He stood for a whole minute in the sheltered window, never turning his eyes a moment from my face. Then with a feeble stillness, taking each step as a child begins to walk, he glided toward me, and, sinking on his knees at my feet, took my two hands softly in his, and laid his damp forehead upon them.
“Aurora—Aurora, forgive me, forgive her—I am dying—I am dying!—she wronged you unconsciously.”
It sounds in the depths of my soul yet—the pathetic anguish of those words! I could not move: my lips clung together: a stillness like that of the grave fell over us both. He had taken me, the implacable child, for the wronged mother; his cold lips lay passive upon my hands, and I had no power to fling them off.
He meekly lifted his head. Those burning eyes were filled with tears, in which they seemed to float like stars reflected in water.
“You will not speak it, Aurora, and I am dying?” he murmured, clasping his arms over my neck, and drawing his head upward to my bosom, till I could feel the sharp, quick pants of his heart close to mine. “I have been years and years searching for the thing forgiveness; and now when your lips alone can speak it, they will not! I am waiting, Aurora—but you will not let me die! To wait is torture—but you will not speak!”
O my God, forgive me! but the black blood of Egypt rose like gall in the bottom of my heart, when he spoke of torture in that prayerful, broken-hearted manner. I forgot him, though he lay heavy as death upon my bosom, and thought only of the real torture under which she, for whom I was mistaken, had perished. My heart rose hard and strong, repelling the feeble flutter of his with the heave of an iron shaft.
“It is not Aurora—I am not your gipsy wife, Lord Clare, but her child—the foundling of your servant—the scoff of your whole race. I am Zana!”
“Zana!” he repeated, lifting his eyes with a bewildered and mournful look, “that was our child; but Aurora, how many times shall I ask where is she? Have I not come all this weary way to find her? Where is she, Zana?”
“I gave you her journal,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I have it here under my vest: you will find it by and by, but let it be a little while. She, Aurora, herself, this writing is not forgiveness; and I say again, child, I am dying!”