“Is he?” replied Mr. Montenero coldly, and with a look of absence. “But, my dear, we can have the pleasures of the imagination another time. Here are some realities worthy of our present attention.”
He then drew his daughter’s arm within his. I followed; and all the time he was pointing out to her the patterns of the Spanish instruments of torture, with which her politic majesty Queen Elizabeth frightened her subjects into courage sufficient to repel all the invaders on board the invincible armada—I stood silent, pondering on what I might have said or done to displease him whom I was so anxious to please. First, I thought he suspected me of what I most detested, the affectation of taste, sensibility, and enthusiasm; next, I fancied that Mowbray, in explaining about the tapestry-chamber, Sir Josseline, and the bastinadoed Jew, had said something that might have hurt Mr. Montenero’s Jewish pride. From whichever of these causes his displeasure arose, it had the effect of completely sobering my spirits. My poetic fit was over. I did not even dare to speak to his daughter.
During our drive home, Berenice, apropos to something which Mowbray had said, but which I did not hear, suggested to her father some lines of Akenside, which she knew he particularly admired, on the nature and power of the early association of ideas. Mr. Montenero, with all the warmth my heart could wish, praised the poetic genius, and the intimate and deep knowledge of the human mind displayed in this passage. His gravity gradually wore off, and I began to doubt whether the displeasure had ever existed. At night, before Mowbray and I parted, when we talked over the day, he assured me that he had said nothing that could make Mr. Montenero displeased with me or any living creature; that they had been discussing some point of English History, on which old Montenero had posed him. As to my fears, Mowbray rallied me out of them effectually. He maintained that Montenero had not been at all displeased, and that I was a most absurd modern self-tormentor. “Could not a man look grave for two minutes without my racking my fancy for two hours to find a cause for it? Perhaps the man had the toothache; possibly the headache; but why should I, therefore, insist upon having the heartache?”
CHAPTER XI.
Mowbray’s indifference was often a happy relief to my anxiety of temper; and I had surely reason to be grateful to him for the sacrifices he continued daily to make of his own tastes and pleasures, to forward my views.
One morning in particular, he was going to a rehearsal at Drury-lane, where I knew his heart was; but finding me very anxious to go to the Mint and the Bank with Mr. Montenero and Berenice, Mowbray, who had a relation a Bank director, immediately offered to accompany us, and procured us the means of seeing every thing in the best possible manner.
Nothing could, as he confessed, be less to his taste; and he was surprised that Miss Montenero chose to be of the party. A day spent in viewing the Mint and the Bank, it may perhaps be thought, was a day lost to love—quite the contrary; I had an opportunity of feeling how the passion of love can throw its enchantment over scenes apparently least adapted to its nature.
Before this time I had twice gone over every part of these magnificent establishments. I had seen at the Bank the spirit of order operating like predestination, compelling the will of man to act necessarily and continually with all the precision of mechanism. I had beheld human creatures, called clerks, turned nearly into arithmetical machines.