All the Jews to be banished, and Don Pedro with a steady forefinger, “That man—­take him, too!  Who does not know that his grandmother was Jewess, and that he lived with her and drank poison?” But the Dominican, “No!  The Holy Office will take him.  You have but to read—­only you must not read—­what he has written to see why!”

Gray Ocean, stretching endlessly and now coming close, were it not well if I drowned myself this gray morning while I can choose the death I shall die?  Now the great murmur sang Well, and now it sang Not well.

Low cliff and heaped sand and a solitary bird wide-winging toward the mountains of Portugal, and the Ocean gray-blue and salt!  The salt savor entered me, and an inner zest came forward and said No, to being craven.  In banishment certainly, in the House of the Inquisition more doubtfully, the immortal man might yet find market from which to buy!  If the mind could surmount, the eternal quest need not be interrupted—­even there!

Blue Ocean sang to me.

A vision—­it came to me at times, vision—­set itself in air.  I saw A People who persecuted neither Jew nor thinker.  It rose one Figure, formed of an infinite number of small figures, but all their edges met in one glow.  The figure stood upon the sea and held apart the clouds, and was free and fair and mighty, and was man and woman melted together, and it took all colors and made of them a sun for its brow.  I did not know when it would live, but I knew that it should live.  Perhaps it was the whole world.

It vanished, leaving sky and ocean and Andalusia.  But great visions leave great peace.  After it, for this day, it seemed not worth while to grieve and miserably to forebode.  Through the hours that I lay there by the sea, airs from that land or that earth blew about me and faint songs visited my ears, and the gray day was only gray like a dove’s breast.

Jayme de Marchena stayed by the lonely sea because that seemed the safest place to stay.  At hand was the small port of Palos that might not know what was breeding in Seville, and going thither at nightfall I found lodging and supper in a still corner where all night I heard the Tinto flowing by.

I had wandered to Palos because of the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria de la Rabida and my very distant kins-man, Fray Juan Perez.  The day after the gray day by the shore I walked half a league of sandy road and came to convent gate.  The porter let me in, and I waited in a little court with doves about me and a swinging bell above until the brother whom he had called returned and took me to Prior’s room.  At first Fray Juan Perez was stiff and cold, but by littles this changed and he became a good man, large-minded and with a sense for kindred.  Clearly he thought that I should not have had a Jewish grandmother, nor have lived with her from my third to my tenth birthday, and most clearly that I should not have written that which I had written.  But his God was an energetic, enterprising, kindly Prince, rather bold himself and tolerant of heathen.  Fray Juan Perez even intimated a doubt if God wanted the Inquisition.  “But that’s going rather far!” he said hastily and sat drumming the table and pursing his lips.  Presently he brought out, “But you know I can’t do anything!”