The judge made an impatient sign, and the masked man tied the victim's hands and feet together with a thick cord, and winding it around the breast, placed the hunched, nude figure upon a stool, while he passed the ends of the cord through two of the iron rings in the wall. Then, kicking away the stool, he left the victim suspended in air by cords that cut into his flesh.
"Confess!" said the judge.
But Dom Diego set his teeth. The executioner drew the cords tighter and tighter, till the blood burst from under his victim's nails, and ever and anon he let the sharp-staved iron ladder fall against his naked shins.
"O Sancta Maria!" groaned the physician at length.
"These be but the beginning of thy tortures, an thou confessest not," said the judge, "Draw tighter."
"Nay," here interrupted the surgeon. "Another draw and he may expire."
Another tightening, and Gabriel da Costa would have fainted. Deadly pale beneath his mask, he felt sick and trembling—the cords seemed to be cutting into his own flesh. His heart was equally hot against the torturers and the tortured, and he admired the physician's courage even while he abhorred his cowardice. And while the surgeon was busying himself to mend the victim for new tortures, Gabriel da Costa had a shuddering perception of the tragedy of Israel—sublime and sordid.
V
It was with equally mingled feelings, complicated by astonishment, that he learned a week or so later that Dom Diego had been acquitted of Judaism and set free. Impulse drove him to seek speech with the sufferer. He crossed the river to the physician's house, but only by extreme insistence did he procure access to the high vaulted room in which the old man lay abed, surrounded by huge tomes on pillow and counterpane, and overbrooded by an image of the Christ.
"Pardon that I have been reluctant to go back without a sight of thee," said Gabriel. "My anxiety to see how thou farest after thy mauling by the hell-hounds must be my excuse."