The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

My mother was afraid to die. The torture that she then endured seemed preferable to that black, stony, eternal sleep, which the end of life was to her.

In her bed-room was a mutilated fragment of black marble. It was, or had been, the body of a beast joined to a human head. Though worn with time, hacked and broken, the grave, thoughtful beauty of that countenance, the solemn thought that seemed frozen into the stone, imbuing every fragment, must have won attention even from a person who looked upon it only as an antique of wonderful beauty.

This fragment of Egyptian art stood upon the base of a Roman pedestal, which the old Sibyl had found years before among the broken rubbish of the Alhambra. It was of a time coeval with the Roman altar, which you may yet find embedded in the Torre del Homenage, and had a value to the antiquarian of which my great grandame was fully aware. Though she would have sold anything for money, this had been an offering to her idol; and she, almost alone among our people, still kept a traditionary hold upon the faith of Egypt. How she became possessed of this antique I never knew; but it was the only thing on earth which she held sacred, and to that she rendered idolatrous devotion.

As my mother sat upon her pallet bed, feeling the unnatural strength ebb from her frame, her eyes fell upon this marble face, turned with its grand serenity of expression toward her. All at once it seemed as if she had found a friend. She remembered the old Sibyl’s faith in this block of stone, and gazed upon it with strange interest. The tumult of her feelings was hushed. The natural yearning, which exists in every female heart, for something to adore, something strong and high, from which she can claim protection, possessed her. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward, gazing on the marble face till her eyes were full of tears. Directly she began to sob like a child, and this was the sound that reached the old woman as she bent over her drao.

But that hard old heart soon shook off its human emotions. Brutus was not more stern in his sense of justice, nor did he show less of relenting; the laws of her people must be carried out. She would yield the power of life or death over her grandchild to no inferior member of her tribe; she alone would be judge and executioner. Perhaps there was something of mercy in this; the death she gave with her drao was easy, almost delightful; a sleepy, voluptuous languor seized upon the victim, grew sweeter, deeper, and eternal.

Such was the fate meditated for the poor girl who was sobbing in the next room. The tribe would have stoned her to death. That old Sibyl had a touch of compassion in her murderous designs, but she was not the less determined to kill. She took up the drao and set it in the same niche with the swaling lamp. Then she passed into the bed-room softly as a cat, closing the door after her with, great caution, as if they two had not been quite alone.

The poor Gitanilla sat, upon her miserable pallet, looking wistfully toward that antique relic of old Egypt; but she cowered down with a faint cry, as the old woman crept between her and the marble, lifting up one hand as if denouncing her for looking upon a thing that she held in reverence. What passed in that miserable little room I cannot say. My mother never spoke of it; and in her manuscript there was nothing when it came to this part of her story, but great inky scrawls that no one on earth could read.

When the old Sibyl came forth Aurora was upon the ground, her forehead resting against the idol, and murmuring some wild words through a passion of tears.

“Repeat,” said the Sibyl, standing over her, and holding up the heavy iron lamp that flared lividly over the mutilated features of the marble and the wild face of the Gitanilla. “Say it again, thus with your face where it is. If there is a lie on your lips that stone will sear them as with a red hot iron.”

“Oh, grandame, I have spoken truth, nothing but truth. See!” and with a sort of insane awe she pressed her lips upon the broken mouth of the idol two or three times.