She soon discovered that he was musical, and they sang frequently together, while she played the accompaniment; and when he gave forth the notes of the Master of Ravenswood's farewell to his lost love, and gave it with a power and pathos that, though she had heard many of the best tenors at Vienna sing the same air, yet none had seemed to do so with such tenderness and heart-broken despair—and when their eyes met, her heart began to thrill beneath the ardour of his gaze, for Cecil, when he sung thus, gave his whole soul to it, and thought of Mary—Mary Montgomerie only, or it might be the memory of the mother that taught him; but to the ear of Margarita every note seemed, as she once said, 'to be a lover's wail over a lost love.'
On one of these occasions, Cecil saw some pieces of dance music lying about, inscribed with the name of Captain Mattei Guebhard.
'The captain—he is a friend of yours?' he remarked.
'He was here on a visit to Michail once—yes,' she replied, with a shrug of her shoulders, and dismissed the subject. 'I grew weary of him; he was jealous as Jelitza!'
But Cecil observed next day, that all those particular pieces of music had disappeared.
Always fond of female society, Cecil found the daily association with this accomplished girl a source of the purest pleasure, and he strove, but in vain, to find traces and resemblances in her to Mary Montgomerie; for Margarita was larger, darker, more brilliant and colossal in her beauty, if we may use such a term.
She had quite a repertory of Servian legends, to which she recurred from time to time, and told with a piquancy which her foreign accent and foreign graces of manner enhanced; and one day she took him to a little lake—a dark and stagnant tarn, overshadowed by great trees, and near the Morava, which she affirmed to mark the grave of the jealous Jelitza, so famed in Servian song.
Remembering her reference to this personage when she spoke of Guebhard, he asked who she was.
'Oh, the very incarnation of jealousy!' said Margarita; 'she could not bear even the brotherly tenderness of her husband Paul for his young sister, and in order to alienate him, slew his favourite courser, and charged her with the act. But Paul gave credit to his sister's denial. Then she slew his falcon, and blamed his sister therefor; but Paul would not believe her. And at last she killed her little baby, and left in its tender body a knife which Paul had given his sister, whom he now slew in the wildness of his fury, by having her torn asunder by wild horses. But in the end, the jealous Jelitza perished by the same fate; and then we are told, "that wheresoever a drop of blood fell from her, there sprang up the rankest thorns and nettles. Where her body fell, when dead, the waters rushed and formed this lake so still and stagnant. O'er the lake there swam a small black courser; by his side a golden cradle floated; on the cradle sat a grey young falcon. In the cradle, slumbering, lay an infant: on its throat the white hand of its mother; and that hand a golden knife was holding." All these apparitions were visible here, once yearly, on this stagnant lake, till the days of my father, who had it blessed by the Archbishop of Belgrade, since when they have been seen no more.'
All the legends Margarita told him were wild and gloomy; yet the Servians seemed to Cecil a lively people, and together they often watched the reapers singing merrily in the fields, and dancing, to the fiddle and native bagpipe, when work was over, the kolo, the national dance of the people.