Columbus E-Book

Sabatini Rafael

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This is Sabatini's romantic adventure depicting the life of Christopher Columbus at the Spanish court, his voyages across the Atlantic Ocean in which he discovered the Americas and his relationship with the mother of his second son Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. The story is very much in the style of Captain Blood and portray Columbus as a swashbuckler.

Leseprobe

Columbus

by Raphael Sabatini

First published in 1942

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

[email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Columbus

a Romance

by

CONTENTS

PAGE

I.

THE WAYFARER

7

II.

THE PRIOR OF LA RABIDA

11

III.

THE SPONSOR

18

IV.

THE NEGLECTED SUITOR

24

V.

THE DOGE

38

VI.

LA GITANILLA

43

VII.

INQUISITORS OF STATE

49

VIII.

BROTHER AND SISTER

56

IX.

THE DECOY

59

X.

THE RESCUE

63

XI.

THE AGENTS

69

XII.

AT ZAGARTE’S

73

XIII.

IN THE WEB

84

XIV.

RE-ENTER DON RAMON

92

XV.

THE LEGACY

100

XVI.

THE EVE OF CORPUS CHRISTI

111

XVII.

CORPUS CHRISTI

117

XVIII.

THE JUNTA

121

XIX.

THE REPORT

133

XX.

THE GIPSIES

146

XXI.

THE MARCHIONESS

154

XXII.

REHABILITATION

162

XXIII.

THE CUP OF TRIBULATION

165

XXIV.

THE FLIGHT

173

XXV.

TERMS

179

XXVI.

THE SEAMEN OF PALOS

195

XXVII.

DEPARTURE

209

XXVIII.

THE VOYAGE

216

XXIX.

THE ORDEAL

233

XXX.

THE LANDFALL

242

XXXI.

THE DISCOVERY

245

XXXII.

MARTIN ALONSO

253

XXXIII.

HOMEWARD BOUND

263

XXXIV.

THE HOMECOMING

269

XXXV.

THE RETURN OF PABLO

272

XXXVI.

TE DEUM

288

XXXVII.

THE ZENITH

293

XXXVIII.

SATISFACTION

297

CHAPTER ITHE WAYFARER

A man and a boy climbed the slope from the estuary of the Tinto by a sandy path that wound through a straggling growth of pine-trees. It was the eventide of a winter’s day at about the time that the Spanish Sovereigns were moving to the investment of Granada, which informs you that these events fell out in the closing decade of the fifteenth century.

From the long line of dunes below them, the Arenas Gordas, stretching away for miles towards Cadiz, the sand was tossed and whirled like spindrift by a bitter wind that blew from the south-west. Beyond, the storm-lashed Atlantic was grey under grey skies.

The man was well above the common height, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, fashioned in lines of great athletic vigour. From under a plain round hat his hair, red, thick and glossy, hung to the nape of his neck. Grey eyes shone clear in a weathered face whose patrician mould and stamp of pride were at odds with the shabbiness of his wear. A surcoat of homespun, once black but faded now to a mournful greenish hue, clothed him to the knees, and was caught about his middle by a belt of plain leather. From this a dagger hung on his right hip and a leather scrip on his left thigh. His hose was of coarse black wool; he was roughly shod, and he carried his meagre gear bundled in a cloak and slung from his shoulder by a staff of quince-wood. His age was little beyond the middle thirties.

The boy, a sturdy child of seven or eight, clinging to his right hand, looked up to ask: “Is it much farther?”

He spoke in Portuguese, and was answered by his sire in the same tongue, on a note that was half-bitter, half-whimsical.

“Now, God avail me, child, that is a question I’ve been asking myself these ten years, and never found the answer yet.” Then, abruptly changing to the commonplace, he added: “No, no. See. We are almost there.”

A turn of the path had brought into view a long, low building, irregularly quadrangular, starkly white against the black wall of pine-trees that screened it from the east. From the heart of it sprouted upwards like a burnt-red mushroom the circular tiled roof of a chapel.

“For to-night that should be the end of our journey. If I am fortunate, Diego, it may also be a beginning.” He resumed his whimsical tone, as if thinking aloud rather than addressing another. “The Prior, I am told, is a man of learning who commands the ear of a Queen, having once been her confessor. To confess a woman is commonly to hold her afterwards in a measure of subjection. One of the lesser mysteries of our mysterious life. But we walk delicately, asking nothing. In this world, my child, to ask is to be denied and avoided. It’s a lesson you’ll learn later. In order to possess what you lack, study to let none suspect that you seek it. Display to them, rather, the advantages to themselves of persuading you to accept it. They will then be eager to bestow. It is too subtle, Diego, for your innocent mind. Indeed, for long it eluded even mine, which is far from innocent. We go to test it now upon this good Franciscan.”

It is among the obiter dicta of the good Franciscan of whom he spoke, Frey Juan Perez, who was Prior of the Convent of La Rabida, that the temper of a man’s soul is commonly displayed in his voice. It is possible that Frey Juan’s was more subtly attuned than the common ear. It is possible that his wide experience as a confessor—in which capacity he commonly heard without seeing, so that his consciousness would be centred in his hearing—had led him to discover a definite affinity between the spiritual qualities and the tone and pitch of voice of a penitent whose countenance was rendered invisible to him by the screen of the confessional.

Be that as it may, certain it is that but for this settled conviction of Frey Juan’s our wayfarer would not so easily have attained his ends.

The Prior was pacing the courtyard at about the hour of compline, which is to say at sunset. The Borgia Pope, whose special devotion to the Virgin was to originate the Angelus, had not yet ascended St. Peter’s throne. As Frey Juan paced, breviary in hand, reading with moving lips, as is canonically prescribed, the office of the day, his attention was disturbed by a voice addressing the lay-brother who kept the gate.

“Of your charity, my brother, a little bread and a cup of water for this weary child.”

There was nothing in the actual words, commonplace enough at a convent doorway, to claim the Prior’s notice; but the voice, and, more than the voice, the contrast between the conscious pride that rang through its veiling huskiness and the humility of the request it uttered, might have compelled the attention of an ear even less sensitive than Frey Juan’s. Its accent was definitely foreign, and the dignity of its intonation gathered increase perhaps from the precision with which a cultured man must be expressing himself in a language other than his own.

Frey Juan, whom we are not to acquit of a very human curiosity, especially in any matter that promised distraction from the gentle monotony of life at La Rabida, closed his breviary upon his forefinger, and stepped round an angle of the courtyard to view the speaker.

At a glance he recognized how perfectly the voice became the man whom he beheld. He discovered power spiritual and physical as much in his shapely height and upright carriage as in his shaven face with its strong line of jaw and aquiline nose. But it was chiefly his eyes that held the Prior: full eyes of a clear grey, luminous as those of a visionary or a mystic, eyes whose steady gaze few men could find it easy to support. He had set down his bundle on the stone bench at the gate. But neither that nor the rest of the stranger’s shabby details could obscure in Frey Juan’s discerning scrutiny the man’s inherent distinction. Beside him the child, on whose behalf he sought that meagre hospitality, gazed upwards in round-eyed wistfulness at the approaching Prior.

Frey Juan advanced with a clatter of loose sandals, a barrel of a man in a grey frock. His face was long and pallid, with a deal of loose flesh about it, but made genial by the humour in the eyes and about the heavy-lipped mouth. He greeted the stranger with a kindly smile, and in formal Latin, to test perhaps his scholarship, or perhaps his faith, for that aquiline nose above the full lips need not be Christian.

“Pax Domini sit tecum.”

To which the wayfarer answered formally, with a grave inclination of his proud head: “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

“You are a traveller,” quoth the Prior unnecessarily, whilst the lay-brother stood aside in self-effacement.

“A traveller. Newly landed here from Lisbon.”

“Do you go far to-night?”

“Only as far as Huelva.”

“Only?” Frey Juan raised his thick brows. “It is a good ten miles. And by night. Do you know the way?”

The wayfarer smiled. “Direction should suffice for one trained to find his way over the trackless ocean.”

The Prior caught a vaunting note in the answer. It prompted his next question. “A great traveller?”

“Judge if I may so describe myself. I’ve sailed as far as northern Thule and southern Guinea, and eastwards to the Golden Horn.”

The Prior sucked in his breath, and scanned the man more shrewdly, as if suspicious of a claim so vast. The scrutiny must have reassured him, for at once he grew cordial.

“That is to have touched the very boundaries of the world.”

“Of the known world, perhaps. But not of the actual world. Not by many a thousand miles.”

“How can you assert that, never having seen it?”

“How can your paternity assert that there is a Heaven and a Hell, never having seen them?”

“By faith and revelation,” was the grave answer.

“Just so. And in my case, to faith and revelation I may add cosmography and mathematics.”

“Ah!” Frey Juan’s prominent eyes considered him with a deepening interest. “Come you in, sir, in God’s name. It is draughty here, and the evening chill. Close the gate, Innocencio. Come you in, sir. We were shamed if we had no better hospitality than that of your modest prayer.” He took the stranger by the sleeve to draw him on. “What is your name, sir?”

“Colon. Cristobal Colon.”

Again Frey Juan’s shrewd eyes scrutinized the Semitic lines of that lofty countenance. There were New Christians of that name, and he could call to mind more than one consigned by the Holy Office to the fire as relapsed judaizers.

“Your way of life?” he asked.

“I am a mariner and a cosmographer by trade.”

“A cosmographer!” The tone implied that the Prior’s interest was increased by the description; as, indeed, it was; for Frey Juan was a scholar whose wide studies included, as Colon had been informed, the provoking mysteries of cosmography.

A bell began to toll. Lights from the leaded gothic windows that overlooked the courtyard, the windows of the chapel, beat dimly upon the lingering daylight.

“It is the hour of vespers,” said Frey Juan. “So I must leave you. Innocencio will conduct you to our guest-chamber. We shall see each other again at supper. Meanwhile we shall supply the needs of your child. It is understood that you spend the night with us.”

“You are very good to a stranger, Sir Prior,” was Colon’s acknowledgment of an invitation upon which he had counted, and for which he had angled in his vaunting self-description.

Frey Juan, no less disingenuous, was content to answer by a wave of deprecation. For kindly man though he was, it was not kindness only that prompted the hospitality. If he knew his world, this was no ordinary traveller. There might be profit in talk with such a man; and if not profit, at least entertainment such as came too rarely into Frey Juan’s present claustral life.

The lay-brother held a door; but Colon hung back, to express himself in terms that reassured the Prior on the score of his faith.

“To rest is less urgent than to give thanks to God and Our Lady for having led my steps to so hospitable a house. By your leave, father, I will go with you to vespers. For the tender little one it is different. If our brother will take him meanwhile in his care, it will deepen my obligation.”

He stooped to speak to the child, who, born and bred in Portugal, had stood intent but puzzled by this talk in unknown Castilian. What he said, holding the promise of refreshment, sent the lad eagerly to the lay-brother’s side. From the gothic portal of the chapel his father watched him go, with eyes that were tender. Then he turned abruptly.

“I keep your reverence.”

With a kindly smile the Prior waved him on into the little chapel of Our Lady of Rabida, whose image enjoyed miraculous fame as a prophylactic against madness.

The bell ceased. The friars were already in the choir, and leaving Colon in the empty nave, Frey Juan went on and up to his place.

CHAPTER IITHE PRIOR OF LA RABIDA

“Dixit dominus domino meo: sede a dextris meis.”

The Gregorian chant swelled up, and Frey Juan, peering through the luminous mist set up by the tapers into the twilight beyond, was gratified to see his kneeling guest in an attitude of rapt devotion.

Anon, because of the interest aroused in him, the Prior was not content that supper should be served to the stranger in the bare hall where charity was dispensed to casual wayfarers, but, treating him as an honoured guest, bade him to his own table.

Colon accepted the invitation as his due, without surprise or hesitation, and the brethren ranged at the trestles set against the walls along the refectory’s length, furtively observed this meanly garbed stranger striding beside the Prior with the proud carriage of a prince, and asked themselves what hidalgo might be honouring their house.

Up that long bleak hall Frey Juan conducted him to the Prior’s table on a shallow dais across the end of it, surmounted by a fresco of the Last Supper so crudely painted as to be presumed the work of one of the friars. Another fresco no less crude, of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, adorned the ceiling, now dimly revealed in the light of a six-beaked oil lamp suspended from it. For the rest two Dukes of Medina Celi, painted in life-size and as if their limbs and trunks and heads were made of wood, scowled at each other across the hall from walls that were coated with the whitewash which the Arab had brought to Spain. The windows, square and barred, were set along the northern wall, at a height which admitting light afforded no distracting view of the outer world.

The food was plain but good: fish fresh from the port below in a pungent stew, followed by a broth of veal. There was wheaten bread and a sharp but wholesome wine of Palos, from the vineyards on the western slopes beyond the pinewoods.

They ate to the drone of a friar’s voice, reading from a stone pulpit in the southern wall, a chapter from a Vita et Gesta of St. Francis.

Colon was seated on the Prior’s right with the almoner on his other side. On Frey Juan’s left the Sub-Prior and the master of the novices completed the group at the Prior’s table. Seen through the misty light from the candlebranch that graced it, the grey lines of the minorites below looked ghostly in the crepuscular gloom enshrouding them.

When at last the reading ceased they stirred into life, and in that hour of relaxation a subdued hum of talk arose. To the Prior’s table came a dish of fruit—sleek oranges, dried figs of Smyrna and some half-withered apples, besides a flagon of Malmsey. Frey Juan brimmed a cup for his guest, perhaps with intent to loosen a tongue that should have much to tell. After that, as he still sat bemused, the Prior ventured to spur him by a direct question.

“And so, sir, having voyaged far and wide you are now come to rest here in Huelva.” Thick-lipped, he lisped a little in his speech.

Colon roused himself. “To rest?” His tone derided the suggestion. “This is but a stage in a new journey. I may stay some days there, with a relative of my wife, who is now in the peace of God. Then I go forth again on my travels.” And he added almost under his breath: “Like Cartaphilus, and perhaps as vainly.”

“Cartaphilus?” The Prior searched his memory. “I do not think I have heard of him.”

“The cobbler of Jerusalem who spat upon Our Lord, and who is doomed to walk the earth until the Saviour comes again.”

Frey Juan showed him a shocked countenance. “Sir, that is a bitter comparison.”

“Worse. It is a blasphemy wrenched from me by impatience. Am I not named Cristobal? Is there no omen to hearten me in such a name? Cristobal. Christum ferens. Bearer of Christ. That is my mission. For that was I born. For that am I chosen. To bear the knowledge of Him to lands as yet unknown.”

The Prior’s eyes were round with inquiry. But before he could give it utterance, the Sub-Prior on his left inclined his head to murmur to him. Frey Juan assented by a nod, and a general rising followed for the “Deo gratias” which the Sub-Prior pronounced.

Colon, however, was not to go with the departing friars. As they trooped out, Frey Juan resumed his seat in the high chair, and with a hand on his guest’s sleeve drew him down to sit again beside him. “We need not hasten,” he said, and refilled Colon’s cup with the sweet Malmsey.

“You spoke, sir, of lands as yet unknown. What lands be these? Have you in mind the Atlantis of Plato, or the Island of the Seven Cities?”

Colon’s eyes were lowered so that Frey Juan might not detect their sudden gleam at the very question he desired, the question that suggested that the scholarly friar who might influence a queen was caught already in the web of interest his guest was spinning.

“Your reverence jests. Yet, was Plato’s Atlantis such a fable? May not the Fortunate Isles and the Azores be remnants of it? And may there not be still other, greater remnants in seas as yet uncharted?”

“These are, then, your unknown lands?”

“No. I have no such speculative things in mind. I seek the great empire in the west, which I know to be of more definite existence, and with which I will endow the crown that may be given grace to support my quest.”

A sudden vehemence in him first startled the Prior; then its histrionic note drew a smile to his pursy lips. He scoffed good-naturedly.

“You know of the existence of these lands. You know, you say. You have seen them, then?”

“With the eyes of the soul. With the eyes of the intellect with which God’s grace has endowed me to the end that I may spread in them the knowledge of Him. So clear my vision, reverend sir, that I have charted these lands.”

It was not for a man of Frey Juan’s faith to mock at visions. Yet of visionaries, being a practical man, he was naturally suspicious.

“I am, myself, a humble student of cosmography and philosophy, yet I may be a dullard. For such knowledge as I possess does not explain how that may be charted which has not been seen.”

“Ptolemy had not seen the world he charted.”

“But he possessed evidence to guide him.”

“So do I. And more than evidence. Your paternity will admit that it is by logical inference from the known that we proceed to discover the unknown. Were it not so philosophy must stand arrested.”

“In matters of the spirit that may be true. In matters physical I am not so clear, and I must prefer evidence to imaginings however logically founded.”

“Then let me urge such evidence as exists. Storms blowing from the west have borne to the shores of Porto Santo oddly carved timbers that have never known the touch of iron, great pines such as do not grow in the Azores, and huge canes, so monstrous that they will hold gallons of wine in a single section. Some of these may be seen in Lisbon now, where they are preserved. And there is more. Much more.”

He paused a moment, as if collecting himself; actually, in order to observe his host. Discerning a rapt attention in that full pallid face, he sat forward, and began his exposition, his tone quiet, level and precise.

“Two hundred years ago a Venetian traveller, Marco Polo by name, journeyed farther east than any European before or since. He reached Cathay and the dominions of the Grand Khan, a monarch of fabulous wealth.”

“I know, I know,” Frey Juan interposed. “I possess a copy of his book. I have mentioned that these are matters of which I, too, am a humble student.”

“You possess his book!” There was a sudden eagerness in Colon’s face that brought to it an increase of youth. “That spares me a deal. I did not know,” he lied, “that I talk to one already enlightened.”

“You are not to flatter me, my son,” said Frey Juan, not innocent perhaps of irony. “What did you find in Marco Polo that I have lacked the wit to discover?”

“Your paternity will recall the allusion to the Island of Zipangu, known by the people of Mangi—the farthest point he, himself, had reached—to be situated fifteen hundred miles farther to the east.” Frey Juan’s nod encouraged him to continue. “You will remember the fabulous abundance of the gold in those regions. Its sources, he says, are inexhaustible. So common is the metal that the very roof of the king’s palace is covered with plates of it, as we cover ours with lead. He tells us, too, of the great abundance of precious stones and pearls, and in particular of a pink pearl of great size.”

“Vanitas vanitate,” the Prior deprecated.

“Not, by your leave, if well applied. Not if employed for the furtherance of worthy ends. Wealth is not mere vanity then; and here is wealth beyond all European dreams.”

The very thought of it seemed to plunge him into a state of contemplation from which he was impatiently aroused by Frey Juan.

“But what has this Zipangu of Marco Polo to do with your discoveries? You spoke of lands across the western ocean. Assuming all the eastern marvels of Marco Polo to be true, how are they evidence of your western lands?”

“Your paternity believes the earth to be a sphere?” He took an orange from the dish, and held it up. “Like this.”

“That is now the general belief among philosophers.”

“And you accept, of course, the division of its circumference into three hundred and sixty degrees?”

“A mathematical convention. That offers no difficulty. And then?”

“Of these three hundred and sixty degrees the known world includes but some two hundred and eighty. That is a fact upon which all cosmographers agree. Thus, the known lands from the westernmost point, say Lisbon, to the extreme of the charted eastern lands, leave still some eighty degrees—nearly a quarter of the earth’s total—to be accounted for.”

The Prior made a dubious lip. “We are told that it is all a waste of water, so storm-tossed and wild that there can be no hope to navigate it.”

Colon’s eyes flashed scorn. “A tale of weaklings who dare not make the attempt. There were also fables of an impassable belt of flame along the equinoctial line, a superstition which Portuguese navigators along the coast of Africa have derided.

“Give me your attention, reverend sir. Here, then, is Lisbon.” He marked a point upon the orange. “And here the uttermost point of Cathay: a vast distance of some fourteen thousand miles by my own measurement of the degree, which on this parallel I compute to be of fifty miles.

“Now if instead of travelling east by land, we travel west by water, thus . . .” and his finger now went leftwards round the orange from the point where he had placed Lisbon, “. . . we come, within eighty degrees, to the same charted point. Your paternity will perceive that it is not merely a paradox to say that we may reach the east by travelling west. To the golden Zipangu of Polo the distance by the west cannot be much above two thousand miles. Thus far we go by evidence. Inference justifies the belief that Zipangu is by no means the farthest limit of the Indies. It is merely as far as the Venetian’s knowledge went. There must be other islands, other lands, an empire that awaits possession.”

With such ardour had he made his exposition that Frey Juan was touched by something of his fire. The simple homely demonstration with the orange had disclosed one of those obvious facts which until indicated can elude the acutest mind. The Prior had been swept almost helplessly along by the strong current of the young cosmographer’s enthusiasm. But here of a sudden he perceived an obstacle, to which his sanity must cling lest he be carried utterly away.

“Wait. Wait. You say there must be other lands. That is to go farther than I dare follow you, my son. It is no more than your belief, a belief in which you may be deceived.”

Colon’s exaltation was not cooled. Rather, being fanned, it flamed more hotly. “If it were only that, it would not be an inference. And a well-founded inference your paternity shall acknowledge it. It is based no longer on mathematics, but on theology. We have it upon the authority of the Prophet Esdras that the world is six parts land to one of water. Apply that here, and tell me where I am at fault. Or let it pass unheeded. Leave out of account my imagined lands, which would halve the distance.” He dropped the orange back into its dish. “It still remains that the Indies lie within two thousand miles of us to westward.”

“And is that naught?” The Prior was suddenly aghast at the vision that rose before his eyes. “Two thousand miles of empty waters holding perils known to God alone. The very thought is terrifying. Where is the courage that would so adventure itself into the unknown?”

“It is here.” Colon smote his breast. He sat erect, all pride, the glow of his eyes fanatical. “The Lord, Who with so palpable a hand opened my understanding, so that reason, mathematics and charts are as naught to my inspiration, opened up also my desire and endowed me with the spirit necessary to an instrument of the Divine Will.”

The force in him was one to bludgeon reason, the confidence a fire in which to consume all doubt. Frey Juan, already won by Colon’s cosmography and logic, found himself now subdued into participation in the man’s fanatical assurance.

“In my vanity—for which God forgive me—I have thought that I had some learning. But you reveal me to myself a mere groper in these mysteries.” He hung his head in thought for a moment. Colon, sipping his Malmsey, watched him like a cat.

Suddenly the Prior asked: “Whence are you, sir? For from your speech it is clear that you are not of Spain.”

Colon hesitated before giving an answer that was yet no answer. “I am from the Court of his Highness King John of Portugal, and on my way to France.”

“To France? What do you seek there?”

“I do not seek. I offer. I offer this empire of which I have spoken.” He alluded to it as to something already in his possession.

“But to France?” Frey Juan’s face was blank. “Why to France?”

“Once I offered it to Spain, and was left to the judgment of a churchman, which was like sending me to a mariner for a judgment on theology. Then I went to Portugal, and wasted time upon learned dullards whose armour of prejudice I had no arts to pierce. There, as in Spain, there was none to sponsor me, and the lesson I have learnt is that without sponsoring a man but wastes his time in seeking the ear of the rulers of these kingdoms. There is no land upon which I would more gladly bestow these treasures than upon Spain. There is no sovereign I would more gladly serve than Isabel of Castile. But how am I to reach her Highness? If I commanded an interest powerful enough to deserve her ear, intelligent enough to perceive the value of what I bring, and persuasive enough to induce her to receive me, then . . . why then I should be content to stay. But where am I to find such a friend?”

Absently the Prior’s forefinger was tracing a circle on the oaken table with a drop of spilled wine.

Covertly watching him, after a momentary pause, Colon answered his own question. “I command no such friend in Spain. That is why I seek the King of France. If I fail with him, too, then I shall challenge fortune in England. You begin to perceive, perhaps, why I liken myself to the errant Jew, Cartaphilus.”

Still the Prior’s forefinger continued its absent-minded tracing.

“Who knows?” he murmured at last.

“Who knows what, reverend sir?”

“Eh? Ah! Whether you are wise. Sleep brings counsel, they say. Let us sleep on this, and talk again.”

Colon was content to leave it there. Not much had been achieved, perhaps, and yet enough to give him hope that he had not wasted time in coming to La Rabida.

CHAPTER IIITHE SPONSOR

Nothing in years of his peaceful conventual life had kindled such a fever in Frey Juan as the words and person of Cristobal Colon. He spent, as he afterwards confessed, a night in which distracting wakeful thoughts alternated with fantastic dreams of golden-roofed Zipangu—by which name it is universally accepted that Marco Polo designates Japan—and of glittering jewelled islands dense with monstrous canes that gushed forth wine when tapped. It distressed his Spanish soul that empire over such lands should be lost to the Sovereigns, who had such need of treasure to repair the ravages of their war against the Infidel. His feelings in the matter were at once patriotic and personal. It was natural that having once been the confessor of Queen Isabel, his devotion to her was not merely that of a loyal subject; it included an affectionate paternal regard, reciprocated in her, he liked to believe, by a measure of filial piety. Representations from him on behalf of his odd guest might induce her to give the man’s claims that consideration which Colon complained had formerly been denied them.

Pondering this as he lay wakeful on his hard pallet, the good Prior was ready to perceive the hand of God in the strange chance that had brought Colon to La Rabida. He was not to suspect that here was no chance at all; that Colon, as coldly calculating in furthering his aims as he was fiery in expounding them, well aware of Frey Juan’s interest in cosmography and of the link that bound him to the Queen, had made his way of deliberate intent to the convent, there to dangle a bait before the Franciscan’s eyes. The Prior’s curiosity, aroused by the ring of the wayfarer’s sonorous voice, had simplified the course. Had it been lacking—and it is clear that Colon cannot have counted upon it—the request for a little bread and a drink of water for his child would have been followed by a prayer for a night’s lodging. In the course of that he must have made an opportunity for just such an interview as Frey Juan’s interest had spontaneously supplied.

Suspecting none of this, the Prior asked himself was there a miraculous quality, a divine intervention, in the sequel to the hospitality he had offered. It was, however, in the nature of Frey Juan to temper enthusiasm with prudence. Before committing himself to sponsoring Colon’s case, he would seek confirmation by others, more competent to judge, of the faith the man inspired in him.

The others whom he had in mind were Garcia Fernandez, a physician of Palos whose learning extended far beyond the healer’s arts, and Martin Alonso Pinzon, a wealthy merchant who had followed the sea, who owned some ships, and who was known for a mariner of great experience.

To his persuasions that Colon should postpone departure for at least another day, his guest yielded with a lofty air of bestowing favours, and on that second night after supper, when little Diego was abed, the four assembled in the Prior’s cell. They crowded the narrow little room, whose furniture included no more than three chairs, a table, a writing-pulpit and Frey Juan’s truckle-bed, with two shelves of books against the whitewashed wall.

There Colon was invited to repeat the exposition with which he had entertained Frey Juan last night. He came to it with hints of a vague reluctance be it to weary these gentlemen, be it to weary himself. But having begun and being caught up in the glow of his own ardour, the manifestly eager attention of his audience came to feed it. Expounding, he left his chair to pace the narrow limits of the cell, fiery of eye and liberal of gesture. He spoke in withering scorn of those who had disdained his gifts, and with haughty confidence of the irresistible power within him ultimately to open purblind eyes to a dazzling vision of those gifts.

Already before he came to those details which had so impressed Frey Juan, both the physician and the merchant were held by that power, which Bishop Las Casas, who knew him, tells us that Colon possessed, easily to command the love of all who beheld him.

Fernandez, the physician, lean and long, with a head shaped like an egg and as bald under his skull-cap, combed a straggling beard with bony fingers as he listened, his pale eyes wide, his body hunched within the black gabardine that clothed it. Sheath by sheath the scepticism in which he had been wrapped was being ruthlessly stripped from him.

Pinzon, on the other hand, yielded himself up readily to that fierce sorcery. He had come in unsuspected eagerness to the Prior’s invitation because the matters upon which he was told that he was to hear this voyager were matters that had long lain within his own speculations. A square, vigorous, hairy man in the prime of life, bow-legged, with eyes vividly blue under thick black eyebrows, he had something of the mariner’s traditional easy, hearty manner. His lips showed very red within the black beard, but the mouth was too pinched and small for generosity. His sober affluence was advertised in a wine-coloured surcoat of velvet edged with lynx fur and the boots of fine Cordovan leather that cased his sturdy legs.

By the time the exposition reached its end these two who had been brought to sit in judgment scarcely needed for their conviction that Colon should unfold a chart on which to the known world he had added those territories of whose existence he was persuaded by his own inner light, besides Marco Polo and the Prophet Esdras. Nevertheless over that map, spread upon the Prior’s table, they came reverently to pore at his bidding.

Fernandez, from his studies, and Pinzon, from his wide experience, were able to appraise not merely its clear perfection as a piece of cartography, but, save in one detail, its scrupulous exactitude in delineating the known world.

Upon this detail the old physician fastened. “Your chart gives two hundred and thirty degrees of the earth’s circumference as the distance from Lisbon to the eastern end of the Indies. That does not accord, I think, with Ptolemy.”

Colon received the criticism as if he welcomed it. “Nor yet with Marinus of Tyre, whom Ptolemy corrected, just as Ptolemy stands corrected here. I correct him also, you’ll observe, in the position of Thule, which I, having sailed beyond it, found farther to the west than Ptolemy judged it.”

But Fernandez insisted. “That is your authority. Your sufficient authority. But for the position you give to India what authority exists?”

It was a moment before Colon replied, and then he spoke with a slow reluctance, as if something more were being dragged from him than he cared to give.

“You’ll have heard of Toscanelli of Florence?”

“Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli? What student of cosmography has not?”

Well might Fernandez ask the question, for the name of Toscanelli, lately dead, was famous among cultured men as that of the greatest mathematician and physicist that had ever lived.

Pinzon’s deep voice boomed in: “Who has not, indeed?”

“He is my authority. The computation that corrects Ptolemy’s is his as well as mine.” Brusquely he added: “But what matter even if it be in error? What matter if the golden Zipangu should lie some fewer or some more degrees in either direction? What is that to the main issue? It needs not the word of a Toscanelli to establish that whether we go east or west upon a sphere, ultimately the same point must be reached.”

“It may not need his word, as you say, but your case would be immeasurably strengthened if you could show that this great mathematician holds the same opinion.”

“I can show it.” He spoke hastily, and would have recalled the words, for it offended his vanity that it should be supposed that his conclusions had been inspired by another.

The sudden, almost startled interest created by his assertion drove him to explanation.

“As soon as I could formulate my theories, I submitted them to Toscanelli. He wrote to me, not only fully approving of them, but sending me a chart of his own, which in the main corresponds with the one before you.”

Frey Juan leaned forward eagerly. “You possess that chart?”

“That and the letter setting forth the arguments that justify it.”

“Those,” said Fernandez, “are very valuable documents. I do not think a man lives with learning enough to dispute Toscanelli’s conclusions.”

Bluntly vehement, Pinzon swore by God and Our Lady that for him so much was not necessary. Master Colon’s speculations had pierced the very heart of truth.

The Prior, sprawling on the truckle-bed, purred now with satisfaction, declaring that it could not be God’s will that Spain, where He was so faithfully served, should lose the power and credit to accrue from discoveries vaster than any the Portuguese navigators had made.

From Colon, however, these protests evoked no further response. On the contrary, his manner became coldly forbidding.

“Spain has had her opportunity, and has neglected it. Engrossed in the conquest of a province from the Moors, the Sovereigns could not see the empire with which I offered to endow their crown. In Portugal a King who looked with favour on my plans, left decision to a Jew astronomer, a doctor and a churchman, a motley commission that rejected me, as I believe from malice. That is why I look afield. Too many years already have I lost.” He folded his map with an air of finality.

But the astute Pinzon, who knew his world far better than the other two, was less susceptible to awe of personalities. He asked himself why, if this man’s decision to go to France were as irrevocable as he pretended, he should have been at the trouble now of so full an exposition of his theories. In Pinzon’s view, what Colon sought whilst seeming to disdain it, was assistance in the execution of his tremendous aims. And so Pinzon addressed himself to the persuasion which he guessed to be invited.

He would be unworthy, he vowed, of the name of Spaniard, if, believing what they had now heard, he should neglect to endeavour to secure for Spain the possessions that would result from their discovery.

“I thank you, sir,” was the lofty answer, “for this ready faith in me.”

Pinzon, however, would not leave it there. “It is so solid, so much in accord with notions that have been mine, that I could even wish to bear some share in the adventure, to set some stake upon it. Give it thought, sir. Let us talk of it again.” There was about him an eagerness scarcely veiled. “I could muster a ship or two and the means to equip them. Give it thought.”

“Again I thank you. But this is no matter for private enterprise.”

“Why not? Why should such benefits be for princes only?”

“Because such undertakings need the authority of a crown behind them. The control of lands beyond the seas and of the riches they may yield demand the forces that only a monarch can supply. If it were not so I should not have wasted all these years in battering upon the doors of princes, suffering denial at the hands of numskull doorkeepers.”

The Prior, out of sympathy with, indeed momentarily dismayed by, Pinzon’s urgings, and relieved to hear them thus repelled, bestirred himself to intervene. “There I might assist you. Especially now that I know of the formidable weapon with which you are armed. I mean this Toscanelli chart. Humble as I am, I could perhaps command the ear of Queen Isabel. For the piety and goodness of her Highness maintains in her a kindness for one who was once her confessor.”

“Ah!” said Colon, as if this were news to him.

Inscrutable, he listened whilst Frey Juan pleaded now, echoing Pinzon’s sentiments that it were shameful in any Spaniard to suffer so great a thing to be lost to Spain and go to the magnification of any other kingdom. Let Master Colon be patient yet a little while. Having waited years, let him now wait but some few weeks. To-morrow, if Colon consented, Frey Juan would ride out to seek the Court, before Granada or wherever it might be, to use with her Highness such influence as by her goodness he possessed, to the end that she might accord an audience to Colon, and hear his proposals from his own lips. Frey Juan would be as speedy as lay in human power, and in the meantime at La Rabida Master Colon would be well cared for with his child.

The note of intercession deepened in the friar’s voice as he proceeded. He became almost lachrymose in his fervent endeavour to break through the cold aloofness in which the tall adventurer stood mantled.

When he ceased at last, his plump hands joined as if in prayer, Colon fetched a sigh. “You tempt me sorely, good father,” he said, and turned away. He paced to the window followed by two pairs of anxious eyes, the Prior’s and the physician’s. In the glance of the merchant Pinzon, who knew his world and the ways of bargainers, there was less anxiety than shrewd mistrust.

At the room’s end Colon slowly turned. He tossed his red head, and, majesty incarnate in a shabby coat, he conferred the favour asked.

“Impossible to refuse what is so graciously offered. Be it as you wish, Sir Prior.”

The Prior bore down upon him, smiling his gratitude. Behind him Martin Alonso laughed outright. Frey Juan supposed it an expression of pure joy, as well it may have been, for there is joy in seeing fulfilled the predictions of our judgment.

CHAPTER IVTHE NEGLECTED SUITOR

The Prior of La Rabida procured himself a mule, and set out upon the following morning for the Vega of Granada, where the Sovereigns had sat down to invest the last Saracen stronghold.

The high confidence in which he went was not misplaced. Queen Isabel received her ghostly father with all the graciousness and piety due from a ghostly daughter. She listened to his tale, and being infected by something of his enthusiasm, yielded to his prayer, summoned her treasurer and bade him count out twenty thousand maravedis for the equipment and travelling expenses of Colon. Then she dismissed the triumphant Franciscan to bring the man to audience.

Here was a promptitude beyond all the friar’s hopes. He made haste back to La Rabida with his news.

“The Queen, our wise and virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer of this poor friar. Do yourself justice now, and the world is yours.”

Colon, incredulous at the swift and easy success attending the gamester’s throw upon which he had come to La Rabida, lost no time in setting out. His son was to remain in the convent’s care until he could take order about him.

At the moment of departure he was sought again by Martin Alonso Pinzon, who put forth an extreme geniality.

“I come to wish you fortune and to felicitate you upon this ready grant of audience. I swear you could have had no better ambassador.”

“I am as sensible of it as I am of this your courtesy.”

“It is no mere courtesy. After all, I have had my part in this success.” Answering the question in Colon’s glance, he went on: “Do me right, sir. It was my support of your views that sent Frey Juan to plead with the Queen.”

It was as if he urged a claim, a pettiness by which Colon was none too favourably impressed. But he dissembled his faint scorn.

“You leave me in your debt, sir.”

Martin Alonso laughed with a display of strong teeth behind the red lips within his black beard. “It’s a debt, faith, you may find it profitable to discharge. Bear in mind, sir, that I am ready to support your project. I love a hazard, and I would set a stake on this. I can command ships, as I have told you.”

“You enhearten me.” Colon was a model of cold courtesy. “But, as I thought that I made clear, the enterprise is too vast for private purses, else it had not been so long delayed.”

“Yet you may come to find that a private purse might bear some share in it. Why should it not, even though the crown should offer the main support?”

“To me it seems that if I am supported by the crown, the crown will bear the cost.”

“But perhaps not all of it.” Martin Alonso was becoming importunate. He smiled, but there was a keenness almost of anxiety in his eyes. “The royal treasury is under sore strain in these days. The war has made a heavy drain upon it. The Sovereigns may favour you, and yet hesitate on the score of the expense. A little help might then be welcome. All I ask is that you remember me should that be so, or,” he added slyly, “if you saw the chance to make it so. After all, as I have said, it would be no more than my due, for my part in sending Frey Juan to Court.”

“I will remember,” said Colon.

But as he rode away it was in the determination to forget. He wanted no partners, least of all an acquisitive merchant who for the paltry purse that he might bring to it would not merely claim a share of the profit but strive also to filch some of the glory.

Accounting his trials now behind him, his shabbiness sloughed, and clad by the Queen’s bounty in a manner to set off his natural graces, he came without delay to Court under the aegis of Frey Juan.

The Franciscan’s words were in his memory: “The Queen, our wise and virtuous lady, has given heed to the prayer of this poor friar. Do yourself justice now and the world is yours.”

It was an enheartening assurance, and for what depended upon himself Colon entertained no doubt. He would do himself the fullest justice, as Frey Juan should see.

And so, when he was brought to audience in the Alcazar in the white city of Cordoba, it was no cringing suppliant that the Sovereigns beheld. Conscious that his russet doublet and the open mulberry surcoat with its hanging sleeves became him well, he bore himself with the swaggering confidence of one who is master of his fate.

Had the result depended upon the Queen alone, it might have followed quickly; for though a woman of much sense and calm judgment, she was still a woman, and so could hardly remain indifferent to the appeal of the dominant masculinity of this tawny-haired man with the eager, magnetic, youthful eyes and that power Las Casas mentions of commanding affection. But King Ferdinand was there, hard and wary, the shrewdest prince in Europe and the most calculating. A man in the late thirties, squarely and strongly built, but of only middle height, he was of a rather lumpy fresh-coloured countenance, fair-haired and with light prominent eyes. Those eyes looked with little favour upon the natural majesty and princely carriage of the adventurer whom Frey Juan presented.

Their Highnesses received Colon in a gracious chamber of the Alcazar, lighted by twin-arched windows and hung in the stamped and subtly coloured leather for which the Moors of Cordoba were famous, its marble floor spread with rich eastern rugs. Two ladies waited upon the Queen, standing behind her tall chair, the handsome young Marchioness of Moya and the Countess of Escalona. The King was attended by his Lord Chamberlain, Andrés Cabrera, Marquis of Moya, of whom it was said that his goat’s eyes justified his name; by Don Luis de Santangel, the grey-bearded and benign Chancellor of Aragon; and by Hernando de Talavera, Prior of the Prado, a tall ascetic friar in the white habit and black cloak of a Hieronomite.

All these, like most of those who filled the high offices about the Sovereigns, were New Christians, men of Jewish blood, who having risen to eminence by the talents of their race, were sowing an envy that was beginning to express itself in that ferocity of persecution of which the Holy Office of the Inquisition was to be the agent.

Colon, by his very name, may have led them to regard him as one of themselves, and certainly, had he looked, he would have detected a sympathetic warmth in the eyes of Santangel and Cabrera. Talavera, however, remained coldly aloof, his glance lowered. Uncompromisingly honest, as he conceived honesty, he would adopt hostility rather than yield to feeble prejudice on racial grounds.

At the outset Colon gave little heed to these satellites. His eyes and attention were on the Queen, at whose elbow Frey Juan Perez had come to take an unobtrusive stand. He beheld a light-complexioned woman of forty of the middle height, her shape and countenance moderately plump, whose blue eyes gave him kindly encouragement. A certain homeliness was not to be dissembled even by the richness of her ermine-lined cloak of crimson satin so profusely slashed as to display in gleams the cloth of gold of the gown she wore beneath it. In the belt of white leather at her waist smouldered the fire of a balas ruby of the size of a tennis ball.

She addressed him in gentle terms, and in her placid voice he caught a hint of the authority that dwelt in her. She spoke in commendation of the ideas by which the Prior of La Rabida had told them that he was inspired, and she assured him that it was her wish to know more of this service which he believed that it lay in his power to render to the crowns of Castile and Aragon.

His head high, his voice resonant, he was prompt to answer:

“I kiss your Highness’s feet. I thank you for the occasion so graciously accorded me. I bring you the promise of discoveries before which those which have brought increase of dignity and power to the Crown of Portugal shall look small and mean.”

“A high promise,” croaked the King, and Colon could not be certain that he did not sneer. Not on that account, however, was he perturbed.

“High, indeed, sire. But no higher than by God’s grace and guidance I shall soar.”

“Say on. Say on,” said the King, and now the sneer was plain. “Let us hear you.”

Colon inclined that proud head of his, which his Highness accounted too stiffly held, and launched himself in terms that had been well-rehearsed upon a recital of his cosmographical theories. But he had not gone far before Ferdinand’s harsh voice and rapid speech broke in upon him.

“Yes, yes. All this we have heard already from the Prior of La Rabida. It is his clear statement of your beliefs that has prompted her Highness to grant you audience at a time when, as you should know, our crusade against the Infidel in Spain is giving us abundant preoccupation.”

A lesser man, one more imbued with the respect of persons, would have been put out of countenance. Colon was merely spurred to a greater assurance.

“The wealth of the Indies, which I trust to lay at the foot of your throne, the inexhaustible wells of it to which I shall open your royal way, will repair the ravages of that conflict and supply resources for its triumphant conclusion, or for its extension even to a deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre itself.”

He could have said nothing better calculated to kindle enthusiasm in Queen Isabel and bring her under the spell of the magic that he used. But to the King it was almost a contradiction, a challenge. With a sceptical smile on his full lips he forestalled any answer from the Queen.

“Do not let us forget that you speak of things seen so far only with the eye of faith.”

“What, then, is faith, sire?” Colon permitted himself to ask, but by answering at once let it be seen that the question was no more than rhetorical. “It is the power to recognize by the inner light of inspiration those things of which the evidence is not tangible.”

“This has more the sound of theology than cosmography.” Ferdinand looked over his shoulder at Talavera with a crooked smile. “It lies rather in your province, Sir Prior, than in mine.”

The friar raised his bowed head. His voice was grave and cold.

“As a definition of faith I have no quarrel with it.”

“For myself,” said the Queen, “whilst no theologian, I have never heard it defined better.”

“Yet,” Ferdinand objected, turning to her in all courtesy, “in such a matter an ounce of experience is worth a pound of faith. And of actual experience admittedly there is none to support the claims of Master Colon.”

Instead of answering, herself, the Queen invited Colon to furnish the reply.

“You hear his Highness.”

Colon lowered his eyes; his tone was almost wistful. “I can but ask what is experience, and answer that it is no more than the foundation upon which those have ever built who have been endowed with the divine gift of imagination.”

“That is obscure enough to be profound,” said Ferdinand, “but it takes us nowhere.”

“By your leave, Highness, at least it points the way. By applying the gift of imagination, by imagining the unknown from the known—the experienced—has man risen by stages upwards from a primeval brutish ignorance.”

His Highness began to show irritation. This man was more subtle and elusive than was proper in disputing with a prince. He made an impatient noise. “We move here in the realm of the intangible, a realm of dreams.”

Colon threw up his head as if affronted. There was an almost fanatical glow in his clear eyes. “Dreams!” he echoed. His voice soared and vibrated with power. “All things are dreams before they become reality. The world itself was a dream before it was created, a dream in the mind of God.”

It was as if he had cast a burning brand amongst them. The King’s jaw fell; Talavera’s brow was dark; Frey Juan looked scared. But in every other face, including the Queen’s, Colon beheld only a flattering wonder, whilst from Santangel’s full dark eyes he caught a look of warm, amused approval.

The King spoke, slowly for once. “I trust, sir, that you are not floundering into heresy in the heat of argument.” And again his glance invited Talavera to pronounce.

The Prior of the Prado shook his head, his lean face forbidding.

“I do not discover heresy. No. And yet . . .” He directly addressed Colon. “You go perilously deep, sir.”

“It is my way, Sir Prior.”

“Undaunted by the peril?” the friar sternly challenged him.

Colon rejoiced that it was the priest who had asked the question, for in answering the priest he could put his scorn into laughter, as he would not dare in answering the King. “If I were easily daunted, reverend sir, I should not be offering to sail into the unknown and defy the terrors with which superstition fills it.”

His Highness deemed it time to set a term to the audience.

“It is not your audacity, sir, that is in doubt,” he said, and the calm comment had the ring of a reproof. “If that were all we might be ready to employ you. As it is . . . it happens that I am by nature slow to take a man’s own valuation of the wares he offers.”

“It is not in my mind that we should do that,” said the Queen. “But neither are we to reject the project because of our incompetence to judge it. Master Colon, his Highness and I will take counsel and consider the appointing of a junta of learned men to examine your claims, and to advise us upon them.”

Remembering how he had fared in Portugal at the hands of a junta stuffed with learning and frozen in the ignorance of its limitations, Colon’s heart would have turned heavy had not the Queen added:

“I shall look to see you soon again, Master Colon. Meanwhile you are commanded to remain at Court. My treasurer, Don Alonso de Quintanilla, shall have orders to provide.”

On that promise he had taken his dismissal, and if he departed in a confidence less high than that in which he had come, yet at least he could bear with him the assurance that he had left a favourable impression on the Queen.

Of his favourable impression upon the others he was soon to be assured. First there was Quintanilla, in whose house, by the Queen’s disposition, he was lodged, and by whom he was cordially welcomed. There was more than his attractiveness to conquer the favour of Quintanilla. The finances of the two kingdoms were depleted to exhaustion by the Moorish war, and the Treasurer of Castile was sorely harassed in his need to provide supplies. By sharpening the persecution of the Jews to the extent of giving the Holy Office a freer hand in the pursuit of the wretched converts who relapsed into Judaism and suffered consequently, with the loss of their lives, the confiscation of their property, the ship of State was being kept precariously afloat. To buoy it up further there were the heavy loans made by such great Jews as Abarbanel and Senior, who sought desperately to deflect the greater persecution which their prescience told them that greed might presently let loose—a persecution not to be confined to relapsing Marranos, who by becoming Christians had brought themselves within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but to include in its remorseless sweep all the Children of Israel. If those succeeded who even now were pressing the Sovereigns to decree the expulsion of the Jews whilst compelling them to leave all property behind, the wealth thus harvested might resolve all difficulties. But in the meantime the difficulties remained to harass the Treasurer of Castile. Therefore was he the more eager for first-hand news of this man who proposed to unlock for Spain the vast treasury of the East, and, because of his hopes, the readier to lend him credit and support.

Then there was the Chancellor of Aragon, Luis de Santangel, whose countenance had shown how deeply he was moved by Colon’s bearing at the royal audience. At heart he, too, was moved by considerations similar to those of Quintanilla. Beholding in Colon a potential saviour of Israel in Spain, he was as ready to believe him the instrument of God as Colon was ready to believe it of himself. For although Santangel had received Christian baptism and practised now the Christian faith, his heart remained with the people of his race. Indeed, so ill had he concealed it that once he had been made to feel the talons of the Holy Office of Saragossa, and compelled to do public penance in his shirt. Only the high value which the Sovereigns set upon his services and the great affection in which they held him had preserved him from worse.

Santangel sought Colon that very day at the house of Quintanilla, took both his hands in a long firm clasp, and looked deep into his eyes.

“I make haste,” he said, “to proclaim myself your friend before your deeds shall have earned you so many that I shall be lost amongst them.”

“Which being translated, Don Luis, means that out of the goodness of your soul you desire to give me courage.”