"From myself," she said; "save me from myself."
CHAPTER XXI
ZALLONY'S SON
Gavin permitted her to escape his arms when he heard the Earl calling to them from the Italian garden above the river. A sense of exultation, of ecstasy no words could measure, possessed him as he watched the slim white-clad figure, here disappearing, there showing itself again between the ramparts of the splendid trees. She was his, henceforth and forever. All her beauty, her charm, her intellect, every grace of speech and manner had passed to his possession.
This stately girl of whom the countryside spoke as of some wondrous divinity, she had promised to become his wife; for him the warm kisses of her lips, the declared secrets of her eloquent eyes, the passionate ardor of her embraces. Yesterday he would have called himself a madman to have dared the meanest of the hopes which now might be regarded with equanimity. To-night he could recall them with that kind incredulity which even attends the first hours of such an avowal as this. What act or purpose of his life had brought him such a reward; why had she deemed him worthy? he asked himself. He was neither a vain man nor a fool. If he contemplated his good fortune with a just trepidation, none the less he believed himself to merit it. She loved him, and henceforth might claim his life. This was the whole lesson of the first brief moments of delight.
Gavin was far too excited to think of returning to the Castle; nor had he any wish to speak to the Earl until his own story presented itself to him in some reasonably plausible shape. Under other circumstances, he could have understood the anger and the impatience which such a declaration might bring upon him; but these he did not expect at Melbourne Hall. Robert Forrester seemed to him rather an aristocrat by accident than by birth. He, himself, would not in any case consider the dignity of his own life and calling as beneath that of one whose ancestors had been the jest of London in the days of the Stuarts. He had the right of an honored name, of considerable achievement, and of his youth; and by these he claimed her. Moreover, the secrets of the Hall were now his own; and he understood that the forgotten years stalked as ghosts through the splendid chambers, speaking of passions outlived and of the aftermath to be garnered from their fields. Father and daughter alike were reaping that which had been sown in Bukharest more than twenty years ago. From his just judgment, from her birthright, it lay upon the stranger to save them. Gavin determined to begin his work that very night.
He had lighted a pipe when Evelyn left him, and with this glowing in the darkness, he set out, with no definite purpose in his mind, toward the gypsy encampment down in the hollow by the river. Behind him, Melbourne Hall stood up as a glittering palace of a wonder-world, its windows casting out their brilliant jets to make blacker darkness in the gardens, and many a picture revealed to speak of ancient centuries and the momentous history of the house. Ahead of him lay the moonlit park, the giant yews and elms, the matchless oaks, glades and dells, where from the elves should come unsurpassable avenues and all the beauty of the forest scene. Gavin walked on, however, oblivious of the night or its wonders. He had a vague idea that he might learn something from the rogues and vagabonds who had followed Count Odin to Melbourne Hall; and, with this idea indicating his path, he came presently to the thicket beyond which the encampment lay. There a sound of voices arrested his attention. Plainly, he said, a woman was speaking; and while the surprise of this discovery was still upon him, the music of a violin, weird and echoing, began to accompany the speaker in a song so plaintive that the very spirit of sorrow appeared to breathe in every note of it.
Gavin listened to the music spell-bound, and yet a little ashamed of his position. No possible advantage to himself or others would have induced him to play an eavesdropper's part at Melbourne or elsewhere. If he lingered in the shadow of the thicket, it was because the music compelled him and he could not escape its fascinations. When the sound of the voice died away, he turned about to come at the encampment by another road; and then he became aware for the first time that he did not stand there alone. A pair of black eyes, shining like a cat's in the darkness, looked up at him as it were from his very shoulder. Returning their gaze, but not without a quickening pulse and some apprehension of danger, he could, at length, outline the figure of a man, slim and agile, and yet not without a certain grace to be perceived even in such a light. That this fellow was one of the gypsies he had no doubt at all. The clear moonlit night revealed the oval face, the restless eyes, the long, tapering hands of a Romany. Gavin remarked the hands particularly, for one of them was thrust into the bosom of a spotlessly white and clinging shirt—and that hand, he said, covered the hilt of a gypsy's knife. So it was to be a hazardous encounter after all. He understood too well that if he moved so much as a foot, this gypsy would stab him.
"Why do you watch us, sir?"