CHAPTER VIII.THE BROKEN IDOL.
Any person who had seen that old gipsy Sibyl tearing her way up the steep ascent of the Barranca that night, must have fancied some evil spirit had broken loose, and was searching for prey among the gaunt aloes and ragged prickly pears. The sharp hiss with which she rent her garments from the harrowing thorns—the fiendish energy with which she broke away from each fresh grasp, betrayed a state of tormenting wrath which Dante alone could describe. There was a force in this bitterness, a concentration of gall that imbued her withered frame through and through with frightful power. Her aged limbs quivered with new life—she walked upright, flung aside her stick, and, grasping the thorny plants firmly with her hands, drew herself up the hill. The sharp leaves cut her like a knife, tore her hands and drew long purple lines down her lean arms; but no blood followed. Her veins seemed withered up, or barely moistened by the gall that fed them with bitter vitality.
The ravine was choked up with darkness; the fires were all out, and the caves closed. Not a sparkle of the Darro could be seen through the black mist that lay below; and the soft winds that scattered fragrance from a wilderness of blossoms on theSierra del Sol, whose palace was crowned by a few rays of light from the dusky moon, only served to stir the stifling dust, through which the fierce old Sibyl waded ankle deep.
With all her toil, the old woman held fast to her crimson skirt, which she gathered up in front and hugged to her bosomattempting thus to keep a firm grasp on a mass of freshly gathered herbs, which protruded from its folds, scattering a fragrant odor upon the dusty air, as she crushed them tighter and tighter in her ascent up the hill.
At length she reached the door of her own cave and entered. The lamp which she had left burning in its niche was pouring forth a volume of mingled flame and smoke, and a few embers glowed still among the white ashes that lay in heaps under the brasier. A rustle of garments, a faint, shuddering shriek came from a dark angle of the cave as the door was flung open. The old Sibyl did not seem to heed it; but turned her eyes that way with a look of blank ferocity, and moved on without appearing to regard my poor mother who sat cowering on the ground, her limbs gathered up beneath the gorgeous masses of her dress, and her great gleaming eyes following each movement of the crone with a scared and shrinking gaze, like those of an animal which feels itself bound for the slaughter.
As if unconscious that any living thing occupied the miserable dwelling with herself, the old woman shook the herbs from her garments, crouched down by the brasier, and, bending her crooked fingers like the claws of a bird, began to rake the scattered embers in a heap from the ashes, blowing them fiercely with her lips till her face was lighted up by the glow like that of a fiend. Half stifled with the smoke, she began to strangle, and her cough sounded through the cave like the bark of a dog. Still she would not leave her work, but sat down on the floor, straightened a fold of her dusty saya between her hands, and commenced blowing up the embers, till her breath came back again.
As the liquid in the bronze vase began to simmer, she gathered up the loose herbs, and after twisting them into fragments with a ferocity that sent their juice trickling through her fingers, she cast them into the vase. Sometimes, when the stems were tough, she employed her sharp teeth, wrangling with the poisonous fibres like a wild cat over its prey.
This was a fearful proof of the insane wrath that possessedher, for she knew well the deadly nature of those herbs, yet remained insensible of the danger, even after her thin lips were swollen and turgid with the poison.
My poor mother, who had cowered in her corner watching all this, could endure the sight no longer; but rising slowly up, crept to her little bed-room and softly closed the door. The old woman eyed her with a sidelong glance as she crept by, but preserved silence and occupied herself with her fire.
Thus an hour passed. Huge drops of perspiration stood on the forehead of my great grandame, for the cave was becoming insufferably warm, and she still bent over her work, imbibing the steam and heat with the endurance of a salamander. At last she lifted the vase from its supporter, and placing a broken bowl upon the floor, drained off perhaps half a pint of dark liquid. This she held up to the lamp and examined closely. A gleam of horrid satisfaction was visible on her face, and she muttered, “They think of distilling the drao—who gave them the secret? Let them boast—let them fancy that the old woman is of no further use. They must come to her for their poison yet. Who else of all the tribe knows the secret, or could distil death into one sweet drop like this?”
She bent over the bowl; her head drooped. For the first time she appeared to think steadily, and mingle her thoughts with something of human feeling.
The fire went out. Heavy smoke, for which there was no outlet, gathered in a cloud of palpable darkness over her head. The poison stood cooling by her side, imbued by a thick, inky blackness, taken, as it were, from her thought; yet, for the first time that night, there was something of human feeling mingled with the bitterness of her nature. It might have been the pale, frightened face of my mother, as she glided by, that awoke a gleam of womanly regret in her fierce bosom. It might have been the memory of some foregone event which this poor child had shared with her; or the sobs that began to issue from the little bed-room, like the stifled moan of an infant, might have softened the iron of her nature.
It is impossible for me to say which of the thousand strings in that sered heart thrilled to the touch of the guardian angel that always, while there is life, finds some tone of music in a woman’s soul. But one thing is certain, the lurid fire in those wicked eyes grew dull, and was smothered as they watched the poison drao curdle and cool beneath them.
And there was my wretched mother, all this time shut up in the little stifled hole that she called a bed-room. Up to this time, a sort of wild excitement had kept her up. Indignation, terror, a conflict of feelings, which in her return from the Alhambra had given her the speed and strength of a reindeer, still burned in her heart like fire. But the stillness of the cave—the slow, silent preparations which that old woman was making for her death—all had a power to chill even her burning excitement. The heart in her bosom seemed turning to stone. Her limbs began to shrink and quiver with physical dread. She was but a woman, poor thing, nay, a child almost, and death was terrible to her, for the Spanish Gipsy has no bright dream of an after life. They who suffer so much in this world have no hope in death, but that of black oblivion. Why should they wish to prolong misery so griping? Would they not be proscribed, crushed, trampled on through all eternity? Would the Busne grant them a place in heaven, they who have hunted our whole race up and down, till it has been glad to find shelter like serpents in the very bosom of the earth?
My mother was afraid to die. The torture that she then endured seemed preferable to that black, stony, eternal sleep, which the end of life was to her.
In her bed-room was a mutilated fragment of black marble. It was, or had been, the body of a beast joined to a human head. Though worn with time, hacked and broken, the grave, thoughtful beauty of that countenance, the solemn thought that seemed frozen into the stone, imbuing every fragment, must have won attention even from a person who looked upon it only as an antique of wonderful beauty.
This fragment of Egyptian art stood upon the base of aRoman pedestal, which the old Sibyl had found years before among the broken rubbish of the Alhambra. It was of a time coeval with the Roman altar, which you may yet find embedded in the Torre del Homenage, and had a value to the antiquarian of which my great grandame was fully aware. Though she would have sold anything for money, this had been an offering to her idol; and she, almost alone among our people, still kept a traditionary hold upon the faith of Egypt. How she became possessed of this antique I never knew; but it was the only thing on earth which she held sacred, and to that she rendered idolatrous devotion.
As my mother sat upon her pallet bed, feeling the unnatural strength ebb from her frame, her eyes fell upon this marble face, turned with its grand serenity of expression toward her. All at once it seemed as if she had found a friend. She remembered the old Sibyl’s faith in this block of stone, and gazed upon it with strange interest. The tumult of her feelings was hushed. The natural yearning, which exists in every female heart, for something to adore, something strong and high, from which she can claim protection, possessed her. She folded her hands in her lap and leaned forward, gazing on the marble face till her eyes were full of tears. Directly she began to sob like a child, and this was the sound that reached the old woman as she bent over her drao.
But that hard old heart soon shook off its human emotions. Brutus was not more stern in his sense of justice, nor did he show less of relenting; the laws of her people must be carried out. She would yield the power of life or death over her grandchild to no inferior member of her tribe; she alone would be judge and executioner. Perhaps there was something of mercy in this; the death she gave with her drao was easy, almost delightful; a sleepy, voluptuous languor seized upon the victim, grew sweeter, deeper, and eternal.
Such was the fate meditated for the poor girl who was sobbing in the next room. The tribe would have stoned her to death. That old Sibyl had a touch of compassion in her murderousdesigns, but she was not the less determined to kill. She took up the drao and set it in the same niche with the swaling lamp. Then she passed into the bed-room softly as a cat, closing the door after her with, great caution, as if they two had not been quite alone.
The poor Gitanilla sat, upon her miserable pallet, looking wistfully toward that antique relic of old Egypt; but she cowered down with a faint cry, as the old woman crept between her and the marble, lifting up one hand as if denouncing her for looking upon a thing that she held in reverence. What passed in that miserable little room I cannot say. My mother never spoke of it; and in her manuscript there was nothing when it came to this part of her story, but great inky scrawls that no one on earth could read.
When the old Sibyl came forth Aurora was upon the ground, her forehead resting against the idol, and murmuring some wild words through a passion of tears.
“Repeat,” said the Sibyl, standing over her, and holding up the heavy iron lamp that flared lividly over the mutilated features of the marble and the wild face of the Gitanilla. “Say it again, thus with your face where it is. If there is a lie on your lips that stone will sear them as with a red hot iron.”
“Oh, grandame, I have spoken truth, nothing but truth. See!” and with a sort of insane awe she pressed her lips upon the broken mouth of the idol two or three times.
The old woman was silent. The lamp shook in her hand; her eyes were fixed upon the idol and the poor creature that clung to it, as if she really expected to see that healthy form fall crisped and withered away from the stone.
The girl turned, clasped her grandame around the knees, and lifting up her eyes, in which was a gleam of wild confidence, exclaimed:
“I am unhurt—I am unhurt—grandame, will you believe me now?”
Still the old woman was silent.
“Grandame, mother of my mother, you will not let me die!”
Terror and doubt again took possession of the poor thing. She clung closer to the old woman, her eyes dusky with fear; her lips growing pale again.
“Chaleco must have your life—he will not believe you; no, nor will the women of our tribe!”
“But you believe me, grandame!”
“And if I do, what then?”
“You have great power, grandame; our people acknowledge it; the stars make you their mistress. You will save me from Chaleco—from our fierce women”——
“How, little one, how? I am old, they would wrest you from my arms. They treat me like an infant already.”
“Let us leave them and seek the mountains, you and I, grandame. They will not follow us up into the snow peaks!”
“To-night I have clambered up to the Alhambra. It is the first time in ten years; to-morrow my bones will be as stiff as rusted iron. How am I to drag myself up to the mountains? How am I, a count’s wife, to leave his people?”
“I am a count’s daughter, but they wish to kill me!” answered the poor girl, sadly. “You will not let them—say, grandame, that you will save me from the Valley of Stones!”
“They are many and strong—I an old woman, feeble with years!”
“They will stone me—oh, they will stone me! and I am innocent of all they think against me!” still pleaded the Gitanilla.
The old woman was evidently troubled. She shook her head, and cast wistful glances on her broken idol, as if interrogating the stone.
“Let me go by myself, then,” cried the girl, eagerly. “I am told that countries stretch far away beyond the mountains. There they will not know that I am an outcast, and my dancing will get bread enough to eat.”
The old woman did not heed her; she was still interrogating the Egyptian stone. Quick flashes of intelligence shot across her face; some project was evidently taking form in her brain.
“He will not believe me—Chaleco will be first among them with his story. I have no power to brave the laws, but I can baffle them. Leave old Papita alone for that.”
Now she seemed all alive with eager cunning, turning from the force of her bitter wrath into a crafty old crone, anxious to save the life of her grandchild, it is true, but exulting as much in the thoughts of baffling all the keen hate and power of her tribe.
“Get up, little one: come sit down here on the bed by my side, and let us talk,” she said, passing her hand over the head of my mother, and caressing her with a grim smile.
“You believe me innocent—you will not let them murder me.”
“Yes, yes, my star, Iknowyou are innocent—else, you see the drao yonder—by this time it had been curdling in your blood.”
“Then you will save me! Who is so powerful? Oh, grandame, your little girl will yet live. Who shall dare to contradict the will of Papita?”
“He, Chaleco! ha! ha! he almost braved me to-night: but he shall be brought round”——
The girl turned faint, and grew paler than she had been before that night.
“No, not that!—oh, not that! Let me die, grandmother—let me die. I would rather a thousand times than marry Chaleco.”
The Sibyl laughed till her teeth shone again.
“Marry Chaleco now!—why, child, he would strangle me if I but hinted it! Oh, our people are wise in this generation, wiser than old Papita. We shall see—we shall see!”
“What shall I do, grandame? What can you think of to save me? They will tear me to pieces.”
“What shall I do?—why, take my right as a count’s widow—murder you myself—bury you myself!”
“Grandame!” exclaimed the child, with a cry of horror.
“And when they think your body deep in the Darro,” continuedthe old crone, without noticing the cry, “Papita will be sitting here with gold in her lap, and her pretty little Aurora shall be married to the Busne, and far beyond the mountains!”
Another cry, in which the love of that young heart leaped forth in an agony of joy, made the Sibyl pause; but it was only for a moment.
“Then my little one shall think of the poor old gipsy in her cave, and send more gold—more and more, till power shall indeed return to Papita.”
But my mother sat upon the pallet wringing her hands, and utterly abandoned to her grief once more. That one gleam of joy had turned upon her heart sharper than a sword. She remembered why she had fled from the Alhambra that night.
“What is this?” said the old woman, sharply. “Tears again? Bah, I am tired of them—speak!”
“Grandame,” sobbed the wretched girl, gasping for breath, for she felt that her last hold on life was going, “the Busne cannot save me—he will not marry a gipsy girl.”
“He shall!” snarled the old woman. “By that he shall!” and she pointed toward her idol.
“Grandame!” exclaimed the girl, astonished.
“Get up,” replied the Sibyl—“smooth that hair—put on the bodice of blue velvet, and the saya edged with gold, that was to have been the wedding-dress with Chaleco. Quick, or the daylight will be upon us.”