Luiza had heard that the place was now owned by a Brazilian, who had made many improvements in it. He had built an observatory commanding a view of the road, with a Chinese roof adorned with large glass balls; and the old family dwelling-house had been torn down, and replaced by a new one furnished by Garde.
“Our poor billiard-room, with its yellow walls,” said Bazilio, with a melancholy accent, “and its garlands of roses! Do you remember our games at billiards?”
“We were a pair of children, then,” responded Luiza, smiling in confusion, as she twisted her gloves between her fingers.
Bazilio crossed his feet, and with eyes fixed on the flowers of the carpet appeared to give himself up to remembrances of a happy past. “Those were my happiest days,” he said at last, in a voice full of emotion.
Luiza could contemplate, unobserved, the delicate head of Bazilio bent down by the melancholy weight of these recollections of past happiness, and his black hair, in which a silver thread shone here and there. She felt herself possessed by a vague emotion, and rising, she opened the window, as if she would dispel her agitation by letting in a flood of light. Then Bazilio spoke of his travels, of Paris, of Constantinople. Luiza said that she had always longed to travel in the East, with the caravans, seated on the back of a camel, fearless alike of the desert and of the wild beasts.
“How courageous you have become!” said Bazilio. “Formerly you were afraid of everything. Do you remember the wine-cellar in papa’s house at Almada?”
Luiza colored. She remembered the wine-cellar very well, with its slippery floor, and its damp coldness that made one shiver; its oil-lamp hanging from the wall, that illuminated with a red and smoky light the large dark beams covered with cobwebs, and its row of casks dimly visible in the shadow. He had often given her a stolen kiss there under cover of the darkness.
She asked Bazilio how he had spent his time in Jerusalem, and if it were a pretty place.
“It is worth seeing,” he responded. In the morning, after breakfast, he would go for a moment to the Holy Sepulchre; then he generally rode out on horseback. The hotel, too, was not altogether a bad one, and one met there occasionally charming Englishwomen; he had formed the acquaintance of several illustrious personages. He spoke of these with deliberation, swinging his foot to and fro,—his friend the Patriarch of Jerusalem; his old friend the Princess de la Tour d’Auvergne. But the time he most enjoyed, he said, was the evening, in the Garden of Olives, before him the walls of Solomon’s Temple, below the obscure village of Bethany, where Martha spun at the feet of Jesus, and in the distance the water, shining motionless under the rays of the setting sun. He had passed some delightful moments there, seated on a bench, tranquilly smoking his pipe.
“And were you never in any danger?” Luiza asked him.