Part 6 (2/2)

It was with a feeling of triumph, that made him forget for awhile personal weariness and anxiety for his friend, that Lucius glanced again at the placard-covered boarding which had arrested his attention on the Sat.u.r.day night preceding the bull-fight. The invitation to the Plaza de Toros had either been torn down as out of date, or covered with more recent advertis.e.m.e.nts; the charge from the Bishop of Cadiz, in all the clearness of its black type, remained there still. Lucius smiled at the thought that he himself was about to join the band of those who were attacking Rome in her stronghold; his second attempt to strike at superst.i.tious error was, he trusted, not likely to end like his first.

Lucius soon found himself at the entrance of the Aguilera mansion. The grating at the end of the arched pa.s.sage was shut, which it had not been on the occasions of his two previous visits.

The Englishman rang gently, but his summons remained unanswered. He rang again rather more loudly, and then walked up to the grating. He heard a heavy step crossing the patio, and through the perforated iron screen which divided them saw the bent form of Teresa approaching towards him.

”How fares the senor?” inquired Lucius.

”Better, thanks to the blessed Santa Veronica, a lock of whose holy hair has been under the caballero's pillow,” was the old woman's reply.

”Pray open the gate; I have come to nurse your master to-night,” said Lucius.

”The caballero wants none of your nursing,” exclaimed Teresa, in her harshest tone; ”and if you wait till I open the gate for you, why, you may stand there till the Guadalquivir runs dry! Away with you and your white Judaism![12] To have the like of you prowling about sick men's beds is enough to make the bones of good old Torquemada[13] shake in the grave!”

Teresa's form vanished from behind the grating, and Lucius, not a little annoyed at this unexpected obstacle to his intercourse with Alcala, returned to his cheerless lodging.

Evening after evening the young Englishman renewed his attempt to gain admission into the mansion of De Aguilera, but always with a similar result. In vain he hoped for a sight of the senorita; she at least, he believed, would not shut out the friend of her brother. Lucius saw no one during repeated visits but the bandy-legged, ill-favoured Chico, or the fanatic Teresa. The latter as jealously guarded the entrance to forbidden ground as ever did fabled dragon of old. As regarded Chico, the case was different. Lucius more than suspected that when this servant answered his summons, the grating might have been unlocked by means of a silver key. But Lucius was too poor to give bribes, and the disappointed Chico became almost as rude as Teresa herself. The young foreigner only exposed himself to insult and abuse by his attempts to visit Alcala.

”This is my just punishment for former neglect of a clear duty,” said Lucius to himself one evening, as he turned from the Moorish archway.

”There was a time when an open gate was before me, but now the gate is shut.”

FOOTNOTES:

[12] ”White Judaism, which includes all kinds of heresy, such as Lutheranism, Freemasonry, and the like.” See the Spanish priest's definition of the term, in the seventeenth chapter of Borrows' ”Bible in Spain.”

[13] A celebrated Spanish inquisitor.

CHAPTER XII.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

It is not the tongue of man alone that can speak to the soul of man; G.o.d's rod hath often a solemn voice, and the conscience cannot but hear it. Much was pa.s.sing through the mind of Alcala of which those around him knew nothing, as he lay with closed eyes and silent lips upon his couch of pain. He was often supposed to be sleeping, when thoughts on the deepest subjects were absorbing his mind.

The horror of the bull-fight had been to Alcala what the earthquake was to the jailer of Philippi; it had startled his soul into uttering the cry, ”What must I do to be saved?” Not that any dark deed of guilt lay on the young Spaniard's conscience. In a place where the standard of morality is low, De Aguilera had led a life comparatively blameless; the picture of maidenly purity ever before him in the sister whom he tenderly loved, had kept him from many an error.

Alcala had little to reproach himself with as regarded man, but he had become conscious that he had offended his Maker, and had never yet made his peace with his G.o.d.

Alcala's ideas in regard to the Supreme Being were vague, as might be expected in a man who had never studied the Scriptures. The Spaniard did not know G.o.d, and therefore did not love Him. Alcala regarded the Almighty as a Being awful in purity and terrible in justice, who required an unhesitating obedience, an absorbing devotion, which the young man knew had never been rendered by himself. If the horn of the bull had gone a little deeper, if it had sent the sinner to the dread tribunal above, how would the disembodied soul have endured the searching scrutiny of an Omniscient Judge, and what would His awful verdict have been? Such was the question which Alcala asked of his conscience, and conscience gave no answer of peace.

The wounded man rather submitted to than sought the ministrations of Bonifacio; they satisfied neither his heart nor his reason. Alcala heard of the sanct.i.ty of the (so-called) Catholic Church, the efficacy of her sacraments, the power of her priests, the intercession of martyrs, the wonders to be wrought by fragment of wood or morsel of bone,--he heard of all these things with weariness and distaste.

Alcala was as a man peris.h.i.+ng of thirst to whom is held out an elaborately chased cup, within which there is not a single drop of life-giving water.

Bonifacio's rebukes were even more trying to the sufferer than were the priest's exhortations. The confessor tried to probe his penitent's conscience, but never laid his finger on the real wound. Alcala's remorse was not for having read some books that did not increase his reverence for the hierarchy of Rome, nor for not having more frequently laid bare his inmost thoughts to a tonsured fellow-sinner.

He could not be argued into believing it to be a crime to have had a Protestant friend. It was not recollection of such transgressions that was troubling the cavalier's soul with the yet unanswered question, ”What must I do to be saved?”

Though Alcala never spoke to his sister of his mental struggles, she perceived, with the quick instinct of affection, that his mind was not at ease. Inez saw also that Bonifacio was by no means satisfied with her brother's spiritual state. This was distressing to the gentle Inez. ”The pious father,” she said to herself, ”cannot know how good is Alcala; I do not think that there is a cavalier to be compared to him in all Andalusia.”

<script>