“I will say that you hate her and love this one!” was my fierce reply, “That is enough!—she will drop down like stone, as this one has!”
My eyes fell upon Lady Jane as I spoke. Her broad eyelids quivered, and a faint motion disturbed the deathly white of her lips. These signs of life filled me with rage. I saw the breath struggling to free itself, and, lifting my tiny foot, dashed it down upon her bosom, looking into her face like an infant fiend to see if I had trampled the coming life away. Her eyes slowly opened, as if it were to the pressure of my foot, and then I flew reeling back against the bank—my father had struck me.
I rose and went away, but without shedding a tear—without looking back. I have been told that my face was very pale when I reached home, but that I was smiling steadily till the teeth gleamed between my lips.
When I reached home, my mother was in the little room that I have described, lying upon a couch, with her large, sleepless eyes wide open, and gazing upon the window.
“Get up, mother,” I said, seizing the cashmere shawl that lay over her, and casting it in a gorgeous heap on the floor—“get up; I want to tell you something.”
She rose with a wild look, for my voice was sharp, and my face so strangely unnatural that it had the force of command.
“Come out into the garden—into the woods, mother.”
She followed me passively. I led her down the balcony steps, across the flower-beds, and into the wilderness. It was gloomy there. Shadows lay thick among the trees, and a leaden sky bent overhead. I liked it. In the broad sunshine I could not have told her. The anguish in her face frightened me even as it was.
She heard me through without uttering a word, but the gleam of her eyes and the whiteness of her face was more heart-rending than the wildest complaints. She held my hand all the time, and as I told her of the scene I had just witnessed, of his caresses, of the blow, her grip on my fingers became like a vice. But I did not wince, her own gipsy blood was burning hot in my veins.
I did not sleep that night, but lay upon the carpet in my mother’s room, resolved not to be taken away till she was in bed.