in his country's service; to renew, in
some future fields, a career that had failed the romance of his own
antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had reached him
his care had been to provide an English nurse for the infant, so that
with the first sounds of the mother's endearments, the child might
yet hear a voice from the father's land. A female relation of Bolt had
settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this duty. Natural as
this appointment was to a man so devotedly English, it displeased his
wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother's jealousy, strongest
in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar pride which belongs to
her country-people of every rank and condition: the jealousy and the
pride were both wounded by the sight of the English nurse at the child's
cradle.

That Roland on regaining his Spanish hearth should be disappointed in
his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the inevitable
condition of such a marriage, since, not the less for his
military bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps
over-fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and
as the first illusions of love died away, there could have been little
indeed congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an
utter absence of education and by the strong, but nameless, distinctions
of national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however,
went deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union; for
instead of bringing his wife to his old Tower (an expatriation which she
would doubtless have resisted to the utmost), he accepted, maimed as he
was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer of a military
post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense loyalty of
Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of a throne
which the English arms had contributed to establish; while the extreme
unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and the stigma of
irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster Roland's belief
that he was supporting a beloved king against the professors of those
revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines which to him were the very
atheism of politics. The experience of a few years in the service of a
bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose highest object of patriotism
was the restoration of the Inquisition, added another disappointment to
those which had already embittered the lif