At length Antonio so far gained on the heart of his patient, as to draw from him the outlines of his story.

Felix de Vasques, the alchymist, was a native of Castile, and of an ancient and honourable line.  Early in life he had married a beautiful female, a descendant from one of the Moorish families.  The marriage displeased his father, who considered the pure Spanish blood contaminated by this foreign mixture.  It is true, the lady traced her descent from one of the Abencerrages, the most gallant of Moorish cavaliers, who had embraced the Christian faith on being exiled from the walls of Granada.

The injured pride of the father, however, was not to be appeased.  He never saw his son afterwards, and on dying left him but a scanty portion of his estate; bequeathing the residue, in the piety and bitterness of his heart, to the erection of convents, and the performance of masses for souls in purgatory.  Don Felix resided for a long time in the neighbourhood of Valladolid, in a state of embarrassment and obscurity.  He devoted himself to intense study, having, while at the university of Salamanca, imbibed a taste for the secret sciences.  He was enthusiastic and speculative; he went on from one branch of knowledge to another, until he became zealous in the search after the grand Arcanum.

He had at first engaged in the pursuit with the hopes of raising himself from his present obscurity, and resuming the rank and dignity to which his birth entitled him; but, as usual, it ended in absorbing every thought, and becoming the business of his existence.  He was at length aroused from this mental abstraction, by the calamities of his household.  A malignant fever swept off his wife and all his children, excepting an infant daughter.  These losses for a time overwhelmed and stupefied him.  His home had in a manner died away from around him, and he felt lonely and forlorn.  When his spirit revived within him, he determined to abandon the scene of his humiliation and disaster; to bear away the child that was still left him beyond the scene of contagion, and never to return to Castile until he should be enabled to reclaim the honours of his line.

He had ever since been wandering and unsettled in his abode;—­sometimes the resident of populous cities, at other times of absolute solitudes.  He had searched libraries, meditated on inscriptions, visited adepts of different countries, and sought to gather and concentrate the rays which had been thrown by various minds upon the secrets of alchymy.  He had at one time travelled quite to Padua to search for the manuscripts of Pietro d’Abano, and to inspect an urn which had been dug up near Este, supposed to have been buried by Maximus Olybius, and to have contained the grand elixir.[7]