Lorenzo was a stranger to her and hers, and the little that was known of him was disadvantageous to him, for it consisted of the certainty that he was a pirate—an outcast of human society. That was a sufficient consideration, and when the full force of it fell on the mind of the beautiful girl, she wept. She wept the tears that are the bitterest—the tears that flow when we are called away, by the dictatorial voice of principle and duty, from the pursuit of some fond object on which all the feelings of our nature are concentrated, and which we had complacently looked upon as the magnet of our happiness. On the one side she had her will and her affections; on the other she had the danger of an ignorance which was broken only by that which made it still more horrible.
Like one, therefore, who is resigned to death, from the sheer insipidity of disappointed life, Agnes sat weeping in her cabin.
The tears fell not with the vigour of energetic sorrow, such as when the soul concentrates her strength to mourn away with one effort some heavy grief, but they dropped with the languor of oversettling despondency, such as when even the full tide of anguish cannot wash away the rooted sorrow.
She was in this condition, when the priest knocked at her door and entered.
“Was she ill?” the good father inquired, “she had remained so long in her cabin that morning?”
“No.”
“Ah! but you are weeping: cheer up, child; come, come, dry those tears: you are, I see, thinking of home. Yes: there is a great difference between your good father’s house and this vessel; but do not give way to sorrow, my child, we must be thankful to Providence for having delivered us from the death and dishonour which, it is likely, would have overtaken us if we had fallen into other hands, and we must not repine at its dispensations in any instance: cheer up. Besides, I have just been told to get ready to go ashore; they will put us on land soon, I suppose, although I cannot see it as yet myself.”
Agnes saw very clearly that the good father had mistaken the cause of her grief, and was not a little glad to observe that he had so readily attributed it to the reminiscences of home. She remained silent. But the priest had only increased her embarrassment of mind, by the news which he brought, and which, he considered, as indeed he himself had felt them to be, the most joyful; for she learnt by his report that she was to leave the schooner: she was glad, and, at the same time, she was sorry.