“She is eminent in alms-deeds and works of charity,” said the good-natured priest. “I was summoned to a miserable hovel near your villa, Madonna Clara, to a dying sinner, a beggar rotting on rotten straw!”
“Jesu!” cried Doña Clara with involuntary horror, “I washed the feet of thirteen beggars, on my knees in my father’s hall, the week before my marriage with her honoured father, and I never could abide the sight of a beggar since.”
“Associations are sometimes indelibly strong,” said the priest drily;—then he added, “I went as was my duty, but your daughter was there before me. She had gone uncalled, and was uttering the sweetest words of consolation from a homily, which a certain poor priest, who shall be nameless, had lent her from his humble store.”
Isidora blushed at this anonymous vanity, while she mildly smiled or wept at the harassings of Don Fernan, and the heartless austerity of her mother.
“I heard her as I entered the hovel; and, by the habit I wear, I paused on the threshold with delight. Her first words were—Checkmate!” he exclaimed, forgetting his homily in his triumph, and pointing, with appealing eye, and emphatic finger, to the desperate state of his adversary’s king.
“That was a very extraordinary exclamation!” said the literal Doña Clara, who had never raised her eyes from her work.—“I did not think my daughter was so fond of chess as to burst into the house of a dying beggar with such a phrase in her mouth.”
“It was I said it, Madonna,” said the priest, reverting to his game, on which he hung with soul and eye intent on his recent victory.
“Holy saints!” said Doña Clara, still more and more perplexed, “I thought the usual phrase on such occasions was pax vobiscum, or—”
Before Father Jose could reply, a shriek from Isidora pierced the ears of everyone. All gathered round her in a moment, reinforced by four female attendants and two pages, whom the unusual sound had summoned from the antechamber. Isidora had not fainted; she still stood among them pale as death, speechless, her eye wandering round the group that encircled her, without seeming to distinguish them. But she retained that presence of mind which never deserts woman where a secret is to be guarded, and she neither pointed with finger, or glanced with eye, towards the casement, where the cause of her alarm had presented itself. Pressed with a thousand questions, she appeared incapable of answering them, and, declining assistance, leaned against the casement for support.
Doña Clara was now advancing with measured step to proffer a bottle of curious essences, which she drew from a pocket of a depth beyond calculation, when one of the female attendants, aware of her favourite habits, proposed reviving her by the scent of the flowers that clustered round the frame of the casement; and collecting a handful of roses, offered them to Isidora. The sight and scent of these beautiful flowers, revived the former associations of Isidora; and, waving away her attendant, she exclaimed, “There are no roses like those which surrounded me when he beheld me first!”
“He!—who, daughter?” said the alarmed Doña Clara.
“Speak, I charge you, sister,” said the irritable Fernan, “to whom do you allude?”
“She raves,” said the priest, whose habitual penetration discovered there was a secret—and whose professional jealousy decided that no one, not mother or brother, should share it with him; “she raves—ye are to blame—forbear to hang round and to question her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the saints watch round your bed!”
Isidora, bending thankfully for this permission, retired to her apartment; and Father Jose for an hour appeared to contend with the suspicious fears of Doña Clara, and the sullen irritability of Fernan, merely that he might induce them, in the heat of controversy, to betray all they knew or dreaded, that he might strengthen his own conjectures, and establish his own power by the discovery.
“Scire volunt secreta domus, et inde timeri.”
And this desire is not only natural but necessary, in a being from whose heart his profession has torn every tie of nature and of passion; and if it generates malignity, ambition, and the wish for mischief, it is the system, not the individual, we must blame.
“Madonna,” said the Father, “you are always urging your zeal for the Catholic church—and you, señor, are always reminding me of the honour of your family—I am anxious for both—and how can the interests of both be better secured than by Doña Isidora taking the veil?”
“The wish of my soul!” cried Doña Clara, clasping her hands, and closing her eyes, as if she witnessed her daughter’s apotheosis.
“I will never hear of it, Father,” said Fernan; “my sister’s beauty and wealth entitle me to claim alliance with the first families in Spain—their baboon shapes and copper-coloured visages might be redeemed for a century by such a graft on the stock, and the blood of which they boast would not be impoverished by a transfusion of the aurum potabile of ours into it.”
“You forget, son,” said the priest, “the extraordinary circumstances attendant on the early part of your sister’s life. There are many of our Catholic nobility who would rather see the black blood of the banished Moors, or the proscribed Jews, flow in the veins of their descendants, than that of one who—”
Here a mysterious whisper drew from Doña Clara a shudder of distress and consternation, and from her son an impatient motion of angry incredulity. “I do not credit a word of it,” said the latter; “you wish that my sister should take the veil, and therefore you credit and circulate the monstrous invention.”
“Take heed, son, I conjure you,” said the trembling Doña Clara.
“Take you heed, Madam, that you do not sacrifice your daughter to an unfounded and incredible fiction.”
“Fiction!” repeated Father Jose—“Señor, I forgive your illiberal reflections on me—but let me remind you, that the same immunity will not be extended to the insult you offer to the
