The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

Our cottage was the loveliest little dwelling on earth. White roses, rich golden multifloras, and the most fragrant of honeysuckles covered it to the roof. You were forced to put back a sheet of blossoms with each hand like drapery every time you opened a casement. The stone porch was sheeted over and fringed down with white jessamine: and the garden that surrounded it was a perfect labyrinth of blossoms. Crimson fuchias, purple and white petunias, verbenas of every tint, roses of every clime, heliotrope and carnations made the earth gorgeous, and the air soft with fragrance.

The peaked roof shot up among the branches of a noble elm tree, and when there was a high wind I loved to watch the old rook’s nest sway to and fro above the chimney tops, while the birds wheeled and cowered among the branches like widowers at a funeral.

The interior of the house was like a cabinet. Pictures collected from abroad, each a gem that might have been piled an inch deep with gold and its value not yet obtained, hung upon the walls. Antique cabinets of tortoise-shell and gold, lighted up with precious stones, stood in the principal room; soft, easy chairs glowing with crimson velvet; tables of Sèvres china, in which beds of flowers and masses of fruit glowed, as if just heaped together by some child that had overburdened its little arms in the garden; others of that fine mosaic only to be found in Italy; carpets from Persia, from Turkey, and one Gobelin, rendered that cottage one nest of elegance. Everything was in proportion, and selected with the most discriminating taste. Small as the building was compared to Greenhurst, it did not seem crowded, yet there was garnered up everything that Lord Clare held most precious.

It was well for us, for he could not have lived away from the beautiful. His taste, his sensuous enjoyment of material things might gain new zest by brief contrasts of the hard and the coarse, but he would not have endured them altogether. Thus it was often said that no man sustained himself under privation or the toil of travel better than he did. He not only endured but enjoyed it. The effort sharpened his appetite for the luxurious and the beautiful. In his whole life, heart and soul, he was an epicure.

Perhaps he had some motive beyond his own convenience in thus surrounding my mother with objects a queen might have envied. He might have wished to overwhelm her remembrance of the miserable gipsy cave in the ravine at Granada by this superb contrast, or possibly it was only a caprice, a natural desire to surround her and himself with things that enrich the intellect and charm the sense. My mother thought it a proof of affection, but she was a child. We often heap material benefits on the being who has a right to our devotion as an atonement for the deeper feeling which the heart cannot render. The man who truly loves requires no stimulant from without. He is always surrounded by the beautiful.

Another might have feared that this sudden change of condition would have set awkwardly on a creature so untutored as my mother—for remember she was a mere child, not more than sixteen when I was born—but genius adapts itself to everything; and if ever a woman of genius lived, that woman was the gipsy wife of Lord Clare. His wife, I say—his wife!—his wife! I will repeat it while I have breath; she was his wife. What had the laws of England to do with a contract made in Spain? What—but I will not go on. My blood burns—the wild Rommany blood of my mother—it has turned his blood into fire that smoulders, but will not consume. There are times when I hate myself for the English half of life that he gave me. Yet I cannot think of him, so kind, so gentle, so full of intellectual refinement, without a glow of admiration. It is his people—his nation—his laws that I hate, not him—not his memory. Indeed, at times, I feel the tears crowd into my eyes when I think of him. My hate is a bitter abstraction after all. When I reflect, it glides from him like rain from the plumage of an eagle.

You should have seen my mother in that beautiful home back of the wilderness at Greenhurst. The moist climate of England refreshed her beauty like dew; her lithe figure had become rounded into that graceful fullness which we find in the antique statues of Greece, still the elasticity, the wild freedom remained. She was more gentle, more quiet, almost sleepily tranquil, because the fullness of her content arose from perfect love and perfect trust. She had left nothing in Spain to regret; and every hope that she held in existence was centred at Greenhurst. Never did there exist a creature so isolated. She had no being, no thought, save in her husband. In the wide, wide world he was her only friend, her sole acquaintance even.

I do not think that she left the park once during her whole stay in England. The noble little Arabian that she rode knew every avenue and footpath in the enclosure, but never went beyond it. She did not seem to feel that there was a world outside the shadow of those old trees. She felt not the thralls of society, nor cared for its mandates more than she had done in the barranco at Granada; but a delicious and broad sense of freedom—an outgushing of her better nature made this, her new existence, perfect heaven compared to that.

With time her intellect had started into vigorous life. A teacher so beloved, with perceptions quick as lightning, had kindled up the rich ore of her nature, and you could see the flash of awakened genius in every change of her countenance. Still the world remained a dream to her; she never thought of human beings except as they were presented to her in books—and Lord Clare selected every volume that she read. He was not likely to present knowledge of conventional life to a person situated as she was, with a mind so acute and imaginative. No, it was the lore of past ages that she studied. Those noble old authors of Greece and Rome whom Clare understood so well, became familiar to her as his own voice. Without having the least idea of it, she was deeply imbued not only with classical knowledge, but with the lofty feelings that inspired those ancient authors, who seldom find themselves echoed with full tone in the mind of woman.

Think what a character hers must have been, with all this grand poetry grafted into the wild gipsy nature.