THE great crises of life usually come upon us by surprise―today vague uneasiness, tomorrow sharp anxiety, the next day overwhelming sorrow. Thus Raymond, who was at first disponed to regard his imprisonment as a fleeting cloud, “like a man’s hand,” soon found that “the heaven was dark with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.” He was treated with a degree of harshness that moved his indignant surprise; his narrow cell was furnished only with the barest necessaries, his food was coarse and scanty, and his feet were fettered. “What have I done to be treated thus?” he asked his jailors, but only received surly and evasive answers. When, however, he requested permission to communicate with his friends, he was vouchsafed the information, anything but reassuring, that they were, all of them, in the same position as himself.
“What!” he cried, “have they taken the Master?”
“If you mean that baptized heathen and heretic Pomponio Laeto, his Holiness has not caught him yet; but he will have him soon enough, and call him to account for his crimes,” said the warder.
“Keep a civil tongue, varlet, when you talk of scholars and gentlemen,” returned the angry and imprudent prisoner. “Corpo di Bacco! Had a knight or noble dared to call the Master heathen and heretic it were worth measuring swords over. If I had my sword!” he broke off sadly.
“Very well, my fine young gentleman,” the warder retorted spitefully. “You will sing to another tune when you are put on the pulley, like your learned and accomplished friend Signor Platina. See if you do not call your master heathen and heretic yourself, ay, and conspirator against the life of his Holiness.”
“That will I do never―never!” cried Raymond, his cheek, which had paled at the mention of the torture, flushing with proud, heroic resolution.
Yet as soon as the warder locked the door and left him to his solitude he flung himself on the mat that served him as a bed, and wept and sobbed like a child. “Mother, mother,” he murmured through his tears, “do you know of all this?”
Wonder at last came to his aid, softening his grief and terror, or at least serving to divert his mind. “What can it all mean?” he said, aloud, for in his loneliness he found it a kind of relief thus to utter his thoughts. “We have done nothing unlawful nothing. The Master has no thought beyond his Latin books, his pupils, his antiquarian researches. How he can have offended his Holiness it is impossible to conceive. Some one must have invented foul slanders against him and all of us. Who, I marvel, are the victims of this abominable malice beside the Master and myself? And Platina, that accomplished scholar, the glory of our academy, to whom we all looked up with such reverence? Who else? Campano? Molza? Sannazaro? Porcaro? Ah, Porcaro!” (the name sent a sudden thrill of pain through every nerve, making his lip quiver and his tears flow once more). “Well, thank God, nothing can touch her. There beats not on earth a heart so base as to injure such as her.” Then, after a long shuddering sigh, “Better name no names in the hearing of that scoundrel of a turnkey, it might do harm. Heaven help me! I know not what to do, or to leave undone.”
This was true; Raymond had passed his young life hitherto in an atmosphere of freedom and security. He had yet to learn his first lesson in the mournful science of the oppressed, the lesson of silence. He was like a wild creature who has never seen the face of the hunter; frank, unsuspecting, fearless, he would have played with the very instruments of death.
“Conspirator against the life of his Holiness?” he repeated the warder’s words. “As much as against the life of Julius Cæsar. Certainly the Master often praised Brutus, talked of him as the deliverer of his country, wished such men for Romans now. Could the Holy Father have taken offense at such words as those? Impossible. ‘Heathen and heretic?’ What is a heretic? ― heretics are burned alive. But assuredly we are no heretics, we scholars. We believe―I am sure I don’t know what we believe!” said Raymond, in utter perplexity, as he rose from his seat and began to pace the narrow bounds of his dungeon as well as his fettered feet would allow him.
It was quite true that scholars such as Pomponius Laetus and Platina were not likely to go beyond vague sentimental praises of freedom and antiquity; and perhaps some rash glorification of the shade of Brutus. The Pope had little to fear from them as rebels. But was he, after all, mistaken in treating them as heretics? He would have sent Giulio to the stake for calling the wafer a, piece of bread and refusing his reverence to the finger bone of St. Cosmo. Who could tell whether Pomponius Laetus believed at all in the Godhead of Him whom the wafer represents, or in the continued existence of St. Cosmo, or of any saint, beyond the grave? Yet the general tenure of the Church’s practice condemns the severity of Paul. Rome, as a rule, wages war with the living, not with the dead. Mere skepticism, Rome thinks, is death; and death is harmless because it is powerless. But is it? Does not the putrefaction of the grave engender poison gases, which slay their tens of thousands? Perhaps, after all, the grim fanatic who filled the papal chair had eyes to see the true interests of the Papacy. Yet he ought to have been content with the banishment, or the imprisonment, of the heads of the academy. Nothing can remove the stain left upon his memory by atrocious cruelties inflicted on a band of innocent, generous youths, whose only offense was their zeal for ancient literature and their attachment to their teachers.
When another and rather more civil warder brought Raymond his evening meal of black bread and beans, he ventured to ask, “What physician attends the prisoners?” He had been thinking in the meantime that it might be possible to communicate with Theodore through a brother in the craft, not improbably also a brother in blood.
“Are you ill?” the warder inquired.
“Not at all. I ask from curiosity.”
“Dr. Levi Volterra,” ―the name confirmed Raymond’s hope that he was a Jew. “But you are likely to make his acquaintance soon enough, poor lad. You are to be examined tomorrow.” With this grim hint he took his leave.
Raymond pushed the food away with a look of disgust, and threw himself once more on his mat. “I will try to sleep and forget my misery for a little while,” he thought. Sleep, thus wooed, does not often prove propitious, yet at last he did fall into an uneasy slumber.
A sound awakened him suddenly, a sound that he had heard before, but disregarded, in happy ignorance of its terrible import,― a cry, faint as if coming from a distance, yet fearfully distinct and shrill. It was repeated again, and yet again. He started up. Cold drops stood upon his forehead. He listened, spellbound, almost holding his breath. Every sound made him shiver from head to foot; yet with the fascination of horror he would not allow himself to miss one. “Hodie tibi, cras mihi,” he thought, and shuddered. Would those cries never cease?
At last there was silence—blessed silence, Raymond thought at first. Then he began to wonder, was it the silence of death with the victim? “Oh, that I could pray,” he thought, “for him and for myself!” He threw himself on his knees, but no words would come. Then it occurred to him to repeat an Ave, and he ran over a dozen hurriedly, from a blind impulse of terror.
But he rose uncomforted, and with a kind of self-contempt. “What have I been doing?” he asked himself. “I desire that God would help some poor friend of mine in his misery, and I have been gabbling over and over again ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.’―Oh, God, help me! Help us all in this our hour of bitter need!―But will He help? Does He hear? Is He there at all?―Everyone in trouble says prayers, so I suppose there is some use in them. Even Sannazaro, scoffer though he is, crossed himself and said a prayer when we were caught in that thunderstorm in the Borghese Gardens.― Ah, happy days !―My mother prays and so does Manuel. But what shall I say? ‘Pater Noster,’ that means ‘our Father.’ ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ Who said those words?—I ought to strengthen myself by thinking of the ancients, that is what the Master would tell me, were he here. There was Mutius Scævola, who thrust his hand into the fire; Regulus, who endured so many tortures for the sake of his country; Anaxarchus―”
But it was in vain that Raymond tried to fix his thoughts upon these elevating examples of fortitude. He felt like a child in an agony of grief over a dead mother, to whom someone offers a toy by way of consolation. These were but toys with which his fancy sported in hours of ease, in real and terrible anguish they had no help to give him. The more he endeavored to meditate upon them, the more empty and meaningless they seemed to groom; until at last they presented no image to his mind beyond that of the letters that composed their names, written upon parchment by the Master’s hand.
He was still vainly endeavoring to draw from his stores of memory something more suited to his need, when he heard the key grate once again in his prison door. A light flashed in, and the jailor’s voice summoned him to arise and follow.
“Tomorrow―he said tomorrow,” Raymond exclaimed in an agitated voice as he started to his feet.
“It does not signify what he said. The Commissary of his Holiness desires your attendance.”
Raymond summoned all his manliness. “Give me a moment,” he asked, “that I may arrange my dress.”
“That is but due respect for his Excellency,” returned the jailor. “But hasten.”
Raymond smoothed his fair hair, sorely disordered by his night of agony, and made some trifling changes in his apparel; an evidence of courage and self-respect not lost upon the jailor. But he also contrived, while standing with his back to that functionary, to take out something unperceived by him, and to slip it under his mat. For he feared that―if the worst came―rude hands might meddle with his clothing. What he concealed so carefully was only a little silken bag, containing a small gold reliquary and part of a child’s silver bracelet.