Blanche Enville sat on the terrace, on a warm September afternoon, with a half-finished square of wool-work in her hand, into which she was putting a few stitches every now and then. She chose to imagine herself hard at work; but it would have fatigued nobody to count the number of rows which she had accomplished since she came upon the terrace. The work which Blanche was really attending to was the staple occupation of her life,—building castles in the air. At various times she had played all manner of parts, from a captive queen, a persecuted princess, or a duchess in disguise, down to a fisherman’s daughter saving a vessel in danger by the light in her cottage window. No one who knows how to erect the elegant edifices above referred to, will require to be told that whatever might be her temporary position, Blanche always acquitted herself to perfection: and that any of the airy dramatis personae who failed to detect her consummate superiority was either compassionately undeceived, or summarily crushed, at the close of the drama.
Are not these fantasies one of the many indications that all along life’s pathway, the old serpent is ever whispering to us his first lie,—“Ye shall be as gods?”
At the close of a particularly sensational scene, when Blanche had just succeeded in escaping from a convent prison wherein the wicked. Queen her sister had confined her, the idea suddenly flashed upon the oppressed Princess that Aunt Rachel would hardly be satisfied with the state of the kettle-holder; and coming down in an instant from air to earth, she determinately and compunctiously set to work again. The second row of stitches was growing under her hands when, by that subtle psychological process which makes us aware of the presence of another person, though we may have heard and seen nothing, Blanche became conscious that she was no longer alone. She looked up quickly, into the face of a stranger; but no great penetration was needed to guess that the young man before her was the shipwrecked Spaniard.
Blanche’s first idea on seeing him, was a feeling of wonder that her father should have thought him otherwise than “well-favoured.” He was handsome enough, she thought, to be the hero of any number of dramas.
The worthy Knight’s ideas as to beauty by no means coincided with those of his daughter. Sir Thomas thought that to look well, a man must not be—to use his own phrase—“lass-like and finnicking.” It was all very well for a woman to have a soft voice, a pretty face, or a graceful mien: but let a man be tall, stout, well-developed, and tolerably rough. So that the finely arched eyebrows, the languishing liquid eyes, the soft delicate features, and the black silky moustache, which were the characteristics of Don Juan’s face, found no favour with Sir Thomas, but were absolute perfection in the captivated eyes of Blanche. When those dark eyes looked admiringly at her, she could see no fault in them; and when a voice addressed her in flattering terms, she could readily enough overlook wrong accents and foreign idioms.
“Most beautiful lady!” said Don Juan, addressing himself to Blanche, and translating literally into English the usual style of his native land.
The epithet gave Blanche a little thrill of delight. No one—except the mythical inhabitants of the airy castles—had ever spoken to her in this manner before. And undoubtedly there was a zest in the living voice of another human being, which was unfortunately lacking in the denizens of Fairy Land. Blanche had never sunk so low in her own opinion as she did when she tried to frame an answer. She was utterly at a loss for words. Instead of the exquisitely appropriate language which would have risen to her lips at once if she had not addressed a human being, she could only manage to stammer out, in most prosaic fashion, a hope that he was better. But her consciousness of inferiority deepened, when Don Juan replied promptly, with a low bow, and the application of his left hand to the place where his heart was supposed to be, that the sight of her face had effected a full and immediate cure of all his ills.
Oh, for knowledge what to say to him, with due grace and effect! Why was she not born a Spanish lady? And what would he think of her, with such plebeian work as this in her hand! “How he must despise me!” thought silly Blanche. “Why, I have not even a fan to flutter.”
Don Juan was quite at his ease. Shyness and timidity were evidently not in the list of his failings.
“I think me fortunate, fair lady,” sighed he, with another bow, “that this the misfortune me has made acquainted with your Grace. In my country, we say to the ladies; Grant me the soles of your foots. But here the gentlemen humble not themselves so low. I beseech your Grace, therefore, the favour to kiss you the hand.”