appearance of the scene
oppressed him and his eyeballs ached. Symphonies of light were massed
over the great high walls; glistening and pendulous, they illuminated
remote ceilings. There was color and taunting gaiety in the decoration;
the lofty panels contained pictures from the classic poets which seemed
profane in so sacred an edifice, and just over the Throne gleamed the
golden tubes of a mighty organ. Then Baruch Mendoza's eyes, half blinded
by the strange glory of the place to which he had been haled,
encountered the joyful and ferocious gaze of the Grand Inquisitor. Again
echoed dolefully the tap of the drum in the key of B, and the prisoner
shuddered.

A voice was heard: "Baruch Mendoza, thou art before the Throne, and one
of the humblest of God's creatures asks thee to renounce thy vile
heresies." Baruch made no answer. The voice again modulated high, its
menace sweetly hidden.

"Baruch Mendoza, dost thou renounce?" The drum counted two taps. Baruch
did not reply. For the third time the voice issued from the lips of the
Grand Inquisitor, as he drew the hood over his face.

"Baruch Mendoza, dog of a Jew, dog of a heretic, believer in no creed,
wilt thou recant the evil words of thy unspeakable book, prostrate
thyself before the altar of the Only God, and ask His forgiveness?
Answer, Baruch Mendoza!"

The man thus interrogated wondered why the Hall of the Oblates was
adorned with laughing Bacchantes, but he responded not. The drum tapped
thrice, and there was a burst of choral music from the death-like monks;
they chaunted the _Dies Irae_, and the sonorous choir was antiphonally
answered with anxious rectitude from the gallery, while the organ blazed
out its frescoed tones. And Baruch knew that his death-hymn was being
sung.

To him, a despiser of the vesture of things, to him the man with the
spiritual inner eye, whose philosophy was hated and feared because of
its subtle denial of the God in high heaven, to Baruch Mendoza the
universe had seemed empty with an emptiness from which glared no divine
Judge--his own people's Jahveh--no benignant sufferer appeared on the
cross. He saw no future life except in the commingling of his substance
with the elements; and for this contumacious belief, and his timidly
bold expression of it, he had been waylaid and apprehended in the gloomy
star-lit street of Lisbon.

The single tap of the drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this
bitter idealist, this preache