She had felt no refreshment from the bath, or from her prayers—she sought it at her casement, but there also in vain. The moon was as bright as the sun of colder climates, and the heavens were all in a blaze with her light. She seemed like a gallant vessel ploughing the bright and trackless ocean alone, while a thousand stars burned in the wake of her quiet glory, like attendant vessels pursuing their course to undiscovered worlds, and pointing them out to the mortal eye that lingered on their course, and loved their light.
Such was the scene above, but what a contrast to the scene below! The glorious and unbounded light fell on an enclosure of stiff parterres, cropped myrtles and orange-trees in tubs, and quadrangular ponds, and bowers of trellis-work, and nature tortured a thousand ways, and indignant and repulsive under her tortures every way.
Isidora looked and wept. Tears had now become her language when alone—it was a language she dared not utter before her family. Suddenly she saw one of the moonlight alleys darkened by an approaching figure. It advanced—it uttered her name—the name she remembered and loved—the name of Immalee!
“Ah!” she exclaimed, leaning from the casement, “is there then one who recognizes me by that name?”
“It is only by that name I can address you,” answered the voice of the stranger—“I have not yet the honour of being acquainted with the name your Christian friends have given you.”
“They call me Isidora, but do you still call me Immalee. But how is it,” she added in a trembling voice—her fears for his safety overcoming all her sudden and innocent joy at his sight—“how is it that you are here?—here, where no human being is ever beheld but the inmates of the mansion—how did you cross the garden wall?—how did you come from India? Oh! retire for your own safety! I am among those whom I cannot trust or love. My mother is severe—my brother is violent. Oh! how did you obtain entrance into the garden?—How is it,” she added in a broken voice, “that you risk so much to see one whom you have forgotten so long?”
“Fair Neophyte, beautiful Christian,” answered the stranger, with a diabolical sneer, “be it known to you that I regard bolts, and bars, and walls, as much as I did the breakers and rocks of your Indian isle—that I can go where, and retire when I please, without leave asked or taken of your brother’s mastiffs, or Toledos, or spring-guns, and in utter defiance of your mother’s advanced guard of duennas, armed in spectacles, and flanked with a double ammunition of rosaries, with beads as large as—”
“Hush!—hush!—do not utter such impious sounds—I am taught to revere those holy things. But is it you?—and did I indeed see you last night, or was it a thought such as visits me in dreams, and wraps me again in visions of that beautiful and blessed isle where first I—Oh that I never had seen you!”
“Lovely Christian! be reconciled to your horrible destiny. You saw me last night—I crossed your path twice when you were sparkling among the brightest and most beautiful of all Madrid. It was me you saw—I riveted your eye—I transfixed your slender frame as with a flash of lightning—you fell fainting and withered under my burning glance. It was me you saw—me, the disturber of your angelical existence in that isle of paradise—the hunter of your form and your steps, even amid the complicated and artificial tracks in which you have been concealed by the false forms of the existence you have embraced!”
“Embraced!—Oh no! they seized on me—they dragged me here—they made me a Christian. They told me all was for my salvation, for my happiness here and hereafter—and I trust it will, for I have been so miserable ever since, that I ought to be happy somewhere.”
“Happy,” repeated the stranger with his withering sneer—“and are you not happy now? The delicacy of your exquisite frame is no longer exposed to the rage of the elements—the fine and feminine luxury of your taste is solicited and indulged by a thousand inventions of art—your bed is of down—your chamber hung with tapestry. Whether the moon be bright or dark, six wax tapers burn in your chamber all night. Whether the skies be bright or cloudy—whether the earth be clothed with flowers, deformed with tempests—the art of the limner has surrounded you with ‘a new heaven and a new earth;’ and you may bask in suns that never set, while the heavens are dark to other eyes—and luxuriate amid landscapes and flowers, while half your fellow-creatures are perishing amid snows and tempests!” (Such was the overflowing acrimony of this being, that he could not speak of the beneficence of nature, or the luxuries of art, without interweaving something that seemed like a satire on, or a scorn of both.) “You also have intellectual beings to converse with instead of the chirpings of loxias, and the chatterings of monkeys.”
“I have not found the conversation I encounter much more intelligible or significant,” murmured Isidora, but the stranger did not appear to hear her.
“You are surrounded by everything that can flatter the senses, intoxicate the imagination, or expand the heart. All these indulgences must make you forget the voluptuous but unrefined liberty of your former existence.”
“The birds in my mother’s cages,” said Isidora, “are forever pecking at their gilded bars, and trampling on the clear seeds and limpid water they are supplied with—would they not rather rest in the mossy trunk of a doddered oak, and drink of whatever stream they met, and be at liberty, at all the risk
