Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 9

"To confess needs a sin. I have none but those I have told the priest.

But I know my accuser--'tis Gabriel da Costa, a sober and studious young senhor with no ear for a jest, who did not understand that I was rallying the market-woman upon the clearance of her stock by these stinking heretics. I am no more a Jew than Da Costa himself." But even as he spoke, Gabriel knew that they were brother-Jews--he and the prisoner.

"Thou hypocrite!" he cried involuntarily.

"Ha!" said the secretary, his eye beaming triumph.

"This persistent denial will avail thee naught," said the judge, "'twill only bring thee torture."

"Torture an innocent man! 'Tis monstrous!" the physician protested.

"Any tyro in the logics will tell thee that the onus of proving lies with the accuser."

"Tus.h.!.+ tus.h.!.+ This is no University. Executioner, do thy work."

The other masked man seized the old physician and stripped him to the skin.

"Confess!" said the judge warningly.

"If I confessed I was a Jew, I should be doubly a bad Christian, inasmuch as I should be lying."

"None of thy metaphysical quibbles. If thou expirest under the torture (let the secretary take note), thy death shall not be laid at the door of the Holy Office, but of thine own obstinacy."

"Christ will avenge His martyrs," said Dom Diego, with so sublime a mien that Gabriel doubted whether, after all, instinct had not misled him.

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ns.

"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 h.e.l.l-hounds must be my excuse."

Dom Diego cast upon him a look of surprise and suspicion.

"The hounds may follow a wrong scent; but they are of heaven, not h.e.l.l," he said rebukingly. "If I suffered wrongly, 'tis Christian to suffer, and Christian to forgive."

"Then forgive me," said Gabriel, mazed by this persistent masquerading, "for 'twas I who innocently made thee suffer. Rather would I have torn out my tongue than injured a fellow Jew."

"I am no Jew," cried the physician fiercely.

"But why deny it to me when I tell thee I am one?"

"'In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird,'" quoted Dom Diego angrily. "Thou art as good a Christian as I,--and a worse fowler. A Jew, indeed, who knows not of the herbs! Nay, the bird-lime is smeared too thick, and there is no cord between the holes of the net."

"True, I am neither Jew nor Christian," said the young man sadly. "I was bred a Christian, but my soul is torn with questionings. See, I trust my life in thy hand."

But Dom Diego remained long obdurate, even when Gabriel made the candid admission that he was the masked man who had cried "Hypocrite!"

in the torture-vault; 'twas not till, limping from the bed, he had satisfied himself that the young man had posted no auditors without, that he said at last: "Well, 'tis my word against thine. Mayhap I am but feigning so as to draw thee out." Then, winking, he took down the effigy of the Christ and thrust it into a drawer, and filling two wine-gla.s.ses from a decanter that stood at the bedside, he cried jovially, "Come! Confusion to the Holy Office!"

A great weight seemed lifted off the young man's breast. He smiled as he quaffed the rich wine.

"Meseems thou hast already wrought confusion to the Holy Office."

"Ha! ha!" laughed the physician, expanding in the glow of the wine.

"Yea, the fox hath escaped from the trap, but not with a whole skin."

"No, alas! How feel thy wounds?"

"I meant not my corporeal skin," said the physician, though he rubbed it with rueful recollection. "I meant the skin whereof my purse was made. To prove my loyalty to Holy Church I offered her half my estate, and the proof was accepted. 'Twas the surgeon of the Inquisition who gave me the hint. He is one of us!"

"What! a Jew!" cried Gabriel, thunderstruck.

"Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+ or we shall have him replaced by an enemy. 'Twas his fellow-feeling to me, both as a brother and a medicus, that made him declare me on the point of death when I was still as l.u.s.ty as a false credo. For the rest, I had sufficient science to hold in my breath while the clown tied me with cords, else had I been too straitened to breathe. But thou needest a biscuit with thy wine. Ianthe!"

A pretty little girl stepped in from an adjoining room, her dark eyes drooping shyly at the sight of the stranger.

"Thou seest I have a witness against thee," laughed the physician; "while the evidence against me which the fools could not find we will eat up. The remainder of the _Motsas_, daughterling!" And drawing a key from under his pillow, he handed it to her. "Soft, now, my little one, and hide them well."

When the child had gone, the father grumbled, over another gla.s.s of wine, at having to train her to a double life. "But it sharpens the wits," said he. "Ianthe should grow up subtle as the secret cupboard within a cupboard which she is now opening. But a woman scarcely needs the training." He was yet laughing over his j.a.pe when Ianthe returned, and produced from under a napkin some large, thick biscuits, peculiarly reticulated. Gabriel looked at them curiously.

"Knowest thou not Pa.s.sover cakes?" asked Dom Diego.

Gabriel shook his head.

"Thou hast never eaten unleavened bread?"

"Unleavened bread! Ah, I was reading thereof in the Pentateuch but yesterday. Stay, is it not one of the Inquisition's tests? But I figured it not thus."

"'Tis the immemorial pattern, smuggled in from Amsterdam," said the wine-flushed physician, throwing caution to the winds. "Taste! 'Tis more palatable than the Host."

"Is Amsterdam, then, a Jewish town?"

"Nay, but 'tis the Jerusalem of the West. Little Holland, since she shook off Papistry, hath no persecuting polity like the other nations.

And natural enough, for 'tis more a s.h.i.+p than a country. Half my old friends have drifted thither--'tis a sad drain for our old Portuguese community."