CHAPTER XIV.
THE GITANILLA’S OATH.
Then for the first time Turner saw the eyes of my mother, those wonderful, glorious eyes, fiery as a star, soft as the dew in a flower They were lifted to Clare’s face, fondly, wonderingly, as if she marvelled that he could thus break the delicious joy that thrilled her heart and soul. There was something of lingering terror yet in her face, but so blended with the wild, deep passion of her love, that it kindled up her features like lightning. The old woman was regarding her not with tenderness, that was impossible. If she had any, it lay so deep in that rocky old heart that no ripple of it ever disturbed the hardness of her features.
The Gitanilla drew toward her, took her rigid fingers, and pressed them to her lips and forehead. She uttered a few words in a tongue unknown to Turner, and tears crowded one after another into her great bright eyes. They must have been full of passionate feeling, for the hard, keen eyes of the Sibyl grew strangely dim, and with her hand she put back the jetty waves from my mother’s forehead, making the sign of some strange writing upon its bloodless surface.
They stood together thus, the bright red flounces of their sayas mingling in waves of gold lace and heavy crimson. The blue bodice of the girl pressed to the jet black velvet that clung to the form of the Sibyl like the fragment of some funeral pall. There was something terrible in their appearance. The old woman’s arms clung around that lithe form with serpentlike folds. Her turban blended, like waves of fire, with those raven tresses. It seemed like the embrace of a demon. For the lamp whirled and flared overhead, swinging to some concealed current of wind, and the smoke flung around them a dusky veil, now of heavy grey, now threaded with fire by the unsteady flame. Besides this, was the contrast of her rich youth with that terrible thing, a wicked old age.
No wonder Turner shrunk against the wall, and grew chilly without knowing why. No wonder Lord Clare was aroused from all the feelings that had enchained him till now! He started forward, and would have taken my mother from the embrace of her last and only relative. But the old woman thrust him aside, and spoke eagerly with the grand-daughter in the Rommany tongue; and in this tongue my mother answered her.
Shall I tell you what she was saying? My mother left me a record in the fragments of her journal. The Sibyl first urged her to win the Busne to the sending of more and more gold; then she extorted a promise, a fearful promise, which the poor girl kept but too faithfully.
When the Sibyl relinquished my mother from her embrace, the poor child staggered and fell away from her arms like a crushed lily. Her lips were violet color; her face more than bloodless. She seemed to be dying.
Lord Clare took her in his arms and laid her face upon his bosom. It was beautiful to see the warm flood of life come back to the mysterious influence of his touch. Her lips grew bright as strawberries; and tears rolled from her half-closed eyes, dropping like dew upon the peachy bloom of her cheek. You could see her tremble from head to foot, so deep, so passionate were the feelings that flooded her young being with their delicious joy.
The Sibyl looked on with grim satisfaction, but the two strange men seemed to expostulate with her, or to ask some directions. She answered them haughtily, and touching the ruby ear-rings with her finger, pointed down the passage.
They obeyed at once, each bending his head submissively as he passed the old woman. I do not know how far those ruby ear-rings were symbols of authority, but my great grandame had some mysterious claim of obedience from the descendants of those few of her people who aided her ancestress in the betrayal of Maria de Padilla, and the two men were all of our tribe who could boast of the treacherous blood that had persuaded that heroic woman to her terrible death. They believed that obedience unto death was due the last descendant of the arch-sorceress, who had most effectually worked out their national hate against the whites. To them the ruby ear-rings were a symbol of absolute power. Had my great grandame commanded them to leap into the Darro without a struggle for life, they would have done it. She only imposed secrecy, craft, and unscrupulous falsehood, and those things came so naturally that it required little authority to enforce them.