Chapter X: A Jack in Office

It was the 29th of June. There was a hush on board the Admiral's ship. Yonder were visible the white low houses of San Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. Around the ship the sea lay still and grey, and the sails hung limp in the hot, heavy air.

A knot of men gathered close around a cabin, listening with lowering brows and compressed lips to bitter groaning, and sobbing cries, that were being wrung from one within, by his wounded soul. Well might the old and way-worn discoverer of mighty continents feel tempted at that moment to cry: "Hath God forgotten to be gracious?"

A storm was coming on; one of his four poor, shabby vessels--that on which his beloved brother Bartholomew held command--was in a shattered condition, and he had asked leave to take shelter in the harbour of the small island he had himself given to Spain, and Spaniards had refused him! What wonder that the noble and generous heart of the old Admiral was wrung to its very depths! What wonder that, as Montoro leant with Fernando against the cabin-door, the lad clenched his fists until the nails almost cut his palms, and muttered fiercely to his boy friend:

"Fernando, ask thy father's leave. There is not a man on board will refuse to turn our guns against those miscreants, though they were twenty times our countrymen. Only let him give the word, and he shall be speedily avenged."

"Ay, speedily," echoed two or three hoarse voices in the group, from those who had caught the tenor of Montoro's passionate request, and the Admiral's young son raised his eyes gratefully. His steadfast face was pale with emotion, his lips trembled. Even this weak testimony to his father was some comfort.

"I only wish," he exclaimed, struggling to speak with manly calm; "I only wish that, as you say, the Admiral would give the word that we should let our guns loose against the dastard hounds. We would soon teach them a lesson they should not easily forget."

"Nay then, young Señor, how about yon fleet?" asked one of the sailors significantly, pointing to a number of gay and gallant-looking ships at a short distance within the harbour. "Think you, Señor Ferdinand, that yon fleet would leave us alone if we took to avenging our insults by bombarding the town? And they are close upon twenty to one!"

"What of that?" hastily ejaculated Montoro, his cheeks still crimson with excitement. "God fights on the side of right and just--"

He stopped abruptly. The sounds of grief within the cabin had ceased during this short discussion, and at this instant the door opened, and a hand was laid on Montoro's shoulder, while the well-known slow, distinct voice said with grave earnestness:

"That is true, my son. The great Father fights on the side of right and justice. But He still better loves to espouse the cause of the merciful. Instead of seeking to destroy life let us rather try to save it, that with the measure we mete it may be measured to us again."

"That comes out of the great book I gave thee to hold the day we started," whispered Fernando to his companion, who nodded. It had been a favourite quotation of the benevolent old priest, Bartolo. Meantime Christopher Columbus proceeded to give proof that he spoke not with his lips only but from his heart.

The great fleet in the harbour of San Domingo was that which had brought out his superseder, Ovando, a few weeks since, and it was now in all the bustle of preparation for a speedy return to Spain with crowds of home-going adventurers, many ill-wishers to the just and virtuous discoverer, numbers of prisoners Spanish and native, and an immense amount of gold, pearls, and other treasures, well-nigh every ounce of which had cost a life.

On board this fleet were the Admiral's most bitter enemies; on board its grandest vessel was the narrow-minded, mean-spirited upstart, Bobadilla, who, to the ever-enduring disgrace of his own name and of his country, had dared to send the great seaman, the great thinker, the man of unbounded hopes, enthusiasm, courage, endurance, and magnanimity--the man who to Bobadilla was as a lion to a rat--had dared to send this giant hero home in chains like a vile malefactor but two years before, and had covetously grasped at his possessions, impudently installing himself in the house of his patient victim, and laying greedy hands upon his arms, gold, plate, jewels, horses, books, and even his letters and precious manuscripts.

Against that fleet, with all its proud sumptuousness contrasted with the miserable little squadron granted to Columbus, and against his base enemies on board, the company on board his own ship considered that he had a full right to feel the most vengeful wrath. It was not Montoro only who could scarcely believe his ears when, after the pause of a few moments following his sacred quotation--moments devoted to further keen, close scrutiny of those weather signs in which he was so deeply skilled--the Admiral summoned forward the crew of the boat that had just returned, and despatched them with a second message to the new governor Ovando, to entreat him to save the fleet from the certainly approaching storm, by a few days' delay of their departure.

"Better to leave them to meet their fate as they leave us," muttered Montoro, with the yet unconquered passion of his nature. But once again that firm touch came upon his shoulder. The Admiral's quick ears had caught the growl, low as it was.

"My son," he said quietly, "you shall go with my messengers. That will be a fitting rebuke for you, will it not," he added with a grave smile, "for uttering opinions contrary to those of your commander, and contrary to those of the Divine Ruler of the universe?"

Obeying a sudden impulse of veneration, Diego snatched the aged hand in his own, and pressed it to his lips. "I can never attain to your generosity, Señor," he murmured, "nor be thus forgiving to those wrongfully my enemies."

Just as the boat was starting, Ferdinand Columbus bent over the ship's side, and called mischievously:

"Diego, there, hark ye!"

"Ay, what is it then?" asked Montoro, as he lifted his head, resting on his oar the while. "What news hast thou since I left thee and the caravel?"

"Great news," was the mischievous answer. "My father gives me leave to tell thee that, since thou art doubtless feared by reason of the coming storm, he will obtain permission at least for such a whipper-snap as thou to abide on shore."

That quick, unmanageable spirit of Montoro's was set all ablaze for a moment at the supposed imputation of cowardice; and he was about to shout back an answer little in accordance with his late act of reverence, but Diego Mendez, the officer in command of the little embassy, hastily clapped his hand over the lad's mouth, as he said with a short laugh:

"Nay now, art thou not a very fool to be so taken in? Dost thou not see by thy tormentor's face that the brain of no Columbus but himself made up that message for thee?"

The friendly intervention was timely. When Fernando called down again--"Say then, dost accept the offer?"--his companion's face was brimming over with merriment like his own, as the retort was shouted up:

"Ha, Fernando, my good Señor, thou art but a sorry messenger. My absent ears have caught the purport of thy father's words better than thy present ones. The Admiral's message to me is, that since thou art feared, I must obtain a leave to land for thee. I bid thee, then, calm thy quaking heart, since I will not fail. Adios."

"And a slap o' the ear for thee when thou returnest," was the answering shout; and then the boat cast off, and was rowed with vigorous strokes to that once fertile, but already so dismal and desolated island of Hispaniola, the head-quarters of cruelty, lawlessness, suffering, and rapacity.

Montoro was very quickly to have a specimen of the deeds that had brought the island to its present wretched condition.

As the boat approached the strand, crowds of idlers gathered about, some to give the new-comers welcome, more to express their contemptuous dislike of the Admiral by covert sneers or openly-expressed scorn bestowed upon his followers.

There, flaunting in silks and brocades, which not even the proudest hidalgos dared any longer wear in Spain, stood half-a-dozen men, who had been loosed from richly-deserved felons' dungeons at home, to serve as colonists for the New World. Near them, reclining in a sumptuous litter, borne upon the bleeding shoulders of four of the meek-spirited and unhappy natives, was an ignorant, cunning rascal, whom Montoro had himself seen carried off to prison for theft in El Cuevo. Now he lay there in all the insolent dignity of riches, with a palm-leaf umbrella borne over his head by one slave, whilst another sickly-looking creature fanned him.

Closer to the edge of the soft-lapping waters was a real Spanish Don, whose poverty-stricken estate had driven him to hide his thread-bare pride in exile. To indemnify himself for leaving his beloved Castile, he spent his whole time and thoughts on the island in squeezing wealth, almost, as it seemed, even out of its very stones. His slaves died off day by day, very nearly as soon as they were allotted to him; but that was nought to their owner, so long as with the remnants of their dying strength they reaped his harvests, and brought up gold for him from the mines. They were to him as machines for making riches; and when one of the machines wore out, it must be tossed aside to make room for another.

But with all Don Alfonzo's heartless barbarities to his miserable victims, he had a warm corner in his callous heart for his own countrymen, whoever they might be. All Spaniards were friends to Don Alfonzo, while the ocean lay between him and his home. He watched the progress of the incoming boat with eyes almost as eager as those with which, week by week, he counted his golden gains; and when, from the shallowness of the water, the rowers had to stop some way short of dry ground, he looked round hastily for some one whom he could order off for their assistance. None of his own people were in sight, but a weak, wan-faced Indian lay beside him, and him the nobleman immediately commanded to rise, and go into the water to help drag up the boat.

With a moan the poor creature began to obey, but too slowly to suit the despotic impatience of the Spaniard.

"Hurry thy lazy carcase, then, thou black-skinned dog," he exclaimed imperiously; and to enforce his words he raised a bamboo cane he held, and brought it down with a fierce swish through the air, which told its own tale of what its effect should be if it came in contact with the native's tender flesh. As the cane rose the Indian crouched with a low, pitiful cry, which was echoed with an added note of indignation by Montoro from the boat.

The next moment Montoro sprang to his feet with a second cry of impulsive admiration. The stinging slash of that bamboo cane had come down upon the arm of a young Spaniard, who had stretched it out as a cover for the helpless Indian; and then, when the arm had performed its allotted task, it was quietly withdrawn, terribly cut as it must have been, and folded over its owner's chest, who as quietly turned and confronted Don Alfonzo.

"It is the command of our Sovereign, Queen Isabella," he said firmly, "that the Indians be treated with humanity, and according to law."

"Who is that?" asked Montoro, as he sprang on to the sandy shore, and pointed out the young man who had made his arm serve so readily for another man's shield.

Shyness was never one of Montoro Diego's failings; and now curiosity and a generous admiration made him put his question eagerly to the first person he came up to. All he got at first was a return question to match his own, a good-humoured:

"And pray, then, who are you? If you're come to work you are welcome; if you have come to make others work, you may as well be off again, for there are more than enough of that sort here already."

"I am going off again," replied Diego laughing. "I have not come to stay; not just yet, at least. But do tell me who that young Señor is."

"Well, he's a crack-brained young Señor, to begin with," was the reply, with a shrug of the shoulders. "His name is Bartholomew Las Casas, and he's only been out here a few weeks. He came out with Ovando. His father came out here before, with the Admiral himself."

Montoro grew still more interested.

"But why do you call him crack-brained?"

"Because he is crack-brained. Crazy as he can be about what he calls the wrongs of the black rascals out here. His father took one over for him to have as his own in Spain, five or six years ago, and comfortable enough the fellow was with such a soft-hearted master. Then comes the royal order that there are to be no more of these Indian slaves in Spain; that they are not cruelly to be kept from their own country, and they are forthwith all packed back again, to be grabbed at as fast as they arrive, and worked to quick deaths in the mines. Meantime, our young Señor Las Casas has been taught to think a whole host of nonsense about their miseries, and his duties of relieving them. If he uses his arms as their covers in his fashion just now he'll pretty soon need some one to relieve him.”

"Ay, verily," murmured Montoro musingly as he turned away from his informant and rejoined his companions. The history of his own family's wrongs had made him more keenly alive to the wrongs of others. He had a generous feeling of envy that it had been the arm of the young Las Casas, and not his own, that had taken the blow for the Indian. But, as the great American poet says,

"A boy's will is the wind's will."

Before half-an-hour had passed Montoro's will had veered round once more--from a desire to relieve injuries to a desire to inflict them. For humanity's sake Columbus had sent urgent warnings and entreaties that the departure of the fleet might be delayed a few days, to avoid the coming storm. And for his charity he received contempt. The Governor and his counsellors looked at the quiet sky, the calm sea, they felt the soft breeze on their cheeks, and the contemptuous answer was sent back:

"In this year of grace dreamers of dreams are out of fashion."

"When I see the Admiral's letters patent as the authorized reader of the heavens, and the interpreter of its signs," said the Governor haughtily, "doubtless he will find me an obedient pupil. Meantime I prefer instruction when I ask for it."

"He and all the rest of them deserve to be drowned if they are not," said Diego Mendez indignantly, as he returned with his party to the boat, and put back to the ship.

Montoro's thoughts flew back to the cannon on board. He felt just then as if nothing on earth would so well satisfy him as to see them pointed at the Governor's house, to see their flash, to hear their roar, and to witness the wholesale destruction they could cause.

"Why was there no young Las Casas to avenge this insult to the Admiral?"

But there was One mightier than Las Casas to do that, One whose artillery was mightier than the cannon in which Montoro put such confidence. Two days passed, and then the tropical storm burst in all its fury. To such poor, unforbidden shelter as he could find the Admiral had guided his battered little squadron, and there he and his followers waited, and watched the gathering gloom of earth and sea and air and sky; and well it might seem to some of those watchers that a spirit of retributive wrath was brooding over the scene of cruelty, treachery, and insolence.

"It will require all their seamanship to ride out the coming hurricane," said the pilot, Antonio de Alaminos, on the second day, as he regarded somewhat dubiously their own quarters.

And Diego Mendez answered moodily:

"I should heave no sigh if they and their ill-gotten wealth went to the bottom of the deep before mine eyes; but I do grieve to have heard that on the craziest of their barques they are carrying home the Admiral's gold, the poor remnant of his rents they have permitted him."

"Never have care for that, Señor," said the young Fernando earnestly. "It is my father's, and it will be kept safe for him."

"It is as well that thou canst console thyself with that belief, any way," muttered the man, as the boy went off to where Columbus was already issuing orders, needed by the sudden wild gusts of wind that came as forerunners of the tempest.

Then came the wild roar and whirl, and darkness made more awful by the fiery flashes that momentarily illumined the terrors of the scene. On land trees uprooted, houses flung into ruins as though made by children's hands of cards, the fields of maize changed as in an instant from fields of gold to grey, scorched deserts. Living beings struck at a breath into corpses; others crushed in the downfall of their homes. And at sea those four poor cranky vessels, which were all a great country could afford its great benefactor, tossing and toiling in the boiling sea.

Now the waters would seethe as though some hideous cauldron, prepared by evil spirits for some demon feast, and the doomed vessels shook through every plank and spar as though with living horror. And then, with a sudden shock the waters would rush together, and mount wildly into mountain waves crowned with crests of foam.

The ships lost sight of each other. Sailors and adventurers all gave themselves up for death. In a delirium of fear they confessed their sins to whoever would heed the dismal catalogue. Ave Marias, invocations of the saints, and such fragments of Scripture as they knew, were groaned forth on all sides, rather as invocations than prayers, as the days went by, and still the furious battle of nature raged.

The fellow to that storm not even the veteran navigator of all seas had experienced before. At times during the blackness of the night it would seem to the affrighted mariners as though hell itself had opened its jaws to swallow them. Making a pathway for themselves through the darkness, the raging billows would suddenly rush onwards brilliant with light, and surround the ship and its awe-struck occupants with a sea of flame. For a day and night the heavens glowed as a furnace; and the reverberating peals of thunder sounded to the distracted sailors as the last despairing cries from the other ships of their sinking comrades. What was becoming of the wretched, foolhardy creatures on board Ovando's proud fleet they had no longer care to think. Drenched with the ceaseless sheet of rain, which poured down day and night throughout that long week of storm continually, exhausted with toil, worn with fears, Columbus and his company were to be still further tried by the majestic terrors of those southern seas.

Wildly tossed as was the whole ocean, it suddenly became observed, with deepening dread, that in one spot the agitation was still redoubled. Even as they looked the waters reared themselves higher and yet higher, grim and terrible as a giant pillar of molten lead; while a livid cloud bent down from the heavens to meet it. Thus joining, and ever gathering fresh size and force as it sucked up the waves in its headlong course, the dreadful column rushed on towards the ships.

The Admiral came forth from his cabin with the iron-clasped Bible open in his hands, to exorcise the evil spirit abroad for their destruction. Men hardened in callousness fell on their knees in silent prayer. Antonio de Alaminos stood gazing with fixed eyes at the invincible enemy. His skill and knowledge were powerless in the presence of that foe. As he stood there waiting for the end he was startled by a voice beside him so clear, so calm, that it was distinct even in the midst of that wild tumult.

"Alaminos, thinkest thou that we shall live through the storm?"

Starting, the pilot turned his gaze for a moment from the advancing column, and exclaimed:

"Montoro! boy, hast thou no fears?"

"None," was the low, soft answer of his lips. "None," was the answer of his rapt, earnest eyes, full of a beautiful awe and reverence. "He holds the storm in His hand, and us."

Even as the boy spoke the vessel swerved, the waterspout passed on beside it, and they were safe.

"The Admiral's Bible has saved us," exclaimed the mariners, as wild with joy as they had been with fear.

Alaminos, the pilot, looked at Montoro de Diego, and said nothing. For the first time in his life the thought had stolen into his mind whether the faith to be learnt from the teaching of the Bible might not be a more precious thing than even its print and paper.

The force of the long-protracted tempest was at length spent; the sea subsided, and Columbus's scattered caravals, none of them lost, gathered together again to offer thanks to God for their preservation, and to seek the shelter and refreshment no longer denied them, in the ports of Hispaniola.

The storm had passed, but it had left behind it sorrow and shame and gloom on the countenances of Ovando the Governor, and those about him. The gay, grand fleet, despatched against the Admiral's advice, was lost, with all those many hundreds of souls on board, and all that wealth. The Admiral's enemies had perished; Bobadilla, the mutinous Roldan, and many another. Those gallant ships were gone. Only that poor, mean, weak little barque, inferior to all its consorts, that had been thought good enough to carry the Admiral's grudged revenue, that lived through the storm, and took its little treasure safe into the Spanish port.

"It is my father's; I told you that God would guard it," said Fernando Colon, some months later, when the strange, good news of that survivor reached his ears.