Chapter 18 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
DOMINI CANES
For two days the Lady Margaret was left to meditate in the solitude and discomfort of her prison. Her fears having been aroused by the parting words of the Fiscal Advocate, it was supposed that these might now be left to the work of sapping her resistance and obduracy.
Her meditations, however, took a turn which the inquisitors of the Faith were very far from expecting, and this she revealed when next she was brought to audience before them.
There had been a change meanwhile in the constitution of the court. Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo remained to preside, and the Diocesan Ordinary was the same rubicund and humorous-looking man whom last she had seen on the Inquisitor's right hand. But instead of the former Fiscal Advocate another had been found who understood English well and spoke it tolerably, a man this of terrifying aspect with a thin, hawk-nose, a cruel, almost lipless mouth and close-set ungenerous eyes which looked as if no pitying glance had ever issued from them. The notary, too, had been changed, and his place was taken by another Dominican with sufficient knowledge of English to interpret for himself what might transpire in the course of the examination he was to record. Frey Luis was again present.
The audience was taken up by the Inquisitor at the point where it was last suspended. He began by once more entreating the accused to enable the court to use her with clemency by a full and frank confession of her sin.
If, on the one hand, the Lady Margaret had been weakened by fear and by distress, on the other she had been strengthened by indignation at the discovery which she believed that her meditations had brought her. To this indignation she now gave the full expression which she had prepared.
"Would it not better become your priestly office to depart from subterfuge?" she asked Frey Juan. "Since you claim to stand for the truth in all things, were it not better that you allow the truth to raise its head?"
"The truth! What truth?"
"Since you ask me, I will tell you. It is always possible, however improbable, that it may have escaped you. Men sometimes overlook the thing under their very feet. Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna is a Grande of Spain, a very great gentleman in this great kingdom. His actions are those of a villain, for which the civil courts—the secular courts, you call them—should punish him. They are also such as to render his faith suspect. Besides, as I understand it, he has committed sacrilege in threatening violence to a priest and sacriligious murder in shedding the blood of men employed by the Holy Office. For these well-attested offences your courts of the Inquisition should punish him. There would appear to be no escape for him. But because he is a great gentleman..."
She was interrupted by the notary, who had been writing feverishly in his endeavour to keep pace with her. "Not so fast, my sister!"
Deliberately she paused, to give him time. Indeed, she desired as ardently as did he and every member of the court that her words should be recorded. Then she resumed more slowly:
"But because he is a great gentleman, and there are inconveniences in punishing a great gentleman, who commands, no doubt, high influence, it becomes necessary to shift the blame, to find a scapegoat. It becomes necessary to discover that he was not responsible for his villainies; temporal or spiritual, that he was in fact bewitched at the time by an English heretic whose wicked and perverse will plunged him into this course for the purpose of destroying him in this world and the next."
This time it was the Fiscal Advocate who interrupted her, his voice rasping harshly.
"You increase your infamy by a suggestion so infamous."
The mild Inquisitor raised a hand to silence him. "Do not interrupt her," he begged.
"I have done, sirs," she announced. "The thing is clear, as clear and simple as it is pitiful, mean and cruel. If you persist in it, you will have to answer for it sooner or later. Be sure of that. God will not permit such wickedness to go unpunished. Nor, do I think, will man!"
Frey Juan waited until the notary had ceased to write. His compassionate eyes pondered her very solemnly.
"It is perhaps natural, reared as you have been, and ignorant as you are of us and of our sincerity, that you should attribute to us motives so worldly and so unworthy. Therefore, we do not resent it, or allow it to weigh against you. But we deny it. There is no thought in our minds to spare any man, however high placed, who shall have offended against God. Princes of the royal blood have done penance for offences of which the Holy Office has convicted them without hesitation or fear of their power and influence. We are above such things. We will go to the fire ourselves sooner than fail in our sacred duties. Take my assurance of that, my sister, and return to your cell, further to meditate upon the matter, and I pray that God's grace may help you to a worthier view. It is clear that your mood is not yet such as would enable us profitably to continue our endeavours on your behalf."
But she would not be dismissed. She begged to be Beard a moment yet in her own defence.
"What can you have to add, my sister?" wondered Frey Juan. "What can you have to urge against the evidence of the facts." Nevertheless he waved back the familiars who had already advanced for the purpose of removing her.
"The evidence is not one of facts, but of inferences drawn from facts. No one can prove this witchcraft with which you so fantastically charge me by the direct evidence of having seen me distilling philtres, or murmuring incantations, or raising devils or doing any of those things which witches are notoriously reputed to do. From certain effects observed in one who to my distress and dismay has been associated with me, and because this person is a great gentleman towards whom it is desired to practice leniency, inferences are drawn to inculpate me and at the same time to exculpate him. Commonest justice, then, should admit inferences to be similarly drawn in my defence."
"If they can so be drawn," Frey Juan admitted.
"They can, as I shall hope to show."
Her firmness, her candour, her dignity were not without effect upon the Inquisitor. In themselves these things seemed almost, by the evidence of character contained in them, to rebut the charge of sorcery. But Frey Juan reminded himself that appearances can be terribly deceptive, that an air of purity and sanctity is the favourite travesty used by Satan for his evil ends. He allowed her to proceed because the rules of the tribunal expressly prescribed that an accused should be encouraged, to talk since thus frequently many matters that must otherwise remain hidden were inadvertently disclosed. Calmly she posed the first of the questions she had considered and prepared in the solitude of her cell.
"If it is true that I used the arts of sorcery upon Don Pedro with the object of inducing him to take me to wife and the further object of luring him into the ways of Lutheranism which you account the ways of damnation, why did I not keep him in England, where I could in perfect safety have carried out my evil designs?"
Frey Juan turned to the Fiscal, inviting him to answer her, as his duty was. A contemptuous smile curled the man's thin lips. "Worldly considerations would suffice to influence you there. The Count of Marcos is a gentleman of great position and wealth, which you would naturally desire to share. The position would be forfeited, the wealth confiscated, once it were known that he remained in England as a result of a heretical marriage. For that offence he would have been sentenced to the fire. Because contumaciously absent he would have been burnt in effigy, to be burnt in his proper person later and without further trial at any time when he should come within reach of the arm of the Holy Inquisition." He smiled again, satisfied with the completeness of his reply, and fell silent.
"You are answered," Frey Juan informed her.
She had gone white in her dismay. "You account this piling of absurdity upon absurdity an answer?" It was a cry almost of despair. Then she recovered. "Very well," she said. "Let us test elsewhere this net which you have drawn about me. Have I your leave to interrogate my accuser?"
Frey Juan questioned with his eyes first the Diocesan then the Fiscal. The first by a shrug and a grunt implied that the matter was of no great consequence. The second assented sharply in his rasping voice.
"Why not? Let her question by all means—ut clavus clavo retundatur."
Permitted, then, she turned her gaze full upon Frey Luis where he sat beside the industriously writing notary.
"Amongst all that you overheard when you listened at the cabin door to Don Pedro's talk with me, you heard him, whilst urging me to become his wife, inform me that there was a priest on board the ship who would marry us at once?"
"It is set down in my memorial," he answered shortly, his great eyes almost malevolent.
"Do you remember what answer I returned him?"
"You returned him no answer," said Frey Luis, emphatically.
"But if I had bewitched him for the purpose of becoming his wife, should I have left such a proposal as that unanswered?"
"Silences are not to be construed as negatives," the Fiscal cut in.
She looked at the priestly advocate, and a wan smile momentarily flitted across her face.
"Let us by all means come to speech then." And once more she turned to Frey Luis. "On the following morning when first I met you on deck, what did I say to you?"
Frey Luis made a gesture of impatience, turning to the presiding Inquisitor.
"The answer to this is already in my memorial. I have there set down that she informed me that she had been brought aboard by force, that Don Pedro sought to coerce her into marriage, and she appealed to me for protection."
"If I had bewitched Don Pedro so as to induce him to marry me, should I have made such a complaint or should I have appealed to anyone—particularly to a priest—for protection?"
Frey Luis delivered his answer violently, the malevolence deepening in his eyes. "Have I anywhere said that you bewitched him to the end that he should marry you? How should I know the purpose of such as you? I say only that you bewitched him, else it is impossible that a Godfearing pious son of Mother Church could have thought of marriage with a heretic, that he could have threatened sacrilegious violence to a priest, or have sacrilegiously shed the blood of men discharging the sacred functions of apparitors of the Holy Office."
"If all this proves him to have been bewitched—as well it may, for I do not understand these things—how does it prove that I bewitched him?"
"How?" echoed Frey Luis, and remained staring at her with glowing eyes until prodded into answering by the Inquisitor.
"Ay. Answer that, Frey Luis," said Frey Juan in a tone which, although quiet, startled his assessors.
The truth is that—as he was subsequently to confess—a doubt had been set astir in the mind of Frey Juan Arrenzuelo. It was a vague doubt which had been started by her assertion that the whole accusation against her was made with the object of rendering her a scapegoat for the offences of Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna. It was upon the utterance of this accusation that he had sought to dismiss her, so that before proceeding with her examination he might have leisure to make an examination of conscience and assure himself completely that there was no ground for the thing she imputed, be it in himself or in her accuser. Since then, however, her firm demeanour which it seemed impossible to associate with any but a quiet conscience, and the strong inferential arguments contained in her questions, had served to increase his doubt.
So now he insisted upon an answer from Frey Luis to a question which he suddenly perceived that the memorial itself, to have been complete, should have raised and answered.
The Dominican's reply now took the shape of counter-questions. But he addressed himself to the court. He found it impossible to support the glance of those clear, challenging eyes of hers. "Is it upon this alone that I base my accusation of witchcraft? Have I not set forth in detail the satanical subtlety of the answers with which she met my endeavours to convert her to the true faith? I have not dared confess, but I confess it now and cast myself upon the mercy of this sacred tribunal, that there were moments when I was in danger of coming under her infernal spells, moments when I, myself, began to doubt of truths in Holy Writ, so subtly did she pervert their meaning. It was then I knew her for a servant of the Evil One; when she mocked me and the holy words I spoke with wicked, wanton laughter." Passion inflamed him, and lent a warmth of rhetoric to his denunciation, by which his hearers were impressed. "It is not upon this thing or upon that that my conviction rests, the solemn conviction upon which I have based my accusation; but upon the aggregate of all, a sum utterly overwhelming in its terrible total." He stood tense and taut, his great dark eyes looking now straight before him into infinity, seeming to them a man inspired. "I have set down what I have clearly seen with the eyes of my soul by the Heavenly light vouchsafed them."
Abruptly he sat down, and took his head in his hands, trembling from head to foot. At the last moment his courage had failed him. He had not dared to add that to him the crowning proof of her evil arts lay in the spell which she had cast over him, to assail him in the very stronghold of his hitherto invulnerable chastity. He dared not tell them of the haunting vision of her white throat and curving breast which had first assailed him as he sat on the hatch-coamings of the Demoiselle, and which had constantly tormented him since then, so much so that more than once he had faltered in his duty as her accuser, had actually considered neglecting it on the morning that he landed at Santander, had since been tempted to fling down the pen, to deny the truth which he had written, and to imperil his immortal soul by lies to save her lovely body from the fire to which in justice it was inevitably doomed. Because her beauty assailed his senses with all the power of some pungent overmastering perfume, because he writhed in longing for the sight of her and in agony for the thought of the just doom that must overtake her, he could entertain no single doubt of her guilt. That her spells could so beat down the ramparts of purity which years of self-denial and piety had built so solidly about his soul, was to him the crowning proof of the abominations which she practised, of the arts by which she went to work to weaken him whose duty it was to destroy her. Not until that fair body, which Satan used as a lure for the perdition of men's souls, should have been broken by the tormentor and finally reduced to ashes at the stake would Frey Luis account performed the duty which his conscience imposed upon him.
He heard Frey Juan quietly asking her if she was answered, and he heard her firm reply.
"I have heard a whirl of meaningless words, protestations of convictions of Frey Luis' own, which can hardly be accounted proof of anything. He says that I argued with subtlety in matters of religion. I argued out of such teaching in these matters as I have received. Is that proof of witchcraft? Then every Lutheran, it follows, is a witch?"
This time Frey Juan made no rejoinder. He dismissed her, announcing the audience suspended.
But when she had been removed by the familiars, he turned to Frey Luis. To Base the disquietude of his conscience, he now subjected Frey Luis to an examination so minute and searching that in the end the Fiscal Advocate remonstrated with him that in his hands the accuser seemed to have become the accused.
Frey Juan met the remonstrance with a stern reminder. "It is not merely lawful, but desirable, to examine a delator closely; especially when, as in this instance, there is no evidence other than his own."
"There is the evidence of the facts," the Fiscal replied, "the evidence of words used by Don Pedro, which the woman admits herself to have been correctly reported, and there is what Don Pedro himself cannot deny."
"And," ventured Frey Luis, with the fierce vehemence of righteous exasperation, "there is her own heresy which she has admitted. To a heretic all things are possible."
"But because all things are possible," he was quietly answered, "we are not to convict a heretic of all things beside heresy, unless we have abundant proof."
"To ease your mind, Frey Juan, were it not best to put her to the question at once?" suggested the Fiscal Advocate. And Frey Luis, swept by his emotions, made echo to that.
"The question, ay! The question! Let torture wring the truth from her evil stubbornness. Thus shall you have the confirmation that you need for sentence."
Frey Juan's countenance was stern; all compassion, all wistfulness had departed from his eyes. He turned them almost angrily upon the Fiscal.
"To ease my mind?" he echoed. "Do I sit here in this seat of judgment to ease my mind? What is my ease of mind, what my torment of mind, compared with the service of the Faith? The truth of these matters shall be reached in the end, however long we labour to extract it. But we shall extract it for the greater honour and glory of God and not for my ease of mind or the ease of mind of any living man." He rose abruptly, leaving the Fiscal Advocate silenced and abashed. Frey Luis would have interrupted again. But he was sternly reminded that he was not a member of that court, nor entitled to speak there save when bidden as a witness.
In the silence that followed, Frey Juan took up the notes which the notary had made. He read them carefully. "Let copies be sent to the Inquisitor-General this evening, as he has required."
Now, the Inquisitor-General of Castile, Gaspar de Quiroga, Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo's special interest in this case was sprung from the fact that Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luna, as we know, was his own nephew, his only sister's child cherished by him in the place of the son which his vows denied him. This fact, notorious throughout Spain, it was which had rendered the Inquisitors of Oviedo fearful of dealing with Don Pedro's case and had brought them to the decision of referring it to Toledo where it could be under the eye of the Inquisitor-General himself.
The Cardinal was profoundly distressed and perturbed. Whatever the outcome, and however much of the blame a scapegoat might be made to bear, the fact remained that Don Pedro had grievously offended. It would be held that he could not have so offended had he not lapsed from grace by some action of his own, and for this it was impossible that he should escape punishment. Some heavy penance he would certainly have to perform to satisfy the requirements of a tribunal which had not hesitated in its time to impose penances upon princes of the blood. Short of that it would be said that his uncle made an unworthy use of his mighty and sacred office to favour his own relatives and to relieve them of the payment of their just dues. Obstacles enough were placed already in the path of the Inquisitor-General by a King who with difficulty curbed his jealousy of any usurpation of power in his dominions, by a Pope who could hardly be said to approve the lengths to which the Holy Office carried its ardour in Spain, and by the Jesuits who missed few opportunities of marking their resentment of the interferences and even persecutions which they had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.
Nor would Don Pedro by his conduct, whether before the court appointed to examine him or in the private audiences to which his uncle summoned him from the prison of the Holy House, where he was meanwhile confined, do anything to lighten the task before the Inquisitor-General.
He laughed to furious scorn the charge of witchcraft levelled against Margaret, refused utterly to avail himself of the escape which such an accusation against her offered him, denounced himself for a scoundrel in his dealings with her, and regarded his present difficulties as the natural and proper punishment which he had brought upon himself. He would accept it, he announced, with fortitude and resignation but for the knowledge that his own villainy and the stupid bigotry of his judges had implicated Margaret with him and placed her in a position of danger, of the full terrors of which she would herself be scarcely aware as yet.
To his uncle in private and, what was infinitely worse, to the Inquisitors deputed by his uncle to examine him in the court over which Frey Juan de Arrenzuelo presided, he persisted in the assertion that because of his rank and his relationship with the Inquisitor-General it was sought to spare him the consequences of his acts by a trumped up tale of his having been bewitched. The Lady Margaret, he assured his judges, hectoring them boldly and angrily, had practised against him no magic but the magic of her beauty, her virtue and her charm. If these were arts of sorcery then half the young women in the world might be sent to the stake, for at some time or other and against some man or other they had all exercised them.
It was bad enough to have Don Pedro thus insisting upon incriminating himself, and saying no word that helped forward the incrimination of the heretical woman who was at the root of all this distressing business. To insist, almost as if attempting to persuade him, that his very words and demeanour were but proofs that the sorcery was still working briskly in his veins, was merely to render him ribald and offensive in his exasperation. He called the inquisitors dolts, asses in stupidity and mules in obstinacy, and did not even hesitate to tell them on one occasion that he believed it was they who were possessed of devils, so infernally did they corrupt all things to their own predetermined ends, so damnably did they corrupt truth into falsehood.
"The truth to you, sirs, is what you desire to think it is, not what every sane evidence may reveal it. You desire no evidence save that which will confirm your egregious preconceptions. There is no animal in the world so hot on a false scent and so persistent as you Dominicans. Domini canes!" Deliberately he broke the word into two, and saw by their resentful eyes that they had caught the insult he intended. He repeated it again and yet again, rendering it each time more clearly an invective, and finally translating it into Spanish for them to make quite sure that his meaning did not elude them. "Dogs of the Lord! Hounds of God! That is what you call yourselves. I wonder what God calls you."
The audience was immediately suspended, and word was sent to Cardinal Quiroga of his nephew's extravagant words and indecent conduct, which left little doubt now in the mind of any of his examiners that he was indeed the victim of arts of witchcraft. But Frey Juan now added a note to the effect that however persuaded they might be of this, yet the evidence was hardly sufficient to justify sentence of the woman Margaret Trevanion upon the charge of sorcery, wherefore, he submitted to the Inquisitor-General that this accusation against her should be abandoned, and that the court should proceed upon charge of heresy alone. If she was indeed a witch, she would still suffer for it in suffering for the offence which was provable against her.
A grand Auto de Fé was preparing in Toledo for the following Thursday, the 26th of October—Frey Juan wrote on Thursday the 19th—and the charge of heresy could be disposed of so that the accused should suffer then, whilst Don Pedro should at the same time purge his offence by some penance in that Auto which the Inquisitors would determine and lay before his eminence for approval.