“Don Carlos himself had given me the dagger,” she said rapidly.
The fan flew open; a touch of the wind fanning her person came faintly upon my cheek with a suggestion of delicate perfume.
She noticed my confusion, and said, “Let us walk to the end, Señor.”
The old man and the duenna had cards in their hands now. The intimate tone of her words ravished me into the seventh heaven.
“Ah,” she said, when we were out of ear-shot, “I have the spirit of my house; but I am only a weak girl. We have taken this resolution because of your hidal-guidad, because you are our kinsman, because you are English. Ay de mi! Would I had been a man. My father needs a son in his great, great age. Poor father! Poor Don Carlos!”
There was the catch of a sob in the shadow of the end gallery. We turned back, and the undulation of her walk seemed to throw me into a state of exaltation.
“On the word of an Englishman———” I began.
The fan touched my arm. The eyes of the duenna glittered over the cards.
“This woman belongs to that man, too,” muttered Seraphina. “And yet she used to be faithful—almost a mother. Misericordia! Señor, there is no one in this unhappy place that he has not bought, corrupted, frightened, or bent to his will—to his madness of hate against England. Of our poor he has made a rabble. The bishop himself is afraid.”
Such was the beginning of our first conversation in this court suggesting the cloistered peace of a convent. We strolled to and fro; she dropped her eyelids, and the agitation of her mind, pictured in the almost fierce swiftness of her utterance, made a wonderful contrast to the leisurely rhythm of her movements, marked by the slow beating of the fan. The retirement of her father from the world after her mother’s death had made a great solitude round his declining years. Yes, that sorrow, and the base intrigues of that man—a fugitive, a hanger-on of her mother’s family—recommended to Don Balthasar’s grace by her mother’s favour. Yes! He had, before she died, thrown his baneful influence even upon that saintly spirit, by the piety of his practices and these sufferings for his faith he always paraded. His faith! Oh, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite! His only faith was hate—the hate of England. He would sacrifice everything to it. He would despoil and ruin his greatest benefactors, this fatal man!