My Mother:
In dedicating this book to you, I have no choice of words; the memories of a helpless and feeble childhood crowd too closely on my heart for that. From the day when you received me an infant from the arms of a dying sister, down to the calm twilight of your own most useful life, I have a remembrance only of more than motherly kindness and entire affection. My childhood and my youth, with all their joys and tender griefs, are so beautifully blended with thoughts of your household virtues and maternal love, that it is impossible to realize that even partial orphanage was ever known to me.
I once hoped to blend with yours the name of that honored father, who has but lately laid down the burden of almost fourscore years and ten, and gone forth from the faithful affection which surrounded him here, to the more perfect love of heaven. But my father is dead, and in the holy welcome of angels the voice of his own child is hushed. Still, through the golden chain of your love, my mother, this dedication shall yet reach him. With you—who made his old age tranquil almost as the heaven he approached, who went faithfully down to the valley of the shadow of death, giving him up only to the angels that waited there—I leave this homage, that it may be conveyed to him through your nightly prayers.
ANN S. STEPHENS.
New York, May, 1857.
THE HEIRESS OF GREENHURST.
CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST GIFT.
It is my mother’s story that I am about to write—the story of her young life, her wrongs, her sufferings, and the effects of those wrongs, those sharp sufferings as they flowed in fire and tears through my own existence. Her history ran like a destiny through my own. My life is but a prolongation of hers. I have but done what she would have accomplished, had she not been trampled down like a broken flower, in the civilized life with which none of her blood or race could hope to mingle and live.
She was a gipsy of Granada. You may search for her birthplace among the caves that perforate the hill-side to the right, as you gaze down upon Granada from the Alhambra. That hill, honeycombed with subterranean dwellings, and its bosom swarming with human beings, was my mother’s home. Beggars—yes, call them so—a people born to delude and prey upon all other races, these were her companions. She was a gipsy of the pure blood, not a drop, not a taint had ever mingled with the fiery life that glowed in her veins.
Men call me beautiful. And so I am. But compared to my mother, as I remember her, that which I possess is but the light of a star as it pales into the morning, contrasted with the same bright jewel of the sky, when it burns pure and undimmed in the purple of the evening. I have, it is true, eyes like hers, long, black, almond shaped; but English blood has thrown a soft mistiness upon their lightning. My cheeks have a rich bloom; but hers were of a deeper and more peachy crimson, glowing out through the soft creamy tint of her complexion with a warmth that shames comparison. See, I can shake down my hair, and it falls over me like a mantle rolling in heavy black waves far below my waist; but hers swept to the ground. I have seen her bury her tiny foot in the extremity of those raven curls, and press them to the earth while she stood upright, without straightening a single tress. As for her person, you could liken it to nothing of human beauty. An antelope—a young leopardess, an Arab steed of the pure blood—these were the comparisons that flashed to the mind as you watched the movements of that lithe form—those delicate and slender limbs. Imagine, if you can, a being like this, wild as a bird—utterly untamed, her veins burning with that lava fire that seems caught from another world, her every movement an inspiration. Imagine this creature at fourteen years of age roaming beneath the old trees that lie at the foot of the Alhambra, and earning a scant subsistence with her castanets, and her native dance, from the few foreigners who brave the discomforts of Spanish travel to visit the Alhambra.