Chapter 4 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE NEGLECTED SUITOR
The Prior of La Rabida procured himself a mule, and set out upon the following morning for the Vega of Granada, where the Sovereigns had sat down to invest the last Saracen stronghold.
The high confidence in which he went was not misplaced. Queen Isabel received her ghostly father with all the graciousness and piety due from a ghostly daughter. She listened to his tale, and being infected by something of his enthusiasm, yielded to his prayer, summoned her treasurer and bade him count out twenty thousand maravedis for the equipment and travelling expenses of Colon. Then she dismissed the triumphant Franciscan to bring the man to audience.
Here was a promptitude beyond all the friar’s hopes. He made haste back to La Rabida with his news.
“The Queen, our wise and virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer of this poor friar. Do yourself justice now, and the world is yours.”
Colon, incredulous at the swift and easy success attending the gamester’s throw upon which he had come to La Rabida, lost no time in setting out. His son was to remain in the convent’s care until he could take order about him.
At the moment of departure he was sought again by Martin Alonso Pinzon, who put forth an extreme geniality.
“I come to wish you fortune and to felicitate you upon this ready grant of audience. I swear you could have had no better ambassador.”
“I am as sensible of it as I am of this your courtesy.”
“It is no mere courtesy. After all, I have had my part in this success.” Answering the question in Colon’s glance, he went on: “Do me right, sir. It was my support of your views that sent Frey Juan to plead with the Queen.”
It was as if he urged a claim, a pettiness by which Colon was none too favourably impressed. But he dissembled his faint scorn.
“You leave me in your debt, sir.”
Martin Alonso laughed with a display of strong teeth behind the red lips within his black beard. “It’s a debt, faith, you may find it profitable to discharge. Bear in mind, sir, that I am ready to support your project. I love a hazard, and I would set a stake on this. I can command ships, as I have told you.”
“You enhearten me.” Colon was a model of cold courtesy. “But, as I thought that I made clear, the enterprise is too vast for private purses, else it had not been so long delayed.”
“Yet you may come to find that a private purse might bear some share in it. Why should it not, even though the crown should offer the main support?”
“To me it seems that if I am supported by the crown, the crown will bear the cost.”
“But perhaps not all of it.” Martin Alonso was becoming importunate. He smiled, but there was a keenness almost of anxiety in his eyes. “The royal treasury is under sore strain in these days. The war has made a heavy drain upon it. The Sovereigns may favour you, and yet hesitate on the score of the expense. A little help might then be welcome. All I ask is that you remember me should that be so, or,” he added slyly, “if you saw the chance to make it so. After all, as I have said, it would be no more than my due, for my part in sending Frey Juan to Court.”
“I will remember,” said Colon.
But as he rode away it was in the determination to forget. He wanted no partners, least of all an acquisitive merchant who for the paltry purse that he might bring to it would not merely claim a share of the profit but strive also to filch some of the glory.
Accounting his trials now behind him, his shabbiness sloughed, and clad by the Queen’s bounty in a manner to set off his natural graces, he came without delay to Court under the aegis of Frey Juan.
The Franciscan’s words were in his memory: “The Queen, our wise and virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer of this poor friar. Do yourself justice now and the world is yours.”
It was an enheartening assurance, and for what depended upon himself Colon entertained no doubt. He would do himself the fullest justice, as Frey Juan should see.
And so, when he was brought to audience in the Alcazar in the white city of Cordoba, it was no cringing suppliant that the Sovereigns beheld. Conscious that his russet doublet and the open mulberry surcoat with its hanging sleeves became him well, he bore himself with the swaggering confidence of one who is master of his fate.
Had the result depended upon the Queen alone, it might have followed quickly; for though a woman of much sense and calm judgment, she was still a woman, and so could hardly remain indifferent to the appeal of the dominant masculinity of this tawny-haired man with the eager, magnetic, youthful eyes and that power Las Casas mentions of commanding affection. But King Ferdinand was there, hard and wary, the shrewdest prince in Europe and the most calculating. A man in the late thirties, squarely and strongly built, but of only middle height, he was of a rather lumpy fresh-coloured countenance, fair-haired and with light prominent eyes. Those eyes looked with little favour upon the natural majesty and princely carriage of the adventurer whom Frey Juan presented.
Their Highnesses received Colon in a gracious chamber of the Alcazar, lighted by twin-arched windows and hung in the stamped and subtly coloured leather for which the Moors of Cordoba were famous, its marble floor spread with rich eastern rugs. Two ladies waited upon the Queen, standing behind her tall chair, the handsome young Marchioness of Moya and the Countess of Escalona. The King was attended by his Lord Chamberlain, Andrés Cabrera, Marquis of Moya, of whom it was said that his goat’s eyes justified his name; by Don Luis de Santangel, the grey-bearded and benign Chancellor of Aragon; and by Hernando de Talavera, Prior of the Prado, a tall ascetic friar in the white habit and black cloak of a Hieronomite.
All these, like most of those who filled the high offices about the Sovereigns, were New Christians, men of Jewish blood, who having risen to eminence by the talents of their race, were sowing an envy that was beginning to express itself in that ferocity of persecution of which the Holy Office of the Inquisition was to be the agent.
Colon, by his very name, may have led them to regard him as one of themselves, and certainly, had he looked, he would have detected a sympathetic warmth in the eyes of Santangel and Cabrera. Talavera, however, remained coldly aloof, his glance lowered. Uncompromisingly honest, as he conceived honesty, he would adopt hostility rather than yield to feeble prejudice on racial grounds.
At the outset Colon gave little heed to these satellites. His eyes and attention were on the Queen, at whose elbow Frey Juan Perez had come to take an unobtrusive stand. He beheld a light-complexioned woman of forty of the middle height, her shape and countenance moderately plump, whose blue eyes gave him kindly encouragement. A certain homeliness was not to be dissembled even by the richness of her ermine-lined cloak of crimson satin so profusely slashed as to display in gleams the cloth of gold of the gown she wore beneath it. In the belt of white leather at her waist smouldered the fire of a balas ruby of the size of a tennis ball.
She addressed him in gentle terms, and in her placid voice he caught a hint of the authority that dwelt in her. She spoke in commendation of the ideas by which the Prior of La Rabida had told them that he was inspired, and she assured him that it was her wish to know more of this service which he believed that it lay in his power to render to the crowns of Castile and Aragon.
His head high, his voice resonant, he was prompt to answer:
“I kiss your Highness’s feet. I thank you for the occasion so graciously accorded me. I bring you the promise of discoveries before which those which have brought increase of dignity and power to the Crown of Portugal shall look small and mean.”
“A high promise,” croaked the King, and Colon could not be certain that he did not sneer. Not on that account, however, was he perturbed.
“High, indeed, sire. But no higher than by God’s grace and guidance I shall soar.”
“Say on. Say on,” said the King, and now the sneer was plain. “Let us hear you.”
Colon inclined that proud head of his, which his Highness accounted too stiffly held, and launched himself in terms that had been well-rehearsed upon a recital of his cosmographical theories. But he had not gone far before Ferdinand’s harsh voice and rapid speech broke in upon him.
“Yes, yes. All this we have heard already from the Prior of La Rabida. It is his clear statement of your beliefs that has prompted her Highness to grant you audience at a time when, as you should know, our crusade against the Infidel in Spain is giving us abundant preoccupation.”
A lesser man, one more imbued with the respect of persons, would have been put out of countenance. Colon was merely spurred to a greater assurance.
“The wealth of the Indies, which I trust to lay at the foot of your throne, the inexhaustible wells of it to which I shall open your royal way, will repair the ravages of that conflict and supply resources for its triumphant conclusion, or for its extension even to a deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre itself.”
He could have said nothing better calculated to kindle enthusiasm in Queen Isabel and bring her under the spell of the magic that he used. But to the King it was almost a contradiction, a challenge. With a sceptical smile on his full lips he forestalled any answer from the Queen.
“Do not let us forget that you speak of things seen so far only with the eye of faith.”
“What, then, is faith, sire?” Colon permitted himself to ask, but by answering at once let it be seen that the question was no more than rhetorical. “It is the power to recognize by the inner light of inspiration those things of which the evidence is not tangible.”
“This has more the sound of theology than cosmography.” Ferdinand looked over his shoulder at Talavera with a crooked smile. “It lies rather in your province, Sir Prior, than in mine.”
The friar raised his bowed head. His voice was grave and cold.
“As a definition of faith I have no quarrel with it.”
“For myself,” said the Queen, “whilst no theologian, I have never heard it defined better.”
“Yet,” Ferdinand objected, turning to her in all courtesy, “in such a matter an ounce of experience is worth a pound of faith. And of actual experience admittedly there is none to support the claims of Master Colon.”
Instead of answering, herself, the Queen invited Colon to furnish the reply.
“You hear his Highness.”
Colon lowered his eyes; his tone was almost wistful. “I can but ask what is experience, and answer that it is no more than the foundation upon which those have ever built who have been endowed with the divine gift of imagination.”
“That is obscure enough to be profound,” said Ferdinand, “but it takes us nowhere.”
“By your leave, Highness, at least it points the way. By applying the gift of imagination, by imagining the unknown from the known—the experienced—has man risen by stages upwards from a primeval brutish ignorance.”
His Highness began to show irritation. This man was more subtle and elusive than was proper in disputing with a prince. He made an impatient noise. “We move here in the realm of the intangible, a realm of dreams.”
Colon threw up his head as if affronted. There was an almost fanatical glow in his clear eyes. “Dreams!” he echoed. His voice soared and vibrated with power. “All things are dreams before they become reality. The world itself was a dream before it was created, a dream in the mind of God.”
It was as if he had cast a burning brand amongst them. The King’s jaw fell; Talavera’s brow was dark; Frey Juan looked scared. But in every other face, including the Queen’s, Colon beheld only a flattering wonder, whilst from Santangel’s full dark eyes he caught a look of warm, amused approval.
The King spoke, slowly for once. “I trust, sir, that you are not floundering into heresy in the heat of argument.” And again his glance invited Talavera to pronounce.
The Prior of the Prado shook his head, his lean face forbidding.
“I do not discover heresy. No. And yet . . .” He directly addressed Colon. “You go perilously deep, sir.”
“It is my way, Sir Prior.”
“Undaunted by the peril?” the friar sternly challenged him.
Colon rejoiced that it was the priest who had asked the question, for in answering the priest he could put his scorn into laughter, as he would not dare in answering the King. “If I were easily daunted, reverend sir, I should not be offering to sail into the unknown and defy the terrors with which superstition fills it.”
His Highness deemed it time to set a term to the audience.
“It is not your audacity, sir, that is in doubt,” he said, and the calm comment had the ring of a reproof. “If that were all we might be ready to employ you. As it is . . . it happens that I am by nature slow to take a man’s own valuation of the wares he offers.”
“It is not in my mind that we should do that,” said the Queen. “But neither are we to reject the project because of our incompetence to judge it. Master Colon, his Highness and I will take counsel and consider the appointing of a junta of learned men to examine your claims, and to advise us upon them.”
Remembering how he had fared in Portugal at the hands of a junta stuffed with learning and frozen in the ignorance of its limitations, Colon’s heart would have turned heavy had not the Queen added:
“I shall look to see you soon again, Master Colon. Meanwhile you are commanded to remain at Court. My treasurer, Don Alonso de Quintanilla, shall have orders to provide.”
On that promise he had taken his dismissal, and if he departed in a confidence less high than that in which he had come, yet at least he could bear with him the assurance that he had left a favourable impression on the Queen.
Of his favourable impression upon the others he was soon to be assured. First there was Quintanilla, in whose house, by the Queen’s disposition, he was lodged, and by whom he was cordially welcomed. There was more than his attractiveness to conquer the favour of Quintanilla. The finances of the two kingdoms were depleted to exhaustion by the Moorish war, and the Treasurer of Castile was sorely harassed in his need to provide supplies. By sharpening the persecution of the Jews to the extent of giving the Holy Office a freer hand in the pursuit of the wretched converts who relapsed into Judaism and suffered consequently, with the loss of their lives, the confiscation of their property, the ship of State was being kept precariously afloat. To buoy it up further there were the heavy loans made by such great Jews as Abarbanel and Senior, who sought desperately to deflect the greater persecution which their prescience told them that greed might presently let loose—a persecution not to be confined to relapsing Marranos, who by becoming Christians had brought themselves within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but to include in its remorseless sweep all the Children of Israel. If those succeeded who even now were pressing the Sovereigns to decree the expulsion of the Jews whilst compelling them to leave all property behind, the wealth thus harvested might resolve all difficulties. But in the meantime the difficulties remained to harass the Treasurer of Castile. Therefore was he the more eager for first-hand news of this man who proposed to unlock for Spain the vast treasury of the East, and, because of his hopes, the readier to lend him credit and support.
Then there was the Chancellor of Aragon, Luis de Santangel, whose countenance had shown how deeply he was moved by Colon’s bearing at the royal audience. At heart he, too, was moved by considerations similar to those of Quintanilla. Beholding in Colon a potential saviour of Israel in Spain, he was as ready to believe him the instrument of God as Colon was ready to believe it of himself. For although Santangel had received Christian baptism and practised now the Christian faith, his heart remained with the people of his race. Indeed, so ill had he concealed it that once he had been made to feel the talons of the Holy Office of Saragossa, and compelled to do public penance in his shirt. Only the high value which the Sovereigns set upon his services and the great affection in which they held him had preserved him from worse.
Santangel sought Colon that very day at the house of Quintanilla, took both his hands in a long firm clasp, and looked deep into his eyes.
“I make haste,” he said, “to proclaim myself your friend before your deeds shall have earned you so many that I shall be lost amongst them.”
“Which being translated, Don Luis, means that out of the goodness of your soul you desire to give me courage.”
“It means much more. It means that I foresee a great destiny for you, and that by you Spain is to be magnified.”
Colon smiled crookedly. “I would the King had perceived it as clearly.”
“The King is cautious. Slow to reach decisions.”
“And I thought him quick to decide that I am a charlatan.”
Don Luis was shocked. “Never believe that. His scepticism was to test your quality, and you rang true under the test. Those are the Queen’s own words, my friend. So take heart in the assurance that your patience will not long be tried. You’ll sup with me to-night, and you too, Don Alonso. Your good friend Frey Juan will be with us, breaking for once the rigours of St. Francis. To-morrow you are to wait upon the Marchioness of Moya. She desires your better acquaintance. When I tell you that she has more influence with the Queen than any person living, you’ll see that you are civil to her. But, faith, there’s little need to enjoin it. Her beauty will do that to one whom I judge to have an eye for beauty.”
The eye which Santangel so truly described was feasted to the full next day upon Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya, when Don Luis conducted him to her mansion on the Ronda, overlooking the majestic Guadalquivir.
He went in the glory of russet doublet and mulberry surcoat, his red mane sedulously dressed, and in his clear mariner’s eyes a glow of high confidence borrowed from the shape his fortunes were at last assuming. It was a glow that deepened when he contemplated the Marchioness and met in her soft glances the approval in him of a shapeliness that matched her own.
Yesterday at the audience he had admiringly observed her. He had not been a man, or, at least, not the man he was, had he overlooked her. But yesterday there had been so much else to command his attention, whilst now there was nothing to deflect the delight his eye might take in her. A woman in the glory of her young maturity, she was fashioned on stately lines, tall and superbly made. Her black hair and the oval face beneath were framed in a pointed and stiffened silken coif that was edged with jewel-work. Her lips were moist and red, and there was a caressing languor in the regard of her dark eyes. Her high-waisted gown was of yellow silk with a broad hem of blue. Cut squarely and low, it revealed a glory of white throat.
Santangel, benign and fatherly, presented Colon.
“Marchioness, I bring our discoverer to kiss your hands.”
She chose to take the phrase literally, and held out to him the fairest hand he had ever seen; the texture of it to his finger-tips and lips was as the texture of satin. His lips dwelt in fervour upon it for longer than was quite seemly.
“Shall I prophesy for you?” she said, with a smile. “It is that Spain will yet desire to be as free of your hand as you make free with mine.”
“A prophecy to intoxicate me, madam.”
“I do not judge you easily intoxicated?”
“Not easily. No. But when the wine is sweet and rich I take my chance of it.”
“With a full confidence in yourself. You do not lack for that, as we saw yesterday.”
“Yesterday, madam, I was but a navigator, rehearsing what his trade had taught him.”
“Oh!” Her fine brows arched upwards. “And to-day?”
“To-day the humblest suitor for your favour.”
“Yet I had not supposed you humble.”
“It was not my honour yesterday to be addressing you.”
Gently she rallied him. “Fie, sir! That is to set me above the Queen.”
“Have mercy, madam. Do not provoke me to high treason.”
“That were, indeed, folly. For in the Queen you have made a sure friend, upon whose support you may rely.”
“It is more than I dared hope.”
“But why?” He felt the ardour of her glance upon him. “The Queen is a woman, after all, and loves audacity in a man. Like the King, she discerned no lack of it in you.”
“To support me she had need to discern something more: that I can fulfil no less than I promise.”
“If you doubt it, you do poor justice to your arts of persuasion. Does he not, Don Luis?”
“If he doubts it,” said Don Luis so dryly that he set them laughing.
“You need not,” she assured Colon, “any more than you need doubt that I shall fail to keep you in the Queen’s mind.”
“For that it is not only I who will have cause to thank you,” said he, with a full recovery of his normal swagger. “Queen Isabel, herself, and all Spain will be in your debt.”
“Now,” she laughed, “I hear the voice of the man of yesterday, the high note that brings us all into submission. For the rest, Master Colon, it is not with the debt to me of Spain that I shall be concerned.”
Thus for a full hour they talked with more covert fencing in their words than Don Luis approved. When he had kissed her hand in leave-taking:
“Count us your friends,” she bade him, “and dispose of our house as if it were your own.”
Outside in the Spring sunshine, on the Ronda, Santangel took him by the arm. He used a gentle, friendly tone.
“As a foreigner, Master Colon, you may be in danger of mistaking words which we Spaniards utter in merely formal courtesy, and which could be acted upon only to our dismay.”
Colon laughed. “You mean that Spanish courtesy offers everything, counting upon a like courtesy to accept nothing.”
“Since you understand it so well, you will not over-value the Marchioness’s words.”
“Nor under-value her gracious kindness.”
“I am by no means sure that it would not be more prudent.” He hugged the arm closer. “Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla is the Queen’s dearest friend, of great influence with her and an intimacy to which none other is admitted. Yet there’s a prudishness in Queen Isabel that would not condone light conduct even in her dearest friend. That is something to be remembered. The other thing is Cabrera.” Santangel hesitated a moment, with a sidelong glance at his companion. Quickly and softly he added: “He is one of ours.”
Colon was mystified. “One of ours?”
“A New Christian,” Don Luis explained. “Marquis of Moya and a power in the land as you behold him, he is yet the son of Rabbi David of Cuenca.”
Light came to Colon. It revealed, first, that he was assumed by Santangel to be a Marrano; second, that because of this the wife of a Marrano must be sacred to him. Now despite his hispanicized name, and something in his cast of countenance to justify the assumption, a Marrano Colon was not. Yet perceiving that to deny it might jeopardize the goodwill towards him of a man whose esteem he valued and upon whose support he counted, opportunism prompted him to be disingenuously non-committal.
“I see,” was all he said.
“You’ll forgive what would be a liberty if it were not rooted in regard for you.”
“I were a clown if I did not thank you.” Then Colon laughed. “Oh, but be easy, sir. Cristobal Colon is not the man to let passion touch his destiny. My mission is too great to yield to human weaknesses.”
“Your mission may be. But are you?” wondered the Chancellor. “Move circumspectly here, my friend, if you would prosper.”
Days of great consequence had followed for Colon, days of confident waiting, in which he took the eyes of the courtly throng in the antechambers of the Alcazar, and was proudly conscious that he took them. He had travelled far from the humble little house in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello in Genoa, where he was born; but no farther, he opined, than his deserts entitled him. From this conviction came a poise to match his inches and his patrician countenance. Men nudged one another as he passed, and ever and anon he would catch an awed whisper of his name. Haughty grandes, hidalgos who accounted themselves fashioned of different fibres from those that made up the members of the common herd, princes of the Church, great captains, and men of state sought his acquaintance and used him with deference. For him more than one lovely lady cast aside Castilian reticence and allowed languid eyes to express a yearning admiration. He was enhanced by a certain mystery that attached to him. Shrewdly aware of its value, he did nothing to dissipate it. None could speak with certainty of his origin. By some he was accounted a Portuguese, by others a Ligurian noble. Some related that he was of a learning that was the pride of the University of Pavia, where it was said that he had studied; by others it was asserted that he was a great fighting seaman who had made himself the terror of Islam in the Mediterranean; others, again, explained that, boldest of navigators, he had sailed his ships into seas no other keels had ploughed. In one particular only were all agreed: his looks, his princely bearing, made human by a touch of swagger, his easy address and graceful speech, coloured by a foreign accent which yet did not impair its fluency, all went to convey an impression of his high consequence.
These days, in which he loftily rubbed shoulders with the great, were probably the happiest he had ever known, warming him with that sense that at last he filled in life his proper place. He knew no impatiences then, for, as has been said, whilst one may travel pleasantly there is little haste to arrive. Unfortunately this pleasant travelling did not last. Imperceptibly the aura that had been set aglow about him grew dim with the passage of weeks in which nothing happened. The Queen’s intimate, the Marchioness of Moya, might still address him in public with an eagerness in her dark eyes which she did not trouble to conceal. Cabrera, following his wife’s lead, might miss no chance of marking his regard, and the dignified Santangel, by many accounted the most influential man in the two kingdoms, might use him publicly with an almost paternal affection. Upon the Court in general he began to perceive that he grew stale, and he was led to invoke the assistance of the Marchioness, to the end that she might exert the omnipotence at Court derived from the great love the Queen was known to bear her.
With this intent, he sought her one day at her palace on the Ronda, to be received with gentle reproaches for having made himself so long expected there.
“It is, madam, that I lacked the presumption to suspect it.”
“It is for a discoverer to make discoveries,” she told him, and so opened a door to the suit he came to make.
“I am, alas, a discoverer in danger of lying becalmed, forgotten.”
“Not by me, at least, my friend. If it depended upon me or my reminders to the Queen, you would have a fleet of ships by now. I have even been rebuked for my insistence.”
He displayed contrition. “Madam! That I should be the cause of that!”
“I have no quarrel with the cause,” she assured him with such warmth that Santangel’s warning and his own vaunt were alike forgotten.
“I shall study to deserve this favour. You shame me that I should come to importune you with my affairs.”
“Your shame should be that they supply the only reason for your visit!”
“It would be so if I were not glad that to make my prayer provides the occasion.”
“Prayer? Lord, sir, I am no saint to be prayed to.”
“Am I to believe that when I have but the evidence of my eyes?”
“And what do they show you?” She was challenging.
“More loveliness than seems mortal, or than they can calmly endure.” He took her hand again, and for a moment she let it lie in his grasp. Her eyes were troubled. In their dark depths there was an appeal he could not read, and something of fear, aroused by his too impetuous ardour. They were as the eyes of one who, about to leap, pauses appalled by the width of the chasm.
Her voice came to him in a soft murmur. “Señor Cristobal, do not let us glide into a folly we should both repent. Your hopes of the Queen’s favour——”
“Must yield at need,” he interrupted hotly, “to more imperious hopes.”
“Those are not for us, Cristobal. Let us be wise in time, my friend.”
Yet the low, caressing tone was not calculated to restrain him.
“Wise! What, then, is wisdom?” he asked, and would passionately have answered his own question, but that she forestalled him.
“It is not to jeopardize the good we may possess for an illusion of something better that is unattainable.” It was as a prayer to him to help her to be strong. “There are some things that I can give,” she continued, “and those I give without stint. Be content. To seek more would be to lose all. For both of us.”
He sighed, mastering himself, and bowed his red head. “It must ever be as you command.” He released her hand. “I am not to trouble you, but to serve you.”
The tenderness of her glance was deepened by the humility of that obedient surrender. And then their sanity was completely restored to them by the entrance of Cabrera.
He advanced, a short, ungainly figure on his crooked legs, a friendly smile in his goat’s eyes, and he used Colon with a warm consideration. He was still pleasant when Colon had left.
“Decidedly I must do what I can to promote the wishes of this navigator,” said he. “He knows how to engage my interest.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“And surely not surprised. You’ll not find it odd that I should do my best to help him aboard a ship and have him sailing to the Indies or to perdition.”
“Lord, Andrés! Will you be jealous?”
“I will not,” laughed Cabrera. “It’s to save myself that detestable emotion that I’ll labour to have our gentleman weigh anchor at the earliest.”
She laughed without embarrassment. “I shall do nothing to discourage you. He wishes himself at sea, and since I wish him well, must I not also wish him at sea? We’ll labour to that end.”
She was so ingenuously frank and so lovely that Cabrera was content to be amused. Yet there was a sincerity under his jesting answer. “He’ll not wish himself at sea more fervently than I do. There is too much of him.”
It followed out of this that two or three days later, meeting Colon in one of the galleries of the Alcazar, Santangel was the bearer of reassuring news.
“There are more friends working for you than you may suppose. Here is Cabrera gone near to embroiling himself with the King by pestering him on your behalf. You see,” he added, “the wisdom of my advice that you be circumspect with the delectable Marchioness. It bears fruit in Cabrera’s friendly interest in you.”
“And makes him anxious to be rid of me,” said Colon, sardonic. “But if the fruit is to exasperate his Highness, how shall that profit me?”
“There is some profit for you with the Queen at least. Cabrera pleaded with them both, and her Highness this morning bids me assure you that your affairs will soon be in train. If they have been so long delayed it is because of preoccupations with this war, to which are now added troubles with the King of France.”
“The devil take the King of France, then.”
“That is not all.” The Chancellor’s face grew set in lines of sternness. “Torquemada is clamouring for a bill of expulsion against the Jews.”
“May Satan toast him over his own faggots.”
Santangel shrank in horror. “Sh! In God’s name! Men have gone to the fire for less. Here passion will not serve. Patience. Patience is the only armour.”
“I am empanoplied in it cap-à-pie. It begins to irk my bones.”
It was to irk them further yet. The Sovereigns quitted Cordoba to return to the camp in the Vega of Granada. The Court followed, and Colon went with the Court. He went with it to Seville, and thence in the winter to Salamanca, where at least he made a new and powerful friend in the learned Dominican Frey Diego Deza, the Prior of St. Esteban, who was the preceptor of the young Prince Juan. Deza’s keen, approving interest in Colon’s project revived for a season his drooping hopes. Deza added his weighty urgings to those with which Colon’s other few friends kept the matter before the Sovereigns. And something might now have come of it, but that a rebellion in Galicia demanded quelling and distracted thought from all other matters.
Plunged back into despair by this fresh postponement, Colon swore that because he was divinely inspired all the legions of Hell were in arms against him.
And now, a year and more after that exultant journey from Palos at the Queen’s command, he was back in Cordoba, still waiting, still following the Court, but fallen into such neglect that the Queen had forgotten to offer him his old lodging and he had been too proud to seek it unbidden. Thus, on Santangel’s recommendation, he had hired himself a room over the shop of Bensabat, the tailor, in the Calle Atayud, narrowest and most crooked of streets in that city of narrow crooked streets.
The royal mind engrossed in warlike preparations for the final conquest of Granada could spare no thought for the schemes and dreams of navigators, whence it had followed that, cooling his heels about the royal antechambers, this man once regarded as a portent was now become an object of derision. His notion of reaching the Indies by the west which once had inspired awe was now so much a subject for mockery that six months ago already a witling had expressed it in a quatrain:
Colon declares he finds it best
To reach the east by going west.
I nothing doubt he’s found as well
The road to Heaven lies through Hell.
The silly lampoon had enjoyed a vogue in a Court which welcomed weapons of ridicule. It had reached the ears of the lordly Messer Federigo Mocenigo, Venetian Ambassador to the Sovereigns of Castile and Aragon, and thence it had followed that whilst Colon gloomed about the Court of Spain neglected and forgotten, he came to excite a deal of anxious thought in other unsuspected quarters.
In distant Venice a pattern of sinister design was being woven into the warp of his destiny.