“In this house lives the right honorable Señor don Alonso de Valdecuellos, Master of the Horse to our lord, the King. He has been wounded in the war with the Moors and is now in this city recovering from his injuries.”
“Well! well! His daughter?” broke in the impatient youth. “His daughter, or his sister, or his wife, or whoever she may be?”
“No woman! Then who sleeps in that chamber there, where all night long I have seen a light burning?”
“There? There sleeps my lord Don Alonso, who, as he is ill, keeps his lamp burning till dawn.”
A thunderbolt, suddenly falling at his feet, would not have given Manrico a greater shock than these words.
“I must find her, I must find her; and if I find her, I am almost certain I shall recognize her. How?--I cannot tell--but recognize her I must. The echo of her footstep, or a single word of hers which I may hear again; the hem of her robe, only the hem which I may see again would be enough to make me sure of her. Night and day I see floating before my eyes those folds of a fabric diaphanous and whiter than snow, night and day there is sounding here within, within my head, the soft rustle of her raiment, the vague murmur of her unintelligible words.--What said she?--What said she? Ah, if I might only know what she said, perchance--but yet without knowing it, I shall find her--I shall find her--my heart tells me so, and my heart deceives me never.--It is true that I have unavailingly traversed all the streets of Soria, that I have passed nights upon nights in the open air, a corner-post; that I have spent more than twenty golden coins in persuading duennas and servants to gossip; that I gave holy water in St. Nicholas to an old crone muffled up so artfully in her woollen mantle that she seemed to me a goddess; and on coming out, after matins, from the collegiate church, in the dusk before the dawn, I followed like a fool the litter of the archdeacon, believing that the hem of his vestment was that of the robe of my unknown lady--but it matters not--I must find her, and the rapture of possessing her will assuredly surpass the labors of the quest.
“What will her eyes be? They should be azure, azure and liquid as the sky of night. How I delight in eyes of that color! They are so expressive, so dreamy, so--yes,--no doubt of it; azure her eyes should be, azure they are, assuredly;--and her tresses black, jet black and so long that they wave upon the air--it seems to me I saw them waving that night, like her robe, and they were black--I do not deceive myself, no; they were black.