Chapter 14 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
FREY LUIS
Fear was an emotion which had never touched the Lady Margaret Trevanion, because in her twenty-five years of life she had never been exposed to any source of it. From the first dawn of memory in her there had been those to obey, some few to guide, but none to command her. At Trevanion Chase and along that Cornish countryside, where she was regarded as the Lady Paramount, her will had prevailed whenever and wherever it had been exerted. None had ever sought to thwart or oppose her. None had ever been lacking in respect. This partly because of the station into which the had been born, but more because she possessed a generous share of that quality of reserve and self-seclusion which is usually the result of breeding. That any should offend her in even the slightest measure was utterly inconceivable. In this assurance, and in the dignity born of it, a dignity not merely superficial but going to the very core of her being, lay her immunity from all presumptions and even from the impertinences of fatuously audacious gallantry, to which the unusual freedom of her life and ways might otherwise have exposed her.
So deep-rooted was her self-assurance, so firmly established by all past experience, that it did not forsake her even now when she found herself physically constrained, rudely handled, her head muffled in a cloak. Astonishment and resentment were her predominant emotions, Fear did not touch her, because it was incredible to her that she should have anything to fear, unthinkable that this violence should not be kept within very definite limits. She refrained from struggling, as much because she realized the futility of a trial of strength with the arms that held her, as because it was utterly beneath her dignity to have recourse to physical measures of self-defence.
Quiescent, then, she lay in the sternsheeets where she had been placed, seeking to control the seething indignation which might hamper the free exercise of her wits. She was not more than half conscious of the heave of the boat, of the creak of rowlocks and thwarts as the men strained at the oars and of an occasional inarticulate sound from one or the other of her rowers. Beside and immediately above her sat one whom she sensed to be Don Pedro. His arm was about her shoulders, either as a measure of repression or protection. It did not trouble her as at another time it must have done. She did not shrink in pudicity from that male contact which in another place must have awakened her resentment. There was a graver violence here to engage her indignation.
At the end of perhaps a half-hour that arm was withdrawn from her shoulders. Hands were busy with the cord which had been employed to secure the cloak about her waist. It was unfastened, the muffling garment was pulled away, and suddenly her head was free to the night air, her eyes free to take stock of her surroundings: the water about her, the stars overhead, the dark forms of the sailors heaving rhythmically on the thwarts, and the man who bent over her, his face a grey blue in the encompassing gloom. He spoke in the voice of Don Pedro.
"You will forgive this rude audacity, Margaret? It was a question softly uttered on a note of pleading."
She found her voice and was almost surprised at its steadiness and hardness. "We will speak of that when you set me ashore again in the cove below Trevanion Chase."
She guessed his smile rather than perceived it; that smile of subtle, mocking self-sufficiency which she knew so well, which she had rather admired but now found entirely abominable. "If I did not hope for forgiveness before then, I must kill myself with despair. There is no return, Margaret. You are committed with me to this adventure."
She attempted to struggle up from the floor of the boat upon which she was sitting. His arm returned to encircle her shoulders and so repress her movement.
"Calm, my dear," he urged her. "You need fear no indignity, no undue constraint. You go to the high destiny I have reserved for you."
"It is for yourself that you are reserving a high destiny," she answered boldly. "Gallows' high," she explained.
He said no more. With a half-sigh he sank back and was silent. He judged it better to wait until this mood of indignation should have passed, as pass he thought it must when she realised more fully how utterly now she was in his power. That realisation should bend her stubbornness more effectively than any words of his. She was not yet afraid. Hers was a high spirit, and this manifestation of it but rendered her the more desirable in his eyes. She was indeed a woman worth the winning, and to win her was worth all the patience he could command. That he would win her in the end, no doubt was possible to him. Like her own, his will, too, had been ever paramount.
The boat ploughed on. She looked up at the stars overhead, and at another yellower star low down on the horizon, a star which seemed to grow as they advanced. Once she looked back; but her glance failed to pierce the gloom which now blotted out completely the coastline and all sign of land. All that it revealed to her was that Don Pedro was not alone in the sternsheets. Another sat there beside him, grasping the tiller. One more protest she made, one more imperious demand, backed by a threat, to this helmsman, to put about and convey her back to shore. The man, however, did not understand. He said something in Spanish to Don Pedro and was answered shortly and sharply in the same tongue.
Thereafter she wrapped herself once more in her angry dignity and was silent. The yellow star ahead increased in size. It was reflected in a quivering spear of light across the water. Ultimately it resolved itself into the poop lantern of a towering ship, and soon they were bumping and scraping along the black sides of a great vessel, towards the entrance ladder, at the summit of which another lantern was being held by a human figure silhouetted in black against the light from the vessel's waist.
They brought up at the ladder, and her ladyship was invited by Don Pedro to ascend. She refused. She experienced in that moment her first wave of panic, and yielded to it. She struggled, resisted, commanded and threatened. A rope slid down the ship's side by the ladder. A sailor caught the end and made in it a running noose. This was slipped over her head, and allowed to slide down her body as far as her knees. Then her arms were raised, and the noose came up again about her until it reached her armpits and gently tightened there. Another moment and Don Pedro had caught her up and hoisted her to his shoulder. Thus burdened, supporting her with his left arm, he grasped the ladder with his right, and raised his right foot to the lowest rung. He began the ascent. She realised that if she struggled or attempted to fling herself from him, she would be suspended by the rope. Of the alternative indignities, the less was to be borne thus upon his shoulder.
In the ship's waist, where a ring of lanterns made a patch of almost brilliant illumination, he set her down. The rope which had been drawn up hand over hand in a measure as she was borne aloft, lay like a snake along the deck at her feet. Don Pedro loosed and widened the noose until it fell away from her.
At the head of the entrance ladder stood Duclerc, the master, lantern in hand By the hatch-coamings two others waited: one of them stockily-built and dressed as a gentleman, the other tall and gaunt, in the white habit and black scapulary and mantle of a Dominican friar, his face lost in the shadows of the pointed cowl which covered his head.
The first of these advanced briskly now, and bowing low before Don Pedro, murmured softly. This was Don Diego, the intendant or steward of the Count of Marcos, he who had fitted the ship for the voyage to England so soon as word had been brought him of his master's waiting there.
The friar remained where he was, immovable as a statue, his hands folded within the capacious sleeves of his gown. Don Pedro's glance seeming to question his presence, the alert Don Diego explained it readily. No ship in the service of Catholic Spain could sail without a spiritual guide. He invited the friar forward and presented him as Frey Luis Salcedo. Priest and noble bowed to each other with all outward semblance of mutual deference. As the friar came upright again, his hands still folded in his sleeves, the gleam of a lantern momentarily dispelled the shadows cast about his face by the cowl. Her ladyship had a glimpse of an ascetic countenance, narrow, lean and pallid, in which glowed two sombre eyes whose glance struck through her stout soul the chill of a fear such as nothing in this adventure had yet occasioned her. In that single glance so swiftly eclipsed, she caught something of sinister menace, of active malevolence, before which her soul shuddered as it might have shuddered in the presence of a supernatural manifestation.
Then Don Pedro was informing her that the ship's main cabin was at her service, and inviting her to follow Don Diego, who would lead the way. She stood an instant hesitating, her head high, her chin thrust forward, her glance proud to the point of defiance. At last she turned and followed the stocky figure of the intendant, being followed in her turn by Don Pedro. Until resistance could be of some avail, she must suffer them to have their way with her. This she perceived, and, perceiving it, submitted upheld ever by her dignity and assisted by the persisting incredulity that any real harm could possibly touch her.
At the entrance to the gangway under the break of the poop Don Pedro was arrested by a hand upon his arm.
He turned to find the friar at his elbow. The man had followed him. If his sandalled feet had made any sound upon the deck, this had been lost in the noise of general activity aboard as the ship broached to. There had been a creaking of blocks and halliards, a pattering of steps, and now as the helm was put up, the slatting sails filled and bellied with a succession of thuds like muffled cannon-shots. Listing slightly to larboard under the burden of the breeze, the Demoiselle out of Nantes with her crew of Spanish sailors slipped away through the night.
Don Pedro frowned interrogatively into the ascetic face upon which the tight of a lantern swinging just within the gangway was beating fully.
The friar's thin lips moved. "This woman whom your lordship brings aboard?" he questioned.
Don Pedro was conscious of a spasm of anger. The impertinence of the question was aggravated by its contemptuous terseness. But he tempered the reply which another would have had from him to the quality of his questioner.
"This lady," he said with a slow emphasis, "is the future Countess of Marcos. I am glad to have this opportunity of announcing it to you, so that you may speak of her henceforth with a proper deference."
He turned on his heel whilst the friar was impassively bowing, and went on towards the great cabin, damning in his heart Don Diego for having taken aboard for spiritual guide a brother of the order of St. Dominic. These Dominicans were all alike in their insolence, swollen with pride of power in the authority they derived from their inquisitorial functions. From the Inquisitor-General to the meanest brother they knew no respect of rank however lofty.
A comprehensive glance at the interior of the cabin dispelled some of Don Pedro's irritation. It had been furnished in a manner worthy of its intended tenants. On the snowy napery of the table crystal and silver sparkled under the light of the swinging lanterns; cushions of crimson velvet laced with gold embellished the chairs and dissembled the rudeness of the long sea-chest ranged under the stern windows of the coach. A long mirror stood between the doors of the two cabins opening on this main one on the starboard side and another beside the door of the single cabin to larboard. A soft, eastern rug of brilliant reds and blues was spread underfoot and there were tapestries to mask the bulkheads.
Beside the table, slight and sleek, stood Pablillos, one of Don Pedro's own household, fetched from his Asturian home to be now his body servant.
Don Diego, in the circumstances, and considering the haste, had done more than well, and deserved the two words of commendation which his master uttered. Then, dismissing him, Don Pedro waved the lady to a place at table from which Pablillos now withdrew and held the chair.
She looked at him steadily. Her face was white under a cloud of red-gold, now slightly dishevelled hair There was also some disarray in her dull red bodice, and there was a rent in the lace collar under which her bosom rose and fell to betray the emotion she desired above all to dissemble.
"I have no choice," she said, coldly, contemptuously, in protest. "Since you will waste your time to my hurt in constraining me, I must submit. But it is the act of a coward, Don Pedro, and of an ingrate. You return me evil for good. I should have left you to the fate which you prove to me that every Spaniard deserves at the hands of honest men."
With that she moved slowly forward in frosty dignity and took her place at table.
Don Pedro stood deathly pale, pain in his eyes and dark shadows under them. Against the whiteness of his face, his little pointed beard and upward flung moustaches looked startlingly black. He betrayed no anger under the lash of her words: only melancholy. He inclined his head a little.
"The rebuke is merited, I know. But even if you deem my action base, do not blame all Spaniards for the faults of one. And even for these faults, in judging them, consider the source from which they spring." He sat down opposite to her. "It is not by his actual deeds that a man is to be judged, but by the motive which inspires them. A thousand men of honour might have crossed your path in life and retained your esteem as men of honour because moved to no action that could diminish them. I am, I trust, a man of honour..."
She uttered a short, interrupting laugh. He caught his breath, and flushed a little; but repeated himself and continued. "I am, I trust, a man of honour, as in the past you rightly judged me. I might have departed leaving you in that persuasion, had not an overmastering, an overwhelming temptation shattered all preconceptions for me. Knowing you, Margaret, I came to love you, passionately, desperately, blindly."
"Must you continue?"
"I must. For I desire you to understand before you judge. This love of mine, growing to worship, filling me with a sense of adoration, rendered you so necessary to me that I could not face life without you." He passed a hand wearily across his pallid brow. "These things are not of our own devising. We are the slaves of Nature, pawns of Destiny, who uses us to her purpose, lashing us into obedience of her peremptory will. I did not ask to love you. I did not even desire it of my own volition. The desire was planted in me. It came I know not whence, a behest which there was no disobeying, compelling, utterly overmastering. In what opinion you held me before to-night I scarcely know. But I think that you esteemed me. And a woman such as I unerringly judge you to be could not esteem a man whom she supposed addicted to banal gallantries, to the pursuit of trivial amours, making sacrilegiously of love a pastime and a vileness. I am no such man. This I swear to you by my faith and my honour in the sight of God and His Holy Mother."
"Why trouble to swear or to forswear? All this is naught to me."
"Ah, wait! It must be something, surely. It must have weight with you that what I have done has been done in no levity possible to some such man as I say that I am not. I have abducted you. It is an ugly word."
"A proper word to describe an ugly fact, a crime for which you shall most certainly be brought to answer."
"A crime, as you say. But it is opportunity that make the criminal. There has never been in human man—save One, and He was more than human—so much inherent virtue that there is no point at which temptation cannot break it." He sighed. "Believe me at least that I should never have done what I have done if, in addition to the temptation provided by my need, my irresistible need of you, the circumstances themselves had not conspired to force me. Time would not stand still for me. This ship could not be kept indefinitely in English waters. Every hour exposed her to the risk of seizure. So I must make haste. I spoke to you last night of love—timidly, tentatively. I was rebuffed. It was to have been feared. The disclosure came too abruptly. It startled you, disturbed you, ruffled you. In other circumstances I should have paused. I should have brought an infinite patience to my wooing, sustaining that patience by the conviction that just, as in our first meeting, something of you had gone out to me to mark me for your own as long as I have life, so something from me must have gone out to you with the same message, although you might not yet be aware of it. It is impossible that the emotions which stirred in me should be other than reciprocal. They were as the spark that is born of the meeting of flint and steel, to the creation of which both elements are necessary. You were not yet aware of it; that was all. But in time, in a little time, I must have awakened you to this awareness. Time, however, was not at my command. It was impossible that I could protract my stay in England." He flung out an arm in a gesture of passion, and leaned forward a little across the table. "What choice, then, had I but to resort to this villainy as you deem it, as the only alternative to the impossibility of renouncing you?" He waited for no answer. But swept on. "I have brought you away by force that I may woo you, Margaret, that I may place at your feet all that I have and all that I am, and crown you with all the honours won already and all those yet to be won under your dear inspiration. It is known by now on this ship that I am taking you to Spain to make you Countess of Marcos, and from this moment you will be entreated by all with the deference and homage due to that rank."
He paused, his melancholy, love-lorn glance upon her in humble supplication. But neither the glance nor his words had produced any visible impression. The eyes with which she returned his glance were hard, and there was only scorn in the little smile that tightened her red lips.
"I have thought you whilst you spoke sometimes a knave, sometimes a fool. I perceive you now to be a sorry mixture of both."
He shrugged and even smiled, an infinite weariness in his eyes. "That is not argument."
"Argument? Does it need argument to prick the empty bubble you have laboured so to blow? By the same arguments there is no vileness in the world that cannot be justified. The facts are here, Don Pedro; you have returned evil for good; you have used me with violence and indignity, hoping to constrain me to your will; you have left anxiety and sorrow behind, in a house which sheltered you in time of stress. These facts no arguments in the world can ever dispel. The attempt upon me I tell you now is idle. I'll be no man's countess against my will, and I have no will to be yours and never shall have. If you would earn a forgiveness you may yet come to need, I ask you again to give orders to go about and restore me to my home."
He lowered his eyes and sighed. "Let us eat," he said, and spoke rapidly in Spanish to the waiting and wondering Pablillos, who at once grew busy with the dishes prepared upon a buffet.
In a spirit of admirable philosophic detachment, Don Pedro found himself admiring the courage which permitted her to answer him so firmly, to sit before him so uprightly, and to meet his eye so steadily. How differently would any other woman he had ever known have borne herself in this situation! What tears and outcries would not have deafened and nauseated him! But Margaret was tempered finely as steel. Not in all the world could he find such another mother for his sons. What men would she not bear to add lustre and honour to the house of Mendoza y Luna?
Of her ultimate surrender he was confident. The arguments he had used were sincere enough; they expressed his utter faith; and in that faith he could practice patience, a virtue impossible only where there is doubt.
She ate sparingly; but that she could eat at all was a further proof of her spirit. She drank, too, a little wine; but was careful to drink only from the same jug as that which supplied Don Pedro. Observing this caution he rated her wit as highly as her spirit. Thus her very defiances and mistrusts but served to magnify her in his adoring eyes.
The single cabin on the starboard side had been prepared for Don Pedro, and prepared luxuriously. Informed of it by Pablillos he yielded it to her ladyship, and she withdrew to it with the cold resignation which had marked her every surrender to the force of circumstances.
Alone there, her demeanour may have altered. In secret she may have yielded to fear and grief and indignation. Certain it is that when early on the following morning she sought the deck, where she might conceive herself less prisoned than in the coach, there was a haggardness which her countenance had never worn before and a redness about her eyes which may have been the result of weeping or of sleeplessness, both new experiences in the life of the Lady Margaret Trevanion. Apart from those, however, she flew no signals of distress. She had dressed herself with pains, repairing the disorder which her garments had suffered, and she had tired her hair with care. Her step was as firm as the canting deck permitted, her manner one of chill dignity and assurance.
Thus she emerged from the gangway to the waist, which, beheld now in the morning sunlight, seemed less spacious than yesternight. Her glance strayed from the square main hatch with its shot rack to the boats on the booms amidships and lingered a moment on a sturdy lad, who, engaged in polishing the brass hoops of a scuttlebutt, eyed her with furtive interest. The wind had freshened with the sunrise, and there were men aloft taking in sail. Save for the youth at the scuttle-butt she seemed singularly alone. But as she moved forward along the weather quarter away from the break of the poop, she saw that there were men on the quarter-deck above. Duclerc, the sturdy, bearded French master, leaned on the carved rail, observing her. As she turned he doffed his bonnet in salutation. Behind him two sailors were gazing up into the shrouds, following the operations there of those aloft.
She crossed the canted deck to the quarter on which she supposed that land her England—would last have been. There was no land now in sight. She had a sense almost that the ship was in the centre of a vast aqueous globe, for the pellucid morning sky seemed one with the ocean. A nausea of dismay swept over her, and she steadied herself against the bulwarks, to become suddenly aware that she was less alone than she had believed. Against one of the forecastle bulkheads leaned a tall figure as immovable as if it had been a caryatid carved to bear the burden of that forward deck.
It was the friar. His cowl was now thrown back from his tonsured head, and his face thus fully revealed in the light of day announced him younger than she had supposed him, a man in the middle thirties. Despite its hungry, almost wolfish look, it was a not unhandsome face, and one that must anywhere arrest attention. The nose was prominent, almost Semitic, the cheek-bones thrust forward boldly, seeming to drag the sallow skin with them and leave gaunt hollows in the cheeks. His mouth was wide, but thin of lips and firm, whilst under a jutting brow two great, dark eyes glowed sombrely.
He stood within but a few yards of where she had come to lean, his finger closed upon his breviary, a string of beads intertwining his fingers and hanging from his hand; they formed—although she could not know or guess it—a chaplet brought from the Holy Land, each grain of which was wrought of camel-bone.
Perceiving her regard upon him, he slightly inclined his head in greeting, but his face remained as impassive as if carved of wood. He advanced towards her, his great stern eyes upon her, and she grew conscious of a faint uneasy quickening of her pulses, such as besets us at the approach of some creature of a species not known or understood. To her surprise he greeted her in English. He uttered commonplaces, but his deep, grave voice and sibilant Spanish accent seemed to lend them consequence. He expressed a hope that she had found a ship's quarters not too uncomfortable, that sleep had been possible to her in surroundings that must be unaccustomed so that, waking refreshed, she had commended herself to the Holy Mother of God, the natural protectress of all virgins.
She realised that the apparently courteous hope was in reality a question, although perhaps she scarcely understood the depth to which it was meant to probe. Indeed, her active wits were already engaged on other matters. This man was a priest, and although his might be a creed superficially different from her own, yet in fundamentals it was essentially the same. Good and Evil wore the same aspect in Roman as in Lutheran eyes, and he was by his office and his habit a servant of the Good, an upholder of virtue, a champion of the oppressed. Had he known no English, he could not have availed her. He must have drawn his own conclusions touching her presence on that ship, or accept whatever tale Don Pedro told him. But the fact that she could appeal to him, tell her own story and be understood, seemed all at once to dispel her every qualm and open a clear way for her out of her present difficulties. Let him but know of the violence done her, of how she was placed, and his assistance must be won; he must stand her friend and protector, and he a man in authority who could enforce, even upon so great a gentleman as Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, the need to right this wrong.
Don Diego had blundered worse than he knew, or Don Pedro yet suspected, in bringing this Dominican as the ship's spiritual guide. The man's knowledge of English, which was the very ground upon which Don Diego had chosen him for a voyage to England, was the very ground upon which, had there been no other, he should have been left in Spain. But this was all outside her ladyship's knowledge. All that mattered was that he spoke her tongue and that he was here beside her to hear what she had to tell.
The colour flooded to her cheeks, a sparkle came to eyes that a moment since had been dull with dejection. Her first words were such as must commend her to him, and almost quiet the doubts concerning her that were stirring in his mind, doubts which his questioning greeting had desired to test.
"God must have sent you to me; God and that Holy Mother whom you pronounce the protectress of all maids in need. Be you her deputy by me. For I am sorely in need of protection."
She saw the stern eyes soften. Compassionate tenderness invested that ascetic countenance.
"I am an unworthy servant of the Lord and of those who call upon the Lord. What is your need, my sister?"
Briefly, with feverish speed, she told him that she had been ravished from her home and brought by violence aboard this ship, in which she was being carried to Spain in the power and at the mercy of Don Pedro de Mendoza.
He inclined his head. "I know," he said quietly.
"You know? You know?" There was almost horror in her voice. Was it possible that this priest was in the plot? Were the hopes vain to which his presence had but given birth? He knew, and yet bore himself with such indifference!
"I also know, if man's words are to be believed, that Don Pedro means you honourably."
"What is that to the matter?" she cried out.
"Something. Something, surely, that his intentions concerning you are not villainous or sinful."
"Not villainous? Not sinful? To bear me off against my will! To coerce me!"
"It is a wrong, a grave and wicked wrong," Frey Luis admitted quietly. "Yet not so grave or so wicked as it might be, and as first I feared it was. I feared a mortal sin to imperil the salvation of his soul. And who voyages in ships should more than another preserve that state of grace in which to meet his Maker, since at any moment the perils of sea may summon him to that Dread Presence. But a wrong there is, as I perceive. You desire me to prevail upon Don Pedro to repair it. Content you, my sister. In my protection, under God's, whose servant I am, rest you assured that no evil shall befall you. Don Pedro either returns you to your home at once, or you shall be delivered from this coercion so soon as you touch Spanish soil."
She could have laughed in her exultation, so easy had it been to secure the frustration of all Don Pedro's measures. The voyage no longer had any peril to daunt her. The mantle of Saint Dominic protected her, and although she knew little, if anything, about that ardent, zealous 'saint who had preached the love of Christ with fire and sword and warred relentlessly upon all who did not think as he did, she felt that she would hold his name ever hereafter in reverence and love.
Frey Luis had passed his beads and breviary into his left hand He raised now his right, with three fingers extended, and made the sign of the cross in the air over her golden head, a murmur of Latin on his lips.
To the Lady Margaret this was almost as the ritual of some incantation. Her wide-set, generous eyes dilated a little as she looked at him. Frey Luis read the question of that uncomprehending stare, observed that golden head held rigid, unbowed and unresponsive to his benediction, and his own eyes reflected a sudden doubt which mounted swiftly to conviction. Dismay overspread the austere face. This thing which Don Pedro had done went deeper than he could have dishonoured him by suspecting. It suddenly assumed proportions of wickedness and evil far exceeding any which he attached to the abduction in itself, indeed the last wickedness he would have believed of a nobleman of a family so renowned for piety as Don Pedro's, a family which had given Spain a Primate. This abducted woman, whom Don Pedro intended for his wife and the mother of his children, was a heretic.
Before that horrible discovery Frey Luis recoiled in body as in spirit. His lips tightened; his expression became mask-like. He folded his hands within the sleeves of his white woollen habit, and without another word turned on his sandalled heel and moved slowly away to cogitate this horror.