impression had been increased not only by the appearance of the
Israelite, which, dignified and stately, bore no likeness to the cringing
servility of his brethren, but also by the singular beauty and gentle
deportment of his then newly-wed bride, whom he had wooed and won in that
holy land, sacred equally to the faith of Christian and of Jew. The
young Quexada did not long survive his return: his constitution was
broken by long travel, and the debility that followed his fierce disease.
On his deathbed he had besought the mother whom he left childless, and
whose Catholic prejudices were less stubborn than those of 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 Jew himself had
demanded--and to lose no occasion to soothe or mitigate the miseries to
which the bigotry of the time often exposed the oppressed race of his
deliverer. Donna Inez had faithfully kept the promise she gave to the
last scion of her house; and, through the power and reputation of her
husband and her own connections, and still more through an early
friendship with the queen, she had, on her return to Spain, been enabled
to ward off many a persecution, and many a charge on false pretences, to
which the wealth of some son of Israel made the cause, while his faith
made the pretext. Yet, with all the natural feelings of a rigid
Catholic, she had earnestly sought to render the favor she had thus
obtained amongst the Jews minister to her pious zeal for their more than
temporal welfare. She had endeavored, by gentle means, to make the
conversions which force was impotent to effect; and, in some instances,
her success had been signal. The good senora had thus obtained high
renown for sanctity; and Isabel thought rightly that she could not select
a protectress for Leila who would more kindly shelter her youth, or more
strenuously labor for her salvation. It was, indeed, a dangerous
situation for the adherence of the maiden to that faith which it had cost
her fiery father so many sacrifices to preserve and to advance.