“I do not know why you ask, but it is no secret. I have lived there six years.”
“That is, since about the time that Lady Clare died,” he observed, as if making a calculation.
“I believe it is,” was my answer.
He hesitated a moment, and then said, in a courteous voice,
“Who is your father?”
I had learned to blush at my incapacity to answer this question, and when it was thus abruptly put, the temper burned in my cheek. Rising up haughtily in my stirrup, I gave the bridle an abrupt pull, and poor Jupiter a lash that set him off like an arrow. He almost knocked the man down. I looked back to learn if he was harmed. He called after me in a language that I had never heard spoken before, at least that I could remember, but I understood it. The man was showering curses upon me or my horse.
After the appearance of this singular man, the monotony of my life broke up. I became restless and self-centred, speaking of his presence in the park to no one, but thinking of it with continued wonder. Some mysterious sympathy, wild and painful, but oh, how intense, drew me toward this strange being. I feared, yet longed for his presence—longed to hear again that language at once so strange and so familiar, that had fallen as yet only in curses on my ear, but still carrying a fierce sort of fascination with it.
I rode to the portion of the park where I had seen him, again and again, and sitting on my pony, searched every dingle and group of trees, expecting each moment to see him start, brigand-like, from the leafy gloom. But he did not come, and, filled with restless disappointment, I at length sunk into the ordinary occupations of life, but with an unsettled feeling that had never possessed me before.
By this time I knew that some mystery was attached to my life—that I was nameless, motherless, fatherless. In short, that like a wild hare or a wounded bird, I had been picked up in charity by the wayside, and in charity nurtured by that unique Spanish woman and old Turner. I felt this keenly. As ignorance was swept from my mind, the painful mystery that clung around me darkened my soul with a feeling of unspeakable desolation. I had learned what shame was, and felt it to my heart’s core every time my want of name or connections was alluded to. Still the entire force of this isolation, the effect it might have upon my after life and character, could not be felt in all its poignancy, as it was in later times. But its mistiness, the indefinite form which every thing regarding my past history took, made myself a subject of perpetual thought. Upon my memory there was a constant, but unavailing strain. There seemed to be a dark curtain in my mind, hiding all that my soul panted to know, but which I had lost all power to lift or disturb. Thus time wore heavily—heavily months and months—still I saw no more of the man whose memory hung about me like a superstition, which I had neither power nor wish to throw off.