‘You are unlikely to have the chance,’ said Jaume. ‘And this Father Juan is a saint. He told me today that a single drop of the blood shed in Christ’s passion was enough to wash away the sins of infinite worlds.’
‘Oho, so you went into the confessional?’
‘I confessed and, God be praised, he absolved me!’
‘O, Jaume, Jaume, to think that you have been gaffed at last! But I’ll not ask absolution from a priest who makes cowards of my comrades.’
After vespers I heard the Vicar preaching. The camp was quiet, except for howling dogs and the smothered shrieks of a woman in delirium, and his voice came clear through the open windows of the Church:
‘…And I will recount another notable and proven miracle, vouched for by a worthy priest of my acquaintance who had a cure in the West Indies. A nobleman, poor in virtue but rich in the goods of this world, lived fast-rooted in grievous vice. He would ride with lance and dagger into the city of Havana where, gritting his teeth and gazing fiercely into the Heavens, he would cry: “Hey, God the Father! Come down and fight with me, and let us see which of us is the better man!”, with many other blasphemous and indecent expressions. This sinner was one night walking up and down a dark apartment of his magnificent mansion, rosary in hand, muttering I do not know what foolishness, when a woman’s voice, as sweet as a chime of bells, spoke from the floor: “Don Bassanio”—for that was his name—“why do you not put that rosary to its proper use and pray with devotion?” Astonished and awed, he reached for his tinder-box, struck a spark, lighted a candle and looked about him. He was alone in the room.
‘Searching further, he found on the floor a coloured picture of the Virgin, which he took up and laid against the wall, supporting it with both his hands, while he knelt and piously told his beads. At this juncture, two tall negroes appeared from nowhere, blew out the candle, stripped him stark naked and flogged him with slave-whips. They flogged him and flogged him, as he continued with his devotions, until he was nearly dead and fell fainting to the ground; whereupon a supernatural light pervaded the room and the same gentle voice said: “Go, villains, go! Leave this soul which is not yours—my Son has granted it to me through His mercy and my prayers.” Instantly they vanished, the light passed out by the door, and the rich man crawled after it and lay down on his bed. He sent for a friar, who asked in wonder why he had been summoned in the middle of the night.
‘The stricken sinner related his experiences, displaying his bruised and bleeding back, and begged urgently to be confessed, for the first time in eight-and-thirty years. The friar bade him be of good cheer, and console himself with the thought that God had generously pardoned even worse offenders. And he began the recital of his sins—not omitting one, for they were all fixed in his memory—which lasted, with brief intermissions, for no less than seventeen days; and at the end, observing his perfect contrition, the friar absolved him with a light penance. But so weak was he that he fell a victim to fever on the very day his penance was completed, and died like a saint.’
Thus Father Juan saved many a strayed soul with authentic and comforting anecdotes and, the better to fulfil his obligations, came to live ashore in the house of Captain Leyva, who had now succumbed to the plague.
***
For a week I was too sick even to keep my journal, and meanwhile many events occurred which can be reported only in brief, the details being lost. The natives continued to ambush our people whenever they left camp or strayed near the picket-fence, and we had three more men killed and ten wounded. Malope’s son was their leader, and the soldiers blamed Sebastian, though dead, for the tactics that our former friends now adopted. It appears that in the assembly-house, just before the murder, he had taken up an arrow and driven it in turn against his helmet, corslet and tassets, boasting to the natives that they were proof against their weapons; so now they aimed at our eyes or legs.
General Don Lorenzo gave orders for a few of the sick to be hauled out of bed and sent on guard, and thus contrived to detach a sergeant and twelve fit men for a punitive expedition against Malope’s village. They took the long-boat and, everyone running off at sight of them, they looted the huts at their ease and then burned every one to the ground.
This action alarmed the villagers who were our nearest neighbours on the other side, and they sent us a deputation under a flag of truce. Don Lorenzo hobbled out to meet them at the gate, but they retired when they saw his escort of arquebusiers. He called to them ingratiatingly, and asked: ‘Why do you not bring food as you used to do? We are your friends.’
Their leader replied, with eloquent gestures: ‘Halt, enough! Malope—Malope amigos—pu pu!’, meaning that he did not understand why, if we were such good friends with Malope, we had shot him dead. ‘What do you call this?’ he asked, pointing accusingly to the thick smoke that drifted across the bay from the burning village.
Don Lorenzo explained that the murderer had been punished and his head nailed to Malope’s house, whose sons were ill-advised to pursue their vengeance. They next asked after ‘the Taurique,’ meaning Don Alvaro, and were told: ‘He is asleep.’ Given presents from a chest of trade-goods, the property of the Colonel, they went off well-content, and both that day and the next came to the camp-gate with generous offerings. The food that they now brought was doubly welcome, because for the past week we had been forced to feed the sick with flour from our scant reserves. Throughout our stay in Santa Cruz, no native ever refused us hospitality or showed bad faith; yet how did we treat them in return?
In my register the deaths now exceeded the marriages and births, being, respectively, forty-one against eighteen and two. Though it was clear that we could not maintain ourselves ashore without inviting utter disaster, Doña Ysabel let it be understood that she would regard as mutinous any further talk of leaving the island. It seemed to me likely that she would postpone until too late the necessary decision—not that I much cared what became of me, so dulled were my feelings and intelligence—when the aggrieved soldiery would surely murder her and all her family. If that time came, I should not lift a finger to aid them.
Chapter 21
THE SETTLEMENT ABANDONED
Don Lorenzo did what he could for the welfare of the troops despite his wound, which was now purulent, and on the day after the General’s funeral he ordered the Captain of Artillery, with ten convalescents, to take the frigate in renewed search of the Santa Ysabel. They were away for a fortnight and, though following their instructions to the letter, found no trace of our lost comrades. Captain Lopez brought back a heap of pearl shells from one of the low islets to the north-east, but no pearls; also eight handsome, light-coloured boys, who were of no use to us as hostages, nor even as interpreters, because they spoke an altogether different language from that of Santa Cruz. Some charged him with vicious inclinations, but it is my belief that he acted from pure stupidity. On their arrival the boys speared a score of fish in the bay, which they divided among themselves and the officers; but a few days later the novelty of their new circumstances palled on them. Having robbed us of a good many toys and trifles, they stole a sea-going canoe from our neighbours and sailed off home.
An equally foolish affair was Captain de Vera’s seizure of three women, with six children, as hostages from the village beyond Malope’s. Since they refused to eat, their husbands were allowed to visit them daily, but always came accompanied by a flock of relatives who clamoured loudly for their release, shouting and wailing outside the guard-house and the Residency. After a week of this, Doña Ysabel wearied of the farce and set them free, at the Chief Pilot’s request.
Meanwhile, the fever had spread to the flagship, where the master-gunner and two of the standing guard died, but so far none of the crew was affected; and then to the smaller vessels, where nearly all the sailors fell sick, and fifteen died. A constant shifting of quarters now followed, those ashore hoping to recover their health on shipboard, and contrariwise. I was up and about again, though unsteady in my walk, and
liable to shed tears of pure weakness at the least excuse. The forlorn aspect of the camp shocked me; the troops filthy and unkempt, no longer ashamed of their stained and rusty armour; heaps of refuse flung to rot outside the huts; all cultivation abandoned; the neglected dung-trenches giving off a foul stench.
The only officer whose spirit had not been tamed by the common misfortune was the Chief Pilot: to show that he still had faith in our enterprise he even offered to bring his sailors ashore and set them to planting yams and maize. One day the Ensign-Royal went to visit him. I cannot say whether he was acting disinterestedly, or whether he had been deputed by others to say what he did; at all events, he warned Pedro Fernandez to cease his meddling unless he cared to be stabbed or strung up, or find himself, at best, marooned on the island for which he had conceived so strange and morbid an affection.
‘So you have returned to your old way of thinking?’ the Chief Pilot said sadly. ‘I had hoped that the Colonel’s cruel fate might have taught you prudence. Here we are, Don Toribio, serving God and the King to the best of our ability, and no man who, having put his hand to the plough, looks back…’
Don Toribio cut him short with: ‘So you are still singing your old song of Keep in step! Sús, sús, sús!—behaving more like a soldier than ever the Colonel did—and weeping for the heathen whom we have cheated with false hopes of salvation? Your piety is commendable, but since there will be no priest to watch over their souls’ welfare once they are baptized, it seems to me more pious to let them be. At present, unless I am ill-instructed in Christian doctrine, they have a limbo prepared for them after death, which is a tolerable enough state, compared with the Purgatory and Hell awaiting the baptized who die in sin.’
‘How do you mean: “there will be no priest”? Is not our Vicar willing to preach and baptize here for as many years as God grants him life?’
‘Your intelligence is out of date. Father Juan has himself drawn up a petition to Doña Ysabel in which he sets out many unanswerable objections against clinging to the settlement, and every man ashore who can hold a pen has put his mark or name to it. Then was then; now is now. Much has happened since the Colonel was executed, and the Vicar having come over to the side of reason, no signatory need stand in fear of the Governeress’s vengeance.’
‘Did he take this step of his own impulse?’ Pedro Fernandez asked in surprise.
‘I dare say that Captain Corzo prodded him a little; and also that he was not sorry to be prodded, for the great longing that he has to be with birds of his own black feather. But it is all one: the paper bears his name at the head, and tomorrow he will read it to your crew.’
Not more than nineteen soldiers were still capable of bearing arms, and most of these had the fever on them so that they could go on sentry duty only during daytime. The two veterans made a name by going about their work in soldierly style, when their comrades had abandoned themselves to despair: Juarez stood guard on thirteen consecutive nights, and Matia on fifteen. They held that a close sympathy exists between a soldier and his equipment. ‘Let your helmet rust and your head will ache; leave your corslet unscoured and the pain will go to your lungs; neglect your sword, and strength will drain from your sword-arm.’ When the petition was offered them for signature, they refused even to look at it, saying sourly: ‘We are ignorant soldiers; we know no Latin.’
Father Juan coming to the Chart-room, begged the Chief Pilot to sign and persuade his crew to do likewise. He answered that since his offer to grow crops was taken in such bad part by the troops, he had little sympathy with their petition; he would read it to the sailors, but nothing more.
The Vicar understood from this that he was displeased, but remarked shrewdly: ‘My son, if I thought that your reasons for wanting to stay in this island were wholly pious, I should praise you….’ With that he left, having been called away to the forecastle, but while still in the waist of the ship he suddenly cried out: ‘My head, my head! O God, shield me!’ and clung to the bulwarks. He was taken below to Juan de la Isla’s cabin, where it was found that he had the fever strong upon him.
Pedro Fernandez went ashore to fetch him his bedding and baggage and warn Doña Ysabel that mass would not be celebrated for several days at least. From a desire not to intrude upon her grief, he had paid her only a single brief and formal visit since Don Alvaro’s death; but on this occasion he hoped to be granted a longer audience. He found her dry-eyed and dressed from head to foot in black, which enhanced the beauty of her golden hair and milky skin. ‘A Governeress must not give way to grief,’ she told him with a sad smile, ‘though her heart bleed inwardly.’ When she learned of the Vicar’s affliction, she offered to feed him from her own table, but did not seem much concerned at the news, remarking merely that God’s purposes could not be gainsaid.
He was about to take his leave with a deferential salute, when Doña Ysabel restrained him. ‘Dear friend,’ she said, ‘you have witnessed the courage with which I face my cruel bereavement. Can you, too, steel your heart to hear ill news that concerns you nearly?’
Pedro Fernandez answered that he could, since her lips would take the sting from any misfortune they might report, were it ever so great.
‘Then listen, friend Pedro,’ she said, tightening her grip on his sleeve. ‘Some hours before my sainted husband died, he made me a weighty disclosure: that in Callao, on the evening when we should have sailed, a letter reached him from your brother-in-law, the confessor of the Clarissas in Lima, to the effect that your wife had died peacefully in his presence after receiving the sacraments. The funeral was to take place the next morning, and you were desired to attend it. Your poor wife having passed beyond mortal help, the General thought it right to withhold this message from you, because your services could not be spared. He told me that it had often been his intention to break the news to you, but feared to unsettle your mind already loaded with the cares of navigation; besides, he had destroyed your brother-in-law’s letter, lest Miguel Llano should read it, and was ashamed of the deceit.’
Tears started from Pedro Fernandez’s eyes and his large frame was shaken by sobs. He had loved Doña Ana with the extravagant devotion that deep-sea pilots often feel for wives from whom they are parted for years at a stretch. But presently he managed to control his grief, as if Doña Ysabel’s courageous bearing set him an example, and sighed as he crossed himself devoutly: ‘May her soul rest in eternal peace! The Lord has given; the Lord has taken away—blessed be His name!’
She bent forward and tenderly touched his brow with her lips. ‘Alas, dear Pedro, I pity you! I know too well what bitter pangs you suffer.’
Still weeping, he fell at her feet, but she raised him up, imploring him sweetly not to give way to his grief. Then she added, what she had omitted before, that his brother-in-law had undertaken to rear the motherless little boy, and care for him well in his own house.
When Pedro Fernandez took his leave, somewhat comforted by her kindness, she bound him, for her sake and that of the whole expedition, not to let this great loss prey upon his mind to the neglect of duty.
‘Now that my sainted husband lies under the sod,’ she said, ‘and my three brothers have all taken to their beds, you are the only man in whom I can place reliance. It is a common accusation against us Galicians that we keep ourselves to ourselves and distrust even our neighbours, let alone strangers; yet when we are shown true friendship by an outsider, which he proves by frequent acts of devotion, why, then we admit him freely to our close circle, and keep no secrets from him, and all we have is his.’
He trusted and believed her. Having spent most of that night on his knees, praying for his wife’s soul, in the morning he thought it his duty to forgive Don Lorenzo for the murderous threats he had made, and be reconciled to him. In the wing of the Residency which had been made over to Don Lorenzo as Captain-General, he found Doña Mariana alone in attendance upon him. He was now past the help of physicians, stretched on his bed as stiff as a linstock, except when a spasm seized him
and he groaned dismally like a felon on the rack. His face was set in a fixed grin, the corners of his mouth drawn downwards and backwards, and his forehead dripped with sweat. A stout rope had been hitched to a beam above the bed, and Doña Mariana told the Chief Pilot, amid tears: ‘Only with this, and the help of two strong men, can we turn him on his side.’ For Don Lorenzo’s twitching grin spelt neither mirth nor defiance: it was the horrid sardonicus risus—the spasmodic cramp of a man in the agony of lock-jaw.
‘How goes it with you, my lord?’ the Chief Pilot asked in a voice of commiseration.
‘I am dying, Don Pedro,’ he answered indistinctly through clenched teeth, ‘and I fear, without shrift.’ After a pause, he was understood to say: ‘Ah, Death, in what a wretched state have you overtaken me!’ Then he turned his eyes to the crucifix at the foot of his bed, and muttered: ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!’
Pedro Fernandez offered to fetch the Vicar, for which solicitude Doña Mariana thanked him tearfully. Glad to be able to forget his own sorrow in the service of others, he returned to the flagship, and entreated Father Juan to confess Don Lorenzo, who had not another hour to live.
‘No more have I!’ whispered the Vicar. ‘Nevertheless, let him be carried to my bedside, and I will do even as you ask.’
‘Alas, reverend Father, that is impossible.’ And the Chief Pilot explained the predicament.
‘I cannot come to him, my son. My strength fails.’
‘God will renew it,’ said the other, adding that no young man should be allowed to die without confession, and be cut off in the midst of his sins; nor, indeed, should anyone else while a priest was at hand.
The Islands of Unwisdom Page 33
