It was the first time that she had ever deceived her mother, because it was the first time that she had loved. Yes, loved, for though she would as soon have sacrificed her life as to have acknowledged it, yet she did love him, and the poor untutored Quadroon girl read the fact that the mother could not, with all her cultivation and knowledge of the world, detect. But jealousy is an apt teacher, and the spirit of Maud Leonardo was now thoroughly aroused; she sighed for revenge, and puzzled her brain how she might gain the longed-for end.
Captain Ratlin had eyes for only one object, and that was the young and beautiful English girl. He never gave a thought to Maud; he had never done so for one moment. As a friend of her father, or rather as a dealer intimately connected in a business point of view with him, he had given a present to his daughter, and had endeavored to make himself agreeable to her at all times, but never for one moment with a serious thought of any degree of intimacy, save of the most public and ordinary character. Probably Maud herself would have never thought seriously about the matter had she not felt how much the English girl surpassed her in beauty, in accomplishment, and in all that might attract the interest of one like Captain Ratlin.
Jealousy is a subtle poison, and the Quadroon was feeding upon it greedily, while its baleful effect was daily becoming more and more manifest in her behaviour.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ATTACK.
DON LEONARDO was no favorite among the tribes and chiefs of the region which was his immediate neighborhood, and he lived within the walls of his well-arranged residence, more like one in a fort than in his own domestic dwelling, maintaining himself, in fact, by a regular armament of his servants and a few countrymen whom he retained in his service. With the negroes he was, therefore, no friend, save so far as he purchased their prisoners of them, whom they secured in their marauding inroads upon the interior tribes. They feared Don Leonardo because he was a bold, bad man, and cared not for the spilling of blood at any time, for the furtherance of his immediate gain in the trade he pursued. It was for his interest to make them fear him, and this he contrived to do most effectually.
As Don Leonardo always paid for the slaves he purchased of the coast tribes in hard Spanish dollars, they believed him to possess an inexhaustible supply of specie, and the idea of robbing him had more than once been broached among them in their counsels; but feat and want of tact as to proper management in conducting an assault, they felt would insure the defeat of such a purpose, and thus the Spaniard had remained unmolested for years in his present position, but in no way relaxing the necessary degree of vigilance which should render safe his household, for he knew full well the treacherous character of the negroes, and that they were not for a moment to be trusted.
Maud, his daughter, was in no way ignorant of this state of affairs. She fully understood the entire matter. Perhaps the fact that some portion of the blood of that despised race ran in her own veins, led her to conceive a plan for revenge which should embrace not only the party who was the grave object of her hate, but even every person of white blood in her father's household, not even excepting her father! No one, save a North American Indian, can hold and nourish a spirit of revenge like a Quadroon. It seems to be an innate trait of their nature, and ever ready to burst forth in a blaze at any moment.
It was impossible to understand exactly by what course of reasoning Maud had arrived at the purpose of attempting the destruction of the household as she did. One would have supposed that she would have been apt to adopt the easiest mode of arriving at the desired result, and that with even her simple knowledge of poison, she might, with a little adroitness, have taken the lives of all who were gathered under her father's roof at a single meal; but the revengeful girl evidently had some secret feeling to gratify, in the employment of the agents whom she engaged for her purpose, and the blow she resolved should be struck, and decisively, too, by the negro enemies of her father, who were his near neighbors.