Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above all he loved to talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with whom he had been intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant, fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty had led the disastrous overseas expedition against the Infidel, which had been shattered on the field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.

  He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants he had seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was embarking with crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights and men-at-arms, the array of German and Italian mercenaries, the young king in his bright armour, bare of head — an incarnation of St. Michael — moving forward exultantly amid flowers and acclamations to take ship for Africa. And she would listen with parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body bending forward in her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic. Anon when he came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir, her dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly truthful. He did not say that military incompetence and a presumptuous vanity which would listen to no counsels had been the cause of a ruin that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal, and finally the very kingdom itself. He represented the defeat as due to the overwhelming numbers of the Infidel, and dwelt at length upon the closing scene, told her in fullest detail how Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of those who urged him to fly when all was lost, how the young king, who had fought with a lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day’s defeat, had turned and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to fight his last fight and find a knightly death. Thereafter he was seen no more.

  It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and more deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with questions touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning his ways of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the crown of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served but to engrave more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of the knightly king. Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent girl, his empanoplied figure haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that her waking senses would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the memory of someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the memory of the dream — words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind not calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth, a mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She mourned him with a fond widow’s mourning; prayed daily and nightly for the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the thought that she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood that had been imposed upon her.

  One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.

  “Is it so certain that he is dead?” she asked. “When all is said, none actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not possible that he may have survived?”

  The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.

  “In Portugal,” he answered slowly, “it is firmly believed that he lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his country from the thrall of Spain.”

  “Then... then...”

  Wistfully, he smiled. “A people will always believe what it wishes to believe.”

  “But you, yourself?” she pressed him.

  He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his ascetic face. He half turned from her — they were standing in the shadow of the fretted cloisters — and his pensive eyes roamed over the wide quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground. Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as claustral conditions would permit.

  At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.

  “Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted one who had been Don Sebastian’s preacher, I was warned by a person of eminence to have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only was he alive, but he would be secretly present at the Requiem.”

  He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted lips.

  “But that,” he added, “was fifteen years ago, and since then I have had no sign. At first I thought it possible... there was a story afloat that might have been true... But fifteen years!” He sighed, and shook his head.

  “What... what was the story?” She was trembling from head to foot.

  “On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the gates of the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid guard refused to open to them, they announced that one of them was King Sebastian, and so won admittance. One of the three was wrapped in a cloak, his face concealed, and his two companions were observed to show him the deference due to royalty.”

  “Why, then...” she was beginning.

  “Ah, but afterwards,” he interrupted her, “afterwards, when all Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied that King Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was affirmed to have been no more than a ruse of those men’s to gain the shelter of the city.”

  She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to draw from him the admission that it was possible denial and explanation obeyed the wishes of the hidden prince.

  “Yes, it is possible,” he admitted at length, “and it is believed by many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-spirited. The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon him that he preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a throne of which he now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal believes it so, and waits and hopes.”

  When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the clear conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who hoped more fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or yearned more passionately to acclaim him should he show himself. And that was much to think, for the yearning of Portugal was as the yearning of the slave for freedom.

  Sebastian’s mother was King Philip’s sister, whereby King Philip had claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of Portugal. Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that foreign rule, and Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply, passionately patriotic man, had been foremost among those who had sought to liberate her. When Don Antonio, the sometime Prior of Crato, Sebastian’s natural cousin, and a bold, ambitious, enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt, the friar had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those days Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had unstintingly exerted on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was profoundly devoted. After Don Antonio’s army had been defeated on land by the Duke of Alba, and his fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised by his active share in the rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In the end, because he ex
pressed repentance, and because Philip II., aware of the man’s gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la Real, where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant of the Princess Anne of Austria.

  But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio — who, restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad — or yet to abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever the independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne. And because of Anne’s fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to claim his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the great stream of life, were drawn more closely to each other.

  But as the years passed, and Anne’s prayers remained unanswered and the deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon a reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.

  One evening in the spring of 1594 — four years after the name of Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess — Frey Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose every inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face with a stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention, but there was about this man something familiar to the friar, something that stirred in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of shabby black was that of a common townsman, but there was something in his air and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of intrepidity and assurance.

  Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips of the stranger — who, in the fading light, might have been of any age from thirty to fifty — a puzzled frown upon the brow of the friar. Then the man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.

  “God save your paternity,” was his greeting.

  “God save you, my son,” replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him. “I seem to know you. Do I?”

  The stranger laughed. “Though all the world forget, your paternity should remember me.”

  And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. “My God!” he cried, and set a hand upon the fellow’s shoulder, looking deeply into those bold, grey eyes. “What make you here?”

  “I am a pastry-cook.”

  “A pastry-cook? You?”

  “One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the Convent here, and so for the sake of old times — of happier times — I bethought me that I might claim your paternity’s support.” He spoke with a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.

  “Assuredly...” began the priest, and then he checked. “Where is your shop?”

  “Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?”

  Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.

  For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour, desired to see her Excellency.

  “Lady,” he told her, “I have great news; news that will rejoice your heart.” She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. “Don Sebastian lives. I have seen him.”

  A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled until her face became as white as the nun’s coil upon her brow; her breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet, and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from falling. He saw that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared that she would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly delivered.

  “What do you say? Oh, what do you say?” she moaned, her eyes half-closed.

  He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she quelled the storm of her emotions.

  “And you say that you have seen him? Oh!” Once more the colour suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. “Where is he?”

  “Here. Here in Madrigal.”

  “In Madrigal?” She was all amazement. “But why in Madrigal?”

  “He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I — his sometime preacher and counsellor — was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people.”

  It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.

  Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been born.

  It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams, particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince. At last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.

  “I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply touched. He desires your leave to come and prostrate himself at your feet.”

  She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom heaved in tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint consent.

  Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour, where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in the background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle height, dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme simplicity, yet without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had first discovered him.

  His hair was of a light brown — the colour to which the golden locks of the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago might well have faded — his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes were grey. His face was handsome, and save for the colour of his eyes and the high arch of his nose presented none of the distinguishing and marring features peculiar to the House of Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his mother.

  Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before her.

  “I am here to receive your Excellency’s commands,” he said.

  She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.

  “Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up as a pastry-cook?” she asked him.

  “To serve your Excellency.”

  “Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least understand is that of a pastry-cook.”

  The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep sigh.

  “If in the p
ast I had better understood another trade, I should not now be reduced to following this one.”

  She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between them was very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a promise to come soon again, and the undertaking on her side to procure for his shop the patronage of the convent.

  Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass celebrated by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel — which was open to the public — and afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy and accompany him thence to the convent parlour, where the Princess waited, usually with one or another of her attendant nuns. These daily interviews were brief at first, but gradually they lengthened until they came to consume the hours to dinner-time, and presently even that did not suffice, and Sebastian must come again later in the day.

  And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also in intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian’s future came to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself. His penance had been overlong already for what was really no fault at all, since it is the heart rather than the deed that Heaven judges, and his heart had been pure, his intention in making war upon the Infidel loftily pious. Diffidently he admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel were of opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be long delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip might oppose Sebastian’s claims.

  Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa’s, and the long hours he spent in Anne’s company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal, within and without the convent. She was a nun professed, interdicted from seeing any man but her confessor other than through the parlour grating, and even then not at such length or with such constancy as this. The intimacy between them — fostered and furthered by Frey Miguel — had so ripened in a few weeks that Anne was justified in looking upon him as her saviour from the living tomb to which she had been condemned, in hoping that he would restore her to the life and liberty for which she had ever yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been against her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she was still within the five probationary years prescribed. Therefore, in her view, her vows were revocable.