And so the poor young nobleman tried to stifle grief and apprehension in dreams of other lands, of whose discovery he would not live to hear, although his son would one day help others to found new homes on their far-off soil.
[CHAPTER V.]
DEATH FOR ARBUES DE EPILA.
The days went by; the days of that year, 1485: and still the hideous spectacles of the Auto da Fé continued to be witnessed with shame and anguish by the inhabitants of Saragossa. Still the cry of the tortured victims ascended up to heaven, and still Arbues de Epila lived in his case of mail.
Those were busy, agitating days for Spain. The war with Granada was still in progress. King Ferdinand was much exercised in mind with various jealousies connected with French affairs, and, more than all important for future ages, the Queen's confessor, Ferdinand di Talavera, together with a council of self-sufficient pedants and philosophers, was taking into consideration that request of the Genoese, Christopher Colon, or, as we call him, Columbus, to be provided with such an equipment of ships, men, and necessary stores, as should enable him to find and found countries hitherto unheard of, and only thought of, most people declared, by crack-brained dreamers.
"Besides," finally decided Talavera and his sage council, with pompous absurdity; "besides, if there were nothing else against this scheme, such as the convex figure of the globe, for instance, which, of course, would prevent vessels ever getting back again, up the side of the world, once they got down, there was the impudence of the suggestion. It was presumptuous in any person to pretend that he alone possessed knowledge superior to all the rest of the world united."
And such impertinent presumption was certainly not to be encouraged in an "obscure Genoese pilot." And so, for that while, after weary waiting, and the weary hope deferred that maketh the heart sick, Columbus and his splendid plans were dismissed. But this result was not arrived at until four years after the months with which we are, for the minute, more immediately concerned; and so to return to the thread of our narrative, and to add yet further—and still the men of Saragossa gathered into secret bands, discussing rather by tokens, than by words, the unspeakable cruelties that were being committed in their midst, and the proposed destruction of their arch-instigator, Arbues de Epila.
All was ripe at length for the fulfilment of the fatal plot; fatal, alas, not only to the Inquisitor, but to his murderers also, and to many and many another wholly innocent of the crime.
All day long Don Alonso, Don Miguel, Don James of Navarre, with the rest of the conspirators, many of them with the noblest blood of Aragon flowing in their veins, watched with a fierce, hungry eagerness for the moment in which to strike the blow. The hours wore on, the evening came. In low-breathed murmurs one and another rekindled their own fury, or revived the flagging courage of a companion, by recalling the generosity of character, the blameless life, of some friend or relative snatched out of life by this barbarous persecution.