The Signor Grimaldi rightly deemed the circumstances grave, and, calling
to him his friend and Sigismund, he communicated the apprehensions of the
monk and Maso. A braver man than Melchior de Willading did not dwell in
all Switzerland, but he did not hear the gloomy predictions of the Genoese
without shaking in every limb.
"My poor enfeebled Adelheid!" he said, yielding to a father's tenderness:
"what will become of this frail plant, if exposed to a tempest in an
unsheltered bark?"
"She will be with her father, and with her father's friend," answered the
maiden herself; for the narrow limits to which they were necessarily
confined, and the sudden burst of feeling in the parent, which had
rendered him incautious in pitching his voice, made her the mistress of
the cause of alarm. "I have heard enough of what the good Father Xavier
and this mariner have said, to know that we are in a situation that might
be better; but am I not with tried friends? I know already what the Herr
Sigismund can do in behalf of my life, and come what may, we have all a
beneficent guardian in One, who will not leave any of us to perish without
remembering we are his children.
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