The sword hung over their heads, suspended by a single hair, which a hasty or incautious movement, a word, a breath even, might suffice to break.
XIX.
Truth and Freedom
"Man is greater than you thought him;
The bondage of long slumber he will break.
His just and ancient rights he will reclaim,
With Nero and Busiris he will rank
The name of Philip."--Schiller
Never before had it fallen to the lot of Don Juan Alvarez to experience such bewilderment as that which his brother's disclosure occasioned him. That brother, whom he had always regarded as the embodiment of goodness and piety, who was rendered illustrious in his eyes by all sorts of academic honours, and sanctified by the shadow of the coming priesthood, had actually confessed himself to be--what he had been taught to hold in deepest, deadliest abomination--a Lutheran heretic. But, on the other hand, from the wise, pious, and in every way unexceptionable manner in which Carlos had spoken, Juan could not help hoping that what, probably through some unaccountable aberration of mind, he himself persisted in styling Lutheranism, might prove in the end some very harmless and orthodox kind of devotion. Perhaps, eventually, his brother might found some new and holy order of monks and friars. Or even (he was so clever) he might take the lead in a Reformation of the Church, which, there was no use in an honest man's denying, was sorely needed. Still, he could not help admitting that the Sieur de Ramenais had sometimes expressed himself with nearly as much apparent orthodoxy; and he was undoubtedly a confirmed heretic--a Huguenot.
But if the recollection of this man, who for months had been his guest rather than his prisoner, served, from one point of view, to increase his difficulties, from another, it helped to clear away the most formidable of them. Don Juan had never been religious; but he had always been hotly orthodox, as became a Castilian gentleman of purest blood, and heir to all the traditions of an ancient house, foremost for generations in the great conflict with the infidel. He had been wont to look upon the Catholic faith as a thing bound up irrevocably with the knightly honour, the stainless fame, the noble pride of his race, and, consequently, with all that was dearest to his heart. Heresy he regarded as something unspeakably mean and degrading. It was associated in his mind with Jews and Moors, "caitiffs," "beggarly fellows;" all of them vulgar and unclean, some of them the hereditary enemies of his race. Heretics were Moslems, infidels, such as "my Cid" delighted in hewing down with his good sword Tizona, "for God and Our Lady's honour." Heretics kept the passover with mysterious, unhallowed rites, into which it would be best not to inquire; heretics killed (and perhaps ate) Christian children; they spat upon the cross; they had to wear ugly yellow sanbenitos at autos-da-fé; and, to sum up all in one word, they "smelled of the fire." To give full weight to the last allusion, it must be remembered that in the eyes of Don Juan and his cotemporaries, death by fire had no hallowed or ennobling associations to veil its horrors. The burning pile was to him what the cross was to our forefathers, and what the gibbet is to us, only far more disgraceful. Thus it was not so much his conscience as his honour and his pride that were arrayed against the new faith.
But, unconsciously to himself, opposition had been silently undermined by his intercourse with the Sieur de Ramenais. It would probably have been fatal to Protestantism with Don Juan, had his first specimen of a Protestant been an humble muleteer. Fortunately, the new opinions had come to him represented by a noble and gallant knight, who
"In open battle or in tilting field
Forbore his own advantage;"
who was as careful of his "pundonor"[#] as any Castilian gentleman, and scarcely yielded even to himself in all those marks of good breeding, which, to say the truth, Don Juan Alvarez de Santillanos y Meñaya valued far more than any abstract dogmas of faith.
[#] Point of honour.