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"And who are you that could resist the fiat of that Tomas de Torquemada, before whom, they tell me, even the crowned heads of Castile and Arragon veil low?" The monk half rose, with an impatient and almost haughty start, at this interrogatory; but, reseating himself, replied, in a deep and half-whispered voice "Daughter, listen to me! He was charged with letters to yon abbess from the queen.
I must lay by my pen and watch for an opportunity to keep tryst at the gateway with my two good friends.... Nine of the clock. God help me! I waited in the garden till I heard a whistle, and stole down to the gate as before. A man put out his hand and caught at mine through the bars. It was that vile Tomas the wretch who would have murdered my dear love!
Santo Tomas was closely invested and fiercely attacked, Ojeda being reduced to such an extremity that he owed his escape only to a rescuing force sent by Columbus from Fort Isabella, on the coast. Driven off by the superior arms of his foes, Caonabo withdrew sullenly to his stronghold in the mountains. But he was quickly back again, with a larger force than before.
But your Lordship may attribute this to your good fortune, and to the intelligence and experience of Joan Xuarez Gallinato. Don Tomas conducted himself in this war, not like a gentleman of his age, but like an old soldier, full of experience. Your Lordship should greatly esteem this relative, for I trust that your Lordship may be a second father to him.
He took the money and comforted Tomas, telling him that he could make interest with persons of great influence in Toledo, especially a nun, a relation of the corregidor's, who could do anything she pleased with him. Now the washerwoman of the convent in which the nun lived had a daughter, who was very thick indeed with the sister of a friar, who was hand and glove with the said nun's confessor.
And as for my own part in the fray, when I recognized in the five-feathered chieftain of the three that copper-hued imp of Satan who had been the merciless master of ceremonies at the torturing of my poor black Tomas, the decent meed of mercy which even a seasoned soldier may cherish died within me, and I made sure the steel would find its mark.
When this undertaking had been accomplished, he came up very close to me, and without a word looked up balefully from the heavy folds thrown across his mouth and chin under the very tip of his hooked nose. "I could not do it," I said. "I could not. It would have been useless. Too much like murder, Tomas."
But Uncle Tomas was not the man to be taken unawares, and reversed the surprise, striking Espartero with a small force in the darkness, and driving back his men in confusion and dismay. Eighteen hundred prisoners were taken, and the general himself narrowly escaped. General Mirasol was taken, with all his staff, in a road-side house, from which he made an undignified escape.
Indeed we should have tried to reach the town that night had not Tomas told us the next three miles of the trail were so steep and rough he could not undertake to fetch us over it unless we abandoned our animals, saddles, and packs. We turned into our blankets early, after a cold supper, for we did not care to chance a fire.
Twenty years before, when Señor Tomás had told him of the relations between Rafaela and Manolo, he too had declared: "They say he beats her." What connection might there be between these statements, which seemed to weave a nexus of hate between the son and the dead lover?
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