“It is well; I shall not want you again for some hours. As we leave Granada so soon, you may have friends to part with, something to purchase. Go into the city if you desire.”
“Thank you, my lord!” replied Turner, with more than ordinary meekness; “I am much obliged by the permission.” The young earl looked up suddenly. There was a dryness in Turner’s voice that he did not like, but the immovable face of the old man revealed nothing. He touched his hat with military brevity and moved away, measuring his long strides down the avenue with a slow regularity that marked all his movements.
Lord Clare looked after him anxiously, and muttering to himself, “Well, well, we must manage him some way,” entered the Fonde, and spent some hours alone in his room walking to and fro, and tortured with those thousand wild dreams that haunt an imaginative person so like demons when the great epochs of life are close at hand. The sunset paled around him, and night came more darkly than is usual in that climate. Still he ordered no lights, but placing the bundle of page’s garments on the table near his elbow, sat down and waited in sombre silence.
To reveal all the thoughts that flowed through his mind, one must have known his previous life, and of that even to this day I am not informed. Nay, who is ever informed of those acts which give the well-springs of thought in any human being? Men and women live together under the same roof, sit at the same board, and talk of knowing each other’s hearts, feelings, lives. At the Day of Judgment when all hearts will be read, fold by fold, like the leaves of a book, how will these persons be astonished at the unspoken feelings, the unimagined acts that have marked the lives, and burned themselves upon the hearts with which they believed themselves so familiar.
Lord Clare sat motionless now, for he was waiting with that intense anxiety which makes one’s own breath a torment, because it disturbs the stillness with which we desire to envelop ourselves when listening. At length he heard a step, soft and cat-like, stealing through the passage. Then the door of his room opened, and in the darkness he saw two eyes glowing upon him like those of a tiger, when the rest of its body is concealed among the dusky limbs of a forest tree.
“Come,” said the voice of old Papita, “it is time.”
Lord Clare started up and moved toward the door.
“The clothes, give me the disguise,” whispered the Sibyl; “where is it?”
Without waiting for a reply, she put forth her claw-like hands, felt her way to the table, and grasped the bundle.
“Come, come,” she whispered, seizing Lord Clare by the hand.