the spot. There was a sound of singing, sweet and low, as of childish voices; for the first to issue from those gloomy portals were the boys of the College of Doctrine, dressed in white surplices, and chanting litanies to the saints. Clear and full at intervals rose from their lips the "Ora pro n.o.bis" of the response; and tears gathered unconsciously in the eyes of Juan at the old familiar words.

In great contrast with the white-robed children came the next in order.

Juan drew his breath hard, for here were the penitents: pale, melancholy faces, "ghastly and disconsolate beyond what can be imagined;"[#] forms clothed in black, without sleeves, and barefooted--hands carrying extinguished tapers.

[#] Report of De Pegna.

Those who walked foremost in the procession had only been convicted of such _minor_ offences as blasphemy, sorcery, or polygamy. But by-and-by there came others, wearing ugly sanbenitos--yellow, with red crosses--and conical paper mitres on their heads. Juan's eye kindled with intenser interest; for he knew that these were Lutherans. Not without a wild dream--hope, perhaps--that the near approach of death might have subdued his brother's fort.i.tude, did he scan in turn every mournful face. There was Luis D'Abrego, the illuminator of church books; there, walking long afterwards, as far more guilty, was Medel D'Espinosa, the dealer in embroidery, who had received the Testaments brought by Juliano. There were many others of much higher rank, with whom he was well acquainted. Altogether more than eighty in number, the long and melancholy train swept by, every man or woman attended by two monks and a patrino. But Carlos was not amongst them.

Then came the great Cross of the Inquisition; the face turned towards the penitent, the back to the _impenitent_--those devoted to the death of fire. And now Juan's breath came and went--his lips trembled; all his soul was in his eager, straining eyes Now first he saw the hideous zamarra--a black robe, painted all over with saffron-coloured flames, into which devils and serpents, rudely represented, were thrusting the impenitent heretic. A paper crown, or carroza, similarly adorned, covered the victim's head. But the face of the wearer was unknown to Juan. He was a poor artizan--Juan de Leon by name--who had made his escape by flight, but had been afterwards apprehended in the Low Countries. Torture and cruel imprisonment had almost killed him already; but his heart was strong to suffer for the Lord he loved, and though the pallor of death was on his cheek, there was no fear there.

But the countenances of those that followed Juan knew too well. Never afterwards could he exactly recall the order in which they walked; yet every individual face stamped itself indelibly on his memory. He would carry those looks in his heart until his dying hour.

No less than four of the victims wore the white tunic and brown mantle of St. Jerome. One of these was an old man--leaning on his staff for very age, but with joy and confidence beaming in his countenance. The white locks, from which Garcias Arias had gained the name of Doctor Blanco, had been shorn away; but Juan easily recognized the waverer of past days, now strengthened with all might, according to the glorious power of Him whom at last he had learned to trust. The accomplished Cristobal D'Arellano, and Fernando de San Juan, Master of the College of Doctrine, followed calm and dauntless. Steadfast, too, though not without a little natural shrinking from the doom of fire, was a mere youth--Juan Crisostomo.

Then came one clad in a doctor's robe, with the step of a conqueror and the mien of a king. As he issued from the Triana he chanted, in a clear and steady voice, the words of the Hundred and ninth Psalm: "Hold not thy peace, O G.o.d of my praise; for the mouth of the unG.o.dly, yea, the mouth of the deceitful, is opened upon me: and they have spoken against me with false tongues. They compa.s.sed me about also with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause.... Help me, O Lord my G.o.d: O save me according to thy mercy; and they shall know how that this is thine hand, and that thou, Lord, hast done it. Though they curse, yet bless thou." So died away the voice of Juan Gonsalez, one of the n.o.blest of Christ's n.o.ble band of witnesses in Spain.

All these were arrayed in the garments of their ecclesiastical orders, to be solemnly degraded on the scaffold in the Square of St. Francis.

But there followed one already in the full infamy, or glory, of the zamarra and carroza, with painted flames and demons;--with a thrill of emotion, Juan recognized his friend and teacher, Cristobal Losada--looking calm and fearless--a hero marching to his last battle, conquering and to conquer.

Yet even that face soon faded from Juan's thoughts. For there walked in that gloomy death procession six females--persons of rank; nearly all of them young and beautiful, but worn by imprisonment, and more than one amongst them maimed by torture. Yet if man was cruel, Christ, for whom they suffered, was pitiful. Their countenances, calm and even radiant, revealed the hidden power by which they were sustained. Their names--which deserve a place beside those of the women of old who were last at his cross and first beside his open sepulchre--were, Dona Isabella de Baena, in whose house the church was wont to meet; the two sisters of Juan Gonsalez; Dona Maria de Virves; Dona Maria de Cornel; and, last of all, Dona Maria de Bohorques, whose face shone as the first martyr's, looking up into heaven. She alone, of all the female martyr band, appeared wearing the gag, an honour due to her heroic efforts to console and sustain her companions in the court of the Triana.

Juan's brave heart well-nigh burst with impotent, indignant anguish.

"Ay de mi, my Spain!" he cried; "thou seest these things, and endurest them. Lucifer, son of the morning, thou art fallen--fallen from thy high place amongst the nations."

It was true. From the man, or nation, "that hath not," shall be taken "even that which he seemeth to have." Had the spirit of chivalry, Spain's boast and pride, been faithful to its own dim light, it might even then have saved Spain. But its light became darkness; its trust was betrayed into the hand of superst.i.tion. Therefore, in the just judgment of G.o.d, its own degradation quickly followed. Spain's chivalry lost gradually all that was genuine, all that was n.o.ble in it; until it became only a faint and ghastly mockery, a sign of corruption, like the phosphoric light that flickers above the grave.

Absorbed in his bitter thoughts, Juan well-nigh missed the last of the doomed ones--last because highest in worldly rank. Sad and slow, with eyes bent down, Don Juan Ponce de Leon walked along. The flames on his zamarra were reversed; poor symbol of the poor mercy for which he sold his joy and triumph and dimmed the brightness of his martyr crown. Yet surely he did not lose the glad welcome that awaited him at the close of that terrible day; nor the right to say, with the erring restored apostle, "Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee."

All the living victims had pa.s.sed now. And Don Carlos Alvarez was not amongst them. Juan breathed a sigh of relief; but not yet did his straining eyes relax their gaze. For Rome's vengeance reached even to the grave. Next, there were borne along the statues of those who had died in heresy, robed in the hideous zamarra, and followed by black chests containing their bones to be burned.

Not there!--No--not there! At last Juan's trembling hands let go the framework of the window to which they had been clinging; and, the intense strain over, he fell back exhausted.

The stately pageant swept by, unwatched by him. He never saw, what all Seville was gazing on with admiration, the grand procession of the judges and counsellors of the city, in their robes of office; the chapter of the Cathedral; the long slow train of priests and monks that followed. And then, in a s.p.a.ce left empty out of reverence, the great green standard of the Inquisition was borne aloft, and over it a gilded crucifix. Then came the Inquisitors themselves, in their splendid official dresses. And lastly, on horseback and in gorgeous apparel, the familiars of the Inquisition.

It was well that Juan's eyes were turned from that sight. What avails it for lips white with pa.s.sion to heap wild curses on the heads of those for whom G.o.d's curse already "waits in calm shadow," until the day of reckoning be fully come? Curses, after all, are weapons dangerous to use, and apt to pierce the hand that wields them.

His first feeling was one of intense relief, almost of joy. He had escaped the maddening torture of seeing his brother dragged before his eyes to the death of anguish and shame. But to that succeeded the bitter thought, growing soon into full, mournful conviction, "I shall see his face no more on earth. He is dead--or dying."

Yet that day the deep, strong current of his brotherly love was crossed by another tide of emotion. Those heroic men and women, whom he watched as they pa.s.sed along so calmly to their doom, had he no bond of sympathy with them? Was it so long since he had pressed Losada's hand in grateful friends.h.i.+p, and thanked Dona Isabella de Baena for the teaching received beneath her roof? With a thrill of keen and sudden shame the gallant soldier saw himself a recreant, who had flaunted his gay uniform on the parade and at the field-day, but when the hour of conflict came, had stepped aside, and let the sword and the bullet find out braver and truer hearts.

_He_ could not die thus for his faith. On the contrary, it cost him but little to conceal it, to live in every respect like an orthodox Catholic. What, then, had they which he had not? Something that enabled his young brother--the boy who used to weep for a blow--to stand and look fearless in the face of a horrible death. Something that enabled even poor, wild, pa.s.sionate Gonsalvo to forgive and pray for the murderers of the woman he loved. What was it?

x.x.xVII.

Something Ended and Something Begun.

"O sweet and strange it is to think that ere this day is done.

The voice that now is speaking may be beyond the sun: For ever and for ever with those just souls and true-- And what is life that we should mourn, why make we such ado?"--Tennyson

Late in the afternoon of that day, Dona Inez entered her sick brother's room. A glitter of silk, rose-coloured and black, of costly lace and of gems and gold, seemed to surround her. But as she threw aside the mantilla that partially shaded her face, and almost sank on a seat beside the bed, it was easy to see that she was very faint and weary, if not also very sick at heart.

"Santa Maria! I am tired to death," she murmured. "The heat was killing; and the whole business interminably long."

Gonsalvo gazed at her with eager eyes, as a man dying of thirst might gaze on one who holds a cup of water; but for a while he did not speak.

At last he said, pointing to some wine that lay near, beside an untasted meal,--

"Drink, then."

"What, my brother!" said Dona Inez, reproachfully, "you have not touched food to-day! You--so ill and weak?"

"I am a man--even still," said Gonsalvo with a little bitterness in his tone.

Dona Inez drank, and for a few moments fanned herself in silence, distress and embarra.s.sment in her face.

At last Gonsalvo, who had never withdrawn his eager gaze, said in a low voice,--

"Sister, remember your promise."

"I am afraid--for you."

"You need not," he gasped. "Only tell me _all_."

Dona Inez pa.s.sed her hand wearily across her brow.