Chapter 35 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE RETURN OF PABLO
It happened that at about the time that Colon was tasting the first sweets of victory, at the risk of his neck, at the Court of the King of Portugal, a man was landing from a fishing-ketch at Seville in whom even his sometime intimates would not readily have recognized Pablo de Arana. A black beard unkempt and untrimmed clothed his gaunt, hollow cheeks. His black hair was tangled and matted. Abject of appearance, he was clothed in the odds and ends which he owed to the charity of the fishermen who had pulled him naked from the sea a fortnight earlier.
Venetian patience, having been exhausted of its hopes of securing the Toscanelli chart, had sent Pablo to expiate his offences against God and man at the bench of a trireme.
The galley to which he was assigned had been detailed to convey an illustrious personage to the Court of the Spanish Sovereigns at Barcelona, when it was caught in one of those storms that seem to have swept all the seas of the world in the early part of that year 1493. The vessel was driven out of its course to be ultimately capsized and lost.
With the strength of terror, Pablo de Arana had wrenched from the deck the staple to which he was chained when the vessel was in danger of foundering. When adrift, after the galley had vanished, and in danger of being shortly sunk by the iron links that dangled from his leg, another slave, clinging to one of the galley’s long sweeps, had been cast against him by a wave. Pablo had clutched frenziedly at the loom of the great oar. Its original possessor, similarly weighted by his chain, protested that it could not support them both. Pablo agreed with him so thoroughly that he raised himself momentarily from the water on that length of timber and dealt the wretch so shrewd a blow between the eyes that, half-stunned, he loosed his hold.
“Go with God,” said Pablo to the vanishing head, and climbed to bestride the lightened sweep.
There were other survivors, struggling and wailing and clinging to wreckage in the storm-tossed sea. Pablo, who believed in minding his own affairs when he saw no profit in minding that of others, conceived it prudent to get away from these fellow unfortunates before any of them should be tempted to dispute with him the possession of the oar that was his by right of conquest. So he set himself to swim and paddle with it diligently, until he found himself entirely alone.
Then, at last, he came soberly to consider his case, and began to make the acquaintance of despair. Not only was there no land in sight, but he did not even know in which direction land might lie. The sky, out of which it was raining heavily, was so black that it was impossible to determine the position of the sun, which would have given him an orientation; and anyway, the sun must be near its setting. With the approach of night Pablo began to regard his oar as less of a plank of salvation than he had supposed it. He might by luck and tenacity live through to another day. But in what better case would its dawn find him? He began to give thought to his immortal soul, and even to deplore its immortality; for perceiving in this hour of illumination the utter foulness of his life, he had no cause to hope for any sort of bliss in eternity. He had always supposed that when his time came to enter upon it he would find a priest to shrive him, so that with the comforting viaticum of absolution he might peacefully make the dread journey. He was being cheated, he thought, of his Christian rights, in being left to perish unshriven, with all his weight of sin upon him to bear him down to Hell. His soul revolted at so monstrous an injustice. It was impossible that the Divine Will could be concerned in this. A merciful God would surely spare him, so that he might have the chance to practise the better life that follows upon repentance. From this it was but a stage to vow repentance and amendment if he were spared. He sought to invoke Our Lady’s pity, to bribe Her with promises of pilgrimages to be made to the nearest of Her shrines, barefoot, in his shirt, and candle in hand, like the humblest penitent.
In such vows did the scoundrel spend a night of anguish, tossed in the dark, astride his oar, from wave crest to wave crest.
Towards midnight the wind eased; by daybreak it had died down completely, and a ground swell of long, oily waves was the only legacy of the storm. As the light grew, his smarting eyes beheld a long, grey coast-line. But the comfort the prospect brought him was no more than momentary. That land was anything from five to ten miles’ distant, and he could have little hope of reaching it. Indeed, he could have little hope of maintaining his hold upon the oar much longer. Although it buoyed him up, the position enforced upon him was one of strain, and already he was conscious of a fatigue that was fast using up his strength.
Nevertheless, in his despair, he kicked and paddled himself along in the direction of that distant coast, until, as time wore on, his spells of activity were broken by ever-increasing spells of exhaustion.
It would be towards noon, by when he had undoubtedly made some progress, but by when he felt himself at the end of his endurance, that he sighted a distant brown sail between himself and the land. The wild hope it begat revived his expiring strength. Much of this he wasted in shouts that were lost upon the empty air, and in odd attempts to raise himself and wave an arm in signals which could not possibly be seen.
Destiny, however, had still some purpose to serve by means of Pablo de Arana. A breeze that sprang up from the land and a landward drift of the current combined to bring the boat and the shipwrecked man towards each other. Late that afternoon, by when Pablo’s senses were beginning to wander and he was scarcely able to hold his head above water, he was hauled, limp and nerveless, aboard the ketch.
As he lay inert upon the bottom boards that were fishy and foul from a recent haul of the net, one of the men poured aguardiente down his throat, and a blanket was wrapped round him, for he was naked of all save a pair of cotton drawers. They could have no delusions about him. He was proclaimed a galley-slave by the chain dangling from his leg and the weals that scarred his back from the overseers’ whips. Only the nature of the galley from which he had escaped remained undetermined, and here Pablo’s mendacious inventiveness found its opportunity once he was sufficiently revived to give an account of himself.
He was, of course, a Christian martyr: a Spanish gentleman of Seville, a fighting sea-captain taken prisoner by Moslem corsairs and chained to the oar of an Algerian galley. Unable longer to endure torment at the hands of the Infidel dogs, he had staked his life on a chance of escaping, and last night, taking advantage of the storm, he had broken loose and flung himself overboard.
Commiserating eyes considered him as he sat propped against the mast, his beard and hair whitened by the salt that had dried upon them.
“Ah!” said the master of the ketch. “But then the oar? How did you come by the oar?”
Pablo had forgotten to provide for the oar. He peered at them out of inflamed eyes.
“The oar? Oh, that!” The stiffened muscles of his face contracted in a grin. “Why, it was this way: Driving as we were before the wind, the oars were not at work. My companions slept, and whilst they slept I unfastened the oar, lifted it from its thole-pin and cast it into the sea just before I leapt. In the dark and the noise of the storm it wasn’t noticed. By the time I came to the surface the galley had vanished, swept along by the wind. And now by the great mercy of God and Our Lady, my desperate attempt has brought deliverance and restored me to Christian men.” He crossed himself, joined his hands, and raised his bleary eyes in piety to the firmament, his lips moving in silent prayer.
The three men of the ketch nodded understanding and grunted sympathy. There was more aguardiente, and after that, when he protested himself famished, they supplied him with an onion and a hunk of bread.
They knocked off his shackles and spared him some odds and ends of garments, to which each contributed something, with apologies for having nothing better to offer a hidalgo.
That evening they landed him at Malaga, and the master of the ketch took him with his tale to the Augustinian monastery at the foot of the Gibralfaro. The good fathers received him with the fond solicitude due to one who had suffered Christian martyrdom at the hands of the Moors. They housed him, fed him and provided him with a threadbare but still serviceable suit of patrician cut. In their charitable anxiety to restore him to his friends in the city of Seville, they offered him the company thither a few days later of a merchant who travelled with a mule train of his wares, and Pablo committed to the fable of his Sevillan origin could think of no pretext on which to decline the offer. Nor for that matter was he deeply concerned to decline it. Provided that he was not required to go to Cordoba, where too much was known about him, and where the Corregidor might possess too good a memory, it mattered little whither he went. For the purpose of living by his wits, which were now his only stock-in-trade, Seville was as good as any city in Spain, for not a doubt but it would harbour as many fools as any other.
If he had a regret regarding Cordoba, it was because he supposed it likely that Beatriz would have returned there, and Beatriz might be able to supply his needs. She had certainly shown herself able to do so before, and there was greater reason why she should do so now. He had a score to settle with Beatriz. It was to her that, after the fashion of his kind, he attributed all the misfortunes that had overtaken him. It was her failure to come to his assistance in Venice that had resulted in his sentence to the oar, at which he must soon have rotted and perished but for the miracle that had delivered him. She owed him amends for that, and he did not doubt that he would constrain her to make them if he could but find her. To seek her in Cordoba, however, was more than at present he dared. Later, perhaps, some channel would offer through which to discover and reach her.
In the meantime he must depend upon his own resources, and these took him little further than imposing upon the charity of well-disposed and pious persons by a harrowing tale of sufferings in Moslem captivity and vaguely consequent loss of fortune.
Using as capital such poor sums as his narrative ability earned, he had recourse to gaming, of which Seville taverns offered ample occasion. He was skilful with the dice, especially when matched against the young, the inexperienced and the naturally dull, and he was prudent enough to match himself against no others. Thus he contrived to exist, but more or less penuriously and scarcely consistent with the hidalguia which he had assumed together with a sword and a plume to his cap.
It was in the tavern that he frequented most, the Posada de Palomares, near the Puerta del Arenal, that he came to hear of Don Cristobal Colon. He heard that name casually at first, and then insistently; for soon nothing else was talked of from end to end of Spain. The fame of the man was spreading across Europe, and every day brought additions to the epic tale of an achievement by which the size of the world appeared to be increased. It was almost as if this Colon had supplemented the work of creation. Fantastic accretions came to swell the story of that voyage into unknown seas in defiance of the monsters guarding it. Dolphins and mermaids were amongst the lesser creatures tenanting those waters. Islands had been found inhabited by dog-faced men, by men with tails, by pigmies who went on all fours and by giants with a single eye placed in the middle of the forehead. Strange animals too had Colon discovered, and amongst them birds that could talk like human beings. Gold was as common in that New World as mud in Spain, and there were rivers that flowed over beds of precious stones. In every palace, every hovel, every counting-house, every convent and every tavern Don Cristobal Colon and the world of his discovery were in those days the only topics. His long struggle for recognition made a fine theme for ballad-stringers, and in their rhymes the Salamanca doctors came at last under the scourge of the ridicule they deserved.
Then, one day, word ran through Seville that the great man was coming, and the city was stirred to a delirium at the prospect of beholding this portent. The Sovereigns, so ran the report, had sent for him to go to them at Barcelona, and he was on his way thither from Palos, travelling by easy stages across Spain in a triumphal progress, the like of which, for the enthusiasm it excited, had never yet been seen.
Feverishly Seville prepared herself to do fitting honour to this discoverer of worlds, and upon all this seething excitement Pablo de Arana looked with the disdain of a lofty mind for puerile and ingenuous emotions. What, after all, he asked, was it all about? A foreign upstart, a Ligurian of no birth, a common mariner with nothing to lose but his life, had adventured upon a voyage that had brought him to new lands. Since the lands were there, it followed that anyone sailing forth must have discovered them. Why, then, all this ado?
Some few there were whom he impressed by his lofty scorn; the majority, however, condemned it, and there were odd ones who, unintimidated by either his wolfish countenance or the length of his sword, cast it back with insult in his teeth.
That scorn, however, proved none so lofty as to restrain his curiosity when, at last, the great man arrived in Seville. In order to behold him Pablo turned out of doors with the rest of the city on that memorable Palm Sunday.
Seville had put on her best in honour of the hero. The streets through which he was to pass were carpeted with ramage, with fronds of palms, branches of myrtle, and flowering boughs of jasmine, peach and lemon, whilst every window and balcony was hung with tapestries or gay cloths of velvet.
Even the religious houses lent themselves to this pomp. One of the streets by which he would come ran on one side along the blank wall of the garden that enclosed the Convent of Santa Paula. A scaffolding had been set up in the garden, so that the sisters might view the cavalcade over the summit of the wall, from which panels of rose-coloured satin with Arab embroideries in gold thread were hung.
The Prioress, disposed by a lingering worldliness to hero-worship, had shared the common thrill when news of the great adventurer filtered through the convent walls. It was she who had borne the tale of it to her niece Beatriz, once a cantatrice but now little more than a lay-sister, and a model of piety even to the professed nuns.
“There is news,” she had told her, “as wonderful as any of the achievements of the great Cid. A gallant sailor, a campeador of the ocean, in a small, frail caravel, fronting the perils of the seas, has discovered a new world and added it to the crown of our good Queen Isabel. A feat to make us proud that we are Spaniards.” Thus in a glow of worldly enthusiasm the Prioress of Santa Paula.
“A new world?” questioned her niece, who sat by a window, plying her needle.
“No lesser term will serve. It contains single islands that are larger than all Spain, I am told, and yield so much gold that Spain is to become the wealthiest nation in the world. Some of this wealth is to furnish a crusade to deliver the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel. Don Cristobal,” she added, “is on his way from Palos de Moguer to the Court at Barcelona.”
“Don Cristobal?” Beatriz caught her breath, and turned a frowning, questioning stare upon her tall, graceful and still comely aunt.
“He is to pass through Seville.” The eyes of the Prioress sparkled in her pale face under its rigid coif. “He is expected here on Sunday, and the city is preparing to receive him with royal honours. Santa Paula must bear its part. We must hang out our bravest broideries. Let me think now . . .”
“You said Don Cristobal.” Beatriz’s voice was muted.
“Don Cristobal. Yes.” And the Prioress recited his full name and titles with sonorous relish. “The High and Mighty Lord Don Cristobal Colon, High Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy of the Indies.”
“God avail me!” Beatriz murmured faintly. Of a deathly pallor, she sank back in her chair, and closed her eyes.
“Why! What ails you? Are you ill, child?”
“Nothing.” Beatriz commanded herself, and essayed a smile. “It is nothing. You were telling me . . . Don Cristobal Colon . . . Viceroy, you said . . .”
“Viceroy to be sure. Viceroy of the Indies of his discovery. Does he deserve less? Who is there living who can claim more? Great was the conquest of Granada. But what is the conquest of a province to the conquest of a world? You see that we must all do him honour. Come and help me to choose the embroidered cloths for the occasion.”
Obediently Beatriz went, but her aunt found her unusually dull and absent-minded, and had occasion to chide her lack of enthusiasm in a matter that deserved so much.
It was odd, thought Beatriz, that she should be reproached with that, when her heart was filled with thankfulness that the Cristobal who was rarely absent from her loving, sorrowing thoughts, should have so heroically succeeded. To know of him raised to such honour almost consoled her for her loss of him, so pure and selfless was the love she bore him. It was as well perhaps that she had lost him; for what place could she find beside a man who had risen to such eminence? What could she ever have been to him but a let and hindrance in his ascent? Thus selflessness set her feet upon the path of resignation. Yet it was not a path to be trodden without pain. It was steep as Calvary, and the cross under whose weight she toiled was the bitter thought of the contempt in which he must hold her memory.
To see him again could but deepen her pain; yet not on that account had she the power to deny herself the opportunity. And so on that last day of March she was among the sisters on the platform that had been raised against the garden wall. Black-mantled like them, and with a black hood for coif she would pass, if observed at all, for a lay-sister of the order.
From the Giralda Tower to San Marcos, soon after midday, the bells crashed forth in every steeple to announce that Don Cristobal Colon was entering the city.
To receive him at the Puerta de Cordoba, and to utter a brief address of welcome, stood the Alcalde-Mayor of Seville with a guard of honour of mounted alguaziles. A detachment of these went ahead so as to clear a way through the ever-swelling multitude in the narrow tortuous streets.
The Alcalde, Don Ruiz de Saavedra, would have had the Admiral follow at once, at the head of the procession. But Colon’s instincts of showmanship gave better counsel. First let him display the evidences of his achievement, and thus enhance the climax which he would provide in his own person. Himself he marshalled the order of the procession, and the alguaziles were followed by a train of mules and donkeys bearing the exhibits he brought from the New World. Cases slung like panniers contained the gold, some in dust, some wrought into barbaric ornaments, whilst others were filled with gums and spices. A cage borne like a litter on poles between two donkeys contained a pair of iguanas, six feet long, giant lizards that drew gasps of astonishment and horror from the sightseers; in lesser cages there were utias and birds of fantastic plumage. A half-score of Colon’s mariners led the beasts of burden and guarded their loads, enjoying a share in the triumph and breezily jesting with the Sevillans as they passed.
Next came the little troop of Indians, moving lithely in the blankets with which, for modesty’s sake, their nakedness was mantled. The first pair displayed on poles the grotesque masks of wood and gold that had been among the gifts of the caciques to Colon. The crowd gaped in wonder at these savages, some of them with painted faces, others with head-dresses of parrots’ feathers and one with a gold ornament in his nose. Some carried the rude spears and the long bows that were natural to them, whilst each of the three girls bore a parrot like a falcon on her wrist.
The better to behold these fantastic beings the Sevillans craned their necks, with exclamations of “God avail us!” and “Jesus Maria!” Their greatest amazement, however, amounting to awe, was produced by a large parrot on the wrist of a tall Indian who came last. To every scratch of the Indian’s finger on the parrot’s head, the bird responded with a screech of “Viva el Rey Don Fernando y la Reina Doña Isabel!”
The Sevillans, scarcely able to believe their ears, asked themselves what manner of world was this that had been discovered in which even the birds could talk.
The Indians were followed by another group of Colon’s mariners, and after these—now that the stage was suitably set for him—the great man himself made his arresting appearance. He came mounted on a white Arab with the sombrely splendid Alcalde riding beside him. Erect in the saddle, in a crimson doublet that was cut square at the breast and laced in gold across the white froth of an undergarment, he was a figure of princely pride. He rode bare-headed and a fulvid tone, which lately increasing strands of grey had brought into his naturally red hair, served to stress the patrician cast of his countenance.
The acclamations of the crowd brought a smile to his shaven lips and a sparkle to his clear grey eyes.
Passing the garden wall of the Santa Paula Convent, the stir and the waving of the sisters over the parapet of the wall’s summit drew his glance upwards to the white-coiffed faces.
Beatriz, who had watched his approach in wide-eyed wonder, worship and pain, caught her breath in sudden dread, and slipped behind the nearest nun, so as to be hidden from that raised searching glance.
With a hand lifted in salutation to the sisters he passed on, and she came forward again, and eagerly advanced head and shoulders, so that she might still follow him with her longing, sorrowing eyes.
It was just opposite that convent wall, as near as the crowd had permitted him to get, that Pablo de Arana had taken his stand to view the show. As the files of mounted alguaziles who made a tail to the procession passed in the wake of Colon and the Alcalde, the crowd closed into the street’s middle like water into a ship’s wake, and flowed along, to follow to the Alcazar, where a banquet was to be offered to the Viceroy of the Indies.
Pablo, however, did not move with the mob. He remained, like a fixed object in a whorling stream, letting the human tide flow past him until he was left there, as it were—high and dry and almost alone, on the spot to which astonishment had rooted him, his breathing a little quickened by excitement. Then, with a sudden resolve, he plunged across the street, and along the convent wall, now deserted by the sisters, until he came to the green wooden door embrased in it. He tore at the bell-chain as if he would pull it away, and listened impatiently to the clangour within.
A shutter opened behind a grating in the door, and the wrinkled weathered face of the old gardener of the convent disclosed itself at the Judas-hole. Cunning old eyes took stock of the raffish air and rusty finery of this lantern-jawed visitor.
“What do you want here?” a querulous voice demanded.
“Civility to begin with,” snapped Pablo. “Then you will tell Mistress Beatriz Enriquez de Arana that her brother has come from Italy and is here to see her.”
The gardener studied him suspiciously. “Are you her brother?”
“It’s what I am telling you. Pablo de Arana is my name.”
“Wait there.”
The shutter was slammed in his face, and it was not until, cursing that ill-mannered old custodian, he was beginning to ask himself whether he should ring again, that a drawing of bolts came to end his impatience.
“Come you in.”
He stood in a fair garden of alleys bordered by clipped myrtle hedges. Beyond a file of tall cypresses, and through the burgeoning ramage of orange-trees and pomegranates, the walls of the convent gleamed white in the Spring sunshine.
Near a granite fountain set amid silver-bladed aloes Beatriz stood waiting for him. Under the black mantle that reached from shoulder to heel, the straight slender figure was sheathed in simple grey without any ornament. She had cast back the hood of her cloak, and the sunlight touched her rich chestnut hair to the hue of bronze. She was very pale, and there was a look of strain, almost of fear, in the wide-set eyes that watched Pablo’s brisk approach.
“God be praised that you are free, Pablo,” she greeted him.
“Owing nothing to anyone for that,” said he.
“I am glad—so glad—that they let you go.”
“Let me go?” He laughed at her. “Let me go to the galleys. That’s where they let me go. They and you.”
He made it plain that he came in no spirit of brotherliness. The implied reproach, however, she ignored. “How did you find me?” she asked.
“By chance. A lucky one, I hope. God knows I’ve the right to a little luck. I’ve not found much of it yet in my life.”
She motioned him to the lichened granite seat by which they were standing. “Tell me of your escape,” she asked him.
He sat down. “That is soon told. The galley foundered in a storm somewhere off Malaga. I was a night and a day in the water, and all but dead when a fishing-boat rescued me. They landed me at Malaga. I pretended to have escaped from a Turkish galley, and that earned me the charity of a monastery. After a while I drifted here to Seville. Devil take me if I knew why until I caught sight of you on that wall this morning. Yet I’m not so sure that I know now. For it’s a cursedly unsisterly welcome you give me.”
She had been gravely observing him whilst he spoke, considering his pretentiously raffish, soiled appearance with his sword and the plume out of curl in his hat; scanning the lean hungry countenance that had been handsome once, before vicious hard living had stamped it with its present wolfishness; heeding the sneeringly querulous speech with its suggestions of martyrdom. Once, out of loving pity, her every impulse had been to shelter and protect him. Because they were sprung from the same womb she had felt a duty to him. She had gone with him in his flight from Spain so that she might serve him at a time when disillusion seemed to have rendered her own existence of little account. She had sacrificed herself for him. So that she might provide for him in his idle, thriftless worthlessness she had allowed herself to be debased. But all that was over. Considering him now, she found him repellent, knew that he had been repellent to her ever since that day in the Pozzi when he had urged her to prostitute herself so as to rescue him from the consequences of his evil courses. In a measure—though, God be thanked, not in the full measure he had begged—it was what she had done, and because of that her life lay irretrievably in ruins, robbed of the one great chance of redemption that had been offered her.
Perhaps Pablo had ill chosen the moment of his visit. Perhaps that very recent glimpse of Cristobal, reopening her wounds, rendered all this too poignantly apparent to her. She made an effort to dissemble her distaste of him. She sat down beside him, but not too close.
“You appear so suddenly, so unexpectedly,” she excused herself. “You take me by surprise.”
“And not too pleasant a surprise, you would say.”
“What pleasure can I take in your presence in Spain knowing its dangers to you?” This was true, yet less than the whole truth.
“Sh! What the devil!” He looked over his shoulder in apprehension, to make sure that there was nobody within earshot. Reassured, he flashed his teeth in a grin. “There’s no great danger so long as I keep wide of Cordoba. And even there it’s doubtful if anyone troubles to remember. Still, as you say, I’ld be safer out of this cursed land. And that’s where you can help me, Beatriz.”
“Help you?”
“A man can’t go on his travels with empty pockets. It’s like my luck to be penniless in the hour of my greatest need.”
“I’ve never known you other in any hour.”
“Must you sneer at my evil luck?” He broke again into that self-pitying whine. “God knows I’ve never had good fortune in all my sad life.”
“Have you deserved it?” she asked him.
He scowled annoyance. “That comes well from you. By my life, it does. You are to reproach me now, are you? Do you think I don’t know what I have to thank you for? Do you suppose they didn’t tell me in Venice why I was being sent to the galleys?”
“You were sent to the galleys for a theft,” she coldly reminded him.
“Rot your pert tongue! Had you kept faith I should have gone free. Oh, they told me. You were given a chance to do a service to the State as the price of my deliverance. But you cared so little for your brother that you played them false and played me false; delivered me to death for aught you knew or cared. Me, your brother. Your brother! A noble, loving sister you, Beatriz. Our sainted mother, whom God have in His Holy keeping,” he added, crossing himself, “must have turned in her grave at your treachery. And yet you dare to reproach me. It’s . . . it’s unbelievable.”
She looked at him in wonder; and the wonder grew to see that he was not acting. He was sincere in his grievance. She had made him very angry. The sheer unreason of it made her angry in her turn.
“Did they tell you what it was they required me to do? Did they tell you that so vile did I become on your account that I actually set out to do it—that I came to Spain to practise the arts of a decoy upon Cristobal Colon?”
“Colon! Cristobal Colon!” His jaw fell in stupefaction. Then his face contracted in a grimace of disbelief. “Colon?” he repeated.
If in the heat of the moment she had said perhaps more than she intended, she did not now retract. “Colon,” she replied. “I was to steal a chart from him, so as to prevent the great discovery he has now made for the glory of Spain. That is what I was required to do, what I came to do.” Anger made her hoarse, blazed at him from her clear, hazel eyes. “Now you know.”
But as her anger had flamed up, his own had cooled. “Indeed, I do not. You came to do it, you say. And then? What failed?”
She spoke in scorn. “My vileness. That is what failed. That and my heart. I came to see my loathsomeness. But it had already gone far enough to ruin me. Because of you, Pablo, I have damned myself in this world whatever may be in store for me in the next.”
This, it seemed to him, could have but one meaning. Yet that was something not to be believed. He probed cautiously. “Damned yourself? You set me riddles. You were doing this thing, and then you broke off and did not do it. Faith, to me it seems that mine was the only soul you damned by that stupidity.”
“Can’t you understand? I came to care for Colon. We loved each other.”
“The devil! What are you telling me? That you were his mistress?”
She felt her colour rising under his searching contemptuous glance. “That shocks your purity, of course.” Defiantly, in self-defence, she added: “He offered me marriage.”
“Marriage! Lord God! Marriage! The Viceroy of the Indies!” He looked at her with widening eyes. “You were never a liar, Beatriz, and I must believe you. But marriage! Mother of God!” Reflecting, he twirled the point of his black beard between finger and thumb. “But why not? Why not, eh?”
“That I already have a husband is, of course, a trifle not worth remembering.”
“A husband? Basilio? Pshaw! He’s as good as dead.”
“But lives.”
“On the galleys, for life. What need to publish it? You fool, Beatriz! Could you not have forgotten it and taken such a chance? We must take chances in this life if ever we are to accomplish anything. And what a chance was this! You’ld be Vicereine of the Indies now, and easily able to help a poor devil of a brother. Of course you never gave me a thought; never saw the difference this would make to me.” He seemed on the verge of weeping.
It made her laugh despite her pain. “For once I did not.”
“For once? When did you ever think of me? When did you ever think of any but yourself? You left me to perish like a rat in the Pozzi.”
“Better for me had I never thought of delivering you from it.”
“There you go again. Better for you. Always yourself. Never another. Never me. And you dare to say it to my face!”
She stood up suddenly. She was profoundly affronted. He filled her with horror. She burned with shame at the thought of the intimate thing she had told him merely to provoke the selfish reproaches of a mind that could take no heed of her agony.
“You had better go, Pablo. Indeed, I don’t know why you came. There is nothing for you here.”
He looked up at her in blank amazement. Never yet had she used so cold and hard a tone with him. This was proving a morning of surprises for Pablo.
“May I die, but you’re a sweet loving sister. Have you no heart at all, Beatriz? I have told you that I am penniless, and you . . . and you . . .” Indignation stifled him. “It’s more than a man can endure.”
“Is it money that you want? Is that why you sought me?”
“No,” he thundered indignantly. “I came because with me blood is thicker than water; because you are my sister, and I owe you a brother’s love; because I am not a cold, unfeeling fish like you, Beatriz. That’s why I came.”
“I am sorry that I disappoint you, Pablo. Had it been merely money that you sought . . .”
“I’ve said I didn’t seek it. No. But I am come so low in misfortune that I cannot refuse help from anyone, not even from my worst enemy. For when it’s a choice between pride and hunger, pride must founder. A neck can’t remain stiff when the belly’s empty.”
“I understand. Wait here.”
She left him with his thoughts, which were not pleasant. Whatever he had come for—and he could scarcely define it even to himself—disappointment was his portion. It was bitter for a man to find himself unwelcome to his own kin, to discover a sister so frigidly indifferent to one’s misfortunes. But then Beatriz had always been a prudish fool. Had it been otherwise she would never have disregarded such an opportunity as fate had offered her. It was one of the ironies of existence that God gives nuts to the toothless.
Her return disturbed his melancholy musings. She held out a little purse of green network, through the meshes of which there were gleams of silver and of gold. “Here is what I can spare you, Pablo. It is the half of what I possess.”
“It will be something,” he admitted, by way of thanks, balancing the purse in his palm. “How do you live, Beatriz?”
“By teaching music, by needlework and other little services in the convent here. Aunt Clara has been very good to me.”
“Aunt Clara? To be sure. I had forgotten. She is the Mother Abbess, is she not?”
“The Prioress of Santa Paula here.”
“And I never thought of that.” He displayed genuine regret. “I must recall myself to her. She is our mother’s sister, after all.”
“Better not,” Beatriz advised him. “Her views are strict, and she has heard of your . . . misfortunes in Cordoba.”
“And you mean . . . ?” Here was yet another unpleasant surprise for him. “The devil! What a family to belong to!”
“It is certainly regrettable that you were born into it. Come, Pablo. I will let you out.”
He went in surly humour. Half-way to the door in the wall he paused, detaining her. “This is a poor Lenten life you lead here, Beatriz. Needlework and teaching music to children.” He made a wry face of disgust.
“It is enough. I have peace.”
“Peace and poverty. A revolting combination. And a girl of your looks! With your voice and your legs you needn’t want for gold. There’s riches for you in singing and dancing. With me to protect you, we might go to Italy again. I should be safe there so long as we kept away from Venice. What do you say to it?”
“So that is why you came?”
“I’ve only just thought of it. May I die else. And it’s a good thought. You can’t deny that.”
“Oh, I thank you for it.” He did not like her smile. “But here I have all I need.” She moved on and he, perforce, must follow.
“Devil take it, Beatriz, it’s mean-spirited to be so easily content.”
“I am content to be mean-spirited. It’s in the Beatitudes, Pablo: ‘Blessed are the meek’.”
She unbarred the door.
“Devil take the Beatitudes,” he exploded in irreverence. “With me to look after you, you could live in plenty. At your ease.”
“Never more at my ease than here.” She opened the door. “Go with God, Pablo. I shall pray for you. I am thankful that you are free again. Be prudent so that you may continue free.”
“St. Mary! What good is freedom if . . . Oh, think it over. I’ll come again.”
She shook her head, her face set. “Better not. It is not very safe. There is Aunt Clara. Go now.”
He stepped out in evil mood, reviling her selfishness.
She closed and barred the door upon him and all that he stood for.