Chapter 24 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE FLIGHT
Beatriz, half-stunned by the events, was left there with Zagarte and her woman. Their kindly attempts to rouse her went unheeded.
“And the accursed dogs have broken your guitar,” the Morisco inveighed, regarding the wrecked instrument with rueful eyes.
She swept a hand wearily across her brow. “No matter for the guitar, Zagarte. My singing is finished with it. I shall not want another.”
“How? Not want another?” His wide mouth fell open. “What are you saying?”
Wearily she got up. “Just that, Zagarte. It is finished, my friend. I won’t sing again, here or anywhere.”
“Now, now, God avail us! Those misbegotten sons of dogs have shaken you. We’ll give you a holiday to-day. To-morrow . . .”
She shook her head, a mournfulness to inspire compassion in her lovely face. “There will be no to-morrow.” She put a hand on his arm. “Have patience with me, Zagarte. Be kind. I can bear no more.”
The little man set an arm round her, paternally. The wrinkles in his lean brown face deepened in concern. “But this will pass. It will pass, devil take it. A fine girl like you isn’t so easily dismayed.”
“I’m not dismayed. I am broken. Broken like that guitar.”
“But what have they done to you, those scoundrels?” he demanded, and in his exasperation so far forgot his baptism as to have recourse to the objurgations of his early faith. “May dogs defile their graves!”
“Oh, it is not what they have done. It is what life has done. What I have done. Pay me what is due to me, Zagarte, and let me go. I could be of no further use to you here.”
He swung from prayers to reproaches, and back again to prayers. Had she no heart? He had always been generous with her. She had reaped a liberal share of the takings. He might let her have even a little more. What was to become of his mystery?
“It was well enough before I came to it.”
“But since you’ve been in it, it can never be the same again.”
“You have been good to me, Zagarte, and that would count with me if anything could. But I must go.”
“Where will you go, child?”
“Away from Cordoba. Away from the life I’ve been living. That is all that matters.”
From this resolve no power on earth could move her. Zagarte’s patrons were to know her no more. On the morrow, sad-eyed and wistful, she said farewell to the Morisco, and on a mule, with her packages slung behind her, accompanied only by her woman and the muleteer, she rode out of Cordoba by the Almodovar Gate, and took the westward road that leads to Seville.
At about the same hour the Corregidor from his seat of judgment in the cheerless audience chamber of the Corregidoria, with the melancholy crucifix on the white wall behind him, was scowling down upon Rocca and Gallina.
Once again those two had known the cramped, foetid hospitality of Cordoba gaol, following upon some crude and brutal surgery performed on Rocca to reduce the dislocation of his shoulder.
Colon, by the favour of the Corregidor, so fully acquainted with the secret history behind this affair, appeared now not as a delinquent, but as the accuser.
Courteously invited by Don Xavier to state his case, he announced that he had it on the word of Don Luis de Santangel, who at need would confirm him, that these men were guilty of a theft of which some days ago he had been the victim. Coming upon them yesterday he had taxed them with it, whereupon they had drawn their daggers and assailed him constraining him to employ force so as to defend his life.
Don Xavier cleared his throat, and delivered himself.
“From the information in our possession, we know the first part of that statement to be true. The rest is so natural a sequel that its truth is not to be doubted.” He directed a black scowl upon the prisoners. “By the intervention of the Envoy of the Most Serene Republic, and because at that time the proofs of your offence were not perhaps so conclusive as they are to-day, you were leniently dealt with. That lenience you have abused by renewing your criminal turbulence. It is, as before, for his excellency the Alcalde to pass judgment upon you. What judgment he will pass I cannot foretell. But since both of you are men of vigour and stout sinew you may hope that he will take the view that a term of years on the bench of a galley is due from you to the justice of Castile.”
Whatever the Venetians may have expected, it was not this. Before that grim prospect both broke into speech, Gallina protesting that men could not be treated with such manifest injustice without even being heard in their own defence, Rocca demanding again, as a person in the following of the Venetian envoy, to be allowed to communicate with Messer Mocenigo.
Don Xavier answered them with cruel waggishness. “As for being heard on your defence, that is a matter for the Alcalde, who will certainly hear you. In Castile we deprive no man of his rights. It is only so as to spare you the torment of suspense, that I have indicated what must follow, since no defence that you can offer could deceive us as to your offences or diminish their abominable character.
“As for an appeal to his excellency the Envoy of the Most Serene Republic, the Alcalde will probably agree with me that it is desirable to avoid the possibility of an intervention that might be a cause of friction between States. So go with God, both of you.”
When they had been hustled out, Don Xavier turned to Colon. “Be sure they will not trouble you again. But tell me, sir, the alguaziles say that there was a woman present with them at Zagarte’s, a dancing-girl.”
Colon’s heart trembled within him. But his answer was steady.
“That was mere chance. She is nowise concerned.”
To that extent he could be merciful to her whom he judged to have used him with so little mercy. But no more. Although he ached for her, yet he desired never to see her again. Finding her in the hour of his great need, he had joyously given her in return for the consolation she brought him, all that he had to give, all that there was of him. She had become more to him than any other living creature, not excepting even the beloved child he had left at La Rabida. In her his spirit had found a spirit upon which to lean. This union had made him strong, deepening the inspiration to a mighty achievement, rendered more glorious in prospect from the hope of laying at her feet the fruits of it. Now these feet were disclosed to him as of basest clay, planted in the foul mud of deceit and harlotry. He had enshrined—so that he might cherish her to the point of reverence—an ignoble decoy hired to delude and rob him. And she had robbed him of something more than a chart. She had robbed him of his last illusion, of the last shred of lingering faith in human love and human decency. Well, let her go, poor wretch. Her punishment would come upon her all too soon without action of his. It would spring naturally out of the infamy of her existence.
For him there remained still the discovery of new worlds. Let that high destiny suffice him. It was as well, perhaps, that he should travel his road without encumbrances, with the singleness of aim in the appointed task proper to one who was, as he believed and had declared himself, an instrument in the hand of God for the service of Man.
Thus he sought solace for the bitterness in his heart, the aching loneliness in which he was left by the defection of Beatriz. But resignation came not so readily to his beckoning. For days he moped and fretted in idleness at Cordoba. More than once he had to do violence to himself to avoid the weakness of repairing to Zagarte’s, where he supposed that Beatriz still displayed her incomparable grace in the saraband. To combat the temptation he would seek the Mezquita, and prostrate himself before the blue and white image of Our Lady of the Assumption, seeking in that unearthly devotion to escape the heartbreak of his frustrated earthly love.
At the end of an intolerable week, finding that Don Alonso de Quintanilla was leaving for the camp in the Vega, he took horse and rode in his train to rejoin the Court.
Mists were rising from the water-courses of the Vega at the close of a summer day when they descended into the plain, saluted from the distance by the roar of the Queen’s lombards that were pounding the Saracen walls with stone and iron.
Through the stir and bustle of the camp they came at dusk to Santangel’s luxurious pavilion, and there the welcome from the elderly Chancellor warmed Colon’s chilled heart like wine.
“You do well to show yourself, and so keep their Highnesses mindful of you. But what ails you?”
Santangel took him by the shoulders, and turned him so that the light from the lamp on the camp table fell full upon his haggard face. “Are you ill?”
“In the soul of me,” said Colon, and told his wretched tale.
Santangel was aghast. “And she made no defence?”
Colon misunderstood the indignation rumbling in that deep voice. “What defence could she make? I took them so unawares, in the very act of conspiring anew. I overheard too much.”
“Too much! You did not overhear enough. You fool! Did you never ask yourself upon what information we were able so soon to recover your stolen property? Did it never cross your mind that someone must have told us just where to seek it?” Colon looked at him in bewilderment. “It was Beatriz. Beatriz Enriquez. Whom else should it have been? It was by an inadvertence that she betrayed to Gallina that you kept the chart at your lodging. But the moment she knew that it had been stolen, she came to me and told me all.”
“To you?” Colon was still unconvinced. “To you? But why to you? Why not to me?”
“That’s a long story, and a wretched——”
“Besides,” Colon raged on, “from what I overheard it was plain that she was leagued with those scoundrels, that she had been hired to decoy and betray me. That is not to be denied.”
“It is not denied.” Santangel was sorrowful. “But the price! The poor girl was no venal adventuress. They suborned her craftily, cruelly, using her natural love for a rascal brother who is in the clutches of the Venetian State. But the unhappy child came to love you, and when the need arose proved it; proved it terribly by sacrificing her brother for you. That is what she did when she denounced the thieves to me. That is the woman you are scorning; the woman of whom in your pride you would not seek an explanation; the woman whose heart is probably now broken.”
Colon sat down heavily. “I shall go mad, I think. Why, if this is so, why did she not tell me?”
“What chance did you give her? You drew your horrible conclusions and——”
“I mean, when she told you.”
“Can’t you understand how she must shrink from so dreadful a confession, at least until the harm had been repaired?” He sighed. “I might have told you, myself, before you returned to Cordoba. She asked me to tell you. But . . .” He shrugged. “I thought it better to leave that for her. I thought it better that she should win absolution from you by confession.”
Colon took his head in his hands. “Absolution!” he cried. “But from what you tell me, it is I who stand in need of it.”
“God be praised that you perceive it.” Don Luis came to set a hand on Colon’s shoulder. “Lose no time here. Get back to Cordoba and put an end to what she will be suffering. Make your peace with that unhappy child.”
“Do you suppose that I need urging?”
Thus, within five days of quitting Cordoba, Colon was back again, seeking her at Zagarte’s, only to learn from the Morisco that she was gone. This was a check in full career.
“Gone? Gone whither?”
Zagarte did not know. She had taken her belongings, and left on the morning after the disturbance with the Venetians. There was the muleteer whom she had hired. He should be able to say whither he had conveyed her.
The muleteer, when Colon found him at his stables near the Gallegos Gate, informed him that he had left Beatriz at a convent near Palma del Rio, at the junction of the Genil with the Guadalquivir.
Colon set out upon the following morning, and rode the thirty miles to Palma in four hours, his impatience mounting with every league of the journey. He found the low white building of the convent, above the river, on a hillock reached through a thicket of ilex. The elderly, toothless lay-sister who opened to his knock eyed him with the suspicion she would bestow upon any gallant who came inquiring for a lady. When at last she had understood whom he sought, it was to answer him that Beatriz Enriquez had stayed but two days at the convent. Then she had left again, but whither she had gone, or even what road she had taken, the sister could not tell him. Perhaps in the town of Palma he might be able to discover it.
Within a couple of hours there was no muleteer or inn in Palma that he had not visited. But he could find no trace of her. He spent the night at an inn, and on the following morning set out again, to pursue the road that led south and west. At Lorna del Rio, at Tocino and at Guadajoz, and at every roadside tavern in between, he went inquiring, describing Beatriz and the Morisco woman who accompanied her. It all proved vain. No trace of her remained, and at last, despairing, he abandoned the quest and went back to Cordoba to enlist the aid of the Corregidor.
Don Xavier would spare no effort to oblige one who enjoyed the powerful protection of the Chancellor of Aragon. His alguaziles should set inquiries afoot in every district they visited. In this renewed hope Colon waited, lingering for weeks in Cordoba. Gradually, however, with the lack of news, his hopes withered, and his bitterness grew in considering the want of faith which had made him so prompt to convict Beatriz.