Aurora shrunk back into the recesses at this command, and stood there motionless as stone till daylight glittered upon the azulejos around her, and she was shrined, as it were, in a mass of living gems.
At length the terror that had kept her so motionless gave way. She changed her position; sat down, began counting the exquisite fragments that jewelled the wall, tracing the delicate lines of gold and silver that crept like glittering moss around them, with the tip of her fingers. At last, emboldened by the silence, she stepped down from the recess, and wandered restlessly around the body of the mosque.
Notwithstanding the great causes for anxiety that beset her, and though she had been in that spot before, she wandered through its gorgeous mazes with a strange and delicious swell of the heart. Love, the great magician, had unsealed her eyes to the beautiful. Never before had she distinguished the grand and varied richness of those columns. The deep, many-tinted greens engrained in the verd-antique, jasper of that rare kind which seems clouded with blood, grew beautiful in her eyes. She saw pillars of oriental alabaster rising among the forest of columns, like snow mellowed to golden richness by a meridian sun; and others with sweeping clouds of the deepest ruby tint, stained into a ground of dusky yellow. These mingled with columns of glittering black, or sheeted from floor to arch with gold, contrasted gorgeously with the snow-white shafts that rose on every hand; some with capitals, dashed lightly with gold; others cut, as it were, from solid pearl, and all made precious with the most perfect sculpture.
Filled, as I have said, with a new-born sense of the Beautiful, my mother wandered through all this Byzantine gorgeousness, amazed that she had never seen it before. With no knowledge of architecture, she felt without understanding the beautiful proportions of the building, while her eyes were fixed upon its pillars supporting arches graceful as the bend of a rainbow, and enriched with a beauty hitherto unknown even to Moorish art.
Her heart was numb for the time, and she wandered on like one in a dream—now looking upon the pavement, then lifting her eyes upward where traceries of snow, delicate as a spider’s web, but yet of a pearly richness, linked with blossoms of silver, ran through the arches, chaining the pillars together with a gleaming network. The doors, the royal seat, everything around was one blaze of rich mosaic—the pavement of white marble, starred with gorgeous tiles, spread away beneath her feet. Broken, soiled by neglect, in ruins, as all this was, perhaps it seemed but the more enchanting for that! for to a keen imagination these fragments of beauty were suggestive of an ideal perfection, which no art ever reached. But my mother could not long be won from the great causes of anxiety that surrounded her. Her heart began to ache again, and with a weary step she sought the Mih-rab, and seating herself on the agate floor, sat pondering over her own miserable thoughts till the sun went down.
With strained eyes and a weary heart, she saw the rich light fade away from the pillars till the arches were choked up with blackness, and all the slender columns seemed like spectres crowding toward her hiding-place. She grew feverish with anxiety; her lips were parched; a faintness crept through her frame. It was not hunger, but she was exhausted, and remembering the food her grandame had left, felt for it in the darkness.
She drank of the water, and tasted a mouthful of bread; but it was suspense, not want of food, that had taken away her strength. She could not endure to look out from her hiding-place, for now that crowd of pillars seemed like men of her tribe, all greedy and athirst for her young life.
Thus she remained; it might be hours or minutes; it seemed an eternity to her, and then she heard footsteps and a voice.
CHAPTER X.
THE COURIER AND HIS WILD VISITOR.
At a back door of the little Fonde, which stands within the enclosures of the Alhambra, sat a little old man, or if not absolutely old, so withered and shrunk up that it was impossible, at a little distance, not to think him aged. But at a close view you saw, by the sharp black eyes, the thin, but unwrinkled lips, and a certain elasticity of movement, that he had scarcely passed the middle age of life. A coat of drab cloth, with short-clothes of the same material, a plush waistcoat, knee and shoe-buckles of gold, and silk stockings, at once swept away all idea of his being a native of Granada, and to an experienced eye proclaimed him the retainer of some old English family. Besides all this, there was an air of rather peculiar nicety in his apparel. His cravat was richly ruffled with lace, and flowed down ostentatiously over the waistcoat. His wristbands were of the same costly material, with here and there a slight fray or break, which gave suspicion of some previous and more exalted ownership.