CHAPTER VI.THE SIBYL AND THE LOVERS.
There had been no absolute disagreement between Aurora and her lover; yet with that keen intuition which belongs to love, and which becomes almost superhuman when love blends with genius in a woman’s heart, she felt that he was disturbed, that she had done something to arouse painful thoughts, which led him, for the time, away from her. She did not weep—he had told her that grief annoyed him—but in the shadow of that beautiful portico her little heart might heave, unnoticed, beneath its velvet bodice, and, spite of herself, tears would swell up into her great, mournful eyes.
“You seem weary, little one,” he said at length, takingheed of her drooping attitude. “Let us find a place to sit down. I also begin to feel tired; we have been wandering in the ruins these three hours!”
He moved on, and she kept by his side, with her face averted, that he might not see her tears. They crossed an angle of the court, and entering one of the arches, passed through an open door into theSala de los Abencerrages. The marble basin of a fountain, now dry, occupied the centre of this room, and upon its rounded edge the two seated themselves.
Here the moonbeams came more faintly, penetrating the open work cloister, and throwing fantastic shadows on the pavement. Beautiful stalactites hung over them, peering downward, as it were, from a bed of shadows. Portions of the walls were dim. The rest gleamed out, with all their delicate tracery revealed, like luminous frost-work, such as you, of a colder climate, find upon your window-panes, when the mornings are unusually cold.
They had been sitting there some minutes, yet I do not think they had spoken. His arm was around her, and it is impossible that he should not have felt the swelling of her heart, for, as I have said, it was flooded with a tender grief, brought on by that hard, hard thing to bear, the first reproof from beloved lips. He was a man of strong feelings, but not one to utter those feelings much in words. A degree of proud reserve followed him even in his moments of deepest tenderness.
No man ever guessed half that was going on in his heart, and what is stranger still, no woman ever knew the whole. There might have been something of pride in his sensations when he saw the entire control that he had gained over that poor, wild heart. For what human being is above pride in that conquest which sweeps the entire life of another into his bosom? But he was touched also with a feeling of sadness, of regret for having moodily reproved her for what was, after all, the spirit of her race. Still he did not speak these regrets, but drew her closer to him, and taking her little brown hand in his, pressed it to his lips.
He felt her heart leap against his arm, but she only crept a little closer to him, trembling all over, and smiling through her tears.
“And do you indeed love me so much?” he said, with a tone of sadness in his voice, for he was asking himself where must all this end; and the answer that presented itself made his better nature recoil.
She drew his hand toward her, and pressed her lips upon the palm. There was something peculiar and child-like in this act. With all her unreserve, it was the only outward proof that she had ever given him of the passion that was transfiguring her whole nature.
While her lips were still upon his palm, he felt her start, listen, and shudder all over. Then clinging to his arm with one hand, she turned her head and looked backward over her shoulder. It was in this chamber that the Abencerrages were supposed to have been beheaded, and a deep, broad stain, which tradition marks out as their blood, discolors half the marble fountain on which the lovers sat. Feeling her shudder, and remarking that her head was turned that way, he supposed that it must be this blood shadow which suddenly occupied her thoughts.
“Nay, how childish,” he was beginning to say; but she broke from his arm, rushed by the fountain, and seizing hold of a slender pillar at the opening of an alcove, all in shadow, as if stricken by some sudden fear, stood peering into the recess.
He arose and was going toward her, when a little object, scarcely larger than a child of ten years old, and so thin that it seemed but the shadow of something else, passed slowly by him. He would not have believed it human, but for the snake-like glitter of two eyes that gleamed their rage upon him, and gave vitality to the shadow as it passed.
Aurora still clung to the column, waving to and fro as if she must have fallen but for that support. She turned her face to his as he came up, but the pallor that lay upon it, the fear thatquivered over limb and feature, had utterly changed her. He would not have known the face again.
“Aurora, what is this? What terrible thing has happened?” he exclaimed, reaching forth his arm to support her. But she shrank away, shuddering, and still clinging to the pillar, she writhed herself behind it, whispering hoarsely,
“It is my grandmother; she has heard us!”
The Englishman was enough affected by this to hasten into the court, and satisfy himself that the person who had passed him was indeed Aurora’s grandmother. He saw her gliding away through the shadowy side of the cloisters, and it seemed to him that muttered wrath and shrill curses were blended with the silvery rush of the fountain.
The sound struck him with strange terror. Still ignorant of the exact danger that might threaten him or the poor Gitanilla, he could not account for the cold thrill that passed through his frame as the curses pierced to his ear through the sweet fall of those waters.
He went back into theSala de los Abencerrages, and found my mother crouching down by the marble basin, with her wild eyes turned toward the entrance.
“Was it she? Did she speak?” whispered the poor child, rising with difficulty and moving toward him.
The young man was shocked by this wild terror, so disproportioned, as he thought, to the cause. He took both her hands in his and shook them gently, hoping thus to arouse her from the trance of fear that seemed to have benumbed the very life in her veins.
“Sit down by me, Aurora—sit down, child, here in your old place, and tell me what all this means.”
He spoke with gentle authority, and without a shadow of the terror that shook every limb of her body. The sound of his clear, bold voice seemed to reassure her. She crept forward with timid hesitation, and allowed him to place her by his side.
“Now tell me, child, what troubles you thus? If that viciousshadow was indeed your grandmother, she has gone away quietly enough, no harm has come of it.”
“You little know,” said the Gitanilla, still keeping her eyes upon the entrance—“you little know our people, or her.”
“But what is there for me to learn? Tell me what this fear means?”
“It means,” answered the poor thing, locking her hands hard and pressing them down upon her trembling knees—“it means that they will poison me.”
“Poison you! this is the madness of fear,” exclaimed the young man, impatiently.
“Or perhaps stone me to death in some dark hollow of the mountains, the whole tribe hunting down one poor creature for her love of the Busne, Chaleco among the first.”
“Aurora, are you mad? Has this miserable little witch crazed you?”
“You will not believe me—you have not seen the poison drao scattered into the wholesome food which an enemy is to eat—or a poor girl strangled in her bed, and buried in some rude pass of the mountains, on the very day when she was to have danced at her own wedding festival.”
“But this is murder!” cried the young man. “The laws of Spain will not permit men to kill their females in cold blood.”
“Our laws are older than those of Spain,” answered the Gitanilla, with a certain degree of pride in her tone, as if she gloried in the antiquity of the very custom that was to crush her. “Our laws are older and better kept than those of the Busne; traditions do not run so far back as their origin. They are fixed and unchangeable—he who breaks them dies!”
“But what have you done, innocent child, that these laws, however strengthened by antiquity, should fall on you?”
“I love you, a Busne—one of the race we hold accursed—our enemies—our oppressors. I am alone with you, and have been for hours, here in these vast ruins. But that is nothing; that they approve so long as it brings gold; but I love you!I have said it in words, in my looks, every way in which love can speak when it burdens the heart with its sweet joy. She, my weird grandame, has seen this. Did I not feel that she was close by in the ambassador’s hall?”
“But they dare not kill you for that—for the innocent affection which you could not help—affection that has dreamed of no wrong.”
“She has seen us here, sitting together; she has heard me, heard you. They will believe me an outcast of the tribe, and kill me as they would a viper!”
The young man arose, walked out into the court, and began to pace up and down the glittering pavement, hurriedly, as one seeks rapid motion when some great mental or moral struggle is going on in the mind. Gradually his steps became more rapid; his brow flushed, and with an impetuous movement of one hand, as if thus dashing aside all further consideration of a harassing subject, he sought the Gitanilla again.
“Aurora,” he said, in a hurried manner, “you shall never go back into that nest of fiends—look up, child—you are mine now. They shall not touch a hair of your head, or even look upon your face again! Come, what have you to fear? I am powerful—I am rich, and I love you. I struggle against it no longer—it is a duty now, I love you! Go with me to my own country—I cannot give you this sky or these fairy ruins, but you shall be surrounded with beautiful things nevertheless. You shall study, learn; forget that miserable ravine burrowed with human fox-holes, and swarming with murderers. Come, Aurora, look up, I long to see that cold, dead color swept away. Smile, smile my bird, we will not part again.”
When a nation has but one virtue, how powerful that one must be. There is much good in every human heart that God has created, and when all that good pours itself into a single channel, it has a power and vitality which men of more diffuse cultivation little dream of.
Aurora knew nothing of her lover’s rank, of his wealth, or the thousand barriers that lay between his condition and hers.She was aware that sometimes, when a Gitano becomes wealthy—a rare case—he had been known to wed a Busne wife, but that such unions invariably made the Gitano an object of suspicion and dislike to his own people. If this privilege were permitted to the men, it might be—she could not tell, no case had ever come beneath her observation—extended to the females also. But then a betrothed female like herself—the promised wife of a count—how was this to be hoped? All these thoughts, full of doubt and trouble, came upon my poor mother while the Englishman stood impatiently—for his restrained manner had entirely disappeared—waiting her reply.
“They would not let me go—I am betrothed. No one of our females have ever married with the Busne,” she said, at last, in a voice that betrayed the utter despondency that possessed her.
The young man started, and a flush swept over his forehead. At first he found it difficult to speak. How very, very hard it is for a man, whose impulses are all honorable, to express a wrong wish in words! But after a brief struggle he became cold and grave. She must understand his full meaning. He would not deceive—would not even persuade her. If she went with him it must be with a full knowledge of her position, of the impossibility that any marriage could ever exist between them.
Some men would have glossed this over, covered it with transcendental poetry, smothered the sin with rose-leaves. He did nothing of the kind. Knowing the wrong, he would neither conceal this conviction from himself nor her. Therefore it was that, with a cold, almost severe conciseness, he explained himself. True, there was little merit in this; it was rather a peace offering to his own pride than a homage to truth. From all that he had heard of the gipsies, he did not believe that anything he was saying could make much difference to the Gitanilla. But it was due to himself, and so he spoke plainly.
She understood him at last. It was with great difficulty,for the idea entered her mind as a proposition of murder would have done. It dawned upon her by degrees, arousing and kindling the wild Gitana blood in her veins with every new thought. She heard him through, not without attempting to speak, but the effort seemed strangling her. He saw that she writhed faintly, once or twice, but heeded it not and went on.
At length she sprang up, her cheeks in a dusky blaze, her eyes full of lightning. Her little tawny hand was clenched like a vice and stamping her foot upon the pavement, she struggled for voice. It broke out at last, loud and ringing, like the cry of an angry bird.
“I am a Gitana—a Gitana. Did you take me for a Busne?”
Before he could answer, or had half recovered from the surprise into which this storm of passion threw him, she had gone. He saw her dart into the cloister, and caught one glimpse of a shadow that seemed to leap across the court, but even that had disappeared before he could reach the broad moonlight.