“Listen, Antonia! I will not have them spoken of. They are Jews—or at least infidels, all of them!—the devil himself is their father—the bishop, when he was here last confirmation, told me so.”
“Mother!”
“At least they are unbaptized Christians, Antonia. If you are not baptized, the devil sends you to do his work. As for Don Luis, he is a very Judas! Ah, Maria Santissima! how I do pity his good mother!”
“Poor Don Luis!” said Isabel plaintively.
“He is so handsome, and he sings like a very angel. And he loves my father; he wanted to be a doctor, so that he could always be with him. I dare say this man called Houston is no better than a Jew, and perhaps very ugly beside. Let us talk no more about him and the Americans. I am weary of them; as Tia Rachella says, ‘they have their spoon in every one’s mess.’”
And Antonia, whose heart was burning, only stooped down and closed her sister’s pretty mouth with a kiss. Her tongue was impatient to speak for the father, and grandmother, and the friends, so dear to her; but she possessed great discretion, and also a large share of that rarest of all womanly graces, the power under provocation, of “putting on Patience the noble.”
CHAPTER III. BUILDERS OF THE COMMONWEALTH.
“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing
herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her
invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her
mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eye in the full mid-day beam.”
—MILTON.
“And from these grounds, concluding as we doe,
Warres causes diuerse, so by consequence
Diuerse we must conclude their natures too:
For war proceeding from Omnipotence,
No doubt is holy, wise, and without error;
The sword, of justice and of sin, the terror.”
—LORD BROOKE.
It is the fashion now to live for the present but the men of fifty years ago, the men who builded the nation, they reverenced the past, and therefore they could work for the future. As Robert Worth rode through the streets of San Antonio that afternoon, he was thinking, not of his own life, but of his children’s and of the generations which should come after them.