“The matter is,” answered Rocha, with a voice of terrific hoarseness, “that we have caught cold waiting for you in these confounded corridors. The archbishop, above half-an-hour ago, commanded us to bring you to him dead or alive; but a rascally jackanapes in waiting upon her excellency the Camareira-mor would not let us in to deliver our message, so we have been airing ourselves hitherto to no purpose.”
“Do you know,” said Rocha, taking me into a little room where a lamp was still burning, “that affairs do not go on so smoothly as they ought? The archbishop seems to have lost both time and temper since he has been pressed into the cabinet; and, as for the Prince of Brazil and his consort, God forgive me for wishing their advisers and all their intrigues in the lowest abyss of perdition. How can you be scheming a journey to Madrid at this season? The floods are out, and the robbers also, and I tell you what, as the archbishop says twenty times a day, if you do go you deserve to be drowned and murdered.”
“The die is cast,” I replied, “and I must take my chance; but really I wish you would have the goodness to bid the archbishop a very good night in my name, and let me put off asking his benediction till to-morrow, for I am quite jaded.”
“Jaded or not,” answered the monk, “you must come with me; the wind is up in the archbishop’s brain just at this moment, and by the least contradiction more would become a hurricane.”
Finding resistance vain, I suffered myself to be conducted through two or three open courts, very refreshing at this hour you may suppose, and up a little staircase into the archbishop’s interior cabinet. All was still as death—no lay-brother bustling about—no sound audible but a low breathing, which now and then swelled into a half suppressed groan, from the agitated prelate, whom we found knee-deep in papers, immersed in thought.
“So,” said he, “there you are at last. What have you been doing all this while? Who but a brute of an Englishman would have kept me waiting. Ay, ay, you told me how it would be, and you are right. They plague my soul out. We have twenty rascals pulling as many ways. Your people too are not what they used to be, though Mello would make us believe to the contrary. One thing I know for certain, some infernal mischief is afloat, and unless God’s grace is speedily manifested, I see no end to confusion, and wish myself anywhere but where I am. These smooth-tongued, Frenchified, Italian, Voltaireists and encyclopedians have poisoned all sound doctrine. Ay,” continued he, rising up, with an expression of indignation and anger I never saw before on his countenance, “somebody’s ears[25] are poisoned whom I could name.... But where is the use of talking to you? You are determined to leave us, be it so. God’s providence is above all. He knows what is best for you, and for me, and for these kingdoms. There is your passport, countersigned by your friend Mello; and here is a letter for Lorenzana, and another for his catholic majesty’s confessor, in which I tell him what an amazing fool you are, and unless you continue one without any remission, we shall soon have you back again. Tell Marialva,” he added, addressing himself to Rocha (for the other father had not been admitted), “tell Marialva and all his friends that I have dried up my tongue almost more times than one, in attempting to argue a thousand silly whimsies and crotchets out of his harum-scarum English brain; but come,” said he, extending his arms, “I bear no malice, I pity, I do not condemn. Let me give you an embrace, and pray God it may not be the last you will receive from me.”
It was, alas! the last I ever received from him, poor, honest-hearted, kind old man! A sort of melancholy foreboding which seemed to pervade all he said in this interview was too soon realized. The fatal tide of events flowing on as it were with redoubled, tremendous velocity, swept away in the course of a few short months from this period the Prince of Brazil, the lovely and amiable infanta his sister, her husband Don Gabriel of Spain, and the good old King Charles the Third. Not long after, the archbishop-confessor himself was called from the plenitude of power and the enjoyment of unrivalled influence to the presence of that Being in whose sight “no man living shall be justified;” but as in many trying and peculiar instances he had shown the tenderest mercy, it may tremblingly be hoped that mercy has been shown to him. Notwithstanding the bluntness of his manner, the kindness of his heart, so apparent in his good-humoured, benevolent eye, found its way, almost imperceptibly to himself, to the hearts of others, and tempered the despotic roughness he sometimes assumed both in voice and gesture.
I still seem to behold the last, earnest, solemn look he gave me when, the door closing, he retired to the cares of state, and I with my escort of torch-bearers and dominicans hastened forth to breathe the open air, of which I stood greatly in need. Many things I had heard, and many others I conjectured, above all, the reluctance I felt at the bottom of my heart to leave a country in which I had received such uncommon marks of friendship, bore heavily upon me. When I got home, scarcely two hours before daybreak, and tried to compose myself to sleep, I was neither refreshed nor recruited, but experienced the agitation of feverish and broken slumbers.
LETTER XXXIV.
Dead mass at the church of Martyrs.—Awful music by Perez and Jomelli.—Marialva’s affecting address.—My sorrow and anxiety.