“Isidora looked and wept. Tears had now become her language when
alone--it was a language she dared not utter before her family. Suddenly
she saw one of the moonlight alleys darkened by an approaching figure.
It advanced--it uttered her name--the name she remembered and loved--the
name of Immalee! “Ah!” she exclaimed, leaning from the casement, “is
there then one who recognizes me by that name?”--“It is only by that
name I can address you,” answered the voice of the stranger--“I have not
yet the honour of being acquainted with the name your Christian friends
have given you.”--“They call me Isidora, but do you still call me
Immalee. But how is it,” she added in a trembling voice,--her fears for
his safety overcoming all her sudden and innocent joy at his sight--“how
is it that you are here?--here, where no human being is ever beheld but
the inmates of the mansion--how did you cross the garden wall?--how did
you come from India? Oh! retire for your own safety! I am among those
whom I cannot trust or love. My mother is severe--my brother is violent.
Oh! how did you obtain entrance into the garden?--How is it,” she added
in a broken voice, “that you risk so much to see one whom you have
forgotten so long?”--“Fair Neophyte, beautiful Christian,” answered the
stranger, with a diabolical sneer, “be it known to you that I regard
bolts, and bars, and walls, as much as I did the breakers and rocks of
your Indian isle--that I can go where, and retire when I please, without
leave asked or taken of your brother’s mastiffs, or Toledos, or
spring-guns, and in utter defiance of your mother’s advanced guard of
duennas, armed in spectacles, and flanked with a double ammunition of
rosaries, with beads as large as----” “Hush!--hush!--do not utter such
impious sounds--I am taught to revere those holy things. But is it
you?--and did I indeed see you last night, or was it a thought such as
visits me in dreams, and wraps me again in visions of that beautiful and
blessed isle where first I----Oh that I never had seen you!”--“Lovely
Christian! be reconciled to your horrible destiny. You saw me last
night--I crossed your path twice when you were sparkling among the
brightest and most beautiful of all Madrid. It was me you saw--I
rivetted your eye--I transfixed your slender frame as with a flash of
lightning--you fell fainting and withered under my burning glance. It
was me you saw--me, the disturber of your angelical existence in that
isle of paradise--the hunter of your form and your steps, even amid the
complicated and artificial tracks in which you have been concealed by
the false forms of the existence you have embraced!”--“Embraced!--Oh no!
they seized on me--they dragged me here--they made me a Christian. They
told me all was for my salvation, for my happiness here and
hereafter--and I trust it will, for I have been so miserable ever since,
that I ought to be happy somewhere.”--“Happy,” repeated the stranger
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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