The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

“That my rights of vengeance should not be lost. I had received nothing but pangs and shame. The tribe had her. Papita swooped up Lady Clare—but the greater criminal, the most hated thing of all, was left to me. No dog ever scented his prey as I tracked Clarence, Earl of Clare.”

“What for?” I cried, thrilled with a horrible suspicion. “Why did you so hound out my father?”

“Why?” he repeated with shut teeth and gleaming eyes. “What do we follow the trail of a snake when it has bitten us for, but to kill it?”

My heart was seized as with the talons of a vulture, as he said this. I remembered the subtle poisons so often mentioned in my mother’s journal, and rapidly connected them with my father’s terrible appearance when he returned home to die. Some of these poisons I knew to be of slow action, eating up vitality from the human system like the sluggish influence of miasma. Had my noble father been thus poisoned, and by the man who stood before me?

I could not speak—the horrible thought paralyzed me; my throat was parched; the breath panted and swelled in my lungs, but I could not draw a deep respiration. Was it indeed so?—had I sought shelter with my father’s murderer? He read my thoughts and smiled fiercely.

“You are wrong,” he said; “I did not do that, it needed not the drao, his own thoughts were enough to poison a dozen lives stronger than his. I watched him night and day—night and day, Zana; at a distance sometimes, but oftener close as a brother might, in those safe disguises that our people study so well. Month after month I was alone with him in the desert—on the hot sands of Africa—on the sluggish waters of the Nile. I was his dragoman, his confidential companion; for in the desert, Zana, even that haughty being, an English nobleman, learns something of that equality which he is sure to find in the grave. Ten thousand times I could have killed him like a dog, left him in the hot sands for the jackals, and no one have been the wiser; but that would have been like a gentile, who, in the greed of his revenge, ends all with a blow. It was sweeter to see the flesh waste from his bones; the light from his eyes; and to watch the death-fires kindle in his cheeks, set to blazing and fed by the venom of his own thoughts. I tell you, girl, not for the universe would I have shortened his misery for a moment. To watch it was all the joy I have tasted since your mother’s last death-wail.”

While he spoke, I struggled with the breath driven back upon my chest as one wrestles with a nightmare. It seemed as if I was given up to the power of a demon. At last my voice broke out so sharp and unnatural that it seemed like another person’s.

“Stop, stop, I will not endure this; he was my father—he was not deserving of this cruel malice, this murderous revenge. He was my father, man, remember that, and spare me.”

“It is because he was your father that I hated him—that I gloated over the pangs that ate away his life with a keener anguish than I could have dealt him,” answered the gipsy, hissing the words forth as a serpent shoots venom through its jaws.

“My God! my God! is the murderous blood of this man’s race in my veins?” was the wild response that broke from me as I writhed in the torture of his words—“must I become a fiend like this?”