he was innocent; and Father Francis so believed him that, after pronouncing absolution and blessing, he hastened from the prisoner to the King to implore a yet longer reprieve. But Ferdinand, though more moved by the Prior's recital than he chose to display, remained firm; he had pledged his kingly word to the Chief of the Santa Hermandad that the award of justice should not be waved without proof of innocence, and he could not draw back. One chance only he granted, urged to do so by an irresistible impulse, which how often comes we know not wherefore, till the event marks it as the whisper of some guardian angel, who has looked into the futurity, concealed from us. The hour of the execution had been originally fixed for the sixth hour of the morning; it was postponed till noon. The morning dawned, and with its first beams came Father Francis to the prisoner. He found him calm and resigned: his last thought of earth was to commend Marie, if ever found, to the holy Father's care, conjuring him to deal gently and mercifully with a spirit so broken, and lead her to the sole fountain of Peace by kindness, not by wrath; and to tell her how faithfully he had loved her to the last. Much affected, Father Francis promised-aye, even to protect, if possible, an unbeliever. And Stanley once more knelt in prayer, every earthly thought at rest. The last quarter-bell had chimed; and ere it ceased, the step of Don Felix was heard in the passage, followed by the heavy tramp of the guard. The Prior looked eagerly in the Noble's countenance as he entered, hoping even then to read reprieve; but the stern yet sad solemnity on Don Felix's face betrayed the hope was vain. The hour had indeed come, and Arthur Stanley was led forth to death! CHAP. XXII. "Oh! blissful days, When all men worship God as conscience wills! GRAHAME. Retrospection is not pleasant in a narrative; but, if Marie has indeed excited any interest in our readers, they will forgive the necessity, and look back a few weeks ere they again arrive at the eventful day with which our last chapter closed. All that Don Felix had reported concerning the widow of Morales was correct. The first stunning effects of her dread avowal were recovered, sense was entirely restored, but the short-lived energy had gone. The trial to passively endure is far more terrible than that which is called upon to act and do. She soon discovered that, though nursed and treated with kindness, she was a prisoner in her own apartments. Wish to leave them she had none, and scarcely the physical strength; but to sit idly down under the pressure of a double dread-the prisoner's fate and her own sentence-to have no call for energy, not a being for whom to rouse herself and live, not one for whose sake she might forget herself and win future happiness by present exertion; the Past, one yearning memory for the husband, who had so soothed and cherished her, when any other would have cast her from his heart as a worthless thing; the Present, fraught with thoughts she dared not think, and words she might not breathe; the very prayer for Stanley's safety checked-for what could he be to her?-the Future shrouded in a pall so dense, she could not read a line of its dark page, for the torch of Hope was extinguished, and it is only by her light we can look forward; Isabella's affection apparently lost for ever; was it marvel energy and hope had so departed, or that a deadening despondency seemed to crush her heart and sap the very springs of life? But in the midst of that dense gloom one ray there was, feeble indeed at first as if human suffering had deadened even that, but brightening and strengthening with every passing day. It was the sincerity of her Faith-the dearer, more precious to its followers, from the scorn and condemnation in which it was held by man. The fact that the most Catholic kingdom of Spain, was literally peopled with secret Jews, brands this unhappy people, with a degree of hypocrisy, in addition to the various other evil propensities with which they have been so plentifully charged. Nay, even amongst themselves in modern times, this charge has gained ascendancy; and the romance-writer who would make use of this extraordinary truth, to vividly picture the condition of the Spanish Jews, is accused of villifying the nation, by reporting practices, opposed to the upright dictates of the Religion of the Lord. It is well to pronounce such judgment now, that the liberal position which we occupy in most lands, would render it the height of dissimulation, and hypocrisy, to conceal our faith; but to judge correctly of the secret adherence to Judaism and public profession of Catholicism which characterized our ancestors in Spain, we must transport ourselves not only to the country but to the time, and recall the awfully degraded, crushing, and stagnating position which acknowledged Judaism occupied over the whole known world. As early as 600-as soon, in fact, as the disputes and prosecutions of Arian against Catholic, and Catholic against Arian, had been checked by the whole of Spain being subdued and governed by Catholic Kings-intolerance began to work against the Jews, who had been settled in vast numbers in Spain since the reign of the Emperor Adrian; some authorities assert still | in 1492, who were Hebrews in external profesearlier. They were, therefore, nearly the sion as well as internal observance; but their original colonists of the country, and regarded condition was so degraded, so scorned, so exit with almost as much attachment as they had posed to constant suffering, that it was not in felt towards Judea. When persecution began to human nature voluntarily to sink down to them, work, "90,000 Jews were compelled to receive when, by the mere continuance of external the sacrament of baptism," the bodies of the Catholicism-which from its universality, its more obstinate tortured, and their fortunes con- long existence, and being in fact a rigidly enfiscated; and yet-a remarkable instance of in- forced statute of the State, could not be regarded consistency-they were not permitted to leave either as hypocrisy or sin-they could take their Spain; and this species of persecution continued station amongst the very highest and noblest of from 600 downwards. Once or twice edicts of the land, and rise to eminence and power in any expulsion were issued, but speedily recalled; profession, civil, military, or religious, which the tyrants being unwilling to "dismiss victims they might prefer. The subject is so fuil of whom they delighted to torture, or deprive philosophical inquiry, that in the limits of a themselves of industrious slaves over whom romance we cannot possibly do it justice; but they might exercise a lucrative oppression;" and to accuse the secret Jews of Spain of hypocrisy, a statute was enacted, "that the Jews who had of departing from the pure ordinances of their been baptized should be constrained, for the religion, because compelled to simulate Catholichonour of the Church, to persevere in the ex-ism, is taking indeed but a one-handed, shortternal practice of a religion which they inwardly disbelieved and detested.+ How, then, can compelled obedience to this statute be termed hypocrisy? Persecution, privation, tyranny, may torture and destroy the body, but they cannot force the mind to the adoption of, and belief in tenets, from which the very treatment they commanded must urge it to revolt. Of the 90,000 Jews forcibly baptized by order of Sisebut, and constrained to the external profession of Catholicism, not ten, in all probability, became actually Christians. And yet how would it have availed them to relapse into the public profession of the faith they so obeyed and loved in secret? To leave the country was utterly impossible. It is easy to talk now of such proceedings being their right course of acting, when every land is open to the departure and entrance of every creed; but it was widely different then, and, even if they could have quitted Spain, there was not a spot of ground, in the whole European and Asiatic world, where persecution, extortion, and banishment would not equally have been their doom. Constant relapses into external as well as internal Judaism there were, but they were but the signal for increased misery to the whole nation; and by degrees they ceased. It was from the forcible baptism of the 90,000 Hebrews, by Sisebut, that we may trace the origin of the secret Jews. From father to son, from mother to daughter, the solemn secret descended, and gradually spread, still in its inviolable nature, through every rank and every profession, from the highest Priest to the lowest Friar, the General to the common Soldier, the Noble to the Peasant, over the whole land. There were indeed some few in Spain, before the final edict of expulsion * Basnage asserts that the Jews were introduced into Spain by the fleet of Solomon, and the arms of Nebuchadnezzar, and that Hadrian transported forty thousand families of the tribe of Judah and ten thousand of the tribe of Benjamin, &c. +"Gibbon's Decline and Fall," Vol. 6, chap. xxxvii, from which all the previous sentences in inverted commas have been extracted. sighted view of an extensive and intensely interesting topic. We may often hope for the present by considering the changes of the past; but to attempt to pronounce judgment on the sentiments of the past by reasoning of the present, when the mind is always advancing, is one of the weakest and idlest fallacies that ever entered the human breast. Digression as this is, it is necessary clearly to comprehend the situation in which Marie's avowal of her religion had placed her, and her reason for so carefully wording her information as to the existence of the secret closet, that no suspicion might attach itself to the religion of her husband. Her confession_sent a shock, which vibrated not only through Isabella's immediate Court, but through every part of Spain. Suspicion once aroused, none knew where it might end, or on whom fall. In her first impulse to save Arthur, she had only thought of what such confession might bring to herself individually, and that was, comparatively, easy to endure; but as the excitement ceased, as the dread truth dawned upon her, that, if he must die at the expiration of the given month, her avowal had been utterly useless, the dread of its consequences, to the numerous secret members of her faith appalled her, and caused the firm resolve under no circumstances to betray the religion of her husband. Him indeed it could not harm; but that one so high in rank, in influence, in favour with Sovereigns and People, was only outwardly a Catholic, might have most fatal consequences on all his brethren. That he should have wedded a Jewess might excite surprise, but nothing more; and in the midst of her varied sufferings she could rejoice that all suspicion as to his race and faith had been averted. She felt thankful also at being kept so close a prisoner, for she dreaded the wrath of those whom her avowal might have unwittingly injured. Such an instance had never been known before, and she might justly tremble at the chastisement it might bring upon her even from her own people. As long as she was under Isabella's care she was safe from this; all might feel the vibration, but none dared evince that they did, by the adoption of any measures against her, further than would | religious duty, she would do violence to her be taken by the Catholics themselves. Knowing this, her sole prayer, her sole effort was to obtain mental strength sufficient under every temptation, either from severity or kindness, to adhere unshrinkingly to the Faith of her fathers to cling yet closer to the love of her Father in Heaven, and endeavour, with all the lowly trust and fervid feelings of her nature, to fill the yearning void within her woman's heart with His image, and so subdue every human love. It seemed to her vivid fancy as if all the misfortunes she had encountered sprung from her first sin-that of loving a Nazarene. Hers was not the age to make allowances for circumstances in contradistinction to actual deeds. Then, as unhappily but too often now, all were sufferings from a misplaced affection-sprung, not from her fault, but from the mistaken kindness which it exposed her to without due warning of her danger. Educated with the strong belief, that to love or wed, beyond the pale of her own people was the greatest sin she could commit, short of actual apostacy, that impression, though not strong enough, so to conquer human nature, as to arm against love, returned with double force, as sorrow after sorrow gathered round her, and there were none beside her to whisper and strengthen, with the blessed truth that God afflicts yet more in mercy than in wrath; and that His decrees, however fraught with human anguish, are but blessings in disguise-blessings, sown indeed with tears on earth, to reap their deathless fruit in heaven! But, though firmly believing all her suffering was deserved, aware that when she first loved Arthur, the rebel-thought-" Why am I of a race so apart and hated?" had very frequently entered her heart, tempting her at times with fearful violence to give up all for love of man; yet Marie knew that the God of her fathers was a God of Love, calling even upon the greatest sinner to return to Him repentant and amending, and that even as a little child such should be forgiven. He had indeed proclaimed Himself a jealous God, and would have no idol-worship, were it by wood or stone, or, far more dangerous, of human love; and she prayed unceasingly for strength to return to Him with an undivided heart, even if to do so demanded not only separation from Stanley-but a trial in her desolate position almost as severe-the loss of Isabella's confidence and love. Few words passed between Marie and her guardians; their manner was kind and gentle, but intercourse between rigid Catholics and a proclaimed Jewess, could not be otherwise than restrained. From the time that reason returned, the Queen had not visited her, doing actual violence to her own inclinations from the mistaken-but in that age and to her character natural-dread that the affection and interest she felt towards Marie personally, would lessen the sentiments, of loathing and abhorrence with which it was her duty to regard her faith. Isabella had within herself all the qualifications of a Martyr. Once impressed that it was a most cherished wishes, sacrifice her dearest desires, her best affections, resign her most eagerly pursued plans-not without suffering indeed, but, according to the mistaken tenets of her religion, the greater personal suffering, the more meritorious was the deed believed to be. This spirit would, had she lived in an age when the Catholic faith was the persecuted, not the persecutor, have led her a willing Martyr to the stake; as it was, this same spirit led to the estab lishment of the Inquisition, and expulsion of the Jews--deeds so awful in their consequences, that the actual motive of the woman-heart which prompted them is utterly forgotten, and herself condemned. We must indeed deplore the mistaken tenets that could obtain such influencedeplore that man could so pervert the service of a God of Love, as to believe and inculcate that such things could be acceptable to Him; but we should pause, and ask, if we ourselves had been influenced by such teaching, could we break from it? ere we condemn. Isabella's own devoted spirit could so enter into the real reason of Marie's self abnegation for Arthur's sake, that it impelled her to love her more; while at the very same time the knowledge of her being a Jewess, whom she had always been taught and believed must be accursed in the sight of God and lost eternally unless brought to believe in Jesus, urged her entirely to conquer that affection, lest its indulgence should interfere with her resolu tion, if kindness failed, by severity to accomplish her conversion. She was too weak in health, and Isabella intuitively felt too terribly anxious as to young Stanley's fate, to attempt anything till after the expiration of the month; and she passed that interval in endeavouring to calm down her own feelings towards her. So fifteen days elapsed. On the evening of the fifteenth, Marie, feeling unusually exhausted, had sunk down, without disrobing, on her couch, and at length fell into a slumber so deep and calm, that her guardians, fearing to disturb it, and aware that her dress was so loose and light, it could not annoy her, retired softly to their own chamber without arousing her. How many hours this lethargic sleep lasted, Marie knew not, but it was at length broken by a dream of terror, and so unusually vivid, that its impression lasted, even through the terrible reality which it heralded. She beheld Arthur Stanley on the scaffold about to receive the sentence of the law-the block, the axe, the executioner with his arm raised, and apparently already deluged in blood-the gaping crowds-all the fearful ap purtenances of an execution were distinctly traced, and she thought she sprung towards Stanley, who clasped her in his arms, and the executioner, instead of endeavouring to part them, smiled grimly as rejoicing in having two victims instead of one; and as he smiled, the countenance seemed to change from being entirely unknown, to the sneering features of the hated Don Luis Garcia. She seemed to cling yet closer to Stanley, and knelt with him to receive the blow; when, at that moment, the scaffold shook violently, as by the shock of an earthquake, a dark chasm yawned beneath their feet, in the centre of which stood the spectral figure of her husband, his countenance ghastly and stern, and his arm upraised as beckoning her to join him. And then he spoke; but his voice sounded unlike his own: "Marie Henriquez Morales! awake, arise, and follow!" And with such extraordinary clearness did the words fall, that she started up in terror, believing they must have been spoken by her side-and they were! they might have mingled with, perhaps even created her dream. She still lay on her couch; but it seemed to have sunk down through the very floor of the apartment she had occupied, and at its foot stood a figure, who, with upraised arm, held before her a wooden cross. His cowl was closely drawn, and a black robe, of the coarsest serge, was secured round his waist by a hempen cord. Whether he had indeed spoken the words she had heard in her dream Marie could not tell, for they were not repeated. She saw him approach her, and she felt his strong grasp lift her from the couch, which sprung up, by the touch of some secret spring, to the place whence it had descended; and she heard no more. CHAP. XXIII. "ISABEL.-Ha! little honour to be much believed, to extend far and wide, beneath the very bowels of the earth. It was lighted with torches, but so dimly, that the gloom exaggerated the horrors, which the partial light disclosed. Instruments of torture of any and every kind-the rack, the wheel, the screw, the cord, and fire-groups of unearthly-looking figures, all clad in the coarse black serge and hempen belt; some with their faces concealed by hideous masks, and others enveloped in the cowls, through which only the eyes could be distinguished, the figure of the cross upon the breast, and under that emblem of Divine peace, inflicting such horrible tortures on their fellow-men that the pen shrinks from their delineation. Nor was it the mere instruments of torture Marie beheld: she saw them in actual use; she heard the shrieks and groans of the hapless victims, at times mingled with the brutal leers and jests of their fiendish tormentors; she seemed to take in at one view, every species of torture that could be inflicted, every pain that could be endured; and yet, comparatively, but a few of the actual sufferers were visible. The shrillest sounds of agony came from the gloomy arches, in which no object could be distinguished. Whatever suffering meets the sight, it does not so exquisitely affect the brain as that which reaches it through the ear. At the former the heart may bleed and turn sick; but at the latter the brain seems, for the moment, wrought into phrenzy; and, even though personally in safety, it is scarcely possible to restrain the same sounds from bursting forth. How then must those shrill sounds of human agony, have fallen on the hapless Marie, recognizing as she did with the rapidity of thought, in the awful scene around her, the main hall of that mysterious and terrible tribunal, whose existence from her Or, with an outstretch'd throat, I'll tell the world earliest infancy, had been impressed upon her Aloud what man thou art. "ANGELO.-Who will believe thee? My unsoil'd name, th' austereness of my life, SHAKSPEARE. When Marie recovered consciousness, she found herself in a scene so strange, so terrific, that it appeared as if she must have been borne many miles from Segovia, so utterly impossible did it seem, that such awful orgies could be enacted within any short distance of the Sovereigns' Palace, or their subjects' homes. She stood in the centre of a large vaulted subterranean Hall, which, from the numerous arched entrances to divers passages and smaller chambers that opened on every side, appeared *I may be accused in this scene, of too closely imitating a somewhat similar occurrence in Anne of Ghierstern. Such seeming plagiarism was scarcely possible to be avoided when the superstitious proceedings of the behmic tribunal of Germany and the secret Inquisition of Spain are represented by history as so very similar. mind, as a double incentive to guard the secret of her faith; that very Inquisition, from which her own grandfather, Julien Henriquez, had fled, and in which the less fortunate grandfather of her slaughtered husband, had been tortured and burnt. For a second she stood mute and motionless, as turned to stone; then, pressing both hands tightly on her temples, she sunk down at the feet of her conductor, and sought in words to beseech his mercy; but her white lips gave vent to no sound save a shriek, so wild that it seemed, for the moment, to drown all other sorrows, and startle even the human fiends around her. Her conductor himself started back; but quickly recovering "Fool!" he muttered, as he rudely raised her. "I have no power to aid thee; come before the Superior we must all obey-ask him, implore him, for mercy, not me." He bore her roughly to a recess, divided off drapery, in which sat the Grand Inquisitor and at the upper end of the hall, by a thick black his two colleagues. One or two familiars were behind them, and a secretary sat near a table covered with black cloth, and on which were several writing implements. All wore masks of black crape, so thick that not a feature could be answer-a concession, he said, in a tone far more terrifying to Marie than even the horrors around her, only granted in consideration of her age and sex. None opposed the sentence; and she was conducted to a close and narrow cell, in which no light could penetrate save through a narrow chink in the roof. How many days and nights thus passed the hapless prisoner could not have told, for there was nothing to mark the hours. Her food was delivered to her by means of a turn-screw in the wall, so that not even the sight of a fellowcreature could disturb her solitude, or give her the faintest hope of exciting human pity. Her sole hope, her sole refuge, was in prayer; and, oh! how blessed was the calm, the confidence it gave. So scanty was her allowance of food, that more than once the thought crossed her, whether or not, Death by famine would be her allotted doom; and human nature shuddered, but the spirit did not quail! Hour after hour passed, she knew not whether it was night or day, when the gloom of her dungeon was suddenly illumined; she knew not at first how or whence, so noiseless was the entrance of the intruder, but gradually she traced the light to a small lamp held in the hand of a shrouded individual, whom she recognised at once. There was one fearful thrill of mortal dread, one voiceless cry for strength from Heaven, and Marie Morales stood before Don Luis erect and calm, and firm as in her hour of pride. discerned with sufficient clearness for recognition, ness, to allow time for reflection on her final elsewhere; yet, one glance on the stern, motionless figure, designated as the Grand Inquisitor, sufficed to bid every drop of blood recede from the prisoner's heart with human terror, at the very same moment, that it endowed the woman with such supernatural fortitude that her very form seemed to dilate, and her large eye and lovely mouth expressed-if it could be, in such a scene and such an hour-unutterable scorn. Antipathy, even as love, will pierce disguise; and that one glance, lit up with almost bewildering light, in the prisoner's mind, link after link of what had before been impenetrable mystery. Her husband's discovery of her former love for Arthur; his murder; the suspicion thrown on Stanley; her own summons as witness against him; her present danger; all, all were traced to one individual, one still working and most guilty passion, which she, in her gentle purity and holy strength, had scorned. She could not be deceived-the mystery that surrounded him was solved-antipathy explained; and Marie's earthly fate lay in Don Louis Garcia's hands! The Grand Inquisitor read in that glance that he was known; and for a brief minute a strange, an incomprehensible sensation, thrilled through him. It could scarcely have been fear, when one gesture of his hand would destine that frail being to torture, imprisonment, and death; and yet never before in his whole life of wickedness, had he experienced such a feeling as he did at that moment beneath a Woman's holy gaze. Anger at himself for the sensation, momentary as it was, increased the virulence of other passions; but then was not the hour for their betrayal. In low, deep tones, he commenced the mockery of a trial. That her avowal of her faith would elude torture, by at once condemning her to the flames, was disregarded. She was formally accused of blasphemy and heresy, and threatened with the severest vengeance of the church which she had reviled; but that this case of personal guilt would be mercifully laid aside for the present, for still more important considerations. Was her late husband, they demanded, of the same blaspheming creed as herself? And a list of names, comprising some of the highest families of Spain, was read out and laid before her, with the stern command to affix a mark against all who, like herself, had relapsed into the foul heresy of their ancestors-to do this, or the torture should wring it from her. But the weakness of humanity had passed; and so calm, so collected, so firm, was the prisoner's resolute refusal to answer either question, that the familiar to whom she had clung for mercy, looked at her with wonder. Again and again she was questioned; instruments of torture were brought before her-one of the first and slightest used-more to terrify than actually to torture, for that was not yet the Grand Inquisitor's design; and still she was firm, calm, unalterable in her resolution to refuse reply. And then Don Luis spoke of mercy, which was to consist of imprisonment in solitude and dark Garcia now attempted no concealment. His mask had been cast aside, and his features gleamed without any effort at hypocritical restraint, in all the unholy passions of his soul. We will not pollute our pages with transcribing the fearful words of passions contending in their nature, yet united in their object, with which the pure ear of his prisoner was first assailed-still lingering desire, yet hate, wrath, fury, that she should dare still oppose, and scorn, and loathe him; rage with himself, that, strive as he might, even he was baffled by the angel purity around her; longing to wreak upon her every torture that his hellish office gave him unchecked power to inflict, yet fearing that, if he did so, death would release her ere his object was attained; all strove and raged within him, making his bosom a very hell, from which there was no retracting, yet whose very flames incited deeper fury, towards the being whom he believed their cause. "And solitude, darkness, privation-have they so little availed that thou wilt tempt far fiercer suffering?" he at length demanded, strug gling to veil his fury in a quiet, concentrated tone. "Thou hast but neared the threshold of the tortures which one look, one gesture of my hand, can gather around thee; tortures, which the strongest sinew, the firmest mind, have been unable to sustain-how will that weakened frame endure ?" "It can but die," replied the prisoner, “as nobler and better ones have done before me!" |