“Madonna,” said the Father, “you are always urging your zeal for the Catholic church—and you, Senhor, are always reminding me of the honour of your family—I am anxious for both—and how can the interests of both be better secured than by Donna Isidora taking the veil?”—“The wish of my soul!” cried Donna Clara, clasping her hands, and closing her eyes, as if she witnessed her daughter’s apotheosis. “I will never hear of it, Father,” said Fernan; “my sister’s beauty and wealth entitle me to claim alliance with the first families in Spain—their baboon shapes and copper-coloured visages might be redeemed for a century by such a graft on the stock, and the blood of which they boast would not be impoverished by a transfusion of the aurum potabile of ours into it.”—“You forget, son,” said the priest, “the extraordinary circumstances attendant on the early part of your sister’s life. There are many of our Catholic nobility who would rather see the black blood of the banished Moors, or the proscribed Jews, flow in the veins of their descendants, than that of one who”—— Here a mysterious whisper drew from Donna Clara a shudder of distress and consternation, and from her son an impatient motion of angry incredulity. “I do not credit a word of it,” said the latter; “you wish that my sister should take the veil, and therefore you credit and circulate the monstrous invention.”—“Take heed, son, I conjure you,” said the trembling Donna Clara. “Take you heed, Madam, that you do not sacrifice your daughter to an unfounded and incredible fiction.”—“Fiction!” repeated Father Jose—“Senhor, I forgive your illiberal reflections on me,—but let me remind you, that the same immunity will not be extended to the insult you offer to the Catholic faith.”—“Reverend Father,” said the terrified Fernan, “the Catholic church has not a more devoted and unworthy professor on earth than myself.”—“I do believe the latter,” said the priest. “You admit all that the holy church teaches to be irrefragably true?”—“To be sure I do.”—“Then you must admit that the islands in the Indian seas are particularly under the influence of the devil?”—“I do, if the church requires me so to believe.”—“And that he possessed a peculiar sway over that island where your sister was lost in her infancy?”—“I do not see how that follows,” said Fernan, making a sudden stand at this premise of the Sorites. “Not see how that follows!” repeated Father Jose, crossing himself;
“Excæcavit oculos eorum ne viderent.
But why waste I my Latin and logic on thee, who art incapable of both? Mark me, I will use but one unanswerable argument, the which whoso gainsayeth is a—gainsayer—that’s all. The Inquisition at Goa knows the truth of what I have asserted, and who will dare deny it now?”—“Not I!—not I!” exclaimed Donna Clara; “nor, I am sure, will this stubborn boy. Son, I adjure you, make haste to believe what the reverend Father has told you.”—“I am believing as fast as I can,” answered Don Fernan, in the tone of one who is reluctantly swallowing a distasteful mess; “but my faith will be choaked if you don’t allow it time to swallow. As for digestion,” he muttered, “let that come when it pleases God.”—“Daughter,” said the priest, who well knew the mollia tempora fandi, and saw that the sullen and angry Fernan could not well bear more at present; “daughter, it is enough—we must lead with gentleness those whose steps find stumbling-blocks in the paths of grace. Pray with me, daughter, that your son’s eyes may yet be opened to the glory and felicity of his sister’s vocation to a state where the exhaustless copiousness of divine benignity places the happy inmates above all those mean and mundane anxieties, those petty and local wants, which——Ah!—hem—verily I feel some of those wants myself at this moment. I am hoarse with speaking; and the intense heat of this night hath so exhausted my strength, that methinks the wing of a partridge would be no unseasonable refreshment.”
“At a sign from Donna Clara, a salver with wine appeared, and a partridge that might have provoked the French prelate to renew his meal once more, spite of his horror of toujours perdrix. “See, daughter, see how much I am exhausted in this distressing controversy—well may I say, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”—“Then you and the zeal of the house will soon be quit,” muttered Fernan as he retired. And drawing the folds of his mantle over his shoulder, he threw a glance of wonder at the happy facility with which the priest discussed the wings and breast of his favourite bird,—whispering alternately words of admonition to Donna Clara, and muttering something about the omission of pimento and lemon.
“Father,” said Don Fernan, stalking back from the door, and fronting the priest—“Father, I have a favour to ask of you.”—“Glad, were it in my power to comply with it,” said Father Jose, turning over the skeleton of the fowl; “but you see here is only the thigh, and that somewhat bare.”—“It is not of that I speak or think, reverend Father,” said Fernan, with a smile; “I have but to request, that you will not renew the subject of my sister’s vocation till the return of my father.”—“Certainly not, son, certainly not. Ah! you know the time to ask a favour—you know I never could refuse you at a moment like this, when my heart is warmed, and softened, and expanded, by—by—by the evidences of your contrition and humiliation, and all that your devout mother, and your zealous spiritual friend, could hope or wish for. In truth, it overcomes me—these tears—I do not often weep but on occasions like these, and then I weep abundantly, and am compelled to recruit my lack of moisture thus.”—“Fetch more wine,” said Donna Clara.—The order was obeyed.—“Good night, Father,” said Don Fernan.—“The saints watch round you, my son! Oh I am exhausted!—I sink in this struggle! The night is hot, and requires wine to slake my thirst—and wine is a provocative, and requires food to take away its deleterious and damnable qualities—and food, especially partridge, which is a hot and stimulative nutritive, requires drink again to absorb or neutralize its exciting qualities. Observe me, Donna Clara—I speak as to the learned. There is stimulation, and there is absorption; the causes of which are manifold, and the effects such as——I am not bound to tell you at present.”—“Reverend Father,” said the admiring Donna Clara, not guessing, in the least, from what source all this eloquence flowed, “I trespassed on your time merely to ask a favour also.”—“Ask and ’tis granted,” said Father Jose, with a protrusion of his foot as proud as that of Sixtus himself. “It is merely to know, will not all the inhabitants of those accursed Indian isles be damned everlastingly?”—“Damned everlastingly, and without doubt,” returned the priest. “Now my mind is easy,” rejoined the lady, “and I shall sleep in peace to-night.”
“Sleep, however, did not visit her so soon as she expected, for an hour after she knocked at Father Jose’s door, repeating, “Damned to all eternity, Father, did you not say?”—“Be damned to all eternity!” said the priest, tossing on his feverish bed, and dreaming, in the intervals of his troubled sleep, of Don Fernan coming to confession with a drawn sword, and Donna Clara with a bottle of Xeres in her hand, which she swallowed at a draught, while his parched lips were gaping for a drop in vain,—and of the Inquisition being established in an island off the coast of Bengal, and a huge partridge seated with a cap on at the end of a table covered with black, as chief Inquisitor,—and various and monstrous chimeras, the abortive births of repletion and indigestion.
“Donna Clara, catching only the last words, returned to her apartment with light step and gladdened heart, and, full of pious consolation, renewed her devotions before the image of the virgin in her apartment, at each side of whose niche two wax tapers were burning, till the cool morning breeze made it possible for her to retire with some hope of rest.
“Isidora, in her apartment, was equally sleepless; and she, too, had prostrated herself before the sacred image, but with different thoughts. Her feverish and dreamy existence, composed of wild and irreconcileable contrasts between the forms of the present, and the visions of the past,—the difference between all that she felt within, and all that she saw around her,—between the impassioned life of recollection, and the monotonous one of reality,—was becoming too much for a heart bursting with undirected sensibilities, and a head giddy from vicissitudes that would have deeply tried much firmer faculties.
“She remained for some time repeating the usual number of ave’s, to which she added the litany of the Virgin, without any corresponding impulses of solace or illumination, till at length, feeling that her prayers were not the expressions of her heart, and dreading this heterodoxy of the heart more than the violation of the ritual, she ventured to address the image of the Virgin in language of her own.
“Mild and beautiful Spirit!” she cried, prostrating herself before the figure—“you whose lips alone have smiled on me since I reached your Christian land,—you whose countenance I have sometimes imagined to belong to those who dwelt in the stars of my own Indian sky,—hear me, and be not angry with me! Let me lose all feeling of my present existence, or all memory of the past! Why do my former thoughts return? They once made me happy, now they are thorns in my heart! Why do they retain their power since their nature is altered? I cannot be what I was—Oh, let me then no longer remember it! Let me, if possible, see, feel, and think as those around me do! Alas! I feel it is much easier to descend to their level than to raise them to mine. Time, constraint, and dullness, may do much for me, but what time could ever operate such a change on them! It would be like looking for the pearls at the bottom of the stagnant ponds which art has dug in their gardens. No, mother of the Deity! divine and mysterious woman, no!—they never shall see another throb of my burning heart. Let it consume in its own fires before a drop of their cold compassion extinguishes them! Mother divine! are not burning hearts, then, worthiest of thee?—and does not the love of nature assimilate itself to the love of God! True, we may love without religion, but can we be religious without love? Yet, mother divine! dry up my heart, since there is no longer a channel for its streams to flow through!—or turn all those streams into the river, narrow and cold, that holds its course on to eternity! Why should I think or feel, since life requires only duties that no feeling suggests, and apathy that no reflection disturbs? Here let me rest!—it is indeed the end of enjoyment, but it is also the end of suffering; and a thousand tears are a price too dear for the single smile which is sold for them in the commerce of life. Alas! it is better to wander in perpetual sterility than to be tortured with the remembrance of flowers that have withered, and odours that have died for ever.” Then a gush of uncontroulable emotion overwhelming her, she again bowed before the Virgin. “Yes, help me to banish every image from my soul but his—his alone! Let my heart be like this lonely apartment, consecrated by the presence of one sole image, and illuminated only by that light which affection kindles before the object of its adoration, and worships it by for ever!”