It was nearly two hours after sunset when Pizarro, at the head of a file of soldiers, at length went up to the fortress to tell the Inca that the fatal moment had come. As he entered the room Valverde and his monks stopped and Atahuallpa looked up. An expression of scornful reproach more eloquent than many words lit up his noble features, now made more noble than ever by the dignity of near-approaching death. His lips moved as though he would say something, but the same instant he bethought him that he could say nothing save through the interpreter, so he closed them again and turned his face away from Pizarro as though he could no longer bear to look upon the man who had taken his gold as ransom and then betrayed him to death.
“How goes it with his Highness, holy father?” said Pizarro affecting not to notice the Inca’s silent reproach. “Have thy sacred ministrations yet been crowned with success?”
“For his soul’s sake and to my own sorrow I say that though I have striven with him all day, he still hardens his heart against the blessed unction of our holy Faith and still clings to his false gods, not even confessing that he hath sinned, but remaining like one of his own dumb idols and refusing the grace that is offered to him. Greatly would I have loved to be the means of saving so great a sinner, and for many hours I have wrestled in spirit to this end; but the ways of Heaven are inscrutable, and it would seem that it is not to be. There is but one hope now, and that is that the fear of the fire may even at the last moment melt him into repentance.”
“It hath been found ere now a more potent reasoning than even such eloquence as thine, holy father,” replied Pizarro grimly, “and for my part, and not only for his soul’s sake, should I rejoice to see it, for truly he hath had hurt enough at our hands without dying by a death of torment.”
Valverde frowned at this and said sternly—
“Señor, he who could find mercy for the heathen or the idolater in his heart hath commonly little room left for the love of God. The Inca hath already passed beyond the civil power into the keeping of the Church, which now by my hands gives him back into thine for the execution of his body as an obstinate heretic and idolater as mercifully as maybe and without shedding of blood. Do thou, as a true son of the Church, see to this, and, shouldst thou need any excuse to thy conscience, find it in this charge of mine.”
Pizarro bowed and crossed himself, feeling now much lighter at heart, for to such a man in such an age this was full and sufficient warranty for the doing of any cruelty or injustice.
“Since it is the Church that bids me, by thy lips, holy father,” he said gravely, “my responsibility in the matter is discharged. I have come to tell thee and the prisoner of the Church that all things are ready for the carrying out of the sentence.”
“Then let us go,” said Valverde, solemnly clasping his hands and casting his eyes up to the roof; “and may God and the Saints in their infinite mercy change his heart even at the last minute of the eleventh hour!”
The Inca’s chains were then struck off and he was led out from the room into the forecourt of the fortress, and there the procession of death was formed between two rows of torchbearers. First went Brother Joachim bearing the great white crucifix aloft, then came Valverde in his full canonicals chanting the Mass for the Dying with the four monks who came behind him walking two and two on either side of the Inca, who, with his hands clasped behind him, gazed upwards to the sky gemmed with the innumerable stars of two hemispheres and flooded by the white radiance of the moon, the sister-wife of his Father and Lord the Sun.