A Strange Determination.
For some moments after Smythje was gone, Kate Vaughan remained where he had left her—silent and motionless as the sculptured marbles by her side. Niobe was near; and, as if by accident, the eyes of the young Creole turned upon the statue of the weeping daughter of Dione.
“Ah!” muttered she, struck with a strange thought; “unhappy mother of a murdered offspring! If thy sadness was hard to endure as mine, thy punishment must have been a pleasure. Would that I, like thee, were suddenly turned into stone. Ah, me!”
And finishing her apostrophe with a profound sigh, she stood for some time silently gazing upon the statue.
After a while her thoughts underwent some change; and along with it her eyes wandered away from the statues and the shrubbery. Her glance was turned upward towards the mountain, and rested upon its summit—the Jumbé Rock now glittering gaily under the full sheen of the sunlight.
“There,” soliloquised she, in a low murmur, “upon that rock, and there only, have I felt one hour of true happiness—that happiness of which I have read in books of romance, without believing in; but which I now know to be real—to gaze into the eyes of him you love, and think, as I then thought, that you are loved in return. Oh! it was bliss! it was bliss!”
The remembrance of that brief interview with her cousin—for it was to that her words referred—came so forcibly before the mind of the impassioned young Creole as to stifle her utterance, and for a moment or two she was silent.
Again she continued—“An hour, have I said? Ah! scarce a minute did the sweet delusion last; but had I my choice I would rather live that minute over again, than all the rest of my past life—certainly, than all of it that is to come!” Again she paused in her speech, still gazing upon the rock—whose sparkling surface seemed purposely presented to her eyes, as if to cheer her heart with the sweet souvenir it recalled.
“Oh! I wonder,” she exclaimed at length, “I wonder how it would be, were I but up there again! To stand on the spot where I stood! Could I fancy him, as then, beside me? Could I recall the look he gave me, and my own sweet thoughts as I returned it? Oh! it would be like some delicious dream!”
Passion again called for a pause; but soon after, her reflections found speech.