“Your father had a presentiment that he would die a violent death when he was a comparatively young man, and he told me that when the door was opened by your hand, he would be there to meet you.”
“Ah, Clarine, I think it is superstition rather than reason that leads you to think as you do. I never saw my dear father, nor my mother to know her, but my father’s words are sacred to me and I will be true to the trust that he has confided to me.”
“You had a noble father and a beautiful mother. He was brutally murdered by an assassin. When your poor mother heard the news, just after you were born, she went out of her mind, and a few days later we laid her beside the one whom she had loved so well. Their blood cried aloud for vengeance, but the murderer was a coward. He ran away from Corsica and the curse of Rimbecco still rests upon our family. But come, child, we have talked enough about such matters. Let us go into the garden and the bright sunshine will drive away unhappy memories.”
When they had gone, Manassa opened his eyes, then, raising his oaken staff, brought it down upon the floor with all the strength he possessed.
“They say women cannot keep a secret, but Clarine has kept that one for nearly eighteen years. She would have made a good wife, but she wouldn’t have me, although I was only seventy-five when I proposed to her. I think I know where that dungeon is and I will find out how to open the door. But when I shut it, I hope that Manuel Della Corsica and his son Vandemar will be on the inside. When they are, I shall never try to open the door. No, I will let them starve and die there—then no one can say Rimbecco to the Batistellis, or to their servants who love them and will ever be faithful to them.”
CHAPTER XIX.
THE AVENGER OF BLOOD.
No two individuals could be more dissimilar as regards the essentials which enter into the composition of human character, than Helen Enright and Vivienne Batistelli. Helen’s education had been devoted chiefly to the head, with but little attention to the finer sensibilities, and virtually none at all to the passions of the heart. Mrs. Inchbald and Mary Wollstonecraft had not voiced the rights, or rather the wrongs, of women, so that her education was the result of an individual inspiration instead of proceeding from a preconcerted and combined movement on the part of her sex. She was fortunate in having a father who loved her so well that he pushed aside the conventionalities of the time and allowed his daughter to have her own sweet will in everything which did not interfere with his personal comfort.
When he fully realised the extent of her acquirements, he became intensely proud of her; but his praises in those days were more calculated to drive away suitors than to attract them, for by the men of that time a highly educated woman was looked upon as one to be avoided and not likely to make, what Englishmen most desire, an obedient wife.
On the other hand, Vivienne’s education had been almost wholly of the heart. She could read and write the French language quite well and had also acquired a fair knowledge of the English. If her father and mother had lived, she would, no doubt, have been sent to France to receive fuller instruction, but when she arrived at the age of sixteen, she became, by her brother Pascal’s wish, and with no opposition on her part, mistress of the house; always subject, of course, in important matters, to the will of her elder brother, who was master in all things.
Left fatherless and motherless within a few days of her birth, the little Vivienne had grown up under the care of Clarine, her nurse, who had been in the service of the Batistelli family since her mother had been an infant. Stories about fairies, the folklore of the country, and tales of bloody vendettas, had been poured into the child’s ears by Clarine and Manassa. In this way her perceptive powers and sensibilities were dominated by the physical rather than the mental. She had led a retired life, for her brother Pascal was not social in his nature. Julien was too much so, but his associates were never welcome to the hospitalities of the house. If it had not been for the agreement, or rather understanding, between the old Count Mont d’Oro and Pascal’s father, regarding the marriage of Napier and Vivienne, the young girl would have grown up fancy-free, so far as love of man was concerned—meaning, of course, any particular man.