Note (21) — Chapter XX

“I am surprised, sister,” said Fernan, whom Father Jose’s gaining his queen had put in unusually bad humour—“I am surprised that you never busy yourself, as young maidens use, at your needle, or in some quaint niceties of your sex.”—“Or in reading some devout book,” said Donna Clara, raising her eyes one moment from her tapestry, and then dropping them again; “there is the legend of that (21)Polish saint, born, like her, in a land of darkness, yet chosen to be a vessel——I have forgot his name, reverend Father.”—“Check to the king,” said Father Jose in reply. “You regard nothing but watching a few flowers, or hanging over your lute, or gazing at the moon,” continued Fernan, vexed alike at the success of his antagonist and the silence of Isidora. “She is eminent in alms-deeds and works of charity,” said the good-natured priest. “I was summoned to a miserable hovel near your villa, Madonna Clara, to a dying sinner, a beggar rotting on rotten straw!”—“Jesu!” cried Donna Clara with involuntary horror, “I washed the feet of thirteen beggars, on my knees in my father’s hall, the week before my marriage with her honoured father, and I never could abide the sight of a beggar since.”—“Associations are sometimes indelibly strong,” said the priest drily;—then he added, “I went as was my duty, but your daughter was there before me. She had gone uncalled, and was uttering the sweetest words of consolation from a homily, which a certain poor priest, who shall be nameless, had lent her from his humble store.”