“My poor dear man,” he said, his voice quivering with compassion, “what you must have suffered! But, cheer up; we are Englishmen and Devon men, like yourself, and one of our purposes in coming here was to deliver you out of the hands of these Spanish devils, and we’ll do it, too. We’ve a good surgeon aboard our ship, and you shall be in his hands this very day, please God. Are there any more of you in this place?”
“He doesn’t know, poor soul,” answered Basset, interposing, “but I do; there be two more Englishmen that we’ve found in the cells; and they’m almost so bad as this man. We found ’em safely locked up; but they’m out now and being taken care of by our men.”
“Can they walk?” demanded George.
“A few yards, perhaps,” surmised Basset, “but not so far as the wharf.”
“Then they must be carried,” decided George. “And these men,” indicating the scarlet-garbed individuals, whose business it evidently was to actually carry out the fiendish commands of the Inquisitors—“shall help to do it. I dare say we can find all the additional help we need somewhere in this building. I will go out and see to it; and, meanwhile, you will remain here and see that none of these persons escape.”
“Ay, ay,” responded Basset, “I’ll take care of that, trust me. I don’t think there’ll be any trouble, after the example I made of that fellow,” pointing to the prostrate figure on the paved floor. “The rascal presumed to dispute my authority when I came in here and told everybody that they were prisoners, and—there a be! No, I don’t think there’ll be any more trouble.”
Whereupon George passed from the terrible chamber with its fearful evidences of the dreadful lengths to which misguided fanaticism will occasionally carry men, even in the cause of religion, and proceeded to busy himself in making all the arrangements necessary for the comfortable conveyance of the three unfortunate victims of Inquisitional cruelty down to the ship.
The thing was done! Righteously, or unrighteously, it was done at last, and the little party of stern, inflexible-visaged Englishmen emerged from the Inquisition building of San Juan de Ulua grouped protectively round the three litters in which lay the quivering, emaciated, anguished bodies of their fellow-countrymen, delivered, against all hope, from a fate a thousand times worse than any ordinary kind of death, while within the gloomy, forbidding walls of the building they left behind them nine corpses as a warning and example that, even in that far-off land, Englishmen might not be tortured to death with impunity. It was a terrible demonstration of crude, primitive justice; and whether or not it was as effective in inculcating a lesson as it was intended to be, it is now impossible to say; but one thing at least is certain, that from that time forward there is no record of any Englishman having ever been received into the Inquisition at San Juan.
The party reached the ship unmolested, although they naturally attracted a great deal of attention during their passage through the streets. How it would have been with them during that short march if the inhabitants of the city had been aware of the terrible tragedy which had just been enacted within the walls of the Inquisition can never be known, possibly it might have resulted in a still more terrible tragedy in the streets, with far-reaching results upon the city itself, but Saint Leger believed that he had taken every possible precaution against such an occurrence.
As events proved, however, there was one precaution which he had omitted to take; he should have insisted upon the arrest by the alcalde of Don Manuel Rebiera, the acting Commandant, upon that individual’s display of hostility at the termination of their interview with him; and this George had not done. Now, Don Manuel was both a bigoted Catholic and a Government official. He was one of those who held that the Church—and in his case the term included every individual belonging to the Church—could do no wrong; even the atrocities of the Inquisition, which many devout Catholics secretly reprobated, were to him perfectly justifiable, and the institution itself as sacred as the cathedral; and the suspicion aroused within him by George’s question as to the whereabouts of the building—that this little band of autocratic, domineering heretics meditated an invasion of its sacred precincts, possibly with the intention of perpetrating some act of violence therein, and in any case desecrating it by their intrusion—stirred his fanatical religious rancour to boiling point, while the fact that those same heretics held the town—a possession of his Most Catholic Majesty—at their mercy, was not only as great an offence from his patriotic point of view, but he also felt that it inflicted a deep stain upon his honour as a Spanish soldier, which he was resolved to wipe out, if possible.