Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “I... I heard of it an hour ago,” he lied a thought unsteadily. “I... I commiserate you deeply.”

  “I deserve commiseration,” answered she, “and so does my poor father, and those others. It is plain that amongst those he trusted there was a traitor, a spy, who went straight from that meeting to inform against them. If I but had a list it were easy to discover the betrayer. One need but ascertain who is the one of all who were present whose arrest has been omitted.” Her lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. “What is to become of me now, alone in the world?” she asked him. “My father was my only friend.”

  The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw here a noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.

  “Your only friend?” he asked her thickly. “Was there no one else? Is there no one else, Isabella?”

  “There was,” she said, and sighed heavily. “But after what befell last night, when... You know what is in my mind. I was distraught then, mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so that I could not even consider his sin in its full heinousness, nor see how righteous was your intent to inform against him. Yet I am thankful that it was not by your deletion that he was taken. The thought of that is to-day my only consolation.”

  They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm to assist her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to accompany her within. But she denied him.

  “Not now — though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will come and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more able to receive you — that is, if I am forgiven for...”

  “Not another word,” he begged her. “I honour you for what you did. It is I who should sue to you for forgiveness.”

  “You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!” And so she left him.

  She had found him — had she but known it — a dejected, miserable man in the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying Susan he had acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage, and partly from a sense of religious duty. In counting later the cost to himself, he cursed the folly of his rage, and began to wonder if such strict observance of religious duty was really worth while to a man who had his way to make in the world. In short, he was in the throes of reaction. But now, in her unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never know. The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of deletions — since to do otherwise might be to discourage delators — and there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such as took place in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de Ataud better pleased with the world than he had been since morning.

  On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a servant announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his hopes, and thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he received from her a letter which made him the most ample amends:

  “Rodrigo, — There is a matter on which we must come early to an understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated, since as the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit. For myself I care little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo, since if in spite of what has happened you would still wish to make me your wife, as you declared on Monday, it would be my wish to come to you well dowered. Now the inheritance which would be confiscated by the Holy Office from the daughter of a heretic might not be so confiscated from the wife of a gentleman of Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide as your heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to me.

  “Isabella.”

  She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His fortune was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it seemed, Rodrigo was given the chance to make his own by marrying the beautiful Isabella at once, before sentence came to be passed upon her father. The Holy Office might impose a fine, but would not go further where the inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of clean lineage was concerned. He was swayed between admiration of her shrewdness and amazement at his own good fortune. Also his vanity was immensely flattered.

  He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his resolve to marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in person, as she had bidden him, to carry out the resolve.

  She received him in the mansion’s best room, a noble chamber furnished with a richness such as no other house in Seville could have boasted. She had arrayed herself for the interview with an almost wanton cunning that should enhance her natural endowments. Her high-waisted gown, low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice, was of cloth of gold, edged with miniver at skirt and cuffs and neck. On her white bosom hung a priceless carcanet of limpid diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of her bronze-coloured hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never had Don Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure and glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now his olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms, kissing her cheek, her lips, her neck.

  “My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!” he murmured, rapturously. Then added the impatient question: “The priest? Where is the priest that shall make us one?”

  Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance. Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a smile that maddened him.

  “You love me, Rodrigo — in spite of all?”

  “Love you!” It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost inarticulate ejaculation. “Better than life — better than salvation.”

  She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. “Oh, I am glad — so glad — that your love for me is truly strong. I am about to put it to the test, perhaps.”

  He held her very close. “What is this test, beloved?”

  “It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be indissoluble save by death.”

  “Why, so do I,” quoth he, who had so much to gain.

  “And, therefore, because after all, though I profess Christianity, there is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a marriage that must satisfy even my father when he regains his freedom, as I believe he will — for, after all, he is not charged with any sin against the faith.”

  She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his ardour.

  “What do you mean?” he asked her, and his voice was strained.

  “I mean — you’ll not be angry with me? — I mean that I would have us married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner, but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish rites.”

  Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.

  “Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you’ll not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish blood.”

  His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads of sweat stood out upon his brow.

  “My God!” he groaned. “What do you ask? I... I can’t. It were a desecration, a defilement.”

  She thrust him from her in a passion. “You regard it so? You protest love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the faith that was my forbears’, if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you, else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me.”

  Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He could go his ways.

  The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration, a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million maravedis, and a match
less woman, is a dream not easily relinquished. There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement of the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained where Christian scruples were already half-effaced.

  “You do not realize,” he cried. “If it were known that I so much as contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of apostasy, and send me to the fire.”

  “If that were your only objection it were easily overcome,” she informed him coldly. “For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life’s sake betray us, and who else will ever know?”

  “You can be sure of that?”

  He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage that filled him with such repugnance.

  And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in which the conspirators had met.

  “Where is the Rabbi?” he asked impatiently, looking round that empty room.

  “I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him.”

  “Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?”

  “No,” she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. “Yet I would not have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to this.” They were odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He was hardly master of the wits which in themselves were never of the brightest. “I require you to declare that it is your own desire that our marriage should be solemnized in accordance with the Jewish rites and the law of Moses.”

  And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing done and ended, made answer hastily:

  “Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be so married — in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law of Moses. And now, where is the Rabbi?” He caught a sound and saw a quiver in the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove. “Ah! He is here, I suppose....”

  He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his hands in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside, and forth stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt man, stooping slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white habit and black cloak of the order of St. Dominic, his face lost in the shadows of a black cowl. Behind him stood two lay brothers of the order, two armed familiars of the Holy Office, displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.

  Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those terribly damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood blankly at gaze a moment, not even seeking to understand how this dread thing had come to pass.

  The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey Tomas de Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful came the voice of that deeply sincere and saintly man.

  “My son, I was told this of you — that you were a Judaizer — yet before I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in one of your lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses. Oh, my poor child, by what wicked counsels have you been led so far astray?” The sweet, tender eyes of the inquisitor were luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing pity shook his gentle voice.

  And then Don Rodrigo’s terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation.

  “It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this. It was a trap she baited for my undoing.”

  “It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you could not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers.”

  “Father! Hear me, I implore you!” He flung down upon his knees, and held out shaking, supplicating hands.

  “You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed for you. Yet that you should Judaize — that you should be bound in wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism — Oh!” The melancholy voice broke off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his hands — long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. “Pray now, my child, for grace and strength,” he exhorted. “Offer up the little temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error, and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence.”

  On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators, and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the essentials were already present.

  In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand, barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.

  Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness the instrument of her father’s ruin.

  For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte’s legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

  IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL

  The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal

  There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.

  Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the dazzling career of Anne’s own father; but for natural daughters — and especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of cadency — there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore, since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.

  Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was foreordain
ed that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She had youth, and youth’s hunger of life, and not even the repressive conditions in which she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she was beautiful. On the threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle’s will was to be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have beheld the inscription, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate!” she made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear witness that she did not go of her own free will.

  But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip’s was, under God’s, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges unusual to members of religious communities: he granted her a little civil list — two ladies-in-waiting and two grooms — and conferred upon her the title of Excellency, which she still retained even when after her hurried novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the year lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself into preparation for death.

  Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her; in time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey spirit of the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she must nourish her caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses caught in passing of the bright, active, stirring world without; and where memory stopped she had now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of high adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but to feed and swell her yearnings.