“Father,” said Don Fernan, stalking back from the door, and fronting
the priest--“Father, I have a favour to ask of you.”--“Glad, were
it in my power to comply with it,” said Father Jose, turning over
the skeleton of the fowl; “but you see here is only the thigh, and
that somewhat bare.”--“It is not of that I speak or think, reverend
Father,” said Fernan, with a smile; “I have but to request, that you
will not renew the subject of my sister’s vocation till the return
of my father.”--“Certainly not, son, certainly not. Ah! you know the
time to ask a favour--you know I never could refuse you at a moment
like this, when my heart is warmed, and softened, and expanded,
by--by--by the evidences of your contrition and humiliation, and all
that your devout mother, and your zealous spiritual friend, could hope
or wish for. In truth, it overcomes me--these tears--I do not often
weep but on occasions like these, and then I weep abundantly, and am
compelled to recruit my lack of moisture thus.”--“Fetch more wine,”
said Donna Clara.--The order was obeyed.--“Good night, Father,” said
Don Fernan.--“The saints watch round you, my son! Oh I am exhausted!--I
sink in this struggle! The night is hot, and requires wine to slake my
thirst--and wine is a provocative, and requires food to take away its
deleterious and damnable qualities--and food, especially partridge,
which is a hot and stimulative nutritive, requires drink again to
absorb or neutralize its exciting qualities. Observe me, Donna Clara--I
speak as to the learned. There is stimulation, and there is absorption;
the causes of which are manifold, and the effects such as----I am not
bound to tell you at present.”--“Reverend Father,” said the admiring
Donna Clara, not guessing, in the least, from what source all this
eloquence flowed, “I trespassed on your time merely to ask a favour
also.”--“Ask and ’tis granted,” said Father Jose, with a protrusion of
his foot as proud as that of Sixtus himself. “It is merely to know,
will not all the inhabitants of those accursed Indian isles be damned
everlastingly?”--“Damned everlastingly, and without doubt,” returned
the priest. “Now my mind is easy,” rejoined the lady, “and I shall
sleep in peace to-night.”

“Sleep, however, did not visit her so soon as she expected, for an hour
after she knocked at Father Jose’s door, repeating, “Damned to all
eternity, Father, did you not say?”--“Be damned to all eternity!” said
the priest, tossing on his feverish bed, and dreaming, in the intervals
of his troubled sleep, of Don Fernan coming to confession with a drawn
sword, and Donna Clara with a bottle of Xeres in her hand, which she
swallowed at a draught, while his parched lips were gaping for a drop in
vain,--and of the Inquisition being established in an island off the
coast of Bengal, and a huge partridge seated with a cap on at the end of
a table covered with black, as chief Inquisitor,--and various and
monstrous chimeras, the abortive births of repletion and indigestion. “Donna Clara, catching only the last words, returned to her apartment
with light step and gladdened heart, and, full of pious consolation,
renewed her devotions before the image of the virgin in her apartment,
at each side of whose niche two wax tapers were burning, till the cool
morning breeze made it possible for her to retire with some hope of
rest. “Isidora, in her apartment, was equally sleepless; and she, too, had
prostrated herself before the sacred image, but with different thoughts. Her feverish and dreamy existence, composed of wild and irreconcileable
contrasts between the forms of the present, and the visions of the
past,--the difference between all that she felt within, and all that she
saw around her,--between the impassioned life of recollection, and the
monotonous one of reality,--was becoming too much for a heart bursting
with undirected sensibilities, and a head giddy from vicissitudes that
would have deeply tried much firmer faculties. “She remained for some time repeating the usual number of ave’s, to
which she added the litany of the Virgin, without any corresponding
impulses of solace or illumination, till at length, feeling that her
prayers were not the expressions of her heart, and dreading this
heterodoxy of the heart more than the violation of the ritual, she
ventured to address the image of the Virgin in language of her own. “Mild and beautiful Spirit!” she cried, prostrating herself before the
figure--“you whose lips alone have smiled on me since I reached your
Christian land,--you whose countenance I have sometimes imagined to
belong to those who dwelt in the stars of my own Indian sky,--hear me,
and be not angry with me! Let me lose all feeling of my present
existence, or all memory of the past! Why do my former thoughts return? They once made me happy, now they are thorns in my heart! Why do they
retain their power since their nature is altered? I cannot be what I
was--Oh, let me then no longer remember it! Let me, if possible, see,
feel, and think as those around me do! Alas! I feel it is much easier to
descend to their level than to raise them to mine. Time, constraint, and
dullness, may do much for me, but what time could ever operate such a
change on them! It would be like looking for the pearls at the bottom of
the stagnant ponds which art has dug in their gardens. No, mother of the
Deity! divine and mysterious woman, no!--they never shall see another
throb of my burning heart. Let it consume in its own fires before a drop
of their cold compassion extinguishes them! Mother divine! are not
burning hearts, then, worthiest of thee?--and does not the love of
nature assimilate itself to the love of God! True, we may love without
religion, but can we be religious without love? Yet, mother divine! dry
up my heart, since there is no longer a channel for its streams to flow
through!--or turn all those streams into the river, narrow and cold,
that holds its course on to eternity! Why should I think or feel, since
life requires only duties that no feeling suggests, and apathy that no
reflection disturbs? Here let me rest!--it is indeed the end of
enjoyment, but it is also the end of suffering; and a thousand tears are
a price too dear for the single smile which is sold for them in the
commerce of life. Alas! it is better to wander in perpetual sterility
than to be tortured with the remembrance of flowers that have withered,
and odours that have died for ever.” Then a gush of uncontroulable
emotion overwhelming her, she again bowed before the Virgin. “Yes, help
me to banish every image from my soul but his--his alone!