“Donna Clara was now advancing with measured step to proffer a bottle of
curious essences, which she drew from a pocket of a depth beyond
calculation, when one of the female attendants, aware of her favourite
habits, proposed reviving her by the scent of the flowers that clustered
round the frame of the casement; and collecting a handful of roses,
offered them to Isidora. The sight and scent of these beautiful flowers,
revived the former associations of Isidora; and, waving away her
attendant, she exclaimed, “There are no roses like those which
surrounded me when he beheld me first!”--“He!--who, daughter?” said the
alarmed Donna Clara. “Speak, I charge you, sister,” said the irritable
Fernan, “to whom do you allude?”--“She raves,” said the priest, whose
habitual penetration discovered there was a secret,--and whose
professional jealousy decided that no one, not mother or brother, should
share it with him; “she raves--ye are to blame--forbear to hang round
and to question her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the saints watch round
your bed!” Isidora, bending thankfully for this permission, retired to
her apartment; and father Jose for an hour appeared to contend with the
suspicious fears of Donna Clara, and the sullen irritability of Fernan,
merely that he might induce them, in the heat of controversy, to betray
all they knew or dreaded, that he might strengthen his own conjectures,
and establish his own power by the discovery. “Scire volunt secreta domus, et inde timeri.”

And this desire is not only natural but necessary, in a being from whose
heart his profession has torn every tie of nature and of passion; and if
it generates malignity, ambition, and the wish for mischief, it is the
system, not the individual, we must blame. “Madonna,” said the Father, “you are always urging your zeal for the
Catholic church--and you, Senhor, are always reminding me of the honour
of your family--I am anxious for both--and how can the interests of both
be better secured than by Donna Isidora taking the veil?”--“The wish of
my soul!” cried Donna Clara, clasping her hands, and closing her eyes,
as if she witnessed her daughter’s apotheosis. “I will never hear of it,
Father,” said Fernan; “my sister’s beauty and wealth entitle _me_ to
claim alliance with the first families in Spain--their baboon shapes and
copper-coloured visages might be redeemed for a century by such a graft
on the stock, and the blood of which they boast would not be
impoverished by a transfusion of the _aurum potabile_ of ours into
it.”--“You forget, son,” said the priest, “the extraordinary
circumstances attendant on the early part of your sister’s life. There
are many of our Catholic nobility who would rather see the black blood
of the banished Moors, or the proscribed Jews, flow in the veins of
their descendants, than that of one who”---- Here a mysterious whisper
drew from Donna Clara a shudder of distress and consternation, and from
her son an impatient motion of angry incredulity. “I do not credit a
word of it,” said the latter; “you wish that my sister should take the
veil, and therefore you credit and circulate the monstrous
invention.”--“Take heed, son, I conjure you,” said the trembling Donna
Clara. “Take you heed, Madam, that you do not sacrifice your daughter to
an unfounded and incredible fiction.”--“Fiction!” repeated Father
Jose--“Senhor, I forgive your illiberal reflections on me,--but let me
remind you, that the same immunity will not be extended to the insult
you offer to the Catholic faith.”--“Reverend Father,” said the terrified
Fernan, “the Catholic church has not a more devoted and unworthy
professor on earth than myself.”--“I do believe the latter,” said the
priest. “You admit all that the holy church teaches to be irrefragably
true?”--“To be sure I do.”--“Then you must admit that the islands in the
Indian seas are particularly under the influence of the devil?”--“I do,
if the church requires me so to believe.”--“And that he possessed a
peculiar sway over that island where your sister was lost in her
infancy?”--“I do not see how that follows,” said Fernan, making a sudden
stand at this premise of the Sorites. “Not see how that follows!”
repeated Father Jose, crossing himself;

    “Excæcavit oculos eorum ne viderent. But why waste I my Latin and logic on thee, who art incapable of both? Mark me, I will use but one unanswerable argument, the which whoso
gainsayeth is a--gainsayer--that’s all. The Inquisition at Goa knows the
truth of what I have asserted, and who will dare deny it now?”--“Not
I!--not I!” exclaimed Donna Clara; “nor, I am sure, will this stubborn
boy. Son, I adjure you, make haste to believe what the reverend Father
has told you.”--“I am believing as fast as I can,” answered Don Fernan,
in the tone of one who is reluctantly swallowing a distasteful mess;
“but my faith will be choaked if you don’t allow it time to swallow. As
for digestion,” he muttered, “let that come when it pleases
God.”--“Daughter,” said the priest, who well knew the _mollia tempora
fandi_, and saw that the sullen and angry Fernan could not well bear
more at present; “daughter, it is enough--we must lead with gentleness
those whose steps find stumbling-blocks in the paths of grace. Pray with
me, daughter, that your son’s eyes may yet be opened to the glory and
felicity of his sister’s vocation to a state where the exhaustless
copiousness of divine benignity places the happy inmates above all those
mean and mundane anxieties, those petty and local wants,
which----Ah!--hem--verily I feel some of those wants myself at this
moment. I am hoarse with speaking; and the intense heat of this night
hath so exhausted my strength, that methinks the wing of a partridge
would be no unseasonable refreshment.”

“At a sign from Donna Clara, a salver with wine appeared, and a
partridge that might have provoked the French prelate to renew his meal
once more, spite of his horror of _toujours perdrix_. “See, daughter,
see how much I am exhausted in this distressing controversy--well may I
say, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”--“Then you and the zeal
of the house will soon be _quit_,” muttered Fernan as he retired. And
drawing the folds of his mantle over his shoulder, he threw a glance of
wonder at the happy facility with which the priest discussed the wings
and breast of his favourite bird,--whispering alternately words of
admonition to Donna Clara, and muttering something about the omission of
pimento and lemon.