35. Engaged to Isabel Arundell, August 1856.
In August, after a lapse of four years, Burton renewed acquaintance with Isabel Arundell, who one day met him, quite by accident, in the Botanical Gardens, and she kept meeting him there quite by accident every day for a fortnight. He had carried his life in his hand to Mecca and to Harar, he had kept at bay 200 Somalis, but like the man in Camoens, he finally fell by "a pair of eyes." [163] According to Lady Burton, [164] it was Burton who made the actual proposal; and it is just possible.
"You won't chalk up 'Mother will be angry' now I hope," said Burton.
"Perhaps not," replied Miss Arundell, "but she will be all the same."
Mrs. Arundell, indeed, like so many other English mothers, was violently prejudiced against Burton. When her daughter broached the subject she replied fiercely: "He is not an old English Catholic, or even a Catholic, he has neither money nor prospects." She might also have added that he was apt to respect mere men of intellect more than men of wealth and rank, an un-English trait which would be sure to militate against his advancement.
Miss Arundell bravely defended her lover, but without effect. A few days later she again met her old gipsy crone Hagar Burton, who repeated her sibylline declaration. As Miss Arundell never, by any chance, talked about anything or anybody except Burton, and as she paid liberally for consulting the Fates, this declaration necessarily points to peculiar acumen on the part of the gipsy.
At one of their meetings Miss Arundell put round Burton's neck a steel chain with a medal of the Virgin Mary and begged him to wear it all his life. Possessing a very accommodating temperament in matters that seemed to himself of no vital importance, he consented; so it joined the star-sapphire and other amulets, holy and unholy, which, for different purposes, he carried about the world.
That this medal had often acted as a preservative to Burton she was in after life thoroughly convinced.