ch I
was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the
trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you could
not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers."

"Father! Hear me, I implore you!" He flung down upon his knees, and held
out shaking, supplicating hands.

"You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man
unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told
that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be
so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your
soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good
and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed
for you. Yet that you should Judaize--that you should be bound in
wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism--Oh!" The melancholy voice
broke off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his
hands--long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. "Pray now,
my child, for grace and strength," he exhorted. "Offer up the little
temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error,
and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve
salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my
prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence."

On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first
Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators,
and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the
ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the
essentials were already present.

In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of
the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two
by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the
familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand,
barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by
halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral,
where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by
the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the
meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.

Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged
by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her b