finally accomplished the dearest wish of his heart in marrying the object of his early affection, Doña Mencia Sol. Thou knewest him to be a man alike immoveable in love or hatred, and yet didst venture to deceive and betray the child whom he doated on, forcing him to cut short her young days to save his and her honor, although it should rend his heart-strings; and thus drawing upon thee all the extremity of his fell resentment. Now, thou hast thy reward!'

When the monk first abruptly introduced the name of Doña Catalina, it seemed to seal up the lips and benumb the very soul of Philip in the instant; but as the Prior proceeded to refer to the feelings and fortunes of Diego Garcia, surprise, wonder, curiosity were successively depicted upon the royal counte

nance.

'It was true then,' cried Philip, 'what Father Arteaga averred, that Don Diego caused Doña Catalina to be bled to death by the hand of Gil Cano? And that, notwithstanding the solemn asseverations of the Emperor to the contrary, he slew the Valencian in his dwelling, and the priest at the altar, to suppress the knowledge of his crime?'

'Doña Catalina died as thou sayest, with her own good will, and by her father's procurement, because his and her fair fame exacted the sacrifice; but deem better of the Count of Orotava than to suppose he would stain his hands with the blood of peasantly artisans or feeble friars slain at vantage,

as a common stabber takes off his man.

Know that

Gil Cano and Joaquin Arteaga were the marked victims of the Holy Office, the first as a relapsed Jew, and the second as a secret favorer of the damnable heresies of Martin Luther; and it was only in regard of the time and the mode of their end, that the commands of the Count of Orotava intervened.'

'But the carefully announced and yet secret Garci Perez? The dagger, so openly displayed, and so strangely withdrawn? The place and manner of each death, selected as if in defiance of God and man?'

'Trifle not with thy conscience, Don Philip. It was for thine ear the vengeance of Garci Perez was so fearfully performed and so loudly proclaimed. Who, beside the Emperor and thee, knew that Garci Perez, the ancient appellation of his house, was the name the Conde de Orotava bore among the sierras of the New World and in the rocks of the Alpujarras, while pursuing his enemy; and that after Don Gaspar had fallen by his hand, Garci Perez was made to stand godfather to every act of violence done by the mountain outlaws, just as our ballad singers string their endless tales of chivalry on the name of the Cid? Trifle not with thy conscience, I say. To thee were his admo nitions addressed, and thou didst hear and tremble. Bethink thee of the days of disquiet and the nights of anxiety the fear of him has occasioned thee,15*

VOL. I.

of thy incessant efforts to shake his credit with thy father, of thy machinations against his life, delation, poison, the dagger, which thou hast so liberally but vainly employed to remove him from thy path, —of the innumerable supplications to heaven for mercy, extorted from thee in thy secret hours by the agonies of thy remorse and apprehension,-of thy despair to learn, when Don Carlos retired from the cares of empire to the solitudes of Yuste, that the object of thy dread then disappeared from thy sight and thy power, to be the more terribly present to thy conscience,-bethink thee of these, as thou didst fondly imagine, the hidden passages of thy life, nor seek to disguise thy knowledge of the Garci Perez of the Puerta del Sol, the Garci Perez of Our Lady of San Salvador.'

Strange light seemed to break on the soul of Don Philip, as, with scarce audible voice, he gasped out,' But the dagger, the dagger, Lord Prior?'

'Behold it here,' said the monk; and he reverentially kissed the crucifix upon the silver-netted handle of the poniard, as he drew it from his bosom, and tauntingly held it before the eyes of Philip. 'Gaze thy fill, King of Spain. This little weapon has done good service in its day. It saved my life at the bridge of Garellano, when the grip of a fierce Norman was on my throat; it drank the heart's blood of Gaspar de Pimentel; it served to deliver Mencia de Sol from the outrages of a sottish Saxon brute in the sack of Rome; it chastised the officious

impertinence of the priest of San Salvador; and it is yet damp from the body of its last and greatest victim, the gallant and princely Carlos.'

The Prior seemed to look at the weapon, as he recounted its uses, with something akin to the affection we bear a valued servant. Philip had dropped upon a seat, as the monk proceeded: his quivering features, his eyes almost starting from their sockets, and his convulsed frame, betrayed the tempest of passions which raged in his bosom; while terror of what further the monk might say or do overmastered his every faculty.

'Fear not,' the Prior continued, 'that I design to take thy worthless life.' And he flung the dagger on the floor as he spoke. 'I may have been tempted to do it, time and again, when thou hast unconsciously been, as now, at my mercy; but I reserved thee for higher purposes of punishment. I chose that thou shouldst live on, as I have, through long years of corroding sorrow. For I come to tell thee that thy Carlos died as guiltless of raising his thoughts or wishes to the Queen as the babe that is unborn, and innocent of aught else, indeed, unless it be the guilt of springing from so wicked a sire. And he died by thy orders, because I did so will it, and did cause thy purposes to be so moulded as to effect it; for thus only could fit retribution be meted out to thee for thy own black deeds.'

'And who art thou, mysterious arbiter of my destiny,' cried Philip, 'who presumest thus to harrow

up my soul with reminiscences of the buried sins of youth, and who fillest mine ears, like a night-raven, with more horrid words of present guilt and wo?'

'Who am I?' slowly responded the monk:'Look, and if grief and penitential vigils have not obliterated every lineament of the features once familiar to thine eye, look, and learn that the barriers, which the fortune of birth interposed between Philip of Spain and me, are broken down by community of anguish. I court concealment no longer, for it is only to see this hour, that I have dragged along the weary years of a painful existence. Sometimes the frail body communicates disease to the mind; but in me the fixed purposes of the soul have sustained the sinking strength of its tabernacle. But, now the great object of life is answered, there is no longer the tension of its pursuit to uphold me; and I shall meet death as cheerfully as I ever rested on a hard-won field of battle, since the VENGEANCE of Garci PerEZ is complete.'

He dropped his cowl on his shoulders, as he spoke the last words, and exposed to Philip the sunken and emaciated features of the Conde de Orotava, bearing marks of extreme old age, but with unbroken nobility of air, and an eye of fire, which gleamed on Philip, like the grave-lamp burning in the mansions of the dead. The soul-smitten King buried his face in his hands, and uttering a loud groan, sunk insensible on the floor; and when his terrified attendants, summoned to the apartment by