CHAPTER XIX.MY FIRST HEART TEMPEST.
I had never seen a hunt in my life, for though Lord Clare kept horses and hounds, they had never been called out since our residence at Greenhurst. But now, we often heard the sweep of horses and the baying of dogs from the distant hills.
One day, I wandered off lured by this novel sound, and lost myself in a pretty valley. I am not sure if it was not beyond the verge of our park, for I exhausted myself with the fatigue of running after the sound, and fell breathless upon the moss beneath a clump of trees. While I lay bewildered and panting with fatigue, a group of horsemen rushed down the valley in full chase. Their red coats flashed between the leaves, and I saw hound after hound leaping through the brushwood. They disappeared like a flash of lightning. Then came the swift leap of other horses, and a lady appeared among the trees. Her hunter was on the full run, shooting like a thunderbolt through thickets, and over the broken ground with foam flashing from his nostrils, and blood dropping from his mouth where the curb had been ground into it. The lady had lost all control of her hunter. She reeled in the saddle, and nothing but her desperate hold upon the rein kept her from falling.
I knew her, notwithstanding the masculine hat and cravat, the black skirt sweeping behind her like a thunder-cloud, and the deathly paleness of her face. I knew her the first moment, and shrunk back into the undergrowth, not with fear but loathing. Oh, how I did hate that woman. Some persons think children cannot hate. They never studied a child like me. She came on, pale as marble, reeling with exhaustion, but with a strong will firing her eyes till they gleamed like stars beneath her hat. On she came. The horse veered. A ravine laybefore him. He stretched out his limbs and plunged forward. She saw death in the next instant, shrieked, flung up her arms, and the horse leaped from under her, lost his foothold on the opposite bank, reeled backward and fell with a fearful neigh into the depths of the ravine.
I did not move but looked on waiting to see if she would stir. I had no idea of death, but as I saw her pale face turned to the sky, her black garments sweeping like a pall down the bank, and her lifeless hand lying so still in the grass, a fierce interest seized me. It was not joy, nor pity, nor hate, but I thought of my mother, and hoped that the stillness would last forever.
A second horse came tearing his way down the valley. A scarlet coat flashed before my eyes and made me dizzy. Some one dismounted, a horse stood panting beneath his empty saddle. The fiery glow of crimson mingled confusedly with those black garments on the grass—then my sight cleared, and there was my father holding that woman in his arms—pressing her frantically to his bosom—raining kisses upon her marble forehead and her white eyelids. He held her back with his arms, looked into her face, uttered wild, sweet words that made my heart burn. Tears flashed down his cheeks, and fell like great diamonds in the blackness of her dress. His grief made him more of a child than I was.
He strained her to his heart, pressed his lips to hers, as if his own soul were pouring itself into her bosom.
“Jane, Jane, my love, my angel, my wife, listen to me, open your eyes! you are not dead—not gone—lost without knowing how much I love you. Oh, open those eyes—draw one breath, and I am your slave forever.”
She did not move, but lay cold and still in his arms. I was glad of it!
He laid her upon the grass with a groan that made even me start, and looked despairingly around.
“Will no one come?—must she die?—oh, my God, what can I do?”
He stood a moment, mute and still, looking, oh, how steadily, how mournfully down upon her. Then speaking aloud, and with a solemnity that made me tremble, he said,
“I have avoided her—struggled, suffered, tried to crush the great love that is within me, and this is the end! What is left to me?”
I saw a shudder pass over him, and knew that he was thinking of us—me and my mother.
Again his voice reached me, not loud, but deep and solemnly impressive. His mournful eyes were bent upon her, and he slowly sunk to her side.
“Let her live—only live,” he said, “and so help me heaven, her own will shall dispose of me! Let all else perish, so she but breathe again!”
I rose from the ground and stood before him. My little hand was clenched, and my frame shook with passion seldom known to one of my tender years.
He started, as if a serpent had sprung up from the bosom of that beloved one, gazed in my eyes an instant, and then put me sternly back with his hand.
“Go,” he said, with a sharp breath, as if every word were a pain—“go, weird child, I ask not what evil thing brings you to search my soul with those unnatural eyes—but go and tell your mother all that you can understand of this. Tell her that if this lady lives, she will be my wife—if not, I leave England forever. Tell her all!”
“I will tell her!” I said, looking fiercely into his eyes. “You shall never see her again, never, never, never!”
Such passion must have been fearful in a little child. He looked on me with a sort of terror.
“Tell your mother I will write, and send Turner to her,” he said, more gently.
“I will say that you hate her and love this one!” was my fierce reply, “That is enough!—she will drop down like stone, as this one has!”
My eyes fell upon Lady Jane as I spoke. Her broad eyelidsquivered, and a faint motion disturbed the deathly white of her lips. These signs of life filled me with rage. I saw the breath struggling to free itself, and, lifting my tiny foot, dashed it down upon her bosom, looking into her face like an infant fiend to see if I had trampled the coming life away. Her eyes slowly opened, as if it were to the pressure of my foot, and then I flew reeling back against the bank—my father had struck me.
I rose and went away, but without shedding a tear—without looking back. I have been told that my face was very pale when I reached home, but that I was smiling steadily till the teeth gleamed between my lips.
When I reached home, my mother was in the little room that I have described, lying upon a couch, with her large, sleepless eyes wide open, and gazing upon the window.
“Get up, mother,” I said, seizing the cashmere shawl that lay over her, and casting it in a gorgeous heap on the floor—“get up; I want to tell you something.”
She rose with a wild look, for my voice was sharp, and my face so strangely unnatural that it had the force of command.
“Come out into the garden—into the woods, mother.”
She followed me passively. I led her down the balcony steps, across the flower-beds, and into the wilderness. It was gloomy there. Shadows lay thick among the trees, and a leaden sky bent overhead. I liked it. In the broad sunshine I could not have told her. The anguish in her face frightened me even as it was.
She heard me through without uttering a word, but the gleam of her eyes and the whiteness of her face was more heart-rending than the wildest complaints. She held my hand all the time, and as I told her of the scene I had just witnessed, of his caresses, of the blow, her grip on my fingers became like a vice. But I did not wince, her own gipsy blood was burning hot in my veins.
I did not sleep that night, but lay upon the carpet in my mother’s room, resolved not to be taken away till she was in bed.
Turner was there in the evening, and they conversed together alone, for more than an hour. The old man left us, with tears in his eyes. I heard my mother say to him in her low, sad voice, for she was always sad now,
“Do not fail me, my good friend; I shall never ask another favor of you, so grant me this.”
“Poh, poh!” was his answer, “you will ask five thousand; and I shall perform every one, trust old Turner for that!”
But there were tears in the old man’s voice, I was sure of that. After his departure my mother was greatly disturbed, walking the room, wringing her hands, and convulsed with the tearless grief that rends one’s heart-strings so silently.