“‘Those brothers are one. Leave him out!’ saith the King. I will read you his mind! ‘Master Christopherus Columbus hath had too much from the beginning. Nor is he necessary as he was. When the breach is made, any may take the fortress! I will leave him and give him what I must but no more!’ He will send at last another than Bobadilla, but not again, if he can help it, the old Viceroy! Of course there is the Queen, but she has many sorrows these days, and fails, they say, in health.”
“It may be,” said Juan Lepe. “I myself were content for him to rest The Admiral only. But his mind is yet a hawk towering over land and sea and claiming both for prize. He mingles the earthly and the heavenly.”
“It is true,” said Fray Juan Perez, “that age comes upon him. And true, too, that King Ferdinand may say, ‘Whatever it was at first, this world in the West becomes far too vast a matter for one man and the old, first, simple ways!’”
“You have it there,” I answered, and we covered the embers and went to bed in La Rabida.
Winter passed. It was seen that the Admiral could not sail this week nor the next.
Juan Lepe, bearded, brown as a Moor, older than in the year Granada fell, crossed with quietness much of Castile and came on a spring evening to the castle of Don Enrique de Cerda. Again “Juan Lepe from the hermitage in the oak wood.”
Seven days. I would not stay longer, but in that time the ancient trees waved green again.
Don Enrique had been recently to Granada. “King Ferdinand will change all matters in the West! Your islands shall have Governors, as many as necessary. They shall refer themselves to a High Governor at San Domingo, who in his turn shall closely listen to a Council here.”
“Will the High Governor be Don Cristoval Colon?”
“No. I hear that he himself agrees to a suspension of his viceroyalty for two years, seeing well that in Hispaniola is naught but faction, everything torn into ‘Friends of the Genoese’ and ‘Not friends!’. Perhaps he sees that he cannot help himself and that he less parts with dignity by acceding. I do not know. There is talk of Don Nicholas de Ovanda, Commander of Lares. Your man will not, I think, be sent before a steady wind for Viceroy again—never again. If he presses too persistently, there can always be found one or more who will stand and cry, ‘He did intend, O King—he doth intend—to make himself King of the Indies!’ And King Ferdinand will say he does not believe, but it is manifest that that thought must first die from men’s minds. The Queen fails fast. She has not the voice and the hand in all matters that once was so.”