The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

Trouble blinded my eyes as I read. My hands trembled as they grasped the paper on which her tears had fallen. My soul was full of my mother—tortured by her grief—swelling fiercely with a bitter sense of her wrongs.

I read on to the end. All my mother’s history was before me—I saw her as she described herself, a wild dancing girl of Granada, thrown upon the notice of a romantic and imaginative young man—that gipsy marriage in the caverns of the Alhambra was before me in all its dismal terrors. Was it a marriage, or a deception by which my mother was betrayed? Whatever it was, she believed it to be real. No doubt that she was Lord Clare’s wife ever appeared, but, in the last page, the cry of her wronged love broke out in one fierce burst of sorrow. The certainty that he loved another—had never entirely loved her—uprooted the very fibres of life. She never wrote rationally after that.

“I will go,” she wrote, and great drops as of rain blotted out half the words—“I will go to him once more, and tell him of my oath. Surely, surely he will not let me die—me, his wife, his poor Gitanilla, whose beauty is not all gone yet. This woman, does she love him as I do? Will she give up?—oh, Heaven forgive me, I gave up nothing! What had I to yield, a poor, dancing gipsy, with nothing on earth that was her own, but the beauty of which he is tired, and the heart he is breaking? But she, this woman with one husband in the grave—what can she offer that Aurora did not give? Still, oh, misery, misery, he loves her—I can see it. He thinks me blind, unconscious, content with the sparse hours that he deals out grudgingly to me and my child. Content! well, well, it may not be. I have read of jealous hearts that create by wayward suspicions the evil they dread. What if I were one of them? Oh, heavens, what happiness if it rested thus with me! Let me hope—let me hope! * * * *

“It is over, he has struck my child—the blow has reached my heart. She is at his dwelling—I too will enter it—I too will strike. Have I not sworn an oath that must be redeemed? His oath is forgotten. The gipsies remember better. * * *

“She sleeps in his house to-night; I will be there! How wakeful the child is! How wild and fiery are the eyes with which she has been watching me from that heap of cushions! They are closed, and I will steal away. But how come back? Will it be the last time? * * * *

“I have seen them both—he has told me all. He never loved me as he loved her, not even then, among those ruins. Never loved me! O, my God! am I mad to repeat these words over and over, as the suicide, frantic with the first blow, plunges the dagger again and again in his bosom? Why cannot words kill like daggers? They pierce deeper—they torture worse; but we live. Yes, if this pang could not wrench life away, nothing can reach this stubborn hold on existence. He has said it with his own lips—I am not loved—through all his life that woman has ever stood between me and him. I rose from my knees then and stood up. Did I entreat? No, no! Perhaps he expected it—perhaps he thought the abject gipsy blood would creep to his feet yet. * * * *

“Why was Zana waiting in the darkness of that house? How much her eyes looked like those of my grandame. Ha! my oath. It is well I kept silent there. Have I not sworn that nothing but death shall separate us two? Let them live, the despised gipsy has the courage to die. Zana, my child, gather up your strength, many dreary miles stretch between us and the caves of Granada, but death is there. Without his love, my poor little one, what can we do but die?” * * *

Here the manuscript ended. But upon one of its blank pages was written, in another hand, words that froze the tears in my heart.

It was a stern command to forsake the people of my father’s blood; and after avenging my mother’s death, return to my own tribe for ever. The words were strong with bitter hate, that seemed to burn into the paper on which they were written. The fearful document was signed Papita.

The papers dropped from my hand. I remember sitting, like one stupefied, gazing down upon a pile of gold that nearly filled the coffer, fascinated by the glitter of two antique ear-rings, set with great rubies, that glowed out from the mass like huge drops of blood that had petrified there. I took them up and clasped them in my ears; their history was written out in the manuscript I had just read; and I locked them with a sort of awe. They seemed a fearful link that was to drag me back to my people.