"I, señor! The Lord forbid! I am an old Christian, and a good Catholic, and so I hope to die. But if you must hear all the truth, I would walk in a yellow sanbenito, with a taper in my hand, before I would acknowledge that he ever said one word or thought one thought that was not Catholic and Christian too. All his crime was to find out that the good Lord loved him, and to be happy on account of it. If that be your religion also, Señor Don Juan, I have nothing to say against it. And, as I have said, God granting me, in his great mercy, one assurance first, I am ready to follow you and your lady to the world's end."
With these words on her lips she left the room. For a time Juan sat silent in deep thought. Then he opened the Testament, and turned over its leaves until he found the parable of the sower. "'Some fell upon stony places,'" he read, "'where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and, because they had no root, they withered away.' There," he said within himself, "in those words is written the history of my life, from the day my brother confessed his faith to me in the garden of San Isodro. God help me, and forgive my backsliding! But at least it is not too late to go humbly back to the beginning, and to ask him who alone can do it to break up the fallow ground."
He closed the book, walked to the window and looked out. Presently his eye was attracted to those dear mystic words on the pane, which both the brothers had loved and dreamed over from their childhood,--
"El Dorado
Yo hé trovado."
And at that moment the sun was shining on them as brightly as it used to do in those old days gone by for ever.
No vague dream of any good, foreshadowed by the omen to him or to his house, crossed the mind of the practical Don Juan. But he seemed to hear once more the voice of his young brother saying close beside him, "Look, Ruy, the light is on our father's words." And memory bore him back to a morning long ago, when some slight boyish quarrel had been ended thus.
Over his stern, handsome face there passed a look that shaded and softened it, and his eyes grew dim--dim with tears.
But just then Doña Beatriz, radiant from a morning walk, and with her hands full of early spring flowers, tripped in, singing a Spanish ballad,--
"Ye men that row the galleys,
I see my lady fair;
She gazes at the fountain
That leaps for pleasure there."
Beatrix was a child of the city; and, moreover, her life hitherto had been an unloved and unloving one. Now her nature was expanding under the wholesome influences of home life and home love, and of simple healthful pleasures. "Look, Don Juan, what pretty things grow in your fields here! I have never seen the like," she said, breaking off in her song to exhibit her treasures.