"How fares the señor?" inquired Lucius.
"Better, thanks to the blessed Santa Veronica, a lock of whose holy hair has been under the caballero's pillow," was the old woman's reply.
"Pray open the gate; I have come to nurse your master to-night," said Lucius.
"The caballero wants none of your nursing," exclaimed Teresa, in her harshest tone; "and if you wait till I open the gate for you, why, you may stand there till the Guadalquivir runs dry! Away with you and your white Judaism![12] To have the like of you prowling about sick men's beds is enough to make the bones of good old Torquemada[13] shake in the grave!"
Teresa's form vanished from behind the grating, and Lucius, not a little annoyed at this unexpected obstacle to his intercourse with Alcala, returned to his cheerless lodging.
Evening after evening the young Englishman renewed his attempt to gain admission into the mansion of De Aguilera, but always with a similar result. In vain he hoped for a sight of the señorita; she at least, he believed, would not shut out the friend of her brother. Lucius saw no one during repeated visits but the bandy-legged, ill-favoured Chico, or the fanatic Teresa. The latter as jealously guarded the entrance to forbidden ground as ever did fabled dragon of old. As regarded Chico, the case was different. Lucius more than suspected that when this servant answered his summons, the grating might have been unlocked by means of a silver key. But Lucius was too poor to give bribes, and the disappointed Chico became almost as rude as Teresa herself. The young foreigner only exposed himself to insult and abuse by his attempts to visit Alcala.
"This is my just punishment for former neglect of a clear duty," said Lucius to himself one evening, as he turned from the Moorish archway. "There was a time when an open gate was before me, but now the gate is shut."
FOOTNOTES:
[12] "White Judaism, which includes all kinds of heresy, such as Lutheranism, Freemasonry, and the like." See the Spanish priest's definition of the term, in the seventeenth chapter of Borrows' "Bible in Spain."
[13] A celebrated Spanish inquisitor.