Chapter 38 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
SATISFACTION
Later that same afternoon, as Colon was taking his ease, a chamberlain brought him word that a certain Don Pablo de Arana solicited the honour of being received by him.
It was notorious that Colon, despite the eminence to which he had climbed, remained easily accessible. With his greatness he had put on none of that exclusiveness which in so many is greatness’s only sign. Although the name conveyed nothing to him, he ordered this stranger to be brought.
He beheld a man still young, of middle height, spare and of a rather disreputable exterior in a shabby pretension of gentility. A pair of dark eyes, nervously intent, met his glance out of a lean, pallid face that ended in a blue-black, pointed beard.
Colon found his tone and manner as little prepossessing as his appearance.
“You are Don Cristobal Colon,” said the stranger, between question and aggressive assertion.
Colon was all urbanity. “To serve you perhaps.” He sat down, and waved his visitor to a chair, which was disregarded. “What do you seek of me?”
He was answered in a word, delivered with explosive truculence.
“Satisfaction.”
Colon put up his brows, beginning to wonder whether he had to deal with a madman. “Satisfaction?” His tone was mild. “Pray for what?”
“For the wrong that you have done my sister.”
This was more than Colon could accept with gravity. He burst into laughter, and rose.
“You’ll be mistaking me for someone else. I do not think I have the honour to know your sister.”
“The seducer’s common denial,” said the fierce Pablo. “It will not serve you with me.”
“Will it not? What will, then?”
“Reparation. That is what I am here to demand. Reparation.”
Colon began to find him tiresome. “My good sir, the door is behind you. Take advantage of it before I summon a servant to rub you down with a cudgel.”
The fellow sneered. “That were, indeed, unwise. You’re a great man these days, are you not, Don Cristobal? Lord Admiral, Lord Viceroy, and Lord other things. But not all your greatness shall shelter you. Show me violence, and the world shall know your villainy. We shall see if you’ll stand as well with her Highness the Queen when——”
“Enough!” Colon flung at him in a tone that checked the minatory flow. “I do not find you amusing. Out of this, before my patience wearies.”
Pablo recoiled. He cringed, he sighed, he flung out his arms and let them fall again. “So be it. I had hoped that for your own sake, for the sake of your fair name, for the sake of decency, you would be reasonable. Oh, I am going,” he cried, retreating again before the anger gathering in Colon’s countenance. “But you’ll not be surprised if I go elsewhere with the tale of the cruel wrong you have done poor Beatriz Enriquez.”
“Who?” Startled by the name, Colon leapt forward, flinging out the question in a roar.
Pablo retreated yet again. He had almost reached the door. But suddenly he perceived that there was less reason to fear violence. He recovered. “Beatriz Enriquez, I said. I see that you had not understood me. That is my sister.”
He stood waiting now, observing that Colon had lost colour, that his breathing had quickened.
“Where is Beatriz?” Ignoring all the rest, he thus disclosed to Pablo yet another advantage.
The rascal’s wits were quick to seize it. He shook his head. “I am not to tell you that.”
“Why not? How else am I to make this reparation?” His voice had fallen to a humble note. “That I have wronged her, I know. How I know! I have suffered for it, but perhaps no more than I deserve. But—praised be Our Lady!—you bring me the means to end it. Come, man: where is she? Tell me.”
Dumbfounded, Pablo gaped at him. Unaccountably things had taken a turn in a direction quite other from what he had expected. Somewhere his calculations had been at fault. It was necessary to readjust his views to what he found. “Why should I tell you?” he asked at last, groping his way.
“Why? So that I may go to her at once, of course.”
“Can you be supposing that she wishes to see you?”
Colon showed him a face of dismay. “Do you mean that it is beyond her to forgive my error?”
“Does that surprise you?”
Colon did not answer. He stood gloomily considering. Then he took a turn in the room, closely watched by the other’s crafty, probing eyes. He came to halt before Pablo, presently, and threw up his head. Whilst pale and in prey to manifest excitement, yet his voice was level. “I must take my chance. I must go to her. I must see her and explain myself. After all, man, her happiness is as much concerned as mine. Where is she, then? Tell me.”
“I should be breaking faith with her,” Pablo lied impudently.
“She’ll forgive you that. Come, man. Don’t keep me waiting.” He spoke with a fresh, increasing urgency.
Pablo was baffled, cheated of advantages that had seemed so full of profit. He had not reckoned that Colon would have discovered the error of his judgment of Beatriz; nor could he conjecture how Colon had discovered it, since, as Beatriz had told the tale, there was no such error. It was infernally inconvenient to his plan. It shattered his line of attack. He could only keep to his evasions and see what came of them.
“You do not know her if you still think so.”
Standing squarely before him, Colon was pondering him now with penetrating eyes, whose expression changed slowly from intercession to something that Pablo found disquieting.
“What was it,” he asked slowly, “that brought you here? You spoke of satisfaction, of reparation, did you not? What was the reparation that you had in mind?”
Uncomfortable under those stern searching eyes that were as grey as steel and as cold, Pablo shifted on his feet, shrugged and put on a sneering brag. “What is the usual reparation to a woman one has wronged and abandoned?”
“I do not know. It is not in my experience.”
Pablo grew sullen. At every point this man checkmated him. He shrugged again, ill-humouredly, offensively. “Yet it should be plain. If she is without means . . .” He left it there, his glance defying those dreadful eyes.
“Ah! Money. That is what you came for?”
“What else in such a case?”
“I see. I see.” His tone made Pablo’s blood run cold. “And you dare, you dog, to say that Beatriz sent you?”
Colon’s hand was suddenly raised. To avoid the blow, Pablo not only stepped back, but answered quickly: “Of course not.”
“Ah!”
Quickly Pablo ran on: “Beatriz would perish of want before she would touch a maravedi of yours. But that,” he blustered on, “is no reason why I should not make you provide for her.” He thought that he began to see his way at last. “I account it no less than a brother’s duty.”
“Rightly. And you need employ no compulsion. All that I have is at her disposal. But she shall hear of it from me. So tell me where to find her.”
“That I will not. I have told you that she will neither see you nor accept anything from you.”
“So that you are to be her unsuspected almoner. I understand. But are you to be trusted?”
“What choice have you but to trust me?”
“I might still turn you out of doors.”
“And have me publish the infamy of the great Don Cristobal Colon? Petition the Queen’s Highness for justice upon the seducer of my sister? Is that what you would prefer?”
But now in the very moment in which Pablo thought that he had found the sure way, Colon actually laughed at him, actually had the air of being amused, but with something sinister in his amusement.
“You’re an impudent dog. I begin to remember you. You are—are you not?—the noble brother for whose sake, so as to save you from the Venetian galleys, she lent herself to the treachery that parted us.”
This was worse and worse. Pablo asked himself how much more this man might know, and cursed Beatriz’s tongue. But he would play his hand to the end. “What then?” he demanded truculently. “You are not to blame her for obeying the instincts of a good sister.”
“Or was it the promptings of a bad brother? However, you’ve escaped from the galleys to begin again, it seems.”
“From the Venetian galleys.” Pablo was strident. “The arm of Venice does not reach to Spain.”
“You start at shadows. I was not suggesting it.”
“I start at nothing. Let us keep to the point.”
“What is that?”
“What are you prepared to do for my sister?”
“Everything once you tell me where to find her.”
“We go round in circles. I shall never tell you.”
But Colon, he could see to his disgust, was not taking him seriously. There was still that disquieting mockery in those cursed eyes.
“You are not brotherly, my friend. You show no proper concern for your sister. Whatever you may say, I can bring happiness to her in finding my own. Perhaps you had not thought of that. Come, sir, come. Where is she?”
“You make me repeat myself. I have said that I shall not tell you.”
“Not even at a price?”
Pablo blinked in surprise, incredulous. Then his heart leapt within him for satisfaction in his own craft. He had played his victim into a corner, and in that corner the great Colon lay at his mercy. He fingered his black beard. He stood for a moment affecting reflection.
“Devil take you for tempting a poor wretch. But . . . Oh, well, since that’s your mood . . . A thousand gold florins would be nothing to you. And you need have no fear that you’ll not find her as you left her. She’s been shut up in a convent ever since. May I die if that’s not the truth. A thousand gold florins, then, and I’ll tell you where she is.”
“You are modest. I had in mind a much higher price than that.”
“Eh?” Pablo stared a moment, then swept him a bow. “I’ll leave myself to your generosity.”
“How wise you are. For the price I propose to give for your information is nothing less than your own life.”
“My life!”
Colon smiled upon his sudden change of countenance, his wide-eyed consternation. “You see, I am well-informed about you. I happen to know why you went to Italy, taking your sister with you, so that you might prey upon her living upon her earnings as a cantatrice. You were in flight from your native Cordoba, having killed a man. I don’t know his name or station. But that’s no matter. They will be known to my good friend, Don Xavier Pastor of Cordoba, the Corregidor, who will thank me to send you to him, as I certainly shall unless you tell me where to find Beatriz? The choice is yours, my shameless friend.”
It was with Arana’s recovered assurance as with a lamp that is suddenly blown out. His eyes bulged in his leaden face. His lips twitched. It was a long moment before they recovered the power of utterance, and then what came was merely an ejaculation of obscene blasphemy. Rage and fear struggled, within him, and his rage was not all against Colon. Some of it he reserved for Beatriz, and for this shameless incredible betrayal of him by which he was now undone.
“Come, sir,” Colon prodded him. “We have wasted time enough. Make your choice.”
“Malediction!” growled Pablo. “May I die, but that’s unworthy. Cowardly. It’s no choice at all.”
“More choice than you deserve. More than I need give you. The Corregidor has arts to make men talk, even valiant men; and I do not think you are very valiant, Master Pablo. So answer my question. And lest you should attempt any of the tricks you deal in I’d better tell you that you will be held here under guard until I return. So that should you lie to me, the Corregidor shall have you. You are warned.”
“How do I know that you’ll keep faith with me when I’ve told you?”
“You don’t. You’ll have to trust me. But if I didn’t mean to keep faith I should not waste time with you. I’ld send you at once to Cordoba, where the rack would wring the information from you.”
It was the end of the encounter for Pablo. Abjectly the rogue surrendered. “You’ll find Beatriz in the Convent of Santa Paula in Seville.”
Colon’s eyes flashed. “That is the truth?”
“As I’ve a soul to be saved.”
“I doubt if you have. But no matter. You would not dare to lie. On my return you shall have fifty florins to take you out of Spain. But if ever you set foot in it again, or if ever again you venture to approach your sister, I’ll see to it that to Cordoba you still find your way.”
He clapped his hands as he ended, and into the care of the chamberlain who answered the summons he delivered his visitor. “Until my further orders this man is to be kept here under strict guard, but without other hardship. You may go, Master Arana. And a last warning: no subtleties.”
It was a superfluous admonition. That unlucky man, Pablo de Arana, went out broken in spirit and more persuaded than ever that he was the sport of a malign fortune.
Colon sought Santangel’s apartments, and thrust himself without ceremony upon the Chancellor.
“Great tidings, Don Luis.”
Santangel, who was at work, laid down his pen, to gaze in wonder upon this transfigured man who seemed to have grown younger by ten years.
“God avail me! What’s happened? You look as if you had made another discovery.”
“I have. A greater than the Indies.” He loosed a boyish laugh. “I have discovered Beatriz. She is in Seville.”
Don Luis stood up, his eyes reflecting the joy in Colon’s. “Praise the Lord!”
“I do, and I am leaving at once for Seville.”
“At once?” Santangel’s satisfaction was checked. “You don’t mean to-day?”
“Within the hour. As soon as a horse is saddled.”
Santangel approached him. “But you can’t.” His protest was vigorous. “You are to sup to-night with the Duke of Arcos. The banquet is in your honour.”
“They shall honour me in my absence. Make my excuses to the Duke.”
Santangel was distressed.
“He’ll never forgive you.”
“I should never forgive myself if I stayed to sup with him.”
“But . . .” The Chancellor’s distress increased. “Devil take you! Have you forgotten that you are commanded to dine with their Highnesses to-morrow?”
“Their Highnesses will dine very well without me. Wish them a good appetite for me, and explain that vital matters have taken me to Seville.”
“Are you mad?”
“It is possible,” laughed Colon.
“But you can’t do this. A royal command . . .”
“Must give way to a command from Heaven.”
Santangel was appalled. “Will you treat it lightly? In God’s name, come to your senses. Their Highnesses are impatient to settle the details of this new expedition.”
“I was impatient to settle the details of the old one. But I had to wait. The Sovereigns and I have changed places. That’s all.”
“But, Cristobal, my friend!” The Chancellor was wringing his hands. “This is stark madness.” He caught Colon by the arm. “Listen, listen, you madman. Such a thing will make enemies for you, and envy has made you enemies enough already. You conceive what will be said, the poison that will be uttered against you. And if you leave their Highnesses affronted by this disregard of their commands, they may lend an ear to it. Princes are jealous folk. Most jealous of their rights over their subjects. Think what you may jeopardize.”
But he expostulated in vain. Colon laughed irresponsibly. “I am thinking only of Beatriz. I can think of nothing else. The lover is greater than the discoverer. But the discoverer is still great enough to brave the frown of royalty and the malice of courtiers.”
He took the troubled Chancellor by the shoulders. “Serve me in this like the friend, the dear friend you have always been. Whisper the exact truth to the Queen. She is a woman and tender-hearted. She may understand.”
“And the King?” Don Luis was emphatic. “What shall I say to him?”
“Persuade him that I am saving money for him by this sudden journey,” laughed Colon. “He’ll forgive anything on that score.”
“You make a jest of it,” cried Santangel in despair.
“What else?”
He caught and wrung Santangel’s reluctant hands. “God keep you, Don Luis,” he said in exuberant farewell, and was gone like a whirlwind.
THE END