Ripperda walked several times up and down the apartment. Several times he glanced suspiciously towards his son; and stopped opposite to him, as if he were going to speak; then turned away, and resumed his perturbed pace. A consuming impatience inflamed every feature; and, once or twice, he took out his watch, and looking at it, muttered to himself.—At last, abruptly drawing near his son, he snatched the cross of the Amaranth from his breast, and scornfully exclaimed.—
"If you would belong to me, forswear all of which this is the emblem."
Louis was dumb.—The Duke resumed with wild solemnity.
"One night in the Alcazar,—when my gaolers had left me no other light than my injuries,—I bethought me who raised those walls!—In the black darkness of my prison, I saw a host,—they who fell in the passes of Grenada! And from that hour, the soul of Aben Humeya passed into my breast. Yon is my ensign!" He pointed to a crescent, on a standard in a far corner of the room. Louis still gazed on him without speaking; but the apprehension in his mind was in his looks.
"Do not mistake me," rejoined the Duke, "my injuries have not made me mad; but they have driven me to a desperation that will prove you to the heart. Are you now willing to go, where I shall go; to lodge, where I shall lodge? Shall my God, be your God? And my enemies, your enemies? Or, am I cast out, like Ismael, to find my revenge on them who mock me—alone?"
Louis had now subdued the effect of his fears, and rallied himself to argue again with his father, as man with man. He could not penetrate the whole of the threats he had heard; yet his rapid arguments embraced every possible project of revenge. The Duke listened to him with stoical apathy. But when the energetic pleader dwelt on the heinousness of coalescing with the enemies of the Christian faith, in any scheme of vengeance against its professors, Ripperda interrupted him with a withering laugh.
"What, if I make their faith my own?"
"Impossible!" cried Louis, "you whose life has been a transcript of your faith; noble and true! It is not in you, my father, to desert a religion whose founder was perfectly holy, just, and merciful; to embrace the creed of an impostor! One whose life was polluted with every vice; and whose blasphemous doctrines sanctioned oppression, and privileged murder! Oh, my father, it is not in you to become the very thing that excites your vengeance."
As Louis continued a still more earnest appeal to his understanding and his conscience, Ripperda suddenly stopped before him.
"You may spare your arguments, De Montemar; I know all you would say; but it is my choice to be a Mussulman."