“Let the dead rest,” cried Doña Feliz, sharply. “That is a forbidden subject in Doña Isabel’s house. You are her guest.”
Vicente accepted the reproof with a shrug of his shoulders, and Doña Feliz added, as if at once to turn his thoughts and afford the sympathy he craved, “Talk to me then, if you will, of Herlinda. Do you know where she is now?”
“Yes, in Lagos, in that dreariest of prisons the convent of Our Lady of Tribulation. Think you Maria Santisima can desire such scourgings, such long fastings, such interminable vigils as they say are practised there? God grant the scoffers are right, and that the reputed self-immolations are but imaginings,—tales of the priests to attract richer offerings to the Church shrine. When I saw it, it was groaning beneath vessels of gold and silver and wreaths of jewels. Oh, Feliz! Feliz! higher and heavier than the treasures they pile on their altars are the woes these monks and nuns accumulate upon our devoted country!”
Doña Feliz glanced around warily, but an expression of genuine acquiescence gleamed from her eyes.
“You are where I have always hoped to see you,” she said in a low tone; “but beware of a too indiscriminate zeal. They say Comonfort himself has been too hasty, must draw back—retract—”
“Retract!” cried Vicente. “Never! Down, I say, with these tyrants in priestly garments,—these robbers in the guise of saints! The land is overrun with them; their dwellings rise in hundreds in the sunlight of prosperity, and the hovels of the poor are covered in the darkness of their oppressions. The finest lands, the richest mines, the wealth of whole families have passed into their cunning and grasping hands. There is no right, either temporal or spiritual, but is controlled by them. Better let us be lost eternally than be saved by such a clergy. What, saved by bull-baiters, cock-fighters, the deluders of the widow and orphan, the oppressors of the poor!”
“You are bitter and unjust,” interrupted Doña Feliz; “remember, too, the base ministers of the Church take nothing from the sanctity of her ordinances.”
“So be it,” answered Vicente. “Perhaps,” he added, with a short laugh, “you think I have lost my senses. No, no; but my personal loss has quickened my sense of public wrongs. In losing Herlinda, I lost all that held me to the past,—old superstitions, old deceptions. The idle boyish life died then, and up sprang the discontented, far-seeing, turbulent new spirit which spurns old dogmas, breaks old chains, and cries for freedom.”
Vicente had risen to his feet; his face lighted with enthusiasm; his pain was for a moment forgotten. The listening child felt a glow at her heart, though his words were as Greek to her. Doña Feliz thrilled with a purer, more reasonable longing for that liberty which as a child she had heard proclaimed, but which had flitted mockingly above her country, refusing to touch its ground. Her enthusiasm kindled at that of the young man, though his sprung from bitterness. How many enthusiasms own the same origin! Sweetness and content produce no frantic dissatisfactions, no daring aims, no conquering endeavors.
“You belie yourself,” she said, after a pause. “It is not merely the bitterness of your heart which has made you a patriot. The needs, the wrongs, the aspirations of the time have aroused you. Had Herlinda been yours, you still must have listened to those voices. With such men as you at his call, Comonfort should not falter. The cause he espoused must triumph.”