"Mandrake and henbane—a little of this mixture, and Quentin might love me! There is no sea here, and he could never fancy the villa to be a ship," thought Isidora, weeping tears of bitterness and wounded pride. "If I can only bring this delirium on him, the real truth of his heart may come out, and I shall learn whether he loves me or loves me not, and who this other is that he prefers to me. But if in his madness—pho! I can defend myself. Oh, Padre Florez, was it a good or bad angel that tempted you to leave this open book in my way, and lured me to read it?"
A strange and deep dark smile came over the lovely face of this wild and wilful girl as she took up the lamp and approached the cabinet of the worthy Padre Florez, whose room seemed quite as much a laboratory as a library, for goodly rows of phials and bottles contested for place with the Bollandists, Acta Sanctorum, the Acts of the Council of Trent, the Annals of Ferrereas, &c., for doubtless he had been the doctor—a curer of bodies as well as of souls—in his comarca, or district of Estremadura.
Hastily and impatiently she passed her lamp along the rows of little drawers containing herbs and simples, and the shelves of phials, the labels of which were quite enigmas to her; but on the third occasion a cry of joy escaped her.
"Las Mandragoras—el Beleño!" she exclaimed, as she snatched two small bottles, each full of a clear liquid, which bore those names. But now a terrible yet natural doubt seized her.
"How much of these may I pour in this wine without destroying us both?—what matter how much—what matter how much, so far as I am concerned? My life is neither a valuable nor a happy one; but he—have I a right to destroy him, perhaps body and soul—ah, Madre divina, body and soul, too! No matter—I must learn the truth, and whether he loves or only fears me."
In fact, the sudden passion which she had conceived for Quentin seemed to have disordered her brain.
She heard him calling her at that moment, and as there was no time to lose in further consideration, she filled a small phial from both bottles, thrust it in her bosom, and left the room, previously, by what impulse we know not, concealing the book of the padre, who could little have foreseen the dangerous use to which its open pages would be put.
With a heart that palpitated painfully between hope and fear, love and anger, Isidora quitted the room of the padre to return to Quentin.
He, in the meantime, had become greatly alarmed by her protracted absence, and procuring a light by flashing powder in the pan of one of his pistols, he was proceeding in search of her through the chambers of the villa, from the walls of which many a grim old fellow in beard and breast-plate looked grimly and sternly at him out of his frame:—many a grave hidalgo by Diego Velasquez were there, and many a scriptural Murillo, sold, perhaps, by that great painter for bread in the streets of his native Seville.
Of all the chateaux en Espagne, this Villa de Maciera, with its episodes, was, perhaps, the last of which Quentin could have imagined himself to be even temporarily master. Gloomy, empty, and deserted, it seemed to be veritably one of the mysterious mansions of which he had read so much in the romances of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, who was then in the zenith of her fame.