"He will not relent," said Fray Sebastian, hardly restraining his sobs. "He will die."
"I see one chance to save him," returned the prior; "but it is a hazardous experiment. The consent of the Supreme Council is necessary, as well as that of my Lord Vice-Inquisitor, and neither may be very easy to obtain."
"To save his body or his soul?" Fray Sebastian asked anxiously.
"Both, if it succeeds. But I can say no more," he added rather haughtily; "for my plan is bound up with a secret, of which few living men, save myself, are in possession."
XXXIV.
Fray Sebastian's Trouble.
"Now, with fainting frame,
With soul just lingering on the flight begun,
To bind for thee its last dim thoughts in one,
I bless thee. Peace be on thy noble head.
Years of bright fame, when I am with the dead!
I bid this prayer survive me, and retain
Its power again to bless thee, and again.
Thou hast been gathered into my dark fate
Too much; too long for my sake desolate
Hath been thine exiled youth; but now take back
From dying hands thy freedom."--Hemans
It was late in August. All day long the sky had been molten fire, and the earth brass. Every one had dozed away the sultry noontide hours in the coolest recesses of dwellings made to exclude heat, as ours to exclude cold. But when at last the sun sank in flame beneath the horizon, people began to creep out languidly to woo the refreshment of the evening breeze.
The beautiful gardens of the Triana were still deserted, save by two persons. One of these, a young lad--we beg pardon, a young gentleman--of fifteen or sixteen, sat, or rather reclined, by the river-side, eating slices from an enormous melon, which he cut with a small silver-hilted dagger. A plumed cap, and a gay velvet jerkin lined with satin, had been thrown aside for coolness' sake, and lay near him on the ground; so that his present dress consisted merely of a mass of the finest white holland, delicately starched and frilled, velvet hosen, long silk stockings, and fashionable square-toed shoes. Curls of scented hair were thrown back from a face beautiful as that of a girl, but bold and insolent in its expression as that of a spoiled and mischievous boy.
The other person was seated in the arbour mentioned once before, with a book in his hand, of which, however, he did not in the course of an hour turn over a single leaf. A look of chronic discontent and dejection had replaced the good-humoured smiles of Fray Sebastian Gomez. Everything was wrong with the poor Franciscan now. Even the delicacies of his patron's table ceased to please him; and he, in his turn, was fast ceasing to please his patron. How could it be otherwise, when he had lost not only his happy art of indirect ingenious flattery, but his power to be commonly agreeable or amusing? No more poems--not so much as the briefest sonnet--on the suppression of heresy were to be had from him; and he was fast becoming incapable of turning a jest or telling a story.