“Father! Hear me, I implore you!” He flung down upon his knees, and held out shaking, supplicating hands.
“You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed for you. Yet that you should Judaize—that you should be bound in wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism—Oh!” The melancholy voice broke off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his hands—long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. “Pray now, my child, for grace and strength,” he exhorted. “Offer up the little temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error, and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence.”
On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators, and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the essentials were already present.
In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand, barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.
Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness the instrument of her father’s ruin.
For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte’s legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the dazzling career of Anne’s own father; but for natural daughters—and especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of cadency—there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore, since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.