Their last meal lay untasted. Some wine had formed part of it; and this Carlos now brought, and, with a few gentle, loving words, offered to his father. Don Juan put it aside, but drew his son closer, and looked at him in the moonlight long and earnestly.
"How can I give thee up?" he murmured.
As Carlos tried to return his gaze, it flashed for the first time across his mind that his father was changed. He looked older, feebler, more wan than he had done at his coming. Was the newly-awakened spirit wearing out the body? He said,--
"It may be, my father, that God will not call you to the trial. Perhaps months may elapse before they arrange another Auto."
How calmly he could speak of it;--for he had forgotten himself. Courage, with him, always had its root in self-forgetting love.
Don Juan caught at the gleam of hope, though not exactly as Carlos intended. "Ay, truly," he said, "many things may happen before then."
"And nothing can happen save at the will of Him who loves and cares for us. Let us trust him, my beloved father. He will not allow us to be tempted above that we are able to bear. For he is good--oh, how good!--to the soul that seeketh him. Long ago I believed that; but since he has honoured me to suffer for him, once and again have I proved it true, true as life or death. Father, I once thought the strongest thing on earth--that which reached deepest into our nature--was pain. But I have lived to learn that his love is stronger, his peace is deeper, than all pain."
With many such words--words of faith, and hope, and tenderness--did he soothe his weary, broken-hearted father. And at last, though not till towards morning, he succeeded in inducing him to lie down and seek the rest he so sorely needed.
Then came his own hour; the hour of bitter, lonely conflict. He had grown accustomed to the thought, to the expectation, of a silent, peaceful death within the prison walls. He had hoped, nay, certainly believed, that in the slow hours of some quiet day or night, undistinguished from other days and nights, God's messenger would steal noiselessly to his gloomy cell, and heart and brain would thrill with rapture at the summons, "The Master calleth thee."
Now, indeed, it was true that the Master called him. But he called him to go to Him through the scornful gaze of ten thousand eyes; through reproach, and shame, and mockery; the hideous zamarra and carroza; the long agony of the Auto, spun out from daybreak till midnight; and, last of all, through the torture of the doom of fire. How could he bear it? Sharp were the pangs of fear that wrung his heart, and dread was the struggle that followed.