his whole heart, or as much of it,
poor wretch, as he dare tell to himself; and entreated to be allowed to
finish his novitiate, and enter the order, on the understanding that he
was to be sent at once back to Europe, or anywhere else; "Otherwise,"
as he said frankly, "he should go mad, even if he were not mad already."
The Jesuit, who was a kindly man enough, went to the Holy Office, and
settled all with the Inquisitors, recounting to them, to set him above
all suspicion, Eustace's past valiant services to the Church. His
testimony was no longer needed; he left Cartagena for Nombre that very
night, and sailed the next week I know not whither.

I say, I know not whither. Eustace Leigh vanishes henceforth from these
pages. He may have ended as General of his Order. He may have worn out
his years in some tropic forest, "conquering the souls" (including, of
course, the bodies) of Indians; he may have gone back to his old work
in England, and been the very Ballard who was hanged and quartered three
years afterwards for his share in Babington's villainous conspiracy:
I know not. This book is a history of men,--of men's virtues and sins,
victories and defeats; and Eustace is a man no longer: he is become a
thing, a tool, a Jesuit; which goes only where it is sent, and does good
or evil indifferently as it is bid; which, by an act of moral suicide,
has lost its soul, in the hope of saving it; without a will, a
conscience, a responsibility (as it fancies), to God or man, but only to
"The Society." In a word, Eustace, as he says himself, is "dead." Twice
dead, I fear. Let the dead bury their dead. We have no more concern with
Eustace Leigh.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BANKS OF THE META

"My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with
me--Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods!"

TENNYSON'S Ulysses.

Nearly three years are past and gone since that little band had knelt
at evensong beneath the giant tree of Guayra--years of seeming blank,
through which they are to be tracked only by scattered notes and
mis-spelt names. Through untrodden hills and forests, over a space of
some eight hundred miles in length by four hundred in breadth, they had
been seeking for the Golden City, and they had sought in vain. They had
so