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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




"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 matchless 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 foreordained 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.

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 expressed 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.

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