"'El Dorado--'"
"'Yo hé trovado.'
Yes, I remember now," said Don Juan promptly.
"And the golden country you had discovered--was it not the truth as revealed in Scripture?" asked Carlos, perhaps a little too eagerly.
The penitent mused a space; grew bewildered; said at last sorrowfully, "I know not. I cannot now recall what moved me to write those lines, or even when I wrote them."
In the next place, Carlos ventured to tell all he had heard from Dolores about his mother. The fact of his wife's death had been communicated to the prisoner; but this was the only fragment of intelligence about his family that had reached him during all these years. When she was spoken of, he showed emotion, slight in the beginning, but increasing at every succeeding mention of her name, until Carlos, who had at first been glad to find that the slumbering chords of feeling responded to his touch, came at last to dread laying his hands upon them, they were apt to moan so piteously. And once and again did his father say, gazing at him with ever-increasing fondness, "Thy face is hers, risen anew before me."
Carlos tried hard to awaken Don Juan's interest in his first-born. It is true that he cherished an almost passionate love for Juanito the babe, but it was such a love as we feel for children whom God has taken to himself in infancy. Juan the youth, Juan the man, seemed to him a stranger, difficult to conceive of or to care about. Yet, in time, Carlos did succeed in establishing a bond between the long-imprisoned father and the brave, noble, free-hearted son, who was so like what that father had been in his early manhood. He was never weary of telling of Juan's courage, Juan's truthfulness, Juan's generosity; often concluding with the words, "He would have been your favourite son, had you known him, my father."
As time wore on, he won from his father's lips the principal facts of his own story. His past was like a picture from which the colouring, once bright and varied, has faded away, leaving only the bare outlines of fact, and here and there the shadows of pain still faintly visible. What he remembered, that he told his son; but gradually, and often in very disjointed fragments, which Carlos carefully pieced together in his thoughts, until he formed out of them a tolerably connected whole.
Just three-and-twenty years before, on his arrival in Seville, in obedience to what he believed to be a summons from the Emperor, the Conde de Nuera had been arrested and thrown into the secret dungeons of the Inquisition. He well knew his offence: he had been the friend and associate of De Valero; he had read and studied the Scriptures; he had even advocated, in the presence of several witnesses, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Nor was he unprepared to pay the terrible penalty. Had he, at the time of his arrest, been led at once to the rack or the stake, it is probable he would have suffered with a constancy that might have placed his name beside that of the most heroic martyrs.
But he was allowed to wear out long months in suspense and solitude, and in what his eager spirit found even harder to bear, absolute inaction. Excitement, motion, stirring occupation for mind and body, had all his life been a necessity to him. In the absence of these he pined--grew melancholy, listless, morbid. His faith was genuine, and would have been strong enough to enable him for anything in the line of his character; but it failed under trials purposely and sedulously contrived to assail that character through its weak points.
When already worn out with dreary imprisonment, he was beset by arguments, clever, ingenious, sophistical, framed by men who made argument the business of their lives. Thus attacked, he was like a brave but unskilful man fencing with adepts in the noble science. He knew he was right; and with the Vulgate in his hand, he thought he could have proved it. But they assured him they proved the contrary; nor could he detect a flaw in their syllogisms when he came to examine them. If not convinced, then surely he ought to have been. They conjured him not to let pride and vain-glory seduce him into self-opinionated obstinacy, but to submit his private judgment to that of the Holy Catholic Church. And they promised that he should go forth free, only chastised by a suitable and not disgraceful penance, and by a pecuniary fine.