No wonder. Hope, love, life--alike in its noblest aims and its commonest joys--all were behind him. Before him were the dreary dungeon days and nights--it might be months or years; the death of agony and shame; and, worst of all, the unutterable horrors of the torture-room, from which he shrank as any one of us would shrink to-day.
Slowly and at last came the large burning tears. But very few of them fell; for his anguish was as yet too fierce for many tears. All that day the storm raged on. When the alcayde brought his evening meal, he lay still, his face covered with his cloak. But as night drew on he rose, and paced his narrow cell with hasty, irregular steps, like those of a caged wild animal.
How should he endure the horrible loneliness of the present, the maddening terror of all that was to come? And this life was to last. To last, until it should be succeeded by worse horrors and fiercer anguish. Words of prayer died on his lips. Or, even when he uttered them, it seemed as if God heard not--as if those thick walls and grated doors shut him out too.
Yet one thing was clear to him from the beginning. Deeper than all other fears within him lay the fear of denying his Lord. Again and again did he repeat, "When called in question, I will at once confess all." For he knew that, according to a law recently enacted by the Holy Office, and sanctioned by the Pope, no subsequent retractation could save a prisoner who had once confessed--he must die. And he desired finally and for ever to put it out of his own power to save his life and lose it.
As every dreary morning dawned upon him, he thought that ere its sun set he might be called to confess his Master's name before the solemn tribunal. At first he awaited the summons with a trembling heart. But as time passed on, the delay became more dreadful than the anticipated examination. At last he began to long for any change that might break the monotony of his prison-life.
The only person, with the exception of his gaoler, that ever entered his cell, was a member of the Board of Inquisitors, who was obliged by their rules to make a fortnightly inspection of the prisons. But the Dominican monk to whom this duty was relegated merely asked the prisoner a few formal questions: such as, whether he was well, whether he received his appointed provision, whether his warder used him with civility. To these Carlos always answered prudently that he had no complaint to make. At first he was wont to inquire, in his turn, when his case might be expected to come on. To this it would be answered, that there was no hurry about the matter. The Lords Inquisitors had much business on hand, and many more important cases than his to attend to; he must await their leisure and their pleasure.
At length a kind of lethargy stole over him; though it was broken frequently by sharp bursts of anguish. He ceased to take note of time, ceased to make fruitless inquiries of his gaoler, who would never tell him anything. Upon one occasion he asked this man for a Breviary, since he sometimes found it difficult to recall even the gospel words that he knew so well. But he was answered in the set terms the Inquisitors taught their officials, that the book he ought now to study was the book of his own heart, which he should examine diligently, in order to the confession and repentance of his sins.
During the morning hours the outer door of his cell (there were two) was usually left open, in order to admit a little fresh air. At such times he often heard footsteps in the corridors, and doors opening and shutting. With a kind of sick yearning, not unmixed with hope, he longed that some visitant would enter his cell. But none ever came. Some of the Inquisitors were keen observers and good students of character. They had watched Carlos narrowly before his arrest, and they had arrived at the conclusion that utter and prolonged solitude was the best remedy for his disease.
Such solitude has driven many a weary tortured soul to insanity. But that divine compassion which no dungeon walls or prison bars avail to shut out, saved Carlos from such a fate.
One morning he knew from the stir outside that some of his fellow-captives had received a visit. But the deep stillness that followed the dying away of footsteps in the corridor was broken by a most unwonted sound. A loud, clear, and even cheerful voice sang out,--