“Reverend Father,” said Doña Clara, looking up to Fra Jose, who had dictated the last line, “Don Francisco will know the last line not to be mine—he heard it in one of your sermons. Let me add the extraordinary proof of my daughter’s insanity at the ball.”
“Add or diminish, compose or confound, what you will, in God’s name!” said Fra Jose, vexed at the frequent erasures and lituras which disfigured the lines of his dictation; “for though in style I may somewhat boast of my superiority, in scratches no hen on the best dunghill in Spain can contend with you! On, then, in the name of all the saints!—and when it pleases heaven to send an interpreter to your husband, we may hope to hear from him by the next post-angel, for surely such a letter was never written on earth.”
With this encouragement and applause, Doña Clara proceeded to relate sundry other errors and wanderings of her daughter, which, to a mind so swathed, crippled, and dwarfed, by the ligatures which the hand of custom had twined round it since its first hour of consciousness, might well have appeared like the aberrations of insanity. Among other proofs, she mentioned that Isidora’s first introduction to a Christian and Catholic church, was on that night of penitence in passion-week, when, the lights being extinguished, the miserere is chaunted in profound darkness, the penitents macerate themselves, and groans are heard on every side instead of prayers, as if the worship of Moloch was renewed without its fires;—struck with horror at the sounds she heard, and the darkness which surrounded her, Isidora demanded what they were doing.—“Worshipping God,” was the answer.
At the expiration of Lent, she was introduced to a brilliant assembly, where the gay fandango was succeeded by the soft notes of the seguedilla—and the crackling of the castanets, and the tinkling of the guitars, marked alternate time to the light and ecstatic step of youth, and the silvery and love-tuned voice of beauty. Touched with delight at all she saw and heard—the smiles that dimpled and sparkled over her beautiful features reflecting every shade of pleasure they encountered, like the ripplings of a brook kissed by the moonbeams—she eagerly asked, “And are not these worshipping God?”
“Out on it, daughter!” interposed Doña Clara, who happened to overhear the question; “This is a vain and sinful pastime—the invention of the devil to delude the children of folly—hateful in the eyes of heaven and its saints—and abhorred and renounced by the faithful.”
“Then there are two Gods,” said Isidora sighing, “the God of smiles and happiness, and the God of groans and blood. Would I could serve the former!”
“I will take order you shall serve the latter, heathenish and profane that you are!” answered Doña Clara, as she hurried her from the assembly, shocked at the scandal which her words might have given. These and many similar anecdotes were painfully indited in Doña Clara’s long epistle, which, after being folded and sealed by Fra Jose (who swore by the habit he wore, he had rather study twenty pages of the Polyglot fasting, than read it over once more), was duly forwarded to Don Francisco.
The habits and movements of Don Francisco were, like those of his nation, so deliberate and dilatory, and his aversion to writing letters, except on mercantile subjects, so well known, that Doña Clara was actually alarmed at receiving, in the evening of the day in which her epistle was dispatched, another letter from her husband.
Its contents must be guessed to be sufficiently singular, when the result was, that Doña Clara and Fra Jose sat up over them nearly the whole of the night, in consultation, anxiety, and fear. So intense was their conference, that it is recorded it was never interrupted even by the lady telling her beads, or the monk thinking of his supper. All the artificial habits, the customary indulgences, the factitious existence of both, were merged in the real genuine fear which pervaded their minds, and which asserted its power over both in painful and exacting proportion to their long and hardy rejection of its influence. Their minds succumbed together, and sought and gave in vain, feeble counsel, and fruitless consolation. They read over and over again this extraordinary letter, and at every reading their minds grew darker—and their counsels more perplexed—and their looks more dismal. Ever and anon they turned their eyes on it, as it lay open before them on Doña Clara’s ebony writing-desk, and then starting, asked each other by looks, and sometimes in words, “Did either hear some strange noise in the house?” The letter, among other matter not important to the reader, contained the singular passage following.
In my travel
