“I look to thee, and thy seed, for the regeneration which I once
trusted, fool that I was, mine own day might see effected. Let this
pass. Thou art under the roof of the Nazarene. I will not believe that
the arts we have resisted against fire and sword can prevail with thee.
But, if I err, awful will be the penalty! Could I once know that thou
hadst forsaken thy ancestral creed, though warrior and priest stood by
thee, though thousands and ten thousands were by thy right hand, this
steel should save the race of Issachar from dishonour. Beware! Thou
weepest; but, child, I warn, not threaten. God be with thee!”
He wrung the cold hand of his child, turned to the door, and, after such
disguise as the brief time allowed him could afford, quitted the castle
with his Spanish guide, who, accustomed to the benevolence of his
mistress, obeyed her injunction without wonder, though not without
suspicion.
The third part of an hour had scarcely elapsed, and the sun was yet on
the mountain-tops, when Isabel arrived. She came to announce that
the outbreaks of the Moorish towns in the vicinity rendered the
half-fortified castle of her friend no longer a secure abode; and she
honoured the Spanish lady with a command to accompany her, with her
female suite, to the camp of Ferdinand.
Leila received the intelligence with a kind of stupor. Her interview
with her father, the strong and fearful contests of emotion which that
interview occasioned, left her senses faint and dizzy; and when she
found herself, by the twilight star, once more with the train of
Isabel, the only feeling that stirred actively through her stunned and
bewildered mind, was, that the hand of Providence conducted her from a
temptation that, the Reader of all hearts knew, the daughter and woman
would have been too feeble to resist.
On the fifth day from his departure, Almamen returned to find the castle
deserted, and his daughter gone.
CHAPTER V. IN THE FERMENT OF GREAT EVENTS THE DREGS RISE.
The Israelites did not limit their struggles to the dark conspiracy to
which allusion has been made. In some of the Moorish towns that
revolted from Ferdinand, they renounced the neutrality they had hitherto
maintained between Christian and Moslem. Whether it was that they were
inflamed by the fearful and wholesale barbarities enforced by Ferdinand
and the Inquisition against their tribe, or whether they were stirred up
by one of their own order, in whom was recognised the head of their
most sacred family; or whether, as is most probable, both causes
combined--certain it is, that they manifested a feeling that was
thoroughly unknown to the ordinary habits and policy of that peaceable
people. They bore great treasure to the public stock--they demanded
arms, and, under their own leaders, were admitted, though with much
jealousy and precaution, into the troops of the arrogant and disdainful
Moslems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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