Title: Columbus
Author: Rafael Sabatini
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0700981.txt
Language:  English
Date first posted: Aug 2007
Date most recently updated: Aug 2007

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Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers), Ltd., London, New York, Melbourne,
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Tiptree, Essex. ['Columbus' was first published in 1941.]


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Title: Columbus
Author: Rafael Sabatini




                               COLUMBUS

                              A ROMANCE



                              CHAPTER I

                             THE WAYFARER

A man and a boy climbed the slope from the estuary of the Tinto by a
sandy path that wound through a straggling growth of pine-trees. It
was the eventide of a winter's day at about the time that the Spanish
Sovereigns were moving to the investment of Granada, which informs you
that these events fell out in the closing decade of the fifteenth
century.

From the long line of dunes below them, the Arenas Gordas, stretching
away for miles towards Cadiz, the sand was tossed and whirled like
spindrift by a bitter wind that blew from the southwest. Beyond, the
storm-lashed Atlantic was grey under grey skies.

The man was well above the common height, broad-shouldered and
long-limbed, fashioned in lines of great athletic vigour. From under a
plain round hat his hair, red, thick and glossy, hung to the nape of
his neck. Grey eyes shone clear in a weathered face whose patrician
mould and stamp of pride were at odds with the shabbiness of his wear.
A surcoat of homespun, once black but faded now to a mournful greenish
hue, clothed him to the knees, and was caught about his middle by a
belt of plain leather. From this a dagger hung on his right hip and a
leather scrip on his left thigh. His hose was of coarse black wool; he
was roughly shod, and he carried his meagre gear bundled in a cloak
and slung from his shoulder by a staff of quince wood. His age was
little beyond the middle thirties.

The boy, a sturdy child of seven or eight, clinging to his right hand,
looked up to ask: "Is it much farther?"

He spoke in Portuguese, and was answered by his sire in the same
tongue, on a note that was half-bitter, half-whimsical.

"Now, God avail me, child, that is a question I've been asking myself
these ten years, and never found the answer yet." Then, abruptly
changing to the commonplace, he added: "No, no. See. We are almost
there."

A turn of the path had brought into view a long, low building,
irregularly quadrangular, starkly white against the black wall of
pine-trees that screened it from the east. From the heart of it
sprouted upwards like a burnt-red mushroom the circular tiled roof of
a chapel.

"For to-night that should be the end of our journey. If I am
fortunate, Diego, it may also be a beginning." He resumed his
whimsical tone, as if thinking aloud rather than addressing another.
"The Prior, I am told, is a man of learning who commands the ear of a
Queen, having once been her confessor. To confess a woman is commonly
to hold her afterwards in a measure of subjection. One of the lesser
mysteries of our mysterious life. But we walk delicately, asking
nothing. In this world, my child, to ask is to be denied and avoided.
It's a lesson you'll learn later. In order to possess what you lack,
study to let none suspect that you seek it. Display to them, rather,
the advantages to themselves of persuading you to accept it. They will
then be eager to bestow. It is too subtle, Diego, for your innocent
mind. Indeed, for long it eluded even mine, which is far from
innocent. We go to test it now upon this good Franciscan."

It is among the obiter dicta of the good Franciscan of whom he spoke,
Frey Juan Perez, who was Prior of the Convent of La Rabida, that the
temper of a man's soul is commonly displayed in his voice. It is
possible that Frey Juan's was more subtly attuned than the common ear.
It is possible that his wide experience as a confessor--in which
capacity he commonly heard without seeing, so that his consciousness
would be centred in his hearing--had led him to discover a definitive
affinity between the spiritual qualities and the tone and pitch of
voice of a penitent whose countenance was rendered invisible to him by
the screen of the confessional.

Be that as it may, certain it is that but for this settled conviction
of Frey Juan's our wayfarer would not so easily have attained his
ends.

The Prior was pacing the courtyard at about the hour of compline,
which is to say at sunset. The Borgia Pope, whose special devotion to
the Virgin was to originate the Angelus, had not yet ascended St.
Peter's throne. As Frey Juan paced, breviary in hand, reading with
moving lips, as is canonically prescribed, the office of the day, his
attention was disturbed by a voice addressing the lay-brother who kept
the gate.

"Of your charity, my brother, a little bread and a cup of water for
this weary child."

There was nothing in the actual words, commonplace enough at a convent
doorway, to claim the Prior's notice; but the voice, and, more than
the voice, the contrast between the conscious pride that rang through
its veiling huskiness and the humility of the request it uttered,
might have compelled the attention of an ear even less sensitive than
Frey Juan's. Its accent was definitely foreign, and the dignity of its
intonation gathered increase perhaps from the precision with which a
cultured man must be expressing himself in a language other than his
own.

Frey Juan, whom we are not to acquit of a very human curiosity,
especially in any matter that promised distraction from the gentle
monotony of life at La Rabida, closed his breviary upon his
forefinger, and stepped round an angle of the courtyard to view the
speaker.

At a glance he recognized how perfectly the voice became the man whom
he beheld. He discovered power spiritual and physical as much in his
shapely height and upright carriage as in his shaven face with its
strong line of jaw and aquiline nose. But it was chiefly his eyes that
held the Prior: full eyes of a clear grey, luminous as those of a
visionary or a mystic, eyes whose steady gaze few men could find it
easy to support. He had set down his bundle on the stone bench at the
gate. But neither that nor the rest of the stranger's shabby details
could obscure in Frey Juan's discerning scrutiny the man's inherent
distinction. Beside him the child, on whose behalf he sought that
meagre hospitality, gazed upwards in round-eyed wistfulness at the
approaching Prior.

Frey Juan advanced with a clatter of loose sandals, a barrel of a man
in a grey frock. His face was long and pallid, with a deal of loose
flesh about it, but made genial by the humour in the eyes and about
the heavy-lipped mouth. He greeted the stranger with a kindly smile,
and in formal Latin, to test perhaps his scholarship, or perhaps his
faith, for that aquiline nose above the full lips need not be
Christian.

"Pax Domini sit tecum."

To which the wayfarer answered formally, with a grave inclination of
his proud head: "Et cum spiritu tuo."

"You are a traveller," quoth the Prior unnecessarily, whilst the
lay-brother stood aside in self-effacement.

"A traveller. Newly landed here from Lisbon."

"Do you go far to-night?"

"Only as far as Huelva."

"Only?" Frey Juan raised his thick brows. "It is a good ten miles. And
by night. Do you know the way?"

The wayfarer smiled. "Direction should suffice for one trained to find
his way over the trackless ocean."

The Prior caught a vaunting note in the answer. It prompted his next
question. "A great traveller?"

"Judge if I may so describe myself. I've sailed as far as northern
Thule and southern Guinea, and eastwards to the Golden Horn."

The Prior sucked in his breath and scanned the man more shrewdly, as
if suspicious of a claim so vast. The scrutiny must have reassured
him, for at once he grew cordial.

"That is to have touched the very boundaries of the world."

"Of the known world, perhaps. But not of the actual world. Not by many
a thousand miles."

"How can you assert that, never having seen it?"

"How can your paternity assert that there is a Heaven and a Hell,
never having seen them."

"By faith and revelation," was the grave answer.

"Just so. And in my case, to faith and revelation I may add
cosmography and mathematics."

"Ah!" Frey Juan's prominent eyes considered him with a deepening
interest. "Come you in, sir, in God's name. It is draughty here, and
the evening chill. Close the gate, Innocencio. Come you in, sir. We
were shamed if we had no better hospitality than that of your modest
prayer." He took the stranger by the sleeve to draw him on. "What is
your name, sir?"

"Colon. Cristobal Colon."

Again Frey Juan's shrewed eyes scrutinized the Semitic lines of that
lofty countenance. There were New Christians of that name, and he
could call to mind more than one consigned by the Holy Office to the
fire as relapsed judaizers.

"Your way of life?" he asked.

"I am a mariner and a cosmographer by trade."

"A cosmographer!" The tone implied that the Prior's interest was
increased by the description; as, indeed, it was; for Frey Juan was a
scholar whose wide studies included, as Colon had been informed, the
provoking mysteries of cosmography.

A bell began to toll. Lights from the leaded gothic windows that
overlooked the courtyard, the windows of the chapel, beat dimly upon
the lingering daylight.

"It is the hour of vespers," said Frey Juan. "So I must leave you.
Innocencio will conduct you to our guest-chamber. We shall see each
other again at supper. Meanwhile we shall supply the needs of your
child. It is understood that you spend the night with us."

"You are very good to a stranger, Sir Prior," was Colon's
acknowledgment of an invitation upon which he had counted, and for
which he had angled in his vaunting self-description.

Frey Juan, no less disingenuous, was content to answer by a wave of
deprecation. For kindly man though he was, it was not kindness only
that prompted the hospitality. If he knew his world, this was no
ordinary traveller. There might be profit in talk with such a man; and
if not profit, at least entertainment such as came too rarely into
Frey Juan's present claustral life.

The lay brother held a door; but Colon hung back, to express himself
in terms that reassured the Prior on the score of his faith.

"To rest is less urgent than to give thanks to God and Our Lady for
having led my steps to so hospitable a house. By your leave, father, I
will go with you to vespers. For the tender little one it is
different. If our brother will take him meanwhile in his care, it will
deepen my obligation."

He stooped to speak to the child, who, born and bred in Portugal, had
stood intent but puzzled by this talk in unknown Castilian. What he
said, holding the promise of refreshment, sent the lad eagerly to the
lay-brother's side. From the gothic portal of the chapel his father
watched him go, with eyes that were tender. Then he turned abruptly.

"I keep your reverence."

With a kindly smile the Prior waved him on into the little chapel of
Our Lady of Rabida, whose image enjoyed miraculous fame as a
prophylactic against madness.

The bell ceased. The friars were already in the choir, and leaving
Colon in the empty nave, Frey Juan went on and up to his place.



                              CHAPTER II

                        THE PRIOR OF LA RABIDA

"Dixit Dominus Domino meo: sede a dextris meis."

The Gregorian chant swelled up, and Frey Juan, peering through the
luminous mist set up by the tapers into the twilight beyond, was
gratified to see his kneeling guest in an attitude of rapt devotion.

Anon, because of the interest aroused in him, the Prior was not
content that supper should be served to the stranger in the bare hall
where charity was dispensed to casual wayfarers, but, treating him as
an honoured guest, bade him to his own table.

Colon accepted the invitation as his due, without surprise or
hesitation, and the brethren ranged at the trestles set against the
walls along the refectory's length, furtively observed this meanly
garbed stranger striding beside the Prior with the proud carriage of a
prince, and asked themselves what hidalgo might be honouring their
house.

Up that long bleak hall Frey Juan conducted him to the Prior's table
on a shallow dais across the end of it, surmounted by a fresco of the
Last Supper so crudely painted as to be presumed the work of one of
the friars. Another fresco no less crude, of St. Francis receiving the
stigmata, adorned the ceiling, now dimly revealed in the light of a
six-beaked oil lamp suspended from it. For the rest two Dukes of
Medina Celi, painted in life-size and as if their limbs and trunks and
heads were made of wood, scowled at each other across the hall from
walls that were coated with the white-wash which the Arab had brought
to Spain. The windows, square and barred, were set along the northern
wall, at a height which admitting light afforded no distracting view
of the outer world.

The food was plain but good: fish fresh from the port below in a
pungent stew, followed by a broth of veal. There was wheaten bread and
a sharp but wholesome wine of Palos, from the vineyards on the western
slopes beyond the pinewoods.

They ate to the drone of a friar's voice, reading from a stone pulpit
in the southern wall, a chapter from a /Vita et Gesta/ of St. Francis.

Colon was seated on the Prior's right with the almoner on his other
side. On Frey Juan's left the Sub-Prior and the master of the novices
completed the group at the Prior's table. Seen through the misty light
from the candlebranch that graced it, the grey lines of the minorites
below looked ghostly in the crepuscular gloom enshrouding them.

When at last the reading ceased they stirred into life, and in that
hour of relaxation, a subdued hum of talk arose. To the Prior's table
came a dish of fruit--sleek oranges, dried figs of Smyrna, and some
half-withered apples, besides a flagon of Malmsey. Frey Juan brimmed a
cup for his guest, perhaps with intent to loosen a tongue that should
have much to tell. After that, as he still sat bemused, the Prior
ventured to spur him by a direct question.

"And so, sir, having voyaged far and wide you are now come to rest
here in Huelva." Thick-lipped, he lisped a little in his speech.

Colon roused himself. "To rest?" His tone derided the suggestion.
"This is but a stage in a new journey. I may stay some days there,
with a relative of my wife, who is now in the peace of God. Then I go
forth again on my travels." And he added almost under his breath:
"Like Cartaphilus, and perhaps as vainly."

"Cartaphilus?" The Prior searched his memory. "I do not think I have
heard of him."

"The cobbler of Jerusalem who spat upon Our Lord, and who is doomed to
walk the earth until the Saviour comes again."

Frey Juan showed him a shocked countenance. "Sir, that is a bitter
comparison."

"Worse. It is a blasphemy wrenched from me by impatience. Am I not
named Cristobal? Is there no omen to hearten me in such a name?
Cristobal. Christum ferens. Bearer of Christ. That is my mission. For
that I was born. For that I am chosen. To bear the knowledge of Him to
lands as yet unknown."

The Prior's eyes were round with inquiry. But before he could give it
utterance, the Sub-Prior on his left inclined his head to murmur to
him. Frey Juan assented by a nod, and a general rising followed for
the "Deo gratias" which the Sub-Prior pronounced.

Colon, however, was not to go with the departing friars. As they
trooped out, Frey Juan resumed his seat in the high chair, and with a
hand on his guest's sleeve drew him down to sit again beside him. "We
need not hasten," he said, and refilled Colon's cup with the sweet
Malmsey.

"You spoke, sir, of lands as yet unknown. What lands be these? Have
you in mind the Atlantis of Plato, or the Island of the Seven Cities?"

Colon's eyes were lowered so that Frey Juan might not detect their
sudden gleam at the very question he desired, the question that
suggested that the scholarly friar who might influence a queen was
caught already in the web of interest his guest was spinning.

"Your reverence jests. Yet, was Plato's Atlantis such a fable? May not
the Fortunate Isles and the Azores be remnants of it? And may there
not be still other, greater remnants in seas as yet uncharted?"

"These are, then, your unknown lands?"

"No. I have no such speculative things in mind. I seek the great
empire in the west, which I know to be of more definite existence, and
with which I will endow the crown that may be given grace to support
my quest."

A sudden vehemence in him first startled the Prior; then its
histrionic note drew a smile to his pursy lips. He scoffed
good-naturedly.

"You know of the existence of these lands. You know, you say. You have
seen them, then?"

"With the eyes of the soul. With the eyes of the intellect with which
God's grace has endowed me to the end that I may spread in them the
knowledge of Him. So clear my vision, reverend sir, that I have
charted these lands."

It was not for a man of Frey Juan's faith to mock at visions. Yet of
visionaries, being a practical man, he was naturally suspicious.

"I am, myself, a humble student of cosmography and philosophy, yet I
may be a dullard. For such knowledge as I possess does not explain how
that may be charted which has not been seen."

"Ptolemy had not seen the world he charted."

"But he possessed evidence to guide him."

"So do I. And more than evidence. Your paternity will admit that it is
by logical inference from the known that we proceed to discover the
unknown. Were it not so philosophy must stand arrested."

"In matters of the spirit that may be true. In matters physical I am
not so clear, and I must prefer evidence to imaginings however
logically founded."

"Then let me urge such evidence as exists. Storms blowing from the
west have borne to the shores of Porto Santo oddly carved timbers that
have never known the touch of iron, great pines such as do not grow in
the Azores, and huge canes, so monstrous that they will hold gallons
of wine in a single section. Some of these may be seen in Lisbon now,
where they are preserved. And there is more. Much more."

He paused a moment, as if collecting himself; actually, in order to
observe his host. Discerning a rapt attention in that full pallid
face, he sat forward, and began his exposition, his tone quiet, level
and precise.

"Two hundred years ago a Venetian traveller, Marco Polo by name,
journeyed farther east than any European before or since. He reached
Cathay and the dominions of the Grand Khan, a monarch of fabulous
wealth."

"I know, I know," Frey Juan interposed. "I possess a copy of his book.
I have mentioned that these are matters of which I, too, am a humble
student."

"You possess his book!" There was a sudden eagerness in Colon's face
that brought to it an increase of youth. "That spares me a deal. I did
not know," he lied, "that I talk to one already enlightened."

"You are not to flatter me, my son," said Frey Juan, not innocent
perhaps of irony. "What did you find in Marco Polo that I have lacked
the wit to discover?"

"Your paternity will recall the allusion to the Island of Zipangu,
known by the people of Mangi--the farthest point he, himself, had
reached--to be situated fifteen hundred miles farther to the east."
Frey Juan's nod encouraged him to continue. "You will remember the
fabulous abundance of the gold in those regions. Its sources, he says,
are inexhaustible. So common is the metal that the very roof of the
king's palace is covered with plates of it, as we cover ours with
lead. He tells us, too, of the great abundance of precious stones and
pearls, and in particular of a pink pearl of great size."

"Vanitas vanitate," the Prior deprecated.

"Not, by your leave, if well applied. Not if employed for the
furtherance of worthy ends. Wealth is not mere vanity then; and here
is wealth beyond all European dreams."

The very thought of it seemed to plunge him into a state of
contemplation from which he was impatiently aroused by Frey Juan.

"But what has this Zipangu of Marco Polo to do with your discoveries?
You spoke of lands across the western ocean. Assuming all of the
eastern marvels of Marco Polo to be true, how are they evidence of
your western lands?"

"Your paternity believes the earth to be a sphere?" He took an orange
from the dish, and held it up. "Like this."

"That is now the general belief among philosophers."

"And you accept, of course, the division of its circumference into
three hundred and sixty degrees?"

"A mathematical convention. That offers no difficulty. And then?"

"Of these three hundred and sixty degrees, the known world includes
but some two hundred and eighty. That is a fact upon which all
cosmographers agree. Thus, the known lands from the westernmost point,
say Lisbon, to the extreme of the charted eastern lands, leave still
some eighty degrees--nearly a quarter of the earth's total--to be
accounted for."

The Prior made a dubious lip. "We are told that it is all a waste of
water, so storm-tossed and wild that there can be no hope to navigate
it."

Colon's eyes flashed scorn. "A tale of weaklings who dare not make the
attempt. There were also fables of an impassable belt of flame along
the equinoctial line, a superstition which Portuguese navigators along
the coast of Africa have derided.

"Give me your attention, reverend sir. Here, then, is Lisbon." He
marked a point upon the orange. "And here the uttermost point of
Cathay: a vast distance of some fourteen thousand miles by my own
measurement of the degree, which on this parallel I compute to be of
fifty miles.

"Now if instead of travelling east by land, we travel west by water,
thus..." and his finger now went leftwards round the orange from
the point where he had placed Lisbon, "...we come, within eighty
degrees, to the same charted point. Your paternity will perceive that
it is not merely a paradox to say that we may reach the east by
travelling west. To the golden Zipangu of Polo the distance by the
west cannot be much above two thousand miles. Thus far we go by
evidence. Inference justifies the belief that Zipangu is by no means
the farthest limit of the Indies. It is merely as far as the
Venetian's knowledge went. There must be other islands, other lands,
an empire that awaits possession."

With such ardour had he made his exposition that Frey Juan was touched
by something of his fire. The simple homely demonstration with the
orange had disclosed one of those obvious facts which until indicated
can elude the acutest mind. The Prior had been swept almost helplessly
along by the strong current of the young cosmographer's enthusiasm.
But here of a sudden he perceived an obstacle, to which his sanity
must cling lest he be carried utterly away.

"Wait. Wait. You say there must be other lands. That is to go farther
than I dare follow you, my son. It is no more than your belief, a
belief in which you may be deceived."

Colon's exaltation was not cooled. Rather, being fanned, it flamed
more hotly. "If it were only that, it would not be an inference. And a
well-founded inference your paternity shall acknowledge it. It is
based no longer on mathematics, but on theology. We have it upon the
authority of the Prophet Esdras that the world is six parts land to
one of water. Apply that here, and tell me where I am at fault. Or let
it pass unheeded. Leave out of account my imagined lands, which would
halve the distance." He dropped the orange back into its dish. "It
still remains that the Indies lie within two thousand miles of us to
westward."

"And is that naught?" The Prior was suddenly aghast at the vision that
rose before his eyes. "Two thousand miles of empty waters holding
perils known to God alone. The very thought is terrifying. Where is
the courage that would so adventure itself into the unknown?"

"It is here." Colon smote his breast. He sat erect, all pride, the
glow of his eyes fanatical. "The Lord, Who with so palpable a hand
opened my understanding, so that reason, mathematics and charts are as
naught to my inspiration, opened up also my desire and endowed me with
the spirit necessary to an instrument of the Divine Will."

The force in him was one to bludgeon reason, the confidence a fire in
which to consume all doubt. Frey Juan, already won by Colon's
cosmography and logic, found himself now subdued into participation in
the man's fanatical assurance.

"In my vanity--for which God forgive me--I have thought that I had
some learning. But you reveal me to myself a mere groper in these
mysteries." He hung his head in thought for a moment. Colon, sipping
his Malmsey, watched him like a cat.

Suddenly the Prior asked: "Whence are you, sir? For from your speech
it is clear that you are not of Spain."

Colon hesitated before giving an answer that was yet no answer. "I am
from the Court of his Highness King John of Portugal, and on my way to
France."

"To France? What do you seek there?"

"I do not seek. I offer. I offer this empire of which I have spoken."
He alluded to it as to something already in his possession.

"But to France?" Frey Juan's face was blank. "Why to France?"

"Once I offered it to Spain, and was left to the judgment of a
churchman, which was like sending me to a mariner for a judgment on
theology. Then I went to Portugal, and wasted time upon learned
dullards whose armour of prejudice I had no arts to pierce. There, as
in Spain, there was none to sponsor me, and the lesson I have learnt
is that without sponsoring a man but wastes his time in seeking the
ear of the rulers of these kingdoms. There is no land upon which I
would more gladly bestow these treasures than upon Spain. There is no
sovereign I would more gladly serve than Isabel of Castile. But how am
I to reach her Highness? If I commanded an interest powerful enough to
deserve her ear, intelligent enough to perceive the value of what I
bring, and persuasive enough to induce her to receive me, then...
why then I should be content to stay. But where am I to find such a
friend?"

Absently the Prior's forefinger was tracing a circle on the oaken
table with a drop of spilled wine.

Covertly watching him, after a momentary pause, Colon answered his own
question. "I command no such friend in Spain. That is why I seek the
King of France. If I fail with him, too, then I shall challenge
fortune in England. You begin to perceive, perhaps, why I liken myself
to the errant Jew, Cartaphilus."

Still the Prior's forefinger continued its absent-minded tracing.

"Who knows?" he murmured at last.

"Who knows what, reverend sir?"

"Eh? Ah! Whether you are wise. Sleep brings counsel, they say. Let us
sleep on this, and talk again."

Colon was content to leave it there. Not much had been achieved,
perhaps, and yet enough to give him hope that he had not wasted time
in coming to La Rabida.



                             CHAPTER III

                             THE SPONSOR

Nothing in years of his peaceful conventual life had kindled such a
fever in Frey Juan as the words and person of Cristobal Colon. He
spent, as he afterwards confessed, a night in which distracting
wakeful thoughts alternated with fantastic dreams of golden-roofed
Zipangu--by which name it is universally accepted that Marco Polo
designates Japan--and of glittering jewelled islands dense with
monstrous canes that gushed forth wine when tapped. It distressed his
Spanish soul that empire over such lands should be lost to the
Sovereigns, who had such need of treasure to repair the ravages of
their war against the Infidel. His feelings in the matter were at once
patriotic and personal. It was natural that having once been the
confessor of Queen Isabel, his devotion to her was not merely that of
a loyal subject; it included an affectionate paternal regard,
reciprocated in her, he liked to believe, by a measure of filial
piety. Representations from him on behalf of his odd guest might
induce her to give the man's claims that consideration which Colon
complained had formerly been denied them.

Pondering this as he lay wakeful on his hard pallet, the good Prior
was ready to perceive the hand of God in the strange chance that had
brought Colon to La Rabida. He was not to suspect that here was no
chance at all; that Colon, as coldly calculating in furthering his
aims as he was fiery in expounding them, well aware of Frey Juan's
interest in cosmography and of the link that bound him to the Queen,
had made his way of deliberate intent to the convent, there to dangle
a bait before the Franciscan's eyes. The Prior's curiosity, aroused by
the ring of the wayfarer's sonorous voice, had simplified the course.
Had it been lacking--and it is clear that Colon cannot have counted
upon it--the request for a little bread and a drink of water for his
child would have been followed by a prayer for a night's lodging. In
the course of that he must have made an opportunity for just such an
interview as Frey Juan's interest had spontaneously supplied.

Suspecting none of this, the Prior asked himself was there a
miraculous quality, a divine intervention, in the sequel to the
hospitality he had offered. It was, however, in the nature of Frey
Juan to temper enthusiasm with prudence. Before committing himself to
sponsoring Colon's case, he would seek confirmation by others, more
competent to judge, of the faith the man inspired in him.

The others whom he had in mind were Garcia Fernandez, a physician of
Palos whose learning extended far beyond the healer's arts, and Martin
Alonso Pinzon, a wealthy merchant who had followed the sea, who owned
some ships, and who was known for a mariner of great experience.

To his persuasions that Colon should postpone departure for at least
another day, his guest yielded with a lofty air of bestowing favours,
and on that second night after supper, when little Diego was abed, the
four assembled in the Prior's cell. They crowded the narrow little
room, whose furniture included no more than three chairs, a table, a
writing-pulpit and Frey Juan's truckle-bed, with two shelves of books
against the whitewashed wall.

There Colon was invited to repeat the exposition with which he had
entertained Frey Juan last night. He came to it with hints of a vague
reluctance be it to weary these gentlemen, be it to weary himself. But
having begun and being caught up in the glow of his own ardour, the
manifestly eager attention of his audience came to feed it.
Expounding, he left his chair to pace the narrow limits of the cell,
fiery of eye and liberal of gesture. He spoke in withering scorn of
those who had disdained his gifts, and with haughty confidence of the
irresistible power within him ultimately to open purblind eyes to a
dazzling vision of those gifts.

Already before he came to those details which had so impressed Frey
Juan, both the physician and the merchant were held by that power,
which Bishop Las Casas, who knew him, tells us that Colon possessed,
easily to command the love of all who beheld him.

Fernandez, the physician, lean and long, with a head shaped like an
egg and as bald under his skull-cap, combed a straggling beard with
bony fingers as he listened, his pale eyes wide, his body hunched
within the black gabardine that clothed it. Sheath by sheath the
scepticism in which he had been wrapped was being ruthlessly stripped
from him.

Pinzon, on the other hand, yielded himself up readily to that fierce
sorcery. He had come in unsuspected eagerness to the Prior's
invitation because the matters upon which he was told that he was to
hear this voyager were matters that had long lain within his own
speculations. A square, vigorous, hairy man in the prime of life,
bow-legged, with eyes vividly blue under thick black eyebrows, he had
something of the mariner's traditional easy, hearty manner. His lips
showed very red within the black beard, but the mouth was too pinched
and small for generosity. His sober affluence was advertised in a
wine-coloured surcoat of velvet edged with lynx fur and the boots of
fine Cordovan leather that cased his sturdy legs.

By the time the exposition reached its end these two who had been
brought to sit in judgment scarcely needed for their conviction that
Colon should unfold a chart on which to the known world he had added
those territories of whose existence he was persuaded by his own inner
light, besides Marco Polo and the Prophet Esdras. Nevertheless over
that map, spread upon the Prior's table, they came reverently to pore
at his bidding.

Fernandez, from his studies, and Pinzon, from his wide experience,
were able to appraise not merely its clear perfection as a piece of
cartography, but, save in one detail, its scrupulous exactitude in
delineating the known world.

Upon this detail the old physician fastened. "Your chart gives two
hundred and thirty degrees of the earth's circumference as the
distance from Lisbon to the eastern end of the Indies. That does not
accord, I think, with Ptolemy."

Colon received the criticism as if he welcomed it. "Nor yet with
Marinus of Tyre, whom Ptolemy corrected, just as Ptolemy stands
corrected here. I correct him also, you'll observe, in the position of
Thule, which I, having sailed beyond it, found farther to the west
than Ptolemy judged it."

But Fernandez insisted. "That is your authority. Your sufficient
authority. But for the position you give to India what authority
exists?"

It was a moment before Colon replied, and then he spoke with a slow
reluctance, as if something more were being dragged from him than he
cared to give.

"You'll have heard of Toscanelli of Florence?"

"Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli? What student of cosmography has not?"

Well might Fernandez ask the question, for the name of Toscanelli,
lately dead, was famous among cultured men as that of the greatest
mathematician and physicist that had ever lived.

Pinzon's deep voice boomed in: "Who has not, indeed?"

"He is my authority. The computation that corrects Ptolemy's is his as
well as mine." Brusquely he added: "But what matter even if it be in
error? What matter if the golden Zipangu should lie some fewer or some
more degrees in either direction? What is that to the main issue? It
needs not the word of a Toscanelli to establish that whether we go
east or west upon a sphere, ultimately the same point must be
reached."

"It may not need his word, as you say, but your case would be
immeasurably strengthened if you could show that this great
mathematician holds the same opinion."

"I can show it." He spoke hastily, and would have recalled the words,
for it offended his vanity that it should be supposed that his
conclusions had been inspired by another.

The sudden, almost startled interest created by his assertion drove
him to explanation.

"As soon as I could formulate my theories, I submitted them to
Toscanelli. He wrote to me, not only fully approving of them, but
sending me a chart of his own, which in the main corresponds with the
one before you."

Frey Juan leaned forward eagerly. "You possess that chart?"

"That and the letter setting forth the arguments that justify it."

"Those," said Fernandez, "are very valuable documents. I do not think
a man lives with learning enough to dispute Toscanelli's conclusions."

Bluntly vehement, Pinzon swore by God and Our Lady that for him so
much was not necessary. Master Colon's speculations had pierced the
very heart of truth.

The Prior, sprawling on the truckle-bed, purred now with satisfaction,
declaring that it could not be God's will that Spain, where He was so
faithfully served, should lose the power and credit to accrue from
discoveries vaster than any the Portuguese navigators had made.

From Colon, however, these protests evoked no further response. On the
contrary, his manner became coldly forbidding.

"Spain has had her opportunity, and has neglected it. Engrossed in the
conquest of a province from the Moors, the Sovereigns could not see
the empire with which I offered to endow their crown. In Portugal a
King who looked with favour on my plans, left decision to a Jew
astronomer, a doctor and a churchman, a motley commission that
rejected me, as I believe from malice. That is why I look afield. Too
many years already have I lost." He folded his map with an air of
finality.

But the astute Pinzon, who knew his world far better than the other
two, was less susceptible to the awe of personalities. He asked
himself why, if this man's decision to go to France were as
irrevocable as he pretended, he should have been at the trouble now of
so full an exposition of his theories. In Pinzon's view, what Colon
sought whilst seeming to disdain it, was assistance in the execution
of his tremendous aims. And so Pinzon addressed himself to the
persuasion which he guessed to be invited.

He would be uworthy, he vowed, of the name of Spaniard, if, believing
what they had now heard, he should neglect to endeavour to secure for
Spain the possessions that would result from their discovery.

"I thank you, sir," was the lofty answer, "for this ready faith in
me."

Pinzon, however, would not leave it there. "It is so solid, so much in
accord with notions that have been mine, that I could even wish to
bear some share in the adventure, to set some stake upon it. Give it
thought, sir. Let us talk of it again." There was about him an
eagerness scarcely veiled. "I could muster a ship or two and the means
to equip them. Give it thought."

"Again I thank you. But this is no matter for private enterprise."

"Why not? Why should such benefits be for princes only?"

"Because such undertakings need the authority of a crown behind them.
The control of lands beyond the seas and of the riches they may yield
demand the forces that only a monarch can supply. If it were not so I
should not have wasted all these years in battering upon the doors of
princes, suffering denial at the hands of numskull doorkeepers."

The Prior, out of sympathy with, indeed momentarily dismayed by,
Pinzon's urgings, and relieved to hear them thus repelled, bestirred
himself to intervene. "There I might assist you. Especially now that I
know of the formidable weapon with which you are armed. I mean this
Toscanelli chart. Humble as I am, I could perhaps command the ear of
Queen Isabel. For the piety and goodness of her Highness maintains in
her a kindness for one who was once her confessor."

"Ah!" said Colon, as if this were news to him.

Inscrutable, he listened whilst Frey Juan pleaded now, echoing
Pinzon's sentiments that it were shameful in any Spaniard to suffer so
great a thing to be lost to Spain and go to the magnification of any
other kingdom. Let Master Colon be patient yet a little while. Having
waited years, let him now wait but some few weeks. To-morrow, if Colon
consented, Frey Juan would ride out to seek the Court, before Granada
or wherever it might be, to use with her Highness such influence as by
her goodness he possessed, to the end that she might accord an
audience to Colon, and hear his proposals from his own lips. Frey Juan
would be as speedy as lay in human power, and in the meantime at La
Rabida Master Colon would be well cared for with his child.

The note of intercession deepened in the friar's voice as he
proceeded. He became almost lachrymose in his fervent endeavour to
break through the cold aloofness in which the tall adventurer stood
mantled.

When he ceased at last, his plump hands joined as if in prayer, Colon
fetched a sigh. "You tempt me sorely, good father," he said, and
turned away. He paced to the window followed by two pairs of anxious
eyes, the Prior's and the physician's. In the glance of the merchant
Pinzon, who knew his world and the ways of bargainers, there was less
anxiety than shrewd mistrust.

At the room's end Colon slowly turned. He tossed his red head, and,
majesty incarnate in a shabby coat, he conferred the favour asked.

"Impossible to refuse what is so graciously offered. Be it as you
wish, Sir Prior."

The Prior bore down upon him, smiling his gratitude. Behind him,
Martin Alonso laughed outright. Frey Juan supposed it an expression of
pure joy, as well it may have been, for there is joy in seeing
fulfilled the predictions of our judgment.



                              CHAPTER IV

                         THE NEGLECTED SUITOR

The Prior of La Rabida procured himself a mule, and set out upon the
following morning for the Vega of Granada, where the Sovereigns had
sat down to invest the last Saracen stronghold.

The high confidence in which he went was not misplaced. Queen Isabel
received her ghostly father with all the graciousness and piety due
from a ghostly daughter. She listened to his tale, and being infected
by something of his enthusiasm, yielded to his prayer, summoned her
treasurer and bade him count out twenty thousand maravedis for the
equipment and travelling expenses of Colon. Then she dismissed the
triumphant Franciscan to bring the man to audience.

Here was a promptitude beyond all the friar's hopes. He made haste
back to La Rabida with his news.

"The Queen, our wise and virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer
of this poor friar. Do yourself justice now, and the world is yours."

Colon, incredulous at the swift and easy access attending the
gamester's throw upon which he had come to La Rabida, lost no time in
setting out. His son was to remain in the convent's care until he
could take order about him.

At the moment of departure he was sought again by Martin Alonso
Pinzon, who put forth an extreme geniality.

"I come to wish you fortune and to felicitate you upon this ready
grant of audience. I swear you could have had no better ambassador."

"I am as sensible of it as I am of this your courtesy."

"It is no mere courtesy. After all, I have had my part in this
success." Answering the question in Colon's glance, he went on: "Do me
right, sir. It was my support of your views that sent Frey Juan to
plead with the Queen."

It was as if he urged a claim, a pettiness by which Colon was none too
favourably impressed. But he dissembled his faint scorn.

"You leave me in your debt, sir."

Martin Alonso laughed with a display of strong teeth behind the red
lips within his black beard. "It's a debt, faith, you may find it
profitable to discharge. Bear in mind, sir, that I am ready to support
your project. I love a hazard, and I would set a stake on this. I can
command ships, as I have told you."

"You enhearten me." Colon was a model of cold courtesy. "But, as I
thought that I made clear, the enterprise is too vast for private
purses, else it had not been so long delayed."

"Yet you may come to find that a private purse might bear some share
in it. Why should it not, even though the crown should offer the main
support?"

"To me it seems that if I am supported by the crown, the crown will
bear the cost."

"But perhaps not all of it." Martin Alonso was becoming importunate.
He smiled, but there was a keenness almost of anxiety in his eyes.
"The royal treasury is under sore strain in these days. The war has
made a heavy drain upon it. The Sovereigns may favour you, and yet
hesitate on the score of the expense. A little help might then be
welcome. All I ask is that you remember me should that be so, or," he
added slyly, "if you saw the chance to make it so. After all, as I
have said, it would be no more than my due, for my part in sending
Frey Juan to Court."

"I will remember," said Colon.

But as he rode away it was in the determination to forget. He wanted
no partners, least of all an acquisitive merchant who for the paltry
purse that he might bring to it would not merely claim a share of the
profit but strive also to filch some of the glory.

Accounting his trials now behind him, his shabbiness sloughed, and
clad by the Queen's bounty in a manner to set off his natural graces,
he came without delay to Court under the aegis of Frey Juan.

The Franciscan's words were in his memory: "The Queen, our wise and
virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer of this poor friar. Do
yourself justice now and the world is yours."

It was an enheartening assurance, and for what depended upon himself
Colon entertained no doubt. He would do himself the fullest justice,
as Frey Juan should see.

And so, when he was brought to audience in the Alcazar in the white
city of Cordoba, it was no cringing supplicant that the Sovereigns
beheld. Conscious that his russet doublet and the open mulberry
surcoat with its hanging sleeves became him well, he bore himself with
the swaggering confidence of one who is master of his fate.

Had the result depended upon the Queen alone, it might have followed
quickly; for though a woman of much sense and calm judgment, she was
still a woman, and so could hardly remain indifferent to the appeal of
the dominant masculinity of this tawny-haired man with the eager,
magnetic, youthful eyes and that power Las Casas mentions of
commanding affection. But King Ferdinand was there, hard and wary, the
shrewdest prince in Europe and the most calculating. A man in the late
thirties, squarely and strongly built, but of only middle height, he
was of a rather lumpy fresh-coloured countenance, fair-haired and with
light prominent eyes. Those eyes looked with little favour upon the
natural majesty and princely carriage of the adventurer whom Frey Juan
presented.

Their Highnesses received Colon in a gracious chamber of the Alcazar,
lighted by twin-arched windows and hung in the stamped and subtly
coloured leather for which the Moors of Cordoba were famous, its
marble floor spread with rich eastern rugs. Two ladies waited upon the
Queen, standing behind her tall chair, the handsome young Marchioness
of Moya and the Countess of Escalona. The King was attended by his
Lord Chamberlain, Andrés Cabrera, Marquis of Moya, of whom it was said
that his goat's eyes justified his name; by Don Luis de Santangel, the
grey-bearded and benign Chancellor of Aragon; and by Hernando de
Talavera, Prior of the Prado, a tall ascetic friar in the white habit
and black cloak of a Hieronomite.

All these, like most of those who filled the high offices about the
Sovereigns, were New Christians, men of Jewish blood, who having risen
to eminence by the talents of their race, were sowing an envy that was
beginning to express itself in that ferocity of persecution of which
the Holy Office of the Inquisition was to be the agent.

Colon, by his very name, may have led them to regard him as one of
themselves, and certainly, had he looked, he would have detected a
sympathetic warmth in the eyes of Santangel and Cabrera. Talavera,
however, remained coldly aloof, his glance lowered. Uncompromisingly
honest, as he conceived honesty, he would adopt hostility rather than
yield to feeble prejudice on racial grounds.

At the outset Colon gave little heed to these satellites. His eyes and
attention were on the Queen, at whose elbow Frey Juan Perez had come
to take an unobtrusive stand. He beheld a light-complexioned woman of
forty of the middle height, her shape and countenance moderately
plump, whose blue eyes gave him kindly encouragement. A certain
homeliness was not to be dissembled even by the richness of her
ermine-lined cloak of crimson satin so profusely slashed as to display
in gleams the cloth of gold of the gown she wore beneath it. In the
belt of white leather at her waist smouldered the fire of a balas ruby
of the size of a tennis ball.

She addressed him in gentle terms, and in her placid voice he caught a
hint of the authority that dwelt in her. She spoke in commendation of
the ideas by which the Prior of La Rabida had told them that he was
inspired, and she assured him that it was her wish to know more of
this service which he believed that it lay in his power to render to
the crowns of Castile and Aragon.

His head high, his voice resonant, he was prompt to answer:

"I kiss your Highness's feet. I thank you for the occasion so
graciously accorded me. I bring you the promise of discoveries before
which those which have brought increase of dignity and power to the
Crown of Portugal shall look small and mean."

"A high promise," croaked the King, and Colon could not be certain
that he did not sneer. Not on that account, however, was he perturbed.

"High, indeed, sire. But no higher than by God's grace and guidance I
shall soar."

"Say on. Say on," said the King, and now the sneer was plain. "Let us
hear you."

Colon inclined that proud head of his, which his Highness accounted
too stiffly held, and launched himself in terms that had been
well-rehearsed upon a recital of his cosmographical theories. But he
had not gone far before Ferdinand's hard voice and rapid speech broke
in upon him.

"Yes, yes. All this we have heard already from the Prior of La Rabida.
It is his clear statement of your beliefs that has prompted her
Highness to grant you audience at a time when, as you should know, our
crusade against the Infidel in Spain is giving us abundant
occupation."

A lesser man, one more imbued with the respect of persons, would have
been put out of countenance. Colon was merely spurred to a greater
assurance.

"The wealth of the Indies, which I trust to lay at the foot of your
throne, the inexhaustible wells of it to which I shall open your royal
way, will repair the ravages of that conflict and supply resources for
its triumphant conclusion, or for its extension even to a deliverance
of the Holy Sepulchre itself."

He could have said nothing better calculated to kindle enthusiasm in
Queen Isabel and bring her under the spell of the magic that he used.
But to the King it was almost a contradiction, a challenge. With a
sceptical smile on his full lips he forestalled any answer from the
Queen.

"Do not let us forget that you speak of things seen so far only with
the eye of faith."

"What, then, is faith, sire?" Colon permitted himself to ask, but by
answering at once let it be seen that the question was no more than
rhetorical. "It is the power to recognize by the inner light of
inspiration those things of which the evidence is not tangible."

"This has more the sound of theology than cosmography." Ferdinand
looked over his shoulder at Talavera with a crooked smile. "It lies
rather in your province, Sir Prior, than in mine."

The friar raised his bowed head. His voice was grave and cold.

"As a definition of faith I have no quarrel with it."

"For myself," said the Queen, "whilst no theologian, I have never
heard it defined better."

"Yet," Ferdinand objected, turning to her in all courtesy, "in such a
matter an ounce of experience is worth a pound of faith. And of actual
experience admittedly there is none to support the claims of Master
Colon."

Instead of answering herself, the Queen invited Colon to furnish the
reply.

"You hear his Highness."

Colon lowered his eyes; his tone was almost wistful. "I can but ask
what is experience, and answer that it is no more than the foundation
upon which those have ever built who have been endowed with the divine
gift of imagination."

"That is obscure enough to be profound," said Ferdinand, "but it takes
us nowhere."

"By your leave, Highness, at least it points the way. By applying the
gift of imagination, by imagining the unknown from the known--the
experienced--has man risen by stages upwards from a primeval brutish
ignorance."

His Highness began to show irritation. This man was more subtle and
elusive than was proper in disputing with a prince. He made an
impatient noise. "We move here in the realm of the intangible, a realm
of dreams."

Colon threw up his head as if affronted. There was an almost fanatical
glow in his clear eyes. "Dreams!" he echoed. His voice soared and
vibrated with power. "All things are dreams before they become
reality. The world itself was a dream before it was created, a dream
in the mind of God."

It was as if he had cast a burning brand amongst them. The King's jaw
fell; Talavera's brow was dark; Frey Juan looked scared. But in every
other face, including the Queen's, Colon beheld only a flattering
wonder, whilst from Santangel's full dark eyes he caught a look of
warm, amused approval.

The King spoke, slowly for once. "I trust, sir, that you are not
floundering into heresy in the heat of argument." And again his glance
invited Talavera to pronounce.

The Prior of the Prado shook his head, his lean face forbidding.

"I do not discover heresy. No. And yet..." He directly addressed
Colon. "You go perilously deep, sir."

"It is my way, Sir Prior."

"Undaunted by the peril?" the friar sternly challenged him.

Colon rejoiced that it was the priest who had asked the question, for
in answering the priest he could put his scorn into laughter, as he
would not dare in answering the King. "If I were easily daunted,
reverend sir, I should not be offering to sail into the unknown and
defy the terrors with which superstition fills it."

His Highness deemed it time to set a term to the audience.

"It is not your audacity, sir, that is in doubt," he said, and the
calm comment had the ring of a reproof. "If that were all we might be
ready to employ you. As it is...it happens that I am by nature
slow to take a man's own valuation of the wares he offers."

"It is not in my mind that we should do that," said the Queen. "But
neither are we to reject the project because of our incompetence to
judge it. Master Colon, his Highness and I will take counsel and
consider the appointing of a junta of learned men to examine your
claims, and to advise us upon them."

Remembering how he had fared in Portugal at the hands of a junta
stuffed with learning and frozen in the ignorance of its limitations,
Colon's heart would have turned heavy had not the Queen added:

"I shall look to see you soon again, Master Colon. Meanwhile you are
commanded to remain at Court. My treasurer, Don Alonso de Quintanilla,
shall have orders to provide."

On that promise he had taken his dismissal, and if he departed in a
confidence less high than that in which he had come, yet at least he
could bear with him the assurance that he had left a favourable
impression on the Queen.

Of his favourable impression upon the others he was soon to be
assured. First there was Quintanilla, in whose house, by the Queen's
disposition, he was lodged, and by whom he was cordially welcomed.
There was more than his attractiveness to conquer the favour of
Quintanilla. The finances of the two kingdoms were depleted to
exhaustion by the Moorish war, and the Treasurer of Castile was sorely
harassed in his need to provide supplies. By sharpening the
persecution of the Jews to the extent of giving the Holy Office a
freer hand in the pursuit of the wretched converts who relapsed into
Judaism and suffered consequently, with the loss of their lives, the
confiscation of their property, the ship of State was being kept
precariously afloat. To buoy it up further there were the heavy loans
made by such great Jews as Abarbanel and Senior, who sought
desperately to deflect the greater persecution which their prescience
told them that greed might presently let loose--a persecution not to
be confined to relapsing Marranos, who by becoming Christians had
brought themselves within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but to
include in its remorseless sweep all the Children of Israel. If those
succeeded who even now were pressing the Sovereigns to decree the
expulsion of the Jews whilst compelling them to leave all property
behind, the wealth thus harvested might resolve all difficulties. But
in the meantime the difficulties remained to harass the Treasurer of
Castile. Therefore was he the more eager for first-hand news of this
man who proposed to unlock for Spain the vast treasury of the East,
and, because of his hopes, the readier to lend him credit and support.

Then there was the Chancellor of Aragon, Luis de Santangel, whose
countenance had shown how deeply he was moved by Colon's bearing at
the royal audience. At heart he, too, was moved by considerations
similar to those of Quintanilla. Beholding in Colon a potential
saviour of Israel in Spain, he was as ready to believe him the
instrument of God as Colon was ready to believe it of himself. For
although Santangel had received Christian baptism and practised now
the Christian faith, his heart remained with the people of his race.
Indeed, so ill had he concealed it that once he had been made to feel
the talons of the Holy Office of Saragossa, and compelled to do public
penance in his shirt. Only the high value which the Sovereigns set
upon his services and the great affection in which they held him had
preserved him from worse.

Santangel sought Colon that very day at the house of Quintanilla, took
both his hands in a long firm clasp, and looked deep into his eyes.

"I make haste," he said, "to proclaim myself your friend before your
deeds shall have earned you so many that I shall be lost amongst
them."

"Which being translated, Don Luis, means that out of the goodness of
your soul you desire to give me courage."

"It means much more. It means that I foresee a great destiny for you,
and that by you Spain is to be magnified."

Colon smiled crookedly. "I would the King had perceived it as
clearly."

"The King is cautious. Slow to reach decisions."

"And I thought him quick to decide that I am a charlatan."

Don Luis was shocked. "Never believe that. His scepticism was to test
your quality, and you rang true under the test. Those are the Queen's
own words, my friend. So take heart in the assurance that your
patience will not long be tried. You'll sup with me to-night, and you
too, Don Alonso. Your good friend Frey Juan will be with us, breaking
for once the rigours of St. Francis. To-morrow you are to wait upon
the Marchioness of Moya. She desires your better acquaintance. When I
tell you that she has more influence with the Queen than any person
living, you'll see that you are civil to her. But, faith, there's
little need to enjoin it. Her beauty will do that to one whom I judge
to have an eye for beauty."

The eye which Santangel so truly described was feasted to the full
next day upon Beatriz de Bobadilla, Marchioness of Moya, when Don Luis
conducted him to her mansion on the Ronda, overlooking the majestic
Guadalquivir.

He went in the glory of russet doublet and mulberry surcoat, his red
mane sedulously dressed, and in his clear mariner's eyes a glow of
high confidence borrowed from the shape his fortunes were at last
assuming. It was a glow that deepened when he contemplated the
Marchioness and met in her soft glances the approval in him of a
shapeliness that matched her own.

Yesterday at the audience he had admiringly observed her. He had not
been a man, or, at least, not the man he was, had he overlooked her.
But yesterday there had been so much else to command his attention,
whilst now there was nothing to deflect the delight his eye might take
in her. A woman in the glory of her young maturity, she was fashioned
on stately lines, tall and superbly made. Her black hair and the oval
face beneath were framed in a pointed and stiffened silken coif that
was edged with jewel-work. Her lips were moist and red, and there was
a caressing languor in the regard of her dark eyes. Her high-waisted
gown was of yellow silk with a broad hem of blue. Cut squarely and
low, it revealed a glory of white throat.

Santangel, benign and fatherly, presented Colon.

"Marchioness, I bring our discoverer to kiss your hands."

She chose to take the phrase literally, and held out to him the
fairest hand he had ever seen; the texture of it to his fingertips and
lips was as the texture of satin. His lips dwelt in fervour upon it
for longer than was quite seemly.

"Shall I prophesy for you?" she said, with a smile. "It is that Spain
will yet desire to be as free of your hand as you make free with
mine."

"A prophecy to intoxicate me, madam."

"I do not judge you easily intoxicated?"

"Not easily. No. But when the wine is sweet and rich I take my chance
of it."

"With a full confidence in yourself. You do not lack for that, as we
saw yesterday."

"Yesterday, madam, I was but a navigator, rehearsing what his trade
had taught him."

"Oh!" Her fine brows arched upwards. "And to-day?"

"To-day the humblest suitor for your favour."

"Yet I had not supposed you humble."

"It was not my honour yesterday to be addressing you."

Gently she rallied him. "Fie, sir! That is to set me above the Queen."

"Have mercy, madam. Do not provoke me to high treason."

"That were, indeed, folly. For in the Queen you have made a sure
friend, upon whose support you may rely."

"It is more than I dared hope."

"But why?" He felt the ardour of her glance upon him. "The Queen is a
woman, after all, and loves audacity in a man. Like the King, she
discerned no lack of it in you."

"To support me she had need to discern something more: that I can
fulfil no less than I promise."

"If you doubt it, you do poor justice to your arts of persuasion. Does
he not, Don Luis?"

"If he doubts it," said Don Luis so dryly that he set them laughing.

"You need not," she assured Colon, "any more than you need doubt that
I shall fail to keep you in the Queen's mind."

"For that it is not only I who will have cause to thank you," said he,
with a full recovery of his normal swagger. "Queen Isabel, herself,
and all Spain will be in your debt."

"Now," she laughed, "I hear the voice of the man of yesterday, the
high note that brings us all into submission. For the rest, Master
Colon, it is not with the debt to me of Spain that I shall be
concerned."

Thus for a full hour they talked with more covert fencing in their
words than Don Luis approved. When he had kissed her hand in
leave-taking:

"Count us your friends," she bade him, "and dispose of our house as if
it were your own."

Outside in the Spring sunshine, on the Ronda, Santangel took him by
the arm. He used a gentle, friendly tone.

"As a foreigner, Master Colon, you may be in danger of mistaking words
which we Spaniards utter in merely formal courtesy, and which could be
acted upon only to our dismay."

Colon laughed. "You mean that Spanish courtesy offers everything,
counting upon a like courtesy to accept nothing."

"Since you understand it so well, you will not over-value the
Marchioness's words."

"Nor under-value her gracious kindness."

"I am by no means sure that it would not be more prudent." He hugged
the arm closer. "Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla is the Queen's dearest
friend, of great influence with her and an intimacy to which none
other is admitted. Yet there's a prudishness in Queen Isabel that
would not condone light conduct even in her dearest friend. That is
something to be remembered. The other thing is Cabrera." Santangel
hesitated a moment, with a sidelong glance at his companion. Quickly
and softly he added: "He is one of ours."

Colon was mystified. "One of ours?"

"A New Christian," Don Luis explained. "Marquis of Moya and a power in
the land as you behold him, he is yet the son of Rabbi David of
Cuenca."

Light came to Colon. It revealed, first, that he was assumed by
Santangel to be a Marrano; second, that because of this the wife of a
Marrano must be sacred to him. Now despite his hispanicized name, and
something in his cast of countenance to justify the assumption, a
Marrano Colon was not. Yet perceiving that to deny it might jeopardize
the goodwill towards him of a man whose esteem he valued and upon
whose support he counted, opportunism prompted him to be
disingenuously non-committal.

"I see," was all he said.

"You'll forgive what would be a liberty if it were not rooted in
regard for you."

"I were a clown if I did not thank you." Then Colon laughed. "Oh, but
be easy, sir. Cristobal Colon is not the man to let passion touch his
destiny. My mission is too great to yield to human weaknesses."

"Your mission may be. But are you?" wondered the Chancellor. "Move
circumspectly here, my friend, if you would prosper."

Days of great consequence had followed for Colon, days of confident
waiting in which he took the eyes of the courtly throng in the
ante-chambers of the Alcazar, and was proudly conscious that he took
them. He had travelled far from the humble little house in the Vico
Dritto di Ponticello in Genoa, where he was born; but no farther, he
opined, than his deserts entitled him. From this conviction came a
poise to match his inches and his patrician countenance. Men nudged
one another as he passed, and ever and anon he would catch an awed
whisper of his name. Haughty grandes, hidalgos who accounted
themselves fashioned of different fibres from those that made up the
members of the common herd, princes of the Church, great captains, and
men of state sought his acquaintance and used him with deference. For
him more than one lovely lady cast aside Castilian reticence and
allowed languid eyes to express a yearning admiration. He was enhanced
by a certain mystery that attached to him. Shrewdly aware of its
value, he did nothing to dissipate it. None could speak with certainty
of his origin. By some he was accounted a Portuguese, by others a
Ligurian noble. Some related that he was of a learning that was the
pride of the University of Pavia, where it was said that he had
studied; by others it was asserted that he was a great fighting seaman
who had made himself the terror of Islam in the Mediterranean; others,
again, explained that, boldest of navigators, he had sailed his ships
into seas no other keels had ploughed. In one particular only were all
agreed; his looks, his princely and graceful speech, coloured by a
foreign accent which yet did not impair its fluency, all went to
convey an impression of his high consequence.

These days, in which he loftily rubbed shoulders with the great, were
probably the happiest he had ever known, warming him with that sense
that at last he filled in life his proper place. He knew no
impatiences then, for, as has been said, whilst one may travel
pleasantly there is little haste to arrive. Unfortunately this
pleasant travelling did not last. Imperceptibly the aura that had been
set aglow about him grew dim with the passage of weeks in which
nothing happened. The Queen's intimate, the Marchioness of Moya, might
still address him in public with an eagerness in her dark eyes which
she did not trouble to conceal. Cabrera, following his wife's lead,
might miss no chance of marking his regard, and the dignified
Santangel, by many accounted the most influential man in the two
kingdoms, might use him publicly with an almost paternal affection.
Upon the Court in general he began to perceive that he grew stale, and
he was led to invoke the assistance of the Marchioness, to the end
that she might exert the omnipotence at Court derived from the great
love the Queen was known to bear her.

With this intent, he sought her one day at her palace on the Ronda, to
be received with gentle reproaches for having made himself so long
expected there.

"It is, madam, that I lacked the presumption to suspect it."

"It is for a discoverer to make discoveries," she told him, and so
opened a door to the suit he came to make.

"I am, alas, a discoverer in danger of lying becalmed, forgotten."

"Not by me, at least, my friend. If it depended upon me or my
reminders to the Queen, you would have a fleet of ships by now. I have
even been rebuked for my insistence."

He displayed contrition. "Madam! That I should be the cause of that!"

"I have no quarrel with the cause," she assured with such warmth that
Santangel's warning and his own vaunt were alike forgotten.

"I shall study to deserve this favour. You shame me that I should come
to importune you with my affairs."

"Your shame should be that they supply the only reason for your
visit!"

"It would be so if I were not glad that to make my prayer provides the
occasion."

"Prayer? Lord, sir, I am no saint to be prayed to."

"Am I to believe that when I have but the evidence of my eyes?"

"And what do they show you?" She was challenging.

"More loveliness than seems mortal, or than they can calmly endure."
He took her hand again, and for a moment she let it lie in his grasp.
Her eyes were troubled. In their dark depths there was an appeal he
could not read, and something of fear, aroused by his too impetuous
ardour. They were as the eyes of one who, about to leap, pauses
appalled by the width of the chasm.

Her voice came to him in a soft murmur. "Señor Cristobal, do not let
us glide into a folly we should both repent. Your hopes of the Queen's
favour----"

"Must yield at need," he interrupted hotly, "to more imperious hopes."

"Those are not for us, Cristobal. Let us be wise in time, my friend."

Yet the low, caressing tone was not calculated to restrain him.

"Wise! What, then, is wisdom? he asked, and would passionately have
answered his own question, but that she forestalled him.

"It is not to jeopardize the good we may possess for an illusion of
something better that is unattainable." It was a prayer to him to help
her to be strong. "There are some things that I can give," she
continued, "and those I give without stint. Be content. To seek more
would be to lose all. For both of us."

He sighed, mastering himself, and bowed his red head. "It must ever be
as you command." He released her hand. "I am not to trouble you, but
to serve you."

The tenderness of her glance was deepened by the humility of that
obedient surrender. And then their sanity was completely restored to
them by the entrance of Cabrera.

He advanced, a short, ungainly figure on his crooked legs, a friendly
smile in his goat's eyes, and he used Colon with a warm consideration.
He was still pleasant when Colon had left.

"Decidedly I must do what I can to promote the wishes of this
navigator," said he. "He knows how to engage my interest."

"I am glad to hear it."

"And surely not surprised. You'll not find it odd that I should do my
best to help him aboard a ship and have him sailing to the Indies or
to perdition."

"Lord, Andrés! Will you be jealous?"

"I will not," laughed Cabrera. "It's to save myself that detestable
emotion that I'll labour to have our gentleman weigh anchor at the
earliest."

She laughed without embarrassment. "I shall do nothing to discourage
you. He wishes himself at sea, and since I wish him well, must I not
also wish him at sea? We'll labour to that end."

She was so ingenuously frank and so lovely that Cabrera was content to
be amused. Yet there was a sincerity under his jesting answer. "He'll
not wish himself at sea more fervently than I do. There is too much of
him."

It followed out of this that two or three days later, meeting Colon in
one of the galleries of the Alcazar, Santangel was the bearer of
reassuring news.

"There are more friends working for you than you may suppose. Here is
Cabrera gone near to embroiling himself with the King by pestering him
on your behalf. You see," he added, "the wisdom of my advice that you
be circumspect with the delectable Marchioness. It bears fruit in
Cabrera's friendly interest in you."

"And makes him anxious to be rid of me," said Colon, sardonic. "But if
the fruit is to exasperate his Highness, how shall that profit me?"

"There is some profit for you with the Queen at least. Cabrera pleaded
with them both, and her Highness this morning bids me assure you that
your affairs will soon be in train. If they have been so long delayed
it is because of preoccupation with this war, to which are now added
troubles with the King of France."

"The devil take the King of France, then."

"That is not all." The Chancellor's face grew set in lines of
sternness. "Torquemada is clamouring for a bill of expulsion against
the Jews."

"May Satan toast him over his own faggots."

Santangel shrank in horror. "Sh! In God's name! Men have gone to the
fire for less. Here passion will not serve. Patience. Patience is the
only armour."

"I am empanoplied in it cap-â-pie. It begins to irk my bones."

It was to irk them further yet. The Sovereigns quitted Cordoba to
return to the camp in the Vega of Granada. The Court followed, and
Colon went with the Court. He went with it to Seville, and thence in
the winter to Salamanca, where at least he made a new and powerful
friend in the learned Dominican Frey Diego Deza, the Prior of St.
Esteban, who was the preceptor of the young Prince Juan. Deza's keen,
approving interest in Colon's project revived for a season his
drooping hopes. Deza added his weighty urgings to those with which
Colon's other few friends kept the matter before the Sovereigns. And
something might now have come of it, but that a rebellion in Galicia
demanded quelling and distracted thought from all other matters.

Plunged back into despair by this fresh postponement, Colon swore that
because he was divinely inspired all the legions of Hell were in arms
against him.

And now, a year and more after that exultant journey from Palos at the
Queen's command, he was back in Cordoba, still waiting, still
following the Court, but fallen into such neglect that the Queen had
forgotten to offer him his old lodging and he had been too proud to
seek it unbidden. Thus, on Santangel's recommendation, he had hired
himself a room over the shop of Bensabat, the tailor, in the Calle
Atayud, narrowest and most crooked of streets in that city of narrow
crooked streets.

The royal mind engrossed in warlike preparations for the final
conquest of Granada could spare no thought for the schemes and dreams
of navigators, whence it had followed that, cooling his heels about
the royal antechambers, this man once regarded as a portent was now
become an object of derision. His notion of reaching the Indies by the
west which once had inspired awe was now so much a subject for mockery
that six months ago already a witling had expressed it in a quatrain:


  Colon declares he finds it best
  To reach the east by going west.
  I nothing doubt he's found as well
  The road to Heaven lies through Hell.


The silly lampoon had enjoyed a vogue in a Court which welcomed
weapons of ridicule. It had reached the ears of the lordly Messer
Federigo Mocenigo, Venetian Ambassador to the Sovereigns of Castile
and Aragon, and thence it had followed that whilst Colon gloomed about
the Court of Spain neglected and forgotten, he came to excite a deal
of anxious thought in other unsuspected quarters.

In distant Venice a pattern of sinister design was being woven into
the warp of his destiny.



                              CHAPTER V

                               THE DOGE

Venice at the zenith of her might and wealth, with Cyprus lately added
to her wide possessions, holding the gateway, and therefore a monopoly
of the commerce, between east and west, was ruled at this time by
Agostino Barbarigo, a doge who under an elegant, gay, almost flippant
exterior, masked a shrewdness seldom equalled by any holder of his
office and a hard patriotism that would count no sacrifice--at least
no sacrifice of others--too great to ensure that the Most Serene
Republic should lose no fraction of her enviable power. With this aim
he enjoined great diligence of observation and report in the agents he
maintained at every Court of Europe.

From Spain Messer Mocenigo sent news that brought his Serenity some
disquiet, presenting him with the recurrence of a problem which once
already he had solved. It was in his thoughts, although as yet he gave
it no expression, as he sat with his brother-in-law Silvestro Sarasin,
the senior of the dread Council of Three, the Inquisitors of State.

They occupied the gilded room of the ducal palace which Barbarigo made
peculiarly his own, a room which he had hired Carapaccio to embellish
for him with subjects calculated to please his fastidious, sensuous
eyes.

It was the contemplation of the latest acquisition from that magic
brush, a bathing Dian, that struck from Sarasin a characteristic spark
of humour. He was a fellow of gross shape, short and corpulent, yellow
as a Turk, with a double chin that was like the dewlap of an ox.

"If your allegorical bride were more of this fashion I could find it
in my heart to envy you the dogeship. Madam Leda, I suppose." He
sighed. "One understands that a god should condescend to be a swan."

"Not Leda. No. Diana. In lusting after her you risk the fate of
Actaeon, if not at her hands at least at those of my sister."

"You overrate the family authority." Sarasin was scornful. "Virginia
is a prudent wife. She has no sight for things which it might trouble
her to see."

"Poor soul! You doom her, then, to a perpetual blindness."

"Devil take your Serenity, and your opinion of me," said Sarasin, but
without resentment.

They were men of an age, in the early fifties; but whilst Sarasin's
corpulence betrayed every year of it, the Doge, light-haired, tall and
slimly elegant in a houppelande of sky-blue satin, still conveyed an
illusion of youth. He had risen, and stood with his thumbs hooked into
the golden cord that girdled him, his fair, narrow face sardonically
smiling.

"What opinion do your lewd ways encourage? They tell me that you are
not above being seen at this new theatre Ruzzante has set up on Santi
Giovanni e Paolo. Is that becoming in an Inquisitor of State?"

Sarasin's prominent blue eyes goggled at his brother-in-law.

"They tell you? Who are they? Your spies, I suppose. None else would
recognize me. I may not be above going there, but I am above being
seen there. I go cloaked and masked. And I'm not to be reproved for
it; for I count it within the functions of my office."

The claim was reasonable enough. This theatre which Angelo Ruzzante
had opened, and which was attracting crowds of pleasure-seekers, was
in the nature of an innovation. It was known as the Hall of the
Horse--la Sala del Cavallo--presumably because situated in the little
square where Colleoni rode in Verrocchio's lately unveiled equestrian
statue, a bronze colossus of terrifying beauty.

"You can be diligent, I know, when duty jumps with inclination," the
Doge mocked him. "What do you find there?"

"Nothing for official disapproval. They mime and play some comedies no
more lascivious than I have seen performed at the Patriarch's Palace.
There is a funambulist, who terrifies you by his antics on a rope, an
eastern juggler, a fire-eater, and a girl like a houri in a Muslim's
dream of Paradise."

"My poor deluded sister! And what does she do, this houri out of
Paradise?"

"She dances a saraband, an outlandish Saracen dance, to the
accompaniment of queer clacking things like chestnuts, appropriately
called castanets. Moorish, as the dance, I believe they are. Also she
sings to the guitar; like a nightingale, alluring as one of the sirens
that troubled Ulysses."

Barbarigo laughed. "A houri, a nightingale, a siren! Whence is this
prodigy?"

"From Spain, they tell me. Her songs are Spanish: Andalusian, with odd
cadences that quicken a man's blood."

The Doge's flippancy vanished. "From Spain? Ha! It happens to be of
Spain that I had to talk to you." He sauntered, straight and elegant,
to the window and back, drew a chair to the side of his walnut
writing-table, adorned with heads of imps and cherubs that were gems
of wood-carving, and paused. "I have news from Spain that I find
disquieting."

Sarasin sat up. "Concerned with Naples?"

"No, no. There's nothing there to give us thought. This is a menace
vague as yet, but the more dangerous because impalpable, a thing with
which, if it were to come, there would be no grappling. It arose once
before; two years ago, in Portugal. I was able then to stifle it. It
was not easy and it was costly. This time it may prove impossible."

"A menace, do you say?"

Barbarigo sat down, and crossed his shapely legs, which seemed to have
been kneaded into their dark blue creaseless hose from which the
skirts of the houppelande had fallen away. He leaned forward, an elbow
on his knee.

"There is adrift in the world a rascal Ligurian adventurer--and God
knows no good ever came out of Liguria--who claims to hold the key to
a sea route to the Indies by the west."

Sarasin displayed contemptuous relief. "A madman." He sat back again,
breathing scorn. "A fable."

But Barbarigo added, slowly so as to be the more impressive: "That key
was supplied to him by Toscanelli of Florence."

"Toscanelli!" The Inquisitor was startled. "Bah! Did Toscanelli die a
dotard, then?"

"Oh, no. There has been no subtler mathematician in the world. In this
matter he took for his starting-point the discoveries of our own Marco
Polo, and thence, by application of his mathematical knowledge and
skill, he drew up a chart. This, supported by a letter setting forth
the arguments, he sent to our Ligurian--a rogue named Colombo,
Cristofero Colombo, then in Portugal."

"How do you know this? And why should Toscanelli deal with rogues?"

"This Colombo is a sometime navigator who was living then by making
charts, a matter in which I understand that he is highly skilled. My
information is that he had dreamed of such a thing being possible and
had applied to Toscanelli for an opinion. It was a dream that happened
to coincide with certain conclusions Toscanelli had drawn from his
researches. The Florentine supplied the opinion and a chart, with the
rash enthusiasm and vanity of a man of science who can perceive only
the beauty of his own discoveries, recking nothing of the mischief
they may work in practice.

"With that chart Colombo sought King John in Portugal. The name and
authority of Toscanelli won him attention where otherwise he would
never have been suffered to cross the royal threshold. King John, a
patron of discoverers, since he has grown rich by them, sent him
before a commission of men whose competence he trusted. Fortunately,
like all commissions, this one proceeded leisurely; and so my agents,
who had informed me of all this, were able to go to work as I
commanded. We bought two of the commissioners. The third, a Jew, we
were unable to corrupt. Maybe this Colombo is, himself, a Jew. I do
not know. Anyway, his only supporter was outvoted, and the chart and
letter were consigned to the dust and neglect of things forgotten.

"But lately from Spain comes word to me that this adventurer, having
hispanicized his name and calling himself Colon, is at work again,
this time at the Court of the Spanish Sovereigns. So far he has made
little progress because the Moorish war absorbs attention. But once
Granada falls the rogue may have a hearing. There are strong
influences at work for him, and Spain may well covet some of the power
and wealth that discovery has brought to Portugal."

There the Doge ceased, leaving Sarasin puzzled by the earnestness he
had used. "But what then?" he asked. "What is it to us that Spain
should profit in that way?"

"You have not understood, or else you have forgotten that I began by
saying that this discovery is of a sea-route to the Indies by the
west. If that were realized what would become of our Venetian
opulence, built up and maintained by the monopoly of the eastern trade
which passes through our marts?"

At last Sarasin understood. "God save us!" He sat up, pulling at his
fat nether lip.

Barbarigo uncrossed his legs, and rose. "You perceive the problem.
What is the solution? Bribes may not suffice this time. Queen Isabel
is shrewd, and Ferdinand grasping. They may judge the matter for
themselves, or appoint men I cannot reach."

Sarasin's eyes narrowed. "The solution is simple. Men are mortal, God
be thanked. You can reach this man Colombo." His tone left little
doubt of his meaning. "Expediency justifies these things."

But the Doge shook his fair head. "It is not so simple. If it were I
should not be exercised. The man is nothing. It is the chart and the
letter that matter. Unless we possess those they remain the real
menace whether in the hands of Colombo or another. Until we posses
them Venice will never be secure from it. In Portugal I first tried
the direct method. But my agents blundered. Colombo was set upon one
night in Lisbon. He's a stout man of his hands, and whilst he was
defending himself others came to his assistance. Forewarned by that,
he deposited the documents in the chancellery. There I supposed them
to lie buried after the commission had rejected his proposal. Somehow
he has regained possession of them. But we can be certain that he'll
not again expose himself to being robbed of them by violence."

Sarasin considered. "It's a matter for the Grand Council," he opined
at last.

"If I am powerless, so is the Grant Council; so are the Ten."

"Why so? The Republic might buy him. He will have his price."

"That, too, has been tried. He mocked the man who tried it. 'Where is
the gold that can compass it?' he asked. 'If you held an empire in
your grasp  would you accept less than an empire in exchange?' Thus
the needy rascal in his confident insolence."

Sarasin's fertility of mind was not yet exhausted. "Then outbid Spain
for him. Hire him to make the voyage for Venice."

"How should that profit us? Once he had opened the trail, all the
world might follow it."

"Would there not be compensation in the lands he might discover, in
this empire of which he talks?"

"I could not trust to that. What we hold is certain, and it's a
substance we'll not relinquish for a shadow."

"Why, then, I am baffled."

"As I am at the moment. But a way there must be to thwart this
down-at-heel, or else my next espousal of the sea will be a mockery.
Give thought to it, as I am doing. And meanwhile--Chut!" He set a long
forefinger to his lips. "No word of this to any man."



                              CHAPTER VI

                             LA GITANILLA

The novel theatre set up by Ruzzante in the Sala del Cavallo was
prospering. Increasing patrician patronage was elbowing out the vulgar
throngs that at first had flocked to it, and daily its benches were
being occupied more and more by all that was best and noblest in
Venice.

Among its most assiduous patrons was that very splendid, carnal
gentleman Don Ramon de Aguilar, Count of Arias, envoy of Castile and
Aragon to the Most Serene Republic. Careless of opinions, in a
Castilian pride which included Venetians in the contempt of all who
were not Spanish, he went there openly and, unlike Sarasin, unmasked,
making no secret of the fact that La Gitanilla was the magnet that
drew him thither. Once her interlude had been performed he would
depart, indifferent even to Ruzzante's funambulist who drew such
exquisite shudders from the crowd. The very charitable may have opined
that he was drawn by the songs of his native land, those languorous
Andalusian laments, rather than by the singer. But if all the truth is
to be told, Don Ramon had no ear for music. Of beauty he knew only
that which his eyes could appraise, and to those dark, hot eyes of his
a feast was spread by La Gitanilla's incomparable sinuous grace.

It was natural that he should wish to reward the delight she gave a
fellow-countryman, and so he would send her flowers procured from the
mainland, boxes of exotic comfits and even a trinket or two. Imposing
himself by virtue of his rank and office upon Ruzzante, he was
supplied occasion to visit her behind the scenes, but only to find her
there as circumspect and formal as upon the stage she could be
reckless and abandoned.

It was at an early interview that, misconceiving her reticences and
anxious to set her at her ease, he protested: "Child, you are not to
stand in awe of me."

"Why should I?" she had coolly answered him. "You are a great hidalgo,
a great lord, to be sure. But you are not God, and I go in awe of none
other."

It would have been disconcerting to one who was by no means persuaded
that he was without attributes of divinity, had he not been reassured
by the reflexion that this was a mere trick of the trade of a minx who
knew how to spur desire. So the poor man parried the artful stroke
with a laugh.

"I would I were as sure that you are not a goddess."

But her persistent insensibility began to irritate a vanity swollen by
too many easy conquests.

She continued to receive his visits in her dressing-room because, as
Ruzzante informed her, it would be perilous to deny so great a
gentleman. But not all his arts, nor the splendour and still youthful
beauty of his person, could pierce the wall she raised about her.

Don Ramon grew impatient. Coyness may be suffered and humoured to a
point; but beyond that point it becomes tiresome. He was considering
peremptory ways of ending it when, one morning, as he was putting the
last touches to a careful toilet, his personal body-servant, a young
Moor still named Yakoub although he had been baptized, brought him
word that a lady calling herself La Gitanilla was begging to be
received by his excellency.

There was a twitch of his excellency's vilely loose mouth, deplorable
feature of an otherwise darkly handsome, narrow face. Then with a
slow, sly smile at his image in the mirror, he went to greet his
unexpected visitor.

She awaited him in the long room of the mezzanine, whose balcony
overlooked the Canal Grande, agleam in the sunshine of that February
morning. She advanced to meet his splendour--he was all in sulphur
yellow--eagerness breaking through the veil of her timidity.

"It is kind of your excellency to receive me."

"Kind?" He was deprecatory. "Adorable Beatriz, have you ever found me
other?"

"That is what emboldens me."

"It asks little boldness to perform what is welcomed. Will you not put
off your cloak?"

Obediently she doffed the brown hooded mantle that shrouded her from
head to heel, and stood forth in a sheathing gown of a lighter brown
that revealed her supple grace. Her more than moderate height was
increased in appearance by the high waist from which was hung the long
tongue of a scarlet, gold-edged girdle. Her head was bare save for the
net of fine gold thread that confined the coils of her lustrous
chestnut hair.

Don Ramon contemplated her with discriminating eyes. He considered the
fine texture of her skin on face and throat, of a warm ivory pallor,
flushed now on the cheek-bones by a quickened stirring of her blood.
He pondered the lissom shape and the swell of her breast that was
heaving gently under the stress of an emotion which he found
flattering. Above all he admired the easy proud grace of her carriage
and the splendid poise with which the dancer's art had endowed her
perfect body. This was no common slut of the trestles, no gipsy wench
such as her theatre-name implied. There must be, he thought, good
Castilian blood in veins that looked so delicately blue against the
whiteness of her throat. How else should she come by that air of
pride, that placid self-command, that almost patrician dignity. Here,
indeed, was a woman worthy of his fastidious discernment.

Clear hazel eyes regarded him steadily from under fine dark brows.

"I come to you as a suppliant." Her voice was low and veiled by a
seductive huskiness.

"Not here," he answered gallantly. "Never here. Here you may command."

Her glance fell away from the glow of his eyes. "It is to the envoy of
the Spanish Sovereigns that I make my prayer."

"Then I thank God that I am the Spanish envoy. Will you not sit?"

He led her by the hand to a divan that faced the windows. With studied
artificial deference he remained standing, his own shoulders to the
light.

Some of her calm was being lost in anxiety. "It is a matter of your
excellency's office. It concerns a Spaniard, a subject of our
Sovereigns; in fact, my brother."

"You have a brother? Here in Venice? Well, well, tell me the case."

She told it as smoothly as her anxieties permitted. A week ago, at
Gennaro's tavern in the Merceria, there had been a brawl in which
daggers had been drawn, and a gentleman of the House of Morosini had
been stabbed. In the confusion, as they were carrying him out, her
brother who was present had picked up a poniard from the floor. It was
a rich weapon, with jewels in the hilt, and her brother--she faltered
here in shame--had been tempted to keep it. Two days ago he had sold
it to a Hebrew goldsmith near San Moisè. It had been recognized as
Morosini's, and as a consequence last night her brother had been
arrested.

Don Ramon looked grave. "In so clear a case I do not see what we can
do. Your unfortunate brother, standing convicted of theft, is beyond
an ambassador's protection."

The flush vanished from her face. In its pallor her eyes became deep
pools of fear. "It...it is hardly a theft," she pleaded weakly.
"He found the dagger on the ground."

"But he sold it. A madness. Doesn't he know the severity of the
Republic's laws?"

"How should he, being a Castilian?"

"But theft is theft, in Venice or Castile. Was he in need that he
should have run this dreadful risk?"

"Scarcely that, since I have worked for both of us." There was a hint
of bitterness in the reply. "But perhaps I stinted him. He has been
softly bred, and he craved more than I was able to supply from my poor
earnings."

"You move me deeply," Don Ramon commiserated, and then asked: "What
was it brought you to Italy?"

To hold his sympathy, since she must cling to the hope that out of it
he might yet be moved to help her, she used an utter frankness. She
had left Spain at her brother's urgent pleadings. He was in trouble
there. He had killed a man in Cordoba. Oh, but quite honourably, in a
fair encounter. But the man was of a powerful family, and the alcalde
had been made active. His alguaziles were hunting her brother. So he
must go. Because she loved him, knew him weak and shiftless, feared
for him if he went alone, and also because there was nothing in Spain
to hold her, she had consented to go with him. She counted upon such
arts as she possessed to earn a livelihood for both. They had landed
at Genoa a year ago, and thence through Milan, Pavia and Bergamo, she
had sung and danced her way to Venice. "And now," she ended her
lamentable table, "unless your excellency can help us, Pablo
will..." She broke off with a little shiver of sheer wretchedness.

He was as unmoved by the peril of a worthless brother who, in his
view, deserved the worst that might befall him, as he was stirred by
the spectacle of her distressed loveliness. "A way must be found. He
must not be left to the mercies of the Most Serene."

Don Ramon sank, as he spoke, to the divan beside her, and his fine
jewelled hand came to rest lightly and soothingly upon her shoulder.
"Officially I am without power to intervene. But personally it is
another matter. After all, I have some weight. Depend that every ounce
of it shall be employed."

"I bless you for the hope you give me." Her breath had quickened, the
flush was creeping back into her cheeks.

"Oh, I give you more than hope. I give you certainty. It will matter
less--far less--to the Serene Republic to punish an obscure offender
than to gratify the envoy of Spain even when he is unofficial. So shed
no tears, child, from those heavenly eyes. Your brother will be
restored to you very soon. My word on it. His name is Pablo, is it?"

"Pablo de Arana." She swung to face him in a surge of gratitude with a
movement of intoxicating grace. She was radiant with relief. "May Our
Lady recompense you."

"Our Lady!" His excellency made a wry face. Then he laughed. "Must I
wait, then, until I get to Heaven? I am human, faith, and look for
something in this world."

He saw the radiance perish from her countenance as she turned away,
and for a moment he observed her in frowning annoyance. Abruptly he
took her by the chin and turned her face again so that he could look
into her eyes. He saw the mingled fear and scorn that glared from
them; he sensed the sudden iciness that enveloped her; and the poor
man was at a loss to understand it.

"Why, my Gitanilla, what is this? Will you shrink from me when I am
ready to pawn my credit for you? May I die but I deserve better from
you. Must you act the prude with me?"

"I am not acting," she told him, a blaze of pride in her eyes. "Your
excellency overlooks that I may be a virtuous woman."

Annoyance made him brutal. "Virtue that exhibits itself in dancing!
The poor pretence. Bah!" He released her chin, and rose. "I do not
press myself where I am not welcome."

It was artful enough to cast her into fresh panic. "My lord! My lord!
Let yourself be noble in this, and Heaven will repay the charity you
do me."

He looked down upon her with a sneer. "Is Heaven, then, to pay your
debts for you? In that case let Heaven save your brother from
mutilation, or the galleys, or even death."

She shuddered. "This is to be pitiless," she moaned.

"What pity do you earn? What pity do you show me? Is it not pitiless
to scorn the love that burns me. Do you guess nothing of the jealousy
that torments me when others feast their eyes upon you in the dance? I
would wrest you from all that, and wear you for my own." He checked,
and then resumed on a tone of eager cajolery. "I shall be returning
soon to Spain. You shall come back with me, to live under my
protection. And for your brother...I have said what I can do, and
will."

Virtuous as she claimed to be, yet she knew her world. Bitterly had
she been schooled in its evil ways in the last two years or so, in
which she had depended for a livelihood upon her art and her beauty.
If on the one hand they had maintained her, on the other they had made
her an object for the constant insult of foul and soiling gallantries.
These she had withstood, and in withstanding them her nature had
hardened, so that now, mistress of the wit and guile with which to
repel them, they left her indifferent. She had, in her own phrase,
acquired arts that enabled her to walk undefiled through the world's
filth. Yet here, given a clear choice between her brother's life and
her own defilement, those arts could not avail her. She must stoop to
baser ones if she were to save at once poor Pablo and herself. She
must cheat this man with promises, to be repudiated when he had done
his part. Scruples she stifled with the assurance that a vile fellow
who could so seek to profit by a woman's distress and urgent need,
deserved no better than vile treatment.

With averted head, so that he might not read the shame in her eyes,
she gave him his answer. "Save Pablo, my lord, and then..." She
faltered into silence.

He came close. She had a sense that he hovered over her like a vulture
over the moribund. His breath fanned her cheek. "And then?"

Her senses revolted. "Oh, can't you do it without bargaining?"

It was a shock to him, who had thought her on the point of yielding.

"So cold!" he reproached her, with a touch of bitterness. "So stony!
Gitanilla! Gitanilla! Are you, then, flesh; or are you granite?"

She drew away from him, her breast in tumult, dissembling her disgust.

"I am a woman in sore distress," she cried, hoping yet to arouse his
chivalry.

She took up her cloak. He strode to hold it for her, and in adjusting
it to her shoulders, stooped to sear her white neck with his hot lips.

The shudder with which she tore herself from his light grip,
infuriated him. "Do you hope to move me by cruelty to generosity?" he
mocked her. "Come to me again when you see the folly of that."

She fled without answering, leaving him thoughtful.

He was dissatisfied with his own conduct of the affair. Somewhere he
had blundered. There had been a moment in which she had softened, and
he had failed to take advantage of it. That she would come again he
was persuaded. Meanwhile, he would prepare the way for her brother's
deliverance, and confronting her with the certainty of it as a result
of his endeavours profit by the gratitude it must earn him. She was
clearly of those with whom a man would best serve his interests by a
show of disinterestedness. Thus at least he read her, and, anyway, it
was worth a gamble.



                             CHAPTER VII

                         INQUISITORS OF STATE

It was among the wise enactments of the Most Serene Republic that her
Doge should hold no communications with any representative of a
foreign power. In this as in many other things, however, Agostino
Barbarigo was a law unto himself, and whilst officially, as Doge, he
dared not transcend the rule or receive any envoy at the Ducal Palace,
unofficially, as man and in his family residence, he permitted himself
sub rosa relations with some of them, amongst whom was Don Ramon de
Aguilar. If he violated the spirit whilst observing the letter of the
law, he accounted himself justified by the service he was thus
permitted, from time to time, to render to the State.

Therefore it was not from the ambassador's gilded barge with its
richly liveried watermen, but from a private gondola, that Don Ramon
alighted on the steps of the Barbarigo Palace on the Canal Grande
within an hour of his interview with La Gitanilla.

Sarasin was again with his brother-in-law when the envoy was ushered
into a room of splendours to which the East had richly contributed.
Notwithstanding the Inquisitor's presence, and after formal
compliments, the Spaniard came straight to the matter.

"I am a suppliant. I seek a particular favour at your Serenity's
hands."

His Serenity, spuriously juvenile in a scarlet tunic that fell in
short pleats from the waist, with one leg scarlet and the other white,
and a little scarlet gold-broidered cap on his fair locks, bowed
gracefully. "It is accorded, excellency, so that it lies within my
power."

"All things lie there. And this, after all, is but a little thing.
There's a poor knave, a countryman of mine, who is in trouble with the
law over the matter of a dagger. He found it, and accounted himself at
liberty to sell it. That ranks as theft, of course; but on the score
of his ignorance I hope your Serenity will be lenient with the poor
devil."

Sarasin, asprawl in the room's best chair, put up his eyebrows, whilst
the Doge stood frowning, fingering his shaven chin.

"We are not easy with thieves in Venice," he demurred.

"Oh, I am aware of it. But this is scarcely a theft. The fellow did
not steal--not deliberately steal--the dagger. He found it. If your
Serenity could possibly contrive that the offence be overlooked, I
will undertake that no one suffers loss, and you will leave me
profoundly in your debt."

"Why, if you put it so..." The Doge waved a graceful hand. "Though
you leave me wondering what can be the interest of the Count of Arias
in so poor a knave."

Don Ramon not only deemed frankness best, but accounted it of a kind
to have amusing weight with the jocund Barbarigo. "My interest is not
in him, but in his sister, the lovely Gitanilla. She has been to beg
my intercession, an advocate to make a saint of a devil or a devil of
a saint."

"And which has she made of you?"

Don Ramon laughed. "I am but flesh, and the flesh is weak. It is not
in me to resist a lovely woman."

"Given, I suppose," mumbled Sarasin, "that it is not in her to resist
your excellency."

"I am not so ungallant as to neglect opportunity. Do you blame me,
sir?"

"Not I. Not I." Shivers of mirth agitated Sarasin's corpulence.
"Having seen La Gitanilla, I'ld release all the thieves in Venice on
those terms."

"My sister, you see," said Barbarigo, "is not fortunate in her
husband. As for this poor thief, why I must prove the anxiety I have
ever professed to serve your excellency. Since the rogue's a
foreigner, and provided there is naught else against him..."

"There is naught else, I am sure."

"Why then, on the condition that he leaves the territory of the
Republic at once, I see no obstacle to ordering his enlargement. What
is his name?"

"Pablo de Arana," said Don Ramon, and he was voluble as only a
Spaniard can be in his thanks.

When he had departed, Sarasin heaved himself up. "If your sister is
unfortunate in her husband, so is the Adriatic. What does one say of a
Doge who is without reverence for the law?"

"The lex suprema is the welfare of the State," said the smiling Doge.
"Lesser ones may yield to it."

"God save us! And the welfare of the State is served by letting a
thief go free. I must go to school again."

"If it places the Ambassador of Spain under an obligation to me at
this present time. Have you forgotten what I told you about Messer
Cristofero Colombo, the Ligurian navigator?"

Sarasin stared. "How can Arias help you there?"

"I do not know. Not yet. But I neglect no thread however mean. To
secure this one, by all means let him have his thief, oh, and his
dancing girl."

"The thief if you will. As for the Gitanilla, the poor child deserves
a better fate."

"An Inquisitor of State, for instance. A pity she did not know it. She
might have sought your interest instead of Don Ramon's. You are not
fortunate, Silvestro, in your low pursuits."

"Not so fortunate as Don Ramon. No. Ah, well! What matter a thief more
or less in a world of thieves."

But on the next day Sarasin was of a different mind.

He came panting and sweating from haste and excitement into the Doge's
room in the Ducal Palace, and peremptorily demanded the dismissal of a
secretary who was at work there with Barbarigo.

"What now?" wondered the Doge, when they were alone. "Has the Sultan
Bajazet declared war?"

"The devil take Bajazet. It's this Spanish rogue, Arana. I hear from
Messer Grande that you've signed an order for his release."

"Irregular of me," agreed the flippant Doge. "But was it not what
yesterday I promised that love-sick envoy?"

"Fortunately with the condition that there should be nothing but this
theft against him. A report on him has come before the Three. It is
learnt that Arana came here from Milan, and there are suspicions that
he may be in the pay of Duke Lodovico."

Barbarigo's gesture was disdainful. "A spy in the pay of Milan? That
is not likely. The relations between Duke Lodovico and Spain are no
better than between him and us."

"Don't let that be dust in your eyes. In spying all things are
possible. My report is from Gallina, and he's as shrewd an agent as we
possess. So that this is no miserable question of a larceny, but of an
offence against the State. This man does not belong to Messer Grande.
He belongs to the inquisitors. He belongs to me."

"To you?" Amusement gleamed in the Doge's eyes. "To you, eh? Come,
come, Silvestro. Are you to play Don Ramon's game with the Gitanilla,
holding her thief of a brother as your pawn?"

"I do not like the jest. Have I ever used my office to further my own
ends? Let us be serious. This man is not to be released; at least, not
until we've put him to the question."

The Doge set aside his flippancy, but this because the jest so lightly
uttered had sown a seed in his mind. After a frowning pause, the
wraith of a smile tightened his lips.

"But, of course, as you say, this is no longer a petty question of a
theft. Such suspicions, however unlikely to be justified, must be
investigated." He sighed. "I fear that we must disappoint Don Ramon.
Regrettable, but then...Best examine this Spanish rascal without
delay. But no torture to begin with, Silvestro. And you had better
question the girl at the same time."

That same afternoon two burly warders descended to the foul dank
dungeon of the Pozzi, under the Ducal Palace, to hale thence the
Spanish prisoner, a wretched fellow sapped in nerve and body by hard
living, and now reduced by forty-eight hours of confinement in that
loathly unlighted hole to the mere wreckage of a man.

Huddled on a wooden shelf that served him for a couch he had been
denied all sleep by horror of the rats that invaded the place when the
water came to film and befoul the stone floor with the rise of the
tide in the lagoons. He screamed at sight of the warders, who looked
gigantic and grim in the feeble light of the turnkey's lantern,
conceiving them to be the strangler and his mate.

They soothed his panic, and conducted him above stairs and by a noble
gallery to the little audience chamber of the dread Three.

Impassive in their leather bucket seats of judgment at the polished
table, they received him, Sarasin, the Red Inquisitor, mantled in
scarlet, between his two black colleagues.

Blinking and scared, Pablo de Arana stood before them, cadaverous of
aspect, with blood-injected eyes, a black stubble of beard on his
leaden cheeks. The lingering slime and filth from his dungeon made him
repulsive, and perhaps something more, for Sarasin made great play
with a pomander-ball to his nostrils whilst grimly inspecting him.

The theft of the dagger was touched upon, and summarily dismissed by
one of the black inquisitors as not being a matter for this august
tribunal. Since the offence was established, Pablo might look forward,
he was told, either to the loss of his right hand or a long term at
the oars of the Republic's galleys. That, however, was matter for a
lesser court. The Three had to deal with something graver far.

Thereupon it was Sarasin who took up the interrogation.

Did the prisoner admit that he came to Venice from Milan? He did.
What, then, was he doing in Milan, and what was the precise business
upon which he left it to come to Venice? Warned that prevarication
would be useless, that the tribunal possessed the means to twist or
burn the truth from the most recalcitrant, he was invited to seek
leniency by frankness.

He told a whimpering tale, obscured and complicated by his invocation
of every saint in the calendar in turn to bear witness to his truth,
of having no business in Venice save the safeguarding of his sister
Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, known as La Gitanilla.

Sarasin was facetiously sarcastic. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" he
wondered for the amusement of his colleagues. "A custodian, thou? I
should pity any woman guarded by such a watch-dog. But no matter for
that. What we desire to know is why you could not do this safeguarding
in Milan."

Pablo was voluble. He would willingly have done so. But Messer Angelo
Ruzzante had heard her sing and seen her dance on a trestle stage in a
square of the Ambrosian city, and had tempted her to Venice with the
promise of good money.

Sarasin caressed his double chin. "And that was all? Think well before
you answer. There was no other inducement to come to the lagoons?"

There was none. He came because he could not allow his sister to come
alone, exposed to all the temptations and pursuits that beset the path
of a cantatrice. He took St. James of Compostella to witness that this
was true, and so enabled the Red Inquisitor again to amuse the court.

"I doubt if St. James of Compostella can be induced to leave the peace
of God to come and testify for such a mouldy rogue. But your Ruzzante
shall be brought before us, and also the woman. After we have heard
how far they confirm your tale, we'll make a beginning with you." He
waved a plump hand. "Take him away."

Ruzzante, examined that same afternoon by the Three, confirmed the
prisoner's story. A personable man of some culture and a ready wit,
his testimony did Pablo good service.

After Ruzzante came the Gitanilla, summoned and escorted from her
lodging by an agent of the tribunal, that same agent named Gallina,
who had set afoot the suspicion against her brother.

She stood before them straight and lithe, in a fear so well dissembled
that she seemed almost bold.

The trend of the questions, which completely ignored the matter of the
theft, came to increase her alarm. Commanding herself, she answered
them in a low, steady voice, through whose huskiness rang undertones
of the melodious quality with which she enchanted audiences. Upon the
ears of these three elderly men its magic seemed to have no power.
Coldly, now from one, now from another of the black Inquisitors fell
the questions, whilst Sarasin sat back, his elbows on the arms of his
chair, observing her over his joined finger-tips.

To questions upon what she had done in Milan and why she had left it
for Venice her answers were ready, as they were when she was pressed
to say whether her brother showed himself eager that she accept
Ruzzante's proposals, whether he had not actually displayed anxiety to
do so. Equally ready was she in naming their Milanese associates.
When, however, they shifted their questions from Milan to Spain, and
demanded to be told for what reason she and her brother had left it,
having something to conceal she faltered, fell into contradiction, and
when ruthlessly pressed admitted that her brother was a fugitive from
justice.

At last, those inscrutable men were bringing the examination to a
close when a narrow door behind them opened to frame a resplendent
golden figure. It was Barbarigo, himself, coming from a meeting of the
Grand Council, still arrayed in the ducal chlamys, his fair locks
crowned by the corno, the stiff, humped golden cap of his high office.

His delicate hand, outstretched to stay the Inquisitors from rising,
signed to them to continue, whilst he remained standing, just within
the doorway, having closed the door.

Thence his shrewd eyes pondered the witness, marvelling to behold
either in garb or countenance, so little to betray her station. She
stood, a slender blue pillar in her mantle, the hood thrown back from
her dark head. In the glowing eyes under the broad smooth brow he saw
the fierce pride behind which her fears were hidden. He observed the
sensitive, generous mouth and softly rounded chin, and told himself
that the face possessed not only beauty, but bore the imprint of a
quality that any noblewoman might have envied. Whilst he could
understand the spell she had cast over Don Ramon de Aguilar, yet his
fastidiousness was nauseated at the thought of such a woman falling a
victim to such a profligate. If he knew aught of human nature, the
quality he detected in her was a power to subdue men to her will such
as St. Anthony himself would have been troubled to withstand.

When presently her dismissal came from Sarasin, he observed with
approval the dignity with which this poor cantatrice inclined her head
in acknowledgment.

Then at last he spoke. "Let her be detained in the antechamber."

As the door closed upon her, Sarasin looked round at him in surprise.
But here Barbarigo was official, and the brother-in-law was lost in
the Doge. He came round to face the Inquisitors. "What are your
findings?"

"Little enough," Sarasin informed him. "The prisoner is a worthless
dog on whom that woman wastes her devotion. He lives on her, and she
would go to the rack for him." His glance questioned his colleagues,
and was answered by murmurs of ready agreement. "Therefore," he
continued, "her testimony is of no value, save that it agrees with
Ruzzante's, as his does with the prisoner's own answers. Yet there may
be things which neither the girl nor Ruzzante knows. After all,
Gallina is our shrewdest and most zealous agent, and his grounds for
suspecting this Arana of practising with----"

The Doge had heard enough. "No matter. You may sift that at your
leisure." He stood pondering, chin in hand. "She would go to the rack
for him, eh? So I, too, should judge her. There is fire enough under
that cool skin of hers. Let us use her gently. It may comfort her to
see this brother. And it may be fruitful."

"If your Serenity orders it, I'll have him brought to her."

"Not so. Not so. Rather let her be taken to him."

Aghast, one of the Inquisitors blinked. "He is in the Pozzi,
Serenity."

Barbarigo smiled darkly. "Just so. That is where she should see him."



                             CHAPTER VIII

                          BROTHER AND SISTER

Pablo de Arana, back in his dungeon, crushed by an even greater
apprehension than had been his before his examination by the Three,
was roused from a dejected torpor by the clank and rasp of a key, the
opening of the door, and a feeble yellow glow of light.

Crouching on his plank, he glared like a scared animal; then, as his
sight cleared, he started up, beholding his sister.

The warder set his lantern down beside her on the uppermost of the
three steps that led down to the stone paving. She came down a step,
and then recoiled, appalled by the foulness of the floor. The movement
drew a guffaw from the gaoler. "Aye! Not so dainty as a lady's
parlour. But there he is. My orders, mistress, are to leave you with
him for ten minutes."

The door clanged again, and brother and sister were alone.

It was a moment before either spoke. Hoarsely at last he croaked her
name.

"Beatriz!"

The wretched sight of him was blurred for her by a mist of tears.

"My poor Pablo!"

The sob that broke her voice, chilling him with fresh dread, brought
uppermost the creature's egotism. "Well may you pity me, in the pass
to which you have brought me. Why are you here?"

"Oh, Pablo! Pablo!" she cried, and the reproach in her voice was a
goad to his humour.

"Pablo! Pablo!" he mimicked her. "That's your way of denying it.
You'll say it wasn't by your wishes that we came to this cursed
Venice. Were we not well off in Milan? Did you not earn enough there
to satisfy your selfish greed?"

The lament might drive a sword through her, but it could not take her
by surprise. She was inured to reproaches in return for her unstinting
service to him. She accepted this with the same resignation with which
she would have accepted affliction in him, holding it something that
sprang from a weakness in his nature for which he was not accountable.
Like all egotists he had ever been obsessed by a feeling of martyrdom,
labouring under an abiding sense of wrong, and finding ever other than
in himself the blame for misfortunes procured him by his failings.

His present plaint, however, was too extravagantly unjust for
resignation. "That is not true, Pablo," she defended herself. "Think!
Yourself you urged me to accept Ruzzante's proposals."

"Knowing your nature, your pretensions. What peace should I have had
if I'd opposed you?"

Very gently she remonstrated: "Pablo dear, was it I who stole the
poniard?"

But not all her gentleness of tone could prevent the words from
driving him to fury. "Body of God!" he snarled. "I did not steal it. I
found it. Must you lie so that you can reproach me? And I never should
have been driven to sell the cursed thing if you had not stinted me.
Your grasping avarice is the cause of all this trouble. And now that
I'm in the grasp of these Venetian dogs they must be inventing other
things against me. O God! Born unlucky. That's what I am. Dogged
through life by ill luck. Is there anything I haven't suffered?" He
took his head in his hands, and groaned in self-pity. "But you don't
answer me. Why are you here?"

"The Inquisitors of State permit me to visit you."

"With what purpose? So that you may gloat over the state to which
you've brought me? They are to put me to the question. Did they tell
you? Do you know what it means? Do you know how the hoist wrenches a
man's bones from their sockets?" He ended on a scream. "Mother of
God!" Again he sank his face into his grimy hands.

Pity, conquering repugnance, brought her to step down into the foul
ooze of the floor, so that she might soothe his terrors. But he
writhed himself free of her enfolding arms. "This does not help me."

"I am doing what I can," she told him. "I went to Don Ramon de
Aguilar, to beg him to claim you as a subject of Spain, to use the
influence of his office for you."

"Don Ramon?" He lowered his hands, to look at her. In the
lantern-light his eyes gleamed hope and cunning. "Don Ramon, eh! Vive
Dios, that was well thought. Aye, you should be able to work upon him.
He had an eye to you." He clutched her wrist. "What did he say?"

Her voice was toneless. "He offered a bargain. A shameful bargain."

"Shameful!" His grip tightened. There was alarm in his voice. "What
then? What then? Shameful would be to leave your brother in this hell.
Virgin Most Holy! Will you always play the cursed prude--even in this
extremity?"

Because he felt her shrink from him his voice soared hoarsely in
passion. "Shall I be racked and broken, or maybe strangled, because
you're dainty? Have you no bowels, girl? Having brought me down to
this, will you leave me to perish when at so little cost you can
rescue me?"

"A little cost!"

"What then? What is it, after all? If you had any true feeling for
me----"

She interrupted him. "Feeling? O God! What can I do?"

"What can you do? You know what you can do. You can't deny me."
Suddenly he grew fond and brotherly. He patted her shoulder. "God will
requite you, Beatriz, as I shall. Once out of this you'll find me
different. I'll live for you. I swear I will. At need I'ld give my
life for you. Seek Don Ramon again. Lose no time. Spare no persuasions
with him."

The gaoler, opening the door, mercifully put an end to her agony. "It
is time, mistress. You are required to go."

Pablo became all slobbering fondness in his farewells. She was his
dear good sister, the best sister man ever had. He trusted her,
confident that she would work his salvation.

At last she was following the gaoler up the narrow stone stairs on
dragging feet that were befouled and sodden from the dungeon's slime.
It occurred to her that her soul was in much the same case. Her pity
for Pablo, the long-standing habit of protecting him, fought with her
loathing of his callous indifference to the sacrifice asked of her.
She sought excuses for him in his inherent weakness of body and
spirit, haunted as he was by terror of a dread ordeal that dwarfed all
else.



                              CHAPTER IX

                              THE DECOY

At the stairhead the gaoler surprised her with the announcement that
she was awaited by his Serenity.

With no more than half her wits about her she suffered him to lead her
along that gallery, up a noble staircase by richly frescoed walls,
down yet another gallery flooded by sunshine, to a door of carved
panels enriched by gilding. Admitted by a sleek silken chamberlain,
she was given a moment's pause in an anteroom, and then ushered into
the gilded ducal chamber whose gothic windows looked out over the blue
waters of St. Mark's Basin and the shipping anchored there.

Here Barbarigo awaited her, no longer in his official robes. He had
put off the cloth of gold of the ducal chlamys, but was scarcely less
arresting in a flowing houppelande of black with broad silver
arabesques, over a short crimson tunic and crimson hose.

By the condescension of setting a chair for her he diminished the awe
with which the man and his office alike inspired her.

"Pray sit, Madonna." His voice, like the title he bestowed upon her,
implied a flattering deference. His glance enveloped her, from the
eyes made haggard by the brief visit to the Pozzi, to the foulness on
her shoes and the hem of her gown. All this his fastidiousness
deplored.

"By your Serenity's leave," she responded, taking the seat he offered.
She sat upright, with a statue's rigidity, her bare hands folded in
her lap, and waited.

His Serenity remained standing. "You have seen your brother, Madonna?"

"I have seen him."

He sighed. "I grieve that you should have been pained by the
necessity. Such sights are not for a woman's gentle eyes. And I
commiserate you, too, in the affliction with which you are visited by
your brother's peril. Believe that I could desire to relieve it."

"Your Serenity is gracious." She spoke with an effort. This man
inspired dread. In his willowy elegance, his light movements, his
silken voice, she detected something feline and sinister.

"In this matter now of being an agent of the Milanese----"

"It is false," she was so rash as to interrupt him. "An empty
suspicion. It has no foundation. It can have none."

"You assure me of that?"

"I swear it."

"I do not hesitate to believe you." She gasped relief too soon.
"Unfortunately the Inquisitors of State are less easy to satisfy. They
may test him on the hoist. Even if he withstands that, there will
remain this matter of the theft. For that he should lose his hand. But
as slaves are wanted for the Republic's oars he may be sent to the
galleys for the remainder of his life."

She came to her feet in a white heat of passion. "I perceive that your
Serenity mocks me."

"I?" His lightness vanished. "St. Mark! I hope I am incapable of that.
No, no." A gentle hand on her shoulder pressed her down again to the
chair. "On the contrary." He moved away with with his sauntering gait,
and turned again. "I sent for you to offer you your brother's
freedom."

She said no word, but watched him with dilating eyes. And he added
after a pause: "Without concerning myself whether he is innocent or
guilty."

She continued silently to fix him with her stare, waiting in
increasing surprise and suspicion. He sauntered back, and came to a
halt squarely before her, considering her again with his air of faint,
detestable amusement. "That should earn your gratitude."

"Assuredly, my lord," she choked.

Gently he asked: "And you will afford me proof of it?"

She shivered and for a moment closed her eyes. Again she seemed to
hear Don Ramon's hateful wooing. It stirred her to hot revolt.

"Must it always be the same? Because my necessities compel me to sing
and dance for men's delight, is it to be presumed that there are no
bounds to what I will do in the same cause? Must the credit of virtue
be denied me?"

There was a protesting weariness in Barbarigo's faint smile.

"You go too fast and too far. Unless I gave you that credit, Madonna,
I should have no proposals for you. You are a very beautiful woman, a
fact which will hardly have escaped your notice. Beauty, however, is
not enough. It is because allied with it, I perceive--or else I am a
poor judge--not only intelligence, but a noble pride that guards your
virtue and keeps you pure, that I account you irresistible to any man
upon whom you set your will."

She found all this bewildering. "I do not understand."

"You shall. It is not for myself that I require your service. It is
for the State.

"Listen. At the Court of Spain, in Cordoba, or Seville, or wherever it
may be, there is a needy adventurer in possession of a chart, from an
Italian hand, to which he has no genuine right. By means of this chart
and a letter