“She has not heard it yet; she seems to have fallen into a kind of unnatural apathy. The shock has been too much for her.”
“Poor mother!” he said, in that same tone of bitter remorse Ray had heard him use before; “her worst crime was loving me too well. Bring her here; I have something to say to her which may as well be said now.”
Ray carried over the almost motionless form of the aged gipsy. The stricken lioness was a pitiable sight in her aged helplessness.
“Mother,” said the smuggler, taking the withered, blackened hand in his, and looking sadly in the vacant face, that seemed striving to comprehend what had stunned her and bewildered her so strangely.
His voice recalled her again, and she turned her hollow eyes upon him. Awful eyes they were—like red-hot coals in a bleached skull.
“Mother, listen to me. I have but a short time to live, and I cannot die till I learn if you have kept your vow of vengeance, made long ago against Lord De Courcy.”
“I have! I have!” she exclaimed, rousing to something like her old fierceness. “Oh, Reginald! you have been avenged. I have wrung drops of blood from their hearts, even as they wrung them from mine. Yes, yes! I have avenged you! They, too, know what it is to lose a child!”
“Mother! mother! what have you done?”
“I stole their child! their infant daughter the heiress of all the De Courcys, the last of her line! Yes, I stole her!” She fairly shrieked now, with blazing eyes. “I vowed to bring her up in sin and pollution, and I would have done so, too, if I had not been stricken with a living death. Oh, Reginald! your mother avenged you! A child for a child! They banished you, and I stole their heir!”
“Oh, mother! mother! what is this you have done—where is that child now?”