My mother took the gold and examined it with great curiosity. She had never seen so much money at once in her life.
“I—I am to dance before you, and this will be mine?” she said, at last.
“Yes, it will be yours!”
She handed him back the money, took up her castanets, and stepped forth with a sort of haughty grace. Giving her person a willowy bend sideways, she began, the tears starting afresh to her eyes as she made the effort. But the elasticity seemed to have forsaken her limbs: she stopped abruptly and retreated.
“I will not go on,” she said; “I don’t want the piece of gold; I only know the dances that made you drive my companions away.”
There was no acting in this. My poor mother literally could not perform her task, and it was this very failure that charmed the young Englishman. Had she earned the money it would have been given, and she possibly remembered no more; as it was—ah, would to heaven she had earned it—earned it and gone on her way true to her people—true to the blood that never mingles with that of another race without blending a curse with it.
But there was something in my mother’s refusal that interested the Englishman. He was very young, only in his twenty-fourth year, but of mature intellect and strong of mind. Still the fresh and romantic delicacy of youth clung to his feelings. They were both fresh and powerful. The ideal blended with all things. He could never have been a slave to the mere senses, but sensation excited, his poetical nature made even that exquisite. He was not a man to indulge in light fancies, but his imagination and his feelings were both strong, and in these lay the danger.
Love is the religion of a woman educated as my mother had been. In her it seemed like apostasy from the true faith to allow her heart a moment’s resting-place out of her own race. Indeed, she deemed it an impossibility, and thus secure, was all unconscious of the fatal passion that had transformed her very nature in a single morning.
Not half an hour had elapsed since my mother had met the stranger. The dew that trembled on her coronal of wild blossoms still glittered there; the first footprint she had made upon the grass that morning still kept its place. Yet how much time it has required for me to give you an idea of the feelings that grew into strength in that brief time—feelings that vibrated through more than one generation, that made me what I am; for this man was my father.
Be patient, and I will tell you more; for there lies a long history between that time and this, the history of many persons; for did I not say that my life was but a continuation of hers? And I have known much, felt much, suffered. But who that has known and felt, can say that he has not suffered?