Chapter 15 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
SCYLLA
So deeply perturbed by his discovery was Frey Luis that he required time to recover from the shock and to rehearse the measures by which he was to combat Satan for the imperilled soul of Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. The holy man prayed long and fervently for guidance and for strength. As one who sincerely regarded the world and its honours as trivial evanescenses to be crossed on the path to eternity, he stood in no awe of the great, acknowledged no superiority in any nobility that was not rooted in zeal for the Faith. He would serve no king who was not himself a servant of God; acknowledge no king who did not acknowledge himself that. Worldly power, which himself he had spurned when he assumed the habit of St. Dominic, became a contemptible mockery in his eyes, a thing of scorn, from the moment that it ceased to be employed first and foremost in the service of the Faith. It follows from all this, which was not without its unperceived leaven of arrogance and the deadly sin of pride, that Frey Luis was no respecter of persons or of rank. Yet whilst despising worldly rank, he must acknowledge it. It was necessary to reckon with it. Evil could be wrought by it. Because self-seeking men were sycophantic to it, great strength was often necessary so as to stand against it and thwart it where it addressed itself to unholy ends.
For this strength prayed Frey Luis, and it was not until the following afternoon that he felt himself sufficiently equipped and inspired for his struggle with the devil.
Don Pedro took the air—crisp and sharp, despite the sunlight—upon the poop. He was distressed and moody, when Frey Luis approached him. But because it was some time before the Dominican's words showed whither he was travelling, Don Pedro offered no interruptions, betrayed no impatience.
Frey Luis went a long way round, so as completely to disguise his approaches; so as to say all that mattered, all that should germinate in the 'soul of Don Pedro, before Don Pedro, discerning the friar's real aim, should be tempted to set a term to his discourse. It amounted to little less than a sermon.
He began by speaking of Spain, of her glory first and then of her difficulties. Her glories he described as the mark of divine favour upon her. God made it manifest that the Spaniards were to-day his chosen people, and woe unto Spain should she ever grow negligent of the stupendous grace vouchsafed her.
Don Pedro permitted himself to wonder was the scattering of the Armada by the hosts of Heaven a manifestation of this grace.
The doubt inflamed Frey Luis. Not the hosts of Heaven, but the powers of darkness had been responsible for that. God had permitted it as a warning to a people against the deadly sin of pride—one of Satan's most artful snares—which might betray them into supposing that their glories were the result of their own puny endeavours. It was necessary to remind men, lest they perished, that without the favour of Heaven nothing was to be achieved on earth.
There were a dozen answers which suggested themselves to the logical mind of Don Pedro, who had first known doubt on that morning when he awakened in the cove below Trevanion Chase. But he offered none of them, knowing already how they would be met.
Frey Luis passed on to speak of his country's difficulties. The jealous enemies without, and the insidious enemies within; the latter inspired and sustained by the former. Because Spain, under God's favour and protection, was unconquerable in direct and honourable warfare, Satan sought to undermine the religious unity which rendered her invulnerable by insinuating sectarian disorders into her bosom. To wound her in her faith was to bleed her of her strength. The Jews, those enemies of the Cross, those armies of the powers of darkness, had been driven out. But the New Christians remained with their frequent judaizings. Gone were those other legionaries of hell, the followers of Mahomet. But the Moriscoes remained and their frequent lapses into the abominations of Islam, continued a defilement. And, after all, the taint of Jew and Moor was in many a man of lineage. Not every nobleman of Spain was as clean of blood as Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. But not even clean blood was nowadays a sufficient safeguard, since it assured no immunity from the poison of heresy, poison which, once introduced into the body, laboured there until it had destroyed it utterly. And there were signs of it, more than signs of it, in Spain already. Frey Luis became lugubrious. Valladolid was a hot-bed of Lutheranism. Salamanca was little better than a heretical seminary. The disciples of Luther and Erasmus became daily bolder. Even a primate of Spain, Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, had been guilty of Lutheranising in his catechism.
Upon this climax of exaggeration, Don Pedro interrupted him. "The archbishop was acquitted of the charge."
The Dominican's eyes flashed with holy wrath.
"That acquittal shall be atoned for in hell by those who betrayed their God in pronouncing it. For seventeen years Carranza lay in the prisons of the Holy Office, defending himself with sophistries which the Devil inspired in him for his self-preservation. He should have left them for the fire. In such matters there is no room for arguments or casuistries; whilst men talk, the evil grows; it grows even from their disputations. What is needed is that we extirpate these buboes of heretical pestilence, that we cauterise them once for all with the purifying flame. To the fire with all these putrescentes! And so, Amen!" He flung up one of his long arms in a gesture of denunciation almost terrifying in its remorseless vehemence.
"Amen, indeed!" Don Pedro echoed.
The Dominican's lean, feverish hand clawed the nobleman's arm in its black velvet sleeve. His eyes glowed with eagerness and saintly zeal.
"That is the response I expected from you, the response worthy of your nobility, of your clean blood and of the representative of the great house of Mendoza, which has laboured ever to the glory of God and of Spain."
"What other response could have been possible? I am, I hope, a faithful son of Mother Church."
"Not merely faithful, but active; a member of the Militia Christi. Are you not in some sort my brother, my spiritual brother in the great fraternity of St. Dominic? Are you not a lay tertiary of the order, and, so, consecrated to uphold the purity of the Faith and to expunge heresy wherever you shall find it?"
Don Pedro began to frown at so much vehemence. "Why do you question me, Frey Luis?"
"To test you, whom I find upon the brink of a precipice. To assure myself that your faith is strong enough to keep you from the vertigo that may hurl you down into the depths."
"I am on the brink of a precipice? I? You give me news, brother." And Don Pedro laughed with a flash of white teeth behind his black beard.
"You stand in danger of defiling the purity of your blood which hitherto has been without taint. You have announced to me that you will give your children a heretic for their mother."
Don Pedro understood, though, truth to tell, the thing took him by surprise. The fact was, although he dared not admit it to this zealot, that swept headlong by the stream of passion he had given no thought to this side of the matter.
For an instant he stood appalled. He was a devout and faithful son of the Church, as he had announced; and he was dismayed to discover how reckless he had been of matters which should have claimed his first attention. But the dismay was momentary. The same high confidence that he would win the Lady Margaret to be a willing bride assured him that he would have no difficulty in bringing her within the fold of the True Faith. He said so, and by the confident assurance entirely changed the current of the friar's thoughts. Frey Luis was uplifted like a man who suddenly perceives the light where all before him had been darkness.
"Blessed be God!" he exclaimed piously. "Woe me for the weakness of my own faith! I failed to see, my brother, that you were chosen to be the instrument of her salvation."
He enlarged upon this theme. In his view it justified all that Don Pedro had done, the very violence he had used in abducting this lady. Here was no question of any yielding to carnal lusts such as the friar had shuddered to his soul in contemplating. Don Pedro was snatching a brand from the burning, carrying off not so much a fair smooth body cast in the Satanic mould of loveliness for man's corruption, but, rather, a soul that was in peril of damnation. The friar would be his ally now in this worthy work. He would bear the light of the true faith to this damsel for whom such high temporal destinies were reserved. He would labour in the holy work of delivering her from the heretical abominations absorbed in the abominably heretical country of her birth, and by converting her to the true faith, render her a fit bride for the Count of Marcos, a fit mother for future Mendozas.
Even if Don Pedro had possessed the inclination he would not have dared to oppose Frey Luis in this. But it was what he himself desired, what, now that he came to consider it, he perceived must happen before he could dare take Margaret to wife.
And so Frey Luis was granted charter to preach conversion to the Lady Margaret.
He went about it with an infinite caution, patience and zeal, labouring assiduously for three days to break down the earthworks which he clearly perceived to have been thrown up about her by Satan. But the more he laboured, the more did those Satanic ramparts grow to frustrate the gallant zeal of his attacks.
At first the Lady Margaret had been interested in his expositions. Perhaps, even because of her interest, she had come to interrupt him with questions. How did he know this? What was his authority for that? And when he answered her, behold her presenting him with embarrassing rejoinders straight from Scripture, begging him to reconcile this or that of his statements with these passages from Holy Writ.
To her it was an engrossing game, a heaven-sent pastime to beguile the tedium of those days upon that ship, to take her mind from distracting activities upon the past and the future. But to him it was an appalling torment. There was a simplicity about her which was devastating, a directness of question and a lucidity of statement that at moments reduced him to despair.
Frey Luis had never met her equal. This need not surprise us. His inquisitorial dealings had chiefly been concerned with judaizers and relapsed Moriscoes. His knowledge of English had brought him into touch with some English and other mariners consigned for heresy to the prisons of the Holy Office. But they had been ignorant men, even when ship-masters, in religious matters. They had clung stubbornly to certain fundamental tenets of the heretical creed in which they had been reared; but they had attempted no argument or answers to the arguments which, in the performance of his holy duty, he had placed before them.
The Lady Margaret Trevanion's was a very different case. Here was a woman who had read and re-read the Scriptures, largely for lack of other reading matter, until she knew—whilst scarcely aware of it—a deal of them by heart. Add to this that she was gifted with a clear intelligence, a ready, wit, and a high courage, and that she had been reared in the habit of expressing herself with the utmost frankness. These matters which Frey Luis came so assiduously to expound had never greatly exercised her mind in the past. Her father was not a religious man, and sentimentally his leanings had been rather to the old Romish faith. He had been careless of his daughter's religious training, and had left her to pursue it for herself. But if she had never yet exercised herself upon it in the past, she was ready enough to exercise herself upon it now, when in a sense she found herself challenged to do so. The ease with which she found herself embarked in polemical argument, the readiness with which quotations came to her hand as required, surprised her very self.
It more than surprised Frey Luis. It brought him to a raging despair. It proved to him how right were the fathers of the Church to forbid the translation and diffusion of the sacred writings, and what a lure of Satan's if was to place those books in the hands of those who because they could not understand them must, of necessity pervert their meaning. Thus, by the wiles of the Devil, the very means of salvation were transformed into instruments of corruption.
When he said so in furious denunciation, she laughed at him, laughed like a Delilah or a Jezebel, flaunting her white beauty, as it seemed to him, before his eyes as if to take him in the lure of it, as she had taken Don Pedro. He covered his face with his hands.
"Vade retro, Sathanas!" he cried aloud, whereat she but laughed the more.
"So, sir friar," she rallied him, "I am become Satan now, and I am to get behind you! You're ungallant, which is no doubt very proper in a priest, however distressing in a man. But behind you I will not get. I'll face you out, sir, until one of us goes down in defeat."
He uncovered his face to stare at her with eyes of horror. He took that rallying phrase in its literal sense.
"Until one of us goes down in defeat?" he echoed. Then his voice soared passionately. "Until Satan triumphs, you mean! Woe me!" And on that he fled from the great cabin where the atmosphere had grown stifling, to seek breath and sanity on the open deck with the salt tang of the sea in his nostrils.
That happened on the third day of his efforts of conversion, and it was fateful. Her words pursued him. "I'll face you out until one of us goes down in defeat." It was a threat; a threat of Satan's spoken through those fair, false lips. He perceived it now. Out here under God's sky, it came to him that he had stood in direst peril. He, the hunter, had begun to be the hunted. There were moments, as he now perceived, when his own faith had momentarily faltered under the specious arguments, the glib answers with which she had counter-assailed him; moments when he had stood in doubt of what actually was the teaching of the Church, bewildered by a sudden confrontation with some text of Scripture which seemed to give the lie to what he had last said. And this had happened to him, a man learned in these matters, at the hands of a woman, a girl, an untutored child! It was unthinkable, preposterous that she should be able to do this of her own wit. Whence had she the power? Whence? It must be that she was possessed, a subject of unholy inspiration.
The conviction grew, and something beside the thought of her polemics came to strengthen it. The image of her was solid before his eyes. He beheld her concrete, almost palpable before him even now: the lissom form on the cushions of the sea-chest with the glowing horn panes of the stern windows behind her, her head thrown back in laughter and lending her an air of wantonness; the red-gold hair that seemed at moments to flame in the sunlight, the blue eyes so full of a false alluring candour, the white throat, so fully revealed by the wanton cut of her corsage and the swelling curve of breast below, along which his eyes had unduly lingered. They lingered now upon the image of it all, even though he pressed his palms against his eyeballs as if to crush them, revolted, terrified to find that image evoking an unholy thrill in his starved virility.
"Vade retro, Sathanas!" he muttered again, and piteously from the depths of his soul cried out for help against the terrible lure of the flesh, so long and fiercely repressed and now rising up to destroy him. "Vade retro, Sathanas!"
A hand touched his shoulder. He started as if a red-hot iron had been pressed against him. Beside him as he sat there on the hatch-coaming to which he had sunk, stood the slight, elegant figure of Don Pedro observing him with a half-smile.
"With what devil do you wrestle, Frey Luis?"
Frey Luis looked up at him with haunted eyes. "That is what I desire to know," he answered. "Sit here beside me," he invited, and the great gentleman obeyed.
There was a silence, at the end of which the Dominican began to discourse. He spoke of witchcraft and demonology in a fevered manner and with a leaning to impure things—not necessarily in itself impure. He expounded the origin and nature of the devil; alluded to the many weapons and snares of which the devil avails himself, and the dangers created by the illusions in which these are veiled. Antichrist, he asserted, was to be fathered by an incubus, even as the accursed heresiarch, Luther, had been fathered.
The discourse dragged on. It was obscure and Don Pedro wearied of it.
"What have I to do with all this?" he ventured.
The friar swung to him, and laid a hand heavily upon his shoulder. Solemnly he put a question.
"Would you prefer a crumb of ephemeral and poisoned pleasure to the banquet of infinite and everlasting bliss which is offered to you in Heaven?"
"God help me! Of course not."
"Then be warned in time, my brother."
"Of what?"
Frey Luis answered obliquely. "God hath set woman in the world to put man to the proof. Woe unto him that fails!"
"If you said it in Greek, I might understand you better," was the impatient answer.
"This woman..." the friar was beginning.
"If you mean the Lady Margaret Trevanion, you'll speak of her differently or not at all."
Don Pedro got up stiffly, breathing noisily through his nostrils. But Frey Luis was not to be abashed.
"Words are naught. It is the fact they express that signifies. This lady, my lord, is beyond conversion."
Don Pedro looked at him and fingered his beard. "Beyond such arts of it as yours, you mean."
"Beyond all arts. She is possessed."
"Possessed?"
"Of a devil. She has recourse to witchcraft. She..."
Leaning over him, Don Pedro hissed an interruption. "Silence, madman! Is your vanity so monstrous, your pride so egregious, that because you have not the wit to persuade her, you must assume the devil speaks with her tongue? Why, what a paltry tale, and how often has it not served an incompetent man of God?"
The friar, however, untouched by offence, slowly shook his head. "There's more to it than that. God's grace has revealed to me that which I should have had the wit to perceive before with my earthly senses. For I hold the proof of it. The proof, do you hear? As you might hold it if she had not caught you in her spells, trammelled you in her evil web."
"No more!" Don Pedro stood stern and fierce. "You push presumption to amazing lengths, sir friar. Do not push it so far that in my just resentment I should forget the habit that you wear."
The friar rose, too, and stood close beside him, half a head taller, stern, indomitable in his holy zeal. "No threats will silence one who knows himself within his rights to speak, as I am."
"Are you so?" Don Pedro had dropped all outward signs of anger. He was his habitual, mocking self, mocking and something sinister. "Remember that I, too, have rights here on this ship, and these include the right to have you flung overboard if you become importunate."
Frey Luis recoiled, not in fear of the threat, but in horror of the spirit that prompted it.
"You say this to me? You threaten sacrilege, no less? You are so lost already that you would raise your hand against an anointed priest?"
"Begone!" Don Pedro bade him. "Go preach of Hell to those poor devils in the forecastle."
Frey Luis folded his hands under his scapulary, assuming an outward impassivity. "I have sought to warn you. But you will not be warned. Sodom and Gomorrah would not be warned. Beware their fate!"
"I am neither Sodom nor Gomorrah," was the biting answer. "I am Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, Count of Marcos and Grandee of Spain, and my word is paramount aboard this ship; my wish the only law upon these decks. Remember it unless you are prepared to take your chance of travelling home like Jonah."
For a moment Frey Luis stood considering him with inscrutable, hypnotic eyes. Then he raised his hands and drew the cowl over his head. There was almost a symbolism in the act, as if intended to express the completeness of his withdrawal.
Yet he went without malice of any kind in his piteous heart; for piteous he was to the core and marrow of him. He went to pray that the divine grace might descend upon Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna to deliver him from the snares of an enchantress inspired by Satan to destroy his soul. That fact was now crystal-clear to Frey Luis Salcedo. As he had said, he held the proof of it.