The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

She held her breath, and the last tender love that ever beat in her heart swelled up from its depths as she bent down and gathered the smile with her lips.

He started. She fell upon her knees; she locked his hand in hers; her black tresses drooped over him; oh, with what agony pleaded for a return of the love that had been the pulse of her life, the breath on her lips.

He arose and shook her off—with a mighty effort he steeled his heart and shook her off, the mother of his child, the wife of his bosom. She stood upright, pale and transfigured. For one whole minute she remained gazing on him speechless, and so still that the beating of his heart sounded clear and distinct in the room. She turned and glided into the darkness again, and she disappeared with her child, who waited for her there.

Then followed a panorama of scenery, rivers, mountains, and seas, over which the mother wandered, holding her child by the hand. At last she stood in sight of an ancient city, rich with Moorish relics, but as I turned to gaze on them a crowd of fierce human beings surrounded her, filling the air with hoarse noises, glaring at her and the child with their fierce eyes. An old woman, tiny as a child, and thin as a mummy, stood by, shouting back their reviling with defiance. Thus with whoop, and taunt, and sacrilegious gibes, they drove the poor creature onward to the mountains. Up and up she clambered with the little one still clinging to her neck, till the snow became heavy around her, and she waded knee deep through it, tottering and faint. At last the crowd surged together around a mountain peak, and pointed with hoarse shouts to a valley half choked up with stone cairns and shimmering with untrod snow.

Down into the virgin whiteness of this valley the black masses poured, treading down the snow with all their squalid ferocity doubled by contrast with its whiteness. They took the child from her mother and carried her shrieking to the outskirts of the crowd. I knew the man that held her, and read all the fierce agony of his grief as he strove to blind the child to the horrible deed that crowd was perpetrating.

I saw it all—the first unsteady whirl of stones, the fiendish eagerness that followed; I heard the shrieks—I felt her death agony.

Oh, how I struggled! how I pleaded with the strong will that enslaved my faculties! how I prayed that he would redeem me from the horrors of that mountain pass! But no, the curse of memory must be complete; I was compelled to live over the agony of my mother’s death.

I knew well all the time that the child and myself were one being; but as in ordinary life a person often looks upon his own sufferings with self-pity, as if he were a stranger; so I followed wearily after the little creature as they bore her, an orphan, from the Valley of Stones. I saw her growing thin, pining, pining always for the mother who was dead, till she grew into a miserable shadow, with all the life of her being burning in those large eyes. The old woman and the man kept her to themselves, but she seemed pining to death while they wandered from mountain to mountain, and at last across the seas.

Again Greenhurst arose on my vision, the old building among distant trees, the village just in sight. A gipsy’s tent stood in a hollow, back from the wayside, and in it lay the shadowy child.

The gipsy man and that weird little woman were in the tent, and from without I heard the ringing of bells and the tramp of horses, smothered and soft, as if each hoof-fall were broken with flowers.