CHAPTER II. THE TEMPTATION OF THE JEWESS,--IN WHICH THE HISTORY PASSES FROM THEOUTWARD TO THE INTERNAL.
It was about the very hour, almost the very moment, in which Almameneffected his mysterious escape from the tent of the Inquisition, thatthe train accompanying the litter which bore Leila, and which wascomposed of some chosen soldiers of Isabel's own body-guard, aftertraversing the camp, winding along that part of the mountainous defilewhich was in the possession of the Spaniards, and ascending a high andsteep acclivity, halted before the gates of a strongly fortified castlerenowned in the chronicles of that memorable war. The hoarse challengeof the sentry, the grating of jealous bars, the clanks of hoofs uponthe rough pavement of the courts, and the streaming glare oftorches--falling upon stern and bearded visages, and imparting a ruddierglow to the moonlit buttresses and battlements of the fortress--arousedLeila from a kind of torpor rather than sleep, in which the fatigue andexcitement of the day had steeped her senses. An old seneschal conductedher, through vast and gloomy halls (how unlike the brilliant chambersand fantastic arcades of her Moorish home) to a huge Gothic apartment,hung with the arras of Flemish looms. In a few moments, maidens, hastilyaroused from slumber, grouped around her with a respect which wouldcertainly not have been accorded had her birth and creed been known.They gazed with surprise at her extraordinary beauty and foreign garb,and evidently considered the new guest a welcome addition to the scantysociety of the castle. Under any other circumstances, the strangenessof all she saw, and the frowning gloom of the chamber to which she wasconsigned, would have damped the spirits of one whose destiny had sosuddenly passed from the deepest quiet into the sternest excitement. Butany change was a relief to the roar of the camp, the addresses of theprince, and the ominous voice and countenance of Torquemada; andLeila looked around her, with the feeling that the queen's promise wasfulfilled, and that she was already amidst the blessings of shelter andrepose. It was long, however, before sleep revisited her eyelids, andwhen she woke the noonday sun streamed broadly through the lattice.By the bedside sat a matron advanced in years, but of a mild andprepossessing countenance, which only borrowed a yet more attractivecharm from an expression of placid and habitual melancholy. She wasrobed in black; but the rich pearls that were interwoven in the sleevesand stomacher, the jewelled cross that was appended from a chainof massive gold, and, still more, a certain air of dignity andcommand,--bespoke, even to the inexperienced eye of Leila, the evidenceof superior station.
"Thou hast slept late, daughter," said the lady, with a benevolentsmile; "may thy slumbers have refreshed thee! Accept my regrets that Iknew not till this morning of thine arrival, or I should have been thefirst to welcome the charge of my royal mistress."
There was in the look, much more than in the words of the Donna Inez deQuexada, a soothing and tender interest that was as balm to the heart ofLeila; in truth, she had been made the guest of, perhaps, the only ladyin Spain, of pure and Christian blood, who did not despise or execratethe name of Leila's tribe. Donna Inez had herself contracted to a Jew adebt of gratitude which she had sought to return to the whole race. Manyyears before the time in which our tale is cast, her husband and herselfhad been sojourning at Naples, then closely connected with the politicsof Spain, upon an important state mission. They had then an only son,a youth of a wild and desultory character, whom the spirit of adventureallured to the East. In one of those sultry lands the young Quexadawas saved from the hands of robbers by the caravanserai of a wealthytraveller. With this stranger he contracted that intimacy whichwandering and romantic men often conceive for each other, withoutany other sympathy than that of the same pursuits. Subsequently, hediscovered that his companion was of the Jewish faith; and, with theusual prejudice of his birth and time, recoiled from the friendshiphe had solicited, and shrank from the sense of the obligation he hadincurred he--quitted his companion. Wearied, at length, with travel, hewas journeying homeward, when he was seized with a sudden and virulentfever, mistaken for plague: all fled from the contagion of thesupposed pestilence--he was left to die. One man discovered hiscondition--watched, tended, and, skilled in the deeper secrets of thehealing art, restored him to life and health: it was the same Jew whohad preserved him from the robbers. At this second and more inestimableobligation the prejudices of the Spaniard vanished: he formed a deepand grateful attachment for his preserver; they lived together for sometime, and the Israelite finally accompanied the young Quexada to Naples.Inez retained a lively sense of the service rendered to her only son,and the impression had been increased not only by the appearance ofthe Israelite, which, dignified and stately, bore no likeness to thecringing servility of his brethren, but also by the singular beauty andgentle deportment of his then newly-wed bride, whom he had wooed and wonin that holy land, sacred equally to the faith of Christian and of Jew.The young Quexada did not long survive his return: his constitutionwas broken by long travel, and the debility that followed his fiercedisease. On his deathbed he had besought the mother whom he leftchildless, and whose Catholic prejudices were less stubborn than thoseof his sire, never to forget the services a Jew had conferred upon him;to make the sole recompense in her power--the sole recompense the Jewhimself had demanded--and to lose no occasion to soothe or mitigate themiseries to which the bigotry of the time often exposed the oppressedrace of his deliverer. Donna Inez had faithfully kept the promiseshe gave to the last scion of her house; and, through the power andreputation of her husband and her own connections, and still morethrough an early friendship with the queen, she had, on her return toSpain, been enabled to ward off many a persecution, and many a chargeon false pretences, to which the wealth of some son of Israel madethe cause, while his faith made the pretext. Yet, with all the naturalfeelings of a rigid Catholic, she had earnestly sought to render thefavor she had thus obtained amongst the Jews minister to her pious zealfor their more than temporal welfare. She had endeavored, by gentlemeans, to make the conversions which force was impotent to effect; and,in some instances, her success had been signal. The good senora had thusobtained high renown for sanctity; and Isabel thought rightly that shecould not select a protectress for Leila who would more kindly shelterher youth, or more strenuously labor for her salvation. It was, indeed,a dangerous situation for the adherence of the maiden to that faithwhich it had cost her fiery father so many sacrifices to preserve and toadvance.
It was by little and little that Donna Inez sought rather to underminethan to storm the mental fortress she hoped to man with spiritualallies; and, in her frequent conversation with Leila, she was at onceperplexed and astonished by the simple and sublime nature of the beliefupon which she waged war. For whether it was that, in his desireto preserve Leila as much as possible from contact even with Jewsthemselves, whose general character (vitiated by the oppression whichengendered meanness, and the extortion which fostered avarice) Almamenregarded with lofty though concealed repugnance; or whether it was, thathis philosophy did not interpret the Jewish formula of belief in thesame spirit as the herd,--the religion inculcated in the breast of Leilawas different from that which Inez had ever before encountered amongsther proselytes. It was less mundane and material--a kind of passionaterather than metaphysical theism, which invested the great ONE, indeed,with many human sympathies and attributes, but still left Him theAugust and awful God of the Genesis, the Father of a Universe thoughthe individual Protector of a fallen sect. Her attention had beenless directed to whatever appears, to a superficial gaze, stern andinexorable in the character of the Hebrew God, and which the religionof Christ so beautifully softened and so majestically refined, than tothose passages in which His love watched over a chosen people, and Hisforbearance bore with their transgressions. Her reason had been workedupon to its belief by that mysterious and solemn agency, by which--whenthe whole world beside was bowed to the worship of innumerable deities,and the adoration of graven images,--in a small and secluded portion ofearth, amongst a people far less civilised and philosophical than manyby which they were surrounded, had been alone pre
served a pure andsublime theism, disdaining a likeness in the things of heaven orearth. Leila knew little of the more narrow and exclusive tenets of herbrethren; a Jewess in name, she was rather a deist in belief; a deistof such a creed as Athenian schools might have taught to the imaginativepupils of Plato, save only that too dark a shadow had been cast overthe hopes of another world. Without the absolute denial of the Sadducee,Almamen had, probably, much of the quiet scepticism which belonged tomany sects of the early Jews, and which still clings round the wisdom ofthe wisest who reject the doctrine of Revelation; and while he had notsought to eradicate from the breast of his daughter any of the vaguedesire which points to a Hereafter, he had never, at least, directed herthoughts or aspirations to that solemn future. Nor in the sacred bookwhich was given to her survey, and which so rigidly upheld the unity ofthe Supreme Power, was there that positive and unequivocal assuranceof life beyond "the grave where all things are forgotten," that mightsupply the deficiencies of her mortal instructor. Perhaps, sharingthose notions of the different value of the sexes, prevalent, from theremotest period, in his beloved and ancestral East, Almamen might havehopes for himself which did not extend to his child. And thus she grewup, with all the beautiful faculties of the soul cherished and unfolded,without thought, without more than dim and shadowy conjectures, of theEternal Bourne to which the sorrowing pilgrim of the earth is bound. Itwas on this point that the quick eye of Donna Inez discovered her faithwas vulnerable: who would not, if belief were voluntary, believe inthe world to come? Leila's curiosity and interest were aroused:she willingly listened to her new guide--she willingly inclined toconclusions pressed upon her, not with menace, but persuasion. Free fromthe stubborn associations, the sectarian prejudices, and unversed in thepeculiar traditions and accounts of the learned of her race, she foundnothing to shock her in the volume which seemed but a continuation ofthe elder writings of her faith. The sufferings of the Messiah, Hissublime purity, His meek forgiveness, spoke to her woman's heart; Hisdoctrines elevated, while they charmed, her reason: and in the Heaventhat a Divine hand opened to all,--the humble as the proud, theoppressed as the oppressor, to the woman as to the lords of theearth,--she found a haven for all the doubts she had known, and for thedespair which of late had darkened the face of earth. Her home lost, thedeep and beautiful love of her youth blighted,--that was a creed almostirresistible which told her that grief was but for a day, that happinesswas eternal. Far, too, from revolting such of the Hebrew pride ofassociation as she had formed, the birth of the Messiah in the landof the Israelites seemed to consummate their peculiar triumph as theElected of Jehovah. And while she mourned for the Jews who persecutedthe Saviour, she gloried in those whose belief had carried the name andworship of the descendants of David over the furthest regions of theworld. Often she perplexed and startled the worthy Inez by exclaiming,"This, your belief, is the same as mine, adding only the assurance ofimmortal life--Christianity is but the Revelation of Judaism."
The wise and gentle instrument of Leila's conversion did not, however,give vent to those more Catholic sentiments which might have scared awaythe wings of the descending dove. She forbore too vehemently to pointout the distinctions of the several creeds, and rather suffered themto melt insensibly one into the other: Leila was a Christian, while shestill believed herself a Jewess. But in the fond and lovely weakness ofmortal emotions, there was one bitter thought that often and often cameto mar the peace that otherwise would have settled on her soul. Thatfather, the sole softener of whose stern heart and mysterious fates shewas, with what pangs would he receive the news of her conversion! AndMuza, that bright and hero-vision of her youth--was she not settingthe last seal of separation upon all hope of union with the idol of theMoors? But, alas! was she not already separated from him, and had nottheir faiths been from the first at variance? From these thoughts shestarted with sighs and tears; and before her stood the crucifix alreadyadmitted into her chamber, and--not, perhaps, too wisely--banished sorigidly from the oratories of the Huguenot. For the representation ofthat Divine resignation, that mortal agony, that miraculous sacrifice,what eloquence it hath for our sorrows! what preaching hath the symbolto the vanities of our wishes, to the yearnings of our discontent!
By degrees, as her new faith grew confirmed, Leila now inclined herselfearnestly to those pictures of the sanctity and calm of the conventuallife which Inez delighted to draw. In the reaction of her thoughts, andher despondency of all worldly happiness, there seemed, to the youngmaiden, an inexpressible charm in a solitude which was to release herfor ever from human love, and render her entirely up to sacred visionsand imperishable hopes. And with this selfish, there mingled a generousand sublime sentiment. The prayers of a convert might be heard in favourof those yet benighted: and the awful curse upon her outcast racebe lightened by the orisons of one humble heart. In all ages, in allcreeds, a strange and mystic impression has existed of the efficacy ofself-sacrifice in working the redemption even of a whole people: thisbelief, so strong in the old orient and classic religions, was yet moreconfirmed by Christianity--a creed founded upon the grandest of historicsacrifices; and the lofty doctrine of which, rightly understood,perpetuates in the heart of every believer the duty of self-immolation,as well as faith in the power of prayer, no matter how great the object,how mean the supplicator. On these thoughts Leila meditated, tillthoughts acquired the intensity of passions, and the conversion of theJewess was completed.