"This book, at least, must be true," ran his tumultuous thoughts. "For this Testament do both creeds revere that wrangle over the later." He had a Latin text, and first he turned to the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, and, reading it critically, he seemed to see that all these passages of prediction he had taken on trust as prognostications of a Redeemer might prophesy quite other and more intelligible things. And long past midnight he read among the Prophets, with flushed cheek and sparkling eye, as one drunk with new wine. What sublime truths, what aspirations after peace and justice, what trumpet-calls to righteousness!
He thrilled to the cry of Amos: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." And to the question of Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" Ay, justice and mercy and humbleness—not paternosters and penances. He was melted to tears, he was exalted to the stars.
He turned to the Pentateuch and to the Laws of Moses, to the tender ordinances for the poor, the stranger, the beast. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." "Thou shalt be unto me a holy people."
Why had his ancestors cut themselves off from this great people, whose creed was once so sublime and so simple? There had reached down to him some vague sense of the nameless tragedies of the Great Expulsion when these stiff-necked heretics were confronted with the choice of expatriation or conversion; but now he searched his book-shelves eagerly for some chronicle of those days of Torquemada. The native historians had little, but that little filled his imagination with horrid images of that second Exodus—famine, the plague, robbery, slaughter, the violation of virgins.
And all on account of the pertinacious ambition of a Portuguese king to rule Spain through an alliance with a Spanish princess—an ambition as pertinaciously foiled by the irony of history. No, they were not without excuse, those ancestors of his who had been left behind clinging to the Church. Could they have been genuine converts, these Marranos, or New Christians? he asked himself. Well, whatever his great-grandfathers had felt, his father's faith had been ardent enough, of that he could not doubt. He recalled the long years of ritual; childish memories of paternal pieties. No, the secret conspiracy had not embraced the Da Costa household. And he would fain believe that his more distant progenitors, too, had not been hypocrites; for aught he knew they had gone over to the Church even before the Expulsion; at any rate he was glad to have no evidence for an ancestry of deceit. None of the Da Costas had been cowards, thank Heaven! And he—he was no coward, he told himself.
IV
In the morning, though only a few hours of sleep had intervened, the enthusiasm of the night had somewhat subsided. "Whence came the inspiration of Moses?" flew up to his mind almost as soon as he opened his eyes on the sunlit world. He threw open the protrusive casement of his bedroom to the balmy air, tinged with a whiff of salt, and gazed pensively at the white town rambling down towards the shining river. Had God indeed revealed Himself on Mount Sinai? But this fresh doubt was banished by the renewed suspicion which, after having disturbed his dreams in nebulous distortions, sprang up in daylight clearness. It was his babbling about Dom Diego that had ruined the genial old physician. After days of gathering uneasiness, being unable to gain any satisfaction from the friar, he sought the secretary of the Inquisition in his bureau at a monastery of the Dominicans. The secretary rubbed his hands at the sight of the speechful face. "Aha! What new foxes hast thou scented?" The greeting stung like a stab.
"None," he replied, with a tremor in his speech and in his limbs. "I did but desire to learn if I am to blame for Dom Diego's arrest."
"To blame?" and the secretary looked askance at him. "Say, rather, to praise."
"Nay, to blame," repeated Gabriel staunchly. "Mayhap I mistook or misrendered his conversation. 'Tis scant evidence to imprison a man on. I trust ye have found more."