While these changes had been slowly working among the heads of the household, the hand of Time had not been idle in the humble chambers of the Villa Moraquitos.
White hairs were mingled in the black locks of the mulatto woman Pepita; the negress Zarah was bent with age, and Tristan, the negro lad, had become a man—a man with powerful passions and a subtle and cunning nature, hidden beneath the mask of pretended ignorance and simplicity.
He could sing grotesque songs, and dance half-savage dances, as in the early days of his young mistress's youth when he was Camillia's only playfellow. He knew a hundred tricks of jugglery, sleight of hand by which he could amuse an idle hour, and even now he was often admitted to display his accomplishments before the Spanish girl, her devoted attendant Pepita, and her old governess, Mademoiselle Pauline Corsi, who still remained with her, no longer as instructress, but in the character of companion and friend.
We have as yet refrained from speaking of the Frenchwoman; but as she may by-and-by play by no means an insignificant part in the great life drama we are relating, it is time that the reader should know more of her.
Pauline Corsi was but seventeen years old when she first came to Villa Moraquitos as the preceptress of Camillia, then a child of six. She was therefore thirty years of age at the time of which we write.
But although arrived at this comparatively mature period of life, she still retained much of her girlish beauty of extreme youth.
Unlike most of her countrywomen, she was very fair, with large, limpid blue eyes, and a wealth of showery flaxen curls. Small and slender, with delicate little feet and hands, there was much in her appearance to indicate patrician extraction. Yet she never alluded to her country or her friends.
She told Don Juan that she was an orphan, homeless, penniless, and friendless, glad to leave the shores of her sunny France for the chances of finding better fortune in the New World.
"And I have found better fortune," she would say, lifting her expressive eyes to the dark face of her haughty employer; "for where could I have hoped to meet a nobler patron, or to find dearer friends or a happier home than I have here. Ah, bless you, noble Spaniard, for your goodness to the helpless stranger."
It was in the summer that Pauline Corsi first came to Villa Moraquitos, and it was in the winter of the same year that Don Tomaso Crivelli expired in the arms of his brother-in-law.