Chapter 19 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE REPORT
Pride had stiffened and sustained him for just so long as their eyes were upon him, but not a moment longer.
As the doors of the council-chamber closed behind him his body sagged from its erectness, and half blinded by angry emotion he took a faltering way to a bench that was ranged against a wall.
A couple of pages were whispering in a corner. A stalwart guardsman with polished morion and ordered partisan stood like a statue before the door. These took no heed of him, and there were no others in that gloomy hall to observe the outward signs of his dejection. For although he sat there, with a vague thought of awaiting the end of the deliberations, it was rather out of the need of a word of explanation with Santangel than from any hope that the junta would find other than against him.
His broodings devoured the moments. Time went unperceived, and when the doors of the council-chamber were thrown open to give passage to the men who had sat in judgment upon him, he was startled by the speed with which it seemed to him that their conclusions had been reached. A bare half-hour had they consumed, and not the half of that did it seem to him.
Talavera came first, walking between Maldonado and Rezende.
Instinctively Colon rose. Their eyes, drawn to him by his movement, were at once averted again when they saw who stood there. They passed on, leaving him quivering as if they had struck him.
Next came Deza, walking alone, with bowed head; Deza, who had believed in him, who had been convinced by him, and who had so stoutly championed his cause with the Sovereigns. Deza saw him, too; and Deza, too, passed on without a word or a sign, from which he could but gather that even Deza had come to regard him as a trickster who did not scruple to employ falsehood and mean artifice so as to buttress a weakness in his case.
The viperish Fonseca followed, in animated talk with the Dominican jurist, and now Colon cursed himself for having lingered in that antechamber, thereby exposing himself to this humiliation of being ignored, unheeded.
At last came Santangel, walking in silence with Quintanilla. For a moment Colon trembled, lest Santangel, this dear, warm friend to whom he owed so much, should also pass him by. That pain at least he was spared. Santangel quitted his companion’s side, and careless of the eyes and opinions of others came straight across to Colon. His countenance was troubled. He spoke on a sigh and with a shake of his grey head.
“So far it has gone badly for you, my dear Cristobal. But it may yet be mended. We must strive to recover this chart.”
“I thank you at least for believing that it exists.”
“Why should I not?”
“Others discover a difficulty. Those gentlemen who go yonder . . .”
Santangel’s hand upon his shoulder interrupted him. “The longer I live, Cristobal, the more I perceive how little charity there is in man.”
“That answers me. The junta is to report me a low, swindling trickster. In the words of Don Juan de Fonseca, my claim is an imposture.”
“Waste no thought or temper on that arrogant priest, nor on any of this. I will come to you presently. Go now.”
He patted Colon’s shoulder encouragingly. But Colon was beyond encouragement. He went home in despair and shame.
On weary limbs he mounted the stairs to his lodging, opened the door, and checked under the lintel at sight of Beatriz seated before his table.
She sprang up to greet him, leaving a black lace mantilla to drape the chair. “I had to come, Cristobal, to wait for you here and to have your news at the first moment. I have been so impatient. You have triumphed, my dear. I know you have.”
He came forward into the light from the window, and it revealed how drawn and haggard was his face. She shrank appalled.
“Cristobal!”
His smile was a grimace of pain. He thrust her back into the chair, went down on his knees beside her, and buried his face in her lap.
“It is finished,” he groaned. “All is gone from me: hopes, credit, honour itself. Before night I shall have been reported to the Sovereigns as a lying mountebank. If they are merciful I shall be ordered to leave Spain, or else King Ferdinand, grudging the loss of the poor pittances they have paid me, may cast me into prison for having practised a cheat.”
She took the tawny head in her caressing, soothing hands. She questioned him breathlessly. He sat back on his heels, and looked at her. “I have been robbed,” he said.
“Robbed?” Horror hushed her voice. It stared at him from her eyes. “Of what? Of what have you been robbed?”
“Of everything.” He got to his feet again. “Of everything but life. They leave me that so that despair and shame may feed upon it. I have been robbed of the weapons with which I could have bludgeoned sense into those Salamanca numskulls, those learned dolts, those vain priestly sceptics.”
He set himself to pace the room in long strides, like an angry panther, rehearsing for her the sneers, the innuendoes with which he had been goaded into telling them of documents which, had he been able to produce them, must have commanded respect, but by the absence of which he was branded an impudent impostor.
She sat very still and white, her anguished eyes never leaving him as he swung to and fro in his pacing. At last he came to a halt before her, his lips bitter.
“That is the end of all my dreams, including that dear, proud dream of which you were the centre and pivot, my Beatriz. I must go on my travels again, go peddle my wares elsewhere, if even so much is worth while now that I have lost the surety without which princes will not give heed to what I offer.”
She set her elbows on the table, and took her head in her hands. She strove to recall the exact words which Gallina had wrung from her fears. Recalling them, she came to perceive how much she had admitted, how much she had unwittingly betrayed to that crafty Venetian.
She conquered the numbness that held her, and forced herself to speak. “When did you last see those parchments?”
“When? What do I know? I had not looked at them for months. Even when on Wednesday I enclosed in the case the letter for Santangel that made provision for you, I did not examine the case’s contents, so sure was I that all was there.”
“Is it impossible that when last you handled the chart you did not replace it?”
“Impossible. I never kept it anywhere but in the case. Besides, I have searched everywhere.”
“You were absent all day yesterday,” she reminded him. “Could it be that your lodging was entered then?”
“I found no sign of it. And yet . . .” He recollected something. “I remember a disorder in the coffer when I went to it this morning in which I could not think to have left it. I last opened it on the morning after you were here.” He reflected. “It is possible—yes—that it was yesterday that I was robbed. Yet how? The coffer was locked as I left it. And who would know where I kept the key?”
“I knew.”
“You?” He stared. “You mean that as I told you, so I might have told others. But I did not. And even you did not know which chart in the case was the material one.”
She must tell him, be the consequences what they might. “Listen, Cristobal . . . .” She raised her eyes, and met his haggard, burning gaze. Her courage drained from her. Impossible to add to the torment he was suffering by an avowal which made her the agent, however unwilling, and unwitting at the end, of this betrayal.
“I am listening, my love.”
“Oh, nothing . . . nothing,” she faltered. “An idle, passing thought.”
He stooped, and kissed her lips, nor heeded their cold unresponsiveness. Still leaning over her, he spoke in a voice of heartbreak. “When I found you, I needed you so much, Beatriz. And now that I need you so much more—as I have never needed anyone—I must renounce you.”
There was no response from her. She sat so still that she might have been deemed insensible but for the utter misery of her countenance.
A knock at the door brought the relief of an interruption.
Colon went to open, and found Santangel on the threshold.
“Don Luis!” He stood aside, to give the Chancellor passage.
Santangel came in; then, seeing Beatriz, he halted. “I am perhaps inopportune?”
“Never that. This is a dear friend, Mistress Beatriz Enriquez, who comes to me in the hour when most friends abandon me.”
Don Luis uncovered, and bowed gravely. He recognized her for the dancing-girl whom Colon had defended from the scorn of the Marchioness of Moya. His shrewd eyes observed the disorder of her looks, and thought the better of her for it. Nor had he outlived a reverence for such beauty as that of Beatriz.
“It was urgent to let you know, Cristobal, that their Highnesses will not give audience to the Bishop of Avila until this evening. I have dragged a promise from him that if the missing chart should be discovered before then, he will withhold the report now drawn.”
Colon’s glance softened. “May I die if ever I had a better friend.”
Santangel waved this away. “The chart?” he asked. “Have you thought, at least, by whom you might have been robbed?”
“I can think of none.”
“Surely, surely! Search your mind. Everything depends upon it, even your very honour. Remember the old maxim: Cui bono fuerit? Consider whom it might profit.”
“Some there may be. I had thought of the Portuguese. But only because none else occurred to me. A fantastic suspicion.”
Don Luis stamped about the room in exasperation. “Under what need was Deza,” he cried, “to drag in the name of Toscanelli? We might have done well enough without mention of that chart.”
“He meant to help me.”
Don Luis shook his head in deprecation. “Oh, yes. He meant the best, as I did. And we achieved the worst. Even Deza who was so much your friend has turned against you now. Like the rest, he regards this tale of robbery as a subterfuge. It has killed his faith.”
Colon was shaken by a gust of rage. “God avail me! What anxiety to think evil! What readiness to strip a poor devil of his honour! What jealousy of the favour a foreigner might earn with the Sovereigns! What joy in denouncing me a shameless impostor!”
Santangel’s shoulders were bowed, his countenance a mask of sorrow. “If you can give me no hope of finding those evidences . . .” He ended with a shrug, and a spell of silence followed.
Beatriz continued to sit with her elbows on the table, her chin on her clenched fists, wretchedness in every line of her drawn face. The urge to speak, to tell them what she knew, continued stifled by fear of Colon’s contempt.
“I’ll go to the Queen,” said Don Luis, at last. “Her heart is as tender as her mind is shrewd. Depend upon me to fight for you to the last.”
“Alas, my friend. I furnish you with no more than broken weapons.”
“We shall see. We shall see. Sustain your courage. I will come soon again. Perhaps to-night.”
When he had gone, Beatriz discovered that she, too, must go. They would be awaiting her by now at Zagarte’s. She was late already.
“Yes,” Colon grimly agreed. “You must go. I am to be laughed at for my boastful talk of delivering you from that thraldom.”
She fled distracted, and was half-way to Zagarate’s before she checked. What she lacked the courage to tell Colon, she dared tell the Chancellor; and having told him she could vanish from the scene. On that thought, she stood arrested in the busy street, heeding neither those who jostled her nor those who paused to stare at the wildness of her looks. The thought became a resolve. Zagarte, the mystery and the audience might go hang.
She turned, and then she checked again, dismayed by a dreadful vision. Her brother Pablo, utterly forgotten in her present anguish, rose like a mournful ghost before her. For an instant she stood again in that dark, dank dungeon of the Pozzi, and beheld him gaunt and unkempt, passionately pleading with her to deliver him from that hell even at the cost of her chastity. The thought that now, having calculatedly worn Armida’s girdle so as to accomplish his deliverance, she was to leave him to his hideous fate, doom him for his lifetime to the galleys, shook her resolve. The horror of choosing between her brother and her lover again confronted her. Only by betrayal and sacrifice of one of them could she avoid the betrayal and sacrifice of the other. Only by treachery could she mend treachery.
A passing soldier, jostling her intentionally and muttering a ribald invitation, brought her back to her surroundings. With a look that scorched him from her path, she sped away in the direction of the Mezquita. Don Luis had his dwelling at the head of the street that ran beside the Cathedral’s western wall, down towards the river. The house stood back in a courtyard where palm trees and aloes flourished about the marble basin of a bronze fountain. A halberdier, guarding the gateway, was barring her way to inquire her purpose, when Santangel, himself, emerged from the house.
Gracious and deferential, it was not in his nature to put her off when she begged for a word with him.
“The moment is hardly well-chosen. I am on my way to the Alcazar. You will guess both my purpose and its urgency.”
“Your excellency will go the better furnished by what I have to tell you.”
His kindly eyes searched that pale, eager face. “Come with me.” He led the way across the sunlit court into the cool gloom of a stone hall, where lackeys sprang to minister. He waved them away, and ushered her into a little waiting-room.
“What can you have to tell me?”
Her answer struck at the very heart of the matter. “Who the thieves are, and where they may be found.” Under the amazement in his glance she hurried on: “They are agents of the Venetian Inquisitors of State. Two of them: and their names are Rocca and Gallina. Rocca represents himself as attached to the Venetian embassy at the Court of the Sovereigns. They are lodged at the Fonda del Leon.”
He took a step towards her. “How do you come to know all this?”
“Must I tell you that?” The question rang in his ears like a cry of pain. “Is it not enough that you have their names?”
“If I am to act I should know more; particularly since one of them, from what you tell me, can claim ambassadorial privileges.” And he added: “Does Cristobal know this?”
“I have not dared to tell him.”
“Ah!” He raised his heavy brows. But his rich, deep voice was very gentle. “Why is that? Be quite frank with me, child.”
She stood for a moment in the hesitation of one who faces inevitable calamity, her eyes lowered, her body rocking a little, her hands twisting one within the other. Then with a sudden fierce defiance she plunged into her tale.
“In the Pozzi at Venice I have a brother, held a prisoner, rightly because of a theft, wrongly because suspected of being a spy of Aragon.”
From that beginning the whole miserable story flowed, whilst Santangel, immovable, inscrutable, scarcely seeming to breathe, stood listening and weighing every word.
“I know,” she told him at the end, “how loathly I must appear to you; how loathly I am. I know that I deserve no mercy. Yet this I say, and take Our Lady of Sorrows to witness, that in what incautiously I allowed Gallina to learn from me, I had no thought of betraying Cristobal. For the love I had so vilely been hired to simulate had become a reality.”
“You do not need to protest it. You make it manifest.” Don Luis spoke softly, soothingly. “My poor child! I Yours was a cruel choice between your brother and your lover.”
“And—merciful Heaven!—how have I chosen?” she cried in anguish.
“As was just and right,” he firmly assured her. “For your brother’s plight no responsibility can lie upon you. His own courses brought him to it. He has no claim upon you to deliver him. In urging one he but adds to his offences. Cristobal, however, is caught in a snare in which you were used as the decoy. That he is your lover, that you love him, is nothing to the matter. Duty demands that at all costs you should deliver him.”
Wonder overspread her face at the revelation his reasoning brought her, and with that wonder a relief against which she must still be struggling. “If I could believe that! What a burden of horror would not be lifted from me.”
“Would you put it to the test? Go and confess yourself. There is not a priest would give you absolution until you had made reparation by undoing what you have done. So dismiss an idle remorse. Go now. Leave me to act. I will see the Alcalde-Mayor at once, so that order may be taken.”
“You will require my testimony for that.”
He shook his head, smiling a little. “That is the last thing I shall require. Your testimony would compel the Alcalde to take action against you.”
“I know. That does not matter.”
His smile broadened, it became more tender before this eagerness for reparatory martyrdom. “Child, that would mean your ruin, and at such a price Cristobal would not thank me for the recovery of his honour. Leave this in my hands. I shall contrive without you. Meanwhile, lose no time in telling Cristobal. Tell him everything.”
She trembled. “I . . . I dare not. Not yet, at least.” On a thought she added: “Would you . . . Would your excellency tell him? Then it will be for him to do as he chooses with me.”
He considered. “If you wish it. But, believe me, child, it will come better from you.”
She wrung her hands. “I dare not. At least, not until the harm has been repaired, until the chart has been recovered.”
“Well, well! That is what chiefly matters. The rest we’ll leave for the moment. I’ll lose no time.”
It did not prove as easy as Don Luis counted. Don Miguel de Escobedo, the High Justiciary of Cordoba, was a punctilious gentleman, rigidly bound by the law’s formalities. He was not disposed to take action until his questions were answered.
“It is idle to press me, Don Miguel,” Santangel protested. “Assume that I have received the information under seal of the confessional.”
“Since when have you been in holy orders, Don Luis?”
“It is not only the priest who hears confessions. I am pledged not to divulge the source of my information. Suppose that I could not obtain it without that pledge. Should I then have permitted this crime to go undiscovered and unpunished?”
“But where is the evidence of the crime?”
“My word.”
“Your word? Is it not, rather, the word of some person unknown?”
“Not unknown to me. Will that not satisfy you?”
“How can it? One of these men, you tell me, is in the following of the Venetian envoy. Even with full evidence I must be reluctant to meddle with such a man.” The Alcalde combed his grizzled beard. “Unless action is justified by results, my office will be in jeopardy. Couldn’t you bring me an order from the Sovereigns?”
“No. But I can undertake that they’ll approve you when it is done.”
“May I die if I know what to do. I’ll send for the Corregidor.”
So the executive officer was fetched, a very military gentleman, named Don Xavier Pastor, who proved a man of more ideas and fewer scruples than the Alcalde.
“A chart and a letter, eh?” He nodded, and added pertinently: “If we find them on one or the other of these Venetians, how shall we prove that they do not belong to him?”
“Master Colon, no doubt, will tell you how to identify his property.”
“Then let us begin with Master Colon.”
“But after that?” demanded the Alcalde, shocked by his subordinate’s levity. “One of these men, remember, is attached to an embassy.”
“Depend upon me not to act officially.” Don Xavier permitted himself to wink. “We avoid embroiling ourselves. Trust me to be delicate.”
“If you blunder I shall disown you,” the Alcalde threatened.
“I shall deserve it,” laughed the Corregidor, whom Santangel was finding more and more a man after his own heart.
They went off—Santangel and Don Xavier—to visit Colon, the Corregidor being warned that on no account must he disclose that they already knew the identity of the thieves.
“I bring you hope, Cristobal,” Don Luis greeted him. “Here is the Corregidor, who undertakes to recover your chart.”
“When we don’t know who stole it?”
“That will be for us to discover,” said Don Xavier. There was a confident smile, which Colon thought fatuous, on his long lean face. “Put your faith in us, sir. We have our ways in Cordoba.”
“Surprising ways if you can accomplish this.”
“With your assistance. How shall we know the chart is yours when we find it?”
“It goes with a letter, superscribed with my name, bearing the signature Paolo Toscanelli and his seal: a spread eagle under a ducal crown. The chart, in the same hand, bears the same seal and signature.”
“That is all I need. Look to hear from me soon again. God rest you, sir.” And he marched out.
“A very self-sufficient gentleman, liberal of promises,” was Colon’s criticism, neither just nor grateful, for the Corregidor was on his way to the Fonda del Leon.
He went no farther than the landlord’s parlour, where Quisada, who kept that prosperous house, met him with the respectful anxiety which a Corregidor inspires.
“God save your worship.”
“God save you, Quisada. What rooms have you for hire?”
“None at the moment, sir, the Lord be praised. With their Highnesses in Cordoba there is not a lodging empty.”
Don Xavier stroked his long black moustaches. “That is vexatious, now. Will no guest be departing soon?”
“Oh, yes. To-morrow. My best room above stairs will be free.”
“That is certain? Who is your departing guest?”
“Two foreign gentlemen; Venetians. The mules are ordered for eight o’clock in the morning.”
“Mules?” The Corregidor was jocular. “Do they ride to Venice?”
“Why, no, your worship. To Malaga, to take ship.”
“Of course, of course.” He laughed the point away. “Their room may serve. If so you shall have word from me to-night.”
Thus, with all the information that he required, the Corregidor departed. Late that evening he went to report to the Alcalde, and found Santangel with him.
The Chancellor had come from the Alcazar a half-hour before in grim anxiety to know what was being done. He had been in attendance upon the Sovereigns when Talavera, accompanied by Deza, Fonseca and Maldonado, had presented to their Highnesses the junta’s report, which utterly condemned Colon’s project.
“The idle dream of a reckless adventurer, who so as to impose himself did not scruple falsely to claim the support of a famous mathematician.” Thus Talavera.
The Queen’s face had lengthened in disappointment. Not so King Ferdinand’s.
“A timely conclusion,” his Highness opined. “With the final reduction of Granada before us, we have something other than dreams to engage us.” He turned, smiling, to the Queen. “I have looked with misgiving, as you know, upon the enthusiasm this trickster’s fantasy awakened in your Highness. It was ever my fear that your credulity was being abused.”
The placidity of the Queen’s countenance was momentarily disturbed. A faint flush that may have been of resentment swept like a cloud across it. For despite the courtesy of King Ferdinand’s tone, she perceived in his words a tolerant derision that offended.
“Even at the risk of being mocked for that credulity,” she retorted, “I will neglect no opportunity that might make for the greater power and glory of the realm of Castile which it has pleased God to place under my rule.”
“I trust, Madam, that I am no less sensible of the duties of my position. It is because of this that if err I must, I will err on the side of caution where Spanish lives and Spanish treasure are to be staked.”
“I do not doubt it,” she answered him. “But too much caution may thwart achievement.” She turned to Talavera with something of challenge. “You deliver this, my Lord Bishop, as the considered judgment of the junta?”
“Our considered judgment, Highness.”
“But not unanimous,” Santangel threw in. “It is not mine.”
His Highness laughed with good-humoured mockery. “You are not of much account as a cosmographer, Santangel.”
“But enough of a jurist, Highness, not to confuse negative with positive evidence.”
“That expresses my own feeling, Don Luis,” the Queen was quick to approve him, and turned again to Talavera. “Why must you conclude that it is a falsehood that this chart was stolen?”
“Permit me to remind your Highness that beyond Colon’s word we have no evidence that it ever existed.”
“And beyond yours,” flashed Santangel, “there is none that Colon did not speak the truth. A man’s failure to supply proof of his statements is not in itself evidence that he lies.”
“Not in itself. No,” Talavera answered patiently. “But in the circumstances it is significant that none has ever seen this chart. To allege theft of it when pressed to produce it, is a convenient subterfuge for a trickster who had won a hearing by pretending to possess it.”
Her Highness manifested impatience. “To what purpose such a pretence, since in the end it must be exposed?”
“So as to provide opportunity to present arguments by which he might dazzle and seduce us.”
“This is ingenious. Subtle, indeed. Yet it all proves nothing,” the Queen insisted, advocating, indeed, not Colon’s cause, but her own. “If there has been foolish credulity it has not been mine alone. Frey Diego, there, was won by Colon’s arguments. Do they become worthless because he cannot produce this chart?”
“My belief in his theories, Madam,” Deza defended himself, “were rooted in my belief in the man, and certainly influenced by the assertion that they had the support of Toscanelli. Before the junta he made no mention of Toscanelli. It was I who brought up the matter of the Florentine’s chart when it seemed clear that Colon’s unsupported arguments were not acceptable to judges who were dutifully cautious. I confess that I cannot avoid grave suspicion of his statement that he had been robbed of it.”
Santangel, perceiving the impression Deza’s grave words had made, went in to combat it. “That is a suspicion that I, at least, refuse to share. I recognize greatness when I see it, and Colon is too great a man to be a liar.”
King Ferdinand laughed again. “If I know anything of men, there is no such greatness. The opinion, Santangel, does more credit to your heart than to your head.”
“It is an opinion, Highness, that I shall yet hope to justify.”
“Not only credulous, but sanguine,” the King rallied him. “Well, well. They are qualities that go together; but I had not thought to find them in a man of your sagacity. You will probably agree, Madam, that until Don Luis discovers this justification we may leave the matter, and turn our minds to more pressing business.”
The Queen sighed a reluctant assent, and with a rather wistful smile for Santangel prayed, if without confidence, that he might realize his hopes.
It was the end of the discussion, and with a sense that in the heat of it he had pledged some of his credit, Santangel sought the Alcalde again, to ascertain what had been done.
Thus the Corregidor found him there on his arrival. Don Xavier’s manner was brisk and breezy. “Everything is in train,” he announced. “The Venetians set out in the morning for Malaga, there to take ship for home. Their mules are ordered for eight o’clock. You will probably agree, Don Miguel, that this departure is a sort of admission that their work in Cordoba is done: that they have obtained what they sought here.”
The Alcalde agreed without enthusiasm. Santangel, however, was brought to exasperation. “But perceiving this, have you done nothing more? These men must not leave Cordoba.”
The Corregidor grinned. “I think they must. We have no warrant upon which to detain them, and as I understand it, we are not likely to have one.”
“Indeed you are not,” the Alcalde assured him. “Devil take me if I dare issue a warrant on such evidence, against a man who is a member of an embassy.”
“But what then?” Don Luis demanded.
“If we can’t prevent their departure,” said the Corregidor, with a sly smile, “we can certainly prevent their arrival. The Malaga road is in bad repute, infested with brigands. But we can’t be everywhere, Don Luis, with our alguaziles. If a couple of rash foreigners get themselves robbed, the State can’t be held responsible. I think that is the way of it, Don Miguel. It will avoid any complications with the Venetian envoy.”
Santangel’s relief permitted him to be jocular. “You make me suspect that to be Corregidor of Cordoba is a profitable trade.”