"Or a wretched heretic, whom Torquemada—rest his soul!—would have sent to the stake," joined in her stern-faced duenna.
"Heresy must be put down," observed the don who had first spoken, with a frown which might have beseemed the Grand Inquisitor himself. This Spanish gentleman, who so strongly condemned what he termed heresy, had himself no faith in any religion whatever.
"One pities Don Alcala's sister," said the younger lady. "I rather liked her looks, though she never carried herself with the dignity of an Aguilera; and as for her dress, she, for one, seemed to think that Spanish ladies were born in the frightful mantilla, veil, and high comb worn by their mothers, and must carry them, as birds do their feathers, to the end of their lives!" It need scarcely be mentioned that the fair speaker, like Antonia, had adopted a fashionable Parisian costume, and wore her hair in the Impératrice style.
A cavalier, with obsequious reverence, such as he might have shown to Queen Isabella herself, was presenting to Donna Antonia the fan which she had dropped, when one of her servants approached her, and in a low tone informed his mistress that a lady who called herself Donna Inez de Aguilera asked a few minutes of private audience with the señorita.
"Donna Inez de Aguilera!" exclaimed Antonia, in a tone that expressed curiosity rather than pity; "is she waiting in her carriage without?"
"The señorita is on foot, and unattended," said the lackey, hardly suppressing a smile.
Antonia laughed—such a light, gay laugh—and the sycophants around her echoed the tones of her mirth. "Donna Inez doubtless comes to entreat my intercession for the caballero her brother," said the governor's daughter. "Would it not be like a scene out of some French romance, if we were to see this demoiselle-errante humbling herself to play the supplicant here!" And forgetting, or rather disregarding Inez's request that the audience might be private, Antonia bade her servant introduce the señorita into the crowded garden.
Purposely or not, Antonia moved a few steps to a place where a slight elevation of the ground gave her a raised position, such as might have been afforded by a dais, and her flatterers formed behind her a semicircle which might have graced the court of a queen. There was a smile of conscious triumph on the lips of the governor's daughter. The house of Aguilera was older by three centuries than that of Rivadeo, and to see a descendant of one of the conquerors of the Moors reduced to implore a boon in the presence of so many spectators was a gratification to the mean ungenerous pride of Antonia.
There mingled also with that pride a spirit of petty revenge. Inez had once been invited to a party at the governor's house, and the invitation had not been accepted. There had been various reasons for the refusal of Inez to appear in the gay assembly,—one of the most potent amongst them being the lack of a suitable dress,—but Antonia imagined but one. The heiress of De Rivadeo thought herself slighted by a proud descendant of heroes, and deeply resented the slight.
"Inez de Aguilera is the only woman in Seville who would not have thought herself honoured by my invitation," Antonia had observed to one of her numerous sycophants; and the haughty girl had added the bitter remark, "She may live to repent her folly." Antonia now deemed that the time for such repentance had come.