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House of Torment

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Год написания книги
2017
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"Ah-h-h! C'est vrai alors! L'inquisition! qui lance la mort!"

With extraordinary and sudden strength she twisted herself away from the two sombre figures which held her. She bent forward over the table, snatched up a long knife, gripped the handle firmly with two fat white hands, and plunged it into her breast to the hilt.

For quite three seconds she stood upright. Her face of horror changed into a wonder, as if she was surprised at what she had done. Then she smiled foolishly, like a child who realises that it has made a silly mistake, coughed loudly like a man, and fell in heavy death upon the floor.

CHAPTER XI

IN THE BOX

"Devant l'Inquisition, quand on vient à jubé,
Si l'on ne soit rôti, l'on soit au moins flambé."

It was not light that pressed upon the retina of the eye. There was no vibration to the sensitive lenses. It was a sudden vision not of the eye, but in the memory-cells of the brain which now and then filled the dreadful blackness with a fierce radiance, filled it for an infinitesimal fraction of a second.

And then all was dark again.

It was not dark with the darkness that ordinary men know. At no time, in all probability, has any man or woman escaped a long sleepless night in a darkened room. The candle is out; the silence begins to nibble at the nerves; there is no sound but the uneasy tossing upon the bed. It seems, one would rather say, that there is no sound save only that made by the sufferer. At such hours comes a dread weariness of life, a restlessness which is but the physical embroidery upon despair. The body itself is at the lowest pitch of its vitality. Through the haunted chambers of the mind fantastic thoughts chase each other, and evil things – evil personalities it almost seems – uncoil themselves and erect their heads.

But it is not really darkness, not really despair, as people know when the night has gone and dawn begins. Nor is it really silence. The ear becomes attuned to its environment; a little wind moans round the house. There is the soft patter of falling rain – the distant moaning of the sea.

Furniture creaks as the temperature changes; there are rustlings, whispers, unexplained noises – the night is indeed full of sound.

Nor is it really darkness, as the mind discovers towards the end of the sick and restless vigil. The eye also is attuned to that which limits and surrounds its potentialities. The blinds are drawn, but still some faint mysterious greyness creeps between them and the window. The room, then, is a real room still! Over there is the long mirror which will presently begin to stir and reflect the birth-pangs of light. That squat, black monster, which crouches in the corner of the dark, will grow larger, and become only the wardrobe after all. And soon the air of the chamber will take on a subtle and indefinable change. It will have a new savour, it will tell that far down in the under world the sun is moaning and muttering in the last throes of sleep. The blackness will go. Dim, inchoate nothingness will change to wan dove-coloured light, and with the first chirpings of half-awakened birds the casement will show "a slowly glimmering square," and the tortured brain will sink to rest.

Day has come! There is no longer any need for fear. The nervous pain, more terrible than all, has gone. The heart is calmed, the brain is soothed, utter prostration and despair appears, mercifully, a thing of long ago.

Some such experience as this all modern men have endured. To John Commendone, in the prison of the Inquisition where he had been put, no such alleviation came.

For him there was no blessed morning; for him the darkness was that awful negation of light – of physical light – and of hope, which is without remedy.

He did not know how long it had been since he was caught up suddenly out of the rich room where he was dining with his love – dining among the scent of flowers, with the echo of music in his ears, his whole heart suffused with thankfulness and peace.

He did not know how long it had been; he only remembered the hurried progress in a closed carriage from the hotel to the fortress of the Triana in the suburbs, which was the prison and assize of the Holy Office.

In all Europe in this era prisons were dark, damp holes. They were real graves, full of mould, animal filth, the pest-breeding smells. It was the boast of the Inquisition, and even Llorente speaks of it, that the prisons were "well-arched, light and dry rooms where the prisoners could make some movement."

This was generally true, and Commendone had heard of it from Don Perez.

It was not true in his case. He had been taken hurriedly into the prison as night fell, marched silently through interminable courtyards and passage-ways – corridors which slanted downwards, ever downwards – until in a dark stone passage, illuminated only by the torches which were carried by those who conducted him, he had come to a low door, heavily studded with iron.

This had been opened with a key. The wards of the lock had shot back with a well-oiled and gentle click. He had bent his head a little as they pushed him into the living tomb – a box of stone five feet square exactly. He was nearly six feet in height; he could not stand erect; he could not stretch himself at full length. The thing was a refinement of the dreadful "little-ease" of the Tower of London and many other secular prisons where wretches were tortured for a week before their execution. He had heard of places like them, but he realised that it was not the design of those who had him fast to kill him yet. He knew that he must undergo an infinity of mental and bodily torture ere ever the scarred and trembling soul would be allowed to wing its way from the still, broken body.

He was in absolute, complete darkness, buried in a box of stone.

The rayless gloom was without any relief whatever; it was the enclosing sable of death itself; a pitchy oblivion that lay upon him like a solid weight, a thing obscene and hopeless. And the silence was a real silence, an utter stillness such as no modern man ever knows – save only the few demoniac prisoners in the cachot noir of the French convict prisons of Noumea.

Once every two days – if there indeed were such things as days and hours in this still hell – the door of the cell was noiselessly opened. There was a dim red glow in the stone corridor without, a pitcher of water, some black bread, and every now and then a few ripe figs, were pushed into the box.

Then a clang, the oily swish of the bolts, and another eternity of silence.

The man's brain did not go. It was too soon for that. He lay a fortnight – ten thousand years it seemed to him – in this box of horror.

He was not to die yet. He was not even to lose his mind; of that he was perfectly aware. He was no ordinary prisoner. No usual fate was in store for him; that also he knew. A charge of heresy in his case was absurd. No witnesses could be brought who, speaking truth, could condemn him for heresy. But what Don Perez had told him was now easily understood. He was in a place where there was no appeal, a situation with no egress.

There was not the slightest doubt in his mind that a dreadful vengeance was to be taken upon him for his treatment of the King of Spain. The Holy Office was a royal court provided with ecclesiastical weapons. Its familiars had got him in their grip; he was to die the death.

As he lay motionless day after day, night after night, in the silence – the hideous silence without light – the walls so close, pressing on him, forbidding him free movement, at every moment seeming as if they would rush together and crush him in this night of Erebus, he began to have visitors.

Sometimes a sulphurous radiance would fill the place. He would see the bowing, mocking figure of King Philip, the long yellow face looking down upon him with a malign smile. He would hear a great hoarse voice, and a little woman with a shrivelled face and covered with jewels, would squeak and gibber at him. Then, with a clank of armour, and a sudden fresh smell of the fields, Sir Henry Commendone would stand there, with a "How like you this life of the pit, Johnnie?" … "How like you this blackness, my son?"

Then he would put up his hands and press these grisly phantoms out of the dark. He would press them away with one great effort of the will.

They would go, and he remained trembling in the chill, damp negation of light, which was so far more than darkness. He would grope for the pieces of his miserable food, and search the earthen pitcher for water.

And all this, these tortures beyond belief, beyond understanding of the ordinary man, were but as soft couches to one who is weary, food to one hungered, water to lips parched in a desert – compared with the deepest, unutterable descent of all.

The cold and stinking blackness which held him tight as a fossil in a bed of clay was not the worst. His eyes that saw nothing, his limbs that were shot with cramping pain, his nostrils and stomach that could not endure this uncleaned cage, were a torture beyond thinking.

Many a time he thought of the mercy of Bishop Bonner and Queen Mary – the mercy that let a gentleman ride under the pleasant skies of England to a twenty minutes' death – God! these were pleasant tortures! His own present hopelessness, all that he endured in body – why, dear God! these were but pleasant tortures too, things to bite upon and endure, compared with the Satanic horror, the icy dread, the bitter, hopeless tears, when he thought of Elizabeth.

He had long since ceased praying for himself. It mattered little or nothing what happened to him. That he should be taken out to torture would be a relief, a happiness. He would lie in the rack laughing. They could fill his belly with water, or strain the greasy hempen ropes into his flesh, and still he would laugh and forgive them – Dr. Taylor had forgiven less than they would do to him, he would forgive more than all for the sake of Christ and His Maid-Mother. How easy that would be! To be given something to endure, to prove himself a man and a Christian!

But to forgive them for what they might be doing, they might have done, to his dear lady – how could he forgive that to these blood-stained men?

Through all the icy hours he thought of one thing, until his own pains vanished to nothingness.

Perchance, and the dreadful uncertainty in his utter impotence and silence swung like a bell in his brain, and cut through his soul like the swinging pendola which they said the familiars of the Holy Office used, Elizabeth had already suffered unspeakable things.

He saw again a pair of hands – cruel hands – hands with thick thumbs. Had hands like these grasped and twisted the white limbs of the girl he loved? Divorced from him, helpless, away from any comfort, any kind voice, was it not true —was it true? – that already his sweetheart had been tortured to her death?

He had tried over and over again to pray for Elizabeth, to call to the seat where God was, that He might save the dear child from these torments unspeakable.

But there was always the silence, the dead physical blackness and silence. He beat his hands upon the stone wall; he bruised his head upon the roof of darkness which would not let him stand upright, and he knew – as it is appointed to some chosen men to know – that unutterable, unthinkable despair of travail which made Our Lord Himself call out in the last hour of His passion, [Greek: Êli, Êli lamà sabachthaní].

There was no response to his prayers. Into his heart came no answering message of hope.

And then the mind of this man, which had borne so much, and suffered so greatly, began to become powerless to feel. A bottle can only hold a certain amount of water, the strings of an instrument be plucked to a certain measure of sound, the brain of a man can endure up to a certain strain, and then it snaps entirely, or is drowsed with misery.

Physically, the young man was in perfect health when they had taken him to his prison. He had lived always a cleanly and athletic life. No sensual ease had ever dimmed his faculties. And therefore, though he knew it not, the frightful mental agony he had undergone had but drawn upon the reserve of his physical forces, and had hardly injured his body at all. The food they gave him, at any rate for the time of his disappearance from the world of sentient beings, was enough to support life. And while he lay in dreadful hopelessness, while his limbs were racked with pain, and it seemed to him that he stood upon the very threshold of death, he was in reality physically competent, and a few hours of relief would bring his body back to its pristine strength.

There came a time when he lay upon his stone floor perfectly motionless. The merciful anodyne that comes to all tortured people when either the brain or body can bear no more, had come to him now.

It seemed but a short moment – in reality it was several hours – since his jailors, those masked still-moving figures, had brought him a renewal of his food. He could not eat the bread, but two figs upon the platter were grateful and cooling to his throat, though he was unconscious of any physical gratification. He knew, sometime after, that sustenance had been brought to him, and that he had a great thirst. He stretched out his hand mechanically for the pitcher, rising from the floor and pressing the brim to his lips.

He drank deeply, and as he drank became suddenly aware that this was not the lukewarm water of the past darkness, but something that ran through his veins, that swiftly ran through them, and as the blood mounted to his brain gave him courage, awoke him, fed the starved nerves. It was wine he was drinking! wine that perhaps would be red in the light; wine that once more filled him with endeavour, and a desperate desire which was not hope but the last protest against his fate.

He lay back once more, by no means the same man he had been some little time agone, and as he reclined in a happy physical stupor – the while his brain was alive again and began to work – he said many times to himself the name of Jesus.

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