University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.
THE HURRICANE—LOST HOPES.

The ballad was admirably performed. Nicuesa did not
disparage the judgment of his notary, who, knowing the
taste of the audience, not less than the excellent skill of his
master, had relied confidently on the success of this last
effort as the crowning achievement, and as certain to propitiate
the mood and secure the favour of the multitude.
Nor did he mistake the nature of those who had listened to
the strains. Never was the motif or sentiment of the performance
more suddenly and soon caught up by the sense
of the hearers. While the strain was in progress they had
expressed their satisfaction by such occasional ejaculations
of pleasure and applause, as were permitted by its brief intervals;
and these unbiassed expressions of delight necessarily
stimulated the accomplished cavalier—as they stimulate
even the veteran stage-player—to new and surpassing
efforts. The murmured applauses of beauty, also, were
freely yielded from the bright, eye-glistening, circle by
which he was surrounded, and these went more deeply
into his romantic heart, than even the declared satisfaction
of those sturdy adventurers, for whom alone the performance
was undertaken; and an assembly, which, but a few
moments before, was distracted by clamours of a strife
which promised to end only in a regular combat, à outrance,
was now melted even to tears, while every heart
sympathized with the dreaming cavalier, described by the
ballad, as won from reason and to death by the beguiling
and bright-haired sirens of the Bahamian archipelago.
The tradition which the song embodied was not less
grateful to the marvel-loving spirit of the age, and that
“ocean chivalry” from which it derived so much of its
conspicuousness, because it had already, long before, been

made frequent in their narratives of adventure. They had
a faith, generally, in those days, in the existence of these
half human beguilers, of which they were scarcely less assured
than of the veracity of holy church—and the wild,
spiritual Indian music to which the words had been allied,
was yielded from the voice and instrument of Nicuesa with
such felicity as to leave nothing wanting to the complete
realization of one of those fairy pictures of the mind, which
have been so seldom well embodied save in the eye of the
dreamer. The scene grew up, as the cavalier sung, before
the eyes of the wandering seaman. He could behold
the prow of his bark gliding with noiseless rapidity into the
insidious vortex of those dangerous currents, that lie between
the thousand isles of the Bahamas. Then the music
melted away to such exquisite softness that it seemed
to demand an effort of the ear to detect its connecting murmurs,
while it assumed the accents of that seducing song,
with which, from afar, the cunning siren first touched the
ear of the wanderer, and made him turn aside from his
true path to her destructive embraces. The waters, though
the whirlpool lay beneath them, seemed subdued to a
breathless silence—a gentle zephyr, alone, stole fitfully
over their bosom, bringing the luring voices to the victim.
Soft, in little seams and crisped lines of silver, the faint
light of the waning moon, lay in the track of the vessel,
and the spirit of the scene, no less than of the circumstances,
appeared complete and well chosen, in the fancy
of the hearer, to give vitality to the mournful event recorded
in the ditty.

The murmured delight of all around the musician, suppressed
with difficulty while the strain was in progress,
now rose into loud peals of pleasure and applause when it
was fairly over. Those who stood nighest to the cavalier,
grasped his hands or the skirts of his cloak, while others
to whom he handed the guitar, kissed the instrument to
which they declared the pleasure which it gave them,
and with reluctance passed it on to others, from whom it
received like tributes of acknowldgement.

“Nicuesa, Nicuesa—the brave cavalier, the noble señor;
we will go with him to Cathay—write us down in your
books, Antonio Guerro, we will join the noble Señor
Diego—he shall lead us against the savages of Veragua.”

Such were the frequent cries among the auditors, and the

successful cavalier had already enlisted nearly his full complement
of seamen; but for the sudden occurrence of an
event, in the path of which man's achievement becomes an
absurdity, and his courage the vain effort of the feeblest
bird that ever opposed its little pinions to the weight of the
ungovernable wind. The crowd within the enclosed parts
of the Plaza, now became conscious of confused murmurs
from without. The occasional cries of the Indians, who,
neglecting their piles of fruit, darted away from them and
from the building, first commanded the attention of those
among the Spaniards who were near enough to the entrance
to behold these things with tolerable distinctness.
The whole audience had become conscious long before the
strain was ended, of an increasing warmth and weight in the
atmosphere; and a difficulty of breathing freely was more
than once declared; but this was ascribed to the crowded
condition of the apartment; and so great was the interest
of every mind in the sweet song and the sad story of Nicuesa,
that every minor inconvenience was readily borne,
that the performer should suffer no interruption. But the
change in the temperature of the weather was as singular
as it was extreme. The day, rather cool at first, had
grown as sultry as it was ever known in the oppressive
noon of August; and while the crowd, beginning to be
conscious of some strange and sudden change at hand, were
looking around in that state of indecision which usually
follows the first surprise of most persons by unlooked for
events of terror, a simultaneous calling of the Indians without,
one to the other, in accents of apprehension which
could not be mistaken, aroused them to a common movement
which added to the difficulties of their position. The
more restless portion of the assembly, made a sudden
rush at the same moment for the several places of egress
from the Plaza; which, filled as they had been before, with
benches, tables and fruit piles, were soon completely
choked under the conflicting pressure of their bodies. This
increased the vague terrors of those who strove in flight;
and mingling entreaties and execrations soon prepared the
way for the more brutal strife of blows and violence. Men,
comrades in adventure, and brothers in arms where the positive
danger was equally before them in the array of savage
battle, now took each other by the throat with all the unscrupulous
ferocity of long rankling hate. Manhood forgot
all manliness and trampled down age and imbecility under
his flying feet;—and the screams of savages without, and
the oaths and strife of equal savages within the building,
soon filled the area with sounds which strangely contrasted
with the winning melody to which all ears had just before
listened with such sympathizing delight. But the cries of
the Indians and the fierce clamours of the Spaniards, were
in a single instant, silenced by the more terrible cry of a
power beyond any of theirs. On a sudden, the sea sent up its
voice, with a peculiarity and distinctness, which, though
it revealed the true source of all the commotion, did not
help, in the slightest degree, to allay it. Its deep roar, like
that of a thousand wild bulls, playing on the plains of the
Pampas, or flying from the hunter, already goaded by his
spear, too truly denoted the coming danger which the more
experienced savages had already foreseen. The crowd was
stunned into silence, and for a moment all exertion ceased.

“What cry—what strange sound is that, Señor Vasco?”
demanded Teresa Davila with a trembling voice, which
expressed her fear of a danger of which as yet, she knew
nothing. With the first clear signal of a real danger his
arm had encircled her waist.

“Fear nothing, dearest Teresa, I will save you with my
life,” he murmured fervently, drawing her close in his embrace,
while his keen eye flew over the assembly, to detect
the point most favourable for egress.

“But what means it, Señor?” inquired the trembling
maiden as she yielded for the first time to his embrace,
and suffered him to bear her from the place where she had
been sitting.

“Cling to me—resist me not!” was all he answered, as
he bore her firmly forward.

“Tell me, Señor Vasco, what is the danger?” she whispered
as she clung closer to his arm. “Have the Indians
risen?—is it Caonabo, the rebel?”

“No Caonabo—no rebel, Teresa,” cried the cavalier,
hoarsely, as he bore her forward—“it is the sea—the sea
sends forth that roar as of two meeting thunders. Sink
not now, but cling to me while I lift you here. My neck,
Teresa—let your arm clasp my neck. Be not coy now,
this is no season for your fear of me.”

“Mary-mother! the sea! said you the sea, Señor Vasco?”
and her arms clasped his neck closely, and with all the

conscious dependence of her sex, she prepared to obey all
the requisitions of the strong man who sustained her.

“Ay, it is the sea that roars, Teresa; but it speaks of a
worse danger than itself. It tells that the hurricane is at
hand! See how dark it grows—it is the hurricane that is
now blackening all the sky. We must be forth from this
frail fabric before it is down upon us. We must gain the
open grounds—the square.”

The words of Vasco Nunez, heard by all around, gave
volume to the desultory and vague apprehensions of the
multitude, who knew not what to fear till then. The single
word—“the hurricane!” brought with it the most overpowering
alarm to all.

“The hurricane! the hurricane!” was the cry from
every tongue; and the shouts of the striving men, and the
shrieks of feeble and fainting women, imploring for assistance
from their friends and others, mingled with strange
congeniality with the now louder roaring of the sea as it
plunged headlong against the rock on which the city stood,
sending its white foam even up into its streets from
abysses that seemed a hundred feet below them.

“Save me, save me, dear Señor Vasco!” cried the terrified
woman, close clinging to his neck as he lifted her in
his arms, and pressed forward among the crowd. Even in
that moment of terror and of danger, the strife of the elements
momentarily increasing, and the thickening darkness
only relieved by intensest flashes of lightning, the heart of
Vasco Nunez grew softened with the sweetest sensations
of pleasure, as his ears drank in for the first time a word
of corresponding endearment from the lips of the beloved
one.

“Will I not save you, Teresa! Ay—fear nothing—
you are safe already. Let me think that I am dear to you,
and you are then too dear for me to lose. I cannot lose
you.”

She moaned only in terror, but clung close to him the
while. He was one of the few who still retained their
composure amid the confusion; and with a resolved mind,
which the pressure of necessity only aroused into confidence
and strength, he paused briefly, while, looking
round the crowded area, he strove to detect with his eye
some one single point of egress, upon which he might,
with the best hope of success, concentrate all his efforts.

His glance was momentary only, and, as if satisfied, he
confirmed by a renewed grasp his hold upon his lovely
burden, and went forward with a step equally firm and
fast. To an indecisive man, the task which he had undertaken
would have been impracticable; to him—to the man
of resolution—it was comparatively easy. He put aside
from his pathway with an unscrupulous hand, the ill-directed
fugitives who groped and struggled about him,
and whom, in a moment of such alarm, a breath might divert
and a judicious word readily control; and, feeling the
way along the scaffold, to the steps, with his feet, he soon
descended into the level of the space below. Here his
progress became less easy. The numbers were too great
and the material too rude and obstreperous to be as readily
set aside as those who occupied the high places above.
For a moment the progress of the cavalier was arrested.
A space of twenty feet only remained to be overcome between
him and the outlet which he proposed to gain; yet
that space was occupied by a mass of pressing forms, who,
resisted in their own outward progress, had, with the natural
incertitude of terror, turned their faces within, and were
now striving in a course directly opposite to that which
was their true one. The unmeasured and immitigable terrors
of the struggling wretches had left them restless but without
judgment, and utterly incapable of resolving, they were
yet as utterly incapable of quiet. Swaying to and fro,
with fruitless endeavour, they bore aside or along with
them all better directed energies, making no forward progress
as they were utterly ungoverned by any single rule
of action. But, it was here in chief that the superior mind
of Vasco Nunez displayed itself.

“Hark! hear you not the timbers falling behind us?”
he cried to a group that annoyed him on one hand, and
whom he was anxious to send forward. With an impulse
which was contagious they recoiled, and bounding with
headlong terror upon the backward pressing bodies they
drove them forward with the sheer pressure of their forms.
One of those purposeless and powerless animals, having
the shape of manhood only—a huge creature, whose limbs
seemed sufficiently massive to have breasted the full force
of the hurricane itself, stood with wide mouth and stupid
incapacity immediately in his way. It was not a moment
for indecision,—nor was Vasco Nunez the man—not then,

certainly, when the life of one so precious to his heart,
was in danger, and while she lay almost fainting upon his
arm. With outstretched hand—the only one that was free
for his purpose—he grasped the imbecile by his throat, and,
with all his strength suddenly put forth, he hurled him
forward upon the struggling mass in front. The blundering
giant, unable to arrest the impetus so suddenly given
to his limbs, fell precipitously among the crowd, bearing
down with him to the ground, in his outstretched arms, all
those whom he could grasp in his vain efforts to stop his
fall. These in turn, agitated the farther groups, which,
separating in confused forms, left little openings in front
which gave him glimpses of the sky. How cheering were
these glimpses to his sight! They stimulated his exertions.
Availing himself of the opening, he strode over the
body of the man whom he had thrown down, and who
vainly strove to rise under the pressure of all those who
followed the lead of the cavalier; and striking another
from his way, he pressed forward, and with a bound, into
which all the energies of his elastic and vigorous form
were compressed, he gained the entrance which he had
sought, at the very moment when a terrific thunderbolt
burst at his feet. In the broad red sheet of light which
wrapped every thing around him, he saw nothing but the
annihilation of the lovely being whose entire weight, pressing
on his bosom, seemed that of one already a victim to
the dangers which he had striven so hard to fly. She had
fainted, but he had a worse fear than this. He believed her
to be stricken by the bolt, and in the first moments when
that apprehension seized upon his mind, he laid her insensible
body upon the earth and sunk down beside her,
having no farther purpose or thought of flight. But the
reflection of another instant reproached him for this unmanliness,
and the hope that she might have only fainted
from terror or exhaustion, stimulated him to new exertions.
He raised her again from the earth, and amidst the cries
of the confused multitude flying in all directions over the
plain, some calling for missing relatives and companions,
others imploring succour, and more in sheer terror, asking
protection from the saints, he heard, with pleasurable surprise,
a voice at his right hand—the voice of the venerable
astrologer, who alone, of all the gay company that filled
that day the Plaza de Armas, seemed to have kept a cool,
untrembling mind.

“Straight forward, son Vasco, straight forward. The
little rocks lie before thee, and yield the best shelter for the
maiden in such an hour as this.”

“Take my skirt in thy hand, Micer Codro, if thou
lovest me—the glare blinds me—I see nothing of the rocks
—lie they far from us now?”

“They are at hand, my son, and thy course was rightly
for them when I spake to thee, though when I saw thee
first, I trembled for thy life and that of the maiden, and
called to thee aloud, for thy feet were hurrying towards the
Ozama.”

“The holy angels have guided me, for I saw nothing—
my eyes swim in a sort of light which blinds them. But
how dost thou see thus, Codro?”

“I know not—but I see!” replied the astrologer, who
now paused. “We are safe in this shelter, Vasco—set the
maiden down—here are the rocks.”

The moment was seasonable when they reached the
shelter—a little pile of rocks, part of those links among
which the Indian woman danced at the command of Garabito.
The hot breath of the approaching hurricane had
half suffocated the cavalier in crossing the plain, and it
was with the feeling of a strange faintness that he laid
the pliable form of the maiden in safety, and sank down
beneath the rock beside her.

“Where wouldst thou go, Micer Codro?” he demanded,
as he saw the astrologer about to leave them.

“I will but ascend this hill, my son. I would look
closely at the face of this fearful tempest.”

Vasco scarcely seemed to hear the reply. There was a
wild ringing in his head, a sickness at his heart, and it required
him several seconds of repose beneath the rocks, his
lips pressed closely to the earth, ere he found himself free
of the suffocating vapour which had so nearly stifled him.
When his eyes recovered sufficient strength to resist the
glare which had so blinded them at first, he beheld the
white head of the astrologer bare to the storm, upon which
he gazed with the dreamer's enthusiasm and the prophetic
spirit, having seemingly no fear, though he stood conspicuous
on one of the highest crags of the long chain of rocks
that stretched into the city from the northwestern mountains.

A dozen Indians or more, whom before he had not seen, lay
crouching among the rocks around him in silent terror.
Pointing to the form of Teresa, who still lay without sign
of life, he bade one of them bring water for her restoration.
But the Indian heard him with a stupid stare of indifference,
and, without leaving his place or changing the direction of
his eye, which was turned from the inquirer, and fixed upon
the distant mountains in the northwest, he lifted his finger,
and pointed simply in the same direction. The eyes of
Vasco Nunez followed the guidance of the finger to the spot
from whence the continued and increasing roar assured him
that the desolation was to come; and brave and fearless as
all men acknowledged him to be, a silent awe seized upon
his soul as he surveyed the blackening outlines of that vague
and bodiless form, whose rapidity outshot the speed of the
lightning, and whose power seemed potent for the convulsion
and destruction of all bodies;—under whose pressure
the mountains were split asunder, whose march made the
earth heave and quiver as with a fear like that which fell in
the same time on its frail inhabitants, and whose flight,
driving against the seas, divided their mighty waves asunder
and threw them up into mountains, or sunk them deep down
into their own abysses. On the upper edge of the town,
and advancing from the piled mountains of the north, from
whose brown sides its gigantic and sable limbs seemed to
emerge, a vast, indefinable mass of bulging clouds stretched
forth a hundred distinct and threatening arms towards the
city. Such was the general outline of the hurricane when
first beheld by the eye of Vasco Nunez. But its shapes
were continually changing, as it acquired force from its
own progress, or volume from the accumulating masses of
vapour and wind, which, by a natural attraction, it drew towards
it in its flight. Soon, these hundred arms linked
themselves together, took upon them a spiral form, and had
for awhile the appearance of the horn of some monstrous animal;
a similitude greatly strengthened by the rolling, plunging
and wheeling mass from which it was protruded.
From this projection, or horn, a yellow vapour was shot
forth along the path which the hurricane was directed to
take—a hot and sulphureous blast, that might well have
been the breath of some long suppressed and pent up volcano.
The spiral extremity soon became a beam,—an immense
but straight shaft—thrust forward like a weighty
wedge to force its own way under the pressure of the
monstrous mass behind. But the shaft was soon swallowed
up and submerged by the crowding volume which travelled
after it with a headlong haste beyond its own. Little jets of
cloud, now of a discoloured white, and now of a tawny
yellow, shot incessantly from its sides, and wreaths of a
like complexion hung about its sable skirts, at times wholly
encircling their extremities,—at other times dissipating in
airy flakes, which hung suspended in the untroubled atmosphere,
as the rushing flight of the gigantic body from which
they were ejected, hurried it away beyond their reach.
The vapour which gave them vitality, in great part exhausted,
they hung along the track which the hurricane had
made, in a sullen state of rest, reflecting in gloomy
and lurid hues the dim rays of the sun, whose fiercest
beams could only penetrate in part their dense and turbid
folds. On, on, meanwhile, came the immense and momently
accumulating mass. Its form was now that of a
monstrous serpent, while its plunging motion, as it rushed
through thinner fields of air, seemed that of the wild
beast, leaping down the sides of the mountain to the blood
feast on the plain. The eye of Vasco Nunez was fascinated
and fixed by the awful shadow which was approaching
him; and though his lips were parched as he gazed, and
the hot sand from the mountains which was whirled along
by the tempest, fell like rain upon his cheek, mingled with
big drops of water, scarcely less hot, that oozed out at partial
moments from the cloud;—and though his breathing was
checked, and his blood thickening in his veins, and his
heart faint, he rose to his feet, moved with a wild desire to
procure succour for Teresa who still lay in a state of insensibility,
which had been so long protracted as to make
him apprehensive for her life. But a friendly hand grasped
his arm and would have drawn him back to his place of
shelter. He turned and saw the astrologer, who had descended
unobserved from the eminence where he had
watched the coming of the hurricane.

“Move not now, Vasco, my son: sink down again, I
pray you, for the danger is at hand. It comes not so fast
yet, as it will come a moment hence, when its windy
masses are all free from the mountains, where they have
been gathering for months. But, in a little while, and it is
upon us, with a power beyond any which we have yet

beheld. Look! how it grows and gathers. See you not,
even while I speak, how its flight increases,—and now it
speaks! Down, down, Vasco, lie close as these Indians, or
it will suffocate thee. We are just beneath its track.”

“But Teresa—my poor Teresa!” cried the cavalier;
“she will die, Codro, she will surely die.”

“Nay,” said the astrologer, “fear nothing, this will relieve
her for a space;” and snatching a palm leaf from the
basket of an Indian woman who crouched but a few paces
distant, he himself bent down over the maiden and fanned
her so as to disperse the smoky and sulphureous vapour,
that by this time was circumfused throughout the atmosphere.
“This will help her, my son, and if not, we can
do nothing for her now. The hurricane is above our
heads.”

The gentle agitation of the settling atmosphere, produced
by the leaf, had its effect, as the astrologer had said. Teresa
showed signs of consciousness, and made a feeble effort to
rise as her eyes opened upon the strange aspects of the
savages around her. But the arm of her lover, pleased
with such employ, still held her down in the shelter by his
side.

“Not yet, Teresa,—it is not over. Fear nothing, I am
beside thee.”

He would have said more as she still struggled to rise,
but his voice and her efforts were alike arrested, as the entire
weight of the hurricane, with its terrific roar, passed
above them in the smoky heavens. Plunging from the
mountain passes where it had been for months gathering
in silence, the hot and hurrying volume came rushing
downward with the velocity of an arrow in its pathway to
the sea. The serpentine shape it still preserved, but the
lighter shadows had all fallen from it, or were left behind
in the still atmosphere which it no longer troubled; and
nothing now remained, relieving its excessive blackness, but
a lurid and sulphuric stripe of cloud that hung from and beneath
it, like a train. Though waving to and fro, in a serpentine
direction, chiefly because of the swaying currents
of air set in motion by its own headlong progress, no line
could have been more directly onward than that which it
pursued. Yet it bore along with it bodies of rock, trees
of stupendous size, and fragments of many a bohio, the
miserable tenants of which had escaped with difficulty.

Lengthening itself as it flew, and losing some of its bulk
accordingly, its threatening brow overhung the city, while
its terminating folds were still undeveloped among the
mountain gorges where it had been conceived.

“We are in its very path, Micer Codro,” cried Vasco
Nunez, with accents of alarm, that sprang rather from a belief
of Teresa's danger than from any apprehensions of his
own.

“Close, lie close, dear Vasco; if there be danger here,
there is death elsewhere. Move not now—there is no time
for change, and these rocks will, I trust, give us all protection.
Behold these Indians, they lie flat; they look not
up—they will not stir, till the last train of yellow melts
from off yonder mountains.”

Teresa, restored to full consciousness, clung to her lover
with all the tenacity of life, under the still exciting apprehensions
of its loss, until he quite forgot, in the intoxicating
pleasure of the moment, all of those gloomy terrors to which
he owed his situation. But the feelings of Teresa were not
his feelings. She simply confessed her fears, not her love,
while thus clinging to his bosom. Her words, however
soft and tender, were words of fear, and not of tenderness;
and these, and his warm and encouraging responses, were
alike swallowed up and lost in the howling of the hurricane,
as seeming now to detach itself into parts, its heavy
masses began successively plunging from the steeps into the
sea. The earth shook, the rocks quivered and trembled where
they lay; and it required all the strength of the cavalier, now
convinced of the truth of what the astrologer had assured him,
to keep the terrified Teresa, almost utterly frantic, from rushing
away from those very hills which were their only protection,
but which she dreaded would momently fall upon her.
An Indian woman, terrified in like manner, but with no such
fond and restraining arm to preserve her from her own panic,
fled from the trembling pile which sheltered her, and in
the attempt to fly, was seized upon by the whirling column,
which wrapped itself around her like a shroud, and bore her
twenty feet aloft into the air. Wild shrieks from her companions
followed her, but her own shrieks were unheard—
stifled in the hot embrace of that storm-torrent which bore
her on. A succeeding limb of the same mighty power
wrested her from the weakened hold of the former, and
threw her out from its pathway, as if, satisfied with having

extinguished life, it cared not for the possession of the carcass.
The body fell to the earth, lifeless, but without a
wound. The breath of life was stifled within her nostrils,
and, saving a black line around her neck, she bore no outward
mark of injury. She fell among hundreds of scattered
wretches, amply warned by her swift and sudden fate, to
cower and tremble in their prostrate places of security.
Mass after mass of the dreadful besom of the winds swept
its way to the great deep, and plunging from the heights
into the ocean, laid bare its depths, and turned up its yellow
sands. A wall of waters stood up on each hand, boiling
and fretting to seek their wonted channel, but kept apart
until the march of all the flying legions was thoroughly
complete.

“It is off,—it is over now, dearest Teresa, and thou art
safe. The saints have been merciful to thee, and the mother
of protection has looked on thee with a smile. Thou
canst now look up, Teresa; behold where the black column
is rushing through the seas! Hark, the roaring of the strife
they keep; and look to the Plaza, from which our flight
was of such doubt and difficulty. There is scarce one fragment
left standing beside another.”

While the maiden turned to the spot denoted by her lover,
and by an involuntary shudder attested her recollection
of the difficulty with which her escape was effected from
it, the astrologer called the attention of Vasco Nunez to an
event, the misfortune of which, Teresa being saved, and by
his arm, he did not so much feel at that otherwise happy
moment.

“Ay, Vasco, we are safe—the danger has gone by, and
our lives are spared to us; but next to the loss of life, my
son, we have lost every thing. Look out upon the bay,
and tell me if thou seest at her moorings in the Ozama,
the good ship the `Maragnon?”'

The cavalier looked instinctively as he was bidden to
the spot where his ship had lain at the morning; he passed
his hands above his eyes as if to relieve his sight, and then
replied:

“Indeed, I see her not. There is the fleet of Nicuesa,
and there are the vessels of Ojeda. But the `Maragnon,'
I see not! Can it be that she is whelmed and sunken?
The spot is vacant where she lay.”

“Ay, it hath been ploughed even to its deepest hollows
by the keel of the hurricane. Look where it goes afar

into the broad ocean, and thine eyes may yet see the fragments
of thy goodly ship which it flings out at every
plunge upon the billow.”

“Holy mother, can this be true! can it be, Micer
Codro, as thou say'st, and are all our wearisome toils to
be fruitless and our hopes vain. Jesu be merciful to the
poor fellows that were in her. They are in his hands only.
For us—for thee, Micer Codro—thou hast lost thy all—in
thy old age thou hast lost thy all!”

“Ay, Vasco, but thou livest, my son!” exclaimed the
venerable man turning fondly to the cavalier and throwing
his arms affectionately about his neck—“While thou art
safe I have but little loss, and while thou livest I despair
not of thy star!”

The other was unmoved by his enthusiasm, but deeply
touched by the affectionate devotedness which the old man
displayed towards him in the hour of his evil fortune. He
shook his head mournfully but made him no reply. Turning
from the dismal prospect, he fixed his eyes on the face
of one in whose warm and sunny glance of love he hoped
to read the presage of better fortune.

“Thy ship is then lost, Señor Vasco—do I hear the
tale aright?”

“Señor!” was the involuntary exclamation of the cavalier,
as he repeated the formal address of the maiden. As
if doubting whether he had rightly heard, his eye was
searchingly fixed upon her, as if anxious to trace in her features
something more of warmth and interest than her
words expressed. But the gaze of the maiden, who had
recovered all her composure in the conviction of her safety,
was quiet and impracticable.

“It is lost, Teresa—the good ship, and I fear me all of
the poor people who were in her. But my loss were little
and of little value held by me, could I be sure of thy gain
—could I feel that, losing all things else, I were yet favoured
of fortune in securing thee.”

The speech was spoken in suppressed language, and
not in the hearing of the astrologer, though he readily divined
what passed between them. She bent her eyes upon
the earth, but, save in this respect, gave no sign of emotion
as she l istened to his language, and when he had
finished, how coolly were her requests made, that he should
seek and summon her attendants.

“Can this woman love at all?” demanded the sage, Micer

Codro of himself; but Vasco Nunez, with the blindness
of one who sees only through the desires of his heart,
saw nothing of this coldness and would not acknowledge
its existence.

“It is the bashfulness of the young heart,” said he, to
the astrologer.

“A bashfulness that is ever firm,” replied the other—
“that never trembles, nor pales a cheek, nor suffers a
quivering drop upon her eye-lashes. Oh, Vasco, I would
that thou couldst wean thyself from the love of woman, in
which I see all thy danger, and give thyself to glory and
great achievement only. Thy star!—”

“No more of that Micer Codro—I tell thee, let Teresa
Davila but say that she loves me and I ask for no glory—I
seek not for great achievement.”

“She will never tell thee that, Vasco Nunez; and thou
canst no more defeat the promise of thy star than I can
make it. The woman may baffle thee in thy labour for a
while, and delay thee in thy performance, and destroy thee
after its attainment. But the achievement is most surely
thine. I would spare thee the waste of days, and the waste
of affections upon one, whom thou pursuest without profit,
and can win only to thy loss.”

“Let me win her only, and the loss be mine!” replied
the cavalier closing the dialogue abruptly.