After all his preparations this rebuff must have been a serious blow to Columbus.  It was not his only trouble, moreover.  During the last year he had been earning nothing; he was already in imagination the Admiral of the Ocean Seas; and in the anticipation of the much higher duties to which he hoped to be devoted it is not likely that he would continue at his humble task of making maps and charts.  The result was that he got into debt, and it was absolutely necessary that something should be done.  But a darker trouble had also almost certainly come to him about this time.  Neither the day nor the year of Philippa’s death is known; but it is likely that it occurred soon after Columbus’s failure at the Portuguese Court, and immediately before his departure into Spain.  That anonymous life, fulfilling itself so obscurely in companionship and motherhood, as softly as it floated upon the page of history, as softly fades from it again.  Those kind eyes, that encouraging voice, that helping hand and friendly human soul are with him no longer; and after the interval of peace and restful growth that they afforded Christopher must strike his tent and go forth upon another stage of his pilgrimage with a heavier and sterner heart.

Two things are left to him:  his son Diego, now an articulate little creature with character and personality of his own, and with strange, heart-breaking reminiscences of his mother in voice and countenance and manner—­that is one possession; the other is his Idea.  Two things alive and satisfactory, amid the ruin and loss of other possessions; two reasons for living and prevailing.  And these two possessions Columbus took with him when he set out for Spain in the year 1485.

His first care was to take little Diego to the town of Huelva, where there lived a sister of Philippa’s who had married a Spaniard named Muliartes.  This done, he was able to devote himself solely to the furtherance of his Idea.  For this purpose he went to Seville, where he attached himself for a little while to a group of his countrymen who were settled there, among them Antonio and Alessandro Geraldini, and made such momentary living as was possible to him by his old trade.  But the Idea would not sleep.  He talked of nothing else; and as men do who talk of an idea that possesses them wholly, and springs from the inner light of faith, he interested and impressed many of his hearers.  Some of them suggested one thing, some another; but every one was agreed that it would be a good thing if he could enlist the services of the great Count (afterwards Duke) of Medini Celi, who had a palace at Rota, near Cadiz.