“No! no! no!” said the terrified Doña Clara crossing herself.
“How then?”
“Why, she speaks in a manner in which I never heard you, reverend Father, or any of the reverend brethren, whom my devotion to the holy church has led me to hear, speak before. It is in vain I tell her that true religion consists in hearing mass—in going to confession—in performing penance—in observing the fasts and vigils—in undergoing mortification and abstinence—in believing all that the holy church teaches—and hating, detesting, abhorring, and execrating—”
“Enough, daughter—enough,” said Father Jose; “there can be no doubt of the orthodoxy of your creed?”
“I trust not, holy Father,” said the anxious Doña Clara.
“I were an infidel to doubt it,” interposed the priest; “I might as well deny this fruit to be exquisite, or this glass of Malaga to be worthy the table of his Holiness the Pope, if he feasted all the Cardinals. But how, daughter, as touching the supposed or apprehended defalcations in Doña Isidora’s creed?”
“Holy Father, I have already explained my own religious sentiments.”
“Yes—yes—we have had enough of them; now for your daughter’s.”
“She will sometimes say,” said Doña Clara, bursting into tears—“she will say, but never till greatly urged, that religion ought to be a system whose spirit was universal love. Do you understand anything of that, Father?”
“Humph—humph!”
“That it must be something that bound all who professed it to habits of benevolence, gentleness, and humility, under every difference of creed and of form.”
“Humph—humph!”
“Father,” said Doña Clara, a little piqued at the apparent indifference with which Father Jose listened to her communications, and resolved to rouse him by some terrific evidence of the truth of her suspicions, “Father, I have heard her dare to express a hope that the heretics in the train of the English ambassador might not be everlastingly—”
“Hush!—I must not hear such sounds, or it might be my duty to take severer notice of these lapses. However, daughter,” continued Father Jose, “thus far I will venture for your consolation. As sure as this fine peach is in my hand—another, if you please—and as sure as I shall finish this other glass of Malaga”—here a long pause attested the fulfilment of the pledge—“so sure”—and Father Jose turned the inverted glass on the table—“Madonna Isidora has—has the elements of a Christian in her, however improbable it may seem to you—I swear it to you by the habit I wear;—for the rest, a little penance—a—I shall consider of it. And now, daughter, when your son Don Fernan has finished his siesta—as there is no reason to suspect him of retiring to think—please to inform him I am ready to continue the game of chess which we commenced four months ago. I have pushed my pawn to the last square but one, and the next step gives me a queen.”
“Has the game continued so long?” said Doña Clara.
“Long!” repeated the priest, “Aye, and may continue much longer—we have never played more than three hours a day on an average.”
He then retired to sleep, and the evening was passed by the priest and Don Fernan, in profound silence at their chess—by Doña Clara, in silence equally profound, at her tapestry—and by Isidora at the casement, which the intolerable heat had compelled them to leave open, in gazing at the lustre of the moon, and inhaling the odour of the tuberose, and watching the expanding leaves of the night-blowing cereus. The physical luxuries of her former existence seemed renewed by these objects. The intense blue of the heavens, and the burning planet that stood in sole glory in their centre, might have vied with all that lavish and refulgent opulence of light in which nature arrays an Indian night. Below, too, there were flowers and fragrance; colours, like veiled beauty, mellowed, not hid; and dews that hung on every leaf, trembling and sparkling like the tears of spirits, that wept to take leave of the flowers.
The breeze, indeed, though redolent of the breath of the orange blossom, the jasmine, and the rose, had not the rich and balmy odour that scents the Indian air by night.
Ενθα νησον μακαρων Αυραι περιπνεουσιν.
Except this, what was not there that might not renew the delicious dream of her former existence, and make her believe herself again the queen of that fairy isle?—One image was wanting—an image whose absence made that paradise of islands, and all the odorous and flowery luxury of a moonlight garden in Spain, alike deserts to her. In her heart alone could she hope to meet that image—to herself alone did she dare to repeat his name, and those wild and sweet songs of his country47 which he had taught her in his happier moods. And so strange was the contrast between her former and present existence—so subdued was she by constraint and coldness—so often had she been told that everything she did, said, or thought, was wrong—that she began to yield up the evidences of her senses, to avoid the perpetual persecutions of teasing and imperious mediocrity, and considered the appearance of the stranger as one of those visions that formed the trouble and joy of her dreamy and illusive existence.
“I am surprised, sister,” said Fernan, whom Father Jose’s gaining his queen had put in unusually bad humour—“I am surprised that you never busy yourself, as young maidens use, at your needle, or in some quaint niceties of your sex.”
“Or in reading some devout book,” said Doña Clara, raising her eyes one moment from her tapestry, and then dropping them again; “there is the legend of that Polish saint, born, like her, in a land of darkness, yet chosen to be a vessel—I have forgot his name, reverend Father.”48
“Check to the king,” said Father Jose in reply.
“You regard nothing but watching a few flowers, or hanging over your lute, or gazing at the moon,” continued Fernan, vexed alike at the success of his antagonist and
