"A melancholy air, yet with somewhat of a pleasing sadness in its minor cadences," commented Doña Orosia when I had ceased. "Translate me the words, an your Spanish is sufficient."
"That it is not, I fear," was my reply, "and the task is beyond me for the further reason that the song is not even English, but in a dialect of the Scots. 'Tis only the plaint of a poor lady whose mind seems to have gone astray in her long waiting for a faithless lover"—and I gave her the sense of the verses as best I could.
"Nay," said the Spanish woman, with a singular smile. "She hath more wit than you credit her with. You mark me, the flood of a woman's tears will bear a man further than a mighty river, and her sighs waft him away more speedily than the strongest gale. And once he has gone, taking with him such a memory of her, 'twould be far easier for her to drink the ocean dry than to wile him home. For let a man but suspect that a woman could break her heart for him, and he——is more than content to let her do it!"
She paused; but I made no answer, having none upon my tongue. Presently she added: "When once a woman has the folly to plead for herself, in that moment she murders Love; and every tear she sheds thereafter becomes another clod upon his grave. There remains but one thing for her to do——"
"Herself to die!" I murmured.
"Nay, child! To live and be revenged!" She turned a flushed face toward me; and, though the water stood in her eyes, they were hard and angry. "To be revenged! To plot and to scheme; to bide her time patiently; to study his heart's desire, and to foster it; and then——"
"And then?" I questioned softly, with little shivers of repulsion chilling me from head to foot.
"To rob him of it."
The words were spoken deliberately, in a voice that was resonant and slow. 'Twas not like the outburst of a moment's impulse—the sudden jangling of a harpstring rudely touched; it was rather with the fateful emphasis of a clock striking the hour, heralded by a premonitory quiver—a gathering together of inward forces that had waited through long moments for this final utterance.
What manner of woman was this? I caught my breath with a little shuddering cry.