‘Answer it,’ cried he, ‘I hope I know better than to dispute obstinately with the daughter of my good mistress. No, Master Mariner, I held my peace, as became me, being but a servant; yet I do, nevertheless, steadfastly believe the vision, and I hope that the saints will inspire the sweet Joseffa with kinder thoughts to her suitor, who is truly a goodly man and an honest, and what is better than both, favoured of St. Gieronimo.’
Then I, making inquiries of the steward as to the young lady’s features and carriage, he answered that to-morrow my own eyes would inform me better than his tongue, which could in no way do justice to such a theme as the great virtues and loveliness of his charming young mistress, whose single fault was that she laughed at the wedding ring of St. Gieronimo. Soon after this, our conversation broke off, the steward telling me he would be with me betimes in the morning. I lay long awake that night, conjuring up visions of Joseffa; at length, as sleep was coming over me, I heard, or dreamed I heard, the low tinkle of a guitar, and a manly voice, as of a serenader singing to it beneath an outside balcony.
‘The favoured suitor,’ I murmured, half asleep; and forthwith began to dream that I was his rival, and that Saint Gieronimo appeared again to explain that he meant the wedding ring with a view to my coming, and that Martin’s interpretation of the vision was quite erroneous.
The morning came, and I was ushered into the presence of my most kind benefactors. They sat—the elder lady on a couch, the younger on a footstool at her feet—in a great lofty withdrawing-chamber, the walls and ceiling rarely carved, the floor of sweet-smelling wood, highly polished, and almost as slippery as ice, and the whole apartment darkened by blinds of a peculiar construction, which excluded the heat, but allowed the fresh breeze to pass in freely. As I advanced, the Señora Moranté held out her jewelled hand, which I kissed very respectfully. She was a tall, stately-looking dame, dressed in morning-robes, and her hair, which was beginning to turn grey, covered with festoons of black lace, gracefully arranged, and falling down upon her shoulders. But my eyes were, as the reader may guess, fixed with a far more delighted gaze upon Joseffa. She was, indeed, a beauty of the true Spanish mould. Her form vibrated, as it were, with a graceful suppleness which made her every movement a charm to see. Her oval face—lighted by eyes which alternately flashed and melted—was beaming, sometimes with the joyous rapture of gaily flushing spirits, sometimes, as it were, shaded by a grave expression of pretty coquettish modesty and bashfulness. Her lips were full and pouting, and every moment there came a merry smile upon them, with a sudden arching of her dark eyebrows, which quite enabled me to understand the sportive nature which laughed at poor Martin, with his ring of St. Grieronimo. She bowed slightly as I advanced, and then, flirting and twirling and shaking a fan made of gaily-coloured feathers before her face, stole rapid glances at me; all the while pouting her lips, and sometimes looking down to the ground, and then starting up, and whispering and laughing softly in her mother’s ear, or unto herself, playing all the while with one hand among her long black hair—her white fingers glancing nimbly amid the glossy clustering locks.
The señora received me with a sort of goodnatured dignity, and bade me sit on a low seat hard by. She then began to inspect me, as I thought, as curiously as though I had been some sort of strange animal, muttering to herself, and sometimes whispering her daughter; to my no small embarrassment; all at once, she said—
‘Young man, I fear me you are a heretic?’
I replied softly that I was of the religion of my fathers.
‘But you are a pirate,’ she commenced again; ‘and you put our people to death very cruelly, and you pillage our ships. See, what being a heretic leads you to. Perhaps it was very weak in me to save you, and I know not what father Anselmo will say when next I go to confession.’
I answered that, far away in Scotland I had a mother, who I was sure would do for any poor hunted Spaniard what she had done for me, and that, though we did not worship in the same fashion, yet that never would my mother forget in her prayers the kind heart that had saved her son.’
I spoke this very earnestly, for I felt what I said deeply, and kneeling down, I took the señora’s hand again, and kissed it. She paused a little time, and then asked, what made my countrymen and the French so vengeful against the Spaniards. Now, this was an argument which I had no will to enter into—seeing that such a debate could but breed angry feelings on both sides; and so I endeavoured to turn the matter off by saying, that it was the two nations, and not individuals, who made war—on account of the heritage of the new world.