my father, my mother, and the Director, all seated, and silent as statues. I approached, I kissed their hands, and then stood at a small distance breathless. My father was the first to break silence, but he spoke very much with the air of a man who was repeating a part dictated to him; and the tone of his voice contradicted every word he prepared to utter. 'My son, I have sent for you, no longer to contend with your weak and wicked obstinacy, but to announce to you my own resolution. The will of Heaven and of your parents has devoted you to its service, and your resistance can only make us miserable, without in the least frustrating that resolution.' At these words, gasping for breath, my lips involuntarily unclosed; my father imagined this was an attempt to reply, though in fact I was not capable of uttering a syllable, and hastened to prevent it. 'My son, all opposition in unavailing, all discussion fruitless. Your destiny is decided, and though your struggles may render it wretched, they cannot reverse it. Be reconciled, my child, to the will of Heaven and your parents, which you may insult, but cannot violate. This reverend person can better explain to you the necessity of your obedience than I can.' And my father, evidently weary of a task which he had reluctantly undertaken, was rising to go away, when the Director detained him. 'Stay, Senhor, and assure your son before you depart, that, since I last saw him, I have fulfilled my promise, and urged every topic on your mind, and that of the duchess, that I thought might operate for his best interests.' I was aware of the hypocritical ambiguity of this expression; and, collecting my breath, I said, 'Reverend father, as a son I seek not to employ an intercessor with my own parents. I stand before them, and if I have not an intercessor in their hearts, your mediation must be ineffectual altogether. I implored you merely to state to them my invincible reluctance.' They all interrupted me with exclamations, as they repeated my last words,–'Reluctance! invincible! Is it for this you have been admitted to our presence? Is it for this we have borne so long with your contumacy, only to hear it repeated with aggravations?' 'Yes, my father,–yes, for this or nothing. If I am not permitted to speak, why am I suffered in your presence?' 'Because we hoped to witness your submission.' 'Allow me to give the proofs of it on my knees;'–and I fell on my knees, hoping that my posture might soften the effect of the words I could not help uttering. I kissed my father's hand,–he did not withdraw it, and I felt it tremble. I kissed the skirt of my mother's robe,–she attempted to withdraw it with one hand, but with the other she hid her face, and I thought I saw tears bursting through her fingers. I knelt to the Director too, and besought his benediction, and struggled, though with revolting lips, to kiss his hand; but he snatched his habit from my hand, elevated his eyes, spread out his fingers, and assumed the attitude of a man who recoils in horror from a being who merits the extreme of malediction and reprobation. Then I felt my only chance was with my parents. I turned to them, but they shrunk from me, and appeared willing to devolve the remainder of the task on the Director. He approached me. 'My child, you have pronounced your reluctance to the life of God invincible, but may there not be things more invincible even to your resolution? The curses of that God, confirmed by those of your parents, and deepened by all the fulminations of the church, whose embraces you have rejected, and whose holiness you have desecrated by that rejection.' 'Father, these are terrible words, but I have no time now but for meanings.' 'Besotted wretch, I do not understand you,–you do not understand yourself.' 'Oh! I do,–I do!' I exclaimed. And turning to my father, still on my knees, I cried, 'My dear father, is life,–human life, all shut up from me?' 'It is,' said the Director, answering for my father. 'Have I no resource?' 'None.' 'No profession?' 'Profession! degenerate wretch!' 'Let me embrace the meanest, but do not make me a monk.' 'Profligate as weak.' 'Oh! my father,' still calling on my father, 'let not this man answer for you. Give me a sword,–send me into the armies of Spain to seek death,–death is all I ask, in preference to that life you doom me to.' 'It is impossible,' said my father, gloomily returning from the window against which he had been leaning; 'the honour of an illustrious family,–the dignity of a Spanish grandee–' 'Oh! my father, of how little value will that be, when I am consuming in my early grave, and you die broken-hearted on it, over the flower your own voice has doomed to wither there.' My father trembled. 'Senhor, I entreat,–I command you to retire; this scene will unfit you for the devotional duties you must perform this evening.' 'And you leave me then?' I cried as they departed. 'Yes,–yes,'–repeated the Director; 'leave you burdened with the curse of your father.' 'Oh no!' exclaimed my father; but the Director had hold of his hand, and pressed it strongly. 'Of your mother,' he repeated. I heard my mother weep aloud, and felt it like a repeal of that curse; but she dared not speak, and I could not. The Director had now two victims in his hands, and the third at his feet. He could not avoid showing his triumph. He paused, collected the full power of his sonorous voice, and thundered forth, 'And of God!' And as he rushed from the room, accompanied by my father and mother, whose hands he grasped, I felt as if struck by a thunderbolt. The rushing of their robes, as he dragged them out, seemed like the whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel. I cried out, in my hopeless agony of destitution, 'Oh! that my brother were here to intercede for me,'–and, as I uttered these words, I fell. My head struck against a marble table, and I sunk on the floor covered with blood.
'The domestics (of whom, according to the custom of the Spanish nobility, there were about two hundred in the palace) found me in this situation. They uttered outcries,–assistance was procured,–it was believed that I had attempted to kill myself; but the surgeon who attended me happened to be a man both of science and humanity, and having cut away the long hair clotted with blood, and surveyed the wound, he pronounced it trifling. My mother was of his opinion, for within three days I was summoned to her apartment. I obeyed the summons. A black bandage, severe head-ache, and an unnatural paleness, were the only testimonies of my accident, as it was called; and the Director had suggested to her that this was the time to FIX THE IMPRESSION. How well religious persons understand the secret of making every event of the present world operate on the future, while they pretend to make the future predominate over the present. Were I to outlive the age of man, I should never forget my interview with my mother. She was alone when I entered, and seated with her back to me. I knelt and kissed her hand. My paleness and my submission seemed to affect her,–but she struggled with her emotions, overcame them, and said in a cold dictated tone, 'To what purpose are those marks of exterior reverence, when your heart disowns them?' 'Madam, I am not conscious of that.' 'Not conscious! How then are you here? How is it that you have not, long before this, spared your father the shame of supplicating his own child,–the shame, still more humiliating, of supplicating him in vain; spared the Father Director the scandal of seeing the authority of the church violated in the person of its minister, and the remonstrances of duty as ineffectual as the calls of nature? And me,–oh! why have you not spared me this hour of agony and shame?' and she burst into a flood of tears, that drowned my soul as she shed them. 'Madam, what have I done that deserves the reproach of your tears? My disinclination to a monastic life is no crime?' 'In you it is a crime.' 'But how then, dear mother, were a similar choice offered to my brother, would his rejection of it be deemed a crime?' I said this almost involuntarily, and merely by way of comparison. I had no ulterior meaning, nor the least idea that one could be developed by my mother, except a reference to an unjustifiable partiality. I was undeceived, when she added, in a voice that chilled my blood, 'There is a great difference between you.' 'Yes, Madam, he is your favourite.' 'No, I take Heaven to witness,–no;' and she, who had appeared so severe, so decisive, and so impenetrable before, uttered these words with a sincerity that penetrated to the bottom of my heart;–she appeared to be appealing to Heaven against the prejudices of her child. I was affected–I said, 'But, Madam, this difference of circumstances is inexplicable.' 'And would you have it explained by me? 'By any one, Madam.' 'By me!' she repeated, not hearing me; then kissing a crucifix that hung on her bosom, 'My God! the chastisement is just, and I submit to it, though inflicted by my own child. You are illegitimate,' she added, turning suddenly towards me; 'you are illegitimate,–your brother is not; and your intrusion into your father's house is not only its disgrace, but a perpetual monitor of that crime which it aggravates without absolving.' I stood speechless. 'Oh! my child,' she continued, 'have mercy on your mother. Has not this confession, extorted from her by her own son, been sufficient to expiate her offence?' 'Go on, Madam, I can bear any thing now.' 'You must bear it, for you have forced me to this disclosure. I am of rank far inferior to your father,–you were our first child. He loved me, and forgiving my weakness as a proof of my devotion to him, we were married, and your brother is our lawful child. Your father,