“He—no. Who ever put the idea into your head?”
I seized her in my embrace, and covered her forehead, her eyes, her hair, with rapturous kisses. I knelt at her feet, and wrung her little hand in my ecstasy till she cried out with the anguish.
“Kiss me, Cora, again, again; kneel down here, Cora, at my side, and thank God as I do. We shall be happy, darling, so happy—my head reels with the very thought of it—my heart is so full. Let me weep myself still here—here on my knees, with my forehead in your lap. Cora, Cora, it seems to me that I am dying!”
And now the tears came rushing up from the depths of my heart, and I lay upon Cora’s lap, sobbing the agony of my old grief away, as a half-drowned man lies upon the beach where the storm has tossed him. Oh, how great was the wealth of my existence that moment. Irving did not love another; he was mine, mine, all mine!
Chaleco came in and interrupted us. He inquired the cause of my emotion, and I told him. The tiger that my first words brought to his eyes, crouched and cowered beneath the energy of my entreaties to be freed from the pledge I had given to bury myself with his tribe in Granada. In passion like mine there is almost irresistible eloquence, and my soul was burning with it. Perhaps I looked more like my mother, thus enkindled and aroused.
“Zana,” he said, and the first tears I ever saw in his fierce eyes, burned there like a diamond. “Zana, you ask a terrible thing. Like your mother, I swore a vow to Papita. You love my enemy and hers; you cling to him and cast the gipsy aside. But even better than that, I loved her and her child. I give up my oath of vengeance. What is death, if Aurora’s child may live and love?” Chaleco went out; afterwards I remembered all the force of his words, but then my soul panted for solitude and thought. I spent the night alone, sleepless and happy as few mortals have the capacity of being on this earth.
I knew little, and cared nothing for the propriety of conventional life. On the day before, I had promised to return for Lady Catherine’s final answer to the proposal I had in my ignorance made. I went and inquired, not for her, but for Irving.
He came down to receive me, looking pale and depressed. His reception was cold, his look constrained.
To this day I cannot tell what passed between us during that interview. All that was in my heart I poured forth. I remember his astonishment and his rapture. But of what was said I have no distinct idea; all was a whirl, a vortex of emotion.
A silence that seemed like heaven followed, and then we began to talk more rationally. Oh, the exquisite happiness of that entire confidence—the beautiful, beautiful joy of knowing that I was his affianced wife, the only person he had ever loved! In the first sweet outgush of confidence, I told him everything. He seemed shocked and greatly surprised at Morton’s perfidy; but when I told him of Upham, and the power he had exercised over our lives, by the cruel suspicions instilled into my belief, his indignation was so mingled with sovereign contempt of the man’s pretensions, that he laughed while denouncing him.